Description of Service - Chapter 7

7. The Mayor in The Country

The village was asleep, and must have been quiet, since it was four in the morning. Then the singing started. It was not a soft chorus, but a large number of individuals wailing in unison, accompanied by tambourines and drums, that raised me from my bed in temporary confusion.

This had gone on for several nights now, and if it followed the pattern established on previous nights, would carry on until dawn. It was coming from the small church next door, though perhaps next door inadequately described the center of worship’s proximity, since the long lateral wall of the chapel was shared by my bedroom.

Since it was impossible to sleep, I had little choice but to listen to the inane chanting until daybreak. Shortly after dawn, as the noise gradually dissipated and the congregation dispersed, I made my way up the road to the Perdido house for an early breakfast.

“Oh mister, you’ve been arriving early lately,” Patricia said with her usual surprise, as I took a seat at the table in the kitchen.

“There’s no way to sleep at my house,” I said with irritation that must have been apparent. “The church next door has begun to meet at four in the morning every day, and they sing very loudly.”

“Four in the morning?” Patricia repeated in astonishment.

“Yes. I have no idea why, though,” I said.

“Who understands these Evangelicals? Maybe God ordered them to wake everyone up as a sign of their superiority to other Christians,” Patricia said, with a forced laugh. “They have their own way. Isn’t that right mama?”

“Ah-the Evangelicals…stirring up the spirits at unnatural hours,” Aida said reflectively, looking over at me as she continued to stir a mixing bowl. “The Evangelicals have caused problems here ever since they first showed up. It was your countrymen that brought that religion here, you know,” she said, as she turned her concentration back to her work.

“That’s why most people around here think of Americans as clueless missionaries with a Bible in their hands, talking about Jesus through a translator,” Patricia said, picking up the story. “As close as this country is to your land, it has been full of missionaries from there for a long time, but those groups usually stick to the beaches on the north coast, which are more tourist-friendly. Except that one time a group of them lost their way somehow and ended up in San Juan.”

“You mean missionaries have come all the way here?” I asked, surprised.

“Once, yes,” Patricia said. “It all happened when I was still a little girl, too young to remember. Mama prefers not to talk about it, but as she tells it, that group rolled into town on an old bus soon after the road to La Esperanza was finished. They set up shot in a tent on the edge of town. At first everyone thought it was a travelling circus. That’s what travelling circuses do – set up tents. So the people welcomed them. By the time people figured out that wasn’t it, the missionaries had already set up shop, so the mayor said it was all right for them to stay for a few days. They had trouble communicating exactly what they had come for, since none of them really spoke the language well, and they hadn’t brought much along with them, except Bibles, and they didn’t have any food. The townspeople thought it would be a shame to see these gringos starve, right there on the edge of town, so, like good hosts, people brought them food.”

“It wasn’t that we had much food ourselves,” Aida interjected, excited by what was for her a more prescient memory. “In the years after the war, we struggled here to make ends meet. But these people needed to be fed. Everyone thought they were some kind of refugee group. The mayor said those of us who had restaurants should take them food. Well, some of us did that, and they ate – a lot - for several days. But then when the mayor tried to settle accounts with them they refused to pay. They said everything on this earth belongs to God, and comes from him, and that the food we were giving them was not ours to sell. They offered Bibles instead. But I already have a Bible. So they didn’t pay for their food.”

“You mean they hadn’t brought any money?” I asked.

“On the contrary, Mister Kawil,” Aida replied quickly, still indignant, even after several decades. “They had plenty. They used it to hire a translator, who they paid a ridiculous amount to walk around the town with them, knocking on doors, and walking into houses uninvited.”

“They chose Adib for the job,” Patricia added, with a smirk, “that rascal from around the corner – he’s an old man now -who is always up to no good. He was an ideal choice for the missionaries because he speaks a little English.”

“And because he didn’t mind translating the missionaries’ message,” Aida interrupted again, this time throwing aside her mixing bowl and fixing her gaze on me, as excited as I had ever seen her, “that we are all going to Hell, because we don’t share their beliefs, exactly. Here, we are all Christians, Mister Kawil, and we believe in God. We always have. But these people said God has a trick, that there are certain words one had to say to win his favor. They marched up and down the streets with that silly book of names in their hand. When they get to the gates of heaven, they said, that list of names was going to serve as some sort of celestial bartering device to speed their entrance. Whenever they caught up to anyone they would try their best, through that scoundrel Adib, to extract some sort of magic phrase of salvation. Well I’m no genius, God knows, but that is about the most ridiculous thing I have heard. There’s no tricking God.” The old woman paused for a minute to attend to the pots on the stove. As they simmered, she gradually calmed down, and continued the story.

