Victor: and the Monkey Man

((Miraflores, Lima Peru, 2008) (Based on actual events))



When your with someone twenty, thirty, even forty years—work with them everyday of the week, seven days a week, fifty-weeks ever year (minus two weeks the Monkey Man vacationed, not Victory), that someone you can’t help getting to like them, you even get to love them (him or her). It’s pretty near like being married to the person—almost! You know when that person gets tired, because you are tired, and you can tell by his walking or talking. You know it, because you can feel it.
There was such a person I knew named Victor. He and the Monkey Man (Cipriano) worked in the same park (Miraflores, Kennedy Park) in Lima, Peru.
In the park Victor worked as a photographer, the only one in the park, allowed in the park that is—licensed to be there, and the Monkey man, Cipriano, with his wind-up music box, and the red and white box the monkey was stored in (until he came in the park, and was then taken out of the box, and played on top of the box all day long), he worked perhaps ten-feet to Victor’s side, had worked side by side for forty-years. The Monkey-Man would have his monkey take out a piece of paper, likened to a ticket, and it had a happy saying on it, and he’d hand it to the person holding a coin, and they’d exchange one for the other.
Victor worked by him twelve hours a day. I met Victor and Cipriano for the first time in 1999, when I first met my wife Rosa; he took our second picture together, one evening in the park. Anyhow, one day Cipriano, he just up and died, he was seventy-two years old. A small man, thin, wore a white cowboy looking hat, a blue worn out suite, little eyes; he died on a warm day in 2007.

The times I talked to Victor after that, it had seemed to me that happening took a solid big chunk of life out of him. It hurt him to talk about his old partner, but he did. He even braced himself when he did. I asked him once if he thought about Cipriano much. He said, “A day doesn’t go by when I don’t think of him.” These were hard times for Victor.
Sometimes when we walked by him, he was in a glum of a mood—not that he was to us, my wife and I, just that he seemed so from a distance, he’d always cheer up when he saw us, went over to talk to him.
Anyway, win or lose, life was different for him; eleven months after Cipriano had died, we happened to be in Lima again, we stopped—as we often did—stopped by to say hello to Victor, and he wasn’t there this time, not even his standup, camera, the old one he said was from the 1840s. I asked the nearby shoeshine man, who always worked by Victory (there were several in the park) “Where’s Victory?” He usually went to eat his lunch about 2:00 p.m., perhaps today he went early, but it was only forenoon.
The shoeshine man, hesitated, as if he was trying to figure out how to say, what he had thought he might have say someday, “He died a month ago, we were kind of thinking how to tell you when you came around.” (That was on a warm day, in 2008.)


No: 543 (12-6-2009) SA