[My travel writing from Guatemala]
There I was in the Guatemalan Pacific, suffering from a mild hangover and a squeezing case of last night’s dinner. The hotel stalls smell like dead dogs and I forgot to pack toilet paper. I was trying to be discreet while excreting with nature, gazing at the sky and smiling carefree like a gringa, when a pack of teenage boys, proudly armed with surf boards, bobbed towards me, yelling my name in Guatemalan: “¡Chinita!”
And there I had been all peaceful-like, in the middle of taking the most picturesque crap of my life – when these obnoxious guys with their neon plastic fallace-boards jaunting back and forth in heat and sunshine – came along with their annoying questions, while my ass was choking in the salty ocean water.
Vivid? Continuing…
What’s my name? they asked me. Am I from Japan or Korea?
Now was really not a good time. I just wanted to finish my crap, and really didn’t want them to come any closer. “¡Vete!” I tell them, “¡Quiero estar a solas!” (Go away. I want to be alone.)
They were not persuaded.
Like a grouchy grandma, I grabbed a handful of drippy sand, and chucked it in their direction.
“¡Puta!” they cursed. “¡La China Puta!” the Chinese whore.
I, more or less, responded:
“Tu máma es puta. Ella masticó (chewed up) el testículo de tu papá. Entonces, el tuvo que (had to) la casar (marry her). Pero ella aún es (still is) puta. Y por eso (for this) tu estaba nacido. (you were born).”
Let this be a lesson to you and your balls…I might have meant to say. I yelled as fast as I could in broken Spanish, which is not very fast. What I lacked in vocabulary, I tried to make up for in elaborate hand gestures.
They laughed at me, hard, as I slowly worked through the words, as grammatically accurately as possible: past tense, irregular verb, imperfect, passive verb…
I imagined how crazy this whole scene would be if there were no dark olive ocean covering our bodies: everybody treading angrily, arms and legs waving madly, me doing my thing, every few seconds all of us thrown forward a few feet by a wave, and staggering back again, spitting salt and nonsense.
Finally, I told them honestly, “Mira, yo excreto.” “¿Que?” “¿Que dice ella?” they asked each other, confused. I grunted. (Gruñir.) They got it, and walked away, yelling and whispering.
This is what happens when you forget to pack toilet paper on a solo weekend trip to Champerico.
After five weeks of one-on-one Spanish classes five hours a day, I decided I was frickin´sick of schoolin´and was damn near fluent already, having learned a few curse words, and ¨Gallo,¨ ¨Cabro¨ (names of beer companies) from my host brothers, and gotten a job offer from an American NGO in Panajachel, to coordinate fair trade jewelry orders between seven Mayan villages, with beads imported from Czechoslovakia. (Don’t ask why?)
Ready to leave La Escuela for good, I walked to the Mercardo Terminal in central Quetzaltenango early on Saturday morning, and took the first chicken bus I saw headed for the Pacific Ocean. Xela is crazy cold at night for being so near the equator, and the altitude and pervasive car exhaust makes me huff and puff every morning up the hills to school. I wanted fresh air and adventure, so I headed for the waves. As the Spanish saying goes, “Cuándo concoces el mar, conces la vida.” When you know the ocean, you know life. The ocean really gives you time to think.
But not the bus ride. That was, as always, just a little bit terrifying. Guatemalan chicken buses are so named because passengers are packed like chickens in retired American school buses, three or four people to a seat, and a few children and old ladies stuffed in between the aisles. However, these formerly yellow buses that used to carry suburban children in the U.S. to and from school, have been newly fixed with trippy colors and designs only afore-seen in Scooby Doo, each a unique shade of crazy.
And the bus drivers roar up and down the mountain roads, while a colleague hangs on the bus door, half his body dragging outside the bus, yelling “¡Reu! ¡Reu!” and picking up any and all passengers along the way, regardless of how packed the bus already is.
The chicken bus companies are very competitive, my Spanish teacher had explained to me, and each bus tries to pick up more passengers than the others, so the drivers are often racing each other on the dangerous roads, trying to get ahead of the other guy by driving on the wrong side of the street (the side with cars coming towards you!) and speeding ahead to cut and cut again…all this, while talking on a cell phone, taking a sip of some unknown drink, chain-smoking, and yelling at the other guy who’s half-inside-the-bus to tell HIM to yell the fuck harder.
Every time the bus swerves on a turn down the mountainside, I feel like the weight of all the ninety million squeezing passengers heaving to the centripetal side would be certain to knock the bus off the road, down the mountain, exploding into forever. So every once in a while, I inadvertantly let out a scream and a moan “¡con cuidado!” (careful!) I close my eyes, and wish I were in Six Flags, where at least there existed seatbelts, mechanical engineers, and lawyers.
Nevertheless, the ride was over before long, having scraped through small mountain villages, expansive green farms, babbling brooks and yodelling waterfalls, all sorts of indigenous markets with colorfully dressed women selling strings of bananas that hang from roofs.
In Champerico, I met a Russian guy – one of those permanent tourists who are forever trying to write a book. (I guess that’s what you get for being Russian and attempting a novel.) Incidentally, this man tried to sleep with me. But before that, he seemed rather nice.
We drank Cuban Libros on the straw rooftop of our hotel, while talking politics and Crime and Punishment, and making fun of each others’ English, French, and Italian, sputtering drunken criticisms of Bush in four languages. Very nice Russian man. “Zai da buf, zazde rovio” (phonetic Russian cheers?) Anyway, pretty soon, it was clear he wanted more than a friendly chat a la Dostoevsky, and he started getting a little handsy, at which point I left him on the roof and joined a group of pierced-and-tattoed American tourists to swim the ocean under the light of the near-full moon.
Usually, this swim would be considered completely stupid and unsafe. However, last night we figured we were okay because there was a big Evangelical party right next to the water, with loudspeakers obnoxiously turned outwards from the hut, out to the whole damned world, singing (screaming) off-tune (or erratically composed) gospels about Judgment Day.
Afterwards, the Americans started playing hand games on the sand, but I continued to swim a little longer. As I gazed at the moon’s reflection in the ever-turning water, I realized all of a sudden for the first time how far away I was from home, how crazy random all of this is, and how foreign and exhaustively alone I am in a country that calls me “Chinita” and thinks I’m from Japan.
I tried to lie still in the water and look up at the sky, every so often splashed and sunk by a wave. I listened to all the bubbles rustling like whispers from little worlds, and I felt like a giant with foaming gold in my hands: little ecosystems of plankton all around me, my skin the forever wall.
In the sky: stars, distant stars, and Brian’s airport poem, all my love – my dancing Columbia friends and Horace Mann sweethearts – all of it crashed down at me at once, from the waves, from the stars, and I felt lonely for the very first time. I suddenly started to cry, for the first time in many months, and my tears mixed in with the dark waters. I thought of Alexander, who passed in May, and whether spirits could touch me while I held my breath.
Under the warm Pacific waters of Guatemala, all is pitch black. I am liquid, and living my dream. Life is incredibly beautiful.
I thought about what I came here for, what drives me to the coasts of the world, searching for something that will heal my longing, all the while hurting all the same…But for once, I am perfectly happy with not knowing.