“The mayor asked them to leave, politely, but they didn’t want to go. They had had some success converting, as they called it, a few of the townspeople. They said that God had provided food and shelter for them here, and he had shown them that this was their place to work. Well, even though they didn’t want to believe it, the food came from the people, and as soon as we got fed up with them and stopped feeding them, they had nothing to eat, so God told them to move on. Good riddance, if you ask me.”

“It still makes mama mad,” Patricia said, “but the way those gringos behaved- they believed they were sent directly by God to deal with us, and we were not worthy of being in their company unless we accepted their teachings. But they came here, and this is our land! We have our own traditions and beliefs.”

“And even though they wouldn’t pay for anything given to them,” Aida continued, returning to the subject of finances, which clearly still distressed her, “those people threw money around everywhere, giving it out for everything. They paid for people to improve their houses, to buy things for their children - but only for those who accepted what they said. And there were quite a few who let themselves be convinced by those gringos and their money. It was an easy transaction actually, all you had to do was say the magic words they asked you to say, and they would begin to give you money. There are some easily corruptible people in town who accepted that, but those of us whose faith is strong remained true to our upbringing.”

“Eventually the gringos left,” Patricia said, “but many people that had learned their ways from them.”

“Ha! Learned?” Aida cried out. “They learned principally to judge others who don’t think the same way they do, and that the gringos will pay them money to do it. And the gringos later sent ministers with more money, to build all the churches you see around town, including that one next door to you, Mister Kawil. So really, it’s your own fault that the evangelicals are waking you up early every morning. If it weren’t for your countrymen, everyone would still go to the Catholic church on Sundays like they always did before, and we could continue to live without judging our neighbors, and the spirits could rest in peace without all that nonsensical wailing at ungodly hours!” With that she stormed out of the kitchen.

“As for your problem,” Patricia said, “there’s not much that can be done about it. Those people are not reasonable. They refuse to speak civilly with their neighbors about anything. Everything, to them, is a matter of God, about which they will always be right.”

Despite that warning, I attempted to speak with the pastor, who, because his affairs and finances seemed to be inextricably interwoven with the particular religious scheme with which he and his congregation identified, lived next door behind the church. I hadn’t yet met him informally, since he was one of the few men in town who didn’t play soccer, and he never seemed interested in greeting anyone he saw on the street. Besides not making himself available on the soccer field, the pastor, citing matters about which God had spoken to him directly, indeed proved unwilling to speak to someone of a different denomination about anything related to the church, which from his standpoint seemed to be an all-encompassing criteria.

So I had little choice but to take the problem to my own version of a higher authority. Don Santiago had been mayor of San Juan for nearly a decade. He was the first eminent authority in the history of the town to come from outside the patriarchy of the Sanchez family. I had first met Don Chago, as he liked to be called by those familiar with him, on the soccer field, where the mayor occasionally doubled as one more old man for the teenagers to run circles around. He seemed like a simple man, often donning the straw hat, ripped jeans and soiled shirt indicative of a life of manual labor on the farms of the region, of which he now owned several. Santiago had grown up cultivating coffee on a plantation in a village just outside San Juan, where he had come to understand the use of fertilizer, and the promise to be realized from its sale, a business that no one in the Sanchez family, for which fertilizer had never interfered with success, had ever chosen to understand.

Don Chago had told me when we first met that, as the mayor, he intended to see to it that the municipality took full advantage of my presence in town, and that furthermore, I should call on him for anything I might need. That morning following breakfast, with the very reasonable need of a restful night’s sleep foremost in my mind, I headed around the corner to town hall, to seek him out.

The municipal hall, stretching the length of the block to the north of the central plaza, was built in 1908, according to a faded inscription on the front on the building, and it looked every bit that old. Behind the hall, newer offices had been erected a few years before my arrival in town. Constructed of sturdy concrete for the municipal workers by an extremely, if not uncommonly hapless international aid organization, they lacked the cool air flow of the antique adobe building that they adjoined, and as a result were used mostly for storage, with the exception of the largest office, built by the concerned aid workers to the exact specifications of the mayor himself, which, in the sometimes frustrating way that things here designed for one specific purpose were often used for another, less optimal one, had been converted on the suggestion of one of the mayor’s regents into a barn for the municipal livestock, most of which the same man had then sold to the municipality to fill the new structure, which would otherwise have most likely remained empty.

On the days he was in town, the mayor could sometimes be found in that long space, seated behind a desk on a slightly raised platform close to the tall wooden doors that opened into the hall. Perhaps Don Chago preferred to use that building, nearly a century old, out of tradition. Supported by tremendous, though thoroughly deteriorated beams, cut from the kind of sturdy local tree that could no longer be found anywhere about the region, except perhaps on the highest, most inaccessible slopes of Cerro Grande, the cavernous structure was bathed in a perpetual twilight, lit only slightly by the cautious sunlight that ventured timidly past the large overhang outside, and through the open doorway, at an angle to the platform on which the mayor and his board of regents carried out the most official of the town’s business.

