lapel, while I stood stoically as a child being prepared for Sunday Mass.
“You go on directly after Stan.” She removed the wine glass from my hand and stood back. “Well, you look the part.”
Stan Drury laughed.
“Break a leg, you two,” Rita said, before charging off again.
The backstage was emptying. Stan cocked an ear. “The show has begun.”
We listened to the sound of electric guitars tuning up.
“That’ll be Tim and Harvey — two of our prominent novelists making like rock stars.” Stan giggled as faltering male voices began to sing:
“Get up
Stand Up
Stand up for your rights.”
“Christ, aren’t they awful?”
We moved to the wings where a small crowd of performers was watching. The theatre was jammed; there were well over seven hundred people in the thirty-dollar seats, shrieking and applauding as two middle-aged white guys did their Rasta impersonation. I stared with the others, transfixed. I tried to imagine, back home, the eminent and dignified Alfredo Cruz Ascencio grabbing a mike and allowing, even encouraging, his rapt audience to laugh at him, as these people were doing, laughing until they wept. And second row centre, a black woman in dreads squealed the loudest.
I had dared to think that I was beginning to understand these Canadians, their taut friendliness and polite smiles, their helpful practical advice, their fervent lack of sensuality, but now I felt my theories unravel strand by strand.
“After this,” Stan whispered beerily into my face, “we’ll go out and get drunk.”
I dreaded the thought. This man would quiz me, naming every bar, every newspaper, every writer he’d met until he nailed me. He would find out precisely who I was — and who I wasn’t.
“You’re up next.”
I jumped. But Rita had touched Stan’s shoulder, not mine. Immediately he straightened, and, carrying his manuscript under his arm like a score, he strode on stage to the still trickling laughter and a scatter of fresh applause.
Rita looked worried. “Whose idea was it to put him on after Tim and Harvey?”
I perched on a piece of plywood shaped like a wave. This was a dark night for the theatre’s production of Sinbad The Sailor.
Stan knew how to work a crowd. First he took the mike from the lectern and paced with it slowly until the audience played out its silliness. Then, without speaking, he stood still, all 250 pounds of him, with just the sound of his laboured breathing filtering through the PA.
“Three prose poems from the shantytown of Milagro,” Stan said in a half-whisper that managed to fill the hall.
“‘Milagro’ means ‘miracle’ in Spanish, and the survival of these people is nothing less than a miracle.”
The auditorium was hushed at last.
Stan’s reading was full of pauses and crisp, short phrases evoking the lives of Colonia Milagro which, I confess, I have never visited. Why should I enter that slum? It’s filthy, overrun with thugs and rabid dogs; open sewers stream down its mud-baked streets. Drug dealers lurk in every doorway, jackets bulging with weapons.
Stan, it seemed, had got one of these thugs to give him a guided tour of his barrio, for each poem was full of precisely observed moments. There was the child, clad in ripped shorts, who stood knee deep in the trench, washing himself, as he had been taught by his scrupulous mother, in the typhoid-infested water. The poem ended with a final image of the boy, using his finger as a toothbrush, swabbing the inside of his mouth.
“… sores like open eyes.”
His work received the kind of hushed respect he was clearly accustomed to. I’d met guys like him at la Luna, passing through on “fact-finding missions,” or escapees from Capitalism, with wild hair and a well-thumbed copy of the South American Handbook. They despised the word “tourist” and prided themselves on their idiomatic Spanish and their ability to engage real people in conversation. They always want to be escorted into the shantytowns, as if the wretched souls who hung on there were more real than the tax-paying citizens of the cafés.
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