The Tallest Portuguese in the City

Some fiction for a change:




When you wait at the Sasoonsi David Station, you don’t have to wait long; the trains north to Tbilisi originate there. The platform is like all Soviet platforms. It’s very long and rusted. There are hulks of old trains taken off the tracks that are set back in the distance. The sun sets over there, behind those trains. Their Cyrillic letters are flaking off, gold in the setting sun. A ж like a rusted snowflake, about to fall. On the platform, everyone is speaking Armenian, but as soon as you get on the train, it’s all Russian. Everyone on the train is Armenian, but they’ve put themselves in an international context by getting on the train. Mellifluous Armenian, spoken mostly in the front of them mouth, turns and hides in back-of-the-throat Russian. The train crackles with the sound of spreading newspaper, no one is reading; it’s food being opened. The newspaper speaks a language of its own.

Back outside the station, a man is shopping in the stalls. He is looking for a small bottle of Avshar vodka. No one in the market has the smaller bottles. The bottles they have are all liter-sized. There is a picture of a wolf on the Avshar bottle: a huge gray wolf. The man stands there considering the liter-size. The woman at the stall scowls at him and clucks her tongue. There are a few small snowflakes in the sky that are almost impossible to distinguish from far-off stars, until they are right on top of you. I was sitting there watching them when I noticed the man at the stall. He stuck me as interesting. Let me explain to you why I felt this way.

I have lived my whole life in Yerevan. I grew up in a large apartment only eight blocks from the hospital where I was born in the Komitas area. My father named me Artashes, after the great fighter and my grandfather who lived with us. It had not, nor has it ever been the tradition of Armenians to put on airs and give their children Russian names. All the Yuris I grew up with were Russian. All the Tigrans were Armenian. That’s how you knew who was who.

I was born shortly after the Soviet takeover. Well, maybe about 15 years after, but, relatively soon anyway. When I was born, our once Oriental city with its camels, souks and beautiful Armenian script had already been modernized. The poor place has never really recovered.

My dear city! The pictures I have seen of her in the past are so mysterious and ancient. It looks like Ur or a Pataliputra. The Russians built the metro, but they turned our ancient city into an airport, only the pink tufa stone says anything. Where once the whole city whispered and swore it now only mutters and it is only the tufa that mutters. I can’t understand anything it says. It speaks Turkish, don’t ask me why. Ottoman masons, I guess.

My cousin and I used to tell our parents we were going to watch a parade and we would take a marshutki to the square and pilfer sujuk from the stalls even though we could get whatever we wanted at home. We weren’t bad kids; only testing the limits of our world. It was around that time that I first began to hear the city speaking.

At night, back then, the city still spoke in an Old Armenian, like what they spoke in church. I didn’t understand it and sometimes it scared me. It reminded me of my neighbor, an old man who had had a stroke. I would give my liver to hear that sound again now. Anything would be better than the braying of these damn Turk rocks.

When I finished school, I took a job as a taxi driver. I don’t think they were called taxis back then but I can’t remember what we used to call them. Something beautiful.
There are lots of words I can’t remember anymore. Too many tongues have named the same things over and over. All I hear is babble.

By now, you’ve understood what it is with me. I hear things. I don’t know if any of them are right or if they mean anything. I might be crazy, but if I’m crazy I never bothered anyone so my craziness isn’t the bad kind of crazy. I’m only crazy to myself.

But the night I heard the young man trying to buy the vodka outside the train station, I had to do something. I’ve heard lots of things that I haven’t understood in languages I couldn’t identify. Mostly, the languages come from things, old things and old places, but they can come from people, too. The speaking doesn’t actually come from the mouths of the people, it just emanate out of people who are usually confused or thinking very hard about something. There are some people, I can’t explain it, that have terrible looks on their faces, but the speaking that comes from them is completely euphonious. I have gone and looked up all these words about pretty-sounding voices; none of them are right, of course, but they are the best available. There are no words for the sound a bad copy of a Modigliani made one night in the Vernishage market when I was about fourteen. Or the things I heard the tanks singing when they rolled out in ’89. They sung, they sung like they must’ve been Portuguese and in love and drinking wine in the highest apartment in the city wriggling their toes out the window and they were tanks, hulking, looming, blasting tanks!

I used to hear some interesting things at the Sasoonsi David station. Back in the 70s I saw a Yezdi grandfather speaking the strangest language I’ve ever heard: Cuneiform. I thought he was clucking like a hen but he was speaking Cuneiform. Another time an anxious young mother from the Gegharkunik region was reciting a Zoroastrian prayer. God knows where she got that from! Other things have happened there too. I once heard someone’s market bag singing a popular Russian song at the time and a week after New Year’s Day, every year at about 6 o’clock, the bricks in the plaza sing a Tango in Spanish, something about fireflies watching us pass by or something.

I was there that winter evening waiting for the bricks to start singing like they did every year, but for some reason, it wasn’t happening. It was getting later and later and I was getting colder and colder. I knew my family would be worried. For some reason, my son is very nervous. I don’t remember ever meeting anyone as nervous as him. He worries so much there’s always this high squealing sound around him. I try not to make him worry, but dammit, I hate sitting around inside all day, or on the bench in front of the old building with all the other senile old fools. I might be crazy, but I’m not senile.

So, I didn’t want to make my son worry and I was starting to feel like I was going to freeze to the bench. I decided I would smoke one last cigarette and go. Sometimes cigarettes will say some interesting things, but it depends on the brand. I was about to light the thing when I heard every language at once. I know you can’t understand what I mean and I’m not even going to try to explain it to you. I’ll only repeat myself. I heard every language at once. You decide what it means.

I turned my head immediately in the direction of this newly erected Tower of Babel to find myself looking at one of the most foolish young men I have ever seen. The young man try to buy vodka had about two weeks of brownish beard growth, the hem of his blue underwear was sticking out and I could see that there was an obvious hole in the heel of his boot. He looked like a too-young version of an old drunk. What made it worse (and also much funnier) was that he was, actually, drunk. Very drunk, in fact. Oh, he could stand and all and he even ordered his vodka from the crone at the stall without a slur. But, great god, if you could hear the everylanguage that spilled out of him, a million voices, a billion accents saying a trillion things and every single one of them blind drunk! An old Avar woman talking about cooking the kidneys (I don’t know what animal), a Tamil saying something about his new shoes, something about armadillos in Guarani, “where is my 90 grams of marble?” a raspy voice asked in Maltenglish and a British voice swilled some nonsensical words of Mandarin around and then seemed to spit them out. “Sunglasses no!” the Mandarin from Leeds seemed to be repeating.

This and a galaxy of other voices. Of course no one else noticed. They never do. I listened enraptured. I looked up at the statue of David of Sasoon that sits on the plaza. I don’t know. I guess expected the bronze giant to tilt his head a little, but he was as still as ever. Was it possible that no one else noticed this man? Was it possible that every language could be spoken at once and the world not fall apart? How was it that no one else even felt the slightest difference? David remained immortalized on his horse as impassive as ever. Meanwhile the cloud of voices, of time, of sorrow, lost teeth and belches and sour imprecations moved further away from me toward the station. The young man had bought his vodka and was heading to his train. A woman’s voice yelled out from him “What the hell’s a walrus? in a Pittsburgh-accented American English and a thirteen year old said “It is and has always been!” in Tok Pisin.

I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t let this strange man and this wonderful event go. I had to follow him and at least to ask him if he knew that every language ever spoken was swirling around him like a cloud. I had to know what if there was anything to this dull and sloppy-looking kid, or if perhaps it was his extraordinary mundane quality that created this most incredible sound.

Before I heard this young man, I had never heard more than a cheap riddle in Arabic out of a drunk and even that was more of a limerick. I won’t repeat it here. As a rule, their bottles tend to say much more than the drunks themselves do.

Before getting up, I had to admit to myself that perhaps it was possible that I had finally become the other kind of crazy: the crazy that bothers people. “Well,” I thought, “as long as I am crazy in this way, I should act like it.” After all, if you are the kind of crazy that bothers people it is better to bother people. You should never hold anything in.

I got up to follow the young man, through all the voices, I could hear his boot heel flapping on the street. “Yeah, well why the hell don’t you take a swim?” a voice shouted out in Igbo and then made a sound like “oof!” The man was going to the train station. I knew he was going to get on a train. He was exactly drunk enough to be getting on a train.

“That’s not enough beans!” an incredibly raspy voice called out from the drunk in the Nam language as he opened the doors and disappeared behind them.

