"You live in a world which is a playground of illusion...you are not part of that world." - Sai Baba
"Truth be told, playgrounds can be war zones." - Atticus Shaffer
Bernardo's eyes look upon his younger sister Maria and see a fragile beauty; a graceful porcelain figurine genteelly dressed in frilly white Chantilly lace tied with a soft ribbon of red satin.
Timorous as a gazelle, she reaches out hopefully each morning for the glittering horizon that promises her a dawn bright with nothing but happiness and joy. He marvels at how she can find the fuchsia flor de maga of her homeland waving bright and lush in Manhattan's hazy sunrise smog; resplendent rainbows in the brackish glistening of shallow puddles left behind after a gray autumn drizzle. A child of moonbeams, every evening she sifts the stars of night from the New York City skyline and christens them, entrusting to each a different wish for tomorrow.
For her, life should consist only of dress-shops and church on Sunday, first dances and frivolous fancies of love and white knights in castles on the rusted-rickety fire escape catwalk outside her dingy bedroom window.
Her world is so far removed from the one he knows – a harsh, wild, jungle landscape of jagged brick buildings and dull chain-link fences and back alleys choked with fumes from automobiles and the stench from the gutter; of gangs and Jets and Sharks and grungy kingdoms to be defended marked out in age-dulled spray-painted graffiti on grime-blackened crumbling concrete greasy with rainwater and old motor oil; of stolen oranges and sneers. She does not feel the inexorable, scrambling pulse of the upper West Side course through her veins, does not hear her heart beat to the jangling, discordant rhythm of the streets. She does not know the terrifying burn of a yearning for just one chance, one shot to grab hold of and own (however briefly) a scrappy piece of something that isn't really theirs to take that turns little boys' playground games of 'King of the Hill' perverse and deadly.
All chestnut curls and doe-eyed innocence, she is full of the fantastically exhilarating dream that is 'America'. Just like Anita (Madre de Dios! how he loves that girl, but at times can she ever get under his skin!) and Rosalia and the rest of them, she flings delicate arms wide and waits for the land sprawling from sea to sea to stretch out a shining hand and welcome her to the one nation indivisible where there is liberty (prosperity) and justice for all.
"America – free to be anything you choose! Somehow…someday…somewhere – "
Bernardo knows – has learned – better.
He recalls a time when he was twelve years old and running; running – fleeing – home over the sidewalk cracks as fast as he could, face flushed and streaked with furious tears, because damn the dingy little hiring office that smelled of sweat, cheap cologne, expensive ink, and hot, foul cigar smoke; the office he'd sat in, waiting, for hours, cap in hand, while a line of white boys streamed past him, in and out through the editor's door (it was solid oak, pitted and rubbed glossy with age; he'd taken to counting the knots and whorls in the wood to pass the time) from morning until closing! damn the sagging, flaccid-cheeked secretary (her wizened lips, cloyed with viscous red lipstick, compressed stickily into an indignant line: "No appointment? Well, really! The editor requires all parties make one prior to a visit…") asking him frostily to wait, please, though she really didn't see how she could make the time to squeeze him in…! damn the editor in his grey flannel suit worn shiny at the cuff and elbow saying, "That's all for today," and "Try back tomorrow," before throwing him out with a canned apology! and damn 229 West 43rd Street* and the New York Times; why should he soil his hands delivering their lousy, stupid paper anyway?
Running; running with the words of the doorman – "Beat it, kid; we don't want no truck with Spics 'round here," – ringing in his ears; running, slipping on the park's freshly-watered straggly-yellow grass and skinning his hands, muddying the cuffs of the second-hand suit he wore (it had been his father's when he'd been a boy); looking down at his hands and hating, loathing his scraped skin for being the same colour as that mud. Storming into the apartment and hurtling up the stairs without a word of explanation – because he couldn't face the uncomprehending faces, stunned and pitying – straight to the communal bathroom at the end of the hall; slamming the door and bolting it tight against the howling winds of prejudice. Tearing off jacket, shirt, and trousers and flinging himself into scalding tub-water and scrubbing, scouring stinging flesh 'til it nearly bled, trying to get that filthy, muddy colour out of it so at least people wouldn't look at him like he was so much dirt to be ground under their heels.
"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." – James A. Baldwin