If I Could Paint
Tuesday, August 29th, 2006The tiny restaurant is empty save for the proprietor working by the Gaggia machines that have drawn me in for my fix. As I move in close to the counter, he turns his face up with a welcoming smile. It’s a beautiful boy face, although this is not a child, and I can see it freshly washed over flannel pajamas, trusting to be lovingly fed its share of family breakfast. As he registers my detailed Java preparation request, looking eager to obey, happy to work, I try to decide whether the smooth skin is more the color of chocolate ice cream or mocha cream cake.
Over the hiss of steam we chat about quitting smoking, and he tells me how his seven months of abstinence came about at the request of his young son. It has been a very hard thing to do, he says, sounding as though he’d say it the same way if his boy’s request had been to move the world, as though anything motivated by love and joy makes its difficulty meaningless.
I ask where he is from.
The lilting joy is joined by inhuman knowledge of sorrow as he answers, Somalia.
He wants to go back, and as he tells me this I feel tears and yearning flood the room, although the dust motes in a slant of afternoon sun float undisturbed in the peaceful space. Not with his son yet, who is too young for a dangerous trip. First he just needs to see, to touch the earth where he watched his mother die. There is no family left there. His surviving brothers are scattered from London to LA. In his gentle voice sing a pantheon of ghosts and a flood of memories …love, hate, pain… while the sweet boy man face remains smooth and calm.
We speak a little of the sorrows of lost family, and of human atrocities too incomprehensible to exist.
When I am paying and preparing to leave, he suddenly looks at me in naked hope, only because, perhaps, I am someone’s mother.
His face follows me for days, soft and gentle …astonishing still.
If I could paint, this gentle face, that bravely showed me a spectrum worthy of Dante over a quiet cup of coffee, would undoubtedly challenge me for months.
