The Banner of Tooth and Claw

We sat in the sunlight and the soft dust of the storefronts, waiting for the bus. Dogs trotted down the street barking at each other. Very young boys went by on motorcycles that looked disproportionately large to their small bodies. In the doorway of the store behind us, two women had come out to talk in the sun and to escape the rusty smell of unrefrigerated meat inside. A motorcycle with a bad muffler roared by and all the sound was drown out for a moment except the frantic buzz. The few clouds in the sky did nothing to mitigate the effects of the sun that was baking everything on the street to indolence. From walking around Aregua all afternoon, I was coated by patina of dried sweat that felt like fruit juice had been spilled all over me and then dried with the dirt and flies stuck to it. It was siesta time; we were going to be waiting for the bus for a while.

We came to Aregua for the annual Strawberry Festival that turned out to be something more of an annual Strawberry Tent. The tent itself housed about 7 booths each with 2 or 3 proprietors all selling the exact same thing with different labels: Strawberry jam, Strawberry juice, Strawberry booze some crushed peanut admixture that I didn’t investigate too heartily and, of course, Strawberries. The prices were all the same. Perhaps we were expected to haggle. The strawberries were not exceptionally cheap, but they were the purpose of our trip to Aregua, so I was faily determined to buy some. At each booth, I casually asked the price per kilo, like I was asking for the time, afraid of exciting the seller into a frenzy of laudation on the merits of their strawberries when they were quite obviously all the same. I asked the question like I didn’t give a damn how much they were charging, like I was only asking the question to be civil. At each stand they were 25 mil a kilo. Not terrible, but nothing like the 10 pesos per kilo we once lucked into in Argentina. We bought over six pounds that day and ate strawberries on everything for about a month. In Aregua, we were being asked almost three times that price. After we passed the last stall in the tent we kept walking aimlessly up the road, we intended to turn around and buy a kilo of strawberries, but we ended up turning left somewhere and walking around a neighborhood. There was a nursery back there. We stopped and looked at the plants and next to it, in someone’s yard: a dead dog. He looked asleep but had an ominous hollow quality that indicated a much more profound slumber.

When we came out of the neighborhood, we were on the corner of a plaza with many small and brightly colored flags blowing in the wind. We walked in. It was a feria with semi-hippy products. Homemade skirts, bundles of herbs, a children’s reading area that looked particularly inviting with piles of kids’ books, carpets and pillows. We found a guy selling strawberries there for five mil less than they had been at the festival. He filled a small bag to capacity, he had no scale, but pronounced it a kilo. I raised an eyebrow to Gina and handed her the bag. “Is this a kilo?” I asked her. “I have no idea,” she said shrugging. We paid the man for what we assumed was a kilo and for the next few blocks, we took turns holding the bag and declaring “Yeah, that’s probably about a kilo.”

We toted the bag of strawberries around for a while, until they began to be crushed by their own weight in the small bag and the juice started to leak out of the bottom in a thin, red trickle. More and more, it grew to resemble the ubiquitous bag of meat that Paraguayans are seen everywhere carrying on Sundays, hurrying it off to some barbecue.

We stopped down by the lake and had a beer before leaving. Some event was scheduled for that evening and there was a stage set with rotating colored lights which looked farcical in the afternoon’s glare. We sipped our beer and felt good sitting in the shade and calling each passing stray dog over until our hands had taken on that sulfurous stray dog smell and our palms were grey from canine dandruff.

The bus back to Asuncion was slow in coming, but after 20 mins of sitting on the curb and drinking a water, it came to life around the corner, a diesel engine-rattling existential other.

I’ve always found it odd to look at an approaching bus and think ‘within a few moments, I’ll be on that thing and it will take me away from here, but if I were not to raise my hand and flag it down, it would pass me by and continue on its course.’ I have never really pondered this thought. It’s merely occurred to me a number of times that boarding a bus is a random thing. You don’t plan which one. If we wouldn’t have been in the store buying water when the first one went by, we would’ve gotten on another bus. It’s chaos vs. fate. Were we supposed to get on this bus or could we have gotten on any of them? The heat was getting to me and after we had stepped on to the bus and walked to the back, I let such ponderous thoughts drift away and watched the green leaves spin past the windows.

We stood in the back of the bus and as we made our way toward Asuncion, it became more crowded. Many times the bus stopped, no one got off, but several people got on. From the front came a kind of suitcase-packing motion. The people getting on, pushed into those at the front, who pushed into those in the middle and in the back we had nowhere to go. Every time more people got on the bus, the pressure gradually increased until it seemed even the hollow space in one’s armpits was being utilized.

A few times, someone came in the back door and rode hanging to the railing only partially aboard the bus, like a garbage man at the back of his truck. Invariably these people did not ride for long before theatrically jumping off with an exaggerated world-weariness. This was all normal. Asuncion isn’t a big city, people offer to hold your bags if they are sitting and you are standing and everyone is generally friendly: people smile at bewildered-looking babies, old ladies talk animatedly and as many as three children occupy a lap.

