Sharp Knives
Mark Jacobs
Pablito enjoys the custom of taking a drink in the evening regardless of where he finds himself. Due to the nature of his work, he knows every pueblito in this part of Honduras, and each of them offers a spot that is more or less congenial to his purpose. In Pozo Negro, where he is tonight, it’s a bar in an old brick house fronting the central plaza. Casa Tu Tia boasts a long porch protected from the street by a cement balustrade. The balusters are thick in the middle and make him think of a sturdy woman’s calf. Narcisa had calves like that.
He is sitting at a table with a couple of local men. They are drinking aguardiente. A lantern hangs from a rafter. In its diffuse light, the yellow liquid in the bottle and glasses has a venomous aspect. Snake milk. Discontent is in the air. It wakes Pablito’s private sense of grievance, which has lain quiescent in a place in his mind to which he seldom goes. What’s the point? Nobody cares.
Bruton is the subject of the drinkers’ conversation. An American, Pablito gathers. He lives on what used to be the Geronimo Díaz coffee plantation. Three years ago, Bruton showed up, announcing his intention to bring the property back into production. People welcomed him. All he has done since is disappoint. He broods in gloomy isolation, berating the rare visitor who has the temerity to approach the rundown house in which he passes his solitary days. He plays the guitar poorly and sings like a squawking duck. When he comes into the pueblo for supplies, which he does every week, he slings a sarcastic comment in bad Spanish at anyone unlucky enough to cross his path. Since the end of the first year, there has been no work done at the plantation. The jobs he promised the people of the pueblo turned out to be a mirage.
“Maldito palurdo,” Eliades says. “This is not his country. He has no right to treat us this way.”
Eliades has a face like a block of wood carved by an apprentice. His wife is a teacher. This gives him a refined air he relies on to make up for his own shortcomings.
Carlos—Pablito thinks that’s his name but is not one hundred percent sure—emphatically agrees. Carlos runs a two-man operation producing bricks for builders. The problem from his point of view is that too few people are building houses, not with the economy as dismal as it is today. He would like to lodge a complaint but is unsure to whom it should be addressed. The government in Tegucigalpa is thoroughly corrupt. His hands are always busy, which can be distracting.
In the plaza, a stone’s toss from the bar, an untethered cow snorts. It sounds to Pablito as if the animal is egging on the drinkers. A conspiracy of small events. He has seen them play out before.
“About that machete,” he says to Eliades.
“It belonged to my mother’s older brother. Luis Alberto Quiñones. You remember that horrible accident in la Famosa.”
Who doesn’t? A rainy black night, a twisty road up in the hills. A log from a truck coming down got loose on a turn and speared through the front window of a bus going up, shearing off the heads of seven passengers. They were in the seats behind the driver, who was also killed. In what the newspapers called the last row of death, Luis Alberto Quiñones had been dozing. The family likes to think he was asleep when he met his end in a freak of terrible timing.
“My uncle treated me as a father treats a son,” Eliades says. Then, after a moment’s difficult thought, “As a king treats the prince who will one day take his place.”
There is enough emotion in his voice for two tragedies.
Of the three men, he is drinking the most and the fastest. He gestures in the velvet summer night with a cupped hand, encouraging the others to infer that his father was not half the man his decapitated uncle was.
“Come by the house in the morning,” he tells Pablito. “There’s the machete, and the wife has a butcher knife she is partial to. She won’t let me near the damn thing.”
The bus out of Pozo Negro Pablito intends to be on leaves at nine-thirty. There will be plenty of time to go by Eliades’s. With luck, a neighbor or two may have need of his services.
Pablito is a knife sharpener. It’s already an antiquated trade and will not survive into another generation. There are days and moments in a day when the prospective loss puts him in a somber mood, and he slumps into hopelessness, never mind that he will not be there to witness the end. As it is, he barely survives, traveling from one out-of-the-way place to the next and living close. His grinding wheel is affixed to a bicycle frame and turns when he mounts the contraption and pedals. It never breaks down, and he is used to slinging his máquina afiladora into the cargo bays of buses. Also, there is this: he can leave the damn thing out anywhere and forget it. No one will steal it. The only value in the machine attaches to him, a man of diminishing consequence.
He waits to see if Carlos has knives that need sharpening. Evidently not, because out of the blue, he begins complaining about the Americans.
“They are all the same. North, south, east, west, it makes no difference.”
Slightly resentful in the knowledge that no one cares about his unhappy situation, Pablito wonders how many Americans the brickmaker has known in his life.
