Claudio

I saw Claudio the other day, waiting for his order of barbecued ribs at the van that sits these days of the pandemic in a parking lot, to provide lunch now that the cafes and restaurants are closed. I’d seen him before, trundling his shopping cart around town.

He was talking to Pete who was putting together his order, describing a house I’d often noticed because of its grandeur and its dilapidation.

“My grandfather built it,” Claudio was saying. He is a small man with long black curling hair flowing down into his beard, also long and black and curling. “It’s been empty a long while but we’re fixing it up.”

Pete asked him if he wanted extra barbecue sauce. He did not.

“We had a beautiful garden out front,” Claudio went on, shifting some of the contents of his roller bag to make room for his sack of food. “But then the city put the highway through our garden in 1961, claiming eminent domain, paid us about fifty dollars. But we’re over that now. We’re planting the garden again.”

Pete handed him his sack and Claudio pushed it down into his roller bag. Turning, he saw me listening. “We need flowers,” he told me. “It’s up to the ladies now.” Then he rolled his possessions away.

The house was nearby, so after collecting my spare ribs, I walked over to see it. It was terribly deteriorated, the yellow paint flaking off every surface, the front steps fallen in, bare, water-stained lathes exposed in the ceiling of the front porch. But Claudio was working on it. He’d dragged an old couch out of the house and covered it with a clean sheet; I guessed it was his bed, at least until the weather turned cold. An ornate wrought-iron garden chair, brown with rust, was next to the couch, and in front of them he’d arranged a wooden pedestal with a bunch of purple artificial flowers and some stones.

I have a notion to go and buy him some potted chrysanthemums for his porch, now that fall is here. I’ll probably do it.

In New Mexico Santa Fe