I bought a little green ticket. The price hadn’t changed much since I’d been on a train in ’81. I didn’t have to hurry to the platform, I could hear the drunken voices better than ever. The closer the man got to the train, the happier and drunker they began to sound. At least 24,000 of the voices were now singing. 16,000 songs about love, 2,400 patriotic songs, 900 people singing unintelligibly in languages that weren’t their own. A Russian sang about his brother. A Qutian sang about his mountains and a Hmong girl, about twelve, quietly made up the lyrics as she went. That Hmong was sad; she shouldn’t have been drunk so young, but from the words, I understood why she was.

I got a seat next to the young man so I could listen better. I was worried that after he got on the train he would sleep. It was cold and dark and he’d been drinking heavily. It also must’ve taken at least some of his energy to keep all those voices going, even if he wasn’t aware of them. I assumed that if he went to sleep, the voices would stop. I had never heard that voices come from anything that wasn’t awake. Person or thing, they all slept and when they did the voices quieted.
I had nothing to worry about. The young man had drunk the magic amount of vodka. He was energized, but not so drunk that he would pass out, at least not yet. After the train began to move from the station, he took about a notepad and began to write what looked like a letter. He wrote furiously and as he did so, the voices grew querulous again. Some of them were beginning to sound much drunker. About 1/3 of the voices weren’t making any sense.

It’s not in my nature to be discrete. I don’t believe in it, too sneaky. If you want to stare at someone, you take a good damn gawk or you’re never going to be satisfied, you’ll always be wondering about things, but forever hiding your face. I never attempted to hide anything from this young man. I sat right across from him and craned my body as much as possible on my seat to face him directly. I all but shook my damn eyebrows in his face. My breath stirred the pages of his notepad. He never once looked up or paid me the slightest bit of attention. The conductors seemed to think that I was the unusual one. Asking if I were alright when they came for my ticket. Alright? Alright? How could I have been alright with what I heard? If they heard the 1/100,000 part of what I did they probably would’ve been hauled off to the nut house. I can only say that it was good that I had had my whole life to prepare for the moment. I don’t know how, but I managed to keep my sanity over the course of that long night. The things I heard and the places I heard them from. I am still sorting them out! My brain will be processing them until the moment I die and if I lived to be a thousand it would never finish.

Around the time that we had gotten to Kirovaqan, or whatever they call it now, the young man had filled about 10 illegible pages with his furious writing. You’d think he was trying to write down the voices from the feverish way that he scribbled and stabbed at his notepad. I tried once or twice to glance at his notebook but could make nothing out. It looked like upside-down Amharic.

He was still awake when we reached the border. I kept waiting for my opportunity to talk to him, but he never looked up at me. Never took his eyes of his writing, not even to take drinks from his Avshar bottle(which he tried to hide in his coat; embarrassingly, the neck of the bottle kept slipping out and spilling.) I was also afraid that if I did talk to him, I wouldn’t be able to hear his voice above the roar of the everylanguage around him and that I would stammer and look foolish. I couldn’t decide if I should venerate the scruffy young drunk or pity him.

Just on the other side of the border, after the border guards had checked the train for the nothing that is always on it and had taken our passports and stamped them with the blue stamp in the flying bird-shape of Georgia, the man began to drift asleep. As he did so, the voices too began to drop off. I heard Mongolian protests, vomiting sounds and Melanesian crying. By the time we were in Rustavi there were only a few voices left. One of them had an echoing, sober quality to it, like a voice that was having a quiet cup of coffee in a dark kitchen after being awake all night. I listened to this voice read things off the paper for a while and gradually I began to realize that this voice was speaking my own language, even my own dialect. The paper rattled and it said something else, something about the news. I recognized the opinion and then I recognized the voice: it was my own. I was one of the voices inside the man. Then I did something I had never done before: I spoke to the voice.

“Artashes?” I asked, not expecting to be answered, but unable to believe that I could ever ignore myself. The voice stopped for a while and I thought I had lost it. The young man was asleep; he had dropped his passport book on the floor. I leaned over and picked it up and set it on top of him. As I did so, I heard my own voice come from the young man’s chest, right where I placed his passport. “Poor reading, it said.”

“Artashes!” I cried out to myself. After a life of listening to the voices emanating from wire spools, basinets and old piano keys, none of them had ever spoken to me. Never had a personal word been spoken. The voice yelled my name back. It seemed to recognize me. I called back out to it. “How did you get in there?” I asked and then a funny thing happened. My voice responded in my language, but I no longer understood what it said. Like a beginning student of a language, I was only able to catch about 20% of the sentence. I heard. “I”, “always” and what I think was “dust” although it could’ve been “shoe” (in my language they’re pretty similar). Then I lost the voice completely. It kept talking, but all I heard was the sound. There was no sense in it anymore.

When the train pulled into the Tbilisi station, I didn’t wake the young man, I decided it would be best to let him sleep. The voices in him were silent. I walked off the train and out into the plaza. There was a big market that day and the mandarin oranges that come from the Black Sea coast were everywhere. I bought a bag of them from a vendor using hand signals; I didn’t even feel I could speak in Russian at that moment. I understood nothing around me. Mingrelian, Georgian, Armenian, Azeri: it all had the same torpid sound like a muffled washing machine. Walking down the street, I ripped the mandarin peels off and dropped them in the street. Snow had fallen during the night and seemed to mute even the obstreperous train station. The only thing I could hear was the soft cottony plash of the peels hitting the snow. I walked until I finished the bag and then I flung the thing into the street. Even the taxis weren’t making any noise. The silence was making me feel colder. I would’ve been happy even to hear the tufa back in Yerevan speaking Turkish again.

The snow was coming down much harder than it had been in Yerevan. I decided to go look for an Armenian church to go into to get out of the snow. I couldn’t find one so I had to go into one of the Georgian’s Russian-looking cathedrals. Everything in there was gold and there were icons burning, about ten per wall. I looked at them for a moment. There was one of Mariam. She had eyes like olive pits and fingers like grape vines. “Mariam jan,” I started to say, but then stopped, unsure. I smelled vodka not vodka, but vodka sweat. I turned around and there was the awkward young man with the beard. He was starting at the Mariam with his hat clutched nervously in his hand. There were no voices coming from him, but I could hear something like a river washing over its banks. The sound didn’t have a source. It came from all around me. It was the first thing I had heard since early that morning and it was beautiful, better than any song or assurance of love. It was something that would always be beautiful to anyone who heard it.

I waited until the lanky young man left the church. I followed him out, but I stopped at the door to watch him go. A beggar approached him in the street. The young man nervously took out a few coins, threw them into the beggar’s cup and was gone.

I stood there unthinking, hearing only that river and the satisfying chok sound it made when hitting the embankments. The beggar approached me. He shook his cup and I heard voices in his rattling coins, but they were all incomplete and flat. He shook his scrofulous head, made a vague gesture and walked off toward a side street where there were stalls with more mandarin oranges. It had begun to snow again and the oranges glowed like fire through the gloom of the wet bricks and the grey snow. My vision grew soft and blurry; only the oranges were clear. Everything around them was dark watercolor. I walked to the woman selling them. She was tall and bony and had a nose like something you’d put into a pot of soup.

“Woman, where do these oranges come from?” I suddenly found myself asking in Russian. My voice had returned.

“Batumi, where else?” She replied looking me up and down. Trying to decide what type of crazy I was.

“Maybe I’ll go to Batumi then.” I declared, putting a hand in my pocket like I was out to buy a train ticket from her.

The woman switched to Armenian. “You can go where ever you want, but you should go to your family. They’re probably worried about you.” She used the familiar form of address and I couldn’t tell if it was because she was unaccustomed to speaking Armenian or if she was patronizing me.

“Then I’ll go back to Yerevan, to my son,” I told her. “But better give me some of those mandarins to take back to him; they’re much better here.”

“Buy them at the voksal, papik jan. Then you won’t have to carry them so far.”

“Apres.” I told her. You should live.

At the station, I bought a coffee and a potato pirozhki. I put my two kilos of mandarins under my chair while I ate. In the station, voices complained in Lezgin or spoke quietly in Tartar. All normal voices. When someone pushed back a chair, I heard it call out something in Frisian. When the people walked by their footsteps said either bir or adin, depending on how fast they were walking. Someone called out something for the Yerevan train and I got up.

As we pulled out of the station, I sat down in an empty compartment by the window. I watched the snow-darkened city chok by. It was cold in the car. I wished for a blanket. I watched Tbilisi spin past the window. I looked for the young man. I wondered where he was now, if he had gone to another church or if he was in a tavern. I imagined him drinking and eating somewhere warm and saw how our lives were connected. He would leave Tbilisi and go other places and I was going home. I knew I would never leave Yerevan again.

The sound of the river gradually rose from the sound of the train clicking over the tracks. The conductor came by to take my ticket. “Going to Yerevan? He asked me in Russian.

“Sasoonsi David,” I replied.

“Uncle, there’s only one stop in Yerevan.”

