Scientists in Ghana Use Mosquito DNA To Fight Tropical Disease
By Brent Latham
Dakar
30 April 2009
A research team from the University of Ghana is employing a new scientific technique to identify mosquitoes that transmit elephantiasis, in an effort to control the disfiguring disease. Scientists hope the technology will lead to breakthroughs in the fight against other maladies as well.
DNA bar coding is a new process which promises to help in the fight against tropical diseases by isolating populations of insect species with a role in transmitting sickness from one human to another.
In Ghana, the technology is now moving from the lab to field tests. Scientists plan to use the bar coding technique to identify a particular species of the anopheles mosquito, an insect with a large role in transmitting tropical diseases including malaria.
The Ghanaian research team is targeting the species of anopheles which transmits the disease lymphatic filariasis, commonly known as elephantiasis for the grotesque swelling it causes in some of its victims. Daniel Boakye is a professor at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research at the University of Ghana, and heads the research team.
"The first objective was to look at the diversity in anopheles gambiae varieties and then see how it can be related to the control of lymphatic filariasis globally," Boakye said.
Boakye says his team will use the bar coding technique to analyze a segment of mosquito DNA, which they will then compare to a catalog of samples to determine the exact identity of the species transmitting the disease. By isolating the population that serves as a vector (carrier) for the disease, scientists hope to better prepare communities and governments to target the spread of elephantiasis.
Over two hundred different species of mosquitoes belong to what scientists describe as the anopheles genus. Boakye says different species play a role in the transmission of a diverse range of tropical diseases. With the beginning of this study, Boakye says the technique is taking a large step towards usefulness in epidemiology.
"It will move from the lab into looking at the usefulness of DNA bar coding in medical importance," Boakye said.
Boakye says successful implementation of the targeting process in fighting elephantiasis could mean a reduction in the use of pesticides, and a more eco-friendly approach to fighting endemic diseases spread by insects.
He also hopes the bar coding technology will have an impact in fighting other insect born diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa, including malaria.
"It will work with malaria because it is known that with malaria not all bugs are as efficient at transmitting the parasite," Boakye said.
Like malaria, elephantiasis is endemic in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. World health authorities have targeted the disease for eradication by 2020, largely through medications donated by large drug companies.
The drugs are meant to reduce the ability of mosquitoes to transmit the infection, but the plan has failed with certain species of anopheles mosquitoes, now the target of the bar coding initiative.
Professor Boakye says he hopes the project serves to shed light on the tremendous biodiversity displayed in the insect community, which is often overlooked by the general public.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Experts Probe Urban Growth, Climate Change Links in Africa
Experts Probe Urban Growth, Climate Change Links in Africa
By Brent Latham
Dakar
24 April 2009
A new project has united researchers exploring the connection between rapid urban growth in Africa and climate related emergencies, in an effort to safeguard vulnerable urban populations from the effects of climate change.
The Climate Change and Adaptation in Africa program, or CCAA, aims to increase the capacity of African people and organizations to cope with the effects of climate change.
Sponsored by Canada's International Development Research Center and the United Kingdom's Department for International Development, the project hopes to identify strategies to help the urban poor in Africa's largest cities to adapt to challenges posed by the changing environment, says project manager Francois Gasengayire.
"The program supports research that helps reduce poverty by improving the environment. And the goal is to harness the capacity of the poor to reduce environmental degradation as it relates to natural disasters, and enhance the use of natural resources for food, water, and income generation," he said.
Gasengayire says program organizers sought out proposals from across Africa for research projects exploring the links between urban growth and climate change. The researchers, who have assembled in Dakar, represent a range of institutions working with the diverse climate-related issues facing urban areas throughout Africa.
Gasengayire said that an increase in disasters caused by climate change is likely to be felt most acutely in Africa's urban centers.
"There is a kind of link, and at the same time a vicious cycle between poverty, urban poverty, and environmental burdens," he said.
Experts say the effects of climate change are already being felt across the continent, and fear that incidences of flooding and drought, and the frequency and intensity of severe storms, will continue to increase in coming decades. Gasingayire says recent shifts in familiar weather patterns, caused by climate change, have made traditional agriculture across Africa less profitable, and driven Africans from rural areas to cities in unprecedented numbers.
The resulting population growth of urban centers, in turn, places stress on natural resources, such as arable land, natural fuels, and fresh water supplies, according to Liqa Raschid-Sally, program manager in Ghana and Ethiopia for Sri Lanka based International Water Management Institute.
"When you move water from agriculture to cities, you can also have an aggravation of the situation in the rural area, or the suburban area, affecting the city, and so there are a lot of issues around this rural-urban interface which could be aggravated by climate change and therefore also affect the cities," she said.
Sally says increasing numbers of poor migrants to an urban area also heavily tax infrastructure, placing higher demand on already inadequate water and sanitation systems, and creating a challenge for urban planners. She says her work is aimed at giving policy makers some tools to employ in their planning.
"The approach is to try to have a science-based decision tool to help policy makers and planners, decision makers at the city level essentially, to address these questions," she added.
Such policy tools are necessary because the urban poor have fewer resources to adapt to climate change, and are extremely vulnerable to natural disasters, says University of Ghana researcher Samuel Nli Andey, describing an urban settlement outside Accra.
"The problem is you have this huge migrant settlement, which is located on a flat plain, these areas experience floods on a normal basis, every year there are floods, and we think this is going to increase. And once it increases it is going to affect the lives of the people there," he said.
Andey says his research will focus on surveying houses in the effected zones, and studying the anticipated responses to flooding. He says the problems caused by flooding are likely to worsen as new residents move into flood plains around Accra.
In 2008, floods struck several countries in West Africa, including Ghana, Liberia, and Senegal, and caused significant damage in Accra. Ghanaian officials and urban planners blamed overbuilding in low-lying, flood prone areas for exacerbating the damage caused by the disaster.
By Brent Latham
Dakar
24 April 2009
A new project has united researchers exploring the connection between rapid urban growth in Africa and climate related emergencies, in an effort to safeguard vulnerable urban populations from the effects of climate change.
The Climate Change and Adaptation in Africa program, or CCAA, aims to increase the capacity of African people and organizations to cope with the effects of climate change.
Sponsored by Canada's International Development Research Center and the United Kingdom's Department for International Development, the project hopes to identify strategies to help the urban poor in Africa's largest cities to adapt to challenges posed by the changing environment, says project manager Francois Gasengayire.
"The program supports research that helps reduce poverty by improving the environment. And the goal is to harness the capacity of the poor to reduce environmental degradation as it relates to natural disasters, and enhance the use of natural resources for food, water, and income generation," he said.
Gasengayire says program organizers sought out proposals from across Africa for research projects exploring the links between urban growth and climate change. The researchers, who have assembled in Dakar, represent a range of institutions working with the diverse climate-related issues facing urban areas throughout Africa.
Gasengayire said that an increase in disasters caused by climate change is likely to be felt most acutely in Africa's urban centers.
"There is a kind of link, and at the same time a vicious cycle between poverty, urban poverty, and environmental burdens," he said.
Experts say the effects of climate change are already being felt across the continent, and fear that incidences of flooding and drought, and the frequency and intensity of severe storms, will continue to increase in coming decades. Gasingayire says recent shifts in familiar weather patterns, caused by climate change, have made traditional agriculture across Africa less profitable, and driven Africans from rural areas to cities in unprecedented numbers.
The resulting population growth of urban centers, in turn, places stress on natural resources, such as arable land, natural fuels, and fresh water supplies, according to Liqa Raschid-Sally, program manager in Ghana and Ethiopia for Sri Lanka based International Water Management Institute.
"When you move water from agriculture to cities, you can also have an aggravation of the situation in the rural area, or the suburban area, affecting the city, and so there are a lot of issues around this rural-urban interface which could be aggravated by climate change and therefore also affect the cities," she said.
Sally says increasing numbers of poor migrants to an urban area also heavily tax infrastructure, placing higher demand on already inadequate water and sanitation systems, and creating a challenge for urban planners. She says her work is aimed at giving policy makers some tools to employ in their planning.
"The approach is to try to have a science-based decision tool to help policy makers and planners, decision makers at the city level essentially, to address these questions," she added.
Such policy tools are necessary because the urban poor have fewer resources to adapt to climate change, and are extremely vulnerable to natural disasters, says University of Ghana researcher Samuel Nli Andey, describing an urban settlement outside Accra.
"The problem is you have this huge migrant settlement, which is located on a flat plain, these areas experience floods on a normal basis, every year there are floods, and we think this is going to increase. And once it increases it is going to affect the lives of the people there," he said.
Andey says his research will focus on surveying houses in the effected zones, and studying the anticipated responses to flooding. He says the problems caused by flooding are likely to worsen as new residents move into flood plains around Accra.
In 2008, floods struck several countries in West Africa, including Ghana, Liberia, and Senegal, and caused significant damage in Accra. Ghanaian officials and urban planners blamed overbuilding in low-lying, flood prone areas for exacerbating the damage caused by the disaster.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
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.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
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.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
BACKLOT DIAMOND MINING
BACKLOT DIAMOND MINING
Brent Latham - Thursday, April 23, 2009
If you don't watch too much television in Spanish - where, with a few notable exceptions, you can find the most knowledgeable coverage of American soccer - you may have missed the news, but Univision is at it again.
The cast from La Republica Deportiva, now including Marcelo Balboa, recently completed what has become an annual tradition of uncovering a budding American talent in their reality TV contest "Who Wants To Be an MLS Player?"
The competition is in fact called "Sueño MLS." As if the message wasn't clear enough, this year's winner, Alberto Lopez, secured for himself a youth contract with the Chicago Fire, and will be playing under the nose of the USSF offices in Chicago.
Now, no one is saying that Lopez, who is a star in high school, but has never played on one of the youth clubs that USSF promotes through its development academy, will develop into the next Claudio Reyna, or even the next Jorge Flores - the 2007 winner - for that matter.
The point that Univision seems intent on making is that there are tons of American kids out there who have the talent to be stars, and want to at least try their luck professionally, but are still on the outside of the system looking in.
As obvious as the situation has become by now, I wouldn't bother to touch on another angle of the same theme, except that I continue to hear and read that one reason the US isn't developing star field players is because the club system is too expensive, and excludes players from families who cannot afford to pay the fees for their son to join a team.
While it may be true that the families of many promising stars can't afford club soccer, one of the most commonly accepted fallacies of youth player development in America is the notion that those costs make it too expensive for economically disadvantaged youths to play soccer in the US. That, my friends, is specious reasoning of the highest order.
Even if the conclusion - that the US needs to involve more economically disadvantaged kids in the club system - didn't smack of classism, first in that it assumes the expensive system is superior to others, and second that poor kids are better athletes than rich ones, there would still be no evidence anywhere to support the idea that the youth club system is even capable of producing soccer players of an international caliber in any quantity.
On the evidence of the world's great soccer nations, many of which are not economic superpowers, and have no such thing as an elite, amateur youth club system, we can conclude that there are high quality players everywhere in the world who have learned the game, at least at the youth level, largely without expensive cleats or perfectly groomed fields.
What the otherwise forgettable Univision contest proves is that these days, such players exist in America as well. The problem is not that they're not being produced; the problem is that they are being ignored.
Such potential stars might be found in pickup leagues organized by Mexican-Americans in California or Georgia, or in the backyard of a family in rural Texas, or, in the oft-referenced case of Neven Subotic, playing pickup in a park in Florida.
Many are first generation Americans, and that makes them highly prized commodities outside the United States. And if these players prove one thing, it's that a kid can become a great soccer player in the US without spending a dime, just as youths around the world do.
But the kid who doesn't spend, still will likely never be seen by the USSF, MLS, or anyone else that matters to American soccer, save Univision, and perhaps the Mexican Football Federation.
What is being done about all this, you ask?
The USSF, for one, is at least trying. They have recently increased greatly the amount of scholarships they will give out, allowing underprivileged kids to participate in the scores of clubs that form the US development academy. That is a bold, presumably expensive step forward. But increasing the number of scholarships, even to a couple hundred, still leaves the vast majority of economically disadvantaged youths on the fringes of the formal American system.
Other than a few small tweaks, the powers that be in American soccer appear content to work within the existing system, and the talented players outside the establishment are left to register on other radar screens.
Persistent reports in the Mexican media insist that the Mexican federation has placed youth scouts around the United States to look for young Mexican-American talent, and the Mexican professional league, whose scouts continue to frequent American youth tournaments, is the natural choice and by far the best option for young Mexican-Americans who choose to pursue a career in soccer.
The first big casualty of the process for the US was Edgar Castillo, a New Mexico native who could really help Bob Bradley on the left side of the field right now. (Castillo did play for a youth soccer club, and excelled, but was still overlooked.) Naturally, many other prospects will continue to end up in the Mexican national team setup long before the US can identify them.
Even given this continuing oversight, the American system admittedly works reasonably well. The United States continues to dominate Mexico and the region, particularly on the youth level, so why be concerned with this problem?
For starters, including the best possible talent on the field will obviously make American teams more competitive. Perhaps finding a way to merge talent produced by the formal and informal US systems could provide the boost that finally puts the United States over the top as a soccer nation.
