Four
Corona, a small sub-realm of New York City, of indistinct borders, was defined more by the lots where buildings were missing or by the points at which Bodegas were filled with unfamiliar faces, than by the whim-drawn lines on some zoning map. Roughly along the middle, or at least in the place where the people living there felt they were equally far, in any direction, from some place that was not Corona, lay 99th Street. As perhaps suggested by the number of the street, the people who made their homes along it, were infected on the sub-conscious level with a buzzing presentiment that they lived on the edge of a precipice. Which is not to say that 99th Street was one thing and 100th Street yet another, but rather that on the street where Willie lived, things were never still long enough so that you could watch a whole cloud pass by, or count more than two stars at night. Perhaps only slightly more so than somewhere else, but representing an increment of enormous scope to Willie, more people were violently killed there, more buildings seemed to burn, and the shouting on the street was noticeably louder. So every moment was a tensed, clenched submission to inevitable tragedy. And Willie, like everyone else, knew that tragedy waited around every corner.
In July, a stifling cloak of still, hot air would place itself, and hang immovably over Corona. The noon sun would beat hard on 99th Street, and after dark, the softened tar, the tired buildings and the restless people tried in vain to give back some of that heat to the cooler night air. Like broken refrigerators with the doors flung open, every house and apartment let run its melted human contents out onto the street. The women put aside their aprons or kicked off their work shoes, and came together on certain stoops and porches, where the day’s chismes would keep them busily exchanging into the night. Well apart from them, the men were a spill of T-shirts and gym shorts over some parked car. A day’s labouring made them boisterous and offensive to the ear, so despite an after-dinner shower and the effort of freshly laundered underwear, they were still tolerable only to themselves.
If the men were loud and the thread of their conversations could be followed from a half a block away, then the groupings of the other sex droned with a closed, private intensity. A cluster of ladies seldom offered up the matter of their conferences to even the nearest passerby. So the air was filled really with male voices, and these were governed by a weakly-defined politics of street conversation. Each man was only muted by the more impassioned outcry of his fellow, and a more loudly-made point was a point better made. It seemed more necessary to each participating male that he make a periodic contribution to the aggregate community of speaking, rather than try to logically advance any one personal idea.
Though the men knew nothing of the mental process that arranged it, every few minutes the clamor of those egos would slip into a lull, and a mirror of geography emerged in t-shirted bodies. A circle of Caribbean islands — Cuba, Borinquen, y Quisqueya — was recreated. It seemed, in those brief moments of relative silence, that one of the men might manage to slip his mental grip over a certain particularly elusive idea, one that was always present and yet never voiced. But instead, the silent tension always proved too excruciating. The words were never formed, never spoken, none of them was ever heard to ask “Who are we?” or “Quienes somos?”. The only sound to break the silence was that of the six-packs coming apart. The cans were passed around the circle of men with an air of solemn brotherhood, momentary, but strong enough to let the crisis of silence pass once more without too much thought.