After allowing a minute or so for vision to adjust from the bright day outside, it was possible to discern, in the receding dimness at the far end of the hall, large piles of sacks containing food. Those piles were divided into two groups. There were bags of coffee grown in the communities in the hills around town, stored there for the farmer’s cooperative, ready for transport to market, and also a large number of sacks of grain, corn, and rice, which were donations from concerned international organizations, on their way in to those same communities. A large quantity of that stockpile, the mayor later explained to me, contained the remnants of a failed state plan to distribute disease-resistant corn seed. The seed, treated with a bright red pesticide, had been parceled out, with the hopes that it would lead to a record corn crop, among the aldeas, where the women promptly ground it into cornmeal, in turn producing bright red, and possibly noxious, tortillas. Unable to convince the hungry people to use the distribution for seed instead of food, the mayor, suspicious of the unusual color of the tortillas, decided to suspend the project indefinitely.

Back at the near end of the hall, flanked by instructive depictions of revolutionary leaders in their most belligerent poses, which hung on the wall high above his work area, Mayor Santiago was challenged by such quandaries on a regular basis. So it could hardly have come as a surprise to him when the newly arrived foreigner in town stopped in to denounce the early morning ruckus emanating from the Evangelical church next door.

As soon as he saw me in the large doorway, the mayor jumped up out of his large, stately mayor’s chair, and hurried down from his perch for a greeting befitting my status in the community.

“Good morning, Don Kawil,” the mayor said warmly, with a smile and a firm handshake. “How is your health? How are you keeping up in San Juan?”

“Good morning Don Santiago. I hope it finds you well, in your important job as the leader and purveyor of the well-being of this community,” I said, pleased with my increasing propensity at weaving large quantities of meaningless words into my sentences, in a way very typical of the most educated members of the community.

As part of the standard formal greeting, which would occupy some quarter of an hour, we exchanged mundane questions about uncontroversial items of little relevance. The mayor inquired as to my progress in San Juan, my opinions of the food, and a handful of other topics, which naturally included soccer. I asked about the health of his family, and the weather, which, as the mayor, was among his responsibilities, at least on a local level.

“The climate is improving. Perhaps there will be no rain this afternoon,” I said, inquisitively.

The mayor peered contemplatively through the large door towards the sky outside. “It will rain for several weeks more,” he said, definitively. The experienced farmers of the region, I had already learned, have an uncanny penchant for predicting the weather. A simple glance at the sky by a seasoned coffee grower would yield a forecast as accurate as any meteorologist’s. Those ad-hoc predictions were so reliable that I soon developed the habit of stopping on the street men who appeared to be farmers, the older the better, to ask for a weather prediction whenever I was curious, for whatever motive, about the climate in the coming hours or days.

“And how are things here in mayor’s office,” I asked, now steering the conversation to an eventual turn towards the matter for which I had come.

“Fine, thank you,” he said. “In reality, I am quite busy. We have a trip planned to the capital soon, to purchase school books and supplies.” His face lit up with an idea as he spoke. “You, Kawil, should accompany us on that trip. We will enjoy ourselves.”

The mayor began to explain in depth his motives for the trip, which he described, once again, principally as the purchase of textbooks and supplies for the school. He spoke loudly, as if in general to the all the occupants of the hall, to convince them of the validity of the excursion. The idea of taking the new community worker, as he described me, along, seemed to bolster his previously lukewarm determination to undertake the journey. The mayor described his plan to make the trip to the capital and return to San Juan the same day, which sounded ambitious to me. Seeking to avoid getting myself into something I wasn’t sure I wanted to be involved with, I tried to come up with an excuse to avoid the long trip, but there seemed to be no escaping my role in the mayor’s plan, which continued to evolve by the moment.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow,” Chago said, “at Doña Aida’s house. We’ll be back tomorrow night.” As he completed his loose description of the on-going preparations, one of the mayor’s regents called him to attend to another matter. “It’s been a pleasure as always Don Kawil, is there anything else I can do for you now?”

“In reality Don Chago, there is one issue that seems to need attention,” I ventured. The mayor looked on with concern as, recognizing my opening, I called his attention to the early morning meetings of the church.

“We will have to see what can be done to remedy the situation,” the mayor said when I had finished. The members of the board of regents, five stoic old men whose principle job was to support the mayor in his decisions, had become curious about our now lengthy conversation, and had assembled behind the mayor, mirroring his indignity at this unfortunate breech of peace, between nods of profound agreement after either of us spoke.

“Perhaps there should be an ordinance on the municipal books, to prevent waking up community workers at four in the morning,” I joked with a wide smile. But as I spoke, the mayor’s expression turned from mild consternation to relief.

