It was seen as from a distance, from a remove, through
a darkened glass, as if one was watching from a corner café -- one of those
long, sleek, low affairs where the jukebox in the corner still plays songs by
men named Sinatra or Martin or Tormé.
The window on the street runs the length of the building in such places
and if you look in while walking past you will see men and women leaning
furtively in, towards each other over plates of eggs and bacon while a waitress
named Dot pours them coffee. She is
trying studiously, Dot is, to appear uninterested in their quiet
conversations. Each one has a low pitch
hum of its own, as the couples want very much to be understood by each other
but to be ignored by the outside world.
Except for the odd younger couple.
They care very much to be seen and known, and heard and seen by the
world. And smelled, some want to be
smelled.
But the low pitch hums gave the place a hive effect.
Like bees churning around on the floor, swirling in and out of the booths with
the air currents following, flowing from and through. Dot, with the occasional tinkling urgency of
a dropped fork, or the dull finality of a plate landing in the sink, waits.
The noises inside the café are white noise, drama
encoded for public consumption and displayed with entirely custom-built
receivers. Then up above this noise,
faintly at first but growing, rising, with the swirling violins in the
firmament, and lengthening cellos cutting through the room like the ocean, a
tsunami washes all attentions away. And eyes look up, and through the glass out
into the street where some immaculate disaster has caused a tumult -- deeply,
deeply personal, but through some odd series of back channels sent rushing out
into the street.
From the bodega across the street, comes a flurry of
action.
A woman comes spilling out of the bodega into the
street, doubled over, clutching her breast.
Immediately, with an almost shocking immediacy, the crowd around her, on
the street, makes a bubble, a spontaneous hovering circle around the woman --
and it floats round her in a counterclockwise direction. They are trying, the people in the bubble, to
see if she is shot, or stabbed, or poisoned or otherwise injured, trying to see
if she is hurt, trying to see if she mad, curious, trying to understand what
she is saying, to see if she’s in danger.
And the woman is pulling one of those faces, where she is trying to decide whether to
enter the real world or to get lost forever inside a grief that beckons her
with warmth and affection. It the kind of
grief that plays on violin strings. And
she hovers, like in the movies when some actress is trying to express a
paralyzing realization. Maybe a child
has died. Maybe a lover has
cheated. And the actress grips her heart
and simply tries to hold on. She lets it
pass through her body. She quivers, not
finding any sound in her body. She
simply tries to breathe. Breath comes
only in gasps.
And she is wailing to herself, the woman is. And to the crowd. To the air, to God. But she wails in a language that no one in
the crowd understands. No one in the
bubble has a clue what she is saying. It
is as they were viewing her through a screen, and the words can’t be made
out. If it were a movie, the camera
would pan around the woman, in a motion like the bubble, watching her in her
isolated pain as it writes itself across her face, across her body. Her eyes, stained and tightened in rich
indelible ink, in paralyzed intensity, become the center of attention for just
a brief moment as if peering into the woman’s soul could give some indication
of the thing that is racking her body.
The viewer, if this were a movie, would be allowed a moment of
contemplation, perhaps something in, close up, something allowing the viewer to
turn over in his mind what her meaning could be.
Any interpretations would have to be entirely
contextual, as there are no subtitles provided to help the viewer guess her
meaning. Some in the crowd, in the
bubble, suspect that the woman is so crippled by pain that she is mumbling gibberish, that there is
no literal translation in any language for her words, although they
continue watching as if there is still some universal in her expression, some
emotional communication that will permit a fuller understanding of her
pain. And they understand that in the
event of such pain, words become little more than weak signifiers, anyway. What can words add to an understanding of
such feeling? It is best known, simply
observed. Felt, rather than understood.
And the woman in this scene, and the actress
portraying the woman in the movie of the scene, are turning over in their minds
the subject of the grief. It has become
clear by now, to those who are viewing the scene, that what she is feeling is
grief. It is a pain deeper felt than the
physical, a pain that sinks underneath bone.
It is pain for when a child dies or a lover cheats. No bullet can do to her body what this
grieving, stressing menace has done.
The viewer continues to watch as she heaves her shoulders forward, as if
she wants to collapse in upon herself.
The actress portraying the woman is recalling a time
when her lover left her, with her wanting more.
He was, for a time, the man that the actress had been waiting for, and
he left without her permission. The idea
of the pain broke her in two. The
woman is recalling… What? We do not
know. Because we do not have language
for the pain she feels. And yet we
somehow understand, or we wonder, which is the same as understanding.
So the sepia-toned crowd stands waiting with breath, a
bubble, an enclave, a circle in a river holding hands and watching as the woman
communes with something imperceptible.
She stands with her ghost in the middle of the circle, waiting and
watching as she catches the breath in her throat and slips down under the
smooth surface of the water, baptized in her grief, some unknown tender by her
side, an unseen grief counselor, a memory, hope, or the lack of hope, the feeling
of being alone in public with her pain.
And she slips down into the water, and comes up
gasping for air, spitting with a ferocity that can only be mustered by those
who have borne a heavy load. And she
goes under again, only to surface again.
The crowd in the ring, in the bubble, is waiting to
see if she will drown. And some watch to
see if she will wave for their help.
They stand on the shore and watch her tread water. Is she in
trouble? Does she need help? Is she drowning? Should we throw her a line? Can she
swim? And if she cannot, does she want us
to pull her out of her distress, out the deep and into the shallows?
But the woman simply holds on, keeps breathing,
gasping in the open air. And the actress playing the woman holds on for her close-up. And they both pull faces, and those faces
communicates all we know and all we need to know about the pain. And the
actress, recalling her grief, feels the tear on her cheek. And the camera, if
this were a movie, would pull away, almost imperceptibly at first, but with
increasing speed and ease. And the woman
in her grief and the crowd in their concern would be swallowed entirely by the
street, by the corner. And the street
and the flow of traffic would shuffle back to life, eventually unconcerned. One can already feel the weight of that
unconcern.
And the soundtrack would cue a song in a foreign
language as the camera pulled away, something soft and low, maybe in Spanish
now as we think about it, driven by the mournful plucking of acoustic
guitars. Maybe flamenco, maybe the
mournful wail of a gypsy loss. And the
music would serve to romanticize her pain.
To allow the viewer to think of a time when she felt such pain, when she
wanted someone to reach out to her but felt the vast divide of unshared
meanings.
And the viewer thinks of her pain, the woman’s, in the
street, and a time when she herself held her pain too dear, too close, but
because she is not the woman, her pain is easily sublimated. It is not actual grief, not presently
experienced. It is understood, not felt.
And the camera pans away from the bodega and across
the street and through the traffic, and through a thick plane glass which runs
the length of the café situated opposite the bodega. It picks up the backlighting, the camera
does, on the scene in the street, and the woman and the viewer -- insinuating
the removed comfort of the spoons and the plates and low soft hums, insulating
the café from the sound of her weeping.
And the bustle of the café noises creep into the consciousness, and the
realization sets in eventually that life goes on, There are pies to be made,
coffee to be poured. Dot reaches across
the counter and swats away a fly with her apron.
But there is man in the back, in the corner, in a
booth, and he has seen it all, the comfort and the pain. He looks up from time
to time to view the scene in the café and the scene in the street, and he
imagines the woman’s pain and the young couples’ pleasure and the viewer’s
sublimation, and he sits and stirs his coffee, watching the scene, watching the
life around him, remembering his own.
