I Bet They All Think It's Dumb

Villa Hayes

We were having some people over for dinner. I was pissed because I had ruined a batch of falafel by trying to fit too many into the frying pan. The first batch had turned out all right, so there was enough food, but the boiling oil and sudden falafel crumb mess in the pan was depressing me. “Ahh, why do I always have to add a little more?” I asked the boiling mess. “Don’t worry about it,” Gina said from the sink where she stood chopping vegetables. “It’s no big deal; we’ve got plenty of falafel.” I knew it, but Gina knew that wasn’t why I was upset. It was the wasted food. Seeming to sense this, she said “I can make veggie burgers out of that” and gestured vaguely to the boiling pan that was no beginning to stink of overheated oil. I went out onto the balcony to smoke and get away from the mess for a moment. Inside I heard Gina’s phone ring. “I’ll be right down,” she said. Our guests had arrived.

The nicest thing about our building, which otherwise is sterile and cold—trying to look modern by emulating the utilitarian structure of a spaceship or a soviet-era kitchen—is the terrace. The terrace, like the rest of the building is white on white. Apparently white is the color of modernity here. I can tell you from experience it’s also the hardest color to clean.  The only things that aren’t white are the strips of chrome trim here and there marking boundaries such as doorways and cabinet edges. If it wasn’t for the chrome, I’d probably never be able to find anything; the white door would be lost against the white wall and I’d have to run my hand over the wall looking for it like I was hunting for a trap door or something.

The terrace is different because it’s entirely open under the sky. In the morning, the sun turns the white paint reddish orange and in the evening it is frequently haunted by a jagged opal-colored quarter moon. In Romanian mythology, you weren’t supposed to spin thread in the evening because Vampires would climb up it. They used the thread to climb to the heavens so they could eat the celestial bodies. They gnawed on everything up there, but their most harassed victim was the moon. It was said that the vampires would eat away at the moon, spilling her blood and thereby making her turn red. From our terrace, I have seen this vampire-eaten moon. If I hadn’t grown up with all this nonsense about lunar cycles, gravity etc., I would be inclined to believe that Nosferatu himself had gotten up there and had been chomping away on fair Diane.

We spend a lot of time on the terrace, eating on Sunday afternoons or reading or lying in the sun for a while. I’ve begun visiting the terrace every morning to watch the sun come up now that the time has changed and the hour is much more congenial. I close my eyes and wait to feel the sun on my eyelids as it comes over the terrace wall. I try not to think about anything and listen to the birds. All these things conspire to make me happy, sometimes in spite of myself.

We took our dinner guests up to the terrace. There’s a large table up there that seldom seems to be used, at least not at the incredibly non-Paraguayan hour that we eat. Despite the falafel disaster, we had a good spread. Gina has perfected her homemade bread recipe. There was no tahini, but we’d blended chickpeas, garlic and olive oil which, in my mind, is good enough for hummus. The two bowls of olives, which are becoming staples of our table—like salt and pepper elsewhere— were there, as was a bowl of tabbouleh, homemade crackers with rosemary, salad and flat bread.

The guests and Gina had wine and I had my Fernet and Coke which lately, I’ve begun to get a little tired of. We discussed disconnected topics, mostly relating to our time and foreign perspectives on Paraguay. While someone was making an observation about life in Paraguay, I thought of the countless times I have been asked how I like it here. I realized there was no way to answer that question. A society is not a whole, as much as people may want to believe it is. It is made up of widely disparate elements. Some are quite easy to be fond of while others are almost unbearable. It’s possible to speak in averages, I suppose, but rather than ‘do you like it here?’ the question should be ‘are you having more good experiences than bad experiences?’ This question makes one appreciate the absurdity of what they are asking. Usually, when the question is asked, it’s more in the way of a host asking a guest if they are comfortable. It’s a suggestion of hospitality, a slightly more specific ‘how’s it going?’

I finished my Fernet and went down to get a beer. A Peroni one of the guests had brought. I poured it into a glass and tasted, strangely, the exact flavor of my dad’s beer when I was a kid on a summer afternoon. On Saturdays and Sundays, if my dad wasn’t at work, he did various chores around the house. While he did things like cut the grass or drag bundles of branches from one place to another, he usually had a beer.

It’s a Sunday afternoon 25 years ago in Jackson, Michigan. Warm, but cooling, like end-of-August weather. My sister is upstairs playing Madonna records. The tinny warbling of Lucky Star is drifting out over the lawn, where I’m running around with a Batman figure in my hand. The green smell of cut grass is strong, but the lawn is only half cut. My dad, in ripped jeans and an old t-shirt is in the driveway hunched over the over-turned lawnmower. I run over to him to see what he’s doing. The smell of grass and oil is strong near him, like a potent summer cocktail. He’s got lawnmower grease all over his hands. “Hey,” he calls as I run by. “Hand me that crescent wrench.” I pick up one of the tools lying next to him on the driveway, hoping that I’ve chosen the right one. His grass-greasy hand closes over it and it disappears into the undercarriage of the lawnmower—the wrench tinkling against the metal of the lawnmower rather strangely like champagne glass toasting. Next to him is a green glass bottle of beer so beaded in condensation the label is becoming slightly puckered. He reaches over for the bottle and takes a drink. “You want a sip?” He asks. I reach for the bottle.  

I hated it, but the shock of entirely unexpected taste preserved the moment so well. Metallic, herbal and sunny. I tasted the Peroni again. It was the same taste. I held the beer in my mouth awhile, like wine, and dropped from the conversation, remembering.

When I came back, we were discussing places around the city. Someone mentioned the tourist barrio. “Wait, tourist barrio? There’s a tourist barrio?” “Yeah,” came the reply. “It’s all painted like La Boca and there’s a lot of recycled stuff around, they have some classes; it’s pretty cool.” We went downstairs and looked the place up on the computer.

The neighborhood had a Facebook page. Barrio San Jeronimo. It looked vibrant, interesting, like the sort of place that you would see while traveling and think ‘I wish my neighborhood back home was like this.’ Because no one had ever mentioned the place to us, I couldn’t help but to assume that it was much more one-dimensional that what we were seeing on the computer. “It’s probably just one little street,” I told Gina after our guests had left and we were clearing the dishes. “But we might as well go down and take a look at it tomorrow. You never know.”

…

The next day was warm. Even early in the morning, the wind on the terrace was like a sirocco. Around 11, the apartment got too hot and we decided to get out of the house and find the Barrio Turistico.

All we had to do was go a little ways further down a street that we’d always turned off on previous occasions. “I guess it’s over this way,” I said, kicking my chin out in the direction we were going. “I’ve never been down this street, have you?” “No,” Gina responded, coming up alongside me on her bike. “I always assumed there was nothing down here.”

“Me, too,” I said. Wondering why I’d ever assumed this.

About a quarter mile down the street, we saw a chewed-looking street and a sign. The street was slightly narrow, the houses crowded in so closely as to make their boundaries indistinguishable. Children played in the streets and men sat on the Sunday corners, talking idly. The sign was brightly painted and declared the street to be the entrance of San Jeronimo, barrio turistico. We locked our bikes up to the sign, and walked down the pulverized street, slowly at first. It felt like walking into someone’s backyard for a party you’re not entirely sure you’ve been invited to.

High treble-karaoke music was booming over the otherwise quiet neighborhood. Along with the, breathy, slightly off-key singing of someone who has just been dancing, people could be heard talking, laughing and moving things around. All this was just on the other side of a wall somewhere. Nothing of the party could be seen but almost everything could be heard.

The houses that lined the streets had been vivaciously painted. A yellow and green balcony, a bright red house front and a set of reaching concrete stairs changed colors with each step as they wound past papaya trees and portraits of Bob Marley and Jesus. With the palms susurrating overhead and the rolling cumbia music on the karaoke system, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see an ital shack selling tamarind drinks around the corner.

We settled for a guarana’-flavored Fanta instead. The stairs where we sat down to drink it were across from the barrio’s football field, also brightly painted. One poor kid caught a ball unintentionally with his head while talking with his friends. When he covered his face to cry, an older kid came over and rubbed his head and spoke in his ear. We were too far away to hear any of the conversation and after a while we turned our attention back to the vivacious streets.

“What a nice place!”

“Why did no one ever tell us about it?”

“I bet they all think it’s dumb.”

“Yeah, they probably do, huh? It’s intentional, so it probably seems fake to them.”

“I don’t care; I think it’s cool. All these little stores and the colors make you feel different.”

“Yeah. I like it, too. We’ll have to come back some day when some of this stuff is open.”

We wandered around barrio San Jeronimo for another half an hour. We went by the church and looked out over the rusty warehouse landscape below. We talked about how it would be nice to live in such a place and know all the neighbors. I thought about all the conversational gaps I could’ve filled with this place, all the times when I had talked with Couchsurfing guests, trying to think of one place in particular they could go see, something besides Mercado 4 and the Recoleta.

