Marginalia

Arturo is from The Old Country. He is also the one who will be training me this week, the one who will show me the ropes, the ins and outs, corners that can be cut and the ones that can’t.

We were the first to arrive today. As the ones with the most keys in our keyrings, it is incumbent upon us to be the firsts and the lasts. The sunlight was just breeching the skyline, bruising it, if we were to judge from the colors, shaking the birds from the treetops, coughing them out from the shadows. It was near the time that I usually go to sleep.

It was still possible, when we first slipped in through the side door, to perceive the building breathing, cool air circulating close to the cement floors, its chest rising and falling gently. It did not take long, however, for the sound to become inaudible, with all the shuffling, the chatter, the keys on the keyring, the doors swinging on their hinges, the freight elevator awakening from its slumber, the spinning of its gears and tightening of its cables echoing in the shaft.

The building has an alarm, and the alarm has a code, and I am to punch the right numbers in the right order into the keypad mounted to the wall inside of the side entrance, the janitor one, the one with the freight elevator and secret stairwell. I wrote it all down in my little notepad, the one I otherwise keep in my back pocket, as Arturo specified the details of the procedure.

Some doors have keys, other ones have key cards, and yet others have codes. Arturo and I went from door to door, from key to card to code, from the bottom floor to the top, from supply closet to storage room to employee bathrooms to public bathrooms to changing rooms to classrooms to offices. With each new door, another key or card was added to the keyring that was clipped to carabiner hanging from the beltloop of my cargo pants. My little notebook filled up with codes.

By the time we finished making the rounds, the sun had broken free from the treeline, still low enough for its rays to be thick, fleshy, fragrant, as they slanted in through the front windows and spread themselves out lavishly on the cement floors. I sloshed through them and waded in their orange waters on my way to the main entrance.

It was time to open the front doors of The Community Center. The first clients, swimmers, were huddled together in a cluster outside the double doors. They appeared happy to see Arturo and stood at attention at his approach. Many of them nodded in recognition or shared a smile or friendly word as they crossed the threshold, towels under their arms, goggles hanging from their elbows, gym bags slung over their shoulders. Like a school of fish, they darted, in unison, towards the changing rooms.

“Now it’s time to get to the heart of the matter.” Arturo was referring, of course, to the bathrooms. The building has seventeen bathrooms, many of which have three toilets, so we are taking about upwards towards fifty toilets in total. Once per shift, all of them must be cleaned.

For the time being, there were no more keys or codes, no more protocols, no more explanations, no need to dip your toes in first before diving. In the bathrooms, it is all self-explanatory.

“Have at it,” Arturo said, making way for me to pass as he opened the door to the first bathroom. Toilet paper and paper towels have to be stocked; countertops and sink basins have to be wiped down and disinfected; splash markers and smudges have to be removed from the mirrors; toilet have to be scrubbed; trash and feminine hygiene receptacles have to be emptied; and the floors need to be swept and then mopped.

Arturo waited for me in the doorway, like an old-timey tango singer holding up a lamppost on a foggy night. He hadn’t said a word throughout the whole process, which fits with his nonchalance, generalized discretion, and tendency towards understatement. This came as a relief. For as much as I admire these qualities, and for as much as Arturo and I share a language, a sense of place, and the experience of the loss of that place, I wasn’t feeling very chatty either. This whole business of cleaning toilets for a living doesn’t sit well with me. I just wanted to be alone with my thoughts, to allow them to run their course, and to perhaps speed them along their way with a little elbow grease.

The floors, however, were a different story. There are no two ways about it: you don’t become a Zamboni Industrial Electric Walk-Behind Auto Floor Scrubber driver without someone teaching you how to work the levers.

We needed a blank canvas, so Arturo brought me to the biggest one, the blankest. In the gym, I was free to take the corners too fast and the straight lines too slow; free to under-soap the stains and over-soap the clean patches; free to lag behind the Zamboni and get ahead of it; and free to make all the other necessary mistakes, the beginner ones. By the time we reached the bleachers, at the far end of the gym, I had the hang of the basics. Engine revving, I was ready to hit the rest of the building.