“Kawil, my friend, don’t worry,” he said, placing a hand on my shoulder, “there is such an ordinance, I believe, or one is currently in the process of being written.” The regents again nodded, and muttered amongst themselves in firm agreement, after which one of them scrambled up the platform, perhaps to seek out the necessary items to initiate the process of emitting such a decree.

My cause was likely aided by the disagreeableness to the mayor and his board, as Catholics among the majority of the town’s residents, of the persistent Evangelical insistence that they were headed straight to Hell. But the group seemed genuinely concerned as well, less over the problem itself, since making noise was hardly unusual in San Juan, than that the issue seemed to be of importance to me.

“Just one more thing, Don Santiago,” I said, seeing that the mayor was anxious to attend to the others waiting for his attention. “What time shall I wait for you tomorrow?”

The mayor was staring blankly at a villager who had come into town from an aldea, precisely for the purpose of registering his inconformity with the weather of late. Chago had a wry smile of amusement on his face.

“We’ll see about that immediately,” he said to the farmer, smiling as he turned back to me. “Ah- what time? After breakfast.” He looked puzzled, but that was not unusual. Perhaps he was considering what steps he would take to change the weather.

“No,” I insisted. “What time, what hour?”

“Breakfast time – six o’clock?” the mayor said matter-of-factly, and turned back to the patient but disconcerted farmer.

Satisfied, I left. I was never again bothered by the early morning revivals at the church next door. At the time I was convinced the mayor had, through decree, put a stop to the gatherings. But now I think it might have all just been coincidence. Most everything that happens in San Juan, I have learned, is.

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A long siesta was the best way to pass the summer afternoon, out of the stifling midday heat of San Juan.

Long after awaking from my afternoon nap, I would lie in bed, staring out through the small window of my room into the blue sky, as I considered the indifferent stillness around me, and contemplated the tendency of time to move at the pace least desired by he who perceives it. Three weeks had slowly passed in San Juan, and the novelty of the village was beginning to wear off, amidst too much time spent resting in the hammock, or staring out of that window, screened as it was with a transparent fabric, to keep out the dust raised by the occasional vehicle that happened into that forgotten corner of town. Through that portal sunlight passed into my one room dwelling, but any interaction between inside and outside seemed stopped there. Looking out onto the street where so little happened, as I did each morning and afternoon when I awoke from sleep, was like looking at a painting. Outlined by a makeshift curtain was the full crown of a mature tree, growing in the courtyard behind the large iron gate across the street. From my vantage point inside, the tree seemed huge, as it filled the small wooden frame of the window. When I opened the front door to go outside, I would sometimes look for that tree, but in its place see only an unrecognizably small plant reaching skyward timidly against the backdrop of distant hills. Such was the difference between inside and out.

On that particular day, as I lay in bed, my mind was occupied with thoughts of the next day’s trip with the mayor, to the capital. Throughout the first few weeks in San Juan, I had been anxious to return to the city, at first to escape from the reality of my isolation in this small village, and later, as a break from the monotony. But I was unable to ready myself to attempt the all-day trip on public transport. With the mayor, however, I would travel by private car, and, besides agreeing with him that the trip would be a good chance for us to discuss my work in the community during my time in San Juan, I was making my own plans to stay behind for a few days in the city. As I batted those thoughts around in my head, I was startled by a loud rap on the door.

“How are you today, mister?” yelled a voice, in broken English. “It’s Jhonny.”
The oldest son of the Diestra family, the inhabitants of that compound behind the large gate across the street, Jhonny had learned a bit of English from watching movies on television during his many journeys far from San Juan. He had taken a keen interest in me soon after I arrived, perhaps thinking I could be of service in furthering his interest of travelling to the United States.

“I have a trip planned up north,” he told me during one of the first of a string of painfully long conversations that took place on the street between our respective homes, with me anxious to move on to wherever I was headed, and he eager to share more trivial information. “It is beautiful there, with all the blond women, the televisions, houses, and cars,” he rambled, winking at me as if we shared some sort of exclusive understanding that things were much better, in every way, outside this village.

“I am practically a gringo myself,” he added, “my name comes from your President Kennedy.” The confused spelling of his name, he explained, in some detail, was a curious result of the under development which still hampered the town. When he was born, his mother wanted to name him after the long-deceased American president who had done so much for her country, or so she had been told. But if the young woman had only a vague idea of who the president was or what he had done, she had even less idea how to spell his exotic name, so she made her best phonetic guess. Her mistake would remain with Jhonny, and a host of others in this country with the same name, but, since few people knew the difference, it didn’t bother him in the least.