I thought about the impression I had of Asuncion. After all the walking and the traveling for classes, I thought I had the city mapped out. It seemed the corners I didn’t know could hardly contain anything so bright and beautiful as this, and yet, here is was. All those evenings I had looked out over downtown thinking, ‘I’ve seen most of what I’m interested in here.’ Somewhere underneath those grey walls and the light of the orange setting sun, Barrio San Jeronimo was quietly defying me, or perhaps loudly defying me, blasting its karaoke songs through the red, green and yellow streets.

After making two loops through the barrio, we decided to go. If there had been a café to plop down in, I would’ve settled for instant coffee just for a chance to appreciate the ambiance a little more, but everything was closed on Sunday. We walked slowly, though, nodding and saying ‘adios’ to those we passed. A man painting barrels stopped, looked up and said ‘gracias por su visita.’

We came down from the multicolored stairs and the little medieval hill that the barrio sits on like a Caribbean castle and walked down the street we had come in. Everywhere were signs for little shops, all of which had their bright doors closed against the Sunday afternoon languor in the streets.

Three little boys were playing parking attendant, emulating their older brothers who go downtown and point out parking spaces, for a small tip, by waving bright rags around. One boy stood down at the end of the empty street madly signaling to the other two boys that there was a place to park where he was standing. The other boys, fighting over control of their toy car, were completely ignoring him. They could park anywhere they wanted, furthermore, when you’ve got a toy car, who wants to park it? Still, I knew how the boy felt. Standing at the end of the street, waving your hands around, it’s easy to convince yourself that your way is the most logical and that your companions playing with the car are the ones who don’t understand the game.

As we were walking by the scene I heard running and turned around to see, gratefully, that the parking attendant had given up his post.

By the barrio’s entrance, the karaoke music rose in volume. The voice singing into the microphone was all treble-blurred. It was a love song, an I’m-so-happy-I’m-kinda’-sad love song. The chorus was repetitive. Gina and I began to sing it to each other, quietly at first and then loudly, almost as loudly as the kids yelling down the street and the woman singing into the blurry microphone. We danced our way back to our bikes in our clumsy way, repeating the chorus, even after the chorus was finished.

To anyone who had seen our entrance into the barrio and our exit only about half an hour later, we would look to have been radically changed by the experience. If everyone who went in came out dancing, maybe I would’ve heard about the place before.

EPEBAN

EPEBAN

There were no clouds. The periphery of the sky seemed darker than what was overhead, but it was hard to tell if it was distance, piled up and dark, or storms on the horizon that made it look that way. The light blue color was interrupted by mountains that still looked jagged under their snowy outcroppings, their peaks glowing in the winter-bright sky.

At the base of the mountains, the road from Vanadzor heaved itself forward to the capital, looking like it was quarried from the same rocks that loomed above it. The minibus driver did not drive fast; there were several places where the ice and rain and mud had previously torn the road away. To the west of the road, was a Kurd on a horse, a young man with a closely cropped hair. He rode parallel with the minibus, but a few hundred meters out, going nearly the same speed. The minibus driver glanced over and thought only: Kurd. There was no anger in the thought. It was just the first thing to appear. The though appeared before the plain, before the horse, before the snow-hooded mountains, because these things were constant. The rider’s blood was the only thing that stood out against the timeless background.

Continuing south, the dark skies in the distance agglutinated until an ashen rain began to fall, colored as it was by the white mountain peaks it fell against. The snow on the mantles of the mountains was tattered and yellowed by the friable rocks that seemed to be melting underneath and seeping a muddy color into the snow. At the base of the mountains, large black rocks stood out like roots. There was some lightening breaking in the eastern sky, but the sound of thunder was distant, across the border. The smell of melting snow filled the minibus for a moment as the driver rolled down his window to smoke a cigarette.

The wet gust of wind woke Shane up. Since the border, he’d been up three times, but kept falling asleep. The floor was cold, but all the people and all the winter clothes packed into the minibus made him feel like a hibernating animal in a pile of anonymous hibernating animals. He blinked his dry eyes a few times and was preparing to stretch and go back to sleep when he noticed the gloaming mountains through the window. He watched the monotony of the white peaks and grey fields. The Kurd was gone. The only man-made structure was a shack, at the base of a mountain. The windows and doorway were dark with emptiness. Between two points, a muddy path had been beaten into the wet snow. There didn’t seem to be anything at either end of the path. Shane watched the path and imagined a young woman walking it. He imagined the quick way she would walk the familiar path, stepping over the puddles that she knew would be there. A face slowly began to materialize over the scene. His own face reflected in the window. His green eyes were colorless in the glass, but the large pores on his nose and cheeks stood out like dark pin pricks. He frowned at his reflection and turned away from the window.

The mountains passing the windows began to crouch down and then there was nothing, just the cloudy outline of distant mountains looking vague and unfinished and, in the foreground, wet stone that reflected the stormy sky in a shattered mess of grey, blue and maroon. At the entrance of a village there was a sign with the name of that village and at the exit of the village there was the same sign only with a line struck through the name. No more Vernashen. No more Getap. No more Ani. The distant mountains looked like they were moving, grinding and sawing anything that stood among them too long. The huts were made of pulverized stone and the tin cars spraying through the light rain looked gnawed. They were boxy cars with flat paint jobs: hardy brick-reds and dock-worker blues.

Shane looked away from the window over to Peter, who was sleeping with one eye partially open and rolled back in his head, his mass of light-brown hair clashed with his pale face. His ears were very red-looking and the eye that was partially open disclosed the pink rind of the inner eyelid. He was breathing regularly, deep and raspy.

As the minibus approached the suburbs of the capital, the distant mountains sublimated into grey clouds on the horizon broken by massive Khrushchev apartment blocks displaying the same dark windows and doors as the mountain shacks. Everything was built with a roseate stone. The pink color of these stones was in no way feminine. It was stolid and hypertensive, like the face of an angry father. The stones leaned over their parapets to watch the passersby. The people seemed to feel the unseen eyes of these patriarchal bricks and hurried along. The rain began to fall harder. No one seemed to have an umbrella and faces, ears and eyes sunk down deeper into the dark coats. The stones took on the vermillion color of dried blood. Under these heavy visages, Shane rested his temple on the window and fell asleep.

He dreamed he was watching a young woman in a white dress sink down into a streambed. She didn’t say anything, but floated on her stomach with her arms and legs out and gradually sank down, like an alligator, until only her eyes were above the water. He had an urgent reason to get across the stream, but was afraid to step over the woman. He took a few steps back and tried to run so he could jump, but he ran slowly, like he was leaden. He tried to stop, but his momentum overcame him and he began to fall, slowly, toward the water. As he fell, he saw the face of the girl, upturned and watching him. Her white dress was drifting all around her like seaweed.
...

Shane and Peter were traveling together. Shane had been working in Greece when Peter had passed through. The two of them had stayed up late drinking raki and Peter had described the places he hoped to visit in the east. He was a descriptive speaker and heaped details onto the names of cities he had never seen. He built a storied world dropping minarets onto green plains and illuminating market places with candlelight and dust. In his Orient, Dracula was being shipped from Varna, Istanbul was a confusion of camels and Young Turks, Zaporozhian Cossacks were regularly running their plundering boats aground in Trabzon and the Caucasian mountains still belonged to Hadji Murad.

A few days after he met Peter, Shane packed up his clothes, quit his job and went down to the bus station and bought a ticket for Sofia.

After nearly a month of traveling, the two came to a city that had been festooned in glowing mandarins for the winter. The grey streets were partitioned from the grey skies by tables of the impossibly bright fruit. Shane and Peter walked from the train station and crossed a bridge over a river swollen with the reflections of slate-colored churches. Used household items had been laid out over the flagstones of the bridge. A set of blue glass bowls, a pile of leather-bound books, dull-looking knives and a collection of rusty Soviet pins.

The city looked deserted and was hazy with the hay-like smell of burning cow dung and the fog of snow melt. In the evening, even the lights that were burning seemed to be far above the city. Everything at the ground level had been extinguished. Down a narrow street, Peter noticed a glow that lit up the blue cobblestones. They followed it until they were in something like a rampart corniced by a metal shack about the size of an outhouse. A middle-aged woman sat inside listening to an unseen radio. The shack was the only source of light anywhere around. Peter walked up and greeted the woman in Russian. She returned the greeting with a weary gesture. He asked her if there was a place nearby they could sleep, mostly through pantomime. The woman nodded slowly. She yelled out a name, waited a few seconds and yelled it again. The third time she yelled, a teenage boy came running out of the darkness.

“Axper, artarsamatsiner kmanak ko mot,” the woman said to the boy in a tone that sounded like she was swearing at him.

The boy said nothing but gestured for Peter and Shane to follow him.
Shane turned to follow Peter and the boy and then turned back to the woman in the shack, pointed to a small bottle of vodka, then took out his money and tried to give his face a questioning expression. The woman’s tired-looking face gathered into a smile and she took the bottle down from the shelf and with her other hand held up four fingers “chetyri” she yelled and brandished her fingers.

