The Great Spirit

Eliécer Cárdenas

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Opposite the austere mole of the Natural History Museum, he saw the confused greenery of Central Park in that poor and almost cool summer, which had not even warmed asphalt streets enough to melt them in small stretches. He looked at the rows of wrought iron fence depicting Neptunes, whose identical heads were in a series around the Apple. Beyond, he knew that gray, Victorian style building was John Lennon’s the last residence, and at that door the murderer had fired at least six shots. He admired in silence, however, that megalomaniac opulence whose splendor characterized that part of Manhattan, the neurotic, nerve center of New York.

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He slowly crossed the wide avenue, looking at traffic lights as he dove into that huge park, the sleepless and dark heart of the Isle of Manhattan, which covered it in green. “The real New York”, he thought, with arbitrary discrimination towards the rest of the urban Octopus. Of course, he had crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, as he was walking, shaken by wind gusts; and before that he had wandered through the promiscuous street markets of Queens, where one night he saw the most pathetic gay he had ever seen: seventy-something, ugly, with salmon colored pants squeezing sagging buttocks, curls of hair dyed a garish blonde, held up by a roll of fat; his accent pegged him as Venezuelan, and he was waiting for a beautiful manicure at the door of a salon.

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But now he was in Central Park, and he seemed to be in an invulnerable and secret haven. The city attracted and repelled him in regular proportions. Three weeks ago, he had received the invitation from the ghostly semi-Association of Latino Art Curators. The hosts, who volunteered to house him, ultimately did not, using distance and their respective jobs that paid the bills, as pretexts, because one did not make a living as an art curator, etc. In the end, he had no other choice but to bother his cousin and his wife, who lived on Long Island in a residential area, which was scary: not because it was ugly, far from it – brick houses surrounded by yards on tree-lined streets, comfortable homes painted with soft pastels – but because there was emptiness: not a soul walked down those sidewalks, except occasionally when somewhat of a spectacle appeared in shorts and a visor, heading to a nearby supermarket, drivers in gleaming cars passing in front of him; That bizarre pedestrian, looked at him as if he were a rare bug, or worse, a Martian walking about.

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Before gifting himself with that immersion experience in the park of greater New York, a place he longed for desperately in those days, like a mouthful of fresh water in the middle of the desert; he wandered through the adjacent streets and felt like he was in a somewhat exaggerated London or Paris, except that they displayed apartments with Victorian or art-deco styles that, anyone knew, were acquired by tasteful millionaires: actresses, television presenters, stars, industrial tycoons, and corporate managers. Crossing the street at the gates of the Museum of Natural History, he stumbled upon a group of children with their parents, expectant and eager to look at plastic dinosaurs. These days, “Why were people, especially children, so attracted to horrible prehistoric animals?” he wondered, while he stopped to let several little ones leaving the building with stuffed dinosaurs in their arms pass by.

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He thought that there was no way he could see the whole park in one day, so he should stick to the most important sites: the pond nearby, for example, where dozens of ducks swam in the glittering mirror of waters. Apart from a rocky basalt of deep blackness, he glimpsed a gazebo painted white, where, in an exact imitation of Hollywood (weddings, receptions, blondes…) he spotted an Anglo-Saxon bride and groom: he with the ever-present Carnation in the lapel of his suit, and she in white, with a lifted veil and an ingenuous air, and the pastor, Methodist or some other sect, with a Bible between his hands, smiling and muttering to the happy couple.

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There were a dozen guests behind them, surrounding the bride and groom in a semi-circle. Their guests produced cameras that captured the scene, only to disappear among the men’s black and grey suits and the ladies’ sheer dresses. As it was a real, monotonous and predictable film, it was moving slowly, at the edge of the rocks along the pond.

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On the pond’s bank, he glimpsed a subject wearing one of those faux fur suits with rows of fringe, like the North American Indian garb they used to sell in shops for tourists. The subject accurately even had the customary pair of conventional feathers in his hair, wearing them knotted in a pair of braids to look like an Indian in a Western film.