In addition to the question of competition, however, this issue is in essence one of fairness and equality.
National soccer teams are the international representations of a country in many important ways. As long as the predominant route into American national team programs runs through an expensive, and therefore exclusive, club system, our national teams will move further and further from being a true representation of the nation's complex socio-economic makeup.
We should ask ourselves if that is the type of representation we want, as soccer fans, and more importantly, as Americans.
Brent Latham - Thursday, April 23, 2009
If you don't watch too much television in Spanish - where, with a few notable exceptions, you can find the most knowledgeable coverage of American soccer - you may have missed the news, but Univision is at it again.
The cast from La Republica Deportiva, now including Marcelo Balboa, recently completed what has become an annual tradition of uncovering a budding American talent in their reality TV contest "Who Wants To Be an MLS Player?"
The competition is in fact called "Sueño MLS." As if the message wasn't clear enough, this year's winner, Alberto Lopez, secured for himself a youth contract with the Chicago Fire, and will be playing under the nose of the USSF offices in Chicago.
Now, no one is saying that Lopez, who is a star in high school, but has never played on one of the youth clubs that USSF promotes through its development academy, will develop into the next Claudio Reyna, or even the next Jorge Flores - the 2007 winner - for that matter.
The point that Univision seems intent on making is that there are tons of American kids out there who have the talent to be stars, and want to at least try their luck professionally, but are still on the outside of the system looking in.
As obvious as the situation has become by now, I wouldn't bother to touch on another angle of the same theme, except that I continue to hear and read that one reason the US isn't developing star field players is because the club system is too expensive, and excludes players from families who cannot afford to pay the fees for their son to join a team.
While it may be true that the families of many promising stars can't afford club soccer, one of the most commonly accepted fallacies of youth player development in America is the notion that those costs make it too expensive for economically disadvantaged youths to play soccer in the US. That, my friends, is specious reasoning of the highest order.
Even if the conclusion - that the US needs to involve more economically disadvantaged kids in the club system - didn't smack of classism, first in that it assumes the expensive system is superior to others, and second that poor kids are better athletes than rich ones, there would still be no evidence anywhere to support the idea that the youth club system is even capable of producing soccer players of an international caliber in any quantity.
On the evidence of the world's great soccer nations, many of which are not economic superpowers, and have no such thing as an elite, amateur youth club system, we can conclude that there are high quality players everywhere in the world who have learned the game, at least at the youth level, largely without expensive cleats or perfectly groomed fields.
What the otherwise forgettable Univision contest proves is that these days, such players exist in America as well. The problem is not that they're not being produced; the problem is that they are being ignored.
Such potential stars might be found in pickup leagues organized by Mexican-Americans in California or Georgia, or in the backyard of a family in rural Texas, or, in the oft-referenced case of Neven Subotic, playing pickup in a park in Florida.
Many are first generation Americans, and that makes them highly prized commodities outside the United States. And if these players prove one thing, it's that a kid can become a great soccer player in the US without spending a dime, just as youths around the world do.
But the kid who doesn't spend, still will likely never be seen by the USSF, MLS, or anyone else that matters to American soccer, save Univision, and perhaps the Mexican Football Federation.
What is being done about all this, you ask?
The USSF, for one, is at least trying. They have recently increased greatly the amount of scholarships they will give out, allowing underprivileged kids to participate in the scores of clubs that form the US development academy. That is a bold, presumably expensive step forward. But increasing the number of scholarships, even to a couple hundred, still leaves the vast majority of economically disadvantaged youths on the fringes of the formal American system.
Other than a few small tweaks, the powers that be in American soccer appear content to work within the existing system, and the talented players outside the establishment are left to register on other radar screens.
Persistent reports in the Mexican media insist that the Mexican federation has placed youth scouts around the United States to look for young Mexican-American talent, and the Mexican professional league, whose scouts continue to frequent American youth tournaments, is the natural choice and by far the best option for young Mexican-Americans who choose to pursue a career in soccer.
The first big casualty of the process for the US was Edgar Castillo, a New Mexico native who could really help Bob Bradley on the left side of the field right now. (Castillo did play for a youth soccer club, and excelled, but was still overlooked.) Naturally, many other prospects will continue to end up in the Mexican national team setup long before the US can identify them.
Even given this continuing oversight, the American system admittedly works reasonably well. The United States continues to dominate Mexico and the region, particularly on the youth level, so why be concerned with this problem?
For starters, including the best possible talent on the field will obviously make American teams more competitive. Perhaps finding a way to merge talent produced by the formal and informal US systems could provide the boost that finally puts the United States over the top as a soccer nation.
In addition to the question of competition, however, this issue is in essence one of fairness and equality.
National soccer teams are the international representations of a country in many important ways. As long as the predominant route into American national team programs runs through an expensive, and therefore exclusive, club system, our national teams will move further and further from being a true representation of the nation's complex socio-economic makeup.
We should ask ourselves if that is the type of representation we want, as soccer fans, and more importantly, as Americans.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Academics Study Link Between Climate Change and Urban Development in Cape Verde
Academics Study Link Between Climate Change and Urban Development in Cape Verde
By Brent Latham
Dakar
22 April 2009
Like other small island nations, Cape Verde faces uncertain but potentially serious consequences from global climate change. Now, scientists and academics are studying the consequences of climate change in the West African nation, with the specific goal of understanding the link with urban development issues.
The new project led by researchers at the Instituto Superior Tecnico, or IST, in Lisbon, Portugal, seeks to more precisely identify the impact of climate change on Cape Verdeans, and suggest programs to help alleviate potential problems caused by the changing environment.
The project aims specifically to evaluate the links between the effects of climate change and problems faced by city dwellers in the West African nation, says Luis Manuel Alves of IST.
Alves says climate change threatens Cape Verde in a number of ways, including rising sea level, an increase in frequency and violence of storms, coastal erosion, and prolonged drought.
He says the results of climate change are driving more Cape Verdeans to urban areas, increasing stress on urban resources and raising new concerns for urban planners.
Financed under a pan-African initiative called the Climate Change and Adaptation in Africa program, the IST program in Cape Verde is studying urban problems worsened by climate change, including increased stress on fresh water supply, inadequate drainage and sanitation systems, and lack of zoning and urban planning. Officials at the program say these problems result from climate change, and also exacerbate its effects, in what they label a vicious cycle.
Alves says that through dialogue with communities, governments, and other stakeholders, the researchers hope to propose ways for urban dwellers on Cape Verde to adapt to climate change without suffering a reduction in their standard of living.
Alves says the potential dangers to Cape Verde from climate change also threaten other parts of West Africa, particularly low-lying coastal regions, and other small island nations. The institute is undertaking a similar program in Sao Tome and Principe.
By Brent Latham
Dakar
22 April 2009
Like other small island nations, Cape Verde faces uncertain but potentially serious consequences from global climate change. Now, scientists and academics are studying the consequences of climate change in the West African nation, with the specific goal of understanding the link with urban development issues.
The new project led by researchers at the Instituto Superior Tecnico, or IST, in Lisbon, Portugal, seeks to more precisely identify the impact of climate change on Cape Verdeans, and suggest programs to help alleviate potential problems caused by the changing environment.
The project aims specifically to evaluate the links between the effects of climate change and problems faced by city dwellers in the West African nation, says Luis Manuel Alves of IST.
Alves says climate change threatens Cape Verde in a number of ways, including rising sea level, an increase in frequency and violence of storms, coastal erosion, and prolonged drought.
He says the results of climate change are driving more Cape Verdeans to urban areas, increasing stress on urban resources and raising new concerns for urban planners.
Financed under a pan-African initiative called the Climate Change and Adaptation in Africa program, the IST program in Cape Verde is studying urban problems worsened by climate change, including increased stress on fresh water supply, inadequate drainage and sanitation systems, and lack of zoning and urban planning. Officials at the program say these problems result from climate change, and also exacerbate its effects, in what they label a vicious cycle.
Alves says that through dialogue with communities, governments, and other stakeholders, the researchers hope to propose ways for urban dwellers on Cape Verde to adapt to climate change without suffering a reduction in their standard of living.
Alves says the potential dangers to Cape Verde from climate change also threaten other parts of West Africa, particularly low-lying coastal regions, and other small island nations. The institute is undertaking a similar program in Sao Tome and Principe.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
West Africans Find Success in American Professional Soccer League
West Africans Find Success in American Professional Soccer League
By Brent Latham
Dakar
14 April 2009
West African representation in the top professional soccer league of the United States has grown quickly in recent years. As they reach the highest level across the Atlantic, African soccer players are seeing America as an increasingly attractive option.
Before Aboubakarim Ndaw arrived in the United States late last year from his native Guinea, he had heard about the success of some West African players in Major League Soccer, the United States' growing professional league.
Having set up trials with teams across America, Ndaw, 20, hopes to emulate the success of players like Macoumba Kandji, a native of Senegal, who plays for the New York Red Bulls, and Gambian Sainey Nyassi of the New England Revolution.
The number of West Africans playing professionally in the United States' top league continues to grow, to more than two dozen at the beginning of the 2009 MLS campaign.
America has provided an alternative stage for some of Africa's young talent, says Kandji, a forward for the Red Bulls.
"Since I was back home, since I was a little kid, always in the back of my mind I said I want to become a professional soccer player, even though I did not play for any team," Kandji said. "Once I came over here, it gives me a big opportunity because they have club soccer here, they have people to see you play, and there is a lot more opportunities here than back home.
Kandji says he did not come to the United States intent on becoming a professional soccer player. He says after he moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, with his family, he enrolled at a junior college. While playing soccer there, he was spotted by a scout for the United Soccer League, the United States' second division. After a year-and-a-half of outstanding play in the second tier, Kandji earned a transfer to Major League Soccer.
Former American international player, Mike Burns, is the vice president of player personnel for MLS team New England Revolution. He says in the past many West Africans who joined the league had some pre-existing connection to the United States. Some are picked up from lower-level American teams, and others chosen after they attend college in the United States.
Burns says the success of those players has led teams to send representatives, such as Revolution coach Steve Nicol, to Africa in search of new players.
"In the case of our latest two signings, Steve Nicol made two trips over to Ghana this off season and scouted each player and we were able to get them signed in dealing with agents and dealing with the clubs that they were currently on," Burns said. "So in total we have five Africans, and we acquired those players in three different ways.
Burns says aside from helping to improve the quality of play on the soccer field, scouting trips to Africa offer a number of other benefits for the cost-conscious clubs of the Major League Soccer.
"I would say first and foremost would be value, value that we think we can obtain in going there," Burns said.
The Revolution have been among the trailblazers in uncovering hidden gems from West Africa, beginning with the 2007 acquisition of Gambian players Sainey Nyassi and Kenny Mansally, who signed with the team after starring for The Gambia in the FIFA under-20 World Cup played in Canada that year.
Nyassi in particular has enjoyed a high level of success in the league, quickly becoming a regular in New England's lineup. Though the native of Bwiam state grew up admiring European professional leagues like England's Premiere League, he says has been impressed with the quality of Major League Soccer.
"I think they are coming up. It is really growing up," Nyassi said. "Soccer here is now really important. It is getting better every year. Hopefully things will come up because you can see that big players are going to come. As time goes on it will be a big league, a proper league like the Premiere League, hopefully."
Nyassi's twin brother was signed last year by the new MLS team in Seattle, and Nyassi says he is looking forward to the day the two meet on the field.
Despite the success of the Nyassi brothers, the road to professional stardom in the United States is still a difficult one for West Africans, says Guinean player Ndaw.
Ndaw, who is still searching for a team, says American clubs are mostly interested in older players who they can insert directly into their lineups. He says there is not much structure for development of younger players, and that teams are limited by roster restrictions that allow them only a small number of foreign players.
Reflecting on his own success, Nyassi offered some advice for young players like Ndaw, as well as the scores of youths back home in West Africa who long to play soccer professionally overseas.
"Let them just work hard and have patience," Nyassi said. "Work hard, that is all. Success, you never know, it does not come just one day. If you want to be something, imagine that other people are making it so why not you. So work hard and focus, you will be there one day. You will get there."
Nyassi says veteran American players have helped him improve his game, and he intends to learn all he can. After developing as a player in the United States, he hopes to earn a transfer to one of the well-known teams in England.
By Brent Latham
Dakar
14 April 2009
West African representation in the top professional soccer league of the United States has grown quickly in recent years. As they reach the highest level across the Atlantic, African soccer players are seeing America as an increasingly attractive option.
Before Aboubakarim Ndaw arrived in the United States late last year from his native Guinea, he had heard about the success of some West African players in Major League Soccer, the United States' growing professional league.
Having set up trials with teams across America, Ndaw, 20, hopes to emulate the success of players like Macoumba Kandji, a native of Senegal, who plays for the New York Red Bulls, and Gambian Sainey Nyassi of the New England Revolution.
The number of West Africans playing professionally in the United States' top league continues to grow, to more than two dozen at the beginning of the 2009 MLS campaign.
America has provided an alternative stage for some of Africa's young talent, says Kandji, a forward for the Red Bulls.