“God caused them to be born without a soul,” Eliades puts in. “A hundred times, I have asked myself why. The lack of a soul…it’s an abomination.”
Rosario, who owns the bar, has come out onto the porch. She is a bulky woman of fifty who has a way of standing with her arms crossed on her chest that brings to mind a soldier. She wears her long hair down. She wears jeans. On her feet, red leatherette moccasins with beaded designs come to a perky point at the toe.
“Money,” she says. “That’s what motivates them. Money and those monstrous superhero movies. They are children, except that they lack a child’s inborn goodness.”
Another small event. Somehow, the entry of Rosario causes the conversation to intensify in feeling, and they get appreciably louder. Pablito considers this curious. He ascribes the change to competition between the two men, conscious or unconscious, as though the one who comes up with the most outrageous charge will win the barkeep’s favor. He contributes nothing to the discussion. He has, in fact, never met an American, but it’s not his lack of experience that holds him back. It’s his habit of holding in, holding back, holding on.
He is a short, slight man. It was his size that put the permanent diminutive in his name. Sometimes, he is mistaken from behind for a boy until he turns around, and people see the decades in his face. If there is one thing he wishes he could change, it is the innocent expression on that face. As often as he is taken for a boy, he is presumed to be simple.
All the mockery, the insults, the shorty jokes at his expense have given him a weight he carries with him, pueblo to pueblo, year after year, slugging it along with his machine.
He is not a big drinker. One, at most two, in a night. But there is something going on that piques his curiosity. He has thought about retiring to el cuchitril, the cubbyhole behind the bar where he will sleep. But he sticks around as half a dozen men, along with two girls whose long fingernails are painted in violent colors, gravitate out of the crickety darkness to the porch of Tu Tia. It’s not a party, although Rosario takes advantage of the moment to serve drinks to all thirsty comers. Pablito is aware of an unusual wind blowing through his mind, leaving him ruffled but alert. Pain, he reminds himself, is a normal thing to feel. No one is immune. He swells suddenly with a secret sense of pity for all things that live, all things that might. Stones, for example, and the burning bellies of distant stars.
The discontent Pablito was aware of earlier has blossomed into resentment, whose object becomes the Americans. This is to be expected in a poor country so unbearably close to the Colossus of the North. Wake up in the morning, step out into your patio, shoo the ducks and the chickens from underfoot, look up, and there looms Uncle Sam, red-eyed and voracious. You can’t outrun his shadow.
Liquor is consumed, and a fire is lit under the negative passions. The girls put away their phones as if there has been an announcement. The men swear melodramatic oaths on their mothers’ memories. All this exaggeration is necessary. It is a ritual hallowed by repetition. Rosario brings out another bottle. As she hangs a second lantern from a rafter, Pablito envisions her on the front line of the sort of battle commemorated in history books.
Without warning, Pablito’s memory of Narcisa begins to throb.
One of the new men claims he worked, Bruton’s first year, resuscitating coffee plants that the death of Geronimo Díaz left in extravagant neglect. He has long hair and oversized sneakers. On his wrists are thick woven bracelets of a kind Pablito has never seen. He tells fantastic stories about Bruton. The stories paint the American as a monster of selfish appetite. Pablito does not believe a single thing he hears but is as entertained as the rest of the people gathered at Rosario’s. The possibility of sleep has entirely receded for him. It’s the kind of night when you think irresistibly about the wings of blackbirds, thousands of them, rustling in the darkness that hides them so superbly well. Nothing alive ever really sleeps.
Behind their gaudy hands, the two girls whisper about the afilador de cuchillos. They giggle. Pablito takes their small cruelties in stride. He is serene but wonders for a moment where he left his machine. It’s leaning against a wooden bench in the plaza under the enormous kapok tree that dominates the space. Once he departs the scene, people will sharpen their own knives, or the knives will stay dull. The thought causes his resentment to spike. It is his humble contribution to the night’s rebellion that no one has been looking for. Suddenly, it is just here.
One of the girls gets a call on her phone. She signals for quiet with her free hand, then tells people, “He’s here.”
“Who’s here?”
“Bruton. He was just seen going into the Mexican’s.”
This information causes a clamor that confuses Pablito. The Mexican is Lourdes Laurinda. She is not Mexican, she’s Honduran. And Lourdes Laurinda is not her real name; it used to be her stage name. People still call her by it, a token of affectionate respect. She was an actor in Mexican movies. Not a star, never a star. But her face is known. She inherited a house in Pozo Negro from her maternal grandfather and moved here when her career came to an end. She puts on no airs, greets everyone in the street, and knows how to laugh, including at herself. In the little town to which Pablito has come sharpening knives, Lourdes Laurinda is its most beloved citizen.
