Can anyone see another’s pain?

            The head aches with a massive, rhythmical throb; the body moves with the lethargy of a dying beat.  Passing a bright, plate-glass window, the head slowly turns aside to view the body’s reflection; all appears normal, regular, and sedate: there is no visible sign of the agonized internal chewing of vascular nerve tissues pulling him down.  The glass is as if opaque, stolidly reflecting his image alone, but in the next second, forgetting the pain momentarily, he can indeed see through the glass into the storefront—a café of busy people and other lives.

            Later, the man pulls away strenuously from his own aches to concentrate on a Mexican testifying before a grand jury.  Probably young, the texture of the Mexican’s skin is nonetheless matured by years of hard work outdoors, like the mysterious and sinewy history of an old tree.  Facial surface is pocked and rough with whiskery seams, an old country-wood face that reveals a cautious angle of trepidation, splintery severe yet spidery soft.  Two eyes are blackened (like plums), the result of a broken nose (like a deformed walnut), the result of having been attacked by a gang of city youths, late one school-night, while he was going home to his family from his restaurant food-delivery job.

            Beckoning, there is a confused stare into the clogged room of jurors—he searches with stony eyes somewhere else to tap an impenetrable surface and divine a life lost in the peremptory.  From a corner of the jury room, through an abyss of rectangular interior space, veins of time cross between the Mexican and this juror, the fluid essence of a vibrant being, el hombre, and his story.  Hush in the juror’s head hearing how, after a long migration to America, hermano, is hideously attacked, a simple tale of sadness.  Downcast, triste, his savory tobacco-brown skin, coarse from labor pains; he offers with opened palm his earthly simplicity and sympathetic darkness, as if he holds forth an embryonic stone to share.  Hermano es, simpático.

            Transfigured, the juror understands his brotherly connection to the Mexican, each man a different braid in a multi-colored hawser.  Anchored; connected; suddenly an ability, in the juror’s altered consciousness of pain, to grasp visually the Mexican’s life: hot sun and open spaces; sandy soil enlivened with unctuous-delicious green growth.  Distinct images of this man and his life, where the juror visually perceives him, splash farther outward into a rainbow of his feelings that one can share not in the aching head but in sensate viscera.  Edged next to the dark-skinned man the juror is consummated into a brotherhood, imagining a life of white goats and roan horses, red sandy soil and smooth Indian gravel.  A stream rushes from the Mexican and meets the juror; one steps into the pied-colored pebbly stream and becomes part of another’s experience, nature-sanctified water rushing around many toes.

            There is a  fullness to the Mexican—a quarry of emotion layered in word patches, a human plentitude that invites one to participate in a blessed feast.  A brother, not a stranger.  But now, easy satisfaction from life, gustar—the primordial innocence is beaten down.  The Mexican discovers him, and the juror feels hungrily questioned by a distressed loneliness.

            Qué?  Quién?  En Español, la verdad.  Who interprets?

All work is copyrighted property of Gregory Tague.