"Since I was back home, since I was a little kid, always in the back of my mind I said I want to become a professional soccer player, even though I did not play for any team," Kandji said. "Once I came over here, it gives me a big opportunity because they have club soccer here, they have people to see you play, and there is a lot more opportunities here than back home.
Kandji says he did not come to the United States intent on becoming a professional soccer player. He says after he moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, with his family, he enrolled at a junior college. While playing soccer there, he was spotted by a scout for the United Soccer League, the United States' second division. After a year-and-a-half of outstanding play in the second tier, Kandji earned a transfer to Major League Soccer.
Former American international player, Mike Burns, is the vice president of player personnel for MLS team New England Revolution. He says in the past many West Africans who joined the league had some pre-existing connection to the United States. Some are picked up from lower-level American teams, and others chosen after they attend college in the United States.
Burns says the success of those players has led teams to send representatives, such as Revolution coach Steve Nicol, to Africa in search of new players.
"In the case of our latest two signings, Steve Nicol made two trips over to Ghana this off season and scouted each player and we were able to get them signed in dealing with agents and dealing with the clubs that they were currently on," Burns said. "So in total we have five Africans, and we acquired those players in three different ways.
Burns says aside from helping to improve the quality of play on the soccer field, scouting trips to Africa offer a number of other benefits for the cost-conscious clubs of the Major League Soccer.
"I would say first and foremost would be value, value that we think we can obtain in going there," Burns said.
The Revolution have been among the trailblazers in uncovering hidden gems from West Africa, beginning with the 2007 acquisition of Gambian players Sainey Nyassi and Kenny Mansally, who signed with the team after starring for The Gambia in the FIFA under-20 World Cup played in Canada that year.
Nyassi in particular has enjoyed a high level of success in the league, quickly becoming a regular in New England's lineup. Though the native of Bwiam state grew up admiring European professional leagues like England's Premiere League, he says has been impressed with the quality of Major League Soccer.
"I think they are coming up. It is really growing up," Nyassi said. "Soccer here is now really important. It is getting better every year. Hopefully things will come up because you can see that big players are going to come. As time goes on it will be a big league, a proper league like the Premiere League, hopefully."
Nyassi's twin brother was signed last year by the new MLS team in Seattle, and Nyassi says he is looking forward to the day the two meet on the field.
Despite the success of the Nyassi brothers, the road to professional stardom in the United States is still a difficult one for West Africans, says Guinean player Ndaw.
Ndaw, who is still searching for a team, says American clubs are mostly interested in older players who they can insert directly into their lineups. He says there is not much structure for development of younger players, and that teams are limited by roster restrictions that allow them only a small number of foreign players.
Reflecting on his own success, Nyassi offered some advice for young players like Ndaw, as well as the scores of youths back home in West Africa who long to play soccer professionally overseas.
"Let them just work hard and have patience," Nyassi said. "Work hard, that is all. Success, you never know, it does not come just one day. If you want to be something, imagine that other people are making it so why not you. So work hard and focus, you will be there one day. You will get there."
Nyassi says veteran American players have helped him improve his game, and he intends to learn all he can. After developing as a player in the United States, he hopes to earn a transfer to one of the well-known teams in England.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Description of Service - Chapter 6
6. You Are Here Because You Are Not There
The state paid handsomely to maintain the telegraph line to San Juan. It paid people like Angel Perdido, after he was hired as the telegraph operator in San Juan, to learn Morse code. Chunks of the state budget went to train would-be technicians of that nineteenth century art. Having painstakingly learned the intricacies of his post, a telegraph operator in a small town like San Juan could then expect to sit idle for hours, or even days, at a time, at his work by the telegraph.
In the years since he had taken over the job from his father, Angel Segundo had become quite adept at sitting, as he labored in the relative tranquility of the self-employed, even if that description did not exactly fit his situation, which was similar mainly in that he worked unburdened by the threat of supervision, given that those directly tasked with overseeing his work lived in large, comfortable houses, in the capital far away, and a supervisory trip to a far-flung place like San Juan was not high on their agenda, since such an endeavor implied certain inconveniences, such as an overnight stay away from the comforts amassed through years of exploiting the state bureaucracy, and the even more grave and undesirable possible consequences of being physically absent from such post. One simply never knew when the fleeting opportunity for further exploitation of the system might arise. Faced with those circumstances, officials of the telegraph company, like those of other state run enterprises, preferred whenever possible to avoid work that required them to leave the immediate vicinity of their homes.
It was quite a simple matter, then, for the elder Angel, when he grew tired of working daily, to teach his only son to man the infrequently used line, then gradually disappear into the inner sanctum of the Perdido home, from his long-time post in the front room that doubled as the telegraph office. The townspeople carried on sending their occasional telegrams through Angel Segundo, and little changed. A smart man, Angel Segundo, rather than take his chances with the government bureaucracy, simply assumed his father’s identity, and collected the monthly paycheck. The switch worked flawlessly until the elder Angel finally passed away, at which point, in order to avoid inconvenient interruptions in their comfortable income stream, the Perdido family was forced into the unfortunate charade of reporting the death of the younger Angel on all official paperwork. The Perdidos buried the elder Angel, and mourned the younger, in a way that, if disingenuous, was apt given the new responsibilities Angel Segundo would take on as head of the household. After such a confusing experience, Angel Segundo felt obligated to more permanently and dramatically assume the person of his father, referring to himself as Don Angel, and behaving in every way like a man several decades older.
Given the circumstances surrounding the history of the post, it could be said that Angel took his job quite seriously. According to the operator’s manual, the telegraph technician was expected to man the machine all day long, lest an urgent incoming cable arrive and find no one to interpret it. His duties also included attending to the local population, eager to communicate with the outside world.
By the time I arrived in San Juan early that summer, however, it had become relatively clear to even the most aloof observers that not even the most traditional townspeople continued to believe, generally speaking, that the telegraph was a good way to communicate. Given its less than fail-proof design, the antique system was vulnerable to replacement by just about any medium. Indeed, the reliability of communication by telegraph left much to be desired by any standard. If, for example, a telegram came in, and Angel wasn’t at his desk in the office, awaiting it, the senders were apt to give up, and the communication would be permanently lost. It was partly for such reasons, and also because the conformity of the townspeople with of the idea of an outside party receiving and reading their personal messages had decreased significantly, that important communications to and from San Juan had long since begun to be carried in sealed envelopes on the bus, to La Esperanza, where further action was taken.
But no one had explained any of that to me. Indeed, my supervisors had quite the opposite opinion. In the short period our discussion had continued, after the Peace Corps sub-director had told me of my assignment in San Juan, I objected to the placement on the grounds, among other things, of lack of viable communication. The Peace Corps bylaws list reliable communication means in a work site as a fundamental necessity in case of emergency. The sub-director dismissed my concern by encouraging me to make frequent use of what she described as “the efficient and reliable telegraph system.” She further indicated that she felt it a good idea for me to, immediately upon arrival in San Juan, familiarize myself with the system by sending a telegram to her to convey my well-being and safe arrival. I suspected that request was designed mostly to assure her that I had in fact made my way to San Juan instead of off somewhere else, the latter option seeming to be the general consensus for the expected behavior of a worker facing the sort of non-sensical assignment I had been handed.
Nevertheless, that first afternoon in San Juan, after cleaning out as best I could the room in which I would sleep, hanging the hammock out back, and taking a rather extended nap in the shade of the patio overhang, I went straight to the telegraph office, anxious to make good on my promise to report my arrival, if for no other reason than to demonstrate that I was, in fact, in San Juan. It seemed like a simple enough task.
In the years since the first Don Angel had evicted Felicidad from her bedroom in his efforts to fashion the original office, the telegraph had been moved across the street to a front room of Felicidad’s house. After the death of her brother, Soledad had decided that there was no longer space in what was now her house for Angel Segundo and his telegraph, which she deemed to be irreconcilably haunted by Angel’s spirit. Angel tried incense, incantations, prayers, and overnight vigils, and even brought in the local priest, but Soledad was not to be convinced. In an ironic twist which no one in the Perdido family seemed to appreciate, Felicidad came to Angel’s rescue, renting a space to the telegraph company, at a slightly inflated price that took into account the unpredictable consequences of bringing a spirit into her home in such a cavalier fashion.
It was in that new office that I found a middle aged man with unusually light skin bent over a table, distracted in the process of rewiring one of an assortment of old radios, and similar devices, piled on the floor behind his desk, an activity which I would later find occupied the majority of the time that the second incarnation of Don Angel did not dedicate to shouting insinuating comments at adolescent girls as they passed by on the street in front of his office.
I stood in the doorway quietly.
“Ah, mister gringo,” the man said, when he eventually looked from his work. “Don Angel Segundo Perdido, at your service.”
“Good afternoon,” I said. “This is telegraph office?” I stepped forward into the room.
“Come in, mister gringo. I heard of your arrival.” Word had spread, at least through this house. “You’ve come to Aida’s for dinner? That’s good. Sit down, have some coffee first.”
“Patricia, some coffee for the afternoon break. The gringo has come to visit,” he yelled through the doorway at the back of the office, which opened into the corridor leading to the kitchen. A loud yelp signaling affirmation emanated from space beyond the doorway.
“Thank you, Don Angel. In reality I have come to see about sending a telegram to my supervisors in the capital,” I said, handing him a small piece of paper with the wording of the message to be sent.
“Ah, a telegram.” He took the paper and placed it on his desk, smiled at me, and then looked out the front door. “Greetings, Don Jose,” he yelled through the open door in front, at a passing man. A similar cry came from the street outside. Angel smiled as he continued to look out onto the street. Slowly, he focused his attention back on me, “tell me mister gringo, how do you like San Juan?”
“You can call me Kawil, Don Angel. Kawil is my name.”
“Kawil? Gringo is easier. Like me. They call me chele because of the light color of my skin.”
Patricia came in with two cups of coffee on a tray. “Ah mister gringo,” she said, “you’ve met chele Angel? So many white people in here it would seem we are in the U-S-A.”
“Yes,” I replied, giving up on the name issue for the time being. “I came to see about sending a telegraph.”
“Ha!” She laughed. “Send a telegram, mister? I don’t think chele Angel even knows how! Forget about that and come have some dinner.” With that she left the coffee on the desk in front of us, and walked out through the back door.
“Yes, the telegraph’s down,” Angel continued, as he stirred a heap of sugar into his coffee, with a matter-of-factness that should have made it apparent there was nothing unusual about such a state of affairs. “The line is - not so good. Do you like much sugar in your coffee?”
“When do you think the device might be fixed?” I asked, pressing the matter.
“It’s not the telegraph that’s broken,” Angel replied patiently, as he took a sip of coffee, and looked up at me once more. “It’s the line to La Esperanza that is down.”
“Well, that telegram is urgent. It is going to my supervisors to let them know I have arrived,” I explained. “When do you think I can send it?”
“Your supervisors?” Angel said with a laugh. “They should know you are here from the fact that you are no longer there. Tell me, where are your supervisors, if you are working for the cooperative?”
Angel seemed intrigued, both by my arrival, and my interest in his telegraph line, which must have been unparalleled in recent memory. I thought it impolite to press the subject of the telegram further just then, so I let the conversation turn to other matters as the street outside grew dim in the fading afternoon light. I worked on convincing him that my name was not in fact Mister Gringo, and he told me a little about San Juan, the telegraph business, and fixing radios.
In the last light of dusk, Juan arrived, having shut the cooperative for the night. “I looked for you at the house,” he said, stepping into the office from the patio, and taking a seat comfortably on a bench along the wall of the office. “Then I imagined you might be here.”
As the night quickly descended on my first day in San Juan, Angel closed the door to the street, and the three of us passed through to the corridor, and on to the kitchen for dinner. We sat down around the old wooden table, placed in the alcove in a way that left its occupants staring into the adjacent kitchen, where Aida and her two daughters were at work preparing the evening meal.
“Ah, Juan,” Patricia said, with the same surprise that she had greeted us earlier in the day. I was beginning to think that bewildered demeanor to be her natural state. “You’re early. No football today?”
“No Patti, it’s been a long day, with the journey. We are hungry. Let’s see if Aida can move a little faster tonight,” Juan replied, laughing again.
“Savage Indian,” Aida quickly snapped, this time with much more energy than she had displayed in the afternoon.
The only thing I had eaten all day had been the small lunch, and I was hungry. Aida served plates of chicken, avocado, and refried beans, accompanied by the ubiquitous corn tortillas and a salad of vegetables. I began to eat eagerly, as Juan picked the onions out of his salad. Angel observed me closely.
“He eats with a great appetite, not nearly as picky as Juan, but this is not gringo food,” Don Angel said out loud, as I grabbed another tortilla.
“No, Don Angel, but it’s very good,” I said, loud enough so that Aida, who was glancing at us furtively from her post in the kitchen, could easily hear. “I usually don’t eat much after travelling.”
