Manolo
From the remains of another. Hybrid prose by Esénia Bañuelos
It was the first night Papá had ever allowed me in his space.
The pine gateway struggled emptily beneath my childish weight; what seemed like decades of merciless receipts crinkled a passage towards the nightstand. What was José Manuel’s terreno had melted into a play desk for his son to fold the legs of his glasses and the fingers of his soul into a taut bind the size of what then seemed like cousin Lichi Lichi’s mansion in St. John’s—which is to say, it was quite the sight for a little worker’s elf to see my Father basking in an inherited Gooseneck from his nephew and scowling out towards the banalities of a capitalism writhing and crawling endlessly towards him. In many ways, Abuelito’s odd construction burdened him and simultaneously supported my Father as he leaned his hardy disposition on his face. Many men before him, like him, had sworn their bodies to the oak—what was merely a nightstand with not an inch to give for his legs became a place of sincere glory.
Papá was never one to speak. I was meaninglessly six years old and mute. What he and I did not know, we shared in some non-linguistic tongue—that of endless creation, one that was not so limited to this sanctuary of desire. Like his workspace or oficína St. José, as he earnestly urged Mamá and I to call it, the mustard yellow Ford Expedition was not so much a landscaping mobile and was instead more of a banana buggy—a horse-drawn carriage fashioned in the Perrault shape of only the finest golden vegetable. It collared breathlessly into the Hoover parking lot and squealed into a blustering and belabored halt. Bañuelos Lawn Service. Without a word towards the day, Papá was the conductor towards a beautiful palace sheerly bordering the lip of the Calumet River and 173rd—Lansing, where thousandaire Mark (Már) throned an impossibly gorgeous and derelict playground. A reward for all the good I had probably done that week, like get my card flicked to an admonishing yellow, or climb the stout railings to the stairs, pitchpole onto my stomach, and nosedive into the oblivion of a five-stair flight and straight into a heavily pregnant Mrs. Jordan. Whatever it was, he hoisted me up from my armpits and nervously placed me at the mouth of the slide, and that was as much conversation as he and I had before the stirrings of guïras singed my nose and married my ears with the low hum of cicadas.
It seemed that wherever he and I made a space, it was from the remains of another. The workspace was no different in that sense. An ocean of inheritance swarmed my heels and often licked feverishly at my ankles like a mutt Mamá would die before ever letting me explore the porch. Papá did not seem deterred by my interruption of his little workspace and had continued his endless tinkering at the desk, wrangling the plump black vein of some unearthly device beyond my comprehension and making the waters of Lethe flush aglow with light. I knew nothing of what I was watching when I flanked him to see the magician, the craftsman in perfect peace. I only noticed, for the first time, that when he spent that anthemic grin, he sported a little void between the canines. He squinted, rolled his jaw into the burrow of his throat, and beamed a whistling cardinal when he smiled. I had never noticed he was missing something.
Papá was never one for farmer’s decorations. The walls were still aching and painted a tortured beige, a little tribute to Calumet City from the last family to flee towards the gorgeously haggard bungalows of Hegewisch. What could have been the arena for a couple of portraits of starlings and quotes from Matthew—a bursting cinematic of the Final Supper blessing the grounds on which we feasted pearl haricots and carbonized guajillos—a gingham tapestry, anything that would make heaven a little less industrial—was instead ripe with wonder. It seemed more like he wore his California cholo beginnings paged over his head in an uneven, amateur fade than anywhere where he could nestle in at night and become a child again. He unfolded his beloved Dell Inspiron from Tío Hector and gestured ferociously at the cable extending from the paunch monitor he managed to wrestle from a garage sale out on the South Side some years before. What I was about to witness inverted the state of technology as we knew it. Papá was a Da Vinci fashioned from the whit of Guadalajara.
In a split second, there was a versant and severe twinge of light that blinded both my Papá and I in a gruesome inception—all I could translate then with my childish capability towards discernment was that I was seeing. I was effectively seeing two portals squealing—demanding—explicating and inundating me with the same proverbial light. Papá hitched a gasp and crowed, slapped the boundaries of his hands against the fatigued desktop, and proudly stood up amidst the sea of decadent wrappers. My God, I could read his congested pupils below the burden of his brows, I had done it. I found out what happens when you plug an HDMI cable from a laptop into a monitor. Him and I swirled the confines of the oficina, kicking against the burdens of receipts, demands, labors, pain, inheritance, genetic disease, insurance, mortgage, and pain, and pain, and pain. Amid the paper chaos, there were no manuals—no set of instructions—no means of knowing, at least not one available in our language (or lack thereof). Just pure ingenuity.
The greatest engineer—the designer of man. Father, bright in the flesh.
Papá. The son.
José Manuel.
—
Manolo!
I am standing in front of a vacuous abyss at the edge of where Heaven once remanded the loan. Where the Calumet River stood, a couple of pebbles shouldered nothing but the dryest air—some weeds, unattended and forlorn for a trim, whimpered among them. What lifted me from O’Hare this morning was not a banana buggy, but a simple burgundy, faceless landau from the Facebook Marketplace. The return is obligatorily silent, as is typical in the avenues of death and destruction. St. José is no more, and his funeral mass is imminent. A little piece of childhood seems to fill in the driveway cracks. Papá—Manolo—a child joins me at the ledge and pulls a red filament where the desktop once stood. The columnar tree whines, weakly mithers, and ultimately straightens his spine.
It seems the harsh Chicago summers have made for stubborn, humid children. “I never noticed him before,” A little breath stifles and struggles through my teeth. The thing was impossibly tall and disruptive—so unashamed, yet so skinny and fragile. His leaves hadn’t even survived the mild September weeks, and he was undeniably exhausted. An easy Chicago wind would send him over to the Lansing plains—after that, everything else is just another way to say hell.
“He started growing a little bit when you left,” He wrestled the ends of his lips from flying away, sheepish of his pride. “I watered him a little bit sometimes, but often, I forget about him. He’s strong,” His brittle palms are simultaneously caressing and choking the thing, “but he needs me to feed him a little more. What do you know about trees?”
I act the fool.
Esénia Bañuelos is a Mexican-American and mixed Indigenous Huichol prose poet and short fiction author. She is an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College majoring in Linguistics and Literature of English. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net Award, and can be read in MANTIS, The Allegheny Review, The Saranac Review, and The Maine Review.
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