He punched my ticket and handed it back to me. I went back to watching the snow fall past the window. The mandarins shifted in their bag under my seat.

“Ssssetum,” they said.

“We’ll be home soon,” I told them.

Night Sounds and Their Meanings

The night before there had been this quick, staccato popping sound. The sky had been the sort of luminous dark that precedes a tropical storm. There wasn’t any thunder, but the heat lightening flashed behind panels of clouds in quadrants. There had been a small fireworks display earlier in the evening, so I assumed the popping sounds I was hearing outside were more fireworks. I hear fireworks almost every night here; I don’t pay much attention to them anymore. I stood by the sliding glass door of the balcony a while watching fulminating sky and hearing the distant popping sounds until I felt tired.

I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom, when I noticed that the sound had changed slightly. There was now a roaring, still not a roaring associated with the weather, but something produced by man, or men, in this case lots of men. The roar I was hearing was the combined voices of 100s of people. I turned off the electric toothbrush so I could hear better. “Soccer game?” Gina asked, leaning in the doorway, but looking out the bathroom window, toward the noise. “That’s what I thought,” I answered. “But listen to it, usually soccer games call for something like a song. The notes are drawn out oooole, ole, ole, ole, but this is something different. It’s military; short and precise, like a bunch of dogs barking in tune together.” We both listened to the orderly roar for a while and then Gina shrugged and said “must be that military compound down the street” and went to bed.

I stood there a few more minutes. Watching the lightening and listening to the fireworks and yelling, I began to have the disheartening feeling that I was experiencing a distant war. The shouts, the flashes and the muffled explosions, they were not disparate, but functioning in concert. The military shouted something over and over that sounded like “One!” I went to bed.

I woke up in the middle of the night to find the lightening had given over to rain. I got up to close the windows. The apartment had that dreamy effect that comes over the interior of any building late at night in the rain. The streetlights threw wet shadows through the sliding glass door of the balcony. As I closed the door the shadows rolled themselves across the living room floor. Everything was quiet, I decided to lie on the couch a while and have the rain and light all to myself. There was no sound of traffic, no car alarms; everyone in the city was asleep. I watched the rivulets on the sliding glass door bifurcate and change the pattern of light that fell on the floor. I got drowsy after a while and decided I should get back in bed before I fell asleep on the couch. As I was getting up, I heard it again coming from the bathroom window, the only one I hadn’t closed. The sound rushed right up to where I was standing, like it had been meant for me alone. “ONE!” I stood there listening to the chants like 100s of motorcycles being revved at once. I knew it was probably just some boot camp exercise, but to hear all those voices, yelling in unison, in the dark, when the whole town is asleep, makes it feel like they’re yelling at you, like they’re coming for you. I went back to bed. In the bedroom, I couldn’t hear the military anymore. There was only the sound of the rain, which was beginning to come down hard.

The next morning, I woke up to find the rain clouds were still hanging over the city like somebody’s old, grey sleeping bag being aired out: they were all bunched-up and dirty looking. After an hour, it began to rain again, hard at first, but then it tapered off before I had to leave for work.

I walked with the sort of peripheral attention that one employs on a route they know very well, one they walk every day. Down the hill toward downtown, behind the university building with its grey façade and dead cat on the sidewalk. Past the guy with the bundles of herbs and the motor and pestle set up on a little table, his battered radio set to a Guarani talk radio program. Through the park with the fichus tree that dangles its roots just about the wet playground sand. The flooded volleyball court. Across Peru St. which the unmuffled buses roar down like diesel tractors. Lopez St. and the final stretch where I usually take off my headphones and start thinking about what I am going to do when I get into my office. I almost always make myself a cup of instant coffee, even when I have no desire for it. I began to think about doing it again today.

The building was nearly empty as it usually in the morning. The institute is really more of an after-school or after-work program. In the morning it’s a skeletal staff of janitors and security guards by the doors. The library’s open and a few people are seen moving around, sleepy-looking, like they just woke up in there and are trying to find their shoes or something.

I climbed the five flights of stairs to my office. After passing the third floor, all signs of coworkers vanished. Very few teachers go above the third floor and even fewer go above the fourth floor. Occasionally, a janitor will be up there sawing away at something, and Saturdays, when the place is packed with kids and parents a sense of equilibrium seems to keep the fifth floor well-attended, but on week day mornings, when I walk up there, it’s like surveying a domain, a tiled and empty domain.

I unlocked the door, threw my stuff down and turned on the computers. I shook a little instant coffee into the cup that I reuse every day without ever washing and went back down to the teacher’s room on the third floor to get hot water.

I don’t like teacher’s rooms. At least not in different countries, when I still don’t know many people. In other countries I have worked, I always disliked going into the teacher’s room. It’s hard to ignore the fact that conversation always drops a few octaves when you enter. Everyone seems comfortable with each other, but you, you are the new guy, no one knows anything about you, only that you’re from America and perhaps you think you’ve got all the answers. One could certainly assume so by the cock-sure way you enter the teacher’s room every day for your hot water with nothing more than an hola or a buen provecho.

Everyone in the teacher’s room gave me a nod while I filled my cup. I walked out slowly to see if there was anything I might be able to comment on or say to anyone, but no one looked up or said anything loud enough for me to hear. Back up in my office, I opened my e-mail to get the day started. I took a few sips of the ignoble, but stimulating brew and started the pointing and clicking for the day. I was reading one of my mom’s short updates when there came something like a tentative knock at the door, only the sound was so vague and distant it sounded more like someone had dropped a couple of books two floors down. I decided to ignore the sound, no one ever came up here this early and just in case someone was out there cleaning, I didn’t want to start shouting adelante to no one, making myself look nuts. I went back to pointing and clicking.

I was in the middle of taking a sip of coffee when I heard the sound again. It was just as faint, but it sounded a little more intentional, like this time it was saying please. I called for whomever to enter and the door opened. Ahh someone was waiting outside. But what sort of person knocks so lightly and then waits a full five minutes for a response? This sort of person: a tall character in a baggy black sweatshirt and a high and tight haircut. An American with a heavy brow and a slightly dazed look in his eyes who, from the moment he walked in the door, never lifted his gaze from me, as if he suspected me of some treacherous intent. His brow was so heavy it was as if he peered from underneath it, like something would look at you from under a rock. “You work for the Embassy, right?” he asked as he crossed the room to me. “Well, sort of—“ I started. Before I could explain he began telling me how his passport had been stolen. I told him I really had no connection to the Embassy. I didn’t know much about its workings. The Embassy helped me, but I didn’t do anything for them besides work with English language programs. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “You should probably just go there and talk to someone.” He told me he did and that he’d gotten the forms, but that it was going to cost him 160.00 US to get another passport. I was about to sympathize with him a little. The cost was high, I knew, but then, almost in the same breath, he asked me if I could get him a job at the embassy. Clearly this guy had no idea who I was.

I began telling him I really had no pull at the embassy and that even if I did, I probably still wouldn’t be able to get him a job there. “People have to take tests,” I explained. “They have to study and go to lengthy, multi-stage interviews to work at embassies. I myself— .” He cut me off, telling me that he didn’t have any money, that his Paraguayan wife was only able to work a few hours a day, that she was pregnant and soon wouldn’t be able to work. I thought for a second and told him it sounded like he was going to have to go back home. “Get a job there and work for a while, then come back with some money.” This received the same steely, heavy-browed look as before. “I can’t go,” he told me. “They won’t give my wife a visa and to prove that we’re a real couple, I have to stay with her for at least a year.

It went on like this for a while. Everything I suggested to the guy, he seemed to have anticipated with a hard luck story. It sounded like he’d really gotten in over his head. I felt bad for him, but I was also feeling disconcerted. He didn’t seem at all prepared to accept that I wouldn’t be able to help him. His look seemed to be hardening into a stone mask, utterly bereft of emotion. There was something uncomfortable about the way he looked so directly and yet so blankly at me.

“Well,” I tried again. “You could always try to get a job teaching here. Isn’t that why you came?” As soon as I said it, I realized I had no idea why this guy was here. I had no idea how he’d found out I was in this office or that I had some kind of connection to the embassy. “I’m trying but…but I had some, uh, problems when I worked here before.” I didn’t say anything but waited for him to continue. “I started working here about seven months ago. I had been here in Paraguay for a few months when I witnessed a decapitation.” I drew in an audible breath. “Holy shit.” “…” “Holy shit, man. I’m sorry to hear that.” “Yeah, well, shit happens.” “Yeah, but not to most people it doesn’t, I mean not like that. Damn.” While he had been telling me this gruesome story, he had not once allowed his eyes stray from mine. I told him I’d do what I could to help him get a job. I couldn’t really offer much, but I wanted to do something. Before he left he went to write down his number and I noticed that his hands shook so bad he could hardly write. He thanked me. I told him to take it easy and he walked out.

