HOOKED ON COCALAND
st. mj's guide to paradise for
lost gringos
paradise
found and lost
(cont’d)
Colombian
Nobel Laureate in Literature, Gabriel García
Márquez
and a FARC guerrilla at peace talks in San Vicente
del Caguán, Colombia, January 8, 1999[1]
It upsets me as much to think God exists, as to think he
doesn't.
i’m on
Yazmín's porch in Santisima Cruz. sun is out like any day,
semi-fire-glazing every square foot of packed muddy earth in
sight, and me too.
the good
looking kid with the mustache who joined us for breakfast has
left and gone down the camino,
wiping his dark rose-brown golden brow with a white cotton
handkerchief. the whole
time at the table, sammy, he talked with Robbie, not me,
except to say hello and good-bye.[3]
i feel
suffocated, as in
i want to come
out further, all the way out of my shell and meet people, but
Robbie has gone down the camino. there's nobody to introduce
us, and i’m shy by nature.
so here i am,
sitting, waiting for the people of Santisima Cruz to break
through – gently – the wall i spent yesterday
rebuilding. i'm
ready. by their
rules, too, the wall must be breached. this is a tropical
village. any
outsider who sits in public without speaking, taxes the
good-natured openness of a rural tropical town. i don't care for it either.
honestly. i admit the
wall is my ugly creation, not theirs, but i can't get past it
alone any more. the
wall has gotten too big.
but who will be
so nice, after the way i acted yesterday?
43. WHAT THE HECK DO YOU
DO WHEN YOU LAND FEET FIRST IN A REAL
it's
mesmerizing out here. it
cries out for description. a
killer virus could possess me and i wouldn't know i was sick,
i’m so hypnotized.
i'll describe
the carnival of delights, sammy, while i wait to be rescued
from my shell.
the canal on
this side of Little Venice is a moving muddy brown with moving
reflection spots of yellow leaves, green leaves and yellow
sky. that's how a
cloudless blue sky and trees reflect in a muddy canal. clumps of floating
vegetation are bigger today. entire big floating islands
of uprooted flowering plants go by, twirling their purple
flowers in the current like a scene from Disney’s Fantasia. yesterday their stems were
broken, stripped of blue-lavender flowers upstream somehow. today they twirl by, their
many intact purple petals on green spikes rising tall, three
feet above pads. they
sail together in clumps connected by underwater tubers, tops
bursting with blooms, whole clusters spinning, hardly of this
world. water
hyacinths, you might say. a
surreal vision, a floating, flowing, fantasy tropical water
garden, an animated cartoon.[4]
to music.
vallenato.
‘liria’, ‘lirio’,
or ‘water hyacinth’, huge clumps floating in water
when pushed by wind and current up against a subtropical
shoreline in numbers
as here in Mexico
obliterate the usual demarcation between land and
water[5]
there are large
pieces of brown something. Angel
agrees they're broken conchas
de coco, coconut shells. he disagrees the plastic
trash is from
i could retire
here maybe, sammy. it's
got a kind of funky peace and quiet that would be nice for
death. i'd leave
the world surrounded by simple, accepting, caring
people. or so it
seems. maybe they don’t
care. no one has
talked to me, it’s true, not even the kid at breakfast. but he seemed decent enough.
Angel's friends
are gone now and the camino,
the dirt people-way between porch and canal, is almost
empty. vallenato rolls
non-stop from an invisible cantina, as it did all day
yesterday and all last night, really good open-air high
fidelity. maybe
that's what's rearranging my nervous system, the incessant
day-and-night beat of vallenato,
with its wailing song-stories, playful accordion riffs, and
endless lively bass beat, massaging me through the earth’s
soil. i am duly
relaxed. i am duly
reprogrammed. i am a
new person, i think.
let them
discover me as human now, before it's too late.
but no one
comes.
maybe my
performance in the middle of the night is putting them off,
sammy.
a single
‘water hyacinth’ in Santisima Cruz
44. SIMPLE RULES FOR GETTING
TO THE BATHROOM IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT – IN
that's the
problem, maybe. i’ve
needed help adjusting to this town and none has been available
at times. Efrén
had to stay in
as simple as
the town looks, some things are so strange and complicated a
simple act like going to the bathroom, if you don’t get it
right, can cause mass subtropical pandemonium.
it’s not the
best way to present yourself to a town.
i had to get up
twice during the night to relieve myself, as usual. i’d gone to bed at
nine. it must have
been twelve or one when the last night owls in the family were
floating into their indoor roosts and woke me without meaning
to. it seemed a
good time to get up and empty the bladder. from my hammock in the
family sleeping room, i made my way gingerly through the
semi-dark living room and dark little storage room. i was headed out back, so i
could cross the yard to the baño, the wood
shack at the back that serves as crap house and bathhouse
both. but just past the
water urn in the back room i ran into a big shadowy obstacle
that hadn’t been there earlier.
normally i slip
to the bathroom discreetly, sammy, as in
the next
obstacle was the local Cerberus, "Boca Negra," a thin-haired
old cur bitch with a two inch sore under her left eye popular
with flies. during
the daytime she was assigned to the back patio but sought
off-moments to trot through the little house to the camino and make
trouble. a mean, ugly
dog in general. but
an effective watchdog at night for the back yard and patio,
except she overplayed the part and practically chomped holes
in family and friends.
