The Freedom in American Songs

Free The Freedom in American Songs by Kathleen Winter

Book: The Freedom in American Songs by Kathleen Winter Read Free Book Online
Authors: Kathleen Winter
I noticed …”
    He turned to me politely. He and I were, I surmised, around the same age. We each had a few silver hairs. “Yes?”
    â€œWell I was watching your dancing—I know it’s flamenco because I started a beginner’s course not far from here, and I … well I wasn’t very good at it, and to tell you the truth, the teacher was a bit, well, she was a bit cruel, really … I sort of lost confidence and I was wondering …”
    â€œWas it Juliana?” The broken tooth made him lisp a bit. He was soft around the edges, about twenty pounds overweight. There had been no men in the class I’d taken, no men in any of the classes in that building; not in the corridors nor the stairwells. “It must have been Juliana.”
    â€œJuliana de la Fuente. How did you know?”
    He had a gentle voice. His hair flew up a bit at the sides. He stood in front of me holding the plastic bag rolled up at the top. It bore a green dollar-store logo. “Believe me,” he said, “you shouldn’t take anything Juliana says to heart.” He looked past the angel and toward the street where the dance school was, between the subway station and a discount jewellery shop. “Did you notice she has a lot of students in her classes? And none of them has taken her class before. She goes through hundreds of students but not very many of them come back to her. That’s where I went, at first, but I didn’t stay.”
    â€œBut now you can dance. I was watching. You dance beautifully.”
    â€œThank you. My mother was a dance teacher in Edinburgh. I learned a lot from her. She’s eighty-nine now. My name’s Ben, by the way.”
    I told him I had bought a pair of real shoes with the nails, and he said he couldn’t afford real ones but had bought a pair of men’s Italian shoes with hard soles that clattered.
    â€œI got them for two dollars at the nuns’ Thursday bazaar.”
    I felt bad for having said I possessed real flamenco shoes.
    â€œI find,” he said, “you can make do with a lot of improvised things. For instance, a real flamenco hat, for men, is a very expensive black, Spanish hat. It’s specialized, and it will be a long time before I can afford one. But today I found a substitute at the dollar-store.” He raised the plastic bag. “Would you like to see it?”
    â€œI’d like to see you put it on.”
    He took out a black straw hat with straight sides and a wide brim and modelled it for me. It transformed him.
    â€œWow. That’s great.”
    â€œI’m very pleased. I have to be careful about my spending. Have you ever seen people on the street selling the magazine L’Itinéraire ?
    â€œI think so … isn’t it a journal of news about street people?”
    â€œYes. You should, if you have any change at all when these sellers ask you to buy a copy … you should, I don’t mean to tell you what to do, but the magazine genuinely helps them to … it helps them transition from being homeless, to having a home. Myself, for instance, I just three months ago, after being homeless for years, got my own apartment because of my job selling the magazine. The next thing I’m saving up for is some plants. I want to grow some plants in pots—I have a little balcony in the back. I’d like to grow edible plants. Lettuces and carrots.”
    He spoke, I thought, eloquently for a homeless person. He hadn’t shaved in a few days but he had that eighty-nine-year-old mother who’d taught him to dance, and he had a desire to grow his own vegetables in pots …
    â€œYou don’t seem,” I ventured, “like a person who has always been homeless, or who has been homeless for most of your life …”
    â€œNo,” he said. “I had a home. A lot of us had homes. A lot of people who sell the magazine had everything. But something happened that made us

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