'The Park Sweeper'

[coalescent]

I first read 'The Park Sweeper' when it appeared in The Third Alternative about a year ago, and then thought it a good but largely unremarkable story. This second reading hasn't changed my opinion greatly, but there's no denying that it resonates more when read in the context of the collection. Trujillo is coming alive in my mind.

In 'The Park Sweeper' we move from the underbelly of the town to a tourist's-eye view; an artist's-eye view, in fact, examining the details of daily life in Trujillo directly. Richard is a painter, sometimes a musician, and as we first meet him he's observing the titular park sweeper, noting the way he seems to be engaged in a running battle with a park tramp. The battle, we learn, is magical in origin; one of them trying to protect a minituarised Mayan city hidden in the park trees, the other trying to destroy it.

It's not completely clear which of the pair is the good guy. The evidence favours the sweeper over the tramp, but in one of the few clumsy moments in the story, it is suggested that they may be equally wrong in the same way that, in the background of the story, George Bush and Saddam Hussein are equally wrong when it comes to the developing mess in Iraq:

Every TV in town was tuned to rumours of war. As I passed windows and open doors I caught glimpses of tanks and troops massing. Iraqis looked worried, Bush and Saddam posing for history. I thought there must be a magic to war for it to have so many fans worldwide, and I hoped that, if magic there was, it would prove sufficient to create a little corner of the new world order in which Bush and Saddam coudl eternally contend, growing old, impoverished, increasingly insane, victor and loser united in a curmmy, dusty hell. (p.523)

As nice as that image is, it seems somewhat out of place in a story that is more fundamentally a portrait of an affair.

The reason Richard is in Trujillo at all, you see, is that he's involved with Sharon, who is married (though we are left in little doubt that her marriage is unhappy, if not actively damaging). Probably the most important thread in 'The Park Sweeper' is that in which Sharon finds the courage to pursue her own happiness. Along the way, her relationship with Richard is acutely observed; not a grand romance, but an everyday companionship, complete with the half-jokes and wrong words and spontaneous kisses and sudden insecurities that that brings with it. When Richard realises that there is hope for the relationship--that Sharon might actually leave her husband--he's thrilled, but becomes suddenly much more worried that something could go wrong. He notices himself becoming increasingly attentive, almost obsessively so; soon after, Sharon also picks up on it, and Richard offers a more scathing, but familiar, self-diagnosis.

Another pause. "So how're you?"

I gave a faded laugh. "Y'know what I hate? I hate we're always asking each other how we're doing. Like we're patients on a ward."

"They say it's a malady ... love."

"To Shakespeare it was a malady. To a post-modern guy it's fucking ebola." (p510)

In many ways, 'The Park Sweeper' is one of the most straightforwad stories in Trujillo. Certainly after the raw intensity of 'The Same Old Story' it feels cool and refreshing, the day to that story's night. There's a sense of certainty here that few other stories in the collection have--the Mayan trees are almost certainly genuinely magical; Richard himself is almost unambiguously a Good Man (we are told as much). And a sense of familiarity, too; here again is the importance of the magic of the land, and the heroes of the land. Perhaps the fantastic and mundane aren't as neatly integrated as they are in some other stories in the collection, but it's still an excellent refreshment before the book's final, novel-length offering: Trujillo itself.

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