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.

August Morning/ September Afternoon

There are grocery-like kiosks, selling bags of cheap cookies with 2 grams of trans. fat per serving. The color schemes on the printing bags are all misaligned. Outside the illustration lines there are overlapping matrixes of cyan, magenta and yellow. The bags are slightly dusty. There are coolers of sodas. When you buy one, they put a straw in for you. If the straws are self-serve, they will remind you to take one as if it were impossible to consume a soda without a straw. They sell sandwiches that all look the same.

The other kiosks are last-minute gifts for the traveler. If you forgot that someone’s birthday had passed since you last visited, you could buy them a stuffed bear, soccer ball or soccer jersey depending on the recipient. There are also a few mass-produced-looking handicrafts. Paraguayan flags made with Ñandutí lace and different leather products—most of them thermos covers with soccer teams’ logos. Some kiosks sell nothing but the barrel-like thermoses for terere, each one wrapped tight in black leather with an attachment for the guampa—the cup that one drinks terere from, all made to resemble horns with a banana-like curve and a flare at the top. The women selling these thermoses or termos are either talking with each other or standing about five paces in front on their kiosk sort of ushering you into their battery of thermoses.

When you come into the bus station there are religious pamphleteers at the door. They have tracts that depict a cartoon Christ with an uncanny kindness in his eyes and a firm mouth. Other pamphleteers in less salient positions, say tucked in over by the bathrooms, have different tracts printed on rougher paper completely lacking in pictures. The proselytizers at the door are much more aggressive and speak English.
Standing within a few feet from the pamphleteers at the door are police with flak jackets, or something made to look like a flak jacket and blue camouflage pants tucked into their boots. Some of them have the modern equivalent of an elephant gun and berets overshadowing their inscrutable countenances. Most of the cops are not nearly so serious. Some of them smoke. Some of them sit with their terere thermos, passing a guampa back and forth. I don’t know if I should be reassured or disconcerted by the fact that none of them seem to know where anything is. Ask them where the bathroom is. They only shrug.

When I find my gate for Cuidad del Este, I sit down in a plastic scoop of a seat that looks like something a child would love to roll little toy cars up and down. The back of the seat flexes a little as I settle into it in a way that shocks something in my back. All the seats are the same dull orange plastic. Many of them are piled high with those massive plastic weave bags that are invariably blue and white plaid. Whoever made these bags should sell advertising on them. I’ve seen them all over the world. Where ever these bags are seen there is always a faint smell of lanolin in the air.

There is a man selling dulce de mani from a stool not far from where I’m sitting. In some places called Ka’i ladrillo (monkey [Guarani] and brick [Spanish]), dulce de mani is a rockhard conglomeration of peanuts and solidified molasses. Dulce de mani is the kind of candy that you don’t bite into, but rather allow your teeth to find purchase on and sort of ease back and forth against the resistance of your jaw until either the candy or your tooth breaks. It’s good stuff, but I get nervous eating it.

Most people are not incredibly trusting of bus station fare, but I’ve never had a bad experience with it. In Uzbekistan, I had some of the best piroshkis at bus stations; the bus station in Damascus, I remember, had some really good juice. The food items for sale at jerkwater bus stations reflect more culinary culture than any themed restaurant in the capital. What’s available in the bus stations is the absolute basic: the snack and the snack says more about a people than their most involved dish. The difference between the two is like the difference between home and Time’s Square. You recognize the latter as belonging to you in some vague national way, but the former is ingrained in you; it’s your identity.