As soon as he left, I breathed a massive sigh of relief. Whom the hell had I just talked to! Who was this guy who just showed up, unannounced at my office and told me he’d witnessed a decapitation? I had wanted to ask him more. Was it an accident or was it some kind of drug cartel thing? How the hell did you end up in such a scenario? Furthermore, if you had seen it and had gone back to the States afterward for much needed rest and medication why the shit did you come back here? Were you already married? There had been so many questions, but I hadn’t wanted to run the risk of rehashing old memories in this guy who stared so vacantly and who spoke with almost no trace of affect. I tried to put the encounter out of my mind, but it took me a while to get back to work.

Just as I had opened up a document to revise, there came another tentative knock at the door. The same soft, unsure knock I had heard before, like the way someone might knock on your door if they want to talk, but have good reason to think you’re asleep. When the door opened, it was him again. He came right back over to my desk and sat down, as though he hadn’t just been there 20 minutes ago. I felt myself tense but tried not to show it. “What’s up?” He asked if maybe I could loan him some money. I told him that it wouldn’t be possible because I didn’t bring any with me to work, which was true. He remained sitting there for a while, like he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with himself. I told him to go try the bars. I told him he’d be perfect to work the doors at a bar. When he left the second time, I felt the urge to call all my friends and family just to make sure they were OK.

That night, I went to sleep early. I usually go to sleep early here because I can’t sleep in later than seven due to the incredible amount of noise outside that starts around six. I was also worn out from my day and it was raining again. I sat on the couch for a while and watched the lightening before I had to wrench myself up to make it to bed.

I fell asleep almost immediately and probably would’ve slept through the night had I not been awakened by someone yelling around three o’clock in the morning. I woke up and realized that Gina wasn’t in bed. It took me a moment to realize she was over by the window. I guessed that whoever was yelling had been doing it for a while and Gina had tried to see what was going on. I was about to fall back asleep when the yelling recommenced, only now that I was more awake, I realized that it wasn’t yelling, at least not in the conventional sense. It was a human being making a vocal noise, but there the resemblance ended. What I heard from the street below made my blood run cold. I’ve felt my spine thrill in the past at particularly well-done ghost stories, but I’ve never felt everything go cold like that. It was a very curious sound, but from the very beginning, I tried not to listen. It was horrifying and, in a way, disgusting, but at first it was so alien I couldn’t even comprehend it. Eventually the screaming stopped and I thought maybe I’d still be able to fall asleep and forget it ever happened, but just as I was feeling like closing my eyes. It started again.

How can I begin to describe the way this fiendish cacophony sounded? Perhaps the most horrible aspect, is that the screaming was coming from an old woman and that she was yelling so loud inside her home that it sounded like she was up on a roof somewhere. What she yelled made no sense; in fact, it sounded more like some kind to terrible echolalia than anything that had been purposefully constructed. Like an incantation, the same grisly syllables were repeated over and over in tones so piercing they sounded like someone begging to have their sanity taken away so they would no longer have to endure whatever horrific torture they were being subjected to. It sounded like the Exorcist being told through the banging of trash can lids and the sickening thump of something being dragged down old basement stairs. It was rushed, like it was rushing to you, seeking you out and now that you had woken up it knew where you were in your dark bedroom.

The sound went on for about twenty minutes before it abruptly stopped. After it was done, the tired night sounds of far-away traffic and solitary barking dogs didn’t sound the same: it was like everything took on a sinister note. Eventually, I feel asleep again.

The next morning, most of the rain had evaporated. The streets were dry but for little puddles in the deeper depressions. Despite the bizarre twenty-four hours I had passed, I felt happy and well-rested. I walked to work feeling confident about a workshop I was going to give and when I got to the office, I decided that I had enough time to day dream a little and look up visa requirements for Mozambique.

I was reading about border crossings into Tanzania when I was disturbed by a quiet knock on the door.

My conversation with my affectless friend wasn’t quite as odd this time, but it was still very unusual. It’s possible that after the various shouts and screams in the night and stories of decapitation and employment I was getting inured to strangeness of all types. But the one thing I was dying to ask him was “How the hell do you people keep finding me?”

Yanquis del Chaco

You can’t walk out of Asuncion, well, you can but it would take you all day. Depending on the direction, you probably still wouldn’t make it much further than the dusty periphery of a market suburb: the kind they set up on the outskirts of all cities now for the people coming in from the countryside. You would’ve walked all day, just to reach an area of sliding aluminum doors with product logos painted on them, where the streets break down into highways and the sun is still obscured by the roofs and the things piled on top of the roofs, scrap metal mostly, but who knows what else is up there.

This was my problem with, not only Buenos Aires, but all of Argentina. As long as I was in a town, no matter how small, I couldn’t walk out of it. Rosario, Jujuy, Resistencia, they all had nice parks and some trees but on occasion, you want to just walk off the map and not look at any more grey buildings or broken sidewalk tiles. I never cared about the outlying landscape. I’d be just as happy in mountains as forest or a valley. But it was impossible to find your way out. It didn’t help that the streets all have the same names in Argentina. San Martin, Sarmiento, I don’t know how many Rivadavias I walked down. I often thought there was probably just one long Rivadavia that stretched all the way across the country and that I had never escaped it.

The only place that I found that was any different was the north-eastern part of the country, the tiny Missiones province. After crossing the Parana River we seemed to leave the great, endless Rivadavia street behind. There were walls of forest on either side of the highway. The earth shown in large, tiger-orange patches through the grass. The towns were smaller, you took a few turns off the main street and you were out in the fields, in the campo, walking past occasional one-room school houses and grapefruit orchards.

Asuncion is at, roughly, the same longitude as this province and the climate is very similar, but as the original capital of the Rio del Plata area, the city has built its own Rivadavia that spins in hectic circles way out past the suburbs and their dusty warehouses. You’re practically back in the Missiones of Argentina before the city seems to end. But one flank was left unguarded and the cities developers with their blueprints and their T-squares were never able to entire subdue the lands across the river. So, although Asuncion puts up a good fight and hurdles concrete and iron and dust and old peeling advertising posters right to the edge of the river, it has yet to manage to get anything past its waters other than a bridge and then the green takes over.

It was here were we aimed our bikes one Sunday afternoon, looking for an escape from the city, a region called the Chaco’i. The’i means small in Gurani. The small Chaco is a little part of the Great Chaco that hangs down from the great desiccated mass of land that begins on the other side of the river and goes all the way into Bolivia. Paraguay and Bolivia fought a war over the Chaco in the 1930s. One of the ideas about the war over this patch of inferno verde (green hell) is that a rumor of oil in the Chaco was started and both countries rushed in to formally claim the land that, until that point, had about as solid a border as that between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. After the Paraguayans won the war, it was soon discovered that the Chaco was utterly empty of black gold. Most of it looks very much today as it did then: totally empty. In this sense the Chaco is utterly pristine. Although the Chaco makes up a little more than half the countries landmass, 98% of the population lives on the other side of the river.

As much as I would’ve liked to retire to such desolation, the actual Chaco is much further away than the Chaco’i, there’s no border between the two places, but due to the Chaco’i’s proximity to Asuncion, it is more populated than any other region of the Chaco. Who wouldn’t want to live in a jungle just a ten minute drive from the capital city’s downtown? Still, the Chaco’i is nothing like being in Asuncion. There are still more cows than people and the buildings are small and rough-hewn. The only street is the highway that stretches out to Bolivia or down to Argentina. When there is no traffic, there is nothing to hear but birds singing and cows lowing.

As a result of Paraguay’s victory in the Chaco war, there are myriad Asuncion streets names in honor of a group of people that fought in the Chaco war: Aviadores del Chaco, Musicos del Chaco, Defensores del Chaco or Choferes del Chaco. I’m still trying to figure that last one out. I can’t help but to picture tidy mustached guys driving Rolls Royces out onto a battle field. To get to the Chaco’i and the Remanso Bridge we were looking for Avenida Trans-Chaco. Unless you know the city really well, looking for any street with the word Chaco in it is a little confusing.

“Meet me on Aviadores del Chaco.”
“I’m on Choferes del Chaco.”
“Ok, walk over to Cruz del Chaco, if you hit Capellanes del Chaco you’ve gone too far.”
“Is that by the Estadio Defensores del Chaco?”
“No…del Chaco.”

I wrote the directions on my hand. I have a problem with maps: it’s not that I can’t read them or don’t like taking them out, it’s when I have one, I can’t stop looking at it. I want to keep referencing where I am to see what’s around me and I also want to constantly check and make sure I’m still going the right way. Normally, I’m not at all anal about directions. I like to wander and get lost, but there’s something about the color-coded areas and place names about maps that drives me nuts. I get seduced by the mental image Parque Mbuicao conjures up and before I even get over there, I’m looking for something else on the map.

