Sancho's Eyes

For a year I have been trying to write about him. For a year I have passed him every day, I have said hello, I have shared cigarettes, bits of conversation thrown like baseballs back and forth across the wall. Sancho.

The grit of the mouth showing the teeth then curling itself into a tunnel.

San – cho.

I first saw him several months after I began work. It was a day in the Spring, a day when the winter reaches back, when its attempted snow turns into a mist, a day when there is no sky between the buildings, the skyscrapers stand beheaded at the thirtieth floor, there is only grey – grey and the persistent threat of condensation.

So.

By the wall were analysts. There were clerks accountants mailmen doormen receptionists secretaries salesmen programmers phone guys computer guys facilities people real estate people – it was an hour before lunch and everybody had gathered outside of the Berlin Wall to smoke.

It felt like the 30’s and it smelt like Aachen.

Standing in the thick of the cigarette smoke I had suddenly the urge to sit on a suitcase, to check the platform, the train, the train… any minute now.

But there was no train. We knew it all too well.
We smoked.

We.

To shrug it all off, to circumcise the ‘we’, I had wondered off.

I had walked straight up to the wall.
I peaked in.

Then I walked right through it.


There was a small square, and that is where I saw him. This square, it was different, the city sounds vanished here, there was a small waterfall, there was a small café – and, there was Sancho.

He was sitting on his chair, a chair I have come to call his because I have never seen anyone else sitting on it. In fact, I have never seen Sancho anywhere except on that chair – smiling, his hair combed to the side, a disproportionally heavy mustache, a lightbulb of a belly, thighs dangling amused and one inch off the ground.

“Hey,” I said, dusting the wall cement off my shoulders and legs.

He gave me a nod, smiled, and coughed voraciously.

He re-inhaled on his cigarette.

“The things those suckers do to you,” I smirked and reached for my pack.

“Tell me about it,” he said. “My lungs must look like my pants,” he said and flapped the parts of his slacks that were loose below the knees.

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I like that,” I said.

“No kidding.”

And so we began to talk. He had an easy manner, a gift to say things when there were things to be said and to share a silence when the city required it. He seemed to have watched me during my first few months there, and knew more about me than I had ever imagined possible.

“Your father, for instance,” he said once. “When you had immigrated, he had taken to smoking Virginia Slims, do you remember?”

His words were a bucket of ants into my collar and I straightened up. “Of course,” I said.

“You thought it was an immigrant mistake, him smoking the lady brands all that time.”

I gulped at my own cigarette. I nodded carefully. I remembered the endless car rides home, him dropping me off wearily at the entrance then driving back to his own apartment, the red interior of the Buick permanently ashed in menthol, the rolled down windows, the same Abba tape rolling ceaselessly back and forth in the cassette player.

Sancho was quiet for a while and let me think. Then with the dutiful coldness of a surgeon he said: “He just missed your mother,” and left it at that.

And it made sense. During our first few months in the country that brand was all that my mother smoked. For my father, the two years after the divorce were the years of Virginia Slims and Abba and Modern Talking and Bonny M. My mother, on the other hand, filled our kitchen with cartons of Marlboro’s, the house played classical music only, the stove cooked only all things Italian and English had become the international language of choice.

“You have a point,” I said after a while.

And so it began. Each day I would come out just a bit before lunch and squeeze between the cinderblocks into the hidden place behind the wall. Me and Sancho would talk, smoke, we would look at the buildings the way most look at the stars, and he would carefully tell me which is a windmill and which is a skyscraper.

And coming back up to work, I could hardly sit at my desk.

The day when I had met Sancho also marked my first escape to the library.

I began going there every day.

At first I would only walk near the shelves. Walking between them gave me a sudden sense of peace, the sort of peace one feels at a cemetery, knowing suddenly that he is not alone. There was Borges, Bulgakov, Burgess, Burroughs, Carver, (I am moving along the shelves now), Celine, Cervantes, Cortazar there was London, Maugham, Murakami… I would stop by each, drop into their world, and then drop out.

