Memoir: El Negrito y La Niña, Part 1

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Part 1

This is the first in a 3 part series.

rancisco was a small man with a ticking restlessness, whose state of poverty rarely affected his affability. He remained intact, even while being reprimanded by the white men who employed him. When called into their presence, his soul would seem to politely absent his dark eyes. His voice, a soft, ranging woodwind, became prudently atonal. I can picture his ironed shirt angling off his narrow outline as they berated him, the starched cotton exuding a mutinous nudge of sassiness.

I knew him for less than a year starting in the summer of 1989. Sitting side by side in the cramped workshop, he a stone setter and I a goldsmith, Francisco and I labored on the same side of the thick glass that separated us from the others. There were 8 or so furtive, muttering jewelers, who slid occasional glances at us -- the odd couple. But Francisco and I spoke about art and music, film, literature and the world, and I got to listen to his gentle laugh. His light hammer tapped against the steel punch, coaxing a bezel over the curve of a stone. I always looked forward to my afternoons with Francisco, the anticipation of which made my workday bearable.

He was a delicate young man -- even the owners of the business saw that. They'd set him apart from the rest of the workshop lest the hooligans abuse him. Truth was, they all got along fine, the workers saving their bitterness for their employers. The owners, in turn, constantly feared thievery, and it was a fact that Francisco worked with expensive gems. By separating their stone setter from the general riff-raff that handled the less elite aspects of jewelry making, they'd know who to blame if a gem went missing. Blame was an important thing -- with blame went punishment, and that was always an effective deterrent to other would-be thieves. It was important, the owners often said, to know how to handle these people -- the Indios and the Blacks.

The business, a retail jewelry store, was situated on the upper level of a decaying indoor mall, part of a bleak perimeter surrounding an escalator that operated fitfully, and then, never with both sides working simultaneously. Sullen clerks haunted the shops, slouching against doorways, arms supporting elbows as they inspected the smoke from their cigarettes. Their eyes would wander to the only thing in view that was likely to be moving -- the bent and toothless old women whose job it was to polish the pocked marble floors. Back and forth the battered machine would sweep over footprints left by the clerks themselves -- no customer would have passed that way in days. The floors were littered with smashed cigarettes because all ash cans had recently been removed. The old woman with the polisher simply swept the butts off to the side, no longer bothering to pick them up.

"Se Arrienda"--for rent-- signs were taped to many of the windows that had once looked in on thriving businesses. The bomb that went off the previous week just around the corner, taking with it a prominent emerald dealer and several innocent bystanders, had finally compelled the mall administration to seal off all but one of the double glass doors that opened into the lower level. Inside and out, all benches and trash cans had been removed, to lessen the temptation to hide explosives in or near them, and the public rest rooms were closed until further notice. It was not an inviting place to shop.

continued...