I keep my directions simple: R on this street, L on this street. Although it had been a little breezy the evening before, it was warming up fast. We hadn’t been on our bikes long before I started to sweat off the directions on my hand. Luckily they weren’t too complicated, but there were some unexpected turns in the route that I hadn’t seen on the map and after following all these signs, I started to get confused. After about half an hour of riding, we came to a fork in the road and I had to confess to Gina that I had no idea where we were, let alone which way to go. Instinct told me left and after asking some guys on a corner for directions, we found our way to the Trans-Chaco. From there it looked like it would be nearly a straight shot to the bridge.

The Trans-Chaco is an incredibly wide street. Technically, I think it’s a highway, but the stretch through Asuncion, looks like the area at the edge of any medium-to-large-sized town in the States where there is an abundance of fast food places and gas stations and a median strip between the streets which are about 5 lanes wide in each direction. The Trans-Chaco is like this. There’s a McDonalds and a Burger King and a bunch of (hourly) motels, but there’s also a few malls, and a makeshift market set up outside one of them where people sell fruit from wooden crates. Sometimes the sidewalk disappears into drifts of sand that have been blown up from the river banks. Kids ride by on Honda scooters with flat tires. The innumerable parillas all seethe with that charcoal and wood smell. Normally, this would be a very crowded street and we would have a difficult time navigating it on our bikes without being hit, but on Sunday, nobody goes anywhere. Everybody stays home or visits someone nearby and fires up the grill. Sunday in Asuncion looks like Memorial Day in the States.

I’m a little nervous getting on this road with my bike. The other day Gina was coming home from a babysitting gig with her employer driving with two kids in his lap while he talked on the phone. I see a lot of driving as a peripheral attention-type of activity and there’re very few posted speed limits. People everywhere drive with reckless abandon, but here the system actually seem to favor it.

We get on the road and begin skirting the tarry drifts of blacktop and sand that pile up on the shoulder. Traffic is greatly reduced on Sunday, but there’s still a few people out here racing past us. Luckily, there are so many lanes, they give us a wide berth. We ride past the fruit stands and the desultory crowds at the bus stops. Since the malls are some of the only places open on Sunday, a few people have come out to do some shopping and probably just socialize somewhere that isn’t their front steps. On the left side, we pass what looks like an entire apartment complex—about six buildings, all over 10 stories—empty and sitting in a field. There are cows grazing at the bases of these empty monoliths, so utterly empty that you can see through one into the other. There’s a dirt road that runs alongside of them.

“Looks like a place that you’d be driven to in a car trunk,” I tell Gina, gesturing to the dirt road that runs through the field, along the abandoned hulks.

We take a left at a roundabout and climb a gradual hill toward the Remanso Bridge. The buildings here are pushed back farther from the street. There’s an Aloha Café across the street from either a vet clinic or a place that sells pet products. The distances between things and the random way they’re mixed together gives the appearance of a place no one lives in. The buses drive without stopping on their way to the bridge.
The bridge looks like the old Ottoman design that’s made Stary Most and other bridges so famous. The parapet looks like a book someone set down halfway through reading. The water is chocolate milk festooned by floating green vines. At the apex of the bridge, a bunch of kids have scratched their names into the railing. It’s a long bridge and at the middle, looking to the west, the skyline of Asuncion looks distant and metropolitan. Amongst all the palms and lapachos, the city looks like a jungle metropolis. It is the true image of Latin America that people flying into Lima or Buenos Aires, are disappointed not to see immediately.

The opposite bank of the river, which we can see far into from the height of the bridge, is green and endless. There are two roads, narrow and made of the friable concrete that is always crushed and grassy-looking at the edges. We go west, initially heading toward the village of Remansito. The traffic out in the Chaco’i was faster than it had been before crossing the bridge and there’s very little shoulder on the road. There are cows grazing right up to the edge of the road. They blink their long bovine lashes and assume curious looks as we pass by. There’s a white Brahman standing by a derelict bus shelter with skin so loose it looks a wrinkly blanket.

We turn around by the end of the village and ride back toward the Argentine border. We pass a ceramic factory on a road of shards of red pottery. We have to walk our bikes over the clay shards. They make an iron clanking sound as we pass over them, like heavy chains dragging over concrete. There are also lots of work gloves, leather, cotton and the kind with a field of rubber dots on the inside for grip. Gloves everywhere, mixed in with the pottery. I could almost hear some foreman yelling out.

“Ok, boys, listen, we don’t have enough broken pots for the whole road, so we’re going to have to use this here bag of gloves to fill in the rest. Try to mix ‘em in so it doesn’t look too obvious.”

But it was obvious and also, ancient-looking, this road of terra cotta and hands.

After the pottery shards ended, we got back on our bikes and rode past a couple of clapboard cantinas with cage-fronts. We continued down the road and large-leaved plants that seem to prefer thin trickles of water crept from the creeks on either side seemed poised to overtake the road. The dogs barely lifted their heads as we passed. They blinked and returned their heads to nest of their paws. But there was one dog who watched us intently. He looked from across a field where he stood among a flock of birds, large birds like turkeys. I looked at them, trying to understand the reason for this strange tableau. The dog looked back at me, with that apologetic look dogs have when they’re doing something they’re not supposed to. He was standing next to something white. A cow, no, a dead cow. A swollen white cow, surrounded by a black dog and a field of vultures, with the sun nearing the horizon and all the red dust in the air it was a haunting scene, like a landscape painting that for no obvious reason is unsettling to look at.

We decided to turn back at this point. The late afternoon streets were quiet and we didn’t say much. When we got back into the city, people seemed to be waking up from their seistas. Buses roared past, horns honked and the people of Asuncion yelled to each other, unaware that their world abruptly ended only 15 minutes away where the chocolate milk river cradles the buildings, but also holds them back.

Backyards

On the bus, I start thinking about the ultimatum they gave me.The driver shifts after slowing down to avoid a huge pot hole. He uses a pole about four feet high, like something a boat swain would use to unmoor a raft. He cranks the pole around and the gears grind together. I can feel them grinding under my feet. For the second time this week, I’m coming back from San Lorenzo. San Lorenzo is one of those suburbs that makes going into the city unnecessary for anyone who doesn’t live there. In San Lorenzo, you can buy anything you could possibly want. The town resembles a soq of the Arab world, only much more impatient. Nothing is meticulously stacked. There is very little assemblage at all. Almost everything, from shoes to herbs to faucet fixtures, is spilled out like hot laundry on a table. An old woman stands by a table of pink and white cotton and taffeta. It looks like she’s running a confectionary and is sorting pink taffy and cotton candy and bubble gum. She’s got a cigarette in her mouth that’s burned all the way down to the filter. There’s a tiny corona of ashes at the tip. It looks like she’s been holding it that way for a long time. She’s got a hook out and she’s trying either to secure a little pink shirt at the top of her tent, or take it down. The bus passes before I can tell which.

The ultimatum they gave me was to decide if I want to stay here for another year. They told me I had until April 18th to make a decision. I’ve barely been here a month. April 18th is a month away.

The bus’s gears bite together again. The metal floor shutters. I notice that I’m seeing the same stands and advertisements I saw when I came into San Lorenzo a few hours ago. I idly wonder if we’re going in circles. I find it doesn’t really matter much. It’s nice to be sitting on this bus, looking out the window, after so many days spent sitting in my office wondering what to do with myself, staring at the reproduction of a mountain cottage painting. There’s snow on the roof of the cottage and the two-track that winds past is muddy with thaw. I look at that painting long enough and I can feel the weight of the mud on my boots and hear the crow of the roosters in the distance. The smell of burning dried manure hangs around the fringes of that fake painting.

The bus is moving quickly now, but a passenger appears from nowhere and hails the bus. The brakes lock in a way they wouldn’t do in the States anymore and everyone is thrown against the seat in front of them. No one says anything; everyone lowers themselves back into their seat and returns to their preoccupation at the window. We’re passing the woman with the cigarette again. It looks like she’s hung up a pink nightgown with a picture of Spongebob on the front.

We were driving through Oregon when I got the news that I had been accepted to work in Paraguay. We had stopped in Corvallis because I had been thinking about trying to find some adjunct work at the university there. We walked around a little. It was warm that day, warmer than it had been that summer in Costal California. There were fires to the south in places like Medford and you could smell the burnt pine in the air. We stopped into one of those cafés that something seems off about, but you can’t tell what it is. It’s always the carpet. Carpeted cafés are quieter and seem cultish, especially if the carpet is new, but it always takes a while to realize it when I walk into one.