Boca Negra woke
up and growled. i'd
been studying the cur knowing i'd have to get past her
eventually. Angel
had used a noisy ritual dealing with her. Yazmín had tried to
out-bark her. i
stood there like a toddler who didn’t know how to go to the
bathroom.
if Yazmin
thought a big boy like me would be OK on his own, once the
light was on, she was mistaken. she had to help again. she pierced the silence of
the sleeping neighborhood with high-pitched cursing, as if mad
at me and taking it out on the dog. finally, after a lot of
screaming and cursing, by some inscrutable ritual the cur was
appeased and Yazmín said i could pass to the outhouse.
"Pase!" she barked in
Spanish, and – if my bladder hadn't burst, and it hadn’t
fortunately – i got to the baño and back
without incident.
i climbed back
in the hammock, going to bed along with the night owls. i lay in pitch-black quiet,
wrapped in hammock walls, thinking i’d need to go again
towards morning. everyone
would be sleeping. given
the situation, i'd have to make it through the night without
going. i said this to
myself the way you say it to a bedwetting child, hoping it
works on his nervous system while he sleeps, knowing it never
does.
in the middle
of the black, heavily populated wee hours, i awoke in worse
shape. this was an
urgent one, a pressure i hadn't felt in months. i counted the evening's
glasses of water, juice and coffee with regret, all of them to
fight heat, thirst and weariness. aspirin affected me
strangely sometimes, too, storing lots of water and releasing
it all at once twelve hours later. never again would i take
aspirin after 12 noon in this town, i swore, or drink a drop
of anything after dinner.
i climbed out
of the swinging hammock in my silk boxers carefully, not to
expose myself or crash over and wake the house. i made it to the curtained
bedroom doorway and felt my way like a blind man toward the
center of the sala,[7]
hands stretched out in front of me all the way, since i
couldn’t see a darn thing. i
assumed the back door was barred as before and that i couldn’t
contend with it. i
wasn't thinking, i guess.
gradually i
made out the shape of the white fridge and dark front
door. i found a
cross bar on the inside of the wooden front door. i grabbed into cobwebs and
scraped them off on my boxers frantically. panicking more, i brushed
off the boxers before tarantulas crept in. why was i trying to open the
front door anyway? to
stand in silk boxers with my big belly out, peeing in the
brightly lit public camino?
i was forced to
get Robbie up. too
many times on this crazy trip to Cocaland, i’d had to turn to
him in helpless desperation.
wrapped in his
sheet like Banquo's ghost, Robinson Rivera floated whitely
toward the back door through thick darkness. i used my head finally and
opened the fridge for light. he unbarred the back door
making noise and turned on the glaring patio light. this woke up neighborhood
roosters. they took
to crowing rudely in the middle of the paradisal night, and
woke Boca Negra, who barked and woke the next-door neighbors'
yard critters. they
woke up their neighbors’ dogs and roosters. then a chain reaction of
top-volume ferocious barking and ratchety roostery crowing
moved and echoed up and down the previously silent canal. then it moved back and
forth, up and down our sleeping row of houses along the canal
again like a diabolical pestilence, lasting an intolerably
long time, loud annoying cock-a-doodle-doos and barks and
barks and more cackling doodle-doos. when i thought it was over,
it spread, and spread some more, block after block in the
otherworldly darkness. after
a scandalous eternity of infernal racket in all four
directions, all the way to
but there was a
twist. he told me
how to do it. all i
had to do was call her name, he said. but it couldn’t be true, i
said. Angel and
Yazmín had suffered strokes getting the cur to yield.
Robbie’d lived in another country and didn’t know her. i looked at him. something told me not to
argue any more. i
called in a loud whisper. "Boca Negra!"
but it wasn’t
over.
it was a long
dark baño
operation, all told, because after the first watery dispatch,
a sense of fullness remained. i sat and sat. what was i to do? it refused to take care of
itself, as if it knew that it was a municipal nuisance, and
resented the notoriety, and had gone on strike.
i returned to
the back door again, and Robinson was still standing there in
his sheet. i felt
obliged to reveal to him that, regarding my private bathroom
matter, which had become public to an unfortunate degree, it
would happen again during the night, definitely, and wake
everybody between here and
“Go back and
try right now,” he said, handing me a roll of toilet paper
from the supply box next to him.
what a
nuisance. i
couldn't even pee without help, sammy. i was helpless as a
two-year-old, and wasn't even drunk. if Robbie had NOT told me to
try again, i would NOT have known what to do. this time i tried number 2
and it worked. 2
was followed by a number one surprisingly more impressive than
the last one five minutes before, leaving me tremendously
relieved.
i appreciated
Robbie right then, believe me, a friend who possessed the
magnanimity to help another with kindness and tact, in an
awkward, excretory fifteen minutes of galactic fame. his gentle persuasion had
gotten me through it.
i returned
refreshed, full of thanks and apologies. he accepted humbly and
showed me how to bar the door in the dark. the thin end of the log went
in a loop of wire to the left of the closed door, the thick
end in a bigger coat hanger wire loop at the right.
things in
Santisima Cruz could be simple enough, obviously, if someone
just showed you how they worked.
