Almost-on-the-Highway Robbery

My recent problems with car thefts got me thinking of the stupidest time I was robbed. --Aren't they all pretty stupid? you ask. Yes, of course, but some leave you feeling more like a hapless sap than others. Now, I admit that this latest round of car robberies does incline me to believe I was rather excessive in Standing on Principle by still refusing to lock my doors after the second round of thefts, but the Convenience Store Pocket-Pickers of '92 win by a landslide for the extent to which they added insult to ego to injury to my pocketbook.

It all began, as most of these stories do, with idiocy. When yet another one of my $300 cars died (was it the Rambler? the Nova? the Mustang II? the Dart, the Valiant, the Olds? I have no idea, but I loved them all), my stepfather (the nice one) took the situation in hand and said we were going to go to a real car dealership, and get me a real car. Fair enough by itself, but when we got there, after cursory handshakes with the avuncular sales agent, both parents sat down and read magazines, leaving me to deal with the car shark on my own, on the basis that I was (chronologically, at any rate) an adult.

I told the middle-aged salesman what I wanted in a car: large and lumbering; safe and slow. As far as features, I wanted power windows. With regard to design, I was hoping for lots of metal around me, and pedals I could reach. In other words, I wanted some granny's trade-in. What I drove out in was a ridiculous speedy Mustang with a bordello-red interior, a spoiler, and some 'sporty' thing over the back window. The salesman was a 50-year-old man, an authority figure, and I gave up standing by my criteria soon after he began prating on about how 'young ladies like you' needed 'fun, sporty' cars. It was a ridiculous accusation, but I was helpless to protest.

Well, the payments on this thing were a bit obscene, and I was not entirely successful in making them all the time. In the days before online bill-paying, when bills got too late the only recourse we had was to drive somewhere and pay the thing in person, which was what I had to do one sunny summer day in Orange County.

First, go back in time one day.

I stopped at my customary Diet Coke outlet, a convenience store just before the freeway onramp. To get in, I walked past two men standing just beside the door who would have looked more at home in a Dorothea Lange photo than in our sparkling suburbs. When I came out, they asked for money. They told of how they had driven from Oklahoma for work in 'that ole pickup over there' (pointing to distant hideous truck parked in front of the office-supply store), earned some money, but got robbed and now just needed to fix up their ole truck to go back home. I felt flush, having just cashed my paycheck, and it hurt me that decent, hardworking rustics would have such a cruel welcome to California. Again. So I gave them a twenty.

Now, go forward a day.

I had to go pay my current and overdue car payment in person somewhere way up north. For that I needed Diet Coke. Now, I had the whole of my paycheck on me still, most of it in a billfold I had stuck in the side pocket of a jacket, and a lot of it was going to the car. The same two guys were outside the store as I went in. I paid for the Coke with money in my purse, and the same one as before accosted me again with a story. They had come out from Nevada to help their ailing relative in that ole van over there (pointing to a sickly, rusted van parked in front of the auto-parts store), but got robbed coming out of the nursing home or graveyard or something, and just needed to get some money to get back home. I was only brave because I was angry, but I actually managed to give some version of a 'Say, look here, Mister' and express a tiny bit of my indignation at having given them twenty dollars the previous day for a different story.

Needless to say, I did not again contribute to their cause. --Not intentionally, that is. While the talky one was remonstrating with me about his need for gas money, the silent partner picked my jacket pocket clean of the billfold, and with it nearly all the money I had in the world. I'm pretty sure that's the time I feel most stupid about. At least until the next one...

My Sad Mazda, Sadder Still...

In other news, they robbed my car again, this time going into the trunk, and leaving it wide open after the plundering, too. May they enjoy the CDs of Ottoman court music and Jimmie Rodgers, and the spare tire, as much as I did. Interestingly, the old pairs of work shoes in the back remain where they were, but they stole my perfumes (they'll have a bloody existential crisis when they see how very little they smell like the vanilla-and-treacle scents at the store) and a stupid spiral notebook. If I thought any of this was going to be useful to someone, I wouldn't care, but this is just stealing-because-you-can. I could be wrong, but I doubt profoundly that many car prowlers would be thrilled to discover their loot consisted of Turkish classical music and yodeling!

'Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait, ni le mal -

Tout ça m’est bien égal.'

So, my car got broken into last night. Now, when I say 'broken into,' I'm not being entirely accurate: I don't lock this car, on the basis that the window that would be broken in a break-in would be worth more than the rest of the car. Moreover, I don't need to lock it since I store my gold bricks and rubies elsewhere than in the mighty Mazda. And the stockpile of untraceable semi-automatic weapons? The hundred-pound cache of smuggled drugs? Elsewhere, too. There is not much in there to steal, most particularly since we're not in Oregon, where the stack of empty Diet Coke bottles might net up to seventy-five cents at the recycling station.

That fact notwithstanding.

They did steal a little cheap clip-on light from the visor, a hair clip on the same visor, a car cellphone charger that probably works when used in a car with a working cigarette lighter, one pair of pointy, high, terrifyingly green pumps in a size suitable only for me (in a fiercely festive mood) or an eight-year-old Miss Cutie Princess pageant contestant in Little Rock, and maybe about $1.75 in change. I imagine they were shocked and angry at their lousy prize package, because they also stole one-half of a few pairs of shoes, including a charming but too-tight-even-for-me set of size 4 1/2 loden-green wedges. Since I can only guess they have as much use for single shoes as the original owner, I have to assume the intent was solely to wreck someone's day.

What is goofy about this (in addition to the idea of any chucklehead thinking my dodgy, unlocked hatchback a good choice for plundering) is that just last night I thought to myself how long it had been since my car had got 'broken into' last, and I also thought about thinking about moving some of the shoes back into the house into their little shoe homes. But my arms were full of Diet Coke and dim sum at the time, so I decided to do the thinking later.

What is also goofy about this is that there were some perfectly good single-serving maple syrups and hot sauces in the glove box they showed no interest in. Not to mention the almost-entirely-full box of Red Vines, black licorice style.

And From Your Lips She Drew a Hallelujah?

Today so far there was no random reading. I woke up, drank some Diet Coke, checked my email and could think of nothing but Lorca's 'Thamar y Amnon' before work. I just had repeating in my head the ending lines:

'Y cuando los cuatro cascos
eran cuatro resonancias,
David con unas tijeras
cortó las cuerdas del arpa.'



Well, it is a haunting finale, with the alliterative, diminishing hoofbeat of cuando cuatro cascos, and I think it's a masterful, powerful poem, but the last two lines always really get to me. In the poem, Lorca weaves the story of Amnon's rape of his half-sister Thamar together with references to David's sins and other earthly repercussions for the house of David. Everything happens together, and Thamar is Bathsheba bathing on the rooftop, while Absalom murders Amnon, the arrows killing Urias shoot from David's own palace walls and Amnon's lust murders his sister's innocence. Wanting to read it and being lazy, and realizing that moving my mouse is easier than moving my body, I just looked the poem up online. By putting in 'David unas tijeras' (in hopes of getting a page with the entire poem, instead of a site only about the poem) in the search form, I got this site, and got, along with the poem, a commentary that included this: '

'This is a highly problematic poem, for what Garcia Lorca does here, I argue, is to present us with a sympathetic view of Amnón, that it was his overpowering sexual desire that caused him to rape Thamar. Federico is not the first or last person to argue that sexuality has a dark side, that it can and will take on a barbarous, even suicidal persona; however, by entering into the debate by claiming Amnón just couldn't "help himself," that Thamar's own beauty "forced" her half-brother to violate her, Lorca is simply presenting a tired old chestnut that has been used since time-immortal; in short, that there is no such thing as free will, that men are simply slaves to their own libidos.'

So I felt compelled to write about it, because I don't think Lorca was doing that at all. Amnon is portrayed as lusting heavily - and as (perhaps overdramatically, or perhaps genuinely, in fear of God and more divine retribution on his clan) asking for some kind of relief from it.

"Cut out my eyes, Thamar,
with your fixed dawn.
The threads of my blood
weave ruffles on your dress."

There are two separate issues: temptation and sin. Lorca was well aware of the distance between the two, and the lack of causal relationship. In 'Lucia Martinez' from three years earlier, the poet's predatory narrator baldly describes his intent:

'Here I am, Lucia Martinez.
I've come to devour your mouth
And drag you off by the hair
into the seashells of daybreak'

and his chilling, egoistic rationale of the act he intends to commit:

'because I want to and I can.'