After I had read the welcome e-mail from the US Embassy in Paraguay and we paid the bill and left the quiet cafe, Gina and I were driving past fields of mint. The sun was setting and the scent of the mint actually seemed to cool the air. We stopped to camp by a little lake, black with the boughs of an inverted forest. The water was cold.

After swimming out a ways, you could sink down until you felt the pressure building and see the peach color of light through your eyelids turn to grey then black. The water got very cold. The cold would climb up around your feet and ankles until it became a panicky feeling in your chest and you’d race back to the surface. That night, sitting by the fire with the feeling of well-being that comes with being warm and dry after swimming, ten months seemed like very little time.

The bus has been on an unfamiliar street for a while. I check each street sign, hoping to see something familiar. The buildings are all low warehouse-looking places with brand logos painted on their doors. I can’t tell if we are going farther out or coming back into the city. We’re driving toward a ferric raincloud. It’s gotten noticeably cooler. Instead of flip-flops and unwashed hair, the bus is beginning to smell like wet stone. “Another year,” I mutter.

The gears bite together again and there a smell like the singed tooth smell at the dentist’s office. As the bus drives faster, the engine roars louder. For the first year, the idea of going back to the States is appealing. It’s not until the second year that a place, no matter how foreign, begins to feel comfortable. The idea of home becomes mutable. Something keeps pulling me out here. I think I owe it to myself to really follow it this time, to stay long enough to find some new stories here. I’ve been telling the old ones for a little too long. But there are those wearisome afternoons when a cheap reproduction hanging in an office begs you, absolutely begs you to give it up and move to Bozeman or Moscow, ID and build a house, get a dog, cut a lawn, pay bills, drive a car, meet neighbors and plant a tree. It sounds like a sweet litany even now.

The bus finally reaches an area I know, down by the municipal market. I pull the cord and jump off. The streets are already becoming familiar to me, and as I make my way home it begins to rain these big silvery quarters of rain. The sun is shining just above a cloud. A single beam of light is focused right here, almost at my feet. The raindrops are so big and bright and the ground is so dry, the splash of each one is visible. I feel like I’m walking between them, watching the ground all around me dampen. It’s like walking through a room of grey curtains. I push them aside and for a moment there is stillness, like the stillness of being underwater. I can feel the cold around my ankles. I look up and see the trees like I am looking up at their reflections, but instead of being grey, the leaves are verdant with the rain and sun.

You've got to know what that's like by now.

Some Place to Believe in

Gina and I are sitting in a little Peruvian restaurant-cum-bar. There are two Peace Corps volunteers with us. It’s our first weekend in Asuncion. The PCVs have come to the capital to take their GREs and finished a few hours before I called one of them. “Yeah,” she said, “come over and see us. We’re at a bar on the same block as your hotel.” It was Saturday and Gina and I had nothing planned. We could always have taken another walk, but we’ve been taking walks all week. We decided to go to the bar. I didn’t know what the situation is here, but I decided to warn Gina anyway. “PCVs,” I told her, still in our beige hotel room, “drink when they come to the capital. Not always, not really even often, but sometimes, it’s like the capital is too much for them, maybe it reminds them of too many things they’ve nearly forgotten about. I don’t know. Somehow, it seems to remind many of them that they used to be college students and that they used to go out on Saturday night with their friends, friends that, mind you, that haven’t seen in, like, 14 months, friends they’re not entirely sure they still have. They get nostalgic and critical and it’s then that I think they realize they have no idea where they really belong anymore. Rather than think about it too much, I think it’s easier for them to keep socking away the booze and limp back to their sites in the morning, cursing the brashness of the capital and the former home it’s so rudely reminded them of.”

“You think they’re going to be drunk?” Gina asked.

“No, not at all, but I just wanted to mention it, just in case. But, we’re not in the CIS; these PCVs are probably much more accustomed to drinking terrere. They wouldn’t have the same nonchalant approach to booze that we did. I’m sure it won’t be a big deal. You about ready to go?”

I turned off the horizontal air conditioner, scraped the key card off the table and we walked downstairs on the slightly plush red carpet.

We know the guy who runs the restaurant-cum-bar, we’ve been here two or three times this week and spoken with him about his business, the Peru that he left and Paraguayan politics. He’s happy to see us and says ‘hello’ when we all enter. We sit down with the PCVs and order a liter of beer. For four people, this only permits about an eight-ounce serving. The beer tastes good and we continue our conversation where we had left it when we came in and ordered. We talk about Paraguay and listen to the PCV’s opinions. I feel a closeness with them. God, I feel like I’m back in Yerevan, talking with the new group that’s just arrived. Except, somehow, I’m part of the new group. I don’t know what’s ahead for myself in Paraguay, but I know what’s ahead for the PCVs when they return to the states, or leave after their Close of Service to spend their readjustment allowances travelling. I know how it’s going to feel when they step off the plane, or bus and see something they had nearly ceased to believe in and how long they are going to talk over that first meal at home and that first drink with friends and how, when they are alone, pouring over graduate school applications or looking for a job on the internet, they are going to have pangs, literal pangs remembering Paraguay and how for a moment, they will stare into space, remembering their first host family, the idiomatic expressions they learned and used in another language that don’t work in English and the sounds made by birds they might never hear again. These volunteers have five-months left; I remember exactly what five-months-left felt like. I let them tell me about Paraguay, because they tell it so well and with so much love and I don’t tell them a thing about what’s coming at the end of those five months.

We have a few more 8-oz. glasses of beer and a big plate of rice and fish appears on the table. The conversation has lost its focus; we’re at the point which comes in any conversation that’s gone on long enough in which we’re talking about anything that comes to mind. “Where’re you guys from in the states?” One of the PCVs asks. I love how we’ve gotten the special addendum reserved for people living outside the country ‘in-the-states.’ Travelers ask each other where they’re from. Expats have to specify what they mean. I tell them my California/Michigan thing. I’ve been going back and forth to California for too long to not consider it some kind of home, but I was born in Michigan; my family still lives in Michigan.

“Where in Michigan?” one of the PCVs asks.

“Jackson, it’s about 70 miles west of Det— ”

“Yeah, I know it; I’m from Michigan, too.”

We have our Michigan conversation. The same Michigan conversation I’ve had in in San Francisco bars, Chicago music stores, cheap European flights. I know this is a conversation everyone has, but I think people from Michigan come to expect it more, especially when meeting anyone under thirty. I’ve never looked into the statistics, but I would imagine more young people have left Michigan in the last thirty years than any other state.

“You know,” the PCV tells me, “I know someone here from Jackson; he’s a friend of mine you should meet him.”

Look, I’m used to meeting people from Michigan, but from my town, a sleepy, blue-collar place, set at the confluence of a river and a highway, well, it just never happens. Once it happened in San Francisco, only once, but here, in Paraguay? It didn’t seem possible.

“Oh, yeah,” the PCV continues. “He’s been here forever, came in the 60s or something. I guess he just really liked it.”

I ask a little more about the guy from my hometown, but we’re beginning to feel the heat and the conversation turns lackadaisical. Sweat drips into our empty beer glasses. No one makes a move to order more. Flies buzz around the few grains of rice left of the plate. The fish is so completely gone; I find myself wondering where the bones went. A few moments later, we’re awkwardly standing up and telling each other how nice it was to meet. Gina and I walk back across the street to our hotel. I shower and drop off to a nap immediately.

More than a week later, I’m at work, popping into the teacher’s room to see if there’s any coffee made. There’s an older man in the room alone. He looks like he wants to talk.

“Hola. Que tal?”

“Bien, y vos?”

“Bien, gracias, vos tenes clases aqui?”

I’m not sure if what I hear is an accent or just some kind of dialect. After he answers, I ask him in English where he’s from.

“A town in Michigan called Jackson.” The man says wistfully.

“Me too,” I say and he looks up at me with a slightly confused look and I fire out the next question before he can beat me to it.

“What part?”

“Fourth street.” He says with one eyebrow way up on his forehead.

“Me, too.” I say and it’s the most poignant, ‘me too’ of my life.

There but for the grace of God…me too.

Warm-Soda Sunset

It was Sunday, so there wasn’t much traffic. Before noon there is virtually none, but it was much later in the afternoon, probably around 4, by the time we left. We had been out briefly before, with our bikes, to the super market. I had been so hungry, that I decided I’d rather set the bikes up than walk all the way over to the Super Seis. There hadn’t been much to the ride. We went down along the embassy walls, which stretch for three or four blocks. Nothing goes through the embassy, so there are no cross streets and the ride is all angled slightly downhill. It hardly took any effort.