Robbie’s mother Yazmín’s carved front door in
Santisima Cruz
looking out onto camino and caño (walkway and canal)
and Omar’s horse being saddled
passersby can see that cheese – a big block from
the fridge – sits out
on the table at right
meaning it is available for purchase in portions
(note typical aeration of ceiling and walls)
45. STUDY SIMPLICITY AND ASK:
WHICH SIMPLE KID MIGHT SAVE YOU FROM YOUR COMPLICATED
MISERABLE GRINGO EXISTENCE?
things are simple indeed,
as i look around. right
now the old man Bible-reader next door is getting a Saturday
morning haircut in full public view, under the tree by the
canal, sitting on a straight-backed leather chair like
Yazmín's. the
middle-aged barber cuts as professionally as anyone in a
first-world city, clipping away at short white hair with comb
and scissors, his client draped in a white towel. family members from next
door come and go past them, watching.
and all the
clipped white hair goes in the canal, undoubtedly.
nobody says a
word to me, and i say nothing to them.
Robinson is on
the camino two
doors down to the right, and has been the whole time i've been
writing, entertaining a changing circle of small kids, young
people and adults from the neighborhood, probably with
exaggerated tales of the great
they act like
i'm not here, sammy. but
what should i expect? after
pushing them away all day yesterday, then waking them up
excretally in the night. maybe
i don’t belong in this town. if no one talks to me in the
next few minutes i’m going to quit trying, call it even, and
stay in my shell where i belong, cranky, world-weary, reading
the two Augustine books i brought from
a canoe passes,
silently paddled by a grizzled geezer in a flat-topped yellow
straw hat. many canoes
are hollowed out tree trunks, a sacred handicraft passed down
from indigenous forebears, most likely. the paddler sits in the
rear, paddle-steering, letting the rainy season’s strong canal
current do most of the work.
floating trash
gathers in a backwash across the canal. a carton box with printing
on it. a plastic
bag.
all over the
world, millions and millions of people who are dirt poor value
the trash of neighbors, sammy. things
you and i would throw out are ‘finds’. one family uses an
object a thousand times for as many purposes as it can bear,
before losing it or discarding it as trash. another poor family finds it
and uses it another thousand ways. so, the people across the
canal will notice later the great find washed up in their yard
– a huge intact cardboard carton box that floated down from
or maybe Angel
is right. maybe
the trash is from upstream locals.
Robbie invited
me to bathe in it, and despite trash, garbage and probably
sewage – not to mention wading pigs – with the heat turned up
like this, i’m actually considering it.
all the block
is in gales of laughter, including me. two ten-year-old boys went
by, playfully yelling and poking at each other, then one
tumbled on top the other. they
rolled as a unit across the camino
and kept rolling down the bank toward the canal until one
rolled right in splashing, half on purpose. Robbie's audience, the
barber's audience, and i, all looked at each other and
laughed. the boy jumped
out and ran on, laughing unperturbed, though soaked – shirt,
shorts and shoes.
that was a nice
ice-breaker.
a dark
heavy-chested boy goes by with shirt open. he has the same sloppy
swagger Robbie had when i met him in
there are still
no young women in the street. my
theory is, they hide them away just like in ancient Middle
Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, keeping them busy helping
mothers, out of reach of predator males.
if women and
girls are going to hide, sammy, men and boys will have to get
me out of my shell.
and they have
exactly ONE MINUTE before i resign myself to crankiness in
perpetuity.
now a kid comes
along the camino
and up to the door of the house on the left. he stands a while, looking
in. he doesn’t look
at me.
Robbie comes
back to the house and tells the dog next to me on the porch to
come inside. i
explain it can't be Boca Negra because it's male; it has more
hair and just looks
like Boca Negra, maybe her son, hatched years ago, living in
the neighborhood. he
says something in Spanish and insists on driving the dog into
the house. he acts
rushed.
i guess it’s
Boca Negra. then it’s
male, not a bitch, and has more hair than i thought.
46. MAYBE THE TEENAGE
BARBER-FISHERMAN.
when i look
back to the left, the kid who stood at their door is now
sitting down getting his Saturday morning haircut. the old man and his barber
are gone. now we
have a young teenage barber whose motions are jerkier, but
still experienced. it's
the same teen kid that came out after dark last night,
wet-haired and bare-chested, and put on a saintly glowing
white t-shirt.
by their side a
middle-aged man stands and sorts through a fish net. it flashes through the
sunshine and splashes into the canal in a perfect flat
circle. an
old-world circular fish net. he holds on to it with a
rope and hauls it in, full of junk. nothing jumping.