Shane jogged to catch up with Peter and the boy. The city was so quiet. It wasn’t hard to hear their footsteps. A light caught his attention. He turned to look down the dark street and saw a woman running with a flashlight. She had dark hair and almond-shaped eyes that were wide with exhilaration. She locked eyes with Shane. He noticed a dark shape behind her, but couldn’t tell if she was being chased or if she had a companion. The two figures passed him without slowing and continued down the street. He listened to the light tapping of their receding footsteps for a while before continuing to catch up to Peter. He almost ran into him a block later.

“Hey, there you are.” Peter said. “Where the hell did you go? I thought maybe you got lost in back in that warren.

Shane was about to tell Peter about the girl and the other figure, but decided against it. He held up the bottle. “I wanted to thank that lady.”

“Ah, good idea. Besides, I’m sure wherever we’re going isn’t going to be very warm. That might come in handy.” He said, pointing to the bottle.

The next day, the snow began to fall early in the morning. The grey stones that lined the river bank and the bas reliefs of the churches were half obliterated by white. Only the dark metro stations looked the same. Dug impossibly deep, they were like caverns dripping with the river that crossed over them.

After Shane and Peter woke up, they were invited to eat and were served a grey bowl of buckwheat garnished with a pat of butter. They thanked their hosts and surreptitiously left some money under their empty bowls. They shouldered their packs and walked down to the metro.

The trains were the standard spaceship grey of metro trains, the seats and rubber floors worn down like pencil erasers. A garbled recording informed passengers about the next station. Two stops down the line, a group of children got on carrying Unicef Christmas presents labeled in English, for a Boy or, alternately for a Girl. One older-looking girl held a box labeled for a boy. Shane was afraid that she would open the box and that he would have to see her disappointment upon finding a muscly action figure while her friends all got dolls, but she held the box on her lap and stared ahead. Her face was reflected in the window behind Shane and reflected again in the window behind her. Shane looked into her reflection and the reflection looked back. He glanced back at her eyes and saw she wasn’t looking at him, but in the reflection, her eyes looked right into his. There was something familiar about her, something about that face and the darkness. The girl’s reflection smiled slightly and he realized it was the girl from the previous night, the one who’d been running down the street with the flashlight.

“Well,” he thought. “I’m glad to know that she’s OK and that guy wasn’t chasing her.” The girl rose from her seat at the next stop and her reflection was replaced by tired-looking middle aged man.

Three stops later Shane and Peter got off at the bus station and loaded their packs onto a minibus with a tattered red and white placard in the window that read EPEBAN.

…

In his dream, Shane continued to fall toward the girl in the river. He spun his arms to correct his balance, but found his body was at an acute angle to the water. He could only fall. The girl was floating on her stomach, but he watched as she tiled her head over her back until her forehead was parallel with his. She didn’t seem to see him. Her eyes were green, large and tapered at the ends. Her mouth was slightly open, expressionless. Shane tried to grab a hold of something, but his arms moved sluggishly and encountered nothing. The girl’s dress was floating everywhere. Her vacant face seemed to float up from the middle of the white expanse. There was a sound coming from her, something like the whine of a mosquito. The closer he got, the louder it became until there was no other sound. Her eyes continued to look past him and with horror he realized he was falling right into her face. He braced himself for the impact of their foreheads slamming together.

He woke up with a slight jerk, but either the woman sitting next to him hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. He turned back to the window to see a large rusted crane hanging over a series of apartment blocks in various stages of completion. Light shone weakly from some of the apartments in these skeletal buildings. The crane looked like a monster whose destructive efforts had been checked. Frozen as the progress of the machine was, it was no longer certain if it had been building or destroying, if its purpose had been good or evil. Now, it was only a ruin surrounded by ruins.

Beyond the false start of the crane and the floors and walls of the unfinished buildings, the city began. The streets widened to parade-ground width and little kiosks began to spring up like mushrooms after a rain, each with a woman, a dangling lightbulb and rows of bottles. Everything was hewn from the same roseate stones, in blocks so large they looked like something carted in by exhausted men in loincloths. The plazas were laid out with the same stone. The twilight mountains outside the city had been cut down like a forest, carted in and reshaped.

In the cold rain, the smell of stone was irrepressible. The rain mixed with the dust and made mortar. Hearth fires burned, baking the stones and sending their smoke into the sky.

The minibus stopped and everyone got off. Peter and Shane walked a few blocks through the rain until they looked up at a dark and oily bridge. “I think there’s a train up there,” Peter said. “It probably goes downtown.”

The station opened under the tracks. The darkness from the rain had piled up in the corners. There were a few buckets in the middle of the floor. Every few seconds one of these buckets would make a WOK sound as it caught a drop of water from the ceiling. A woman waited behind the yellowish glass of the ticket counter and another swept the floor. Peter and Shane paid their money and were given a plastic coin that served as a token. These were orange and pellucid, like lozenges, sucked to the point where they are brittle and craggy.

The lights on the train flickered. They burned so dimly even the rainy, late-afternoon sky outshone them. There were only a few other passengers on the train. They all looked straight ahead. Shane looked into the reflection in the window in front of him and thought about the girl in the last city, but his thoughts were vague and resembled harassed birds on a wire, flying up, resettling and flying up again.

The rain-smeared city clicked past the windows of the train in a cardiac rhythm: ___________ssstook__duk_____________ ssstook__duk. The lights bounced on and off. In a tunnel, the lights went out and did not come back on. The train was like a sunken ship, full of the same dark water that surrounded it. There was no commotion in the dark, no surprise. The lights came back on revealing the same stoic countenances, unchanged by the interval.

Five or six stations later, most of the crowd rose to get off and Peter and Shane followed. The station had an underground market. Men smoked and talked in front of their kiosks. Although no one spoke loudly, the place seemed to be filling up with a dull roar. Like a fog of smoke and static was roaring through the place unseen.

On the street, the rain had slackened but grown colder. A man pushing a handcart crashed into a pile of sodden cardboard boxes and scattered them down the sidewalk as he continued on his way.
In a dark shop window, a woman was peeling potatoes in the grey light. She glanced up for a second as Shane walked passed. He stopped “Hey, let’s go in here and get something to eat.”

Inside, the thick carpet muffled the external sounds of the rain and traffic. The silence felt like more like weight rather than the absence of sound. There were dark hulks of men seated around tables. Each was bundled up in a large coat with a pancake-flat hat smashed onto his head. They looked unfriendly under all their clothes, but they drank their coffee from demitasse cups and smoked slim cigarettes giving them the appearance of giants fumbling with a child’s tea set.

Outside the wind seemed to be pursuing the grey remnants of the setting sun like a pack of hunting dogs after a rabbit. The cornices and niches in the stone screamed and spat out rain. Someone in a room nearby was slowly playing a piano, taking a few seconds with each note, considering the next.

A waitress pointed to a table with an oilcloth cover and Peter and Shane sat down. A lightbulb shone above them, but the wattage was so dim it made no other impression in the damp room other than to cast a limpid halo on the ceiling. Shane stirred his feet under the table and encountered cold darkness, like water at the bottom of a lake. Everything was greasy to the touch. Peter looked out the window, and to the people on the sidewalk, his white face floated up from the darkness of the restaurant like a buoy. Shane pushed the fingerbowls of salt and paprika back and forth. The salt had absorbed the dampness and was clumped.

The piano playing stopped and a familiar figure walked past the dark frame of the door. “What the hell,” Shane said quietly to himself. “Huh?” Peter turned back from the window. “What d’you say?” “I’ll be right back,” Shane said getting up. “I’ve got to check something.”

He walked after the woman with the dark hair. He watched her go down a small set of stairs and push open a white door. “Izvenitsiya bashalusta.” He called out after her. She glanced back at him and continued to walk but slightly faster. He repeated his words, thinking he may have gotten them wrong, but the girl continued walking down the hall without looking back. Shane stood in the doorway for a moment and then went back to his table.

Back at the table Peter had ordered beers and something that looked like a donut for each of them. He looked up as Shane came into the room. “What the hell was that about?” He asked. “Here,” he said gesturing, “I got you a beer and a piroshky.” Shane sat down, picked up his beer and then sat it back down, not certain where to start. “I think I keep seeing the same person, this girl.”
“I noticed that.” Peter responded. “The similarity, I mean, the eyes, the hair. I’ve seen a bunch of people that looked just like each other. I think it’s adaptation.”
“What do you mean?”

Peter took a drink of beer. “The mountains we saw coming down here, the shepherds out on those rainy plains and the driver of the minibus, they all had a similar look. I can’t really describe it. It was more like a theme. They all sat there looking the same, even those little cars driving down the road. You didn’t notice that?”

“No,” Shane shook his head. “I guess I didn’t. I watched the mountains. You were sleeping and I fell asleep too. I dreamt about a river and a girl. Just now, I thought I saw that girl and even before the dream, a few nights ago, I saw her then, too.”

