Fault Lines - John Knoop

June 21, ’62
Yesterday I sat on the café terrace watching some workmen hacking away at the plane
trees along the road. They moved in like a swarm of locusts and began their attack on the trees.
Two or three climbed into a tree to begin cutting off the limbs while another pair began sawing
at the denuded trunks. They had already eliminated four of the majestic old trees, which have
stood for perhaps two hundred years just at the bend in the road by the village washing troughs.
Nothing remains but the white stubs of their trunks, sawed nearly level with the ground.
the railing.
I drank off my cold coffee and sat watching. Juan came out of his café and leaned against
“They’re changing your view. Why are they cutting them down?”
“I don’t know. I suppose someone thought they were in the way. They are probably going
to widen the road, for the tourist buses.”
“It’s a shame,” I said. He agreed. Progress is a disaster, I thought.
It’s our third spring in Deyá and I feel increasing disappointment with my lack of success. I have
finished thirty-four short stories, many of which made the rounds of the literary magazines like Sewanee
Review, Prairie Schooner, the Virginia Quarterly and others with only an occasional personalized
rejection slip. The agent has certainly tried, but rejections keep coming. I make a vow to write no more
stories until one is so compelling that I can’t ignore it. I am losing momentum and also running out of
the money from my education fund that I’ve spent here instead of at Columbia. My father has said that
it’s time to come back and find a job. I decide I should learn a trade so I spend several days a week in
Palma at the VW repair shop where I’ve been maintaining my motorcycle. The shop manager, Pepe, who
has become my friend, gives me a course focused primarily on how to remove and repair the engines and
transmissions. I’ve always had a rapport with machines, so I get pretty good at it after the first one. I’m
hoping this training will qualify me for a job back in the states. I’m ready to be a member of the
proletariat. Pepe is a thinking man with a habit of fixing on a key word as he works. A word or phrase
roots itself in his mind and rolls off his tongue over and over until something interrupts or distracts him.
“Es dificil,” he’ll say. A pause of several seconds, then, “es dificil.” A pause, as though he’s
reconsidering, then, with renewed vigor, “mas que dificil.”
The other day he had laryngitis so badly that he was reduced to whispering and avoided talking
by using, signs, nods and signals. He was barely able to conserve his voice when seized by a mot juste.
His lips would repeat it countless times, even though he tried to prevent any sound from coming out.
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