Latinos by Earl Shorris

Author:Earl Shorris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

5.

Elena makes mangoes into flowers, as if it were possible to reverse the order of the world, to force nature to retreat from the business of the seed to the beauty of the bloom. She stands all day in the sun on the street corner across from MacArthur Park. Her method looks like magic. She reaches into her box of fruit, impales the weak spot of the seed on a stick, peels the mango with a dozen deft strokes of a razor, and with a few chops of a huge chef’s knife, cuts the orange flesh into a flower. Time is turned around; the fruit becomes the blossom.

For her crime against the order of nature, Elena is hunted by the Los Angeles police. They prowl the streets, slowing as they pass her corner. Sometimes they only confiscate the elements of her magical work Twice they have taken her to prison. The last time the police captured her, she languished in the city jail for sixty days, an unnaturalist, a practitioner of sunny magic, a lesser felon among drug dealers, shoplifters, assassins, and thieves.

Elena is a thick woman, a sensualist, as befits one who sniffs mangoes and every now and then steals a petal from one of her flowers, dampening it with lemon and dusting it with herbs before she touches it to her tongue. In the market, in the morning, she exposes the fruits in their boxes of twelve, runs her hands over them, studies the underside of their fleshiest places, taking only the best; not the soft ones, not the green, but the succulent ones, the mangoes that turn to juice on the tongue.

All around her, in the park and on the corners, the drug dealers and prostitutes work; the thieves sell the loot cached inside their shirts, up their sleeves, in their hats and deep pockets. There are killers, too, standing back, waiting in the shade.

Elena keeps the mangoes in a paper barrel, which is also the table of her operations and the storehouse of condiments and lemons and plastic bags and pointed sticks. In El Salvador, where her three children wait, she was also a street vendor, but she had a permanent place, a stand, a shaded spot; her skin was not so dark, she said, in El Salvador. She paid the police a bribe in those days, in El Salvador; she did not have to run from them. It surprised her when the army came and killed her husband.

Now she buys five boxes of mangoes for fifty dollars in the morning and turns them into seventy-five dollars by the end of the day, sometimes even before dark. That is the magic, she said; the other part, which seems like a miracle, is no more than sleight of hand, quickness, like a cardsharp’s trick. Elena keeps the proceeds of her magic in a wad, tucked in an apron pocket. If business were better, she said, if she had a permanent place, she would lay the bills and

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