After the meal, we lingered around the table, as we drank our evening coffee. Other diners, who had been served at the tables in the front room by Nancy and Patricia, had come and gone. I gazed into the dark kitchen, where the embers of the fire burned orange in recess of the earthen stove, fighting a losing battle with the encroaching dark of the country night. Blackness seeped through the open windows and doors, and swept in from the gaps in the roof created by the broken, irregular tiles. There the night momentarily sequestered the furls of smoke as they huddled among the rafters of the dilapidated roof, each awaiting patiently the chance to escape through one of the openings, to meet the stars shining in the cool night beyond that precarious barrier.
My mind drifted as well, as Juan told Angel of the journey to the capital and back, and of the plans for the cooperative. As they spoke, Aida, nearly finished with her daily work, took a moment’s rest, motionless in a chair along the wall of the kitchen, next to the warm stove. As the flickering light from the fire bounced weakly off the mud walls, her profile was occasionally revealed amidst the shadows there. As a slow current of cold air began to flow in, conspiring with the darkness in its battle against the light from the dying fire in the corner oven, another shadow rose from the courtyard and stole into the kitchen, gliding on worn, bare feet across the dirt floor, towards the place where Aida rested. It was a woman, her slight frame bent against the weight of her body, covered in loose garments, a faded old dress and apron, a shawl covering her head. Aida moved gently aside, and the old woman fell onto the bench next to the fire. She spread her bony fingers in the front of the stove, as the shadows danced along the walls and ceiling.
“Good evening, aunt,” Don Angel said solemnly.
“Good evening, Doña Felicidad,” Juan called out.
The woman said nothing. Angel turned to me. “My aunt is old and doesn’t hear very well. Mama,” he said, calling loudly into the kitchen, “here is mister gringo. He has come to work with Juan in the cooperative here.”
The old woman continued to sit silently for quite some time, warming herself against the stove. Eventually, she lowered her hands and turned slowly towards the table.
“A gringo,” she said slowly, long after it seemed as if she would remain quiet. “That is good. He will do good here,” she whispered as she squinted towards me, through the darkness. Her dark eyes caught the low glint of the fire as they peered at me from a warn face starkly outlined by her coarse, white hair. “He looks like others who have come,” she said quietly, turning her attention back to the fire.
Juan stood up. “Ready to go?” he asked, as he headed into the kitchen to bid goodnight to the women there. I slowly got up as well.
Aida had returned to work, washing dishes in the basin by the sink. I approached her carefully, stopping a few steps short of the countertop. She hadn’t directed a single word towards me yet, and I was a bit wary of her.
“Doña Aida,” I said quietly, “may I eat here each day, as Juan does?”
She paused from her dish washing and looked at her mother in the corner. The old woman gave a quick, firm nod. Aida then slowly transferred her gaze to me. With a sincere nod, she communicated a thousand words of sincere acceptance.
“While there is food, you can come here to eat. It’s late now, go home,” she said. I began to open my mouth to speak, but I was interrupted by a loud voice from the corner.
“Go home, you silly Indians,” cried Felicidad, in a commanding voice, markedly different from her previously whispers. “Get to your homes before the spirits come.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Those first days in San Juan passed in the slow motion that mocks those with few immediate plans or prospects, exacerbating the quandary of the present. The roosters woke me each morning at daybreak, as the gentle morning sunlight streamed through the small window of my room, coaxing me from the long, deep sleep that can only be had away from the loud, bright inventions of the modern world. Awakening there, in that starkly outfitted, four walled room, I would wonder for a moment, as so often is the case after a long sleep in an unfamiliar bed, where I was, before recalling the strange reality that had suddenly become my life. Perhaps in those days it took a few moments more than it might normally have to convince myself that San Juan was not an invention of some long, mid-summer’s dream. It would be quite some time before such confusion ceased to invade the first consciousness of my days.
Confronted with long, empty days, I needed to find a way to pass the time. Working at the cooperative did not seem to be the immediate answer. Juan was constantly in and out of town, and we delayed talking about work, as he was repeatedly called to make runs on his motorbike between San Juan and La Esperanza, in order to pass along messages or retrieve cash. Indeed, his role as a courier seemed to be the most important aspect of his job.
As a consequence, he would often be away overnight, and I found myself quickly and frequently alone in the house. Much of those first few days I spent at home in the hammock out back, wiling away the hours, as I stared at the mountain in the distance. I needed some time to assimilate the shock that the sudden change had brought to my life, and I soon found that quiet time by the garden was one way to slowly adapt to my new surroundings. There I passed the long afternoons, watching the weather pass, from sun, to rain, then back again. I might have remained there indefinitely, when I wasn’t taking my meals at the Perdido house, had it not been for one particular factor, which motivated me to leave the house, late each day. Following the afternoon showers that transformed the hot, hazy midday into a cool cloudy afternoon, I would make my way to the town’s soccer field.
One of my first discoveries in San Juan had been a shared passion with every other man and child, from six to sixty, in town. In those first days, the routine of soccer became a crucial element of adaptation to my new life. Juan, when he was in town, would hurriedly shut the cooperative a few minutes before five, then hurry home to change into soccer gear. Not anxious to let on that I had spent the better part of the afternoon lying in the hammock, I would quickly scramble to my feet when I heard the rattling of the door to the patio from his room, as he unhitched the internal iron bar he used as a lock. Juan would soon emerge onto the back patio, and with the excited smile of a small child anticipating a game, would ask, “Kawil, are we going to play football?”
The answer had been established on the second day after my arrival, when Juan had mentioned the afternoon game. Even on the days that Juan was away, I would go to the field alone to join a game. When he was in town we would religiously follow the same routine. After he arrived and dressed quickly, we would head out the door together, towards the field, up the road past the Perdido house.
The field spreads over two city blocks at the far end of town. Like many fields I would come to know, in the rural areas of this country, it was less than perfect. Sloping gradually downhill along its length, it provided a subtle advantage to the side that played in that preferred direction, causing the players, when assigning teams, to define the two sides as “up” and “down.” The grass would grow to nearly knee length in the rainy season – the condition I found it in upon arrival - then dry out and disappear completely, turning the pitch to a dustbowl by late summer. Cows and other livestock generally displayed less than the desirable hesitancy to meander onto the field during play, roaming about wherever they pleased. But like any other unexpected obstacle, these obstructions were considered part of the game, and were played around without a second thought, except on the amusing occasions when a player of some repute in the village, for example the mayor or one of his staff, on one of their occasional forays onto the field, would haplessly tumble into a pile of cow manure.
But before getting as far as the field, Juan and I had stops to make along the route. The most important detour was to the corner store.
“He’s going to say that he is too busy to play,” Juan would say, as we approached, of the store’s proprietor, Sandro.
“We will convince him, in the end, that sport is more beneficial than work,” Juan continued with a smile, as we stepped off the road into the store, speaking in his particular way, loudly enough to be overheard but not to be accused of speaking directly to anyone.
The store’s owner, Sandro Martinez, was one of San Juan’s success stories. He did not come from one of the traditional families of San Juan, but had still managed to build on that corner a large and successful general store, which amply supported his family. Sandro loved to play football, but his economic endeavors and family took precedence. Sandro had befriended Juan years before, when Juan first arrived in town. Having made his own lot in life, Sandro was not intimidated by outsiders, unlike many of the established families, who perhaps feared losing their tight grip over the town’s affairs.
Each day, despite being short of time on the way to the field, Juan insisted on stopping by Sandro’s store, in an attempt to convince him to leave his affairs at the shop for an hour or two of sport. Invariably, we would find Sandro behind the counter, twirling the end of his long black moustache with long, bony fingers weathered from years of hard work, as he contemplated the barren street in front of his store. And each day, the exchange followed the same basic pattern.
“No football for me today,” Sandro would say, as he looked at us, dressed in our sporting clothes, cleats in hand. “I need to count the inventory.”
“All right Sandro, give up the charade,” Juan would quickly reply. Juan preferred to budget an extra five minutes or so along the way for this conversation, but the soccer game was a pressing engagement, and there was little extra time for the beating around the bush that was standard in discussing less important affairs.
Temporarily frustrated, Juan would take a seat restlessly on the large sacks of grains stacked in the corner, and begin to talk to whoever was in earshot, describing the fun we were about to have at the soccer field.
“It’s a shame you won’t play,” he would say to Sandro, opening whatever product was close at hand, and beginning to snack, “because the games have been very good lately.”
If Sandro refused to give in easily, Juan would scale up his efforts at persuasion by moving behind the counter and raiding the store’s gas-powered cooler, extracting soft drinks, and handing them out as if he were the owner of the store.
Sandro might resist for a few minutes more, before throwing his hands up in capitulation. “If I don’t go,” he would yell out, calling in his wife to look after the store in his place, “these two will eat the entire inventory and there will be nothing left to sell.” Then he would disappear into the back of the store, which doubled as his family’s home, where he would dress quickly, before the three of us headed for the field.
On any given day, anyone might show up to play. High school students played, alongside their professors. Don Angel and Anhiel were there as frequently as their work and past-prime legs would allow. They had formed a team which they called the “Veterans,” a collection of older men, bellies rounded by the years, who attempted to make up for in guile what they had lost in mobility. Even the mayor would come out on the rare occasions that he was in town.
The number of players varied by day as well. Some days, only a dozen or so showed, and we played a small-sided game. Other days, there would be more than thirty men, too many even for that huge field. But seldom was anyone left out, and the game could grow into a fifteen-a-side melee.
I met most every resident of the town on that field in those first few weeks, excluding, of course, the women, who stayed at home at that hour, preparing the evening meal. Soccer was a part of village life in which even an outsider could have a role that everyone could understand. On the field all the rules changed. In a place where clocks have very little use, the one punctual engagement each day was the football match. The game began each afternoon at five sharp. And the criteria for understanding one another changed as well. It no longer made sense to judge by appearance, language, or anything else not directly related to the play on the field. Young and old, conservative and liberal, local and foreigner, all began as equals there.
So in soccer, which, happily, I had grown up playing, I found an equalizing factor that highlighted my similarities to the locals. My work at the cooperative couldn’t do that, since few understood what I, or anyone else there, actually did. Even if my association with the bank did give me a certain immediate legitimacy in the community, the institution of banking was unfamiliar to most in the area, and though my presence in town could be more easily understood through my presumed role in the mysterious activities taking place behind that counter where money was dispensed and collected, in that context I remained a foreigner engaged in generally incomprehensible work. But with each day on that rain soaked, overgrown, bumpy soccer field, I became that much less of an outsider. On the field, I was judged by what I did with the ball, and that was a language in which I was much more proficient.
After each daily session wound to and end, the players would gather together for a moment’s rest on the sidelines, as the sun sank low in the sky. Then each would head for home, several of us, including a number of Perdidos, Angel and Anhiel, and their nephew Oduber, down the same road.
“The gringo is not a bad football player,” Angel began, on one such afternoon late in my first week in town. “He plays as well as some of the better players from this town.”
“Better,” Juan said, in his usual congratulatory manner, to which I was growing accustomed. I appreciated his flattery, though I had been a bit surprised to find that I wasn’t as good as the best players in that town. Soccer was like a religion there, and I was amazed at the concentration of skill. Juan, himself, I later found out, had played semi-professionally in La Esperanza before retiring to a more sensible life in banking.
“He plays so well, in fact,” Angel continued, “that the teams in town are wondering for which one he will play.” I knew that he was talking about the local tournament. It hadn’t taken long for me to be made to understand that, aside from the friendly scrimmages during the week, the town put on weekend matches in which teams from the village played against teams from the outlying settlements.
“There is no doubt which team he will play for,” Anhiel interjected authoritatively, embracing me firmly with one arm as we walked. “He is from the Perdido house, and will play for the Eagles.”
“Sandro might have a different opinion, as the captain of the Independent side,” Juan said, somewhat bashfully.
“But Sandro is not here,” Oduber said. Sandro had left town on one of his frequent trips to purchase merchandise for the store. “Besides,” he said, looking at me as he spoke, “it wouldn’t be right for someone who lives and eats with us at the house to play for the opponents.”
As we arrived at the Perdido house, and the group filed in for dinner, Angel pulled me aside.
“About that telegram,” he began. I had been by his office frequently to ask about progress in sending the telegram to the capital, but the line remained out of order. “Tomorrow I will go to fix the line. Perhaps you are as good with a horse as you are with a football. You can come along if you like.”
In a moment of confidence inspired by the newfound feeling of inclusion on the soccer field, I didn’t think twice. “Of course I will go with you,” I said.
“Tomorrow we go after breakfast then,” Angel said with a pleased expression.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
“Aida, prepare two lunches to carry away– one for me and one for my assistant,” Angel said in a commanding voice. He had come into the kitchen to find me finishing my morning coffee and chatting aimlessly with Patricia.
“Wait for me here,” he said, as he headed out the door.
“So you’re going out with Uncle Angel to fix the line?” Patricia asked, smiling cheerfully as she came over to clear the table.
“Yes, we’ll go fix it, I suppose, we’ll see what it takes,” I said, realizing that I had little idea what fixing a telegraph line might entail.
“So you know how to ride a horse?” she asked. In truth, I had never ridden a horse before. But I assumed that I could.
“Of course,” I replied confidently, with a feigned air of assuredness that made me feel uncomfortable. I was not anxious to provide ammunition to support the idea that I was getting into something over my head, “- so the horse is necessary…” I said, trailing off and leaving the sentence unfinished, hoping that she could complete it with more information.
