Yesterday I was walking past the Plaza del Carmen, and thought to glance over at the sidewalk cafe on the south side hoping to find some friends sipping something cold; I did.
Polly is a sixty-two year old widow from Washington. She is a Berkley summer of love alumni, a visitor of week long buddhist retreats, and lives in a glass house that sits on 12 acres of an island that has only 400 inhabitants. Jose is a friendless, nervous, thirty-two year old Guadalajara native who suffered a nervous breakdown 2 years ago when his house was wrongfully re-posessed by the Mexican government. I say he has no friends, but he has us- his classmates from ITTO.
Jose is self-taught. He finished 6th grade, taught himself english and left home at 15 to move to Seattle where he first slept under bridges and cardboard. He later made a life for himself there despite his illegal work status as a medical lab technician. In the plaza he tells the story of how at 23 he missed a life in the priesthood by one minute. When he knocked on the seminary door, they told him to return at 7 the following day to replace the one amongst them that had just left. When he showed up at 7:01, the next day and knocked, the wooden doors would not budge an inch. He decided he had misinterpreted the calling after all.
They are headed to a tarot card reader and would I like to go. My mother's voice springs up, and I remember her admonitions against fortune tellers. I recount the message to my friends at the table. The widow chuckles softly, and Jose explains that he himself will not be having his cards read for the future; his own history forbids it. He recounts the memories of his own mother, a magic practicioner and catholic. He says he saw her burn a string she held between two fingertips, and that a ring dangling between them levitated before his very eyes. He says his parents told him stories of witches on broomsticks, and wild animals being tamed. Again he asks if I would like to go.
When I was a teenager in El Paso, I told my mother that I wanted to join the convent, go to Mexico and study the catholicism of the latinos. I'd write a book and tell of the disparities and the reasons for all this vodoo magic and why the lines are so smudged. After explaining my thesis my message my calling, my mother paused for a moment and said 'Heather, I really think the bishop would be mad at you if he found out that you were going to all of this trouble just to write some book.'
We payed the cuenta and started the trek to the card reader. We got lost for 15 minutes and really had to look for it. When we got to the place, the door was closed so we stood confused for a minute staring up at a decorative mirrored circle used to deflect demons and the evil eye. Suddenly, the door opened, and a fifty-something-Santa-Claus looking man in a white t-shirt with three gold medalians opened the door. He could do one reading he said, but then he had to wash up. We agreed and walked up the stairs to his second floor apartment.
Upstairs, we first came into a modest reception area with fung shui mirrors in every corner. The wall adjacent to the entrance was filled floor to cieling with a shrine to the nativity. The baby Jesus and family were tucked safely in their cove as the wise men creept around the corner -captured in the brief instant before discovering them and the shepherds already in mid-homage. I crouched down low to examine the details, as the man jumped behind it and with a click lit the whole thing up in Las Vegas-style honors.
He lead us into a connecting room that seemed to be his library and study. It was dusty and disheveled and a hodgepodge of every major world religion. A big desk and a table filled up it's center, and the walls were lined in book cases and books, a stuffed owl, army medals and memorabilia, a shrine to the Virgin of Medjagorgi, Yugoslavia, a shrine to buddha. On the walls hung pictures of the suffering Christ, depictions of the kabbalistic seifroot, allegories of the astrological icons, and images of saints. Somehow amidst all of this, he unfolded two white folding chairs, one for Polly and one for me while Jose shuffled the tarot deck. He sat down opposite of Jose at the center table, pulled out a photocopied and bound book, lit his ciggarete with a camera shapped lighter and then began to read outloud in Spanish while Jose translated.
What he talked about was fundamental oriental philosophies that we all knew and understood. These were general spiritual conditions transparent to all faiths. He talked about the interconnectedness of the human body, mind, and spirit, the connection of this body to the whole of mankind, the whole of this mankind to the planet, to the universe. How God creates the pulse that stems in our brain that manifests into action and subsequent reactions. He spoke of the self inflicted pain and suffering that man creates for himself when God in truth wants nothing more than for us to enjoy this life in the present. That spending time frustrated about why we have been placed between birth and death was a waste of time when we should just live and breath in the spirit of God. That all of the confusion of the past and questions about what happens have answers imprinted already within us and the state of mind we make for ourself. He looked at my friends the whole time while explaining this and they nodded their heads in agreement. I thought him to be laughing at them for kocking on his door three times already to beg for answers so obvious already.
At this point, my throat began to tickle and I created a major disruption that brought his attention to me. He rushed into the other room to bring me a pitcher of water, and then asked why I was coughing, if it was because I was upset by what he had said. No, I replied that I was sick. Do you want to be sick? he asked me. No, I said with a smile. When is your birthday he asked. July 14 I said. You are kind, and quiet and pensive he said. You are compassionate to other people and you tend to cry a lot he said. No, I said. No llarona. You don't cry? he asked. No.
What followed was a reading of tarot in spanish that Jose didn't really take the time to translate, then questions asked of a crystal pendulum, and then back to flipping through books and passages that Jose chose at random.
I didn't feel anything from this experience. The man showed me no proof of any great gift as my friends had thought. He just seemed to me an intellectual and a seeker of the spiritual and religious in general. Nothing seemed all that mystical. The two questions Jose had asked was a)whether he would be an inventor b)whether he could invent the cure to his mother's illness. Of course any decent person would swing the pendulum clockwise and yes for the first question to give the man hope for his dream and counterclockwise for the second to keep the man realistic and sane.