Divergent histories rile and divide the crowd at the bar. Alliances shift and shift again. Some insist the Mexican has long entertained Bruton, her generous heart open even to such as him. Others are convinced the American lout forces his company on a woman of sensitivity despite her obvious repugnance. Conscious of the rustling of ten thousand blackbird wings, Pablito knows it’s time to take his rest in Rosario’s cubbyhole but allows himself to be borne on the current of excitement and is deposited along with the others in the street in front of the Mexican’s house.
It’s a grand old structure of two ample stories with a verandah running on two sides. Handsome white wicker rocking chairs and a delicate round table enhance the impression of gracious living. Even in the unhelpful dark of night, Pablito can tell that the property is beautifully cared for. It’s a fitting house for a retired actor. Lourdes Laurinda has a satellite connection to the internet and runs a profitable business of some sort, although no one seems to know what it is she buys or sells, trades or offers. There is charm in mystery.
It is a mistake to be here, yet Pablito stays where he stands on the fringe of the drinkers as the commotion brings the Mexican and the American out onto the porch. Even Bruton’s bitterest critic must admit they go together well. She wears her dark hair in a braid over her shoulder and has maintained her figure in retirement. Her dress is white and long. Pablito never goes to the movies, but he would swear he knows that perfectly featured face. It is the kind of face on which the most elusive emotions find fit expression. And as for Bruton, he may be bravucón, he may be a bully and a slacker, but he is handsome enough to deserve to stand next to Lourdes Laurinda. His square-jawed face is stubbled, his shoulders have a kind of muscular lilt even at rest, and the gray streaking his hair looks like it belongs right where it is. He wears a shirt with a collar. There are little buttons on the collar, but the shirt is untucked.
Despite the turbulence, nothing might happen. Noise, and the combustible feelings that generate noise, that much is everywhere, frothing and bubbling, but the Mexican exerts a calming influence. She is regal without trying to be, and queens are accustomed to getting their way. On a normal night, nothing is exactly what would happen. But the restlessness Pablito perceived earlier, back at the bar, has only gained force in the interval, and the young guy with the unusual bracelets on his wrists steps forward from the crowd and curses Bruton.
You can see Bruton react. If you were not paying attention, you might think he flinches, but it’s not that. It’s a reflex to strike out. The American is not a man to put up with disrespect. He will make you pay. Still, the stately woman next to him holds him in check just by being there. Be patient, you imagine she whispers to him through clenched smiling lips, the lips of a woman accustomed to enunciate. It’s a mob, but I know them. They are harmless people and have good hearts. They will soon get tired of this foolishness and go away.
Nothing is going to happen; it’s safe for him to stay. This is the lie Pablito tells himself over and over.
Who brought eggs? Who brought overripe tomatoes? Who threw them at Bruton, striking him in the chest with unerring aim and ruining his shirt? Carlos, the brickmaker, is among those who are throwing vegetables, including a rotten head of lettuce that bounces on the porch railing and caroms off dangerously close to Lourdes Laurinda. She takes a step back and then returns to her original position. She is not the sort of person to be cowed.
There is no room in the air for normal human breathing, the taking in and letting out of breath you absolutely must perform to go on living; it is so full of screaming voices venting their anger at the man who bought the Díaz plantation and then did nothing with it. He just holed up in his self-pity and let the place keep sliding downhill into decay and oblivion. People are milling, pumping up their neighbor’s outrage, which is a handy substitute for courage available to all. The Mexican is tugging on Bruton’s sleeve, although it’s not clear to Pablito what she wants him to do or not to do.
The swelling pity for everyone and everything that Pablito felt earlier is displaced now by something less noble. It has a mordant cast to it. My son, he says. He says it again, more loudly this time. My son, goddamn it. He wants the story to be heard, but the crowd is noisy, and the individuals composing it are totally wrapped up in their own discontent. They share a body. The body has a bruise. They are poking their bruise—it’s the strange pleasure of pain—and could care less about what the knife sharpener has to say. Tears blossom in his eyes.
As if on signal, half a dozen men rush the porch in a somewhat coordinated line of action. They intend to pull Bruton down into the dusty street. If they get him away from the Mexican, the spell of her protection will be broken, and justice will be wreaked upon him.
