_____________
|AMERICA|
|Coney Island|
|________________|
Wednesday. July 2012.
Some Cuban grandparents and their American grandchildren are
in the middle of a day out at the seaside. The kids go to the shore, the granddad
figures somewhere else. Granma gets out her mobile phone.
“We on la beach en Coney I-land. The kids is having a great
day. After we go to the rides...the Cuban guy we was with these morning,
remember.”
“Hay mangos, mangos, mangos.”
She asks the vendor if there are hoteles cerca,, “Two
or three millas”.
He stares blankly. Looks through his pockets with some card,
“on my way back”.
“Sombrillas, umbrellas, sombrellas.”
When the dark soggy t-shirted kids run back they’re calling
granma “Mami”. One changes into a t-shirt of the black President. They are
waited on by Mami and the silent man. Mira this, mira that. The kids talk to
each other in varsity English, the grandparents in their own tongues.
“nu’ crackers y lucis wha are them?”
“you know what a fufurufarafara* is?”
“yes I know this one.” “listen tomorrow I have to go the
cemetery to see my mother.”
“I wanna go see my grandmother!”
“…at the funeral…”
“who was there?”
“Rosa, Juan, Lisa”
“and Michelle?
“everybody”
“and she’s also Michelle’s grandmother?”
“of course, and Antonio, Octavio, Arsenio, Hernan, Duchelle,
John, Michael, Jaden, Irene, Vanessa.”
“Christian, tha is my brother son”
“Irene, grandmother has 18 grandchildren!”
“tell her about the church”
“you were running around yelin and screaming.”
“was I there Mami?”
“No you were in my belly.”
In her belly!? What the hell!
“Empanadas, empanadas, empanadas”
A family laughs when an overweight boy carries a full basket of pre-cut mangos
and slips on a towel.
“Mum those birds are eating those people’s chicken”
On reflection the miscelaneuos children must have been
seriously estranged from Mami to arrive at this point.
These Mami children talk amongst themselves about lactose
intolerance. Mami is talking to Mr Cool Cubano the steady love daddy who can’t
talk to the kids about the hand of El Santo which protects them from the
dangers in the street.
“Mami, what
do people drink if they have a lactose intolerance?”
“Que es?”
“When they
caan eat dairy products”
“Remember,
sweedey, you need to finish your book tooray”
Mami buys two mangos from her man with the days’ spending
money. Irene decides without turning her head round that actually she would eat
some.
Old man Mr Cool grasps her air and feeds her the mango
straight into her expectant mouth as requested – she has sand all up her arms
from making a unconscious cocoon shaped sandcastle.
You can tell the estranged kids from the rest by their
unawareness of sex. The other kids- even those younger than them- wear
cartoonisch bikinis and mime the first acts of courting. Whereas these kids wear
unisex shorts and t-shirts over the swimming costumes as instructed by their
absent guardians who have nightmares about their children having sex. The other
kids- 2 sisters and a brother- welcome the attention of a lone boy who is
comfortable making obscene movements with his tongue to the youngest girl in
front of three generations of her family.
In the middle of this there is a stuck up mother who doesn’t
see past her bit of shade, her two little boys and the dreaded
mother-in-law. The boy goes off with
granny to the shoreline and mother is off with granny, period;
“if you do
that again you can kiss goodbye to your lift home”, Mother spits at grandma
behind the boys’ backs. Granny is or was
English or a serious Bostonian and uses this to her advantage. She glides
innocently over the remarks with the cunning of a period spinster.
“Anyone wanna help me sign a
petition against Bloomberg stopping the sell of large bottles of soda**?”, a
young man shouts, wading through the sand and clusters of people with a
clipboard.
“Lady?”
“De soda? No I don sign for no
soda” the granny-mother declares protecting her confusion.
Not convinced she fully
understands the cause, he stands there for a second.
“Yu espeak espanish?” she asks.
“No, sorry lady”, he admits
despite having parents and colleagues who would challenge it.
Is it worth
thinking at this point about who he is working for? And whether a passion for
soda could be genuine, even to someone employing him?:
“Lady, you
buy big bottles of soda for your family, right? Well imagine if everytime you
wento the supermarket you had to buy lots those little bottles. I tellin you
lady, Bloomberg tryna destroy these city.”
“Yeah, at
school they told us about a landfill rubbish dump he’s trying to build over
there but the people, they don’t want it.”
“Really?” The
petitioner asks the girl with a genuine look of shock.
Granny signs.
“You wanna sign it too?” he says
to the girl.
“Yeah sure
ok. Is that ok mami?”
“Sure
sweedey”
“Should I
put my email on here?”
He
intercepts, “No, don’t put that on there, they send you lots emails”, taking
his clipboard and biro and hobbling on with a renewed sense of duty.
“Mami, do you think Bloomberg is a good
mayor?”, she asks when they’re on their own.
“I don know
too much bout these thing sweedey, but he don sound too good from wha I heard
already.”
*
Wonderful
sounding word heard on Mexican TV anoche meaning "pretentious." There
are a few expressions similar to fufurufa, but they've fallen out of use as
class distinctions have been somewhat attenuated in the USA over the last 40
years:
"Hightoned,
above his raisin, country come to city"
**
Over the great ocean
we stare,
With the pasty taxes
here,
And the soda laws
there,
Marks on these very
shores
Of the poorest palettes
of the poor.
Our salvation from the
tasteless pit,
Was a warm offering
from the master’s mitt,
The best the state has
had for swallows ‘n’ swigs
Snatched away by Uncle Sam and his mate Dick Wiggs.