“The horse is necessary,” she said, echoing my words but failing to add anything. She extracted a few potatoes from of a sack next to the table, then headed off down the corridor to wash them, smiling at me as she passed. “Oh, mister,” she sighed.
I was left alone in the kitchen with Aida. She paused from her work in the kitchen, slicing vegetables, and looked up at me, intently. “You really want to go jaunting off through the countryside to try to fix the line?” She asked, with a serious expression. “It’s Angel’s job, not yours.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I answered, growing a bit concerned. It was the first time Aida had showed any interest in my affairs, but my answer must have seemed overly terse, and dissuaded her from pursuing the matter. She put her head back down and continued her work.
“May God protect you,” she murmured. I finished my coffee in silence.
Angel returned after about a half hour. “Let’s go,” he said. “The horses are waiting outside.”
I went outside with him, and surveyed the animals, which he had hitched to the post of the front door. They were smaller than I had expected, and seemed calm, grazing on the overgrown grass alongside the road.
“That one is the more docile,” Angel said, pointing at the smaller of the two horses. “You can ride her without any trouble. Get on up there.”
He leapt effortlessly onto the other horse, with a degree of dexterity that surprised me, after having observed his almost comically uncoordinated exploits on the soccer field. I mounted my horse with considerably more difficulty. Once up, I grabbed hold of the reigns, and we were off. My horse followed along slowly behind the one carrying Angel, with minimal instruction or coaxing. I was pleased to learn that I seemed to know how to ride a horse after all, at least this one.
We rode out slowly along the main road, along a wide stretch frequently travelled by residents of the outlying villages, as they made their way to and from town. Homes, humbled in their isolation by the expanse of the countryside, sat perched above the route every so often. Smoke spat unevenly from the soot-blackened chimneys at the corners of their bright-red tiled roofs. At irregular intervals on either side of the road, small trails and footpaths led off into the countryside. Angel pointed each one out to me in turn, along with the names of the settlements to which they led.
As we advanced around a wide corner, flanked by low embankments where the road bed had been cut through the middle of a low hill, a group of middle aged women, dressed in colorful patterns of bright green, pink, and red, approached on foot from the opposite direction. Many of them carried small children on their backs, tightly wrapped, and clinging to their mothers. Along with their offspring, they carried an assortment of fruits and vegetables which they appeared to be bringing, slowly, to market in town.
“These women come down from the hills with their produce,” Angel told me, as he tipped his wide brimmed hat to the women. I was sorry to not have a hat like his to tip. He spoke loudly even with the women close by, as if they could not understand him, and indeed they seemed not to. Their loads looked excessive for their small frames.
“Don’t they have husbands to help, or animals to carry their loads?” I asked, observing how the women, already weighed down with their children, still managed the heavy loads by carrying larger burdens in pairs, each taking one handle of a woven basket. As I spoke, one of the women happily yelled something at us in a tongue I couldn’t understand.
“They don’t trust their husbands to bring the goods down to market,” Angel said, as we left the group behind. He interrupted his explanation to shout a greeting at a man who was making his way quickly along the road towards town on a large horse, unburdened by cargo. “Perhaps the produce would arrive,” Angel continued when the man and his horse had passed, leaving us and the women in his wake, “but the money would not get further than the cantinas at the crossroads.”
“What was it that the woman said to you as we passed?” I asked.
“I have no way to know,” Angel said. “These women speak Lenca, as they have for centuries. I can not understand them and they cannot understand me. In communicating with them, you and I are equals.”
As we continued out along the road, winding through the valley, among the low hills and bluffs, I tried to envision the life of those women, deep in that countryside. The telegraph line which we were monitoring split from the main road, and ran off into the fields, following a more direct path to La Esperanza than the road. Angel soon guided us off onto one of the rough side roads.
“Down this road, we’ll find the line again,” he explained.
Far narrower and less manicured than the main road, the trail would have been impassable by all but the most rugged vehicle. It was deeply rutted and had not been graded for years, if ever. Large shade trees grew overhead, providing a refreshing break from the growing intensity of the mid-morning sun. We advanced down that road at more leisurely pace, descending gradually towards a slow river, where the path disappeared under a clear, meandering current. When his horse balked at the notion of entering the water, Angel gave a shout and, twisting a small branch off a low hanging tree, whipped the animal into motion, as it splashed its way across the river. I gave my horse a little kick, and she jolted quickly behind, following her companion across the shallow, rocky stream.
“That’s the way,” Angel observed, looking back with approval, “you’re the boss of that beast.”
Angel had been relatively quiet on the way down the road. But as we ventured farther down this side road, in the unhurried manner that comes most naturally in places where time is just a glare, the old man began to speak in low intonations.
“We head this way another two or three kilometers,” he said, trailing off, as if he were trying to convince himself of the route. I thought I heard him say something about climbing a mountain after that, but I wasn’t sure. He repeated the instructions to himself every so often as we moved along.
In that way, we rode along the shaded bank of the stream, to an opening in the forest, where the road led into a large field. The trees on the edge of the field were shorter, but no less thick than those of the wood we had passed through. I could see the ruins of a number of mud brick houses scattered around the clearing.
“Here the road ends,” Angel said. “Before there was an aldea– a small village, here, many years ago, but it is gone.” He got down slowly off his horse.
“We must leave the horses and walk from here. They will tire on the hill faster than we will.” He tied his horse to a tree, and then, as I dismounted clumsily, secured the second horse. The horses began to graze indifferently in the shade of the forest, as Angel led the way out into the field, towards the battered frames of the abandoned houses.
Suddenly, I felt the odd sensation that sets in innately, if inexplicably, when one is being watched. I looked up towards a house at the far end of the clearing, but saw only Angel racing on ahead of me. Moving at an impressive pace for a man past his prime, he had already rounded a corner where the forest juts out into the clearing, and hurried on, away from the ruins. I had to move quickly to catch up to him. He stopped on the edge of a broader, open area where the forest met the rocky incline of the hills, now before us, at the beginning of a long ascent to impressive pine-covered peaks well above. Angel, a bit winded from his sprint, sat down under a tree and opened the pack he carried with him.
“Lunch time,” he said. “Aida has packed our meals.” She had prepared corn tamales wrapped in banana leaves. We ate in the shade of the trees at the point where the clearings came together in a narrow field, as we looked, slightly downhill, at the abandoned town below.
“At the far end of that field,” Angel said after several minutes, pointing to the area below the hill on the other side of the clearing, where the trees were shorter than elsewhere, “you can see the half buried homes. The avalanche that wiped out this community buried many of its people alive. The elders in San Juan, my sisters, for example, insist that their spirits are still here.”
“They don’t like me to come here,” he continued. “And they were quite irritated at the idea of bringing you along. But it is mostly superstition.” With that he finished his tamale, tossing the banana leaf off into the field. Then he leaned against the tree under which were sitting, and pulled his sombrero down over his face.
“Time for the siesta,” he mumbled.
As he slept, I lay in the cool grass of the shade along the edge of the field. This trek had already taken much of the day, I thought, with questionable results. I gazed out towards the buried town, and breathed deeply, drawing the pure country air into my lungs. The thought of spending the entire day on such a dubious adventure didn’t bother me in the least. I had no appointments. Time had suddenly become as meaningless to me as it was to Angel, or anyone else I might find out here.
My mind clear with those thoughts, I gradually drifted off into the shaded realm of a mid-afternoon nap surrounded by nature. I had little idea how much time had past when Angel woke me up, but the afternoon breeze was lisping through the trees, and the air had cooled significantly.
“Ready for the climb?” Angel asked, with renewed vigor in the cool of the afternoon. “God willing, we will find the problem with the line.” He was already on his feet and headed for the base of the hill. I scrambled up quickly and started after him, still a bit disoriented from my deep sleep. The incline was just steep enough to take on upright, but required significant effort. As we climbed, I could see the lay of the land around us. The forested ravine through which we had approached the hills engulfed the mid section of the valley, on either side of the small river we had crossed. As we climbed a bit higher, I could make out among the trees the shaded road we had taken, as it ran between two steep hills into the clearing where the abandoned town lay. Every few steps brought us several meters higher, and before long, the entire valley was visible, San Juan at its center, a large cluster of deep red roofs, flanked by the stark backdrop of Cerro Grande. From the town, the main road ran northwest in a chalky white strip along the base of the mountain, towards the dryer, flatter west. Angel took a seat on a boulder, pausing for a rest as he stared out into the valley.
“In the west on the horizon, that mountain you see is Celaque. It watches over Gracias, the capital of the province to the West, just as Cerro Grande guards San Juan. Jaguars and other creatures still roam those mountains,” he said, mysteriously. “To the south, over there, that long hill is known as the Retumbador. Its name comes from the sound that the thunder makes as it bounces off the side of the hill, and resonates across the valley. There is no way out of the valley on that end, except over the hill. Much as there is no way out in this direction, except over this hill.” With that, he sprung back to his feet and continued quickly upward.
“No time for sight seeing,” he called back as he hurried on, “we should get up the hill. The sun is beginning to drop and the afternoon will be cold if we’re stuck too high on the mountain.”
I scampered upward after him. When we reached the top of that hill, several hundred meters above the clearing where we had started, Angel paused. On the other side of the peak, the telegraph line appeared, held aloft by occasional poles forged from tree trunks, as it ran along the side of an adjacent slope. Every so often, just as the line nearly reached the ground, a flimsy wooden post would appear a few hundred meters on, to affect a gradual climb back upward. It was no wonder, I thought, that the line was usually out of order. We walked down towards the cable, and Angel continued to a place where he could reach up to handle it. There, he pulled an apparatus out of his pack and connected it to the line.
“It’s dead here as well,” he announced in a matter-of-fact way. “The problem is onward.” He paused for some time, considering the line as it ran into the distance, up and over another large hill on the horizon. The sun had sunk behind the peak we had just summitted, and clouds were beginning to set in. The breeze picked up, as if to remind Angel of the limited time. It was already getting cold.
“On the other side of this mountain,” Angel said after some time, “is the town of Yaramanguilla. Those volcanoes in the distance belong to the country to the south.” He pointed to two cone shaped hills on the horizon.
“You’ve been there?” I asked him, as he put away the device he had used to test the line. He began to walk along the line, and I followed, up the next hill, climbing to a peak even higher than before, from which we could once again observe most of the valley below.
“There? Never,” Angel answered after a long delay. “The domain of the Perdidos, is this valley,” he said, still moving along as he turned back towards the valley, partially hidden behind the summit of the first hill. “Onward, by those hills, over there on the other side of Cerro Grande, is Belen. That’s where our family comes from. My father left Belen with his sisters, Felicidad and Soledad, to come to San Juan. But that was a long enough trip for us, at least for a few generations. We stay here, in this valley. Aida, for example, has never been beyond the valley, nor has tia Felicidad or Soledad.” He stopped talking as the climb became a bit more strenuous. When we reached the top of the hill, he spoke again.
“I have been as far as La Esperanza many times, and to Gracias, near Celaque, that mountain we see in the distance.” Angel motioned deliberately as he looked into the distance beyond the valley. He seemed intimately familiar with the geography surrounding this hill, from which he could map out the comings and goings of several generations, and his entire lifetime.
I was still considering the uniqueness of his situation, in a world as big as the one I knew, when Angel started off, back down the hill. I followed after him as he hurried quickly downward.
“And the telegraph line?” I yelled after him, unable once again to match his ambitious pace, as he descended, back towards the valley below, at nearly a run.
“The problem is onward, towards La Esperanza,” he said definitively. “My responsibility ends at the top of the hill.”
The descent was breathtakingly quick behind Angel, who moved down the hill with the agility of a person who had lived a lifetime among rocky inclines such as these. Painstakingly measuring each step as I broke my descent, I fell well behind. The sun was sinking quickly in the sky as we reached the clearing of the buried village. Behind the forest, the setting sun cast long, dark shadows across the field, as dusk visited once more this town that many dusks ago had ceased to count in days. As we walked among the abandoned homes, I again felt a strong premonition, which this time gave rise to a desire to move on as quickly as possible. The horses seemed to share the concern, as they wasted little time, once we untied and mounted them, in trotting quickly back down the path towards the river crossing, where they galloped across the water without any of their previous hesitation.
Angel said nothing as we forded the stream once more, and rushed through the darkening woods towards the main road. When the forest gave way and we had reached the familiar expanse of the main route, he slowed his horse to a trot and pulled back, alongside me. “The spirits are all about out here in the night. They listen to everything we say, and consider each thing we do,” he whispered. “But we are safe now. They have let us pass the woods without problems. They recognize me, but I worried that you would be unfamiliar to them.”
“You said that the stories about the spirits were superstition,” I said, speaking too loudly for Angel, who glanced about worriedly.
“Superstition, in the midday sun, my friend,” he said in a solemn manner, once he had assured himself that we were alone, “becomes reality in the country night.”