I decided to grab a dulce de mani bar for the road. I knew it wouldn’t be much more than 50 cents and that it would be slightly filling. The seller was an amiable guy and our exchange was brief. I returned to my seat with my rock of peanuts and sugar. I took a look at it. It felt soft and had an uncharacteristic scrubbed look to it. It was opaque and the gleam of the hardened molasses didn’t shine through the plastic wrapper as it usually did. I opened it. The smell was slightly fattier than usual. The clean sugar smell was tempered with something slightly greasy. I took a little bite. The flavor was completely wrong. Rather than sweet, it was bitter. There was a soapy, fatty taste like it was made of glycerin. The texture was candle wax and sand. Like anyone who takes a bad bite of something, I looked down at what I was eating to try to determine the source of my disgust. I pocked around the bar until I noticed something dark secreted amongst the peanuts. “A raisin?” They don’t grow grapes in Paraguay and everything imported from Chile and Argentina is usually expensive. Considering the low price of my purchase, I dismissed the idea. ‘’What then? A burnt peanut?” This seemed more likely, but I had to satisfy my curiosity before I bit into the thing again. I began to pick away at the friable substance and had soon dislodged a sizable fly. It’s thick, membranous wings even popping out a little after the weight had been removed from them. I held the dead fly between my fingers for a second. It was about the size of a medium-sized horsefly, entirely black with garbage-catching cilia and a shiny carapace. Holding the fly between my fingers, I couldn’t help but to imagine biting down on the thing. I could feel its yielding, crispy quality and I had the alimentary sensation of this rough, black pill cracking open between my teeth and sliding down my throat.

Did the last bite taste so bad because it had contained another fly? Or was this one enough to spoil the whole bar? I still had the awful soapy taste in my mouth which, as time passed was reveling more or a lardy undertone. There was almost certainly some recycled frying oil in this thing or grease, white and clammy, scraped off the bottom of a pan somewhere. But even while considering these things, my revulsion settled. ‘’Perhaps I got a bad bite,’’ I reasoned. ‘’There’s probably only this one fly.’’ From where I was sitting I could see the seller of the bar. He wasn’t looking in my direction. He was chatting with someone. I wasn’t the victim of some obscure practical joke. What was I anyway? A wimp? Someone who was squeamish about finding a few bugs in his food? Such things had never bothered me before. Besides, we all eat bugs all the time when we’re asleep, right? I dropped the dead fly to the ground. It was large enough to make a little sound as it hit the tile floor. Pnk. I wasn’t just going to throw the thing away because it had one lousy fly in it and tasted like something that could’ve been removed from a McDonald’s grease trap. Besides, I hadn’t brought much food. If I could get this thing down, I probably wouldn’t be hungry later on. ‘’In fact,’’ I thought. ‘’I may not be hungry for a day or two if every bite tastes like that last one.’’

Before crunching back into the bar, I decided to look it over just to make sure there weren’t any more bugs couched between the peanuts. I spotted another dark object and pried at it. I hoped for the burnt peanut I hadn’t been lucky enough to find the previous attempt, but instead the bar disgorged another hairy fly, this one the size of a pebble large enough to make one have to stop and remove it if it had been in a shoe. I dropped it on the floor as well, imagining that the dulce de mani seller and his friend were watching me by now and laughing. I looked over the bar, 2, 3, four more flies. Damn! This thing was studded with flies. They looked like they had been added on purpose! I looked up expecting to see a camera or at least a finger pointed at me and a mouth or two opened in loosed hilarity, but there was nothing. The seller continued talking to his friend and no one around me seemed to notice that I had picked more than a few flies from my dulce de mani bar. As I looked back down at the damp grains and broken insects in my lap, I really wondered if I had unwittingly bought some treat from the campo that was supposed to be full of bugs. People in some places eat bugs. I never heard of it in Paraguay, but I think at one point in every people’s history they ate bugs, way not here and now?

I found a greasy nugget or two that seemed to be free of bugs and ate them quickly to save face. I couldn’t taste the gastric juices of a crushed insect, but neither could I detect anything like peanuts or molasses. The thing reminded me of goat, not goat meat, but the way goats smell after they’ve been out on the fields peeing on each other all day.

I threw the rest away and got a Fanta to wash the goat-piss-taste out of my mouth.

…

I went out skating yesterday. Thirty-one years old and still skateboarding. My friend Jason in Oakland used to call it geriatric skate club when Mikey and I went to the West Oakland skatepark on Sundays. He was right; usually, we’d get up and have breakfast at a particularly geriatric time like 8 am, when there was no one else in the restaurant and the light was falling almost vertically though the open blinds onto the dusty morning floor. The waitress knew us as regulars. Thank god we didn’t always order the same thing or she probably would just come up, with that world-weary air of so many good waitress and said, ‘what’ll it be today, boys? The usual?’ To which we would’ve shuffled our feet on the dusty tile and mumbled assent.