“an old-world circular fish net”
the young
barber-fisherman tosses his net into the Rio Mojana
the only highway to and through Santisima Cruz
another young
man tries tossing the fish net, gets laughs from the audience,
and checks with me to see if i find it funny. i don't. i'm too amazed. but since i'm supposed to
laugh, apparently, i look at them and manage a smile. he hauls it out and there's
nothing jumping.
the young
barber has finished cutting hair and goes upstream to try
fishing. he gets no
laughs for his perfect circular landing, just lots of black
garbage, several jumping fish, and applause from a little boy.
he comes back, walks up
to me and explains, "Thus they are here," meaning so small,
"and yet," he says, "they are eaten that small."
the little fish
come out on the camino
and die in the sun flopping. six,
seven, eight; ten in a pile now after more tosses of the
ancient looking net. the
young barber-fisherman cleans it then goes upstream again.
“Thus they are here, and yet, they are eaten that
small,”
said the teenage barber-fisherman.
out comes a
girl from the same house to the left. it’s a one-story townhouse
like the rest of the block, right up against ours chockablock,
looks the same size, but shelters some forty seven and a half
people, apparently.
meanwhile the
young barber-fisherman has caught one more. he hangs the net up to dry,
pulling the rope up over a branch of one almond tree to the
branch of a second and ties it. he tediously pulls trash
out, dead leaves, mud, gunk, a protracted ritual the details
of which he knows expertly. eleven
little fishies lie on the sunny dirt camino, a few steps
from my white sneakers and bare white ankles.
“eleven
little fishies lie on the sunny dirt camino”
chickens across
the canal decide to raise a fuss. laying eggs maybe.
two shirtless
little boys a half block away play soccer on the camino.
a boy looking
about eight comes out from the same door, with the same bucket
his father used yesterday for throwing out trash, and eleven
little fishies go in the bucket. the teenage
barber-fisherman, standing on the concrete bank, cleans the
fishies quickly with a knife.
“eleven
little fishies go in the bucket”
in
47. MAYBE THE ONE WITH
THIRTY-THREE SIBLINGS.
out the door of
the barbering fishermen, the door to the left, comes yet
another young man, the handsome mustached one who ate
breakfast this morning with Robbie and me in our dirt-floored,
palm-thatch-roofed ‘kitchen’ in the back patio, never talking
to me.[8]
he's the same average
height as the young barber-fisherman and all the rest of the
boys, the same dark color but blacker eyes. his black eyebrows are
bushier. he wears a
straw hat, unlike them. since
i can recognize him from breakfast, i hail him and he asks me
in a mushy bass voice if i'm drawing.
"No,
writing. Do you
live over there?" i wave toward the left, meaning the house
next door.
he says yes and
wipes his brow with the same white cotton hanky as before.
i tell him it
looks like he has a big family.
"Thirty-three
brothers and sisters," says the mushy bass voice, still
friendly.
"Thirty-three!"
i exclaim. "With
one father and mother?"
Yes.
"Well!" i say,
nonplussed and embarrassed. "I thought it was a big
family but not that big." it's
not believable.
i can't control
my curiosity. "Is it
really one father and one mother?" i ask again.
No, he says. One father.
"¿SÍ?"
i'm pushing my luck, but he hasn't discouraged me. he's very frank. "How many mothers?" i ask
nervily.
"Maybe fifteen
or sixteen. In various
places." he's not
the least bit shy or offended, sammy.
"Oh," say i. "Then I won't ask any more
questions." nevertheless
i ask, "Was that your father selling raffle tickets?" i'd seen him come out the
same door. he has his
work cut out for him, if he’s the father. he'd have to sell a bundle
to feed that crew. the
town couldn't afford so many raffle tickets.
"No, a friend,"
he says with good will. "My
father doesn't live here. He
lives with a woman over there," and his hand spans space.
"Oh!" say i. now i am really confused.
"Bueno!" he says, "I'll see you later." in a minute he's out
with one of his thirty-three brothers, i take it. they're on the front patio
bench, a wooden board on props with no back.
thirty-three
with one father, sammy. population
explosion in a nutshell. how
can it work? it was
hard for me to give TWO children enough fathering. yet he looks happy enough,
cleaning his bicycle wheel.
he smiles at me
for tolerating the ugly gray dog with a cock, big tits and a
cut on its face that's all the dogs i've seen at our house
wrapped into one, Boca Negra. i take a close look at the
dog's ugly face and wonder if it's mange.
the sun hits my
ankles like an electric heater on high.
i move my chair
to the caño
just for shade.
now i'm really in the
thick of things. the
young barber-fisherman takes his cleaned fishies inside. a political announcement
airs down toward the two footbridges, and community vallenato pipes
behind it and all other sounds, as always.
vallenato,
vallenato, vallenato. all
day, and even night. over
a nice big bouncing ubiquitous sound system. penetrating and uniting the
whole canalside neighborhood with fabulous party music.
and the kid
with the thirty three siblings gets the prize for bringing me
out of my shell so nicely and gently. so cleverly, sammy, as if he
knew me better than i did.
i didn’t want
much. just a few words,
so we could all
go on living with me a little longer.
but now what do
i do?
the wall has a
few holes, thanks to these guys breaking through, but it’s
still there if i need it. i
haven’t gone overboard as in
so now what?
