On Sundays, you could see him sitting outside the old covenant scribbling furiously in a notebook, dressed in long dirty white robes and carrying a wooden sword on his back. He wrote like he was chiseling rock or hammering nails, building houses or damming rivers, climbing trees or collecting garbage, wrote like most men worked, day after day, dawn until night; the words could not fall out fast enough.
His name was Ramon.
Fifteen years ago he had been enrolled in engineering school studying computer science, which his father hoped would prove profitable for the future. It was there he met Elena.
She was also studying computer science with a father who had the same ambition for her future, and when Ramon saw her typing on an old Apple Macintosh with a cracked screen, those long pale fingers dancing across the stained keyboard (which he imagined to be his back), he fell in love. And Elena fell in love too, with someone else.
That day a pain crawled into Ramon that he had never experienced before. Here was this beautiful girl who had long fingers that did not love him, long hair that did not see him, and long lips that did not kiss him; a beautiful girl who had seduced him while he tried to program with the blank blue screen, the cursor love, this innocent girl that had given him a resounding ‘no’ that echoed in the hallways and into his heart; a ‘no’ that, he believed, under blacklight or the moon would instead become a maybe, a so, a conversation, a yes.
Oh how Ramon tried to woo her: C++, Java, Flash, any program he could stumble upon, he would reformat and develop especially for her; like the email that was a flower, a click later a letter, then a heart, or their .jpeg heads spliced onto famous couples in famous places and famous worlds; and Elena deleted them all.
It may have been different for Ramon, if Elena had opened those messages, she may have fallen in love with him and he may have become handsome, confident, may have improved his posture and had a family with sons, may have had happiness; but she did not click open Ramon’s heart. No, instead she played dead like a possum, ignored him in the hallways, looked the other way, saw in between him, made him into an invisible man. Lacking any other options, Ramon did the only thing he could think of to win her gaze.
He stopped wearing clothes.
Computer programming is difficult work, but programming while sitting next to a naked man is nearly impossible, and it wasn’t so much Ramon’s genitalia (normal) or the excess of black, curly hair (thick), that bothered his peers at school, it was the white. Where his clothes had once been.
White like the moon. Like the rest of Ramon’s body was not. Which was brown. Which was dark, like a tree in the night. This was a white from somewhere else.
At first no one said anything, hoping that it was just one of those phases; perhaps he was under the spell of a somnambulist, or maybe he simply forgot to put on clothes one day, maybe he’d remember them tomorrow. And so Ramon continued on with his routine, albeit, without fabric and soon became known as: the nude Ramon, the white Ramon, the ghost Ramon, and finally, the crazy Ramon.
When people in town asked him why he had stopped wearing clothes he answered Elena, and when people in town asked Elena why she told Ramon to stop wearing clothes, she flew into a rage.
When she was five Elena had sat in the high priestess chair at the annual carnival, she waved the flag at the opening of the cow race every year, was a member of one of the oldest, most respected families in town; she was not about to be dragged through the dirt like a whore, linked to some naked crazy man that had somehow fallen in love with her during computer class.
So Elena complained to the school director that she could not focus on programming while sitting near a naked Ramon, and the school director, though loathe to dismiss a student, was forced into action; he told Ramon to either start wearing clothes, or to leave. Ramon chose the later.
When he tried to explain this decision to his parents, explain that he did not like clothes and Elena did not love him, and the discomfort he felt as a naked man in a clothing-obsessed society; with its pants and dress shirts, blouses and skirts, so people less resemble people than they do mummy’s; when he tried to explain all that, they kicked him out too.
The pants that did not fit him, the shirt that hated him, the socks that disowned him, the hat that left him, the programs that deceived him, the hope that fooled him, the bitch that rejected him, he burned it all in one big pile outside the church; a bonfire of salvation. Gone were his parents, friends, career, school, clothes and left, alone, was this tall, naked man, with bad posture and an overbite, named Ramon.
And so he prayed. He had only prayed once before and that was when he was a child and his best friend’s dog had been very sick, and he remembered kneeling down before bed, gazing into the ether of his ceiling, and wishing Bartholemu to live. Now was different, now he prayed for nothing, he just knelt there outside the church, hands clasped, the sky beginning to rain.
Fifteen years later he wore a gown that had taken on three different shades of color: black for when he slept on the sidewalks in town, brown for when he slept on the banks of the river, and gray for when he sat against the church wall writing.
His teeth had become yellow and tangled like underbrush, his face had been sanded down by the rain and sun and now resembled cut mahogany wood, his hair had become locks inside locks inside locks, his once fierce brown eyes sagged like water buckets; he had eaten little in the last fifteen years, simply scraps and bits found in the dump outside the covenant, his stomach was left never satisfied and always searching for more.
But he still wrote. Everyday. He still saw things.
