to calibrate the levels of misery. Lolo thought her moral calculations endearing but silly, and whenever he caught me
following her example with the few coins in my possession, he would raise his eyebrows and take me aside.
“How much money do you have?” he would ask.
I’d empty my pocket. “Thirty rupiah.”
“How many beggars are there on the street?”
I tried to imagine the number that had come by the house in the last week. “You see?” he said, once it was clear I’d
lost count. “Better to save your money and make sure you don’t end up on the street yourself.”
He was the same way about servants. They were mostly young villagers newly arrived in the city, often working for
families not much better off than themselves, sending money to their people back in the country or saving enough to
start their own businesses. If they had ambition, Lolo was willing to help them get their start, and he would generally
tolerate their personal idiosyncrasies: for over a year, he employed a good-natured young man who liked to dress up as
a woman on weekends-Lolo loved the man’s cooking. But he would fire the servants without compunction if they were
clumsy, forgetful, or otherwise cost him money; and he would be baffled when either my mother or I tried to protect
them from his judgment.
“Your mother has a soft heart,” Lolo would tell me one day after my mother tried to take the blame for knocking a
radio off the dresser. “That’s a good thing in a woman. But you will be a man someday, and a man needs to have more
sense.”
It had nothing to do with good or bad, he explained, like or dislike. It was a matter of taking life on its own terms.
I felt a hard knock to the jaw, and looked up at Lolo’s sweating face.
“Pay attention. Keep your hands up.”
We sparred for another half hour before Lolo decided it was time for a rest. My arms burned; my head flashed with a
dull, steady throb. We took a jug full of water and sat down near the crocodile pond.
“Tired?” he asked me.
I slumped forward, barely nodding. He smiled, and rolled up one of his pant legs to scratch his calf. I noticed a series
of indented scars that ran from his ankle halfway up his shin.
“What are those?”
“Leech marks,” he said. “From when I was in New Guinea. They crawl inside your army boots while you’re hiking
through the swamps. At night, when you take off your socks, they’re stuck there, fat with blood. You sprinkle salt on
them and they die, but you still have to dig them out with a hot knife.”
I ran my finger over one of the oval grooves. It was smooth and hairless where the skin had been singed. I asked Lolo
if it had hurt.
“Of course it hurt,” he said, taking a sip from the jug. “Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry
only about getting where you have to go.”
We fell silent, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I realized that I had never heard him talk about what he
was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad. He seemed to inhabit a world of hard surfaces and well-defined
thoughts. A queer notion suddenly sprang into my head.
“Have you ever seen a man killed?” I asked him.
barré
(Barré)
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