48. OR HOW ABOUT TEENAGE
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, WHO SLEPT HERE TOO.
later.
this town has
me really charmed,
sammy.
now and then
something hits my worry button, but why spoil paradise
indulging glum thoughts?
the sun was
burning up my legs and no sooner had the four poles of the
metal chair sunk slowly and deeply, two full inches into the
cool shady mud along the canal, than Angel invited me on
another walk.
he extricated
the chair and heaved it up on the porch loudly, mud on its
legs and all, giving me the feeling i shouldn’t have moved it
into mud. then he led
me to the church to ask for his certificate of baptism, which
he needed because he’d moved to another town – probably to
help him forget the death of Bienvenido. the church secretary, a
young man graceful in hand gestures, typed one up masterfully
on an old typewriter and asked Angel about the strange guy
beside him who looked like a ‘gringo’. he used the word neutrally
as people usually do, as if he hadn’t heard too many bad
things about the gringo yet, like his baño scene in
the night, or his refusing to talk to people while writing in
full view of everybody in the neighborhood. he got an explanation, and
we met and shook, then he offered us a tour of the church.
the church with
its twin neo-Gothic towers of gray – but pink and blue at dawn
yesterday when we pulled in – is this old: it was dedicated on
the town's saint's day, early May around 1948, Day of
Santisima Cruz, Most Holy Cross. certain dignitaries came
from
we entered the
sanctuary and they raved about the altar, a cross with Christ
on it. it seemed
ordinary enough to me, just painted wood – painted pink flesh,
white cloth, black hair and black cross – all painted
crudely. they
crossed themselves before moving on, showing respect.
in the back of
the church Angel said many pueblos didn’t have a church as
fine as this. they
showed me another cross in the back draped with white silk,
saying it was the saint known as
how could an
empty cross be a saint?
"And here's the
saint," said Angel. it
was a see-through plastic coffin with a figure wrapped in real
cloth. i looked and we
walked closer. i
was bewildered.
"The saint is
the buried Christ," they both said at once.
"Oh!" i said. "The saint is Christ!" my instructors in religion
hadn't mentioned that. a
Methodist preacher and his wife don't talk about saints much.
as for Christ, he’s God,
not a saint, and that’s the pantheon. period. most Protestants can’t even
handle Mary.
Protestants
these days think in small numbers, is my theory, sammy. small families, small
pantheons. in Cocaland,
where families are big, there’s always room for one more
saint, or kid, or dog, whatever. the more the merrier.
"Yes," they
went on, "that's Christ in the tomb."
i looked
through the see-through plastic coffin and saw it was so.
"That's why
they call the cross Santisima Cruz," they explained. i was so bewildered, they
must have thought i had never been to school.
the church
secretary added that García Márquez had lived in
town. he’d written
about the town and church in A Death Foretold,[10]
including the day the church was dedicated.
at that moment,
i was turned around by wooden crosses as saints, and wooden
saints as Christs, all of it unthinkable to a Calvinist
Protestant iconoclast, and the statement didn't compute. it echoed in the back of
the church for a moment.
"García Márquez lived here?" i asked. a Nobel laureate in
literature lived in Robbie’s illiterate swampland hometown? he would have told me that. he used to go on and on
about García Márquez. he called me long distance
the day Gaby won the Nobel prize. i’ll never forget it.
The phone rang. I hadn't heard from him in ages.
"García Márquez won the Nobel Prize!"
"Chemistry? Who's García Márquez?" that
was '82, a year after we met. i didn't know much about
Colombia then.
yes, said the
priest's secretary. García
Márquez, he said, spent all his teen years here, from
twelve on, living with his real parents, maybe 8-10-12 years
off and on, during La
Violencia.[11]
he also wrote the story,
“No One Writes to the Coronel,” about this town.
i knew of such
a story but hadn't read it, i said. i mentioned Aracataca,
García Márquez' other coastal hometown, and One Hundred Years of
Solitude, which i had
read, just so they'd know i'd gone to first grade.
"I write
sometimes," i said. "And
I’m also a doctor." i
almost felt my old socially acceptable self again, sammy.
by this time a
boy had joined us in the sanctuary who had the same bright
eyes and short curly dark hair as the young barber-fisherman.
"You're the
fisherman, aren't you?" i said after another look.
"Sí," he answered. he was wearing a locket with
Christ's head on it i hadn’t noticed before.
Angel confirmed
for the church record keeper what i had said. "Yes, he's a psychiatrist,
and he writes all day and night at the house. He likes to write," he
confirmed. "That's
why he knows about García Márquez." it sounded logical and
ordained, sammy, as if written in heaven and church records
that i'd be a writing doctor for years and years, not a
world-weary drop-out.
i asked if they could show me where
García Márquez had lived. i was taken outside the
front door of the church and shown two big old houses over to
the left that stood along the south side of the main plaza,
facing the plaza, both draped with political banners for the
mayoral race. later
i saw that they backed on the caño, the same
canal our house was on, the same side of the canal, and just a
few blocks away!!!
i was blown
away.