Seeing me speaking frequently to Jhonny, Juan immediately warned me that he was not the sort of person with whom I would want to develop a relationship. Rumors were that he drank far too much, and used his collection of guns unwisely. But Jhonny proved impossible to avoid. Behind the large wall immediately in front of my door, he and his brothers oversaw a large concrete patio for drying the coffee beans that they, as middlemen, purchased from local growers, to later package and transport to market. The activity that accompanied those operations was incessant during the coffee harvest, which was just beginning to wake our sleepy corner of town in earnest, and Jhonny could constantly be found just inside or outside the large gate, engaged in his coffee-related dealings. During the intervals that he was not busy presiding over the purchase, preparation, or resale of the beans, he had developed an unsettling habit of showing up at my door, and inviting himself into the house.

“Mister,” he said loudly, on that warm afternoon, as I opened the door to find him smiling at me through a mouthful of gold-capped teeth, “how are you? I’ve just finished buying seventy quintales of coffee that should arrive in a few hours, let’s celebrate.” Holding up a bottle with one hand, he pushed his way into the house, using his other hand to secure the pistol that he perpetually carried in a holster on his hip.

“Where are the glasses?” Jhonny asked, inspecting the contents of my barren room. I had explained to him several times already, on similar occasions, that I didn’t have any glasses, or any proper silverware or dishes at all. And I hadn’t yet developed much tolerance for aguardiente, the local grain alcohol widely consumed in San Juan despite the prohibition laws still on the books, perhaps because it was the most concentrated form of alcohol available and thus easier to smuggle.

“We’ll have to make due with these plastic cups,” I said, taking a pair of small, disposable receptacles from the desktop. Jhonny frowned, expressing profound disappointment at a level of poverty he understood to be feigned by this person from the great, rich empire of the north. As I ushered him out onto the back patio, he looked around with curiosity, inspecting the meager contents of the room, and possibly, as Juan explained, searching for the hidden cache of gold that it was generally agreed I must have, hidden, somewhere inside the house. On past visits, with little pretext, Jhonny had made off with several items he thought exotic enough to merit his attention, including a handful of books in English, and a soccer ball, which Juan had admired and continued to lament the disappearance of for some time. He left behind a small radio, which he had no use for beside the impressive stereo which had recently began to emit constant, loud music from his truck, parked on the street out front.

Out back on the patio, Jhonny took off the belt that held his sidearm, which he laid on the ground before sitting down. I positioned myself at what I considered a relatively safe distance, and sipped cautiously from the generous portions of alcohol that he dispensed. Jhonny was less reluctant, and became gradually inebriated, as he shared, in the vein of a delinquent proud of his law-breaking acts, the intimate details of the life of a middleman in the countryside.

“My father disappeared on a trip to the border years ago, so I replaced him as head of the family business when I was seventeen,” he began, without the least hint of sorrow or remorse. “Buying and selling coffee is not a difficult job. You set a price, and the people take it or leave it. They really don’t have much choice.”

Jhonny anxiously enumerated the distinct advantages local middlemen enjoyed over their less fortunate clients. Virtually assured a profit, unlike the farmers who supply them, coffee buyers are not subject to the vagaries of the international market. The only necessity, Jhonny explained with a good deal of bravado, was the capital to maintain the tools of the trade: a few large trucks to move the coffee from the farms to the refining facilities, and then onward to the larger coffee buying centers of the west, and the requisite political power to protect their local monopoly.

“And,” he added, glancing at his pistol, “the necessary security precautions.”

Jhonny told me how three families controlled almost all the profits of San Juan’s coffee harvest. Don Nicho Sanchez, the great grandson of the town’s founder and former mayor, had followed in the footsteps of his own father, who had invented the job of middleman in San Juan when he legislatively cornered the market on cattle all those years ago.

“But Don Nicho has diversified into other businesses,” Jhonny explained, “and he didn’t have enough time to handle all the trade in the coffee business, so they left some of it to us, when my father agreed that I would be married to Don Nicho’s oldest daughter.”

Jhonny said the mayor had also managed to secure a small share of the business for himself, around the time he was elected to his post. Between those three businessmen, the zone was divided, and prices paid for coffee carefully regulated. The new coffee cooperative had since begun to eat into the business, Jhonny mentioned, but not significantly.

“There is still ample income to be had trading coffee,” he told me, as he greedily downed another cup full of aguardiente, “and I have become quite wealthy.” As if to justify his boasting, we heard the sound of a large truck arriving on the street outside, at which Jhonny sprang to his feet. “I’ll leave the rest of this bottle here, for later,” he said, as he hurried to the door, and out onto the street, where he met the delivery with a torrent of shouts which I could easily hear as I retook my place on the back patio, to notice that, in his haste, Jhonny had left his pistol behind.

If it was impossible to confirm all that Jhonny had told me through observation of his negotiations with farmers, which took place in far-flung villages in the hills, I understood, having taken in a good deal of information about his business from the conversations which he undertook, at all hours, on the street between his large gate and my window, that his account was generally accurate. Living in a house with walls made of mud meant everything said or done within a fifty foot radius might well have been taking place inside my room. I learned quite a bit about Jhonny in that way which he might never have told me, even under the influence of alcohol, and I wondered, as I stared at that pistol, what stories it might have added to the account.