The waitress came into the room to bring an ashtray for the cigarette Peter had just lit. Shane looked up and saw the familiar almond shaped eyes, only they were beset with wrinkles and the darkness was gone from the hair that had been cropped short and dyed a Russian-looking light brown.

“Maybe it’s not so much the same face,” Shane said after the waitress left “as the same expression.”

“Yeah,” Peter agreed. “That’s it. Everyone’s got the same expression. Their mouths are set, their eyes are sad but their brows are, like, quizzical.”

Outside the rain had frozen to accommodate the night and though the streetlights were not bright, they illuminated the countenances of those who passed beneath them and riveted their shadows to the ground. In the chiaroscuro, the features on each face seemed more uniform than before.
Peter and Shane walked towards the city center. On the way, Shane saw the face of the girl from the night before, the metro, the café and his dream pass him again and again. Each time he stared at her, she stared back at him. The same eyebrows. The same ears. The snow almost seemed to have fallen into her dark hair the same way. No matter the number of repetitions, he remained shocked each time he saw her again. He must’ve betrayed some of his shock because at some point, Peter leaned over and said.

“I know. This is what Ur must’ve looked like.”

Moving the Rain Around

La Entrada

I came into Asuncion in the dark, but the whole city seemed lively with music and the shadows of men in urinating postures. I was returning from Encarnacion to the southeast. We had been driving along the green plains, in and out of storms. The storms were lulling and I had often turned around to find myself the only one awake on the bus. At the end of the afternoon, the sky began to lighten with the return of the sun, only to darken again as it set on the other side of a town called Ita. The countryside began to produce villages again. They would start with a few straggling buildings trailing down the ruta which would then crowd into each other, as if seeking protection from the shaggy green plains. Outside each shop, a young man sat between the redolent crates of warm fruit and when our bus passed, he looked up to watch us go by, with the same uncertain look in every village. In the side streets, children played in the undecipherable ways of country children who must temper their reality with a lively imagination. Old ladies sat in various arrangements around doorways like they were waiting to scold someone who was late coming home.

The shadow of the bus, made long by the setting sun, fell on all these bucolic scenes like a falling curtain in a theater. This quiet, long-preserved scene was drawing to a close as the buildings began to grow more utilitarian, less personal. What was once the territory of the quiet fruit vendor became the haunt of stray dogs and rain-soaked plastic bags. The roads widened as did the parking lots. The old women took their chairs inside and the lights came on. The lights shone off walls that extended to the horizon, walls that the paint had abandoned or florescent lights had burned off. The advertisements were no longer hand-painted but precision-printed by a machine so that the clarity of their message could not be mistaken. The cars became more numerous as if drawn by the promise of the wider roads and more capacious parking lots. Their headlights stretched for miles from the city and their red taillights looked like electric red carpets.

As the light increased, so did the darkness. While the areas around auto dealerships and six-lane avenues shown with the intensity of a lightning bolt’s illumination, the areas immediately outside them: the trunks of mango trees, the interiors of abandoned cars and cats skulking near piles of trash were almost obliterated by preternatural darkness. In such darkness, sound seemed to carry better—the black roar of the bus engine, the yell of a disconcerted mother-in-law and the music. Even past the closed windows of the bus, the music sounded its frantic pulse: the cumbia rhythm that sounds like something going around in a circle—an engine, a washing machine, a ball—but it catches; it sounds like a wheel going over a very bumpy road.

Out in the dark places, the bumpy spin of cumbia music was everywhere. It came from cars with their windows open, young men hanging out like tongues lolling from a dog’s mouth. It came from the bright stores, still open in their islands of light and it came from some great unknown place, like a great temple of sound hidden by all these pretentious worshippers. A muezzin standing up in the sky was calling, evoking lumpy baselines and flirtatious lyrics, spreading them evenly over the city.

I got off the bus at the edge of town. The local buses passed by festooned with colored lights and the raised arms of standing passengers, looking like a curious group of people that all had questions but no one to ask them to. Ribbons of black smoke chased after the buses and then swum back into the tarry street in great spreading plumes. The people in the island of light, were quiet, despite the level of the ambient sound around them. A white and blue painted bus stopped and I got on. The driver took my bill, spooned a few coins from a wooden box and dumped them into my hand.

At the back of the bus there was an upturned face on a downturned body. The body wore the countenance of the unconscious or the dying. It sat across the seat with no regard for comfort, flung there like a sack, but the face that seemed to rise above it was like the face of a cobra floating above the innocuous rope of its body. The face, bruised and dirty, regarded me with malcontent.

The bus smelled like an overripe fruit, alcoholic but very sweet and sweaty, like several people among us had been drinking for a very long time, weeks maybe. The warmth of the sun was couched somewhere between all bodies. One window was wide open and the darkness blew in from the street and sought out the sun that was hidden between the people.

The buildings were industrial, warehouses and mechanic’s garages that slept behind barricades of old tires and radiators. The blocks were long. When the cross streets cut through, there was only a tiny aperture, not enough to let out any rival traffic. The bus didn’t wait for the lights to change. The street was full of holes and the bus jumped full of coins and bolts and musical notes. When it bounced up high enough it was like having your feet go numb, but only for a second.

The bus stops at a red light outside a radiant supermarket. A figure emerges from the dark cross street and steps gingerly among the heaps of bald tires and chunks of broken concrete. The figure’s shadow climbs of the wall, climbs until it reaches the top and reaches back to pull the figure from the darkness. The legs are long and thin but the torso is unnaturally bulky, like a spider. Two more thin legs step from the darkness. It is not a man but a horse a large, unsaddled horse stepping from the oil slicks and spent fan belts of a mechanic’s parking lot. There’s a rider on the horse, a young man in a t-shirt. He brings his hand to his mouth, something gleams, a can of beer flashes in the parking lot lights and right there with the rolling clunk of the cumbia and the honking horns the young man and his horse step from the parking lot and begin to move through the intersection, at first at a quick walking gait then a trot and, crossing the south-bound traffic, a run. The street lights pull at the figure of the rider and his horse like taffy and stretch them across the vacant walls and the grassy lots and the idling motorcycles waiting behind the red light until the image, as if pulled too tight, suddenly snaps from view and disappears like it found a black hole at the corner of Kubitschek and Ayala.

I got off the bus. The bass had swollen in the cumbia and sounded like audible blur. I heard an arena of people cheering. The rider and his mount had disappeared and the music had smothered the clatter of their retreat. Along the streets, I found no one who had seen the spectacle, only the strangely supplicant forms of men peeing into the niches of buildings and the places where the light had not intruded.

La Salida


There was lightening in the distance. From where we stood at the top of the arched bridge, we could see it running through the grey sky in long white streaks. The sky behind us, over Asuncion was smoky, but the sky over the Chaco was that roiling mass of near-purple clouds that purports days of rain. The river was turbid with sentiment and seemed to mirror the agitation of the skies. The green banks groaned over the water. The land here had been flooded and the tubers and roots were swollen with water; the large papaya leaves atop their scaly stalks dripped in dry weather. Being able to hold no more water, the trees, the scrub and the weeds hung heavy over the water satiated and exhausted.

It would’ve been a terrible idea to continue west across the bridge into the Chaco. We could see the streaks in the clouds where it was raining hard enough to make the greys and purples bleed into each other. The ruta that runs across the Chaco, all the way to Bolivia, has a crumbling shoulder and the estanicias, slaughterhouses and terracotta factories up the road produce a lot of truck traffic. If we turned around now perhaps we’d be able to beat the storm back to Asuncion. We talked about turning around, but as I stood there watching the sky, I felt less intimidated by it. It had been so grey in the early morning that we had almost stayed in, until we remembered another Sunday that we had given up because it had seemed on the verge of raining, when it never did. Near-tropical weather seems to bluff a lot. I realized I wanted to see the rain. If we started to get soaked and the road was miserable, we’d turn around. It wouldn’t take much longer than an hour to get home. We picked up our bikes where we had leaned them against the railing and coasted down into the melee of burning garbage smoke, light rain and the indifferent lowing of cows: the Chaco.

From the apex of the bridge, we came right into the Chaco without having to pedal. The eastern bank of the river is urban. There are shopping malls, abandoned housing projects, fly-by-night universities, motels with lascivious-sounding names like El Haram and six lanes of traffic, most of which runs north to south along the river bank. What traffic breaks west and crosses into the Chaco is squeezed into two lanes and split again on the other side of the bridge, with some traffic going south to the Argentine border and some of it going northwest along the ruta that runs through 100s of miles of emptiness before connecting to a road to Bolivia. The Chaco is immediately different. The city ends on the east bank of the river. The smoke-stained concrete structures give way to shacks and tarps on the west bank. Livestock stands in the medians, ruminating. The traffic is almost exclusively motorcycle. Kids with shorn hair and dirty bare feet are clustered around a rill with fishing lines they have tied around dowels of wood. The dogs have the self-assured air they acquire in places where no one has ever willingly given them food. Two bus lines serve the four communities that are placed on this swampy heel of land, the buses rattle and leave wakes of burning oil across the green scenery.

