|
Dearest
Senora Malena,
You
understand that it is particularly difficult for me to write
this e-mail
since I am not only a child but a fictional one--one appearing
in a film.
But, after all, you are a fictional character too, though
not a child. To
tell you the truth, I have been watching you for years. This
is no strange
thing, since everyone in this town watches you all the time.
But I am the one
who stole your black panties. I hope it did not inconvenience
you too
greatly. Such beautiful things must be scarce in wartime,
especially when
one's country is losing the war. Your great beauty inspires
me daily. Most of
the men who see you want to go to bed with you. I am no exception
to this
rule. When my father brought me to a brothel, I chose a whore
who looked like
you. (I do not mean to imply that the whore resembled you
in any other way.)
However, I think that my feelings are not limited to the sexual.
You may have
heard, when I briefly went mad, I recited poetry. I think
I must believe in
the soul. Perhaps I confuse you with my soul. For a child,
the world of
adults--and, for me, the world of war--is like a movie I watch,
just as I
watch you. I see it going on and I am even touched by it,
but I can't
influence it. It ignores me. I hope you will forgive me for
saying that your
life, though undoubtedly real to you, was a kind of movie
to me. I can't
express to you the pain I felt when I saw you beaten by those
horrible women.
Yet what could I do? Only watch. Had you seen me--which you
did not--you
would have seen me grow or struggle to grow out of my childhood.
I got my
first pair of long pants. My father brought me to a whore,
who was the first
woman ever to make love to me. The significance of such moments
was not as
great as I hoped it would be. Twice, though, it was permitted
to me to touch
you, in a small way. Once, I wrote a note to your husband.
(I wrote many
notes and poems to you but could not deliver them.) And once
I helped you
pick up some oranges you had dropped. These were, for me,
my first real
passage into adulthood, not my long pants or my first sexual
experience:
these were the moments when I realized I could do something,
however small,
to help another person. This, oddly enough, was my entrance
into manhood. It
was also the moment when I stepped out of the movie--or, more
accurately
perhaps, into it. I wish I could return your black panties
to you.
Unfortunately, my father discovered them adorning my forehead
and my mother
subsequently burned them in disgust. I hope you will not think
it crude of me
to say that I know another who sometimes wears black panties.
You were my
first love. You were also the first person I could truly help.
How memorable
that makes you. Perhaps your beauty has faded, though I doubt
it. Perhaps you
have begun to forget the events that happened to you in our
town. It was not
a bad town, though some very bad things happened in it. For
me, it was the
place in which love, finding some very unlikely tinder, burst
into flame.
Yours
Sincerely,
Renato
Amoroso
Jack
Foley is a poet and critic in the San Francisco Bay area who
has hosted a show of interviews and poetry preesentations
on Berkeley radio station KPFA. A contributor to Poetry Flash
and The Alsop Review, his books of poetry include Letters/Lights
- Words for Adelle (1987), Gershwin (1991), Adrift (1993),
Exiles (1996), and with Ivan Arguelles, New Poetry from California:
Dead/Requiem (1998). Adrift was nominated for a Bay Area Book
Reviewers' Award. His poems have been published in a wide
variety of magazines, including The New York Quarterly, Exquisite
Corpse, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Talisman and many others.
He is the author of O Powerful Estern Star and Foley's Books,
both from Pantograph Press 2000.
|