49. IN COCALAND A TOUR
OF ALMOST ANYTHING MIGHT UNCOVER A WONDER OR TWO.
maybe they
exaggerated. maybe they
carried on about insignificant things, but that was normal in
a small town. they
had the right to boast forever and ever about García
Márquez and a lot more.
we continued
our tour of Santisima Cruz, Angel and i, for which he had
dressed up in long pants, a shiny gold shirt and his
round-the-clock Basque woolen beret. unfortunately i was in a
rather disrespectful combination of faded red cotton shorts, a
white T-shirt we'd bought with Chalo that said ‘
next stop was
the notary. as we
walked from the church one block, i saw a rifle-toting soldier
in green camouflage and funny shaped hat, the flaps buttoned
up kind of three-cornered like the hats of the American
Revolution. he sat
idly with automatic rifle. i
didn’t think any more about it. many Latin American
countries stationed soldiers here and there around their
countries, especially along important travel routes. in
Angel didn't
accomplish what he wanted at the notary since everyone was
resting. it was
12:30. siesta in Santisima
Cruz went 12 to 2, he said.
now we had time to kill, waiting for the notary,
so we took off on a long tour of the far side of town i hadn't
seen, north of the church. Santisima
Cruz consisted of only two to four north-south streets lined
with houses. they ran
parallel to the river for a dozen long blocks, 'a town long
and narrow', as i tried to say to Angel in Spanish. and you know, sammy, as we
were walking along i got one of my special revelations, that
with two main streets north to south, before and behind the
church, and two main short ones east to west on either side of
the church, the town was laid out like a cross, befitting its
name. except that – now
check this out – Christ was still on it, according to my
revelation, and our house and neighborhood were where the
sword went in Christ’s left side. not very charming, but it
wasn’t begging my pardon for being what it was, it just was. i didn’t dwell on it because
now we were where the crowned head was, at the top of the
cross, the field where they did whatever they did on the
town's saint's day, Santa Cruz day in May. the field at the moment had
fútbol, i.e. soccer, goalposts – and another soldier
in green fatigues with automatic rifle ready. i could have let it bother
me, but i didn’t. i
was charmed by everything.
everywhere
people had spread raw rice on the sidewalk to dry in the sun.
back on the
main river below town i saw a beat up ancient-looking building
made of huge blocks of quarry rock, the Hospital of Santa
Catalina de Sena, which may be Spanish for Santa Clara of
Siena; but Clara was from Assisi, wasn't she?[12]
Methodist
upbringing is useless in
by the ancient
hospital sat a simple homely boat for ferrying the wide river,
the same river we had come up from Magangué. a dark-skinned barefoot
youth in nothing but short black nylon shorts paddled this
tree-hollowed canoe, ferrying away at that moment a dark nurse
in baby blue and white floor-length skirted uniform and
enormous starched stand-up medieval nurse’s bonnet, also baby
blue, trimmed with white. the
ancient-looking beat-up building, the wide river, green banks
with big trees, ancient boat, rustic boy and baby blue nurse’s
bonnet came straight from old European oil paintings. if the two humans hadn't
been so brown and indigenous in their features, i’d have
thought i was in thirteenth century
we walked back
into the heart of town along the river. and when almost to the main
plaza, we turned into a big house near the river that was
important enough it had a real hallway going all the way back
to the patio. Angel
asked to have two copies made of the baptismal certificate on
their Xerox machine. it
was the fanciest contraption i'd seen in the town, after
bikes, TVs and motor launches. the woman who transacted the
business had been in the notary's office earlier. the man who did the copying
was dressed and barbered finer than anyone i'd seen, with a
spiffy glasses case hooked on his belt. Angel gave them some
Colombian pesos and when we got to the main dock and square, i
bought two cokes, one for Angel, and we sat down.
nobody in town
was out to get me. i
just had a simple question.
everywhere, i
said to Angel, there were soldiers holding automatic rifles
waist high, ready to fire, and now there were two more at the
main dock. why?!
"There are
guerrillas nearby and…” something, something.
"How close are
they?" i asked.
"Ai! They're not close, the
soldiers are just guarding the town!"
i didn't
understand. anything
complex could never be discussed with Angel, given the funny
way he spoke Spanish. but
people living here weren’t worried, so i shouldn’t be either.
several
government soldiers guarded Santisima Cruz’ stone-stair town
dock ‘from nearby guerrillas’
it felt like
the right time to ask about his son. had he died here in this
town? yes, he said.
he was buried here.
are we going to
the cemetery? i asked. yes,
he said. tomorrow.
will it be
difficult?
no.
yes, i
insisted.
yes, he agreed.