Despite his concern, Angel was obviously relieved to be free of the forest, and he became more talkative as we rode along the wide road back into San Juan. The horses themselves strode rather triumphantly back up the hill into town, past the main square and up the block to Aida’s house. There I dismounted, and Angel took his leave, pulling my horse along behind his. I went inside, tired and suddenly quite aware of the soreness of my body.
I found the kitchen dark and empty, with only a glimmer of light from the receding flames of the stove complementing a dim lantern on the table. I took a seat at the table and gave a shrill call, trying to imitate the greeting I had now heard on several occasions. Soon Patricia emerged from one of the back rooms. Yet again, she looked surprised to see me.
“Oh, mister, how did it go? Did you fix the telegraph?” she asked as she continued into the kitchen.
“The problem was farther along the line. Our efforts were of no use.”
“Yes, the problem is always along the line further on. Nothing ever happens on this side to disrupt it,” she said, as she shifted some pots around on the stove. I got the sense she had already known the answer to her question, as, it seemed, did Angel, even before we had set off in the morning.
“Then, Patricia,” I asked, as she began to pile food onto a plate for my dinner, “why did we go? Why would Angel allow his time to be wasted?”
“It’s not a waste,” she said. “That is Angel’s job. You need to send a telegram, you have asked, and his job is to send it. Just as my job is to provide this food for you,” she said, setting a heaping plate on the table in front of me. “Each in this world has his role.”
I wouldn’t ask again about telegrams. When the line was fixed, months later, Angel sent the telegram anyway. He had kept the paper I had given him in a drawer in his desk. Nevertheless, when I eventually spoke with the sub-director about the issue, she complained that she had never received news of my arrival. Perhaps the operator in the capital had not been at the telegraph when it came through, I explained to her. But she had no way to understand what I meant.
The state paid handsomely to maintain the telegraph line to San Juan. It paid people like Angel Perdido, after he was hired as the telegraph operator in San Juan, to learn Morse code. Chunks of the state budget went to train would-be technicians of that nineteenth century art. Having painstakingly learned the intricacies of his post, a telegraph operator in a small town like San Juan could then expect to sit idle for hours, or even days, at a time, at his work by the telegraph.
In the years since he had taken over the job from his father, Angel Segundo had become quite adept at sitting, as he labored in the relative tranquility of the self-employed, even if that description did not exactly fit his situation, which was similar mainly in that he worked unburdened by the threat of supervision, given that those directly tasked with overseeing his work lived in large, comfortable houses, in the capital far away, and a supervisory trip to a far-flung place like San Juan was not high on their agenda, since such an endeavor implied certain inconveniences, such as an overnight stay away from the comforts amassed through years of exploiting the state bureaucracy, and the even more grave and undesirable possible consequences of being physically absent from such post. One simply never knew when the fleeting opportunity for further exploitation of the system might arise. Faced with those circumstances, officials of the telegraph company, like those of other state run enterprises, preferred whenever possible to avoid work that required them to leave the immediate vicinity of their homes.
It was quite a simple matter, then, for the elder Angel, when he grew tired of working daily, to teach his only son to man the infrequently used line, then gradually disappear into the inner sanctum of the Perdido home, from his long-time post in the front room that doubled as the telegraph office. The townspeople carried on sending their occasional telegrams through Angel Segundo, and little changed. A smart man, Angel Segundo, rather than take his chances with the government bureaucracy, simply assumed his father’s identity, and collected the monthly paycheck. The switch worked flawlessly until the elder Angel finally passed away, at which point, in order to avoid inconvenient interruptions in their comfortable income stream, the Perdido family was forced into the unfortunate charade of reporting the death of the younger Angel on all official paperwork. The Perdidos buried the elder Angel, and mourned the younger, in a way that, if disingenuous, was apt given the new responsibilities Angel Segundo would take on as head of the household. After such a confusing experience, Angel Segundo felt obligated to more permanently and dramatically assume the person of his father, referring to himself as Don Angel, and behaving in every way like a man several decades older.
Given the circumstances surrounding the history of the post, it could be said that Angel took his job quite seriously. According to the operator’s manual, the telegraph technician was expected to man the machine all day long, lest an urgent incoming cable arrive and find no one to interpret it. His duties also included attending to the local population, eager to communicate with the outside world.
By the time I arrived in San Juan early that summer, however, it had become relatively clear to even the most aloof observers that not even the most traditional townspeople continued to believe, generally speaking, that the telegraph was a good way to communicate. Given its less than fail-proof design, the antique system was vulnerable to replacement by just about any medium. Indeed, the reliability of communication by telegraph left much to be desired by any standard. If, for example, a telegram came in, and Angel wasn’t at his desk in the office, awaiting it, the senders were apt to give up, and the communication would be permanently lost. It was partly for such reasons, and also because the conformity of the townspeople with of the idea of an outside party receiving and reading their personal messages had decreased significantly, that important communications to and from San Juan had long since begun to be carried in sealed envelopes on the bus, to La Esperanza, where further action was taken.
But no one had explained any of that to me. Indeed, my supervisors had quite the opposite opinion. In the short period our discussion had continued, after the Peace Corps sub-director had told me of my assignment in San Juan, I objected to the placement on the grounds, among other things, of lack of viable communication. The Peace Corps bylaws list reliable communication means in a work site as a fundamental necessity in case of emergency. The sub-director dismissed my concern by encouraging me to make frequent use of what she described as “the efficient and reliable telegraph system.” She further indicated that she felt it a good idea for me to, immediately upon arrival in San Juan, familiarize myself with the system by sending a telegram to her to convey my well-being and safe arrival. I suspected that request was designed mostly to assure her that I had in fact made my way to San Juan instead of off somewhere else, the latter option seeming to be the general consensus for the expected behavior of a worker facing the sort of non-sensical assignment I had been handed.
Nevertheless, that first afternoon in San Juan, after cleaning out as best I could the room in which I would sleep, hanging the hammock out back, and taking a rather extended nap in the shade of the patio overhang, I went straight to the telegraph office, anxious to make good on my promise to report my arrival, if for no other reason than to demonstrate that I was, in fact, in San Juan. It seemed like a simple enough task.
In the years since the first Don Angel had evicted Felicidad from her bedroom in his efforts to fashion the original office, the telegraph had been moved across the street to a front room of Felicidad’s house. After the death of her brother, Soledad had decided that there was no longer space in what was now her house for Angel Segundo and his telegraph, which she deemed to be irreconcilably haunted by Angel’s spirit. Angel tried incense, incantations, prayers, and overnight vigils, and even brought in the local priest, but Soledad was not to be convinced. In an ironic twist which no one in the Perdido family seemed to appreciate, Felicidad came to Angel’s rescue, renting a space to the telegraph company, at a slightly inflated price that took into account the unpredictable consequences of bringing a spirit into her home in such a cavalier fashion.
It was in that new office that I found a middle aged man with unusually light skin bent over a table, distracted in the process of rewiring one of an assortment of old radios, and similar devices, piled on the floor behind his desk, an activity which I would later find occupied the majority of the time that the second incarnation of Don Angel did not dedicate to shouting insinuating comments at adolescent girls as they passed by on the street in front of his office.
I stood in the doorway quietly.
“Ah, mister gringo,” the man said, when he eventually looked from his work. “Don Angel Segundo Perdido, at your service.”
“Good afternoon,” I said. “This is telegraph office?” I stepped forward into the room.
“Come in, mister gringo. I heard of your arrival.” Word had spread, at least through this house. “You’ve come to Aida’s for dinner? That’s good. Sit down, have some coffee first.”
“Patricia, some coffee for the afternoon break. The gringo has come to visit,” he yelled through the doorway at the back of the office, which opened into the corridor leading to the kitchen. A loud yelp signaling affirmation emanated from space beyond the doorway.
“Thank you, Don Angel. In reality I have come to see about sending a telegram to my supervisors in the capital,” I said, handing him a small piece of paper with the wording of the message to be sent.
“Ah, a telegram.” He took the paper and placed it on his desk, smiled at me, and then looked out the front door. “Greetings, Don Jose,” he yelled through the open door in front, at a passing man. A similar cry came from the street outside. Angel smiled as he continued to look out onto the street. Slowly, he focused his attention back on me, “tell me mister gringo, how do you like San Juan?”
“You can call me Kawil, Don Angel. Kawil is my name.”
“Kawil? Gringo is easier. Like me. They call me chele because of the light color of my skin.”
Patricia came in with two cups of coffee on a tray. “Ah mister gringo,” she said, “you’ve met chele Angel? So many white people in here it would seem we are in the U-S-A.”
“Yes,” I replied, giving up on the name issue for the time being. “I came to see about sending a telegraph.”
“Ha!” She laughed. “Send a telegram, mister? I don’t think chele Angel even knows how! Forget about that and come have some dinner.” With that she left the coffee on the desk in front of us, and walked out through the back door.
“Yes, the telegraph’s down,” Angel continued, as he stirred a heap of sugar into his coffee, with a matter-of-factness that should have made it apparent there was nothing unusual about such a state of affairs. “The line is - not so good. Do you like much sugar in your coffee?”
“When do you think the device might be fixed?” I asked, pressing the matter.
“It’s not the telegraph that’s broken,” Angel replied patiently, as he took a sip of coffee, and looked up at me once more. “It’s the line to La Esperanza that is down.”
“Well, that telegram is urgent. It is going to my supervisors to let them know I have arrived,” I explained. “When do you think I can send it?”
“Your supervisors?” Angel said with a laugh. “They should know you are here from the fact that you are no longer there. Tell me, where are your supervisors, if you are working for the cooperative?”
Angel seemed intrigued, both by my arrival, and my interest in his telegraph line, which must have been unparalleled in recent memory. I thought it impolite to press the subject of the telegram further just then, so I let the conversation turn to other matters as the street outside grew dim in the fading afternoon light. I worked on convincing him that my name was not in fact Mister Gringo, and he told me a little about San Juan, the telegraph business, and fixing radios.
In the last light of dusk, Juan arrived, having shut the cooperative for the night. “I looked for you at the house,” he said, stepping into the office from the patio, and taking a seat comfortably on a bench along the wall of the office. “Then I imagined you might be here.”
As the night quickly descended on my first day in San Juan, Angel closed the door to the street, and the three of us passed through to the corridor, and on to the kitchen for dinner. We sat down around the old wooden table, placed in the alcove in a way that left its occupants staring into the adjacent kitchen, where Aida and her two daughters were at work preparing the evening meal.
“Ah, Juan,” Patricia said, with the same surprise that she had greeted us earlier in the day. I was beginning to think that bewildered demeanor to be her natural state. “You’re early. No football today?”
“No Patti, it’s been a long day, with the journey. We are hungry. Let’s see if Aida can move a little faster tonight,” Juan replied, laughing again.
“Savage Indian,” Aida quickly snapped, this time with much more energy than she had displayed in the afternoon.
The only thing I had eaten all day had been the small lunch, and I was hungry. Aida served plates of chicken, avocado, and refried beans, accompanied by the ubiquitous corn tortillas and a salad of vegetables. I began to eat eagerly, as Juan picked the onions out of his salad. Angel observed me closely.
“He eats with a great appetite, not nearly as picky as Juan, but this is not gringo food,” Don Angel said out loud, as I grabbed another tortilla.
“No, Don Angel, but it’s very good,” I said, loud enough so that Aida, who was glancing at us furtively from her post in the kitchen, could easily hear. “I usually don’t eat much after travelling.”
After the meal, we lingered around the table, as we drank our evening coffee. Other diners, who had been served at the tables in the front room by Nancy and Patricia, had come and gone. I gazed into the dark kitchen, where the embers of the fire burned orange in recess of the earthen stove, fighting a losing battle with the encroaching dark of the country night. Blackness seeped through the open windows and doors, and swept in from the gaps in the roof created by the broken, irregular tiles. There the night momentarily sequestered the furls of smoke as they huddled among the rafters of the dilapidated roof, each awaiting patiently the chance to escape through one of the openings, to meet the stars shining in the cool night beyond that precarious barrier.
My mind drifted as well, as Juan told Angel of the journey to the capital and back, and of the plans for the cooperative. As they spoke, Aida, nearly finished with her daily work, took a moment’s rest, motionless in a chair along the wall of the kitchen, next to the warm stove. As the flickering light from the fire bounced weakly off the mud walls, her profile was occasionally revealed amidst the shadows there. As a slow current of cold air began to flow in, conspiring with the darkness in its battle against the light from the dying fire in the corner oven, another shadow rose from the courtyard and stole into the kitchen, gliding on worn, bare feet across the dirt floor, towards the place where Aida rested. It was a woman, her slight frame bent against the weight of her body, covered in loose garments, a faded old dress and apron, a shawl covering her head. Aida moved gently aside, and the old woman fell onto the bench next to the fire. She spread her bony fingers in the front of the stove, as the shadows danced along the walls and ceiling.
“Good evening, aunt,” Don Angel said solemnly.
“Good evening, Doña Felicidad,” Juan called out.
The woman said nothing. Angel turned to me. “My aunt is old and doesn’t hear very well. Mama,” he said, calling loudly into the kitchen, “here is mister gringo. He has come to work with Juan in the cooperative here.”
The old woman continued to sit silently for quite some time, warming herself against the stove. Eventually, she lowered her hands and turned slowly towards the table.
