Tensile
This morning, I learned something new from the radio. That the tensile strength of silk can stop bullets. So reported an unnamed surgeon one-hundred-fifty years ago. Whose office was upstairs from a rowdy Wyoming saloon. Who cited the case of a patient with a folded silk handkerchief in his left chest pocket. Who got in front of a slug from a Colt .45 and stumbled away with nothing more than a deep bruise. Over his heart. That the Archduke of Bosnia possessed a silken bulletproof vest. That he rarely wore it, and how different the global maps might look today had he dressed appropriately for that fateful drive in June 1914. Our kids, they go out into this harsh world, full of passion and evolving principles. That all you can do is crumple your love and stuff it in their pocket as they head out the door. Then sleep fitfully for the rest of your life. That the strength of silk cannot be reproduced synthetically. Only certain moths in their larval stage can arrange the carbon bonds just so. That mulberry leaves are the most inauspicious raw material. That the human body and a silk shroud are equally compostable.
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One Suspect Plate of Tapas in Granada
And within hours I was cramping and retching
back at the hotel, a splotch on the risk/reward curve
of travel dining, barely worth a mention
except that the view through the window
above the toilet where I am spewing out of both ends
sweeps across a valley of tiled rooftops
upward to the austere face of the Alhambra,
its butterscotch ramparts sheer and inscrutable
under the rising glow of a near-full moon,
and I will never again have the privilege of purging
before such a magnificent panorama. If duende
is a hard-fought spasm of beauty and suffering
then Spaniards are marinating in it, from cathedrals
and museum galleries crammed with gilded portraits
of doe-eyed virgins bearing Jesus’ instruments
of torture — scourge, nails, sponge, and spear —
to the life-size carving of John the Baptist’s
decapitated head, plopped on a plinth like roadkill,
the sculptor clearly intimate with the anatomy
of a beheading: vertebra, windpipe, jugulars, and gristle
all on display in polychromatic perfection.
Too much info, I know, but I am the turista here, just
passing through the world, like remnants of my dinner,
selectively ignorant of this stratified history,
Moors and Christians surging back and forth
across a stark Iberian Peninsula (and let us not forget
the expulsion of the Jews). I was once a doe-eye virgin, too
but what do I know of the torture chambers of Torquemada
and Franco, the slow societal crawl back toward civility,
only to witness a new collapse into Ukrainian trenches,
Israeli safe rooms, Gazan displacement camps,
frothy spurts of human decency seeping down runnels
in the executioner’s block. I have never embodied
the resistant fury of a flamenco dancer, wrists writhing
above her head, stamping out her ritmo on a square
of plywood to reverberate across the plaza.
When my own queasy stomach abates, I will rejoin throngs
of café society for the tail of this trip, all the gente
gathering at day’s end, leaning in over high-top tables
in twos and threes and fives, nibbling on peanuts,
sipping beer or vermut, holding one another
in attentive gaze, deep in conversation: lovers,
groups of grannies, three-generation families
with strollers, flocks of jostling young dudes.
No one is zoning with their phones, all are presente
each to each in this moment on this plaza,
soft Mediterranean air taking its time to breathe down
the Avenida under the ferrous clatter of Vespers bells,
calling us, not to worship exactly,
but to revere our better, vulnerable selves.