50. SOMETIMES A DUMB GRINGO
LOST IN COCALAND KNOWS MORE THAN HIS HOST ABOUT HIS HOST’S
COUNTRY. IT’S OK.
still later.
we've eaten
late lunch now. Robbie
got up from his nap to eat. he had a big argument with
Angel and Yazmín over why they allowed Bienvenido to
die sooner than he would have if they'd given the kid blood
transfusions.
i waited a long
time and when things settled down i asked Robbie in Spanish,
with an edge, so all would hear and follow, "Robbie, why did
you never tell me García Márquez lived in your
home town?"
"He didn't,"
said Robbie in excellent Spanish using past tense, which he
obviously had stayed in school in Santisima Cruz long enough
to learn. "Who told you that?" he asked.
"The secretary
to the priest," i said.
"It's a lie,"
he said. "He may have
lived in Magangué. He
went from Aracataca to Bogotá, then
i said no, they
told me he wrote a book called the Colonel something about
this town.[13]
Yazmín
said no, it was A Death
Foretold. it was
a story about a young man killed with a pig-butchering knife
in full view of the town, she said, when Robbie was a baby, a
kid everyone including García Márquez had known
named Cajetano Gentíl, something like that.[14]
he'd done
something that was taboo in the town. Omar, Rosana's husband,
confirmed it. everyone
in the world knew García Márquez had lived in
Santisima Cruz.
apparently this
was what happened when your great aunt raised you, not your
mother. i looked at
Robbie like he knew as much about his home-town as
Shakespeare’s granny, then felt sorry for him and dropped it.
this was
supposed to be a flooded, uneducated backwash, sammy. am i a jerk or what?
but do i care?
maybe.
the place is
making me sit up and notice.
it may be doing
something to my religion of rudeness too. i haven't been rude once
today, that i recall anyway.
nor have i felt
unsafe up till now, except for guerrillas wandering around who
nobody’s worried about, and Colombian government soldiers
everywhere with automatic rifles protecting everybody from
harmless guerrillas, hip-ready to fire at me or anyone out of
line. but i’m
trying to ignore the inevitable crazy banana republic stuff,
sammy, and be a nice friendly gringo guest.
“I’m
trying to ignore the inevitable crazy banana republic
stuff" − like:
soldiers
everywhere with automatic rifles ready to shoot
51. DON'T GET PARANOID IN
PARADISE, JUST BECAUSE YOU KEEP GETTING PARANOID IN
all the
automatic rifles, guerrillas, finishing-off sword thrusts and
butchering murders are more than a white honky from suburban
i had a
paranoid vision of my future retirement here, though, sitting
here just now by the canal. i tried, in my future
fantasy retirement, to do every little thing by the book,
socially speaking, though i hate living like that. i committed some
unforgivable faux pas, grouchy and world-hating as i naturally
am from time to time. one
day i offended a politico,
in fact it was the father of the kid with thirty-three
siblings living all over town. and
townspeople, even family and friends idled nearby me, not
warning me of impending doom. they
stood by and watched silently while one of their number did me
in with a pig-butchering knife, like they did Cajetano
Gentíl.
it’s a paranoid
vision, sammy, not the real thing. my ability to acknowledge
that fact, is just further proof i’m doing better.
Yazmín
says the old ones in town do sit and watch and know everything
that happens, saying nothing, just as in A Death Foretold – and
like a movie i saw on your TV, about the Mexican mafia in an
L.A. barrio, where the old ones sat outside their front doors
and knew what was going on, but watched helplessly as father,
then son, then grandson, went to the mafia for help, got
involved and ended up, each one, the centerpiece of a funeral
procession.
"Yazmín
says the old ones in town do sit and watch and know
everything that happens
saying nothing,
just as in A Death
Foretold"
Chalo knew
mafia, he said. maybe
it wasn’t true.
52. AS RARE AND MAGICAL AS A
there were many
contradictions about that poor kid. Chalo seemed innocent and
boyish on one hand, short, with warm eyes, yet was manly,
mature, knowledgeable, adventurous and unafraid on the other
hand. he knew several
English phrases and used them winningly, like, "Oh boy!" yet he’d hardly gone
to school. his clothes
were old, the pants dirty and permanently stained, and ripped
in the right leg near the crotch; yet he was well groomed.
it’s true that
neither Robbie nor i, once we started negotiating with him
over certain things, could tell if he could be trusted. he knew a little too well
what was going on in the streets to have sold cigarettes only
a fortnight, as he claimed; yet as much as he knew, he had no
idea what to charge for showing us a good time. his knowledge of
seeming
inconsistencies, in other words, and easy explanations
reminded me of glib, slippery young patients of mine in
"
he didn’t
care. Ireland,
Iceland, any first world country was better than Colombia when
all you owned in the universe was three packs of cigarettes. he'd have gone to
yet when i
asked if he feared starving or getting hurt on the streets, he
said no. he spent
fifteen hours a day or more working with little result. so i made the mistake of
saying, rather than asking, "You can always go back home to
yes, he agreed,
probably to be polite. for
in coastal
and so, not
much about Chalo seemed reliable. but sammy, any kid that
grows up on the street, in any country, MUST learn to survive
on the street by subterfuge, deceit and so forth. if he didn’t steal a tomato
or a chicken now and then, or invent a story a few times a
day, he would fail and die, probably. there are thousands of boys
like him in Cocaland, and enough beds in homeless-kid
institutions to house only a few.[15]
by the end of
our second day with Chalo he wanted to know how to get into
the
naturally i had
a paranoid fantasy vision about Chalo, too. in it i kicked the bucket,
and Chalo rattled around in my townhome in
but i don’t
want to indulge worrisome thoughts like these. i want to enjoy paradise,
sammy, while i can.