Before they come close enough to grab him, Lourdes Laurinda raises her hand, commanding them to stop. For a moment that teeters, they do. Then Bruton does the one thing he shouldn’t. He pulls a pistol from somewhere on his person. He waves it around. Of course. This is to be expected.
Even without being fired the pistol produces a stalemate, sudden but definite, although in an impulse of self-respect the people who have come from Rosario’s seeking relief continue to make an unconscionable amount of noise. Pablito is hollering as loud as anybody else in the crowd. It’s the only way he can think of to tell the story no one wants to hear. This is his moment, too.
In frustration, he finds himself on the Mexican’s porch, still hollering. Maybe it’s not words now; maybe it’s the sound you get when you stir anger into your frustration and open your mouth. He is behind the line of men held in check by Lourdes Laurinda’s force of character and her expectations. Then he is past them and through it, lunging for the American’s gun.
He does not get it. In the abbreviated instant, he realizes that his mission will fail; he expects to be shot. A shaggy creature inhabiting the humid under-region of his mind half hopes it will happen. It is the only realistic way he will become a story worth telling. But rather than squeeze the trigger and kill him point blank, Bruton flips the pistol, grips the barrel, and hits Pablito on the head with the butt. He goes down.
The unexpected attack on the knife sharpener frees the men on the porch to go after Bruton, whom they storm in a bunch. One man gets hold of the pistol and wrests it from the American’s hand. Bruton is hauled from the porch into the street, where he is pushed and kicked and spat upon until he, like Pablito, goes down.
Then it’s over, just like that. There will be no murder, no ultimate desecration of place or person. Their restraint is due to the presence of the Mexican. No one wants to disappoint her; everyone is eager for her approval. Lying with his cheek on the night-cool bricks of the porch, Pablito experiences an exceptional awareness. Everything that can be lucid is lucid, its outline etched in his interior vision. He fell not far from Lourdes Laurinda’s feet. There are worse places to go down.
My son.
Her name was Narcisa. She was a sturdy woman with calves that matched. She was lonely in Agudo, a town no larger than Pozo Negro. She let Pablito know she was doing him a gigantic favor, bringing him into her bed on a wintry night when every last dog in town was howling its misery at the unstarred sky. He might have tolerated her condescension. He was used to slights, both casual and well thought out. What he could not abide was the shame Narcisa felt and did not disguise, later, becoming pregnant with the child of an itinerant knife sharpener, a negligible man in every regard. The day after their son was born, she ran away to the capital, taking the baby with her. Disappeared into Téguz like a stone dropping into a lake as deep as Hell itself. His son has a name, but Pablito does not know it.
For what seems like a long time, he lies on the bricks, mouthing words he considers important. If only they would go together into the proper order, if only they made sense. He sees Narcisa’s face across the gap of twenty years. It has blurred surprisingly little. She is still sexy.
As men from the bar surround him, he has to put up with the indignity of being carried on an impromptu stretcher of sweaty arms into the bed of a pickup someone has brought up to transport him. He sits up. People tell him to lie down. Their stupidity is not, this time, unkind.
“You have to hear this,” he says. “It’s important.”
“Be quiet now,” Eliades says
The teacher’s husband speaks in what he believes to be a soothing voice, pushing on Pablito’s shoulders with his considerable strength so that he will lie down and behave like a victim of the American’s aggression.
Pablito does not want to be a victim; he wants to be a truthteller. He wants to oblige the people of Pozo Negro to understand that the injustice done to him is as monstrous, as consequential as what Bruton has done to them.
The pickup drives slowly so as not to jostle the afilador, who stubbornly refuses to lie down.
Time is limited.
At some point between the street before the Mexican’s house, where they have picked him up, and the cubbyhole at Rosario’s bar to which he will be delivered, he has to get their attention. Get it and keep it.
So be it. He feels an unwarranted confidence that he will find the words he requires. When he does, there will be sympathy. It will be heartfelt. Even the girls with their mobile telephones and savage nails will feel compassion and may express it in their alien, incomprehensible way. All of that is well and good. He will be pleased to receive as much tenderness as they are willing to offer him.
What their sympathy will not do is cancel the contempt he feels for himself. It’s out now. Jolted loose by the night’s odd events, it’s pacing like a tiger. A tiger’s anger is what he feels. When Narcisa ran away, he did not go after her to claim his unnamed son.
About the Author
Mark Jacobs has published 200 stories in magazines including The Hudson Review, The Atlantic, Playboy, and Evergreen Review. His sixth book, a novel set in the Congo called Silent Light, is forthcoming from Evergreen Review Books. A full list of his publications can be found at markjacobsauthor.com