Arturo Desimone
La veitea e Bruta" "Old age is hardship" as uncle Marito said
A story of empty heat in Poland
The Krakowites resemble Porteños, slightly-bourgeois Buenos Aires people, their faces, the flower of their voices, the onomatopoeia of Polish noises like the "j" is similar to Argentinean breath-spectacular pronunciations corrupting the Spanish, Castilian, Castle covered in florid immigrant graffiti of European nowheres.
My body fills with worthless inner heat, fake ruby of prolonged juvenile love unrequited for the Krakow girl at the tourism office, her mix of Italian, European, slightly Jewish-Slavic traces, her voice, smell-she is a bit too young. She is a student, her nails painted two different colors.
The history of Argentina was men from South Italy and Spain, Valladolid, sent to work in mines for a capitalist French Cat Lord or die in evil wars and tin-man battles against the Indians, ostrich-riding long-coked Tehuelches and rival colonial states. They knew a scarcity of women, Buenos Aires almost an open air prison, almost worse than a desert; millions of men, men without women: ugly apes in heat, leafless trees in prolonged Pampas summer. Men crucified in heat dreaming of a sweet nowhere of home where there were girls who carried water in vats atop their head-scarf.
This pitiful state attracted clemency-smuggling gangs saw a market and brought in women from the East. Lebanese smugglers brought Arabian women, East-European Jewish smugglers brought las Polacas-the Polish whores.
Tangos were the music pieces born in the bordellos, bands playing-
should I tell the girl behind the tourism desk this story?
No I cannot. I rationalize she is of a conservative Krakow class family, I cannot be aggressive, she is a young girl, I will make her afraid.
Instead I smile, ask her too many questions about all the theaters and art galleries in Krakow and Nowa Huta. She explains them on the map, like delineating faint constellations, drawing cricles, laziness and sweet movements of her hands moving across the map-her fingernails painted different colors, her chest is growing like her heart is growing full of information and gazes of love-is this love for me, for the young man like a wolf and an actor, is love is it fear?-she is breathing faster, her nails painted pink and goldy-yellow pressing against the map where the cultural sites of Nowa Huta are, the synagogue in Kaizimierc-breathing faint warm like drinking wine and eating a meal in a too expensive restaurant but this pangea is just the flat map of cake-like Kracow dissected by alcoholic cultural tourists. I cannot, I cannot tell her an Iliad or Odyssey of maritime brothels sailing to Argentina under an Ashkenazi Herod-steer-captain, a Jewish and Arab Lord Hades, a Moses leading Polish women whose eyecolor and perfume alone is made of pure and raw crushed dark forests and jewels from the hearts of wolves I cannot-
"This is Bunker Stuki, maybe still open"
"Ok, Bunker Stucki. What's your name? I will tell them you sent me,"
"That will not impress them much I fear"
"Are you a student?"
"Yes, apparently," she laughed frowning.
"You study something cultural?"
"How do you know?" she gasp-laughs. Because I know my type. "I am doing cultural studies here actually," she smiles looking at the map, the scribbles on theaters in Nowa Huta which I did not visit.
Her friend smiles at the computer screen, not saying a syllable, she is an older one hoping this girl will have done to her what needs at some point to be done to her.
"I can tell by the way you pronounce English words. That and other things." She had a funny accent of trying to sound British like girls who want to be serious and have class but have seldom left Eastern Europe or Argentina or Mongol-Surdistan wherever. "Thank you" she flutters.
"What is your name?"
No answer. The bourgeois child Sphinx looked away unanswering. What is your name? Ok.
I bought two notebooks with the Hebrew and Yiddish alphabets, respectively, bullshitted a little more and asked what other days she worked, which was apparently every day.
I waved, left, smiling and walking like a dog in heat and an actor, and dreaming asking myself why didn't I push harder to get her phone number. Maybe I will go back. I wanted the picture, dinner with her lit by a menorah in the fake Jewghetto restaurant and I tell her the rest of the story, about Tzvi Migdal, the Jewish smuggling organization that brought the beautiful captured Polacas to Argentina, how Argentinean men fought each other to death with sharp stones and fistfuls of nails on the nightclub tiles and frescoes of the bordellos, fighting for the minas, girls-the Argentinean street-name for woman is mina,as in mine, gold mine, silver-
goodye, Eurydyka who I met in a winter mine-
THE END