Moss

There’s something to be said about saying nothing at all.

“It’s Over,”

Tom Waits

1.

It was the second time in less than a month that The Big Boss instructed me to get the bolt-cutters from the backroom. There was yet another lock to cut from a locker. This time it wasn’t a client, much less an archenemy. This time it was one of us. This time it was Arturo.

For several weeks his lungs had been acting up again. He started to do things that were out of character for him, things like coming in late to work, leaving early, taking days off, sitting on the milkcrate in the backroom to catch his breath, wheezing around the corridors behind the push broom.

There was no mistake about it; Arturo wasn’t looking so good, and we told him so; we told him he needed to go see a doctor. He put it off, until he couldn’t put it off anymore. They checked him in at the hospital, hooked him up to the machines, in the tiny room at the end of the sad corridor, just like last time.

This time, however, he didn’t come home.

“A Turn for the Worse.” That was the word around The Center. I resolved to go see him in the hospital, in the case there was something he wanted to tell me, like last time.

Then we got the news.

2.

How do you mourn a revolutionary who outlived the revolution? A revolutionary who emerged from the catacombs, the clandestine torture centers, shaken, scarred, but alive, unlike the others? Who, after the triumph of the counterrevolution, took up life on the margins, eked out an existence for himself, did whatever was necessary to get by, scrub toilets, for example? Who treaded water until the very end, who worked until the very end, just a few days before his lungs collapsed, not from a disease or defect, but from exhaustion, simple and plain, at seventy-eight years of age?

3.

The Big Boss called me into her office. “Have a seat,” she said, signalling to the empty chair across from her.

“I have something for you.”  She rummaged in the bottom of a desk drawer and pulled out an old coffee mug, chipped at the rim, handle glued. It wasn’t just any mug. “Arturo worked here from the day we opened. I have never known him to use any other mug. He cherished it.”

The mug, however, didn’t need any introduction. I knew it well. In all my shifts at The Center, it had never been far off. In the breakroom. On the workbench in the tool shed. In the supply closet. On top of the lockers. On the shelf behind the freight elevator. Atop the stack of pallets next to the janitors’ entrance. Stowed away in Arturo’s lockers when he wasn’t on the clock. It was always somewhere close at hand.

Yet, I knew it in another sense as well. It remitted to a past that Arturo and I shared. A political and aesthetic project that his generation started and mine tried to continue. A life that is no longer viable, no longer intelligible, a collective past life, sunken beneath the waves, the very last bubbles reaching the surface. A margin. A solitude. A language that we spoke well at one time but has since expired, a dead language. It’s value, in today’s world, is merely archeological, a relic, except for those of us who had placed the bet and lost, except those of us who got our hands dirty and boots muddy.

The mug is light gray, not unlike the bark of a cottonwood or the exposed surface of a stone. There is an image of Violeta Parra, earthly green with hints of yellow, on one side of the handle. Her head is tilted downward, her gaze fixed on the fretboard of her guitar. A verse from one of her most celebrated songs adorns the other side of the mug. The text reads, “as sure as the moss will grow over the stones.”

Violeta Parra, like so many of her generation, like Arturo, for example, believed that big change was just around the corner. The world was still young and pliable, and they were determined to reshape it. A New Man was coming into being, and they were the midwives. A new day was dawning, and they were ushering it in. The goal was within sight, just on the other side of the line, just on the other side of the revolution. All they had to do was reach out and nudge it in the right direction, just a little tap. Its nearness was intoxicating. The outcome was seemingly inescapable. A force had been set in motion and was gaining momentum.

You couldn’t stop it any more than you could stop the vines from covering the fences, any more than you could stop the moss from padding the stones and bark. Or so it seemed.

But the laws of history are not those of the natural world. They are less resistant, apparently, to prognosis, more prone to anomaly. History, it turned out, was made out of a harder something. The counterrevolutionaries saw to that. The revolution did indeed turn a corner. But it was not a happy ending waiting around the bend. It was a blood orgy of torture, destruction, disappearance, and death. 