He could look up to the sky and see the blue, the clouds; the bright green mountains smoking inside the blurred heat; the cockroaches in the street and the lizards scuttling in cement, squashed toads and dead dogs, lines and lines of angry insects marching underneath, the cobblestone and the church, the peeled paint and the shade, his parents and the long pale fingers of Elena, he could still see them all if he pleased.
Everything is the same.
The mountains had not moved, the river flowed in the same direction, the heat baked; fifteen years and so little change. Sure, his body had gotten older, but whose body had not aged? Who had not withered?
Ramon’s mind was the mountain, and his thoughts the river flowing through, his eyes the heat; and while all had accumulated garbage and age, endured endless sun and rain, yet all remained distinctly, unchanged. Incapable of it.
Everything is the same.
The twenty year old programmer in love with a girl in his computer class. The Naked Ramon. The Ramon that did not understand how she could ignore him, could not understand such cruelty; to pretend that a man did not exist. The Ghost Ramon. The Ramon that acknowledged everyone, had always shaken hands, always said a salutation when crossing the park, smiled and waved when spotted, walked rather than drive. The Crazy Ramon. The Ramon that had gone to school for fifteen years without complaint, had friends, played mid-fielder in soccer games on Sundays, laughed at the good jokes he heard, the sociable Ramon, the adjusted Ramon, walking the trail to the big city to the land of Apple computers to the place of future success. That Ramon.
Everything is the same.
But you wouldn’t know it. He sits inside a corner inside a corner, deep inside the shade of the church, scrawling furiously in a hand-made book, fist clenched like a talon, like an eagle protecting a nest; he never dares look up. His hair is a black curtain covering his face and his eyes hidden like a God, he writes angrily into his hand-made book; I imagine it to be words, words, words.
If he did look up, and if he did see me standing a few meters away, I would quickly look away; at a tree or slightly adjust my gaze, crook the neck so as to be examining a pole, the architecture of the church, a crack in the wall, anything not to meet that face.
His hair is a Medusa. It has snakes. It coils. Hisses when he writes. I do not know what lies beneath.
If I did meet his gaze, somehow, maybe have a momentary lapse, forget to divert my attention, if he did see me see him maybe I’d turn into stone. Maybe into water. Surely I could never be the same. I don’t know.
Before I saw him at the church I saw his back pressed up against the wall, knees huddled close, eating like an animal; like a man who had become an animal who looked like a man.
I walked by.
And I walked by.
I want to ask what he is writing. I want to see what’s inside his book. What words does he use. How does he construct a sentence. Where does the story begin. How can it end.
I want to know if he still loves her, even after she moved away, married, had kids, employed a maid. Why is he still sitting against the church wall, writing, scrawling those words, why does he refuse to stop.
I see him every day wandering the town and the town sees him wandering through, and the two never touch. Constantly pass at arm’s length. A hand’s width. He is close for they all know him, and yet he is as distant as a space-walker; a man in a dirty gown carrying a wooden sword, from another time and another planet.
He is here and he is not here.
I once loved a girl like Ramon, I think. I remember standing outside of her white Subaru screaming to the street, pounding my fist against the hollow plastic hood; later crying so much my eyes hurt, and even later staring at the darkness thinking nothing.
I remember writing words that found no cohesion, constructed no meaning, words that became a broken river with a million beginnings and no ends, flowing into a digital screen that I saved, over and over again. Only to be revised later in the hope that all that self-inflicted agony was worth it and the mess of documents would be touched with a Chatterton-like genius, to be published right before I would have committed suicide and to rave reviews, so raving in fact that I’d have to drop out of college just to sign my signature into millions of books over and over again. And all because I had been so greatly inspired by a humiliating moment, an embarrassment that like the Golden Hen I’d turn into gold. Which I could harvest. Sell. And profit.
Bitch.
Those fantasies sustained me. The idea of the return, the Phoenix rising from the ashes to reclaim, Odysseus slaughtering the suitors, regaining his wife and home and original name; yes, a return to greatness, and then the ascension to greater greatness.
But Ramon seeks no return. He just keeps departing, leaving for some place no one visits, and just when his family thinks he will come back, just when his eyes look up from his book and the curious bystander stops to think ‘well, perhaps he’s finished and he’ll stop wearing that gown,’ just when he or she or it thinks it; Ramon never fails to disappoint.
He will go out and make a new book. He will thread the pages with a shaky hand. He will wander the town like a phantom. He will eat with the dogs. He will go to the church on Sunday, and he will write like he was chiseling rock or hammering nails, building houses or damming rivers, climbing trees or collecting garbage, he will write like most men work, day after day, dawn until night; and he will never come home.
JOE TURNER'S COME & GONE by August Wilson
AMERICAN PASTORAL by Philip Roth
