The secret press

They have an aging third-world washer, guava green in a back bathroom, with two compartments: one a defunct agitator they call 'Obrero', the other an electric spin-wringer that works - named 'Tlatelolco', which after everything's the only thing left of it worth holding on to. So - some tropic night, after meetings after the calls, the chairs grating, the then-hush meaning the sweatshop tailors under are riding late buses out to the barrios and thinking frijoles or Beta's wedding, they've invented a system: wash, wring, rinse, wring, rinse, wring. Then hung on the roof for morning, the city shut on itself and still - or so - numinous. It makes him expansive, the order of it, the way she keeps that old wringer spinning or pushes a wisp of hair from her face with a track of soapsuds. This is the revolution, he's fond of saying, always smoking, his inkstained hands drawing bubbles through a worn shirt, each weft of it something breathing. Exploding. In my village, she thinks, the way my mother woke us cranking her Forties mangle. Strong-armed as she was, she made her hands useless for grasping after. And would she have held us if she could? Didn't she though? she asks. Then, after a moment, No, She wouldn't have recognized herself in this. In the end, she says, it's all doctrines and doctrines. Or what's left? A wash, a wet housedress she pulls up over her navel, her breasts. In the end it's clothes with clothes under. And she's bent shivering, bare arms in a tub, till his lips find the smear left on her shoulder where she's swatted a mosquito and then forgotten, and she says, oh the copy table, love, spread me thin as paper, print me like a banner. Him: So; how we spin as fast as we can. Her: How it hangs me in a damp night wind.