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It was late the next week, as I was finishing breakfast at Aida’s house, that I heard a car pull up outside, and begin to honk loudly.

Patricia went to see who it was, then rushed back into the kitchen. “Kawil, Don Chago’s outside – he says you’re going with him to the capital,” she said.

“That was supposed to be last week,” I said, frowning with noticeable irritation. Patricia shrugged indifferently and returned to her work. I put down my coffee and went out front.

“What’s going on Kawil? Let’s go!” said Don Chago, rolling down the darkly tinted window of his late model pickup as I approached the driver’s side. Grinning widely, he extended his hand and firmly gripped my arm. “To the capital,” he declared, with a level of glee fit more for a twelve year old than a man of his importance in the community.

“Don Santiago, I thought we were going last week,” I replied slowly, a bit confused and still slightly irritated by the ubiquitous lack of precision in defining dates and times to which I had recently been subjected. It had been almost a week since the mayor had failed to materialize on the agreed morning, and I had not seen or heard from him since.

“Ah yes, delays, delays. But now, we go!” The mayor shouted, still smiling, as he gazed past me into the bright morning. “The capital calls! We have no time to lose.” With those words, he looked back into the vehicle, where two young men were seated behind him, nodding their heads in affirmation of the mayor’s statements.

This sort of haphazard rush, following an incomprehensible inability to plan ahead, was just the type of behavior that had me more than ready to take a break from country life. There was no sense in discussing further. Chago was headed to the capital now. If I wanted to go, I could get in the truck. Or else I could stay in San Juan, indefinitely.

“Let’s just stop by my house so I can get a few things for the trip,” I said. The mayor threw his hands up in delight. He signaled to the person in the front seat next to him, and the young man, who I recognized from the soccer field as the mayor’s cousin, scrambled down out of the truck, and edged his way into the backseat alongside a second young man.

We stopped briefly at my house, where I hastily packed a bag of clothes meant to last for several days.

“Such a large bag for a day trip?” the mayor asked as I returned to the truck. Not ready to reveal my plans to remain in the capital, I quickly changed the subject.

“So we finally go,” I said, returning the mayor’s broad smile, at we sped past the crossroads and out of town. The mayor honked repeatedly, and waved at the people we passed there, as they waited patiently for the morning bus. The early day was bright and clear, and we moved up the road quickly in the mayor’s new pickup.

“Yes, off to the capital. This is a good car,” I observed, as we wound through the valley towards the climb into the mountains west of La Esperanza. “We’ll be there soon, God willing.”

The mayor’s cousin, and the other young man, who turned out to be a nephew, leaned forward curiously from the backseat, interested in my every word, but trusting the mayor to handle the somewhat disjointed dialogue. The two were menially employed by city hall in indistinct but relatively lucrative jobs, and, according to the mayor’s vague explanation, were along on the trip to assure that, at least in his capacity as town leader, he would not be forced to lift anything.

Chago drove rapidly along the dirt highway, which he knew well, towards La Esperanza, leaving in our wake, raised from the dry road bed, a broad trail of dust which blanketed the small groups of people we occasionally encountered, waiting on the roadside in hopes of finding a ride to La Esperanza, perhaps in the bed of a pickup like the one in which we were riding. There would often be no more transport along this route for the rest of the day, once the bus coming from San Juan had passed, and plans for a day of shopping in the regional capital for food, fuel, or medicine would have to be postponed. I watched the weathered faces of distinguished men and women, old and young, dressed in their finest clothes for the expedition to town, fill with hope as our truck approached, only to be disappointed as the mayor sped by, then doubly insulted by the trailing dust cloud, which forced those who wished to remain unsoiled to scurry away from the roadside in a most undignified fashion, as the difference between the haves and have-nots of the countryside was once again subtly outlined in white, chalky earth.

But on this day we were well ahead of the bus, and the mayor was anxious to let the would-be hitchhikers know that hope remained. Rolling down the window just long enough to justify his haste as he sped past the stranded villagers in his shiny, private car, he would shout in their direction.

“The bus is coming behind,” he yelled, after which he quickly rolled the window back up, to preserve the cleanliness of the car’s pristine interior. The mayor would have liked to take everyone along, he explained to me apologetically, but he couldn’t be seen taking business away from the local bus. Each of these waiting villagers meant twenty lempiras more for the bus owner, Don Nicho. It was one of many tacit understandings that allowed Don Santiago’s profitable fertilizer and coffee trading businesses, his position as mayor, and the rest of San Juan’s commercial structure, to continue prosperously intact.

