Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 12, 1993 TAG: 9304100174
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
PAINTING IS HARD ON EL VIEJO
Painting the entire inside of the house made we write like Ernesto again:(No, for those of you who have asked, I will not enter that write-like-Hemingway contest that has a trip to Italy as the prize. I don't want to go to Italy. I don't even want to go to the Valley View Mall. OK?)
When the old man had finished the first bedroom, he knew that it was not there anymore. In his youth he had been a brazo who did not get neck pains from painting ceilings.
The old man knew he had still to paint many bedrooms, a dining room, a living room, a hallway and a kitchen the size of the ring in which brave men fought the bulls and sometimes died.
And yet he had finished only a bedroom.
"Aiyee, mujer," he said to the woman. "It is better that I should face el toro and a quick honorable death in the afternoon. It would be better than to labor in this way that takes a man strength and heart brush by brush and roller by roller."
"It has always been the same with thee, viejo," the woman said. "Even in your youth you protested the painting of su casa."
The old man thought of what the woman had said. She was often right. She looked at his aging body and saw his soul somehow.
"You may be right, querida mia," the old man said. "It is just that I now believe I will not survive long and I wish to see more of the world than appears at the end of a paint brush."
"Thee? Thee wanting to see more of the world, mi esposo?" the woman said, anger kindling briefly in her eyes. "Thee who will not to go the Mall of the Valley View because it is too far afield? Spare me, viejo."
The old man had lately also lost the even disposition of his youth. The woman's comments stung him.
"Yes," he said crisply. "Your automovil would go there of itself. It is a place you go to refurbish your soul and use the plastic credit. To me, it is a place of great confusion and endless walking."
"It is el verdad," the woman said quickly. "It is the truth that hurts. Is this not so, viejo?"
The old man regretted the loss of himself. It was not manly. A man knows when he has not been manly.
"Lo siento mucho, querida," he said. "It is the soulless drudgery in the paint that has driven me to this."
"De nada," the woman said coldly.
The old man dreaded it when she said those words coldly. It mean future hours of tense silence between them.
And endless painting lay ahead. It started to snow, although it was April.