“A gringo,” she said slowly, long after it seemed as if she would remain quiet. “That is good. He will do good here,” she whispered as she squinted towards me, through the darkness. Her dark eyes caught the low glint of the fire as they peered at me from a warn face starkly outlined by her coarse, white hair. “He looks like others who have come,” she said quietly, turning her attention back to the fire.
Juan stood up. “Ready to go?” he asked, as he headed into the kitchen to bid goodnight to the women there. I slowly got up as well.
Aida had returned to work, washing dishes in the basin by the sink. I approached her carefully, stopping a few steps short of the countertop. She hadn’t directed a single word towards me yet, and I was a bit wary of her.
“Doña Aida,” I said quietly, “may I eat here each day, as Juan does?”
She paused from her dish washing and looked at her mother in the corner. The old woman gave a quick, firm nod. Aida then slowly transferred her gaze to me. With a sincere nod, she communicated a thousand words of sincere acceptance.
“While there is food, you can come here to eat. It’s late now, go home,” she said. I began to open my mouth to speak, but I was interrupted by a loud voice from the corner.
“Go home, you silly Indians,” cried Felicidad, in a commanding voice, markedly different from her previously whispers. “Get to your homes before the spirits come.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Those first days in San Juan passed in the slow motion that mocks those with few immediate plans or prospects, exacerbating the quandary of the present. The roosters woke me each morning at daybreak, as the gentle morning sunlight streamed through the small window of my room, coaxing me from the long, deep sleep that can only be had away from the loud, bright inventions of the modern world. Awakening there, in that starkly outfitted, four walled room, I would wonder for a moment, as so often is the case after a long sleep in an unfamiliar bed, where I was, before recalling the strange reality that had suddenly become my life. Perhaps in those days it took a few moments more than it might normally have to convince myself that San Juan was not an invention of some long, mid-summer’s dream. It would be quite some time before such confusion ceased to invade the first consciousness of my days.
Confronted with long, empty days, I needed to find a way to pass the time. Working at the cooperative did not seem to be the immediate answer. Juan was constantly in and out of town, and we delayed talking about work, as he was repeatedly called to make runs on his motorbike between San Juan and La Esperanza, in order to pass along messages or retrieve cash. Indeed, his role as a courier seemed to be the most important aspect of his job.
As a consequence, he would often be away overnight, and I found myself quickly and frequently alone in the house. Much of those first few days I spent at home in the hammock out back, wiling away the hours, as I stared at the mountain in the distance. I needed some time to assimilate the shock that the sudden change had brought to my life, and I soon found that quiet time by the garden was one way to slowly adapt to my new surroundings. There I passed the long afternoons, watching the weather pass, from sun, to rain, then back again. I might have remained there indefinitely, when I wasn’t taking my meals at the Perdido house, had it not been for one particular factor, which motivated me to leave the house, late each day. Following the afternoon showers that transformed the hot, hazy midday into a cool cloudy afternoon, I would make my way to the town’s soccer field.
One of my first discoveries in San Juan had been a shared passion with every other man and child, from six to sixty, in town. In those first days, the routine of soccer became a crucial element of adaptation to my new life. Juan, when he was in town, would hurriedly shut the cooperative a few minutes before five, then hurry home to change into soccer gear. Not anxious to let on that I had spent the better part of the afternoon lying in the hammock, I would quickly scramble to my feet when I heard the rattling of the door to the patio from his room, as he unhitched the internal iron bar he used as a lock. Juan would soon emerge onto the back patio, and with the excited smile of a small child anticipating a game, would ask, “Kawil, are we going to play football?”
The answer had been established on the second day after my arrival, when Juan had mentioned the afternoon game. Even on the days that Juan was away, I would go to the field alone to join a game. When he was in town we would religiously follow the same routine. After he arrived and dressed quickly, we would head out the door together, towards the field, up the road past the Perdido house.
The field spreads over two city blocks at the far end of town. Like many fields I would come to know, in the rural areas of this country, it was less than perfect. Sloping gradually downhill along its length, it provided a subtle advantage to the side that played in that preferred direction, causing the players, when assigning teams, to define the two sides as “up” and “down.” The grass would grow to nearly knee length in the rainy season – the condition I found it in upon arrival - then dry out and disappear completely, turning the pitch to a dustbowl by late summer. Cows and other livestock generally displayed less than the desirable hesitancy to meander onto the field during play, roaming about wherever they pleased. But like any other unexpected obstacle, these obstructions were considered part of the game, and were played around without a second thought, except on the amusing occasions when a player of some repute in the village, for example the mayor or one of his staff, on one of their occasional forays onto the field, would haplessly tumble into a pile of cow manure.
But before getting as far as the field, Juan and I had stops to make along the route. The most important detour was to the corner store.
“He’s going to say that he is too busy to play,” Juan would say, as we approached, of the store’s proprietor, Sandro.
“We will convince him, in the end, that sport is more beneficial than work,” Juan continued with a smile, as we stepped off the road into the store, speaking in his particular way, loudly enough to be overheard but not to be accused of speaking directly to anyone.
The store’s owner, Sandro Martinez, was one of San Juan’s success stories. He did not come from one of the traditional families of San Juan, but had still managed to build on that corner a large and successful general store, which amply supported his family. Sandro loved to play football, but his economic endeavors and family took precedence. Sandro had befriended Juan years before, when Juan first arrived in town. Having made his own lot in life, Sandro was not intimidated by outsiders, unlike many of the established families, who perhaps feared losing their tight grip over the town’s affairs.
Each day, despite being short of time on the way to the field, Juan insisted on stopping by Sandro’s store, in an attempt to convince him to leave his affairs at the shop for an hour or two of sport. Invariably, we would find Sandro behind the counter, twirling the end of his long black moustache with long, bony fingers weathered from years of hard work, as he contemplated the barren street in front of his store. And each day, the exchange followed the same basic pattern.
“No football for me today,” Sandro would say, as he looked at us, dressed in our sporting clothes, cleats in hand. “I need to count the inventory.”
“All right Sandro, give up the charade,” Juan would quickly reply. Juan preferred to budget an extra five minutes or so along the way for this conversation, but the soccer game was a pressing engagement, and there was little extra time for the beating around the bush that was standard in discussing less important affairs.
Temporarily frustrated, Juan would take a seat restlessly on the large sacks of grains stacked in the corner, and begin to talk to whoever was in earshot, describing the fun we were about to have at the soccer field.
“It’s a shame you won’t play,” he would say to Sandro, opening whatever product was close at hand, and beginning to snack, “because the games have been very good lately.”
If Sandro refused to give in easily, Juan would scale up his efforts at persuasion by moving behind the counter and raiding the store’s gas-powered cooler, extracting soft drinks, and handing them out as if he were the owner of the store.
Sandro might resist for a few minutes more, before throwing his hands up in capitulation. “If I don’t go,” he would yell out, calling in his wife to look after the store in his place, “these two will eat the entire inventory and there will be nothing left to sell.” Then he would disappear into the back of the store, which doubled as his family’s home, where he would dress quickly, before the three of us headed for the field.
On any given day, anyone might show up to play. High school students played, alongside their professors. Don Angel and Anhiel were there as frequently as their work and past-prime legs would allow. They had formed a team which they called the “Veterans,” a collection of older men, bellies rounded by the years, who attempted to make up for in guile what they had lost in mobility. Even the mayor would come out on the rare occasions that he was in town.
The number of players varied by day as well. Some days, only a dozen or so showed, and we played a small-sided game. Other days, there would be more than thirty men, too many even for that huge field. But seldom was anyone left out, and the game could grow into a fifteen-a-side melee.
I met most every resident of the town on that field in those first few weeks, excluding, of course, the women, who stayed at home at that hour, preparing the evening meal. Soccer was a part of village life in which even an outsider could have a role that everyone could understand. On the field all the rules changed. In a place where clocks have very little use, the one punctual engagement each day was the football match. The game began each afternoon at five sharp. And the criteria for understanding one another changed as well. It no longer made sense to judge by appearance, language, or anything else not directly related to the play on the field. Young and old, conservative and liberal, local and foreigner, all began as equals there.
So in soccer, which, happily, I had grown up playing, I found an equalizing factor that highlighted my similarities to the locals. My work at the cooperative couldn’t do that, since few understood what I, or anyone else there, actually did. Even if my association with the bank did give me a certain immediate legitimacy in the community, the institution of banking was unfamiliar to most in the area, and though my presence in town could be more easily understood through my presumed role in the mysterious activities taking place behind that counter where money was dispensed and collected, in that context I remained a foreigner engaged in generally incomprehensible work. But with each day on that rain soaked, overgrown, bumpy soccer field, I became that much less of an outsider. On the field, I was judged by what I did with the ball, and that was a language in which I was much more proficient.
After each daily session wound to and end, the players would gather together for a moment’s rest on the sidelines, as the sun sank low in the sky. Then each would head for home, several of us, including a number of Perdidos, Angel and Anhiel, and their nephew Oduber, down the same road.
“The gringo is not a bad football player,” Angel began, on one such afternoon late in my first week in town. “He plays as well as some of the better players from this town.”
“Better,” Juan said, in his usual congratulatory manner, to which I was growing accustomed. I appreciated his flattery, though I had been a bit surprised to find that I wasn’t as good as the best players in that town. Soccer was like a religion there, and I was amazed at the concentration of skill. Juan, himself, I later found out, had played semi-professionally in La Esperanza before retiring to a more sensible life in banking.
“He plays so well, in fact,” Angel continued, “that the teams in town are wondering for which one he will play.” I knew that he was talking about the local tournament. It hadn’t taken long for me to be made to understand that, aside from the friendly scrimmages during the week, the town put on weekend matches in which teams from the village played against teams from the outlying settlements.
“There is no doubt which team he will play for,” Anhiel interjected authoritatively, embracing me firmly with one arm as we walked. “He is from the Perdido house, and will play for the Eagles.”
“Sandro might have a different opinion, as the captain of the Independent side,” Juan said, somewhat bashfully.
“But Sandro is not here,” Oduber said. Sandro had left town on one of his frequent trips to purchase merchandise for the store. “Besides,” he said, looking at me as he spoke, “it wouldn’t be right for someone who lives and eats with us at the house to play for the opponents.”
As we arrived at the Perdido house, and the group filed in for dinner, Angel pulled me aside.
“About that telegram,” he began. I had been by his office frequently to ask about progress in sending the telegram to the capital, but the line remained out of order. “Tomorrow I will go to fix the line. Perhaps you are as good with a horse as you are with a football. You can come along if you like.”
In a moment of confidence inspired by the newfound feeling of inclusion on the soccer field, I didn’t think twice. “Of course I will go with you,” I said.
“Tomorrow we go after breakfast then,” Angel said with a pleased expression.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
“Aida, prepare two lunches to carry away– one for me and one for my assistant,” Angel said in a commanding voice. He had come into the kitchen to find me finishing my morning coffee and chatting aimlessly with Patricia.
“Wait for me here,” he said, as he headed out the door.
“So you’re going out with Uncle Angel to fix the line?” Patricia asked, smiling cheerfully as she came over to clear the table.
“Yes, we’ll go fix it, I suppose, we’ll see what it takes,” I said, realizing that I had little idea what fixing a telegraph line might entail.
“So you know how to ride a horse?” she asked. In truth, I had never ridden a horse before. But I assumed that I could.
“Of course,” I replied confidently, with a feigned air of assuredness that made me feel uncomfortable. I was not anxious to provide ammunition to support the idea that I was getting into something over my head, “- so the horse is necessary…” I said, trailing off and leaving the sentence unfinished, hoping that she could complete it with more information.
“The horse is necessary,” she said, echoing my words but failing to add anything. She extracted a few potatoes from of a sack next to the table, then headed off down the corridor to wash them, smiling at me as she passed. “Oh, mister,” she sighed.
I was left alone in the kitchen with Aida. She paused from her work in the kitchen, slicing vegetables, and looked up at me, intently. “You really want to go jaunting off through the countryside to try to fix the line?” She asked, with a serious expression. “It’s Angel’s job, not yours.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I answered, growing a bit concerned. It was the first time Aida had showed any interest in my affairs, but my answer must have seemed overly terse, and dissuaded her from pursuing the matter. She put her head back down and continued her work.
“May God protect you,” she murmured. I finished my coffee in silence.
Angel returned after about a half hour. “Let’s go,” he said. “The horses are waiting outside.”
I went outside with him, and surveyed the animals, which he had hitched to the post of the front door. They were smaller than I had expected, and seemed calm, grazing on the overgrown grass alongside the road.
“That one is the more docile,” Angel said, pointing at the smaller of the two horses. “You can ride her without any trouble. Get on up there.”
He leapt effortlessly onto the other horse, with a degree of dexterity that surprised me, after having observed his almost comically uncoordinated exploits on the soccer field. I mounted my horse with considerably more difficulty. Once up, I grabbed hold of the reigns, and we were off. My horse followed along slowly behind the one carrying Angel, with minimal instruction or coaxing. I was pleased to learn that I seemed to know how to ride a horse after all, at least this one.
