PEN PAL: Anselmo the Coward

Good evening.

I have a pen pal. His name is Anselmo. He is a farmer. He lives in a small country in Western Europe that looks a lot like Spain.

He sent me a letter. You want me to read the letter?

Well, here is his letter. Sort of.

You see, his native dialect is Rural Vasquez. Nobody speaks it here in America. I've looked for experts to help me in translating it, as I said, but there aren't any. Well, there are experts, but none of them are single, female, available, and worth a second look. So, with a Rural Vasquez-to-English dictionary, I translated this letter myself, trying to capture the wild and unbridled humor of an octogenarian European farmer...

---

Ah, springtime!

The bullfighters are walking along the fence, improving on their balance. They go from one end of the fence to the other, and then work their way back. They sing.

Brave, valiant bullfighters! A hero's heart beats in every one of their chests.

I am not a bullfighter. I am too old and bent-over to fight bulls. The bullfighters call out to me, beckoning me to join them, but I shall not. "Old man," they say, "don't you want to fight a bull? I am sure there is an old and feeble bull waiting for his match."

They laugh and laugh and then I throw the switch that sends 10,000 volts through the fence and they all fall off, twitching.

My heart is a bullfighter's heart, thanks to the operation. But my hands are creased, and they tremble. I fight a cat every so often. What is it to fight a cat? As I slide the rapier into its heart through the gap in its shoulderblades, I feel no honor. The bullfighters dust themselves off and move over to the sword-dummies.

Many months from now, when my time is short and my eyes are dim, I shall be borne into the bullfighter's ring. I will not be a spearman, whose spears poke and enrage the bull. I shall not be a pikeman, opening the gap through which the dread sword of the bullfighter slides towards the heart of the beast.

No, I shall probably be lost, looking for the bathrooms. And with my breeches at my ankles, the bull will surprise me and gore me to death to the astonished cries of the Saturday crowds. My blood will seep into the sand of the ring, and it will mingle with the blood of my ancestors.

I am proud of my ancestors, and I am most proud of the founder of this family, Frederick Grande. It is by his hand that this house was built many centuries ago. By the wife of the man who commissioned that it be built, he had two sons before he was caught and executed. My family tree bends and twists its way through the many years, occasionally pruning and rending the branches of other trees in the same callous manner as it was planted by Frederick.

It is by Frederico's grandson, Pablo the Sneaky, that our fortune was gained. His sneakiness is legendary. It can be seen in the shifty eyes and hunched shoulders of many of the citizens of this town, for there is a little of Pablo in all of us. At least that's what the spokesman of the sausage-packing plant explained it two weeks after Pablo's disappearance. The settlement reached between the company and our family would keep us in wealth for generations.

The graves hold the long and interesting tales of their owners, if not slightly jumbled by a line of dyslexic sextons hired by the church. Our main street needed traffic control, anyway.

There was a bullfighter among them, nestled amongst the highwaymen and those pretending to be clergy. His name was Manuel, and it was said that he was born to be a bullfighter. He would fight any bull, at any time. He fought two bulls at once, and slew them both. He fought them underwater, and would drag them out of the bay by their tails when he was done. It is his Gattling gun that rests above the fireplace, in its place of honor. It is taken down and fired on national holidays as well as when my ancestral home is ransacked by burglars.

I am mistaken. It is not springtime. It is fall, as the annual retreat of our brave and fearless army brings it fleeing across the rolling hills. We are a small, proud nation, and larger nations tend to pick on us for sport and prestige. To rout our armies is the sole requirement for entry in the grand United Nations, and when we, as citizens, rise up and drive back our own soldiers and sons, only then may we participate in unfair trade partnerships and cultural exchanges.

Our rich, crumbly soil is our national treasure. As with any natural resource, it has been stolen several times in the past, in the dead of night. Only through careful detective work was it returned and replaced in the fields and window boxes, where it rightly belonged.

The mayor has the power to levy taxes, but nobody knows what "levy" means and the town's treasury runs dry from year to year. Occasionally, there are donations by concerned citizens and vicious large multinational corporations, such as the sausage-packing plant. The mayor is the best mayor we have had in recent memory. In fact, he is the only mayor we have had in recent memory. Nobody will register to vote, for fear of jury duty, and he wins by default every year. The victory parade takes him upon proud, young shoulders to weave among the battered headstones in our main street.

Recently, he has become old and infirmed, like myself. He has also forgotten his own name over the years. And so, we call him Mayor, and he smiles as he looks up the word "levy" in the dictionary in the town library.

"It says that it is a dam. We shall build a dam," he declared, snapping the massive book shut.

"A damn what?" someone asks.

"We shall build a dam, please," he responds, wringing his hands and returning the dictionary to a shelf. "The dam shall then collect taxes behind it."

"I believe you are confused with levee," I tell my friend, the Mayor.

"That's what I said - levy." He pats me on the shoulder. "This town shall be great once again."

"It was never a great town, Mayor," I say.

"Oh, he says, "then why are we bothering with a dam. Never mind."

The bullfighters are done with the sword-dummies. One of their number is carried off. It is young Blanco the Thief, who has a wife and children. He will only return them when the ransom is paid. Since Inigo the Butcher has no money to pay the ransom, Blanco has suddenly found himself in the role of provider for his stolen family, and bullfighting seemed to him to be the best option. It is not so great an option now, as he is piled on to a cart that will take him to the town clinic. It is there that he will be cleaned off, his wounds will be bound, and he will be buried at dawn.

They have replaced Blanco with the victorious dummy. This dummy is a tough one, with great promise. But he has wasted many previous opportunities in the ring, and it is my fear that he shall soon leave the world of bullfighting for retail fashion display.

I am reminded of my Uncle Vehicular, who invented the mannequin. He spent weeks standing perfectly still in his workshop, performing experiments and taking notes. He would have received credit for this if it weren’t for his second invention, vehicular manslaughter. He discovered this while running across the street to the patent office. An annual ceremony on his birthday in the town center marks this important event, and the re-enactment results in many casualties.

It is time that I put my pen down for the night and headed off for bed. It will be a difficult walk of several hours, but I feel that the delivery service that the furniture maker uses charges far too much for my tastes. I hope I remembered to purchase a mattress, too.

I bid you goodnight, and eagerly await your response,

Anselmo.

[conradd]

Nicely done, Larry. I loved the cadence of the old man's thoughts, and the little twists that kept me smiling.

Deb

Hemingway + Woody Allen = This piece of garbage.

The original idea was to create a standup comedy act based on reading PEN PAL letters from silly or horrifying places.

I have a few others of this series written and outlined out, just waiting for that finishing touch of madness. I like to take those 2:00AM pathetic around-the-world synopses of current events in the globe and dream up bizarre situations for this constant stream of war-torn refugees wandering the earth. If I can't do anything constructive for the battered, displaced, and hopeless I might as well use them as material for my little vignettes.

Even wrote one from Hell. Not sure how the letters get out of Hell or why someone would be writing instead of writhing with agony, but the idea is the same.

[tipu]

i wouldn't know about technical things like the 'cadence' of old geezers' thoughts like Deb, who, being a biddie of advanced years, would...

... but i want an Anselmo t-shirt too!

A couple of lines that got the biggest guffaws from me:

Originally posted by file13
It is fall, as the annual retreat of our brave and fearless army brings it fleeing across the rolling hills.

It is young Blanco the Thief, who has a wife and children. He will only return them when the ransom is paid.

Bring it on Your Eminence!

[drmomentum[$]]

I dunno. Kinda reminded me of Salinger. Big thumb's up from me!

Ah, what the hell, I'll give you my little thumb's up, too so you can have both.

-JP