The salad wasn't pre-prepared - nothing, really, outside of Lima, came pre-prepared - so it sat in layers, not a jumble. Naranja on top, next rodajas de manzana, then piña (fresh from the ground, harvested from inside its big spider plant), banana, then papaya, all slathered in the tin of condensed milk that passed for, well, Just Milk, in Peru. No ground bran dust (the only form of roughage in Amazonas), and no algarrobina gum juice, thanks. The naranja wouldn’t get eaten.
Alicia sat eating a fruit salad in a plaza cafe. Daily dust whirlwinds meant nobody ate outside or on terraces. Amazonas wasn't familiar with the concept of picture windows (or even glass, much); just giant sized doors that never close, so she sat by the doorway and hoped a cloudful of dirt wouldn’t gust onto her food.
A brown skinned woman entered the arched doorway and called irritably for service. Though the words were too fast for her to decipher, Alicia could tell the newcomer was not from here. Both body and voice radiated Big City Impatience. Anyone local knows average wait time in Amazonas to be thirty minutes, perhaps never. This particular waitress, one of the fastest, had a mean table service time of seven minutes.
Alicia tried to focus on conjugating Spanish verbs, awkwardly. She reached for a steaming cup of manzanilla tea. Regretting the attempt at health and purity, she wished she'd just ordered a bloody coffee. In fifteen minutes, she needed to go teach. The bloody letters would never get done.
On the table beside her was a letter, half written and nine months overdue. Addressed to a longtime friend back home, and folded across a card not yet started, for another friend in hospital (Alicia would later curse for always, that she hadn't sent it in time). Beneath, a notebook, containing a hastily scrawled Spanish song in the difficult subjunctive tense. Her language study text book contained CDs called 'Escucha y Aprende', unbesmirched by actual listening.
When the old guy entered Alicia ducked away from his eye. Mr. Toad Hands. His slow progress as innocent as his bewildered stumbling gaze. Local people patted his hands like knotted tree roots, then called the waitress to serve him a galleta cracker. They seemed not to notice the lolling tongue, the abnormally oversize head. He didn’t speak, as they politely nodded and shook his great wart-crusted claws. He slowly creaked and shuffled his way across the café, begging between tables.
Alicia didn’t know where he slept, how he fed himself, whether this was his only food today. She didn’t know if he was capable of speech, or of understanding her halting Spanish, her alien gestures. She tried to watch the other families, anxious not to break the code of polite charitable distance; but aching for him not to call at her table. She knew, with dreadful certainty, what would happen, what always happened. She knew that when he reached her, he'd stretch out a mottled trotter and try to scratch the white color from her arm in amazement.
She also knew that because of this, she wouldn’t ever give him money, even though he's harmless, and doing his best.
Unforgivably, even, the touch of his thumb would put her off her food. Quietly, trying not to broadcast her revulsion for a poor old man who knew no better, Alicia would spend the next ten minutes trying not to breathe the smell of the freshly unwashed. She’d pass the next one hundred minutes trying not to give in to the overwhelming impulse to wash her hands. And while he shuffled and swayed and stared at her, his eyes would be pleading in the common tongue of poverty. While she mutely wished she were more generous, she'd be scratching her skull and trying to remember what 'overwhelming' is in Spanish.
And still, even though she hadn't people-watched in the plaza yet, it'll be nearly time for work, when all this would disappear, till next time, when it would be exactly the same as last.