The bathroom was where I began going to write. To really write. Speaking to Sancho every day of the workweek had got me thinking. There is a lot a man misses when living inside himself for two decades and now that I had a guide, there were things that needed to be jotted down.

I ended up picking the rightmost stall. Out of the three it was the only one with a working door. There were also signs that at least somebody was there. There were things written all over. Things like: “Hide the knives!!!” or “New York City is my toilet.” Seeing things like that made me feel good. It made me feel like I was somewhere where things happened, where something was going on.

Most of what is here was written in that stall, my pants down, staring at the black and peeling paint of the door in front of me, just so we have that clear.

Anyway.

Months passed. I would talk to Sancho before lunch, and camp in the library bathroom during the day. Life became simple. It became increasingly simple because I would simply talk to Sancho and the rest would find itself written.

Still, something was amiss. More and more I began to wonder about this small and round man, where he came from, what he did. I had never seen him out of his chair, yet except for his moustache his face was always shaven fresh. His shirt was white, his pants ironed. If he did have a job, he certainly did not attend it.

The thought made me take to him even more.

And so I began to look into his eyes. A peak at first, and then more and more. Nearly a full year passed before I could look at them fully.

It was during one of the warmer days of the following winter and we were both sitting at a table that had become ours, him in his chair, and me in mine. He was telling me of his home town, a provincial city outside of Valencia, he was telling me of men who carry flour over their backs, women who can break grapes into wine with a snap of their toes, but I was distracted. I would be changing jobs soon, I knew, and the knowledge of leaving had made me look at my surroundings all the more intensely.

For a moment Sancho became silent and looked at me.

“Something’s on your mind,” he said.

I nodded. I looked up also, I looked up and for the first time, for the first time in all of our conversations our eyes met – equally, in a sudden and mysterious symmetry.

They were ancient. I read them then, I read them in a way I had been unable to read them before and saw, with an unexpectedly settling horror that they spoke in hieroglyphs.

There it was, within each perfect circle, symbols – pictographs imported from a cleaner time, a time when men seemed to have gotten it right, when the world communicated not in assignments but in these collages of simplicity, combinations of image thought sound feeling sentiment, three strokes in one, five strokes intersecting in another and the message was conveyed.

Simple.

And Sancho looked away.

Something began to change. The small square we sat in suddenly grew more and more silent, there was only the perpetual gushing of the waterfall, the sky was growing into twilight, above us were office windows, some lit, some turned dark for the weekend.

There also came a smell. At first of tulips, then of something moist and heavy, something close to the smell of firewood that has been forgotten in the rain.

I saw then than Sancho’s eyes were wet. He seemed to be crying, but silently, without drops.

“You don’t have to worry about it,” he said suddenly, seemingly sensing my discomfort. “You live for long enough and even your eyes begin to smell.”

“I know,” I replied instantly, although I understood nothing.

We sat together for some time after that. Neither of us said anything. About an hour must have passed before the city re-occupied the square with its domestic scents – that is, no scents at all.

It was dark.

“I’ll see you Monday?” I said casually, standing up from my chair.

Sancho gave me a nod. His face seemed narrower, his skin malleable.

“Monday,” he said.

It would be the last time I would see him.

                                                                *    *    *

In two weeks I will be changing my job. I walk by the wall every day. I have never returned to the square but each morning I look in, seemingly like a lab student checking the barometer pressure. The square remains empty.

Some days I stand and keep my hand on the cold surface of the cinderblock. On others I drop by the library.

Without Sancho, I have taken to wearing sunglasses. It alarms people less then, I’ve learned, when I come to a Cathedral or a skyscraper to touch it.

Perhaps, I often think, Sancho was only a doorman from a nearby building. Or an analyst awaiting retirement.

Perhaps I was only an analyst myself, awaiting my time.

Still, few days pass, that when I unchain my donkey from a nearby lamppost in the evening, that I do not think of Sancho, the short man so round in his wisdom, that I do not remember the strange and beautiful odor of his eyes.

But I do not worry.

The wall, it has certainly seen stranger things.