It starts to rain as we pass the first pueblito, but it doesn’t fall hard. The sky has darkened perceptibly and some of the cars and trucks turn on their lights. When they pass our bikes, though they are driving at highway speeds, they make no effort to give us any room, even in cases where the opposite lane is completely unoccupied. On bikes, we become poor, unworthy of consideration. The cars pass us as they would pass mailboxes or trees. We stay as far to the right of the shoulder as possible, but the rains have piled the dross up at the edge of the concrete. Stones, broken glass, exploded toads and banks of wet sand making the riding difficult. We talk over the roar of the pickups and the monotonous whir of our bike tires. The rain isn’t bad. It looks like it came down hard earlier, but we’ve missed the worst of it and only get wet by riding along the rain-glazed shoulder of the road, our back tries throwing up a fine spray of wet sand and water that lashes across our backs until we each have a damp fox’s tail from the bottom of our shirts to the our shoulder blades.

The rain is slow. It’s struggling though a saturated atmosphere and most of it dissipates before hitting the ground. The sprays from our bike tires have made the most uncomfortable parts wet, but the rest is almost dry. The town of Villa Hayes appears through the mist and rushes up to us. We take a right turn off the ruta and struggle down a residential road of wet sand dunes. Cows standing in the road regard us indifferently and continue on their course. People are under their porches, sitting and talking. I raise a hand and shout ‘adios’ and they return the greeting. We are out of the city.

Within an hour the rain clouds have evaporated and the sun is shining off the river drying the back of my shirt and my waistline for the ride back. We sit at the costanera for a while, watching the swollen river run past us and listening to the silence in a town where most people are sleeping, still with the impression that it is dark and raining.

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.

What Happened When We Got There

Saturday night and we’re walking around. Most people are eating so there’s not much traffic, which makes what traffic does pass us incredibly treacherous.

VrrruuMMMM!

“Dammit! Why do they have to do that!?”

I just smile. Every time a car goes by driving that fast at night, I’m always just glad we’re not on our bikes. He must’ve been going 100 MPH down a residential street. It’s not that uncommon. When Gina looks to me for indignation (which I’m usually full of) I just shrug. I don’t feel like caring about bad driving right now. It’s a nice night and the streets are otherwise quiet. I manage to say something affirming like “yeah, what a dick,” and we keep walking down toward the wider avenues that cross the city.

The greatest thing about living in a city that’s not mapped out on a grid is that it’s difficult to explore. It takes longer to find things. All the major landmarks of the city, everything that’s in the guidebooks, we went to within our first two weeks here and then, subsequently, walked past, every day for the last six months. When well-meaning locals tell me that I should visit the cemetery, I have a difficult time not telling them that I’ve been there and like them, I pass it on the bus very frequently. It’s nothing special anymore. After six months in the same city, no one is a tourist. The difficulty is that many people still expect you to be. I occasionally consider just acting like I’m still holding my luggage with a bewildered look and plane ruffled hair, I think people would find me much more amiable that way.

I have seen a lot here, but there are still little winding streets I have not followed through to the end. Or, meaning to follow a street to the end, I have started down a tributary alley and ended up, half an hour later, far from my intended destination. The backstreets are the heart of this city in that they betray its jungle origins. When the dense tangles of phone wire and electric cable unspool and disappear into the umbrella-sized fronds of a palmetto, when the houses diminish and crumble into chalky red brick, where the trash piles up at the end of a vine-sewn cul-de-sac that is the real Asuncion. It is also the Asuncion that no one visits. It is the Asuncion of the parrots and the stray dogs, the arm-wide climbing vine and the guava tree.

These little alleys, curvas and callecitos don’t connect to each other. You have to survey the neighborhoods to find them. You have to follow every street until it ends, until you find the tiny gap between houses that is barely still paved. On the other side there is a parrot walking along a fence squawking at an empty river bed full of plastic bags: this is Asuncion and you have to look for it. Six months means nothing to this side of the city. It is hardly any time at all. Even while the famous buildings downtown have become commonplace and the your motivation to interact with society wanes, the curving threads of the backstreets are still there, waiting to offer up their secret stories of the city before it was a city.

I thought I had followed this street before, but no. I haven’t seen this before. A giant gas station with a café and a restaurant? “Yeah,” Gina tells me she’s passed it before. “It’s a nice place, I guess. People get dressed up to come and eat here.” There are three parts: The café with bow-tied waiters, the restaurant that looks like a nice, pay-by-kilo place and the gas station portion that’s got its soda coolers and shelves of snacks. We go into the latter. It’s got imported food, not much but a competitive selection: Jalapeno Pringles from the US, Toblerone chocolates and a water bottle that Gina picks up. “26,000!? For this plastic bottle?” “It must be imported.” I say, shrugging and going over to look at the soda flavors. “Maybe they’ve got that Brazilian maracuya-flavored Fanta.”

We take a right out of the gas station, vaguely in the direction of home. I don’t expect to find much in this quiet night more interesting than the fancy gas station we just saw. I’m kind of hungry anyway. We keep walking up the street. I know it but I don’t know this part of it. “Hey,” I say to Gina. “Look at that place. Richards’.” We laugh for a second at the Keith Richards caricature on the sign. Gina reminds me that something about Keith has always freaked her out a little. I’m reminded of how my mom always said that she imaged all pirates running around back in the 18th century must’ve looked like Keith or Keith looked like them. The place looks nice, dark and bar-like. In Cono Sur, bars don’t really exist, they’re mostly restaurants dubbed as bars. If they have an actual bar, it’s small and no one sits there. They are conglomerations of tables with too-bright lights and too-loud music. They are places to eat or to camp out for the night with a big group of friends. They aren’t places you just stop into to get a beer because you’re walking by.

Richards’ was exceptional in a way that no place in Paraguay has been. There was no electronic music playing. There was no dance floor and there was no cover. The lighting was dim and the bar was long. We lingered for a minute in the doorway and decided to go in a have a beer.

All bars have palpable atmospheres. There’s way too much happening in people’s heads in those places to not leave some kind of psychic miasma hanging up in the ceiling with all the smoke-damp dust bunnies. Bars, contrary to popular belief, can reflect all kinds of moods. Sure, some are surly, but others are tired, some are braggarts, some are cheap (even when the cheapest beer on the menu is 7 dollars) and others are like old couches. These latter have no concern for their appearance, but they are comfortable, homely places. Richards’ was such a place and I was happy we had found it. Even though I could tell Gina was thinking the same thing, I told her anyway.
“This place is cool. Hey look you can even smoke in here.” And with those last eight words, I was sold. I had a bar, and it wasn’t even that far from our house. We sipped our beers, looked around the room and talked a little. The music was quiet and the smoke from the other cigarettes in the bar was drifting lazily up, giving one the feeling of slowly being lowered down. There were only a few other patrons. A group of kids at a table, it looked like two couples both with their chairs as close together as they could go without being stacked on top of each other and a lone guy in a black jacket at the bar who had a wine glass slightly smaller than a goldfish bowl next to him. I guess maybe it was brandy. One of the kids gets up and orders a picture of sangria. The waitress pours in sugar from sugar packets and stirs it in the fruit, wine and ice with stabbing movements.

There’s a stage and a couple of those roaming colored lights drifting over the walls, chairs and particles of dust floating in the air. There are two men, middle-aged, that both look like my Irish landlord from San Francisco. Gina declares that they must be British and possible twins. She seems to like this idea and repeats it a few times. “British twins,” like she’s trying to remember something. I agree that maybe they are and while we’re talking about it one of them moves over to the soundboard. A band materializes from the kids who ordered the sangria. They come on stage and suddenly there’s someone taking pictures. The singer asks if we can hear him OK and the (possible) British twin at the soundboard says “que?” over and over like he can’t hear anything. Everyone laughs at this, including me. I laugh at a lot of what I hear in Spanish just to show that I’ve understood the joke, but the way the guy at the soundboard says ‘que’ is actually funny and I really laugh.

The music starts and we listen to the first few songs before we go back to quietly talking. “It’s nice there’s music. There wasn’t even a cover.” We say to each other. The first band only plays about four songs before getting down. We talk about them for a while and I light another cigarette, wishing I had brought enough money to get another beer. I count my money again just to be sure. Gina tells me that maybe they have something for 9,000 Gs. I tell her they don’t, that I checked already.

Another group comes on, a girl with very long hair and a violin, a guy with a cello and another guy, in the middle, by the mic with a guitar. There’s no drummer. The group plays some vaguely familiar sounding instrumental songs and then goes into covers. The girl with the long hair keeps self-consciously flipping it over her shoulder. They start with Dust in the Wind, which I hold up a lighter for. I think about the violin player in the Kansas video with the beard and the wavy hair and I think about the book Mikey gave me where someone keeps playing the song over and over. Dust in the Wind ends and the group does something like a Beatles medley. Then there’s Hotel California. I think about the Brown Jug where someone was always playing that song on the jukebox. I had played it up really big the last time I was there. “Ok, listen to the songs. Before we leave someone will play Hotel California.” But without Mikey it didn’t seem to work and I was almost sad to leave a few hours later without hearing it, even though I’ve always disliked that song.