We sped onward, up the mountain, towards La Esperanza. As we reached the peak of the mountain road, where it summits and begins a slight decline into the high basin that holds La Esperanza, the mayor motioned out into the wide valley that we had left behind. “The aldea here is called Membrillo,” he said. “It is the highest point in the department. If you look down into the valley to the left, on a clear day like today, you can see all the way to San Juan.”

“How high up are we, here?” I asked, noticing the chill of the morning air, and seeing that in this place, the clouds meandered about closer than usual to the earth, occasionally colliding with the ground and hillsides, as if perplexed that the land here had subtly maneuvered its way upward into their realm.

“High enough,” Chago replied, “to grow unusual fruits and vegetables that won’t grow lower down.”

“You wouldn’t want to be stuck out here at night,” the mayor’s cousin offered from the back seat. “It often freezes.”

Just as quickly we were past the small village, and racing downhill, until we reached La Esperanza. We continued rapidly through town, then across the mountains again and up the road towards the country’s principal north-south route. Near the place where that main highway intersects with the road running west on which we had come, Chago pulled to a stop in front of a restaurant.

“We’ll have some lunch here,” he declared as we stepped down from the car and stretched out legs. It was late morning, and hardy seemed like lunchtime, but my companions seemed intent on stopping at this particular place.

“This restaurant has very good food,” the mayor’s cousin said, grasping my shoulder firmly as we approached the entrance, “and also very good ambiance, if you know what I mean.”

I wasn’t exactly sure that I did know what he meant, but I found out soon enough. The restaurant was staffed by a host of relatively attractive young women, at least compared to the paucity that seemed to exist in San Juan. Here, outside the confines of the constricting context of village life, the mayor’s twenty-something cousin and his teenage nephew were instantly emboldened. Their interest was immediately piqued by our waitress, a young girl with dark features punctuated by deep black eyes and far too much makeup. After taking our order, she milled about, frequenting the unoccupied tables nearby, and bending into impractical positions in a practiced effort at feigning to clean, while she glanced towards our table as the four of us hungrily lunched on steaks of a quality not to be obtained in San Juan. When, on one of her trips past the table, she deposited a plate of enchiladas, saying they were a special gift, Chago’s cousin and nephew began to discuss, egged on by the mayor, which of the two of them she was interested in getting to know.

Because I had seen this kind of behavior before, on my frequent nights out with Miguel and Jorge in the capital, I knew the answer. But, not wishing to dishearten my travel companions, I kept my appraisal to myself. The gaze of that young girl, more than interest me, reminded me of the lack of such attention in San Juan. It had been nearly a month since I had been looked at by a girl close to my age as anything other than an intimidating abnormality. Invigorated by the waitress’s stolen glances, I found myself quickly returned to a profoundly humanizing world of possibilities embodied by her shy smile.

The waitress was waiting for us eagerly as we approached the register to pay. Don Chago took out his wallet.

“Allow me,” I said, reaching into my pocket and offering my share of the cost of lunch.

“I won’t hear of it,” Chago said, pushing my hand away, as he passed a number of crisp, new bills to the girl.

“Where is he from?” The waitress asked the mayor, glancing timidly at me as she took the brightly colored money.

“You don’t hear me speaking?” I quickly said, in annoyed reaction born from a now deeply ingrained unwillingness to stand by passively, while being discussed as if I were an inanimate object. “You can ask me directly if you want to know.” The mayor opened his mouth in surprise, then smiled broadly, as his young relatives looked on with interest at these new developments.

“Pardon me,” the waitress said, blushing as she looked down into the register to make change. “You speak our language? Do you live around here?”

I glanced at the mayor, who stood there at my side, taking in the action as if watching a football match.

“We are from San Juan,” I said proudly. My words elicited an even wider smile from the mayor, followed by an approving pat on the back.

“San Juan? Where is that?” The girl asked as she handed the mayor his change. Chago folded the bills into his wallet, having made clear that there would be no discussion that this trip, including my lunch, was going on the municipality’s tab. I was along at his invitation, and by the look on his face now, it seemed I was already providing sufficient entertainment to warrant any extra expenditure.

“San Juan is near La Esperanza, not far from here,” I said.

“That’s good,” she said, with an unmistakable air of excitement, as she wrote on a small piece of paper. “You can visit here more often. Here’s my phone number. You will find me here most every day. You can call me when you’re in town.”

I smiled at her and took the piece of paper, then confidently turned and began to walk towards the door. My three companions stayed behind for a moment, unsure if the exchange had ended definitively, then came to their senses and followed me out to the car. They didn’t wait to get back on the road to begin to assess what they had seen.

“So Kawil likes the local girls…” the mayor’s nephew shouted, slamming his palm repeatedly against my shoulder in a congratulatory fashion.

“And they like him,” the mayor’s cousin added. “That’s the effect we San Juaneños have on women. Isn’t that right, Kawil? You’re a full-fledged San Juaneño now?”

