Illusion

La Merced

La Antigua, Guatemala

I never understood why Ana, our housemother, told us to be careful of Luis.  Nor did I understand why my friend Kim would parrot these words to me anytime he would come up in conversation.

For those of us living in the host home in Guatemala, Luis was simply “that shoeshine boy” or even “You know, that boy.”  We all knew who “that boy” was.  We passed him sitting on the stoop of La Merced every day on our way to language school.

I didn’t understand my friends’ precautions because after teaching four years in the South Bronx, no young hand-kissing, por-favor-buy-me-a-Pepsi-saying, mentally challenged teenage boy could pose a threat to me.

I loved to stop and chat with him, practicing my fledgling Spanish on him as he practiced his beginning English on me., saying carefully constructed pointed sentences such as, “HOW-ARE-YOU-MY-LOVE?” and kissing my hand, asking me to sit awhile and linger so he could read to me the sentences he had been copying and learning to read.  I never saw the harm in being near Luis.

Then, one moment in time, that will forever be landscaped in my inner eye, I saw a different Luis.  That day, as I made my way home from a café where I had sat eating my plate of papa fritas amidst a sea of stranger faces.  That day—

I saw Luis away from his usual corner.  He was standing in the middle of the street, a hugantic boulder clutched under each arm.  Across from him stood an annoying mosquito of a man who had obviously unfairly provoked him.  Luis, unsure of the growing emotion inside looked ready to pounce.

Around him a sea of people awaited his movements while the object of his wrath at times provoked him and at times attempted to pass. The boy vacillated between the choice of saving face through open aggression or backing down and staying alive, his face contorting as his body rocked back and forth considering his options.

The boy, in the eyes of the crowd, was beloved in an awkward sort of way and they stood watch over him to make sure he did not get hurt.  But to him in the intensity of the moment, the crowd was hostile—it turned him inward on himself and made him feel as though he must finish what had been started.

I too, know that feeling—that loathsome feeling of being watched, observed, and thereby judged.  Feeling all the world has stopped and awaits your movements—ready to render judgment whichever way you choose.  That turning inward on yourself which forces out of the imagination the possibility that the faces which appear so hostile might actually be friendly.

In that moment of vacillation, a stranger stepped up and gently removed the rocks from underneath Luis’s arms, pulling him gently to the side away from the gaze of the crowd.

I hope that in my moments, my strangers will rescue me the way his did him that day, removing the rocks of self-doubt from my demeanor, with which I’ll crush myself, if left alone.