Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights Read Online Free PDF Page B

when not everyone had access to the Salk vaccine—he sent Hieronymus to learn a trade from his architect uncle Charles in the capital of the world, but that didn’t work either. Later, when the young man closed the architectural office on Greenwich Avenue and started the gardening business, his father wrote him a letter. You’ll never amount to anything if you can’t stick to anything. Mr. Geronimo unstuck in the grounds of La Incoerenza remembered his father’s warning. The old man knew what he was talking about.
    In American mouths “Hieronymus” quickly became “Geronimo” and he enjoyed, he had to admit, the Indian-chiefy allusion. He was a big man like his father with big competent hands a thick neck and hawkish profile and with his Indian-Indian complexion and all, it was easy for Americans to see the Wild West in him and treat him with the respect reserved for remnants of peoples exterminated by the white man, which he accepted without clarifying that he was Indian from India and therefore familiar with a quite different history of imperialist oppression, but never mind. Uncle Charles Duniza (he had changed the spelling of his surname, he said, to accommodate Americans’ Italianate tastes) also lacked earlobes and had the family gift of height. He was white haired with bushy white eyebrows, his fleshy lips habitually stretched in a gentle disappointed smile, and in his modest architectural practice did not allow politics to be discussed. When he took twenty-two-year-old Geronimo to drink at an inn run by the Genovese family for drag queens and male hookers and transgendered persons, he wanted to speak only of sex, the love of men and men, which horrified and delighted his Bombay nephew who had never spoken of such matters before and to whom they had until now remained a mystery. Father Jerry, being a conservative of the right type, considered homosexuality a thing beyond the pale, to be treated as if it did not exist. But now young Geronimo was living in his homosexual uncle’s run-down brownstone on St. Mark’s Place and the house was full of Uncle Charles’s protégés, half a dozen gay Cuban refugees whom Charles Duniza, with a lighthearted, dismissive wave of the hand, collectively referred to as the Raúls. The Raúls were to be found in the bathrooms at odd hours plucking their eyebrows or languidly shaving the body hair off their chests and legs before heading out in search of love. Geronimo Manezes had no idea how to speak to them but that was okay because they had no interest in speaking to him either. He had always exuded powerfully heterosexual pheromones which induced, in the Raúls, small moues of indifference that said, You can coexist in this space with us if you must, but please know that in all essential ways you don’t exist for us at all.
    As he watched them prance away into the night, Geronimo Manezes found that he envied them their carelessness, the ease with which they had shed Havana like an unwanted snakeskin, navigating this new city with their ten words of bad English, diving into the polyglot urban sea and feeling instantly at home, or, at least, adding their easy, brittle, angry, damaged misfittery to all the other square pegs in the round holes all around them, using bathhouse promiscuity to create the feeling of belonging. He wanted to be that way too, he realized. He felt what the Raúls felt: now that he was here, in this broke, dirty, inexhaustible, dangerous, irresistible metropolis, he was never going home.
    Like so many unbelievers Geronimo Manezes was looking for paradise, but Manhattan Island then was anything but Edenic. After the riots that summer Uncle Charles gave up the Mafia inn. A year later he would march with the pride marchers, but uncomfortably. He wasn’t a natural protester. Reading Voltaire’s Candide, he declared himself in agreement with the tragicomic philosopher Pangloss: Il faut cultiver son jardin. “Stay home, go to work, attend to business,”