Back on the road, we headed south over the remaining hills towards the capital.
I watched the passing scenes on the roadside, and recognized some of the landmarks I had noticed as I travelled with Juan in the back of the cooperative’s pickup all those weeks ago, through the falling night in the other direction. The world in which I now found myself, and my place in it, seemed irrevocably separated from that moment only a few weeks earlier, as if the continuous fabric of time had been broken.

The mayor’s nephew, still interested by what he had seen at the restaurant, leaned forward, and, draping his arms over the front seat, asked me what I would do with the girl’s phone number. In this complex interaction of space and time through which my journey was beginning, I had little idea what I might do with it. I did know that I had a list of phone numbers to call once I got to the capital. Girls like this one seemed to be just about everywhere outside San Juan, and tracking one down in the countryside was likely to prove to be a task not nearly worth the effort. But I also knew that my masculinity, the end-all be-all of these country-bred men, would be assessed upon my response, and that such a complicated explanation would have dashed the expectations of my travelling companions, who were vicariously enjoying the possibility of future exploits with the young waitress. So I gave a less ambiguous answer.

The mayor had grown quiet, as he conducted the vehicle around the twists and turns of the final mountain passes leading to the capital, and his young attendants continued the dialogue with me. The mayor’s plan remained unaltered; as far as I knew he still planned to return to San Juan that same day, and perhaps he was beginning to realize the difficulty of achieving his goal. If the mountain crossing from La Esperanza to San Juan wasn’t completed by nightfall, it could become dangerous. In the dark of the night, the mountain road could be difficult to decipher from the precipices.

We drove down the final steep hillside into the city, and continued to the warehouse district, where parties on official business, like ours, would frequently make bulk purchases. The mayor soon became disoriented, making a number of ill-advised turns among the capital’s tangle of streets, and eventually arriving at a dead end.

“These streets are too many,” Chago lamented, with an expression as serious as I had yet seen on that jovial face. “We’ve made only one turn since leaving San Juan, all the way here, but now streets run in every direction.” I remembered having been in the area on some previously pointless outing with Jorge, sometime during the training period.

“The shops that sell books should be down that other road, the one we just crossed. It leads towards the city center,” I said, as the mayor turned the car around.

“This Kawil is a good person to have along on the trip,” the mayor said as he steered the car back onto the correct street. “He knows his way around the city as well as the women.”

We eventually found the district we were looking for, and parked the car. We spent the next few hours running item by item through Chago’s municipal shopping list, which he had made official, by stamping it with the mayor’s seal, before leaving San Juan. When he discovered that the makers of the list had failed to include the books for the school, the mayor registered his disappointment at the oversight, and declared that we would instead spend our time looking for a few other items that might be used about town, so as not to waste the trip.

“We’re not going to buy the school supplies? I thought that was the point of this trip,” I said in measured disbelief.

“We will get what is on the list,” the mayor said. “But the rest has not been authorized.”

“But didn’t you authorize the list yourself?” I asked, less perplexed than I might have been a few weeks earlier.

But the mayor had refocused his attention on finding a place to have afternoon coffee. I knew that part of the capital well, so I suggested a place nearby. There, as we drank our coffee, I pointed out shortcuts to different stores that could fulfill the needs of the official list. Here, we were in my domain, and I was indeed useful. We searched for a small generator for the town hall, several lengths of cloth for one purpose or another, and a handful of other items, before stopping into an auto accessory store to investigate the possibility of having new features installed on the mayor’s car. By then it was growing late, and the mayor should have been in a rush to get his shopping done and get back on the road, given the rapidly advancing afternoon. But the mayor’s sense of time appeared to remain as unrefined as it had been in San Juan, and he was relaxed, enjoying himself thoroughly as we walked together from store to store, his cousin and nephew trailing behind.

Darkness was already beginning to fall by the time we returned to the mayor’s car. “We’ll have to hurry to make it back to San Juan tonight,” the mayor said, not willing to admit just yet that amendments to his original plan were needed.

“I think I’m going to stay here tonight, in the city,” I said, perhaps too abruptly, judging from the expressions that suddenly covered the faces of the party members. “It’s late, and I have a few things I should take care of here before going back to San Juan,” I explained. Though I was sorry to have to part with the group after the long day, I was determined to stay a few days in the capital.

“Here? In the capital?” the mayor asked, furrowing his brow in a look of deep concern, before continuing. “That may not be a good idea. It’s my responsibility to get everyone back to San Juan.” He paused and looked up at the darkening sky.

“But at the same time, we may not make it to San Juan before nightfall,” Chago said, only then demonstrating a willingness to partially admit the impossibility of his planned undertaking. “Perhaps we should all stay here,” the mayor said, “Kawil, do you know of any acceptable hotels?”

But I had another idea.