When I get back from the bathroom the band was doing another Beatles song. Gina and I exchange glances and we wait out the song before climbing down off our chairs, mumbling “that was nice,” more to ourselves than each other. It’s late and we’re tired. We’re hardly ever out past midnight, but it’s nice to do every once in a while even if it does make us tired the next day.

Richards’ had been such a great find that I had been thinking about something I could say to the guy at the soundboard to thank him. While I had been at the bar, I tried to work out what I could say to the guy to explain to him how appreciative we were to have found such a comfortable bar and the first I had seen like it in Asuncion.

As we make our way to the door the band is talking, getting ready for their next song. I consider talking to the guy at the soundboard to thank him, but he looks like he’s doing something with his computer, the group’s about to start their next song and just to cram all my appreciation into one word, I decide to just call out ‘gracias’ as we walk out.

What I intended to say to the guy at the soundboard, ended up as a thanks to the whole bar. I called out ‘gracias’ so loud that I thanked both bands for playing. I thanked the waitresses for the beers and I thanked the black jacket guy with the small globe of brandy. It felt good to let everyone know how I felt. My hand was on the door and I was almost out when I heard the voice in the mic say ‘que maleducacion!’ As he said it, the guy at the sound booth turned around and looked at me with a squint. Everyone in the bar looked at me and all their expressions repeated the expression. ‘que maleducacion!’ ‘How rude!’

Sometimes it takes a while for things to translate, but this was one of the instances when it happened right away. I hadn’t even finished walking out the door. “No,” I want to call out. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I just wanted to thank you. You see, I’ve never found a bar like this and I wanted to express my gratitude. Sorry to leave before your set is over, but you can see, we waited until you were between songs. I hope there aren’t any hard feelings.” But I can’t get any of that out. I just stand in the doorway for a moment longer, trying to find anything to say, but nothing occurs to me and after a few awkward seconds, I turn and let the door swing closed.

Outside the bar, I tell Gina what happened. I tell her how I’m upset because it had been such a good night. I tell her how I hate how being in a foreign context amplifies casual comments like that and how now that ‘que maleducacion’ is going to hang over the rest of the night.

We walk down the street until it becomes familiar again. I stop into a few stores to look for cigarettes and everyone seems to mock me. I see ‘que maleducacion!’ on everyone’s face and I just want to tell them all to go to hell.

Wild Honey

We had come down from the mountains where there had been cacti and apples of horse dung on the trail coated with dust. The day had been quiet—almost entirely spoken in the sound of our feet on the gritty trail. Now and then someone’s boot had called out with a raspy slip, when coming down a steep part of the trail, but the others paid no attention. Once, someone said something at a river crossing. Something to acknowledge the beauty of the scene, but the superfluous remark fell under the sound of the rushing water. We reached the trail’s summit around 2 pm. There was snow lying in the shadows of some of the larger trees. It glowed and seemed to give off the buzzing of a florescent light.

We took a different trail back and came to a suspension bridge. Without discussing it, we walked across the bridge one by one, each person waiting their turn, like children waiting to go down a slide. On the other side of the bridge, there was a black mud that was mostly packed and felt like clay to walk on. Each footprint left a vivid imprint of its rubber zigzags, square bumps and raised heel. I stepped off the trail for a moment to leave a footprint where no one would likely tred over it. Maybe it will fossilize.
We came off the mountain around five. The light was blurry and golden. The white insects in the air were singing. The trail ended at the top of a new neighborhood. Everything was walled, but there were vines growing over the walls and the transition from the mountains to the city was gradual. The first street we came to was quiet with large yellow speedbumps and boxy carabiniero vans parked near most intersections. The carabinieros standing outside the vans were friendly, they nodded and said hello to us. Their dark green collars creaked when they nodded, sounding like the insects. We kept in a line as we walked. The sidewalk was narrow and would permit nothing else.

At the bottom of the hill, where the city began, the bus stop was crowded. Those waiting frequently leaned over the curb to see what was coming. Many of them had set their shopping bags on the ground. Two boys sat on a low wall and talked, but everyone else was silent except for the occasional sharp exhalation of impatience.
From a long line of traffic, the bus roared up in its while and orange plastic austerity. The card reader beeped with each passenger’s fare. The back of the bus was slightly raised and we went back there to be out of the way. The seats were all taken. There was an open area at the edge of the raised portion like a dais and we stood in this area, all of us leaning a little to take the strain off our legs. On the turns, the bus swayed violently. It was hard to brace against effectively, especially with some of the mountain’s black mud still on the soles of our shoes. When the bus turned a corner, we swung in tight arcs between our grips on the high railings and our feet planted on the floor.

After two residential stops, a young couple got on and settled in the place beneath where we were standing. The couple was at the early stage in their relationship when they noticed nothing else but each other. When they came on to the bus, they didn’t glance around at the other passengers, as almost everyone who gets on a bus does. They looked straight ahead and when they came to an open area, they stopped and looked relieved when they could face each other again. They looked very warm and clean: the boy in a cotton sweatshirt and the girl in the earth tones of a heavy cable sweater and a thick macramé scarf. They spoke quietly to each other, their faces only a few inches apart. They didn’t tilt their heads and speak into each other’s ears over the roar of the bus, but looked directly into each other’s eyes. The boy did most of the talking. The girl seemed to respond to everything he said with the same sad expression. Not overtly sad, there was no actual pain in it. It was a look that was made to communicate tenderness, but had a wide-eyed, lapine sorrow. It was impossible to tell whether the girl was aware of this. Most of her expression was concentrated in the eyes and the lower lip. The eyebrows, where they nearly met over the bridge of the nose had rounded Q-tip ends; they tapered over the eyes until they were no more than a few feathered hairs pointing to her temples. The way the dark ends bunched together over the nose resembled the eyebrows of a homesick child who is sitting alone somewhere imagining he will never see his family again.

The rest of her face was unremarkable, with the exception of her lower lip that wasn’t quite pushed out, but also couldn’t have naturally sat above her chin so prominently. It was like a roseate pillow on which one would set a ring to be taken to an altar. There was nothing maudlin about her lip. On its own, it probably wouldn’t have been remarkable, but with the eyebrows, it gave her face a look of someone suffering from a fear that had given way to vague but consistent sadness.

It was difficult not to watch the wordless actions of this sad but enamored girl. There was something like spring about her, just after the snows have melted and the smells of the leaves and the grass seeds are tempered by the cold air that conducts them. The boy spoke and the girl returned these sad smiles in reply. She remained perfectly still even when the bus took a turn quickly and the boy had to make a little hop to keep from losing his balance. Neither of them looked away from the other. There was no challenge in looking at them because they gave none of the quick accusatory looks that strangers under observation usually give.

The bus slowed just after we had made our third stop. It was being waved over to the curb. There was another boxy van parked on the sidewalk and at least three carabinieros in their dark green uniforms with their golden and red decorations. The bus came to a stop. The carabinieros came up to the plastic windows of the bus, but they made no motion to board. The noise of the engine stopped and no one spoke. There was a quiet sound of someone’s quick breathing, the sound of someone who can’t get enough breath—they keep trying each breath, finding it to be insufficient for their needs, discarding it and quickly trying another: a lonely and terrifying sound. It was coming from the girl with the sad look. Nothing had changed in her expression, only her eyes were reddening around the edges and becoming glassy. Her eyebrows may have been knit together a little more tightly, but it was impossible to tell. Her expression had already been so profound it only required the slightest adjustment to make it convey terror. The girl was not moving with her hyperventilation the way some people do. She stayed perfectly still, only her eyebrows, already seemingly at their apex, crept up her brow as the green carabinieros formed a line outside the bus; their rifles swaying as they walked. A fare inspector in a bright yellow jacket and dark sunglasses, carrying something that looked like a large calculator, came from around the van and the line of carabinieros and approached the bus.

The girl’s face took on a waxier hue and a tear struggled for moment on her eyelash. It filled up like a balloon and then fell straight to the dusty bus floor. Thpp. It was followed by another. She said nothing and made no movement toward the boy. They remained standing, still facing each other. The boy put his hand on her shoulder. More tears fell, but her expression did not change. The fare inspector was coming down the aisle. He didn’t say anything, just turned to the passengers so that his whole body was in front of them, so that all they could see was the expanse of his yellow jacket. They handed their fare cards to him without saying a word. The bus was preternaturally quiet. The girl was now quietly sobbing. She exhaled in a small and scared ahuh-ahuh-ahuh rhythm. Everyone was watching her. The dark glasses of the fare inspector made it impossible to tell where he was looking or if he had seen her. He continued moving down the bus checking the fare cards in complete indifference.