The Big Boss cleared her throat. She stood up from her chair. Ceremoniously, she extended the mug, cupped in her hands, to me. I stood up to receive it. “I know he was like a father to you. He would have wanted you to have it.”  

I was speechless.

3.

It doesn’t take long, after someone passes away, for people to start romanticizing them.

When my own father, the counterrevolutionary, passed away not too long ago, for example, everyone started talking about what a good person he was, how kind even, a claim that contradicts all the available evidence and flies in the face of his all-consuming narcissistic life project of self-promotion and self-gratification, not to mention the political malice. We all knew what he was and managed our relationships with him accordingly. Some of us, the few, even managed to salvage a bond, albeit tenuous, and retain something resembling love in our hearts for him, despite all the harm that he was capable of, right up to the very end.

Was The Big Boss engaging in this same variety of idealization when she said that Arturo was like a father to me?

Sure, Arturo was my mentor in The Way of the Broom. I would never have understood the finer points of The Custodial Code without him. But was there something else, something that would justify The Big Boss speaking of it in terms of fathers and sons?

Artwork by Lucas "Luxor" Artola (follow on Instagram @soyluxor)

Of course, there was the question of our past lives and how they overlapped. We spoke the same languages, dead and living. Arturo had lived only blocks from The Punk University, whose halls I haunted all those years, where I lost myself irretrievably in the task of salvaging what there was to salvage in the political and aesthetic projects of Arturo’s generation. We crossed the same borders in the middle of the night. Passed through the same holes in the fence. Until recently we lived on the same side of town, this new town, across the tracks from The Community Center whose toilets we both scrubbed for a living.

But we rarely mentioned any of it. He knew about my past, but we didn’t talk about it. I knew about his past, but we didn’t talk about it. We both knew full well what happened, which is to say, what went wrong. Our lives were the proof of it.

It’s not that we weren’t capable of discussing our thoughts and feelings. But, rather, that we didn’t have to. There wasn’t a lack of the past but an excess. It informed everything. At all times, our overlapping pasts were there, in the room with us, in all their facticity, immovable as all the cement in the neo-Brutalist architecture of The Community Center. We didn’t have to name it any more than we would have had to name the mop bucket. We didn’t have to signal to it any more than we had to signal the doorknob of the supply closet before opening it.

There was, perhaps, one exception: the time that I asked Arturo to get some books for me. He was returning to The Old Country to process his indemnification for having been illegally imprisoned and tortured during the last military dictatorship. Hard to find, long since out of print, written in a dead language, they were books that would have been at home on his bookshelf back when he was a militant, wet behind the ears, back when the world, too, was still young. “There’s a reason they don’t print those books anymore,” Arturo said. He chided me about my tastes in authors. He cautioned me about History. But, in the end, he got the books for me.

Toward the end, I felt that there was something be wanted to tell me. The first time, I went to see him in the hospital, in the tiny room at the end of the sad corridor. We just sat there in silence. All three of us. Arturo, me, and an intertwined past. Sunlight muscled its way through the window, high up on the wall. Dust particles floated, unhurried, in the air of the room. Arturo, eventually, dozed off, his labored breathing deepening.

I guess it would be fair to speak about continuity, of filiation, of going down on the same sinking ship. In this sense, loosely speaking, there may be something of a parentage among the custodians of The Community Center, an unbroken multigenerational chain of co-conspirators, of defenders of lost causes. Perhaps this is what The Big Boss was referring to. This commitment to failing better, to borrow a phrase from Beckett.  

Stepping out of The Big Boss’s office and into what remained of my shift, somewhat disoriented, I wondered if I had done enough, if I had said enough, If I had fought hard enough, if I had cleaned enough. Mug in hand, I wondered if I had been a good enough son.