Combat Zone

It’s eighteen shoes by fourteen. I paced it off. Later my calculator confirms my guess in measures that make sense beyond the end of my legs—almost five and a half metres by a little more than four, not even close to the golden mean, but good proportions for an open-air shelter in a park. The roof, sheet-iron with fret-work girders underneath the peak and a frieze all around on the outside, is supported by seven cast-iron pillars on each side, five evenly spaced, and the end pillars doubled on the inside. Look up in there and it looks like a bridge, serious and strong, built to last. On the outside, it is more of a Belle Époque lady, like any one of its thousand siblings around Paris. You look as you pass, appreciate, but don’t turn around and stare.

On the south end today are the chess players. The tables have squares printed into them, but, unlike the immovable concrete chess tables with their attached seats so close no one has ever been seen sitting on one in American parks, these tables are mobile and so are the chairs. The players have dragged a few of them under the shelter because the clouds are spitting now and then. There are four games going, with hangers-on watching, the tables close together. The players have that sublimely cross-eyed earnestness that novice chess players must study first thing along with the Ruy López Opening and the Petroff Defense. They are silent and at my small distance I can’t even hear the click as one player, then another stops the clock after a move: perhaps they have muffled the push button. The games look serious—no speed chess here, only deliberation, hard stares downward, never across the table—and when a player moves a piece it is no different from the rest of the game in its stateliness and deliberation, as if they were playing at playing in slow motion.

Past the chess players, the center of the shelter is empty, no man’s land, or maybe, I think as I look ahead of me, a demilitarized zone. At the far end, two young men, probably Africans, are in a different kind of combat, shadow-sparring, not making any contact, pulling their punches softly, smiling, standing back, setting up again, moving in on each other, trying another jab, a different counter, a new head feint. Not a word, but they know each other and the rules of their game. After thirty or forty seconds, no matter how successful or not their punches—not punches, but the same thing even so—have been, without a word or a sign they back up. The bell rings somewhere inside them—their heads, their fists, who can tell?—and they head to their corners, one step back, flex a little and then the bell rings again and back they go, silent gentle gladiators into the ring, slugging it out as shadows.

The odd silence pouring out from under the shelter, both ends, and wrapping me up like fog is uncharacteristic of the park where parents bring their children to the playground and where gossipy men, natural born kibitzers one and all, play pétanque after carefully arranging their coats on hangers they have brought from home and leave overnight and unmolested, day after day, on an iron frame that may have actually been intended for the purpose. Not today — it could be the mist that makes the dirt of the court too slow for the steel balls, it could be they’re all arthritic, it could be something’s better on television or in a café, but they’re not here. A few people are reading here and there, the few couples and families out for a walk are quiet, and the t’ai chi people—there are usually two different places for t’ai chi, though not always the same people exercising in them—always make about as much ruckus as Marcel Marceau in an argument with Red Skelton.

I am puzzled—less by the silence then by my own desire to break it. I’m the one who complains about noisy restaurants, who hates loud voices and public conversations on cell phones, who wants to scream at honking drivers to shut the hell up and leave me alone, who loves to eavesdrop on conversations but is embarrassed if I think someone can actually hear what I am saying, who sometimes speaks so softly that people can’t tell what language I’m speaking in. And here I am, not suddenly roaring like a lion only out of plain shyness and the fright of being stared at and wondered at—but really wanting to, to hear something, anything, something inarticulate would do just fine, but I can’t do it, and nobody else wants to.

I sigh, and the breathing-out effort wakes me up, and I realize I am still watching the boxers. I had noticed before that the one who is much taller than the other is also the better fighter in addition to his extra reach. Now I notice that I have been shadow boxing over here by myself, falling into an old and odd habit of unconscious physical mimicry—like holding my hand up to my mouth when I’ve just seen someone cut his finger with a knife. Suddenly self-conscious, I stop, but it’s just then the taller boxer sees me from his corner, smiles broadly, and makes big boxing gestures, inviting me into the ring. Why not? Maybe he thinks I’ll give him a better fight—or none at all. I take off my coat, put it on a chair, and step up to him.

I am taller than his friend, but he still has seven or eight centimetres on me head to toe and four or five in reach: if he coils his neck back, I’d be a sucker to go in after him with a reach like his. I step back, trying to get him in, fight my fight, but he just reaches in, and I’m not doing any better than his short friend. We break for our corners—I think I’m beginning to hear their bell now—pause, and come back into the ring, but this time I set up as a southpaw, leading with my right. I feel awkward, but I’m betting he feels worse—almost every right-handed boxer hates fighting a gaucher. And I’m right. I land several jabs fairly quickly, then duck his right hand, way over my head, and land—almost land, rules are rules—a solid left to the body. Four or five more rounds and he’s still not adapting: I figure I may be getting ahead on points We step back, he grins at me, laughs and aloud and says, Tu as gagné. I did, I won?

I start laughing too and so does his friend, though I doubt either understands why I am laughing so hard tears are running down my face and I have to hold my sides. And maybe I did win, as he says, win something. He broke the silence, I made him break the silence.

© Joseph Lestrange

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