playa - peligo

…gaining wisdom by losing memories…

John Ivanovich Malloff – 2010

Havana, Cuba

            John was at a stage in his life when his mobility and comfort took a turn south with sharp tenacity. A prisoner of limited movements, his body was breaking down. He used to be a first-rate catcher who loved a slice of dark rye, now he was confined to limited movements, locked down reading Solzhenitsyn. It had been twenty years since rheumatoid arthritis began to change his life. He craved sunshine. We had just begun fifty days together on an aggressive program of Carib R&R. It was day one, we reclined into lawn chairs on the rooftop terrace of our casa particular. Terracotta tiles, aloe plants and the hanging aroma of my robusto warned us that the morning was about to get much more humid. Roosters, dogs and two-stroke Kawasakis spanked the calmness. The smells of Guanabo started to wake up under the sun.

            This sunny expedition started back in Vancouver on the heels of a salsa gone sour. We could thank the driver of an errant grocery truck that flattened my car a year earlier. He was aggressively lane juggling and pushing for pole position on his delivery circuit down Broadway during rush hour in Vancouver. I noticed his agitation blocks earlier. His truck charged like a rhino in my rear view. Big smash. Suspended instant, shattered dance, crystal explosion, crunching alloys, airbags, ambulance and police officers. My 535i was a write-off, which sucked as it was fitted with after-market components that helped made it a pleasure to drive. After a year of adjusted wrangling ICBC paid me out generously.

            When life blows past your field of view, as a result of an accident, in the days following, it behooves you to examine the priorities in your life that you want to reinforce with deeper meaning. My path to healing inspired me to invest in some father and son time in my back yard abroad. Driven by the desire to capture some of the stories that charmed my childhood I decided to take my father on a Cuban adventure to soak up the sun and catch some baseball.

It had been a few years since we began to notice a few missing pages in the armour of dad’s razor-sharp encyclopedic recall. His words were not as crisp and his stories were starting to lose their luster. The clock was ticking, I bought myself a good digital recorder and got us a few tickets to Cuba. The tape was cued so to speak and the mic was about to go live.

            John's stories filled a magical space in my life. He shared so much knowledge in his speaking years. In 1977 we moved from Vancouver to the Kootenays, I was five. John thought it was his duty to tell wonderful stories as his grandfather had for him. Bedtime stories never came directly from any book, although there were libraries under every pillar. These were highly creative anecdotes mashed together with fragments from his own childhood, forensic understandings of the historical record and his own treatment on whatever he determined was the moral emphasis of his particular tale. I loved his stories, the characters were colourful, the adventures were wholesome, judgements were often deferred and culture was created. 

            His stories were well fed. Pops read books like tuna feed, relentlessly, voraciously, darting through a library like an overflowing bait ball, he was at the apex of consumption. Before we left Vancouver, he spotted a paperback copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago on my book shelf. The cover was half torn-off and taped together. A year earlier I picked it up at a yard sale for a buck but had yet to tackle reading it. John thought he read it in high school, but he couldn't remember so he thought he best give it another sniff.

            Feeling free under the sun, our itinerary was awkwardly open, we could do whatever we wanted and this felt strange. After a few morning espressos out came my new digital audio recorder. We waded into the proposition of interview and storyteller with a green willingness. John was unsure what exactly I aimed to capture. Magic, I wanted magic, suggesting stories from his extensive vaults, perhaps some anecdotes from childhood or a few historical ruminations. It was my goal to revisit the creative genius of days gone by. Reality threw us a curveball. Although he was a willing participant, frustration began to settle in as his access codes were changing. The edges were less colourful, the facts less bulletproof, what was most sad, he recognized and struggled with his diminishing talents.

            Over the coming days we tried recording on the terrace and the beach. We strolled the sleepy beachside town, got haircuts for twenty pesos and ate at all the pizzerias.

            John’s auto-immune disease was advanced, as a result he was afflicted with terrible psoriasis. His skin constantly flaked off. Even for me, a loving son, it could be rather disgusting. I felt sorry for him, he was embarrassed and too restricted to clean up. I would sweep his dead skin into piles out of consideration for our maid. She was a kind woman, she respected my dad and was concerned about his health. He was effusively easy to get along with.

            John dragged that copy of Gulag Archipelago around with him like Linus does his blanket.  Always at his side, ever ready to digest more data, feeding in all ways. Voracious. It wasn’t just that I was seeing my dad as loveable cartoon characters, but John could have also been related to Denis-the-Menace, as a trail of debris followed him around. He was like Linus from Charlie Brown and Denis the Menace combined, enter the evolution of Linus el Menace. As he advanced into the Archipelago its cheap binding began to weather and fail. I teased him to take it easy as I wanted to read it too. At first el Menace made an honest effort to save and protect the paper back, however, as the narrative began to offer more and more morsels the feeding frenzy quickened and the pages began to get torn, ripped and separated from the whole.

            Margarita our maid, was a kind woman, she was fond of dad because he reminded her of a Russian doctor she had a fling with in her youth. Her eyes were bright green and her movements were smooth. Margarita enjoyed using a few basic Russian words with dad. Margarita was attentive to our needs. She also tried to save pages as she found them under the bed, behind the toilet, on the terrace.

She commented, ‘Primero la piel, despues las rositas, y ahora papeles rusos, ‘nyo el piedo todos.’ 

Translated it’s something like, ‘First the skin, then the popcorn, and now these Russian papers, jeepers he’s losing everything.’

El Menace stuck his tongue out, opened his eyes in a wide smile and asked, ‘What did she say?’

            ‘She says you’re eating the book Pops,’ I interject, with the executive rights which all translators reserve.

            Margarita fired in, ‘Papeles locos’ which literally means, ‘crazy papers’ but more accurately it could be understood as ‘your book is a monster.’

            Satisfied with what he heard as being similar enough to the word, Archipelago, John pretended to understand, ‘That’s right Margarita, it’s about an Archipelago but not like the islands in the Caribbean, not like Cuba, he’s writing about the Gulag, a prison network of labour extraction.’

            Margarita laughed, ‘…si senior, como Cuba.’