We were entering the semi-industrial outskirts of the city when there was a commotion. We had stopped at a storefront where there were about 15 young men in black and white. All of them looking sweaty and glassy eyed. First one of them approached the bus, stopped as it was at a light. Then they began to yell. Their intention seemed to be to board the bus, but the driver was reluctant to open the door. Their voices rose as one drunken protestation and in which could be heard the unchecked haughtiness of the mob. Perhaps it was an accident that caused the driver to open the back door. I prefer to think so, because after what happened to his bus, it would be sad to think that he had willfully permitted such a gaggle aboard.

At the squeak of the back door, the sodden mob cheered and ran, galloped toward the door. One by one they flung themselves up, heedless of the crowd already occupying the space they sought. Their hair was all wet as if they had returned from swimming somewhere. Their damp heads butted the arms and chests of other passengers aside. Sweaty elbows thrashed around and drunken exclamations roared from the mob as if from a single, brash voice. Eyes flashed by, hooded, vacant or leering. Teeth shown, some bright, some yellow-brown with decay. A burning cigarette was held aloft, almost to the filter and cheap-smelling. They packed in and hoisted their companions in over their heads. Steadying hands shot to the roof of the bus as we started to move, and yet they continued to pile in, they jostled everyone alike wanting only to find their place on the bus without regard for whomever already occupied that place and after they were all aboard and the back of the bus seemed to sag down they began to sing.

The mob sang as one choleric voice, pounding on the ceiling, stomping on the floors. They sang not of the greatness of their team, but of the foulness of their adversaries. Words like pendeja and puto punctuated their song and their beery breath seemed to intoxicate the over-crowded bus, like black smoke in an under-ventilated room. They swore at each other and joked. After each joke someone would take up another song. Each song had a similar tempo with a complex whistled melody. Rings tapped of the metal railings sounding like picks in a coal mine, the roof boomed a lusty bass. Everyone tried to squeeze away from these rowdy interlopers, but there was no room to squeeze into. Their elbows and knees and dirty ears were everywhere and attached to these things, drunken, leering personages. Wolves’ grins.

I was relieved each time they took up a song. I knew that they would be occupied with the words and the whistles for a moment and would not think about the foreigners who stood so obviously in their midst. Once or twice I heard them say something of the brasileros, the group for which, in Paraguay, Gina and I are frequently mistaken. I kept my eyes out the window and thought about how even kind people I know here have confessed very ardent dislikes of Brazilians. Hooliganism is a condensed version of nationalism. It is xenophobic and intolerant. It is the barrio and the team first, then the city and then, if necessary, the country. With no one supporting the rival team aboard Gina and I were the most deserving of their contempt. I kept my eyes to the window and maintained my position in front of the seat where sympathetic passengers had told Gina to sit down. We still had about two suburbs to get through and as much as I did not want to be on this bus with this drunken mob, I wanted still less to have to push through their teeth and broken fingernails to get to the door when it came time to get off.

We stopped at a traffic light and the song became louder, even more defiant. It was shouted to people on the streets. A few street vendors gave a vague thumbs-up, but others only looked on with nearly the same bewildered look of the bus’ passengers. I heard a shout at the back door and suddenly it was wrenched open and there was a wrathful yell. I expected police, but turned to see the bus being invaded by another group of hooligans. They were wearing the same colors, but yelled and punched as if they wanted to destroy the whole bus for hosting the mob that sang the songs that so reviled them. One mob surged back as the other surged forward through the door. Fists were clenched so tight, the knuckles that punched down were misaligned. Black shoes came kicking off the ground. The violet movement caused the dust dormant in the chairs and groove of the rubber floor to rise. The atmosphere turned yellow and through it could be seen the blurs of legs and torsos and there was a chorus of dull percussive sounds punctuated by the occasional soft crack.

The cacophony of the attack was so loud, I didn’t notice that the emergency levers had been pulled on two of the large window frames, each one about four by six feet. Bodies glanced off each other and there was yelling and ripping and the sound of connecting punches. The bus began to drive off again, as though oblivious to the riot taking place now all up and down the aisle. The dust was sucked out the side of the bus now completely exposed to the elements and the air cleared. Some of the attackers were kicked out the back door and when they hit the moving street below, they rolled like hastily packed duffle bags. One attacker remained for a while with his hands braced on the seat backs on either side of the aisle kicking toward his enemies with all of his weight until eventually he too was overpowered and pushed from the bus onto the grey blur below. I didn’t look back to see what happened to him.

After the attack, the mood lightened. The mob had spent their aggression. They leaned out the side of the bus where the windows had been, where now there was only sky and street, exhaust and a faint breeze. When they began to sing again, the wind from the wholly open side of the bus carried their voices and the smell of beer and sweat away and all that could be heard was the banging of their fists on the ceiling and the tinny clink of their rings on the metal railings as the bus bounded down Avenida Estubio Ayala like a dog trying to run away from its own fleas.