And, the story of the later poem - whether David's, the House of David's, or solely Amnon's, has a vastly different meaning if David or Amnon or Absalom does not choose to sin. Canonically, the story goes that the Christian God will not allow us to be tempted more than we can resist. Literarily, not only is David the most complex and most fully-developed character in the Bible (and the 'first human being in world literature' according to Baruch Halpern's David's Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King), but this poem would be about something else altogether had it simply been foreordained, destiny, or some law of nature (or human nature) that Amnon would rape Thamar. David would not be the same rich character if he were simply forced to do all the great good and bad things he did, and if Shakespeare likewise had written about automatons instead of tormented heroes in his tragedies, would anyone bother reading (let alone memorizing, filming, studying, restaging, and continuing to tease out new meanings from) him all these centuries?

Yes, Amnon was overcome by temptation. That is the point. Temptation as a plot development, spiritual crisis, or moment of growth or decline has no content if it is not hugely desirable. If I have no lust for money, offering me a million dollars to do something unsavory will not sway me: the payoff is insufficient to the task. In other words, I am not tempted. The plot, of the book or of my life, does not move forward. If I do not have lust for my sister, I will not rape her. And the gravest transgressions are not only the ones with the strongest pull but the ones both rationality and our conscience most vehemently cry out against. Our conscience, together with social mores, perhaps, and common sense, human decency, fear of secular or heavenly punishment, empathy, logic, and the like, urge us not to rob the bank, not to drive drunk, not to hit our spouse, and not to embezzle those funds it would be so hard to trace...

It is therefore a struggle, a meaningful struggle, as Amnon admitted when he suggested his eyes be cut out - before they wandered again in the poem down to the ruffles his lust was weaving on her dress. If he could only stop seeing, he reasons, could no longer behold Thamar's beauty, he would have no cause to sin. Amnon's 'threads of blood' directly recall Jesus' sweat of blood as He suffered - suffered temptation, more precisely - in Gesthemani. He could have skipped his execution, and Amnon could have let go of Thamar's arm. I think Lorca evokes that familiar image and contrasts the brief moment Amnon meditates on what it is he is about to choose to do in order to make clear how deliberate the act is. Rather than struggle with the temptation for hours, turn to God, and ultimately accept His will as did Jesus in His torment, Amnon thinks about it for a few lines' worth of text, realizes the grave wrong of what he is considering - and decides that, all things considered, what he really wants right now is to rape his sister, not wait around for an angel to tell him he is strong. The 'hilos de sangre' linking Amnon and Christ serve to emphasize, not powerlessness, but how important it is to realize we do have a choice, and how serious and far-reaching the consequences can be, whether we resist or give in to temptation: in Christianity, it is through Christ's full acceptance in Gethsemani of his role as Savior on the Cross the next day that sinners like Amnon can find forgiveness and redemption.

In the Biblical story as in the poem, Thamar does not just resist physically, she remonstrates aloud with Amnon.

'Déjame tranquila, hermano.
Son tus besos en mi espalda
avispas y vientecillos
en doble enjambre de flautas.'

In the Lorca, she gives appeals to Amnon's empathy, while in the Biblical passages, she as well speaks of the moral, legal, and social aspects of the crime, and even tells Amnon if he were to get David's assent first then she could be his. But despite the fewer words of protest in the poem, surely the entreaty of his soon-to-be victim registered, along with the cries of his own conscience and common sense, in Amnon's mind. She even calls him brother, which should not merely evoke tenderness and kinship loyalty, but remind him that the crime he wants to commit is not merely rape and assault, but incest, as well.

David was chosen of God to found and lead the state of Israel, he wrote love songs to God, he sinned mightily (against Urias, Bathsheba, his people, his son, the people of Israel and, of course, against God, who is the only one we ever really sin against), repented mightily, and was forgiven due to his sincere repentance - but with Yahweh decreeing through the prophet Nathan that 'the sword will not depart' from his house, that evil will rise 'against you out of your own house,' that his own wives would be taken by others, and that the product of his adultery and the impetus for the murder to cover it up, his and Bathsheba's baby, would die. King David heartily, deeply, and sincerely regretted his actions, because he knew he could have made other choices and yet succumbed to temptation. So, too, did Amnon know his options; the charitable impulses and rationality he pushed to the back of his mind were brought to the forefront as Thamar pleaded with him while he pulled her to him. It wasn't fate, it wasn't biology; it was willful sin - with meaning and consequences as powerful as the temptation that urged it forward.