The boy had given up any further attempts to comfort the girl and stood there just looking at her with his head slightly bowed. As the fare inspector approached, the boy raised his face which was empty of emotion. His mouth was a perfect straight line. The girl looked up too, looking as if she’d taken all the fear and panic off the boy’s face and added it to her own. Her nostrils flared and her lips were raised in a strange half-smile. The corners of her eyes were crumbled and shown with tears. The couple stood awkwardly together, like they’d had an argument and one of them said something too cutting to be taken back. Outside the bus, a carabiniero pressed his dark, thumbprint of a face to the window and then, stepping back from the frosted glass, seemed to disappear into a fog.

The fare inspector stepped over to the couple. He raised his fare inspecting device, prompting them to hand over their fare cards. The boy started his story with a shrug as if to say “well, here we are.” He presented his fare card, and, trying to use it to explain the situation, passed it back and forth between his hands, occasionally pointing to it. On the second or third pass the fare inspector reached out and grabbed the card from the boy’s hand and ran it through his machine. The swiping motion caused his head to turn slightly and his dark sunglasses to glint green. The girl lowered her head. The other passengers watched. The back of the bus was mute spectatorship. Their faces were like decorative plates on a wall, expressing nothing as a result of their desire to see a spectacle mixing with their sympathy.

Cars passed outside with commonplace sounds, engines accelerated and radios faded away. People walked by the detoured bus, they seemed curious to see what it was doing on the sidewalk, but when they saw the carabinieros and their boxy green van, they didn’t linger. The late afternoon sun came through the bus windows and put white coins, opals and medallions on the floor. There was a pearl choker of light draped over one of the seats. The boy had finished his story. His expressive hands had fallen and hung at his sides. The inspector wasn’t looking anywhere. He was still standing in front of the boy, but he didn’t seem to be there. The girl’s crying had stopped. She took a glance at the inspector through the curtain of hair that had fallen over her face. He nodded and his glasses gleamed. His mouth opened and closed, but not enough times to have said anything more than a syllable. He took the dais step that led into the back of the bus and left the young couple where they were.

The girl was still crying, but the boy had awkwardly moved closer to her, trying to comfort her. The wet rivets of her tears on the grey bus floor were scattered around her feet. The fare inspector moved into the knot of people at the back of the bus. There was a complaint, someone tried to protest the fare reader hadn’t worked. Couldn’t he see that? He didn’t respond. The back door opened. The protestor was quickly taken off the bus and surrounded by the carabinieros in their moss green uniforms. The other passengers chose not to notice and went on watching the crying girl and her awkward boyfriend.

The door closed and the bus engine turned over beneath our feet. A carabiniero moved the orange cones that he had placed around the bus. We moved into traffic. The bus was totally quiet. The girl cried and smiled alternately, but it was hard to tell the difference between the two expressions. The boy put his arm around her, but his expression remained conflicted.

At the station, when everyone got out, we silently filed off the bus one at a time. It had gotten dark, but there was a bright white corona of light hanging low in the sky at the entrance to the metro and high above it, the grey top of a mountain, floating there in the dark. The light buzzed and the passengers of the bus walked into it and disappeared. The bus drove off. A chime sounded. Another bus drove up. Another silent group of passengers got off and walked into the blur of light. Many of them shielding their eyes.

Why No One Agrees on the Definition of "Liberty"

“Bring your passport,” I tell Gina at the door. “These Embassy things; you never know.” She nods and goes to the bedroom to get her proof of American citizenship.

It’s warm but overcast outside. The sky has that heavy feeling, like every time you look away the roiling grey clouds come down a few more feet. My shirt is still clinging to my back from my walk home earlier. Sweat is peppered under my eyes. Isolated trees stir in a haunted way. A lapacho between two mango trees is shaking and dropping amoxicillin-colored flowers onto a sidewalk already dark with their crushed petals. The mangos are strangely still. Dogs bark, looking down from rooftops, loosing their hanging slaver down onto passersby below. Other barks float up from a frantic place behind walls ten feet high. Plastic and Mylar bags skitter down the sidewalk and collect in drifts around the gutters. When it rains they will dam up the drains and the streets will flood quickly.

The Embassy looks like an exclusive park, a health spa maybe. The Embassy in Buenos Aires, just a formidable building with Americana on the exterior walls to belie its severity, in Yerevan, it was a compound, a neighborhood, a place diplomats were probably loathe to leave. In Almaty, the Embassy was just another office building, three stern Kazakh guards at the door. Today the Asuncion Embassy is open, exclusively open to the invitees of the Fourth of July celebration. An invitation, received the day before, is folded in my pocket.

We come to the side entrance where, for the first time, the doors are open and the buildings of the Embassy are exposed to the row of parked cars on Kubitschek. It’s an informal airport security line: women with their hair pulled back so tightly it shines with stress, metal detector portals with their little red carpets draped across the bottom, like lolling tongues. I hand my invitation to the tight-haired woman, hoping I’m not going to have to argue the plus guest line. She scans its barcode and hands it back, her face cordial, welcoming. Our status has been conferred so easily. Never before have I been invited to something so exclusive. I do not know the protocol; it seems there is nothing to know, however. You walk in, listen to a speech or two, eat some hors d’oeuvres, grin at some people, pocket a few mints and leave.

The Public Affairs sector is at the door, the first to welcome everyone. My job is vaguely linked to the Embassy and I know these people. They are the ones that were here waiting for me when I got off the plane and the ones who rented my apartment and found me a bed. They are good people and I trust them. The reception is through a door. Most of the attendees cannot be seen. There are a few stragglers among us waiting to go in. I notice that all the men are in suits. Public Affairs are wearing suits, everyone is in a black or navy blue jacket with a tie. Hair is brilliantined, cologne bottle necks have been pressed into fishy white palms so recently the imprints are practically still there. The men around me look like they have all just stepped out of the shower from somewhere inside the Embassy and then unwrapped a suit fresh from the cleaners’. I’m wearing jeans and a button-up shirt which is still sweatily clinging to my back.

“Was I supposed to wear a suit?” I ask Public Affairs. “Don’t worry about it.” They tell me, and for a moment I don’t. Then we go inside. There’s a red carpet, gold braid on military jackets, hands to shake, potted plants, the trickle of an unseen fountain and then a fluttering, tented room; white tablecloths; white gloved waiters; chafer dishes with their fuel and garlic smell; a bandstand and a veritable sea of handsomely dressed people: the women in wraps, sarongs, pearl chokers, sequins and the men, damn, the men are all wearing suits!

“It’s all suits!” I whisper to Gina.

“Don’t worry; no one’s going to notice.”

“Notice, hell! I’m wearing jeans! You know how people are at these things: they look you over.” I say trying to communicate the urgency of the situation to her in a way she can appreciate. I know Gina does not like to be looked over. “I’m going to say ‘hi, nice to meet you’ and they’re going to say ‘hmmph!’”

“Relax. No one cares.”

“How will they not care? I’m spoiling the mood. I’m that jerk at the Hallowe’en party just wearing his regular clothes, spoiling the illusion for everyone.” I look around and see that not only is everyone in a suit and tie but that they’ve all got hatpins, stickpins, cufflinks and all that kind of crap. “We’re at the level of dress attire here that’s like just beneath like a top hat and tails!” I whisper fiercely in Gina’s ear.

She tries to pacify me, telling me that she’s not dressed up enough either. I tell her no one can never tell with women. They seem to just wear whatever they want; as long as you’re not wearing a t-shirt you’re OK. She doesn’t seem to appreciate my inability to identify and concludes her supportive speech by telling me we don’t have to stay. I think wildly about leaving for a second, but then I decide that I’m already here, the damage done. If I were to leave, it would probably just look worse. Besides, it looks like those chafer trays are holding quite a few different dining options. It’s possible that there might be a vegetarian item or two among them.

“No,” I tell Gina. “We’re already here. Let’s at least stay and see what kind of food they’re going to have.”

A few speeches are given. The Paraguayan national anthem is sung which everyone takes up heartily. The Star Spangled Banner follows and I feel like I should sing along or put my hand over my heart and bellow out the words because very few people are singing it. I settle for kind of sotto voce singing like my mom used to do in church, a kind of singing that shows that you agree with the general idea of what’s being sung but that perhaps you’d prefer to express your emotion a different way. My singing drops off entirely when the woman’s singing spirals up into the showy “land uh of the uh fre-eeeeeeEEEEeee and the hoooome ovtHe braaaaaaaave” portion.

At the end of the Ambassador’s speech everyone is set loose. The room resembles a model of molecules that are slowly being heated: a few people break away for the bathrooms or the buffet tables, but most stay within their orbit and try to gradually shift the others in their party in the direction they would like to go. When the chafer trays are opened there is very suddenly a strong smell that so closely resembles decay, I unconsciously shift my breathing to my mouth. Gina and I make rounds of the buffet tables. There are at least four large food tables and three dessert tables. One of the tables is dedicated to American Fourth of July Fodder. There are little bags of Lays, macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, baked beans and two pyramids of White Castle-sized burgers. Looking at our national food that most of the attendees seem to be avoiding, I realize that the problem with many traditional American dishes is that you only want to eat them if your mother made them. Anyone else’s baked beans or macaroni and cheese looks suspicious to me. For some reason there’s white rice on the table. I pile a plate with the stuff and dump barbecue sauce all over it and then I take three of the little bags of chips and Gina and I go find a place to sit down at the edge of the party as is usually our wont.