53. RELAX AND ENJOY YOURSELF.
LET YOUR MIND GO. ASSUME THINGS ABOUT YOUR HOSTS
FROM ANYTHING YOU SEE, EVEN THE WAY THEY PILE BRICKS IN
THEIR ESTUFA.
it's getting
darker again. all
afternoon i've been in the back patio with Robinson, his
mother, his sister Rosana and her husband Omar. i've survived meeting people
all over town. my
wall's protecting me, but not so much i can’t talk. i'm less cranky than when we
landed in
the three
little ones run in and out, two belonging to Omar and Rosana
(Rosana being Robbie’s fourth sister), the third a little girl
Adriana left here for some reason when she moved to
i look out the
front door and feel put off, unlike earlier, by the intensity
of the communal experience on the bench. people come and go and in
the 'front patio' of the house to the left, under the guava
and almond trees on packed mud, are seated the young
good-looking school teacher (with thirty-three siblings) who
had breakfast with us and later brought me out of my shell;
the younger barber-fisherman-churchgoer with the locket of
Christ's head; and a goodly number of the huge family from
that house next door to the left, lined up hip to hip on the
long crude plank bench facing their house, backs to canal. i’m embarrassed and shy to
walk into such an intimate public setting, with so many
strangers too nice to be true. maybe later. some things in paradise i
may not be ready for, quite. i
turn and come back in, sit down at the table in our
patio-kitchen, and write again.
Adriana's
little girl tells me it's mosquito time. they aren't bothering me
yet, i tell her. maybe
the wood smoke from the rustic back yard stove keeps them
away, i suggest. she
nods her head.
and there's a
thing of interest, Sammy, the estufa, or 'stove',
quite an elaborate contraption of human ingenuity and make-do.
it tells you something
about these people, simple yet creative – by no means
unintelligent or uneducated; maybe even ‘enlightened’, as
Robbie insisted for years. they
taught
García Márquez to weave a tale, after all.
maybe they can
teach me something.
here's how the
estufa works.
six thick
wooden piles are planted deeply in the mud, in the back
‘patio’, in the area of the patio that i’ve been calling the
‘kitchen’. they call it
a ‘patio’ but really the whole area behind the house is just a
fenced-in back yard of mud, and what i call their ‘kitchen’ is
just a part of the mud back yard. anyway, on these thick
staves sits a wooden stovetop, two feet above the ground. around and atop the edges of
this stovetop are one-inch thick wooden walls ten inches
high. within these
walls, on the surface of the walled wooden stovetop, a
four-feet-by-four-feet territory, are stacks of red bricks,
staggered with spaces between them so air and wood fuel can
pass between them, while pots can be set on top of the
bricks. from the
bundle of sticks leaning against the patio fence, you take a
stick, light it at one end, then place that end on and between
bricks under a pot. to
vary heat, you add or take away burning sticks. the non-lighted ends of the
long sticks rest on the wooden stove wall (the ten-inch high
wall around the edge of the stovetop). that, apparently, is one
purpose of the wall.
Yazmín and
Rosana cooking in their Santisima Cruz back yard patio-kitchen
(yard stretches deeply to a fence and back
neighbors)
in the left foreground is the ‘estufa’
the walled outdoor wooden table that
serves as ‘stove’
(presently super-laden with bottles and pots)
(Boca Negra is asleep in the sun – or is it a pig?)
(wood baño shack, the
home's single bath,
sits beyond oil drum and Rosana)
technologically,
and aesthetically, it's light years ahead of the rusty old oil
drum with a hole in its side that Jaime's mother used in
forget your
new-age shamanic HIV and tantric massage workshops at Ghost
Ranch, sammy. i prefer
my own cure, thank you, the simple life, kicking back in
paradise, swatting mosquitoes next to a back-yard estufa in river
country, waiting for young heroes to draw me out.
these rustic
chumps think the world is full of jumping fishies and twirling
water hyacinths, and everybody loves life like they do; and at
the moment, you know what, i think they’re right.
...and from the other Hill
To thir fixt Station, all in bright array
The
Cherubim descended...
John
Milton
from the
closing lines
one of
the many angel cherubs ('cherubim')
guarding the
earthly paradise called ‘Santisima Cruz’
[1]
Digitally altered photo from an online slide show
at the New York
Times website, Friday, January 8, 1999, accompanying
an article describing attempted peace talks between the
Colombian government and