And David the psalmist, the rhapsodic lover of God, David with his unending faith and sincere contrition on a par with that of the Sufi's paradigmatic lover Iblis, Davidwho writes of the evil he has bred in the world,

'For I know my transgression,
and my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,
and done that which is evil in thy sight'

seeing the evil his son has done, which recapitulates his own, stops pleading,

'O Lord, open thou my lips,
and my mouth shall show forth thy praise'

and instead in the poem abandons hope, abandons praise, and cuts the strings of his harp. David the shepherd with a flock in disarray, David the King of Israel and head of a murdering and incestuous royal family, David the giant-killer who finally tamed his own demons now watching in horror at his sons repeating his crimes and, in the end, David the rapturous Psalmist laying down his harp and songs of praise on hearing the hoofbeats of Amnon's departing horse. That's the part that sticks with me!

Here's the poem itself

Federico García Lorca

Thamar y Amnón

(pub. 1928)

La luna gira en el cielo
sobre las sierras sin agua
mientras el verano siembra
rumores de tigre y llama.
Por encima de los techos
nervios de metal sonaban.
Aire rizado venía
con los balidos de lana.
La sierra se ofrece llena
de heridas cicatrizadas,
o estremecida de agudos
cauterios de luces blancas.

Thamár estaba soñando
pájaros en su garganta
al son de panderos fríos
y cítaras enlunadas.
Su desnudo en el alero,
agudo norte de palma,
pide copos a su vientre
y granizo a sus espaldas.
Thamár estaba cantando
desnuda por la terraza.
Alrededor de sus pies,
cinco palomas heladas.
Amnón, delgado y concreto,
en la torre la miraba,
llenas las ingles de espuma
y oscilaciones la barba.
Su desnudo iluminado
se tendía en la terraza,
con un rumor entre dientes
de flecha recién clavada.
Amnón estaba mirando
la luna redonda y baja,
y vio en la luna los pechos
durísimos de su hermana.

Amnón a las tres y media
se tendió sobre la cama.
Toda la alcoba sufría
con sus ojos llenos de alas.
La luz, maciza, sepulta
pueblos en la arena parda,
o descubre transitorio
coral de rosas y dalias.
Linfa de pozo oprimida
brota silencio en las jarras.
En el musgo de los troncos
la cobra tendida canta.
Amnón gime por la tela
fresquísima de la cama.
Yedra del escalofrío
cubre su carne quemada.
Thamár entró silenciosa
en la alcoba silenciada,
color de vena y Danubio,
turbia de huellas lejanas.
Thamár, bórrame los ojos
con tu fija madrugada.
Mis hilos de sangre tejen
volantes sobre tu falda.
Déjame tranquila, hermano.
Son tus besos en mi espalda
avispas y vientecillos
en doble enjambre de flautas.
Thamár, en tus pechos altos
hay dos peces que me llaman,
y en las yemas de tus dedos
rumor de rosa encerrada.

Los cien caballos del rey
en el patio relinchaban.
Sol en cubos resistía
la delgadez de la parra.
Ya la coge del cabello,
ya la camisa le rasga.
Corales tibios dibujan
arroyos en rubio mapa.

¡Oh, qué gritos se sentían
por encima de las casas!
Qué espesura de puñales
y túnicas desgarradas.
Por las escaleras tristes
esclavos suben y bajan.
Émbolos y muslos juegan
bajo las nubes paradas.
Alrededor de Thamár
gritan vírgenes gitanas
y otras recogen las gotas
de su flor martirizada.
Paños blancos enrojecen
en las alcobas cerradas.
Rumores de tibia aurora
pámpanos y peces cambian.

Violador enfurecido,
Amnón huye con su jaca.
Negros le dirigen flechas
en los muros y atalayas.
Y cuando los cuatro cascos
eran cuatro resonancias,
David con unas tijeras cortó
las cuerdas del arpa.