Now, we were going to take a longer ride. We planned to go across town to the botanical gardens, which for some reason straddle the border of Asuncion and the suburbs to the north of the city. Perhaps their central placement wasn’t deemed necessary because of the riotous flora everywhere in the city. In Buenos Aires, most of the city was grimy concrete walls and loose and broken paving tiles until you got to the botanical garden where the verdure seemed to wash over you. A palm-fringed refuge full of cats, I often found it hard to exit back into the dirty slab of a city after spending some time in the botanical garden. Here, where the primary difference is only the existence of houses, the contrast between parks and the city is often negligible.

There was some traffic, but no great deal of it. I was surprised at how many hills we encountered since Paraguay has a reputation for being so flat. Unlike San Francisco hills, they were all very gradual so that they were not very hard to ride up and could be coasted down for blocks. In the gutters, were large quantities of the red earth that is so common here. Along the streets, there were torn billboard advertisements, huge, dead palm fronds and squealing kids with no shirts or shoes. The passengers in cars and the people on the street turned their heads when we passed, but did not stare outright. We looked different, but there are other people on bikes in Asuncion, though none probably as odd-looking as Gina and me.

We went down a steep hill that entered another major street. Here, the tarry blacktop had been warped by the heat and pressure of the traffic. Where the lanes were, the tar and stone and been pushed away, but on the shoulders and, to some degree, in the middle of the street, there were great heaps of the stuff. Along the shoulders, the tarry blacktop eddied and ebbed in dark currents. In a great wave, it would bring you up on its back, with some difficulty, you tried to stay on its crest, until eventually, the whole thing would diminish into a gummy whirlpool, bringing you back down to the street. We must’ve looked ridiculous to the traffic behind us, trying to straddle that drifting ledge of tar on our bikes, our shoulders absorbing the shock and lifting up and down and our front wheels constantly tacking back and forth.

The botanical garden was a park and nothing like a botanical garden with its different biomes represented. There was no cactus garden, no Mediterranean garden, no succulent plot, not even any labels that I could see. It was just a place where no one had chopped down any trees for a while, so they put a fence around it and called it a botanical garden. Despite the misnomer, it was a nice place, a large leafy forest that, on Sunday, hosted all kinds of kids playing soccer and amorous couples sitting on blankets, terrere’ thermoses between them. There was a cobbled road that made a loop through the front part of the park. It was solid enough to ride a bike on, but the cobbles were hard on the wrists and thighs. We bounced down the road past families buying little bags of popcorn and empanadas and trees that I don’t know the names for. The sun was shining through the canopy of leaves overhead and dappled the cobblestones in a pleasant way. We followed the road past a paddock of goats and ostriches and stopped to watch the younger animals stumble around, the baby ostriches looking oddly like shaggy footballs from our vantage.

The serenity of the scene ended immediately at the exit gate. The park was placed at busy intersection and the petulant cars moved quickly and erratically. We got back on the melted road and road the crest of the tar wave for a while, but we didn’t stay on it as long. We took a side street most of the way back home where the neighborhood was nicer and the streets were quiet with Sunday languor: hoses dripped in front yards where people had abruptly stopped watering the flowers to take a siesta and the hoarse and pensive conversations that follow afternoon naps issued from back patios and plastic chair porches. The dominant sound on the street was the sound of bare feet idly tracing designs on dusty concrete floors.

…
“Yeah, I figured it out,” I was telling the woman in the office where I work. “It’s says 2,400 and a name.” At first, I thought it was some really obscure graffito. Something like what you always see in Latin America, the overlap between futbol and politics; two things foreigners seldom understand. In Argentina, if the writing on the walls wasn’t about Kristina, Messi or the Malvinas I had no idea what it meant. Just names and numbers, but this one I figured out.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, so I heard someone talking about the buses. How the fee used to be 2,000 Guarani, but they raised it to the obscure amount of 2,400, which is really annoying because no one ever has four 100 coins, it’s about as likely as having four dimes in the States. Then I realized, ahh, 2,400 that’s the number I saw on the wall. Now the name above it, something like Japero or Japiro I don’t know who that is, but I’m assuming he (or she) has something to do with the increase in the fare, or maybe they’re going to lower it. I noticed from the way you winced when I said the name you must really dislike this person, too.”
“Japiro,” she whispered. “Japiro isn’t a name. It’s the Guarani word for ‘fuck.’”
“Ahhh, well, I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t go around asking who Japiro was.”
…

Yesterday, I had no idea what to do with myself, which is something that always happens on Sundays when you first move to a country. You sleep in, eat breakfast, read a little and around noon it becomes apparent that there’s a lot more day left that you’re completely unequipped to handle. You set your book down and look around the room for something suggesting a diversion. At this point you realize how very little you actually have in your apartment, given that you’ve just moved into the place. Ideally, you’re looking for a little project. It would be wonderful to knock together a birdfeeder or put some shelves up or even just organize a bunch of stuff you haven’t looked through in a while. But you’ve practically just finished unpacking. Everything is stowed neatly away and nothing has been able to degenerate into anything that would need organizing. It becomes clear that your apartment is not going to meet you half-way on this and the only other option is to attempt to make use of the city. Ah yes, the new sprawling city, right outside your door! All those avenues and alleys just waiting to be seen and strolled, all those interesting little shops, run by grandmothers who are waiting to have a long chat with you, all the bridges to pass over and restaurant menus to peruse, fruit trees to discover and vista points to climb. You pull down the maps and look them over carefully, trying to find a place that isn’t too far away that you haven’t seen yet. To the southwest, it looks like there’s an unexplored area, where a number of major streets go. There’s a hill way down at the end of it, too: Cerro Lambare’. I rouse Gina from where she’s sprawled out after just finishing her third book in a week, watching the Sunday sky drift by in the balcony window.

It’s warmer outside that it was yesterday, in fact, it’s gotten hot this morning. My legs still feel a little stiff from their first bike ride in months yesterday. My jeans start to cling to my tired muscles and my feet begin to swell. We’re walking down a street we know pretty well already. That’s probably why I haven’t really begun to enjoy this yet. It’s because I’m not looking at anything new. When we get off this street and head into the new territory, I’ll have so much to look at I’ll forget all about my aching legs and the general damp feeling that’s already developed. But the new area is a continuation of the area we already know, if anything it’s less comfortable because we don’t know anything about it. There a number of hospitals crowded together here. Motorcycles and dirt bikes and cars made across the Atlantic kick up dust and rev their engines. Fruit vendors sit humbly next to their wares on overturned buckets and various cashiers stand outside the small shops where they work to talk and drink terrere’ and pretend they’re free to go and do whatever they want. Maybe they watch us walk by and envy our freedom. I want to ask them what they would do if they could leave the shops, I’m sure they’d have some good ideas, but it seems like an impertinent question, because we’ve got the day off and they’re at work.

After the hospital, everything starts to repeat itself. There’s the same trio of moldering mangos kicked off the sidewalk. There’s the same empty house that’s on a raised level and has a wildly overgrown lawn. There’s the same peluqueria with the paintings of hombres and mujeres with very tight and neat-looking haircuts and very inept-looking faces. There’s the same white and brown little dog dozing in the sun. There’s the cheap-looking shoe someone has discarded. There’s the hedge in bloom with beautiful and fragrant white flowers. There’s the auto-servicio with refrigerators that don’t work full of warm 3.3-liter Pepsi bottles. There’s the red earth and the broken sidewalk tiles and the hot car exhaust.

After we’ve walked about a mile and a half down the street, we cross to the other side and turn back. The discursive loop has ended because we’ve stopped paying much attention. The walk is better this way, there is no expectation and we’re on our way home. Our fingers feel tight with dust and the heat. Everything that’s exposed feels hot and dry, everything that’s not feels like something that’s been in the microwave for too long, but I feel more carefree on the walk back. The sidewalk is a little less even on this side of the street and we repeatedly have to step over places where tree roots have broken through the tiles or where diffident neighbors have remodeled their section of the sidewalk, building directly over the old one, thus raising the level. A nicer home is obvious from the street by the fact that the sidewalk is always new and therefore raised. When there are several nice homes in a row, it’s like walking up and down a series of little ziggurats.

When we’re nearing our neighborhood, we pass before the fruit stands we saw earlier from the other side of the street. They have a pencil shaving and sucrose smell, like the moving boxes I get from the grocery store’s produce department: empty apple or waxy banana boxes, with the smell of the fruit still so strong inside. They’re selling ensalada de frutas from Styrofoam coolers. They give you a reusable cup, a stack of which stands near the cooler, none of which look very clean. Macerated fruit seems like too porous a thing to eat from a dirty cup; it seems like it would absorb all the dried flakes and dead seeds already in there. Still, as we pass by, I ask Gina if she wants to try some, I can’t pass any kind of street food that I can eat without at least contemplating purchase.

