A Peel to Heaven

One fine day in April, my grandfather died in the street. Though he was crushed flat, they say his head was turned backwards, peering over his shoulder, supposedly, at a pretty young woman in a white dress carrying a white parasol walking the other way. Yes, it’s only speculation, and while it fills me with shame, though perhaps it shouldn’t as he was a widower by then, he’d earned his right to have a look, but be that as it may, I’m inclined to believe it is the truth. How else would he have failed to notice the slippery banana peel in his path, or the looming piano hanging by the frayed rope of a rusty pulley lowering it down from a penthouse window? Those drunken bastards, they had their day in court, thank God, and while it was no surprise when they were found responsible for mishandling the piano, the jury astonished everyone when they delivered the verdict that one of the men, Hector Lunes, was also responsible for the hazardous banana peel, tossed carelessly over the edge during a rooftop lunch break. Lunch! It was more like a happy hour. For this he was given an extra six months and a four hundred and seventy nine dollar fine, which some found excessive, but to me it was the bare minimum, for it was that peel which sent my grandfather toppling into the path of that plunging piano. One step forward and he would have lived.

And yet, though as a young man my thirst for justice was quenched, I understand now that were my grandfather’s ghost to have visited us during those proceedings, he would have asked the judge to set those men free. Shit happens, he would have said. That was the way he was, my grandfather. Live and let live. God takes you when it’s time. Now, as I gaze back across the arc of his life, yet careful to look ahead regularly for obstacles and hazards, I realize, in a sense, that he died as he lived, and that his death, as gruesome as it sounds, was somewhat of a fitting epilogue to sixty years of marriage, a marriage whose roots extend all the way down South, Souther than South, deep into the soil of the seaside jungles of Central America.

My grandfather got his start and had his big break working overseas for a large fruit company. I won’t say its name, but I’m sure you can guess it, and I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t like that. My grandfather was a good man. Yes, he went through some tense situations delivering payments and messages to certain officials, certain militia leaders and other such characters, but that’s Central America for you and besides, they weren’t his payments, they weren’t his messages, and it was only on certain occasions under certain circumstances, it wasn’t his main job at all, which, if you’re wondering, was at first to assist in the transport of the banana crop onto ships bound for New York or New Orleans or San Diego or other such seaside metropoli, then to oversee the chain of transport, and eventually to negotiate contracts with wholesalers around the world, aided by his partner in crime, Professor Linus Erhardt, a veteran of the trade, fluent in a dozen languages, who joined the company under mysterious circumstances in 1947. I met the professor only once, at my grandfather’s funeral. By then he was a stick of a man, though I assume he had always been so, peering out at life through his round spectacles, bewildered by the somber proceedings, for he had never imagined he might outlive my grandfather. When he was pointed out to me by some relative, my uncle I recall, I made a point to introduce myself and squeeze him for stories. No doubt he must have kept an entire library tucked away inside that thin gray coat, but for me he had just a few words.

Your grandfather saved my life.

I pressed him for details, but he just sniffed and shook his head and said God bless you and shuffled along to the refreshments table. Later on I was to learn the story was quite embarrassing for the professor, a baffling predicament involving a shipment of stolen monkeys and the honor of an important official’s daughter. Out of respect for the good professor, I won’t repeat it here. However, it was their escape from that hazardous scandal, their treacherous trek through the Darien Gap, which led to my grandfather’s fateful encounter with my grandmother in Panama. Flush with cash appropriated from that corrupt official so unwilling to understand the professor’s side of the story, and who so nearly ruined him and my grandfather both, they gathered their fellow companymen for a celebration of obscene proportions and took the town by storm, unleashing a tornado of good feeling which raged through the streets of Panama City and found its terminus at the finest hotel in town, their wild behavior only barely excused by their enormous bar tab. Fate found my grandfather banging away at the abandoned piano, a mountain of banana peels towering atop its lid, the legacy of a banana eating contest which, though you would never guess it from looking at him, the professor won handily by a margin of twenty-three, or so the legend goes.

My grandmother, brought along by her father on one of his many international business trips so that she might see something of the world before embarking for the women’s college in the fall, was staying on the top floor in one of the many rooms of the penthouse suite. Upon the staff’s warning of the raucous crowd appropriating the dining hall, my great grandfather forbade my grandmother from venturing downstairs, for there was only trouble to be found amongst those prosperous hooligans. But as the night wore on, my grandmother found herself unable to sleep, not only due to the noise, but also her ever burgeoning curiosity, which finally got the better of her when she could no longer stand to wonder what kind of man could persevere in playing the piano so badly for so long. Her father and his associates were engaged in a heated discussion of geopolitics and political economy in which the fate of the world seemed to hinge on the mystery of when on Earth the racket downstairs would finally end. Sneaking past those learned men was no mean feat, yet somehow my grandmother managed. She hurried downstairs, fearful she might miss the spectacle of the obstinate piano player and spend the rest of her life haunted by his undiscovered specter, but there was nothing to worry about, for my grandfather was taking requests, crowd favorites to which his fellows sang along in a spirit of brotherhood, ecstasy, and an unbottled longing for home. No matter how badly he mangled each tune, my grandfather’s star only shone brighter.

It was then at the end of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” when my grandmother descended that final flight and their eyes met above that mountain of peels. My grandfather, in his drunken state, misperceived my grandmother to be standing atop the mound itself like the queen of all bananas, and indeed, even in his old age, my grandfather still often referred to her as his banana queen. To hear him tell it, from that very moment on that fateful night, the deal was sealed, so to speak, and nothing was ever to be the same. My grandmother, of course, had a different, more lovingly derisive telling of the tale, but even in her version, she never failed to recall the point in the evening when, reclining in her throne of peels, she allowed my grandfather to play the piano using her bare feet instead of his hands, and that, I think, says it all.