|
Sonja de Vries Swans in the Red Light District The canals reflect pink neon signs: “Live Bondage” “Real Lesbians” and other delights, including a gorilla with a large banana, which threatens or entices depending on one’s point of view. In this neighborhood, I walked as a young girl, my grandfather a bartender at the “The Laughing Cat.” I liked that the women on the corners and in the windows, who scoffed at the men traveling in packs, recognized me with their red-lit smiles. Tonight under the neon signs of the Casa Rosada, white swans sleep, preen, glide through this bottle strewn canal. Thirty-one of them, my son counts. They are turn-of-the-century madams, my mother tells us, come back in all their feathered beauty to claim their place again. |