By lunch, I had pretty much seen it all. I would get more familiar with the equipment, with the building, with its closets and passageways and corridors and bathrooms; I would become more efficient, appropriating the tasks, giving them my own personal spin, perhaps; but there would be no new information, nothing that I did not already know after the first half of the first shift. For there on out, the rest would be repetition or, at best, repetition and variation, like a jazz song whose melody I now knew by heart and could hum to myself, speeding it up or stretching it out, adding notes or taking them out, according to the demands of the moment.

Arturo and I had a hard time finding a table. The mezzanine, it turns out, fills up with clients by midday. The tabletops and empty chairs were strewn with their overcoats, tote bags, gym clothes, water bottles, paperback novels, cellphones, laptops, and other Community-Center-visitor paraphernalia. A few times I thought that a client might make room for us at one of the tables, might clear a tabletop or empty a seat, as if we were worthy company, but no, no dice. After circling the floor a few times, we retreated into the employee stairwell, sat down on the floor, backs against the wall, and had our lunch next to the freight elevator.

Unhurriedly, between bites, we talked, for the first time, about The Old Country. We spoke in hushed tones, like we were telling secrets. Not about politics or sports or tourist destinations or any of the first things that come to mind when people think of The Old Country. We were both concerned, instead, with the minutiae, the marginalia, the seemingly insignificant details, with the precision of those who have picked up and left, those who have lifted anchor and set sail, those who have nothing left but their memories.

“Do you remember the bullet hole in the street sign above the bus stop on 1^st and 47^th?”

“It’s big enough to stick your finger through.”

Arturo wanted to know if I was familiar with The Supplicant.

“The one in the yard next to bus terminal on 17^th and 72^nd?”

“The one and only!”

The Supplicant is a sculpture, carved in stone, of a person, an abstract representation of a person, in a position of prostration, presumably at the feet of deity, or one of its earthly emissaries. It is propped up against a curbside tree, between the sidewalk and street, in front of the first house next to the bus terminal. No one knows how it got there, not even the owners of the house, and no one remembered a time when it wasn’t there. Moving it was out of the question, not only because it was too heavy, but because it is as much a part of our city as a tattoo is a part of the body of its bearer, a part of their history, and just as indelible.  

I lived nearby and passed The Supplicant frequently on my way to the university in the morning and then home at night. Arturo worked as a bus driver for a spell. The terminal of 17^th and 72^nd was the end of the line. Between routes, he would go outside and smoke a cigarette, leaning against The Supplicant, who was leaning against the tree at the curb. As he described this scene, I could see him there, orange light from the streetlamps gleaming on the surface of the black cobblestones, as if he had always stood there, as if he would always stand there.

Although we had both lived there for twenty years, neither of us were born in The Old Country. Arturo had been imprisoned during the last dictatorship of The Neighboring Country and had escaped across the border and started a new life for himself. A generation later, under less dramatic conditions, I too had escaped and started a new life for myself. I couldn’t help but wonder if that fact the Arturo and I had lived so long in The Old Country without having been born there had somehow heightened our sense of place. Had it slowed down the sensations, those crucial first impressions, on their way into our bodies? The rooftop clotheslines flapping at the arrival of the South Wind? Had it driven the details further into our psyches? The rich pageantry of the jacarandas in late September? Then there is the hard fact that we both left The Old Country, abruptly unrooted, and relocated to This New Country. Had this passage, with all its sharp edges, with all its indivisible remainders, fattened our memories of The Old Country, sunk them deeper into the mud? The fog rolling in off the river in winter, taking to the streets, cutting off the tops of the trees indiscriminately and hiding the apartment buildings under its shawl until morning?

I had an almost irresistible urge to ask Arturo if he thought we had made the right decision. The aroma of dust and grease from the freight elevator was strong as we finished our respective sandwiches and sipped from our respective water bottles. Tucked away in the employee stairwell, were we any better off?

Arturo didn’t seem to be the type to like contrafactual scenarios. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?” he said, standing up and brushing the crumbs off his coveralls. I was not so quick to rise. I looked up and saw him standing there at the curb. The Supplicant was over his shoulder.

“Come on,” he said, extending a hand, “we have work to do.”