clint

arturo: friend, mentor, kung fu teacher asked for a few bucks to borrow for some tacos.

i graceously obliged but told him i had no cash on me, so he had to wait til i was done working and we both met up at fred meyer.

after i flash the cash, he takes me over to meet someone he's told me about in the deli.
with her trench-coated back turned to the whole store, and with a cowboy hat topped with a black and white feather that concealed all hint of gender, we approached.

"MARIA!" arturo yelled as we approached.

she didn't turn until we were upon her.
and talk about a weather-worn face. missing teeth, an underbite, wrinkles with wrinkles, a mole with inch-long hair on the cheek. this woman could have easily been casted as a witch in any scary movie.

she started to talk to arturo.
spanish.
i understood it!
damn i'm cool.
arturo introduced me as "su enemigo favorito" (your favorite enemy), hinting at the fact that i was white.

she apparently was from guatemala and at some point in her life made her way up here. now she's living on the street and had all of her belongings in suit case lying on the bottom of a fred meyer shopping cart. in the cart were a few more of her belongings along with a stack of newspaper.

we began to talk. she warmed up to the fact that i had visited guatemala and was interested in the mayan hertiage.
apparently she knows a crapload about the mayan, the aztecs, and the inca. arturo says anything i need to know about that subject, she knows.
i told her that i was reading Popol Vuh and she told me what it was about.
so at least she's not bluffing.

but then comes the sad part.
arturo compares her to Russell Crowe in "A Beautiful Mind". she keeps going on and on about how when she lived in guatemala she had a bunch of documents about all the native cultures. she wasn't too specific about what was in them, because everytime she got deep into it, arturo would mock her. he's probably heard her go on about it a hundred times.

but anyway, these documents of hers were very important. so important that movie star clint eastwood stole them from her. and ever since he stole them from her, he's also been trying to get these mayan, aztec, and incan artifacts all for himself and the people of the united states.

in addition to this (which brings us back to "A Beautiful Mind", she reads the newspapers which, in reading between the lines, she can see how Clint is further exacting his master plan of confiscating all mesoamerican artifacts.

while although this made her seem enormously schizophrenic, her manner of speech and vocabulary proved her to be a very educated woman. she said she was once a teacher, but i don't know if it was in guatemala or here in the U.S.
her english was as good as her spanish, so maybe she was teaching up here.

i kinda want to go back another day and talk with her again without arturo's jesting. he kept asking what the papers were telling her and never really giving her a chance to answer.

arturo thinks she's crazy. and he's probably right.
but i think anybody, no matter how messed up, still has some wisdom in them.
this woman definitely does, even though her outward appearance would signal the exact opposite.

on tuesday, i'll talk to maria.