While we were eating, I realized my mistake. The invitation had requested traje de calle. I had just assumed this meant street clothes since I’ve never hear of the bizarre street suit the invitation seemed to request. Now it was clear that traje de calle meant something like a casual suit. Luckily, one other brave attendee had sufficiently lowered my anxiety by sporting an un-tucked shirt with a checker pattern, jeans and sun glasses. In a room of suits, only he and I were truly memorable, perhaps not in the best way, but I had accepted the fact that I was not appropriately attired.
No one seemed to be getting too upset about it anyway.

For the rest of the reception, Gina and I moved among the buffet tables sampling black olives, stale pretzels, mints, little rolls and commenting on the other suspicious-looking items. The decay smell remained. I think it was emanating from something that looked like a fresh cheese station where a man in a white hat stood at the ready with a knife in his hand and a block of something unidentifiable before him. There was a coffee machine at the edge of a table that was covered with Kahlua, Drambuie and whiskey bottles. The espresso that the machine dispensed was the best I’d had since coming here and I had three cups, returning to the man operating machine each time with renewed loquacity for a discussion on the merits of the coffee. When I met some people I knew, I gestured to my cup, sloshing around its contents, all but begging them to try it. They probably thought I was drunk.

We left after about an hour and a half, but it felt like it had been much longer. The Ambassador was near the exit, shaking hands and having his picture taken. I considered going over. “Go over and say ‘hi’ to him,” Gina nudged me in the direction of the Ambassador. “I probably shouldn’t,” I said backing away. “I’m not really dressed for it.”

When we got home, I changed out of my button-up shirt and went out skating. At the rush hour, it was hard to find an open parking lot anywhere. The streets were clogged with cars and I went tearing through them, like they were slaloms. I skated through a few gas station parking lots and bombed down a hill past a parade of red taillights.

...

Yesterday, I had a day off for the Fourth. I work in a bi-national center, so the Fourth of July is considered a holiday, as are Paraguayan holidays. It’s not quite as good as life at the Embassy where I think they consistently get both Paraguayan and American holidays off; we didn’t get Labor Day off and I don’t think we’ll get a break for Memorial Day either.

I went over to the Real Supermarket to buy barbecue sauce; it’s like some kind of expat tradition to go looking for this stuff on the Fourth of July, only to eat copious amounts of it that day, declare it delicious beyond all expectation and then forsake it with all the other half-used bottles of condiments in your refrigerator.
I went to Real because they have an American aisle. I don’t think they call it that, but that’s what I’ve heard it referred to as. What the American aisle amounts to is about two entire shelves crammed with marshmallows, crammed like the way a sleeping bag is crammed into its sack, almost an entire shelf of cardboard tubes of Pringles The Works! TM , a bunch of condiments that aren’t difficult to find anywhere else, such as Heinz Ketchup, that take up about 3/5ths of the aisle and finally, a shelf of IGA-brand canned goods. The canned goods, which were mostly vegetables, were the most American thing I had seen since flying out of Detroit Metro and that’s saying a lot. American stuff is not difficult to find here. Coca Cola is ubiquitous, there are McDonald’s on the main streets of most principle cities, Burger King and Pizza Hut, too. The Simpsons are everywhere, mostly advertising the Paraguayan equivalent of a liquor store and every so often, you see one of those HUGE pickup trucks here, the ones with some kind of corrugated plastic bed-lining and exhaust pipes draped along the thing like some kind of ridiculous trim, four wheels in the back: the types of trucks that usually have huge American flags billowing out behind them, like some kind of red, white and blue bridal veil, now unchastely thrown back and flapping in the wind. Even in the midst of all these reminders of home, the stark can of “Irish” potatoes was too much for me. Seeing it was like seeing an old friend, but then remembering that he owes you money. There’s a limit to the amount of Americanness you want to be able to access in a different country. It’s nice to leave some things behind and really let yourself miss them for a while.

I stood in the aisle for a while, a bottle of barbecue sauce in hand, artificial maple syrup in the other. There are countries, many of them, were either of these items would be impossible to come by. I have lived in one of them. While these countries may have a dearth of American products, they also have a dearth of Americans. Few people, even in the capital, have ever met an American. Every few days there is an old Jean Claude Van Damme movie on TV, dubbed in Russian; that’s all they know of America. As a result, these people are curious. They have heard reports, all conflicting, about America, they want to talk to you. They invite you in and you find the stage set for an ideal cultural exchange: a memory you will both retain for years to come.

Here, and I would argue, all of Latin America, there is cultural proximity to America. The people are familiar with the blockbuster films and the fast food of America. In the malls, they sell our expensive clothing brands and people use American-created social media websites. The youth skateboard and in the clubs, they dance and fall in love to American music. Most people seem to accept this and while there might not be any hostility exhibited toward the United States of America, there is very little interest in it. Italy, its fashion, its Tower of Pisa, its similar, but seldom heard language is interesting, small glimpses of Chinese culture caught in the municipal market are interesting. Anyone interested in going to America wants to go for the cosmopolitan experiences of Disney World or NYC; when I start talking about Oregon and temperate rain forests, I can see, I’ve lost their attention. Most people feel that through the combined efforts of McDonald’s, Ice Age 2, Coca Cola and Nike they already know most of what there is to know about America.

I don’t blame them. The prominence of Mexican culture in many places in the US has done the same thing for me. I enjoy the food, music and celebrations of Mexico at home, so, although I like the culture, I’ve never really felt a burning desire to go there. There’s a feeling that it’s not going anywhere; that I’ll always be able to swing across the border. Likewise, I feel like I know the place, even though I’ve never been there. I hear about it in the news, I’ve worked with Mexicans and had discussions about the different places in the country. I recognize that I know nothing about Mexico; I’ve never been there, therefore I couldn’t really know much about it, however, it cannot have the same spell-binding effect that say, Mongolia or Ethiopia does. When I meet Mexicans, I enjoy talking to them, but I am certainly more loquacious when meeting Yemenis or Azerbaijanis; I am more eager to hear their stories.

It’s the same thing here, in fact sometimes due to the aggressive marketing campaigns of American companies. I think it might be a little worse. I have met quite a few people here that hear my accent and ask my where I’m from. When I tell them, I’ve seen any flicker of interest just fall right off their faces. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell, if many people are just naturally laconic or if they’re just being especially terse with you because you are American.

Before going to the Real Supermarket, I had stopped at the bank to cash my checks. I had to show my passport and I couldn’t help but to notice that the teller acted very curtly. I couldn’t tell if it was my nationality or just the way he was. When he gave me my money, I looked right into his eyes and thanked him; he said nothing but turned away and began to talk to another clerk, done with me and seemingly glad to be rid of me.

In the Real Supermarket, with my bottle of barbecue sauce, I looked around at the American products and wondered if in fact they were the source of the bank teller’s ire. It couldn’t have been me. I hadn’t said anything to him. I tried to imagine what I could’ve done differently to make him acknowledge my thanks instead of turning away.
After I paid for my purchases, I went over to the store’s bag check to pick up my backpack that I can’t bring into the store. The guy working at the bag check was a kid with Down’s Syndrome. Like most people I have met with Down’s, he was garrulous and friendly far beyond the ability of most people. He took the bags of the customers, wished them a good day and genuinely meant it.

When I approached, he was wrapping a gift for a tight-lipped woman perhaps in her early sixties. I waited for him to finish and watched his exchange with the woman. He wrapped her gift with care, but he was not a professional: the paper was a bit wrinkled and the tape on the ends, excessive. As he worked, he talked with the woman. He smiled when he talked, like he was happy for her company. She said nothing, only occasionally reaching out her hand to hold down the package so that he could tape it better. The look on her face was one of annoyance, one of a person that feels herself to be surrounded by dolts. In the middle of applying a piece of tape, the attendant was suddenly racked with a fit of coughing. He turned away to cough. When he had sufficiently cleared his throat, he turned back to the woman and explained that he had been ill lately and smiled. To this the woman said nothing. Her expression didn’t even register that someone had spoken to her. Her package was finished and she took it without another word. No ‘thanks,’ no ‘feel better,’ not even a ‘good bye.’ She just turned and walked out. Watching her go, I thought of all the things I could assume about her biases, perhaps she loathed people of menial employ, perhaps she was a germophobe and was terrified that the attendant would get her sick or perhaps she disliked disability or didn’t understand it. Getting my bag and walking out of the store I realized that she was probably just a jerk and that the teller at the bank that refused to look at me or acknowledge my thanks, had probably been a jerk, too; nationality, barbecue sauce and disability had nothing to do with it.