The Book Conspiracy

I was surprised to see Arturo smoking.

The employees of The Community Center take their smoke breaks outside the side entrance, the janitor entrance, the one with the freight elevator and the secret staircase. Occasionally they gather there, huddled together in small clusters, at the edge of the pavement, where the footpath deadends into the wild grasses. Arturo was never among them. In fact, we worked many long shifts together back when he was training me, and I can’t recall him ever taking a cigarette break.

It was the first time that we met outside of work hours. I found him, as we had arranged beforehand, out behind The Community Center, deep in the recesses of the immense park, sitting on the stone ledge, at the foot of a grove of giant trees, with thick trunks and deeply grooved light gray bark, cottonwoods.

Arturo was rolling a cigarette as I walked up and sat next to him up on the ledge. The white cotton filter balanced between his lips prevented him from returning my greeting. I was singularly impressed by the dexterity with which he pinched strands of brown tobacco from the pouch on his thigh and spread them evenly on the rolling paper that rested between his index and middle fingers. He placed the filter carefully in the spot that he had left for it at the edge of the rolling paper. It was at that point that we turned to greet me with his usual economy of words. “Pibe.”

It had been so long since someone called me that. A flood of emotions and associations overtook me. The leaden clouds shifted apart and exposed, for the first time in days, blue gashes, throbbing with brightness, bursting the seams. The characteristics of the air changed abruptly, and the crisp leaves of the cottonwood rustled as a breeze swooped down from above. Arturo finished rolling the cigarette without looking down at his hands. There was no question that I was in the presence of an expert.

“I didn’t know you smoke,” I said, in part to cover the awkward silence that had ensued from his one-word greeting.

“I don’t.” He offered no further explanation, but at least, I thought to myself, we are up to two-word answers. Maybe I could get three out of my next question.

Something else was off, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. There was something else that did not fit with the image that I had formed of Arturo in the short time that we had worked together. Then it hit me: the flat cap. This was the first time I had ever seen him in one, the first time I had seen him, for that matter, in anything but our beige coveralls. The flat cap was so much a part of him, it was almost as if he wasn’t wearing it at all, as if he had always been wearing it and always would be.

I often find them whispering among themselves.

Arturo wanted to talk about the books. It was the reason, after all, that we had decided to meet on the stone ledge at the foot of the giant cottonwoods.

Arturo is planning a trip to The Old Country, after a short stay in his Home Country, the Neighboring One. He has some important business to attend to: to settle the details of compensation for his illegal imprisonment and torture during the last capitalist dictatorship, similar in so many ways to others throughout the region during the same period, which, as it turns out, corresponds with Arturo’s early adulthood, a tumultuous and passionate and ultimately tragic period, for both him personally and the country. The paperwork, he insists, is a formality, “a few signatures and stamps,” as he put it, that he hopes to dispense with as expeditiously as possible.

The gravitational center of his trip, at least in terms of personal ties, is The Old Country, our old country, which had opened its door to us in our respective times of need and allowed us to build new lives for ourselves, for a time, two decades, as it turned out, though his two decades weren’t the same as mine. He left many close friends behind when he lifted anchor once again and set sail for This New Country, where we both currently live and work at The Community Center as janitors, him the senior, the head, the mentor, and me the junior, a novice and apprentice.

On some days, I start my shift as his is ending. I often cross paths with him by The Side Entrance, the janitor entrance, the one with the freight elevator and secret stairwell, the one the raccoons have come to associate with the trash bins that we remove from the building at the end of the night and push to the curb. Like old friends, though we barely know each other, or perhaps conspirators, we exchange words in The Old Language, a code, one that neither of us hears often enough. We never share anything other than insignificant details from our everyday lives, a shipment that didn’t arrive, a faucet that leaks, a fellow employee who didn’t show up for their shift, but these little conversions, seemingly unassuming, rest upon an impressive substrate of understandings about the world. As we dart across the surface of the water, flitting in this direction or that, there are lost cities somewhere in the depths, overgrown with seaweed, submerged continents.