We rode out slowly along the main road, along a wide stretch frequently travelled by residents of the outlying villages, as they made their way to and from town. Homes, humbled in their isolation by the expanse of the countryside, sat perched above the route every so often. Smoke spat unevenly from the soot-blackened chimneys at the corners of their bright-red tiled roofs. At irregular intervals on either side of the road, small trails and footpaths led off into the countryside. Angel pointed each one out to me in turn, along with the names of the settlements to which they led.
As we advanced around a wide corner, flanked by low embankments where the road bed had been cut through the middle of a low hill, a group of middle aged women, dressed in colorful patterns of bright green, pink, and red, approached on foot from the opposite direction. Many of them carried small children on their backs, tightly wrapped, and clinging to their mothers. Along with their offspring, they carried an assortment of fruits and vegetables which they appeared to be bringing, slowly, to market in town.
“These women come down from the hills with their produce,” Angel told me, as he tipped his wide brimmed hat to the women. I was sorry to not have a hat like his to tip. He spoke loudly even with the women close by, as if they could not understand him, and indeed they seemed not to. Their loads looked excessive for their small frames.
“Don’t they have husbands to help, or animals to carry their loads?” I asked, observing how the women, already weighed down with their children, still managed the heavy loads by carrying larger burdens in pairs, each taking one handle of a woven basket. As I spoke, one of the women happily yelled something at us in a tongue I couldn’t understand.
“They don’t trust their husbands to bring the goods down to market,” Angel said, as we left the group behind. He interrupted his explanation to shout a greeting at a man who was making his way quickly along the road towards town on a large horse, unburdened by cargo. “Perhaps the produce would arrive,” Angel continued when the man and his horse had passed, leaving us and the women in his wake, “but the money would not get further than the cantinas at the crossroads.”
“What was it that the woman said to you as we passed?” I asked.
“I have no way to know,” Angel said. “These women speak Lenca, as they have for centuries. I can not understand them and they cannot understand me. In communicating with them, you and I are equals.”
As we continued out along the road, winding through the valley, among the low hills and bluffs, I tried to envision the life of those women, deep in that countryside. The telegraph line which we were monitoring split from the main road, and ran off into the fields, following a more direct path to La Esperanza than the road. Angel soon guided us off onto one of the rough side roads.
“Down this road, we’ll find the line again,” he explained.
Far narrower and less manicured than the main road, the trail would have been impassable by all but the most rugged vehicle. It was deeply rutted and had not been graded for years, if ever. Large shade trees grew overhead, providing a refreshing break from the growing intensity of the mid-morning sun. We advanced down that road at more leisurely pace, descending gradually towards a slow river, where the path disappeared under a clear, meandering current. When his horse balked at the notion of entering the water, Angel gave a shout and, twisting a small branch off a low hanging tree, whipped the animal into motion, as it splashed its way across the river. I gave my horse a little kick, and she jolted quickly behind, following her companion across the shallow, rocky stream.
“That’s the way,” Angel observed, looking back with approval, “you’re the boss of that beast.”
Angel had been relatively quiet on the way down the road. But as we ventured farther down this side road, in the unhurried manner that comes most naturally in places where time is just a glare, the old man began to speak in low intonations.
“We head this way another two or three kilometers,” he said, trailing off, as if he were trying to convince himself of the route. I thought I heard him say something about climbing a mountain after that, but I wasn’t sure. He repeated the instructions to himself every so often as we moved along.
In that way, we rode along the shaded bank of the stream, to an opening in the forest, where the road led into a large field. The trees on the edge of the field were shorter, but no less thick than those of the wood we had passed through. I could see the ruins of a number of mud brick houses scattered around the clearing.
“Here the road ends,” Angel said. “Before there was an aldea– a small village, here, many years ago, but it is gone.” He got down slowly off his horse.
“We must leave the horses and walk from here. They will tire on the hill faster than we will.” He tied his horse to a tree, and then, as I dismounted clumsily, secured the second horse. The horses began to graze indifferently in the shade of the forest, as Angel led the way out into the field, towards the battered frames of the abandoned houses.
Suddenly, I felt the odd sensation that sets in innately, if inexplicably, when one is being watched. I looked up towards a house at the far end of the clearing, but saw only Angel racing on ahead of me. Moving at an impressive pace for a man past his prime, he had already rounded a corner where the forest juts out into the clearing, and hurried on, away from the ruins. I had to move quickly to catch up to him. He stopped on the edge of a broader, open area where the forest met the rocky incline of the hills, now before us, at the beginning of a long ascent to impressive pine-covered peaks well above. Angel, a bit winded from his sprint, sat down under a tree and opened the pack he carried with him.
“Lunch time,” he said. “Aida has packed our meals.” She had prepared corn tamales wrapped in banana leaves. We ate in the shade of the trees at the point where the clearings came together in a narrow field, as we looked, slightly downhill, at the abandoned town below.
“At the far end of that field,” Angel said after several minutes, pointing to the area below the hill on the other side of the clearing, where the trees were shorter than elsewhere, “you can see the half buried homes. The avalanche that wiped out this community buried many of its people alive. The elders in San Juan, my sisters, for example, insist that their spirits are still here.”
“They don’t like me to come here,” he continued. “And they were quite irritated at the idea of bringing you along. But it is mostly superstition.” With that he finished his tamale, tossing the banana leaf off into the field. Then he leaned against the tree under which were sitting, and pulled his sombrero down over his face.
“Time for the siesta,” he mumbled.
As he slept, I lay in the cool grass of the shade along the edge of the field. This trek had already taken much of the day, I thought, with questionable results. I gazed out towards the buried town, and breathed deeply, drawing the pure country air into my lungs. The thought of spending the entire day on such a dubious adventure didn’t bother me in the least. I had no appointments. Time had suddenly become as meaningless to me as it was to Angel, or anyone else I might find out here.
My mind clear with those thoughts, I gradually drifted off into the shaded realm of a mid-afternoon nap surrounded by nature. I had little idea how much time had past when Angel woke me up, but the afternoon breeze was lisping through the trees, and the air had cooled significantly.
“Ready for the climb?” Angel asked, with renewed vigor in the cool of the afternoon. “God willing, we will find the problem with the line.” He was already on his feet and headed for the base of the hill. I scrambled up quickly and started after him, still a bit disoriented from my deep sleep. The incline was just steep enough to take on upright, but required significant effort. As we climbed, I could see the lay of the land around us. The forested ravine through which we had approached the hills engulfed the mid section of the valley, on either side of the small river we had crossed. As we climbed a bit higher, I could make out among the trees the shaded road we had taken, as it ran between two steep hills into the clearing where the abandoned town lay. Every few steps brought us several meters higher, and before long, the entire valley was visible, San Juan at its center, a large cluster of deep red roofs, flanked by the stark backdrop of Cerro Grande. From the town, the main road ran northwest in a chalky white strip along the base of the mountain, towards the dryer, flatter west. Angel took a seat on a boulder, pausing for a rest as he stared out into the valley.
“In the west on the horizon, that mountain you see is Celaque. It watches over Gracias, the capital of the province to the West, just as Cerro Grande guards San Juan. Jaguars and other creatures still roam those mountains,” he said, mysteriously. “To the south, over there, that long hill is known as the Retumbador. Its name comes from the sound that the thunder makes as it bounces off the side of the hill, and resonates across the valley. There is no way out of the valley on that end, except over the hill. Much as there is no way out in this direction, except over this hill.” With that, he sprung back to his feet and continued quickly upward.
“No time for sight seeing,” he called back as he hurried on, “we should get up the hill. The sun is beginning to drop and the afternoon will be cold if we’re stuck too high on the mountain.”
I scampered upward after him. When we reached the top of that hill, several hundred meters above the clearing where we had started, Angel paused. On the other side of the peak, the telegraph line appeared, held aloft by occasional poles forged from tree trunks, as it ran along the side of an adjacent slope. Every so often, just as the line nearly reached the ground, a flimsy wooden post would appear a few hundred meters on, to affect a gradual climb back upward. It was no wonder, I thought, that the line was usually out of order. We walked down towards the cable, and Angel continued to a place where he could reach up to handle it. There, he pulled an apparatus out of his pack and connected it to the line.
“It’s dead here as well,” he announced in a matter-of-fact way. “The problem is onward.” He paused for some time, considering the line as it ran into the distance, up and over another large hill on the horizon. The sun had sunk behind the peak we had just summitted, and clouds were beginning to set in. The breeze picked up, as if to remind Angel of the limited time. It was already getting cold.
“On the other side of this mountain,” Angel said after some time, “is the town of Yaramanguilla. Those volcanoes in the distance belong to the country to the south.” He pointed to two cone shaped hills on the horizon.
“You’ve been there?” I asked him, as he put away the device he had used to test the line. He began to walk along the line, and I followed, up the next hill, climbing to a peak even higher than before, from which we could once again observe most of the valley below.
“There? Never,” Angel answered after a long delay. “The domain of the Perdidos, is this valley,” he said, still moving along as he turned back towards the valley, partially hidden behind the summit of the first hill. “Onward, by those hills, over there on the other side of Cerro Grande, is Belen. That’s where our family comes from. My father left Belen with his sisters, Felicidad and Soledad, to come to San Juan. But that was a long enough trip for us, at least for a few generations. We stay here, in this valley. Aida, for example, has never been beyond the valley, nor has tia Felicidad or Soledad.” He stopped talking as the climb became a bit more strenuous. When we reached the top of the hill, he spoke again.
“I have been as far as La Esperanza many times, and to Gracias, near Celaque, that mountain we see in the distance.” Angel motioned deliberately as he looked into the distance beyond the valley. He seemed intimately familiar with the geography surrounding this hill, from which he could map out the comings and goings of several generations, and his entire lifetime.
I was still considering the uniqueness of his situation, in a world as big as the one I knew, when Angel started off, back down the hill. I followed after him as he hurried quickly downward.
“And the telegraph line?” I yelled after him, unable once again to match his ambitious pace, as he descended, back towards the valley below, at nearly a run.
“The problem is onward, towards La Esperanza,” he said definitively. “My responsibility ends at the top of the hill.”
The descent was breathtakingly quick behind Angel, who moved down the hill with the agility of a person who had lived a lifetime among rocky inclines such as these. Painstakingly measuring each step as I broke my descent, I fell well behind. The sun was sinking quickly in the sky as we reached the clearing of the buried village. Behind the forest, the setting sun cast long, dark shadows across the field, as dusk visited once more this town that many dusks ago had ceased to count in days. As we walked among the abandoned homes, I again felt a strong premonition, which this time gave rise to a desire to move on as quickly as possible. The horses seemed to share the concern, as they wasted little time, once we untied and mounted them, in trotting quickly back down the path towards the river crossing, where they galloped across the water without any of their previous hesitation.
Angel said nothing as we forded the stream once more, and rushed through the darkening woods towards the main road. When the forest gave way and we had reached the familiar expanse of the main route, he slowed his horse to a trot and pulled back, alongside me. “The spirits are all about out here in the night. They listen to everything we say, and consider each thing we do,” he whispered. “But we are safe now. They have let us pass the woods without problems. They recognize me, but I worried that you would be unfamiliar to them.”
“You said that the stories about the spirits were superstition,” I said, speaking too loudly for Angel, who glanced about worriedly.
“Superstition, in the midday sun, my friend,” he said in a solemn manner, once he had assured himself that we were alone, “becomes reality in the country night.”
Despite his concern, Angel was obviously relieved to be free of the forest, and he became more talkative as we rode along the wide road back into San Juan. The horses themselves strode rather triumphantly back up the hill into town, past the main square and up the block to Aida’s house. There I dismounted, and Angel took his leave, pulling my horse along behind his. I went inside, tired and suddenly quite aware of the soreness of my body.
I found the kitchen dark and empty, with only a glimmer of light from the receding flames of the stove complementing a dim lantern on the table. I took a seat at the table and gave a shrill call, trying to imitate the greeting I had now heard on several occasions. Soon Patricia emerged from one of the back rooms. Yet again, she looked surprised to see me.
“Oh, mister, how did it go? Did you fix the telegraph?” she asked as she continued into the kitchen.
“The problem was farther along the line. Our efforts were of no use.”
“Yes, the problem is always along the line further on. Nothing ever happens on this side to disrupt it,” she said, as she shifted some pots around on the stove. I got the sense she had already known the answer to her question, as, it seemed, did Angel, even before we had set off in the morning.
“Then, Patricia,” I asked, as she began to pile food onto a plate for my dinner, “why did we go? Why would Angel allow his time to be wasted?”
“It’s not a waste,” she said. “That is Angel’s job. You need to send a telegram, you have asked, and his job is to send it. Just as my job is to provide this food for you,” she said, setting a heaping plate on the table in front of me. “Each in this world has his role.”
I wouldn’t ask again about telegrams. When the line was fixed, months later, Angel sent the telegram anyway. He had kept the paper I had given him in a drawer in his desk. Nevertheless, when I eventually spoke with the sub-director about the issue, she complained that she had never received news of my arrival. Perhaps the operator in the capital had not been at the telegraph when it came through, I explained to her. But she had no way to understand what I meant.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