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But something about the man struck him: his hard, tanned features and his aquiline nose really did look like a real Indian’s, an authentic redskin, and nothing like those of a white Anglo-Saxon heading to a costume party. He was looking at the so-called Native American who chanted a kind of litany from his throat that arose with ups and downs, until the man stared back at him and called him over with a movement of his feathered skull.

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Should he approach him? Maybe he was going to ask him for money in return for his curiosity, and, rightly so, for it was money that made him more of a failure in that ruthless city of poverty. The Latino art curators who invited him gave him a few small checks totaling less than five hundred dollars as partial payment, and he didn’t know what would happen when that money ran out he needed to pay for transportation and meals, because his cousin and his wife wouldn’t feed him and pay for his train tickets. He decided, out of pure curiosity, to approach the character in Indian garb.

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The blanket on which he was squatting looked like authentic native handicraft workmanship, although he could not be sure: he was an American art critic, not an expert on indigenous design.

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He knew that he had come from afar, the so-called Indian redskin told him in guttural English. But anyone could figure that out just by looking at his Hispanic face, whose innocence had not yet been lost to the New York streets.

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“I see it in your soul that you are coming from afar. What’s your country like?” the man looked at him with the conscientiousness of a physician to a patient.

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He said that his country was small and had high mountains.

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“Ah, mountains. They are good because from them the Great Spirit descended to man. Squatting on his blanket, he suddenly returned to issuing his drawling psalmody. Several walkers stopped for a few moments to look at him; some photographed him and continued on their way.

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He smiled: The mountains of his country appeared to have been emptied of spirits, large and small. At the summit, the snow had lost its thickness, a volcano emitted vapors, and the people under them wanted to move somewhere else.

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“When there are no mountains, the ones the Whites built will also do the trick,” the so-called Indian raised both arms and directed them toward skyscrapers whose emerging vertices disappeared into the sky.

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The next question for that subject was if he were lost: he really didn’t look like he wore a costume, but authentic native clothing, because of the dignity with which he wore it.

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“Lost? Certainly not. I knew your itinerary on the train, of course,” he said.

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“We all are a little lost in ourselves,’ he said, recalling his life: a sense of misunderstandings, cornets, dead-ends.

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“Find your way, then,” said the subject, returning to raising his arms and humming his litany in sounds, that could be a true Native American language.

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Now it was he who wanted to ask the questions: “Where did he come from? The other just extended his arm, puffing it up in a strange way. He looked like he was imitating an animal.

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“Meadows”, he said; “The Whites closed the prairies to us. Now my parents and my grandparents cannot gallop with their horses m the bison hunt. They learned to drink milk from a carton instead of drinking water from the streams.”

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“And what was there, in that park, so far from a reservation?”

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The red-skinned man raised a hand toward the sky. He glanced upward.

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“Do you see up above?”

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“I saw a flock of birds, ducks, maybe,” he said.

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The feathered man said the cold weather was going to come that year, and he raised prayers to the Great Spirit that the birds would continue their journey over the city, heading to the place where they migrated each year, to avoid the winter ice.

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“Only we humans refuse to follow our paths,” the man said.

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“What nation do you belong to?” he wanted to know.

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“I hope, the village of “Crazy Horse” and the great spirit conversationalist “Black Elk”, said he who claimed to be Indian. He should leave now. He would continue with his prayers.

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He withdrew confused, full of questions without answers. Beyond, within the Park, he noted a small crowd, older people mostly some laying guitars, singing, wearing their hair long, walking around a star on the pavement that commemorated John Lennon and said “Imagine”: which was the melody they were singing.

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He looked upward toward the heavens: a flock of ducks crossed the skyline of Manhattan, in the formation of a V. The weight of the empire seemed to press down on everything, and he envied those birds, which always knew their way.