Last week, when we crossed paths at The Side Door, he disclosed, with his customary nonchalance, his travel plans. For as much as I hate to ask for favors, for as uncomfortable as it makes me to do so, it isn’t every day that I come across someone on their way to The Old Country.

There are a handful of books, three to be precise, tools of the trade, impossible to obtain here in This New Country, that I need to take my studies in the direction that I am trying to take it, out of the rut, the present plateau, and out on to the next peak.

Not wanting to impose, I offered to take care of all the details. My people would locate the works and orchestrate the transaction. Whenever was most convenient for him, my people would contact him and arrange to drop the package off. No hassle. All Arturo had to do was stow the books, a few hundred pages in total, in his luggage.

He didn’t respond immediately to my proposition but, then again, Arturo rarely responded immediately to any of my comments or questions. He took a few drags off his cigarette and, lips pursed, eyes narrowed, scanned my face. Both of us, I realized, were holding our breath. Apparently, I won the staring contest: Arturo let out a sigh, smoke rolling down his chin and onto his chest as he said, “Sure, for old time’s sake.” I had no idea what he was referring to by “old time’s sake.” I didn’t ask.

The cottonwoods quieted down. Arturo straightened up. “What you do with your books is none of my business. Well, it wasn’t any of my business until you decided to involve me.”

The cottonwoods leaned in closer, suddenly interested.

I braced for impact. It had been a long time since I had a good talking to.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get your little tomes but not without hearing my two cents first.” Arturo selected his words with the usual discretion. “From the first time I saw you, I knew. It’s not hard to miss. The same rashness. The same exaltation. The same disregard. I see the way you write in your notebook. Telling secrets. Crossing them out again. Arrows. Diagrams. Codes. Feverishly. As if the fate of the world depended upon it.”

The space between the clouds wrenched open a little further, as if giving birth, and a kamikaze ray of sunlight broke out of the gate and made a run for it, slanting through sky and crashing headfirst onto the wild grasses at our feet, like a suicide bomber.

“You act as if none of it had happened. As if it wasn’t still happening. As if the stakes aren’t what they are. As if we hadn’t lost.” Arturo extinguished his cigarette on the stone slab between us before continuing. “And yet here we are. Day in and day out. In our coveralls and keyrings. It´s the proof, pibe. We’re on the losing team. The stakes are higher than you think. This should be the starting point of all that shit you scribble in your notebooks, all your little plans. Sure, I’ll get your books, like I’ve done so many times before for so many others. But just do me a favor and don't act like none of it has happened before, like it didn't turn out the way it did.”

The clouds pushed their borders together, mending the opening, withdrawing the renegade ray of light, leaving the wild grasses bewildered and grey. The change in light gave me the distinct impression that the park was underwater and that Arturo words were reaching me from a faraway place as they tapered to their conclusion.

Given our respective pasts and shared present, I wasn’t in any position to refute Arturo’s admonition. Besides, there was no room to do so: he had already changed the topic, already retreated to our comfort zone, our default settings, that is, small talk.

Arturo stowed his tobacco pouch and rolling paper in his hip pack before zipping it back up. He did this with great care and precision as he recounted the highlights of his shift. Earlier in the day, he had found some dry humpers on the basement landing of the stairwell, the secret meeting place of many-a desperate teenager of the neighborhood. Unfortunately for us, the janitorial staff of The Community Center, this is a regular occurrence. To chase them out, we use the same method that we use on the raccoons by the trash bins. Loud noises and brooms usually do the trick. Using the details as entry points, Arturo painted a picture of the scene, which he then put in motion by rearranging the details to capture another scene, another aspect of our lives in the janitorial arts.

I laughed, and my laughter had that same faraway quality, as if it were reaching my ears from a distant past. The sky was darker now, lower now, as if night was coming on, though it wasn’t. The wild grasses, the cottonwoods, the stone slab – they all looked different, as if now they were in on the secret, a part of the conspiracy, the book conspiracy, so much larger than any of us, so much older, as fragile as ever, as improbable as ever, and even more so nowadays, as Arturo was so kind to point out.