After coffee and biscuits and gravy, I was often too relaxed and too set in my Sunday frame of mind to much contemplate skating, but we’d go anyway, since after drinking that much coffee you have to do something in which you are moving around. The morning would pass into afternoon and find us still at the skatepark, attempting tricks both known and familiar to us and those entirely out of our ability-range. By mid-afternoon, we’d be back sweaty and dirty sporting shins slightly lumpier that we left with that morning and Jason would ask us how our Geriatric Skate Club had been.

On the BART, I would watch port of Oakland sink beneath the Bay with the sun setting over the waters, capping the chops and waves with a highlighter’s unreal orange. When I came back up from Civic Center in San Francisco, the streets would be cold, dark and windblown with that sweet-vague sewage smell that lies under every large city’s business district. Going west, it got quieter, cooler and foggier until I’d hit entrance to Golden Gate park with an almost audible splash, cannonballing into the wet gauze of fog, street lights and eucalyptus.

I went out into the afternoon yesterday, the sun way out but not with its usual tropical intensity. There was a veneer of clouds hanging low over the buildings like an old worn out blanket, grey but rent full of holes which the sun flashed through every few moments, a light wind escaped these tears as well and small piles of old leaves and candy wrappers were dispelled from their corners, like someone’s random thoughts being shaken off.

I went down to the little parking lot three blocks away. It’s a neighborhood place surrounded by homes, mostly. The parking lot belongs to what I think it a little college or vocational school of some kind. They must teach something specific because the building is really small; comparable perhaps to an unobtrusive church tucked back into an old American neighborhood—the type of church you’d drive by in Minnesota or Indiana and wonder if the place even had any parishioners.

I skated for over an hour making too much noise for the Sunday, but not feeling guilty for making a little of my own noise in a city that’s so frequently honking or firecracking for various reasons. Asuncion is a city that thrives on noise and the total absence of clamor on Sunday is faintly disconcerting. I slapped my board on and off the concrete and a few muffler-less motorcycles cranked by and the quiet hangover pall seemed to lift from the city.

A few people passed: families out for a walk, ranging groups of kids. I nodded to some of them, or waved. Most of them stopped for a moment to watch, but nothing like in Armenia where the slap and roil of my skateboard seemed to gather the big eye’d , dress shoe-wearing children in curious bundles and deposit them on the edge of the parking lot, intent to watch until I asked them to come and dirty their shiny shoes or ruffle their ribboned hair.

A kid stopped to watch me once when I was out skating months ago. I tried several times to get him to try the skateboard. He insisted he could not, but neither did he move. He just stood there, silently pleading with me to make him try it. I couldn’t do it. I’m not accustomed to talking to people here. I feel like a donkey when I open my mouth and it’s impossible to persuade anyone to do anything when you feel like that. After standing at the edge of the parking lot for about ten minutes, the kid walked up the street, but he kept turning around to make sure I hadn’t changed my mind.

Yesterday’s crowd was nothing like this. Some watched curiously without breaking their stride; others allowed themselves one backward glance just before turning the corner and one boy stood there giving me the thumbs up in such a pleasant way I had to ask him to try the board. He agreed, but wouldn’t put down his phone. He held that black rectangular piece of plastic like someone told him it was a magic feather. When he saw that it wouldn’t make him fly, at least not right away. I came over to show him the fundamentals of skateboarding. In his embarrassment, he buried his attention in his phone. He took a mumbled phone call, and after agreed to give the skateboard one more try. I held on to him so he could keep his balance, but in Asuncion, people are not so accustomed to being touched by strangers. Somehow, it’s possible to live in a city of 2 million people and avoid bumping into anyone here. There is no crowded subway and most of the buses are only half-full.

The kid tolerated my hands on his shoulders, but it was obvious he felt awkward. I backed off and told him to keep trying. He looked at the board and then returned his attention its proper receptacle in his hand. We said goodbye to each other a few minutes later and I went back to skating. More people walked by and watched me, but I couldn’t manage any more than a quiet ‘hola.’

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.