Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

Whom else was F. Hopkins likely to see in La Bunne Burger over his late breakfast or his brunch? Proprietors of nearby businesses, for example, he was likely to see there; mamma no longer brought pappa’s dinner wrapped in a towel to keep hot. Abelardo was sometimes there. Also Fred might see tourists or new emigres or visiting entrepreneurs of alien status, come to taste the exotic tuna fish sandwich on toast, the picturesque macaroni and cheese, the curious cold turkey, and, of course, often, often, often the native La Bunne De Luxe Special…said to be the best hamburger on The Street. Abelardo had long looked familiar; Abelardo had in fact looked familiar from tbe first. Abelardo always came in from the kitchen and Abelardo always went back out through the kitchen, and yet Abelardo did not work in the kitchen. Evidently Abelardo delivered. Something.

Once, carrying a plate of…something…odd and fragrant, Rudolfo rested it a moment on the counter near Fred while he gathered cutlery; in response to Fred’s look of curiosity and approbation, at once said. “Not on the menu. Only I give some to Abelardo, because our family come from the same country;” off he went.

Later: “You’re not from Mexico, Rudolfo.”

“No. South America.” Rudolfo departs with glasses.

Later: “Which country in South America you from, Rudolfo?”

“Depend who you ask.” Exit, Rudolfo, for napkins.

Fred Hopkins, idly observing paint on two of his own fingers, idly wondered that — a disputed boundary being clearly involved — Rudolfo was not out leading marches and demonstrations, or (at least!) with drippy brushes slapping up grafitti exhorting the reader to Remember the 12th of January…the 3rd of April…the 24th of October…and so on through the existing political calendar of Ibero-America … Clearly, Rudolfo was an anachronism. Perhaps he secretly served some fallen sovereign; a pseudo-crypto-Emperor of Brazil. Perhaps.

Though probably not likely.

One day, the hour being later than usual and the counter crowded, Fred’s eyes wandered around in search of a seat; met those of Abelardo who, wordlessly, invited him to sit in the empty place at the two-person table. Which Fred did. And, so doing, realized why the man had always seemed familiar. Now, suppose you are a foreigner living in a small city or medium town in Latin America, as Fred Hopkins had once been, and it doesn’t really matter which city or town or even which country…doesn’t really matter for this purpose…and you are going slightly out your mind trying to get your electricity (la luz) turned on and eventually you notice that there are a few large stones never moved from the side of a certain street and gradually notice that there is often the same man sitting on one of the boulders and that this man wears very dusty clothes which do not match and a hat rather odd for the locale (say, a beret) and that he also wears glasses and that the lens of one is opaque or dark and that this man often gives a small wave of his hand to return the greetings of passersby but otherwise he merely sits and looks. You at length have occasion to ask him something, say, At what hour does the Municipal Palace open? And not only does the man politely inform you, he politely engages you in conversation and before long he is giving you a fascinating discourse on an aspect of history, religion, economics, or folklore, an aspect of which you had been completely ignorant. Subsequent enquiry discloses that the man is, say, a Don Eliseo, who had attended the National University for nine years but took no degree, that he is an idiosyncratico , and comes from a family muy honorado — so much honorado , in fact, that merely having been observed in polite discourse with him results in your electricity being connectido muy pronto. You have many discourses with Don Eliseo and eventually he shows you his project, temporarily in abeyance, to perfect the best tortilla making-and-baking machine in the world: there is some minor problem, such as the difficulty of scraping every third tortilla off the ceiling, but any day now Don Eliseo will get this licked; and, in the meanwhile and forever after, his house is your house.

This was why Abelardo had seemed familiar from the start, and if Abelardo was not Eliseo’s brother than he was certainly his nephew or his cousin…in the spirit, anyway.

Out of a polite desire that Fred Hopkins not be bored while waiting to be served, Abelardo discussed various things with him — that is, for the most part, Abelardo discussed. Fred listened. La Bunne Burger was very busy.

“Now, the real weakness of the Jesuits in Paraguay,” Abelardo explained.

“Now, in western South America,” said Abelardo, “North American corporations are disliked less for their vices than for their virtues. Bribery, favoritism, we can understand these things, we live with them. But an absolute insistence that one must arrive in one’s office day after day at one invariable hour and that frequent prolonged telephone conversations from one’s office to one’s home and family is unfavored, this is against our conception of personal and domestic usement,” Abelardo explained.

He assured Fred Hopkins that the Regent Isabella’s greatest error, “though she made several,” was in having married a Frenchman. “The Frankish temperament is not the Latin temperament,” Abelardo declared.

Fred’s food eventually arrived; Abelardo informed him that although individual enterprise and planned economy were all very well in their own ways, “one ignores the law of supply and demand at peril. I have been often in businesses, so I know, you see.” Said Abelardo.

Abelardo did not indeed wear eyeglasses with one dark or opaque lens, but one of his eyes was artificial. He had gold in his smile — that is, in his teeth — and his white coverall was much washed but never much ironed. By and by, with polite words and thanks for the pleasure of Fred’s company, Abelardo vanished into the kitchen; when Fred strolled up for his bill, he was informed it had already been paid. This rather surprised Fred. So did the fact, conveyed to him by the clock, that the noon rush was over. Had been over.

“Abelardo seems like — Abelardo is a very nice guy.”

Rudolfo’s face, hands, and body made brief but persuasive signal that it went without saying that Abelardo was indeed a very nice guy. “But I don’t know how he stay in business,” said Rudolfo, picking up a pile of dishes and walking them off to the kitchen.

Fred had no reason to remain to discuss this, as it was an unknown to him how anybody stayed in business. Merely he was well aware how week after week the price of paints and brushes and canvases went up, up, up, while the price of his artwork stayed the same, same, same. Well, his agent, though wrong, was right. No one to blame but himself; he could have stayed in advertising, he might be an account executive by now. Or — Walking along The Street, he felt a wry smile accompany memory of another of Abelardo’s comments: “Advertisage is like courtship, always involve some measure of deceit.”

This made him quickstep a bit back to the studio to get in some more painting, for — he felt — tonight might be a good one for what one might call courtship; “exploitation,” some would doubtless call it: though why? if ladies (“women!”) did not like to come back to his loft studio and see his painting, why did they do so? And if they did not genuinely desire to remain for a while of varying length, who could make them? Did any one of them really desire to admire his art, was there no pretense on the part of any of them? Why was he not the exploited one? You women are all alike, you only have one thing on your mind, all you think of is your own pleasure… Oh well. Hell. Back to work. — It was true that you could not sleep with an old building, but then they never argued with you, either. And as for “some measure of deceit,” boy did that work both ways! Two weeks before, he’d come upon a harmonious and almost untouched, though tiny, commercial block in an area in between the factories and the farms, as yet undestroyed by the people curiously called “developers”; he’d taken lots of color snaps of it from all angles, and he wanted to do at least two large paintings, maybe two small ones as well. The date, 1895, was up there in front. The front was false, but in the harmony was truth.