It’s a relief to get home. Our damp, microwaved clothes clinging to us, we turn the air on and collapse onto the couch. The all-white room of our brand new apartment is calming, it has the look of an airy cottage on Corfu or some place. We sit on the couch and read for a while, letting the fatigue drain from our swollen calves and sunburnt shoulders. We glance up from our books to look out the balcony doors, projecting ourselves out over the visa of thick-leafed Spanish Plum and willowy Lapacho. When the sun starts to go down we go out to the balcony and look out over the direction of where we walked earlier. We try to use the reference to feel a little more comfortable and familiar with our surroundings, but there’s nothing to be seen but trees and the tops of one or two buildings.

Whited Lilies

Sunday, we went to the Recoleta cemetery. The walk was long down Mariscal Lopez in the sun, under the partial shadow of the security walls surrounding the villas, all with the same red clay tile roofs and white walls. Little purple flowers struggled through the security fences and dropped their petals into the piles of refuse, sand and plastic cups that had blown up against the wall. We had brought a bottle of water from the hotel. It was warm within minutes. I carried it in my back pocket and the water sloshed a little with every step. Every time I took a drink, I wanted to gulp down the whole bottle, but there wasn’t very much and very few places are open on Sunday.

We had to climb up a few stairs, Recoleta stood on an elevated block, like a platform. At first, I thought this was out of reverence, to raise it from the level of all the other city blocks around it; to set it apart as something that contained the mortal remains of the city’s former inhabitants, then I realized that it was probably just the accumulation of graves and material that had raised the area up, like the churchyards in England rising up around the church like leavened dough.
From the street, the Asuncion Recoleta looked more like a New Orleans graveyard than its Argentine counterpart. What could be seen over the concrete wall was nothing like the flights of angels and weeping maidens the guard and adorn the resting places of the Porteño elite. There was no solemnity. Even in the sun,the Recoleta in Buenos Aires, manages to look grey and somber. It induces reflection even in the casual tourist only there to find Evita’s grave between shoe store visits. What we were looking at as we approached the cemetery was an amalgamation of different tastes and designs, all of which were cruelly useless to the dead. The canary-yellow vault and the stained glass crucifix all the chiseled ‘cariñoso’s and the plastic flowers and ribbons were all too weak to form a sufficient façade to cover the reality of the aftermath of death; not what happens when the body dies, but when the very memory of that body dies as well.

At the entryway there were a few tired-looking people reclining under the shade of the trees selling small, withered bunches of flowers. On entering the cemetery, I found it to be bigger than I had imagined, probably near the size of its counterpart in Buenos Aires. There were even signs, made to resemble street signs that marked the lanes that led between the crypts. These were simply labeled Calle ‘A,’ ‘B,’ etc. if horizontal or Avenida ‘A,’’B’ etc. if vertical. The central Avenida, was wide and paved with flag stones. It led to the middle of the cemetery where a large yellow-ish crypt halted its progress.

This main thoroughfare was very nice. The crypts were in good repair on either side, the flags were even and there were a few trees growing among the crucifixes. We walked a little ways down this path, looked at some of the regal graves, such as that of Eliza Lynch’s daughter and then turned on to one of the calles.

The change wasn’t immediate, we walked for a long way among modest crypts, some of them made a little decrepit by time, but the corpses inside seemed to be in peaceful repose. We came to one in which a few errant bones were visible on the floor of the crypt. Somehow, they had been shaken loose, probably when the coffin had been moved for some reason, or perhaps it wasn’t clear to which coffin the bones belonged. We took in the momento mori . Each of us thinking about the bones in our own bodies and how some day they would be divested of their sapient attire. Bones are the easiest permutation of death, probably because they are the farthest removed from us. In life, we are aware of our bones as things that break or get weak or need fillings. They are a sort of reliable hardware. The skeleton is subservient to the viscera and the brain which are more human and more alive. We don’t think of the skeleton as that which will outlive everything else: our final corporeal presence in the world in the form of a pile of bones.

As we walked on, the crypts appeared older, broken down and even vandalized. Gina pointed out a few burnt logs surrounded by ashes here and there which seemed to imply that people stayed here at night, weather they were keeping vigil, squatting or grave robbing wasn’t clear, but from the look of some of the graves, I gathered it wasn’t entirely wholesome. Further down, we came to a very large crypt, which we mistook for a small chapel until we noticed a tiny coffin concealed inside. On the outside, the crypt had been splattered with paint. It looked as if someone had tested many different paint brushes on its walls. It didn’t look like deliberate malice but rather like a gross form of incompetence. There were also carbonized streaks where someone had rubbed ashes and charcoal onto the walls of the crypt. In some places, it looked like they had attempted to write something, but nothing could be made out. The door of the crypt was hanging open and under the shelf that held the tiny coffin there was a disordered pile of bones. Some of them about the size of a large grapefruit and rounded: skulls. Once I realized that I was looking at one, I noticed them all; there was even one next to the tiny coffin facing out. It looked very deliberately placed. I heard Gina gasp behind me and she pointed to one that still had a few locks of matted air clinging to it.

I began to feel somewhat unnerved by the spectacle; I didn’t think it right to keep peering into this grisly resting place. The long hair on the skull made it unmistakably a woman which took the psychological distance out of the experience. I was no longer looking at bones, but into the hollow remnants of faces.

In these kinds of situations, it’s always either drizzling rain or the moon is illuminating everything with a haunting sepulcher light, but now the sun was dazzlingly bright. The lack of mystery made the experience much more unnerving. It was like an encounter with death himself rather than with one of his tired ghosts. I took one more look at the pebbly orbital bones and the deliberate shape of the eye sockets and suggested that we go. I was beginning to feel like I was standing around the scene of an accident and my sudden lack of thoughts unnerved me. The only thought I had was death, even with the birds swooping overhead and the sound of the flower vendor’s radios outside the cemetery.

The other crypts now seemed to me artifices of fear, meant only to belie inevitable decomposition. The more ornate the crypt, the stronger the fear of physical death. As if by creating an inhabitable place to rest in after death would actually keep you alive somehow, like an old woman forever tottering around a one room apartment, never actually dying, but preserved by the cold marble walls around her.

We walked off the main ‘calle’ to a more remote part of the cemetery, where the crypts were smaller and disregarded. The friable walls seemed to close in around us, sometimes forcing us to squeeze through a crevice or confronting us with a dead end. Time had opened many of the doors here. The old locks had rusted off, the stained glass had grown brittle and shattered and the coffins inside had splintered and disgorged their contents. Inside each one of those ornate marble kilns there was a glow of exposed bone. Walking between the crypts was like walking between rows of bored spectators. I glanced about here and there, but tried not to let my gaze rest too long in any one place. There were no longer bodies, everything human and familiar had been effaced, what we were confronted with was limited to remains, remains and effects, the sloughed off and empty of personality.

Crypts doors stood partially if not entirely open, the windows were broken; everything was out in the open, in the sun. Gina and I were particularly thirsty and as we traversed the tumbled plots and tombs we occasionally encountered the shade of a grapefruit or mango tree. We slowed down to walk under the restorative leaves and the global fruit hung suspended before our faces, although not completely ripe, it was a temptation to break one open and suck out the juice, but when I unconsciously traced the branch back to the trunk of the tree, I found them all growing at the junction of several graves. I knew this to be the natural order of things, but I didn’t want to think of having the juice of those grapefruits all over my hands and dribbling down my chin.

Curiously, there was very little smell. I assumed that everything in this older cemetery had decomposed long ago. Everything had ossified and evaporated. Until we stepped between two crypts and the smell of decay seethed into the still air, like a drop of dye in a clear glass of water. I had expected people to smell like animals after death, but even in this they remain apart. Human decay has a greater sweetness, which is what makes it so much more choking. The smell is like ordinary decay combined with the smell of singed hair. It is a smell that is pre-cognitive; you might not know what it is, but there’s something incredibly unnerving about it. The further we proceeded down the calle, the stronger the smell became. Eventually, we came upon a crypt that seemed to be leaking a mixture of oil and melted candlewax. It looked like the marble structure was weeping out its resident.

We wandered around a little more after this, but after all we encountered, it began to feel ghoulish. I wasn’t there to look at the crypts and read the inscriptions anymore. There were only corpses and decomposition, everything else was flimsy scenery. Behind all the marble and candles, there was only one thing happening here and I was intruding upon it.

As we walked back to the street, I thought of the beautiful cemetery we’d stopped into before walking into the grisly one we had just left. How beautiful the place had been with narrow, green strips between the tombs and so many of them with large beautiful plants growing directly out of them. These people had accepted death and had peacefully gone back to the earth. Despite being a graveyard, the place had a feeling of being alive. It was like a riotous garden, where the bodies had lain a foundation for everything to fructify. By contrast, the marble and iron crypts of Recoleta had been perverse and morbid. They sought to convey their cargo directly to heaven but instead inextricably bound it to a grey limbo with neither the green of earth nor the white of paradise.