Artificial Light, Artificial Dark

ENC

I pulled on the spout and tested the coffee that came out. You can tell when it’s not very hot by the way the cup feels in your hand but I sipped it carefully anyway. I added some water hoping the water for tea would be a little hotter, but it didn’t matter. My room was just down the hall, but by the time I reached it, the coffee was already cold. A caged parrot clucked to itself outside my window. It ran through its repertoire of memorized sounds: “Hola,” it squawked, between whistles and then muttered something incoherent.

I came through a limbo to get down here. There’s a kind of long lacuna coil that spins around this country like a tornado on a Doppler Radar screen. About an hour outside the city, you get swept up in it. During the day, the sky dims. At night, the light of the occasional streetlight solders the horizon to the tree line in a bumpy line like something a mole dug through your backyard. A movie comes on the bus’s television, always a movie with gunshots and the muted landscape swirls past the windows in very heavy colors, like minerals: lead and magnesium, cobalt and sulfur. The bus’s windows are sealed and the passenger exhalations begin to cling to the glass. The condensation holds to the windows without running. Each bead of water holds a grey half and a black half: a projection of the night sky and the headlights glare reflected from the dark highway. The occasional streetlights radiate across the surface of the water-pebbled windows. The bus’s interior glows without being lit up. 

Passing through a town, the garish lights shine through in a mauve brilliance. It’s the impression of light rather than the sight, as it must’ve been in the womb: the feeling the beyond the rudimentary and paper-thin eyelids and the fluid and the sheathes of muscle of something busy and glowing.

An ambulance passed by and the bus’s interior pulsed with a poison green light. It revealed faces and lapels and tired hands and shoes propped up on canvas bags. Everyone was tangled and sleeping. Their eyes were closed but widened and the green light brightened the orbits of each one before steering off into the enveloping trees. The light smothered by distance.

It’s hard to believe you’re in a different place. The street signs are the same, the shredded palms, the  deep green teardrop leaves of the mango trees. There are unfinished structures of rebar twisting up from a chalky concrete block and everywhere is the red paint of the Colorado party that turns a raw meat pink after a year of sun. The sidewalks are done in tile, alternately chalky and glazed. 

Encarnacion is different for being built at the mouth of rivers. More money has been spent here and thousands of lights reflect off the water. Through the fogged windows, the city looks like something on bright stilts, braced between the earth and sky.

I stumble through a day and get back on the bus the same evening. Six more hours on the road, staring through the same night-begrimed windows, trying to parse something out of the landscape that I’ve traveled through without ever learning anything about it, like a businessman who frequently takes a NY to LA redeye, knowing nothing of the plains, mountains and deserts sweeping under his feet. At night, I bore through Paraguay like a tunnel; the bus is a part of the city, detached, floundering through the amniotic fluid of the raw countryside. When I get off the bus in Asuncion, I feel slightly clammy. I look around the quiet streets unable to believe that I have been anywhere at all.

CDE

The next weekend I took another bus to Ciudad del Este, which is the other city I go to for work about once a month. Both Encarnacion and Ciudad del Este are atypical Paraguayan towns. They both have large immigrant populations and, as a result, exude a greater cosmopolitan feel. Encarnacion has a few sushi places, Ciudad del Este has a large rubbery-looking mosque. Encarn looks like a very intentional resort. CDE looks like border town, but slightly more schizophrenic than most.

I woke up early in Ciudad del Este with nothing to do until 1:30. The first time I came here, I walked the friendship bridge to Brazil’s Ponta Pora’, but I saw nothing interesting in the area except the bridge itself. Since then, I have been to CDE around 10 times and every time, I’m never sure what to do with myself. There seems to be something happening, but in the short amount of time I have, there is no way to get a true understanding of what it is.

It’s interesting: Look for Ciudad del Este on a map. Can you find it? Apart from being near Iguaçu (or Iguazu or Yguazu, depending on which country you’re in) Falls, the area is remote, days away from Buenos Aires or Rio and even six hours away from relatively unvisited Asuncion. It’s the sort of place you’d look at on a map and wonder what the hell the place was like. Like you’d hold your finger on the little dot on the map, wave a friend over with the other hand and then, when they’d gotten close enough, jab the dot with your finger and exclaim “what do you think they do in a place like that?” whereupon you and your friend would look at the dot and imagine all kinds of crocodile-orchid-parasite-jungle madness. Even now, I look at map points like Maputo or Osh and practically whisper to the names on the map “and what the hell do you have going on?” Ciudad del Este should be one of those places, but here I am and it doesn’t seem willing to divulge anything that’s not already incredibly obvious. In fact, like everywhere else, it seems perfectly happy to mascarade as something incredibly dull.

There was no mystery that I was going to solve, but I wasn’t going to stay in my hotel room all day waiting to go to work, so I went outside to wander the massive shopping complexes.

Because Ciudad del Este is a border town and has its goods priced according to Paraguayan customs (much cheaper than Brazil) the town is something of a modern day trading post. Crunched-looking metal stalls run up and down Ruta 7, crammed together like ingrown teeth. Most of these stalls are festooned with Chinese accessories: hats, towels and those fuzzy brown comforters that are attendant to almost any scene with Marlboro Lights, thick carpeting and the pale blue light of a 2 am television. When you walk by the stalls the attendants sweep their hands toward the products and say adelante as if there were somewhere for you to adeltante to.

To the north and south of the stalls, are the shopping malls. Due to the way that Spanish works (noun + adjective) when a collocation like ‘shopping mall’ is imported into the language and needs to be shorted the word that gets hacked off is the second word, rather than the first, therefore, what we call a ‘mall’ in English, is called a ‘shopping’ in Latin American Spanish. (I have also frequently heard the Rolling Stones referred to as ‘Los Rolling’ rather than, as we would say, ‘The Stones.’) I am happy to have a different half of the term to refer to the Paraguayan shopping mall, or at least the ones in Ciudad del Este, as they are nothing like the roomy showrooms of the States. In CDE, a ‘shopping’ is like a bunch of the aforementioned stalls that decided to split the rent on a big building and then got into some ‘I Love Lucy’-esque property dispute and drew a bunch of lines all over the place, cordoning themselves off from each other in bizarre ways. The ground floors often look normal enough, a little tight perhaps, but nothing unusual. It starts to get weird when you climb the stairs and suddenly come upon an attendant sitting on a stool for a store that you suddenly realize you have passed through between the first and second floors. What’s even weirder is that this store seems to specialize in sex toys, so while you walk up the stairs, you’re crowded by a bunch of glowing dildos.

After the stairwell sex toy store, I came out into a fore-foodcourt . One restaurant had a large buffet-style serving bar and commodious seating area, the other, a little shwarma stand, looked like an entrepreneurial parasite that had been attracted to the smell of the deep fryer. The rest of the building was floor after floor of clothes, all of which seemed to have too many pockets and logos. It looked like the kind of store a racecar driver would shop in.

I went into a classier mall to see what the difference was. The floor plan was easier to follow and they sold expensive watches and Afghan rugs, but there didn’t really seem to be much difference. Both places looked like airport dutyfree stores, only one was in the Shahjalal airport and the other was in Heathrow.

One of Paraguay’s most quoted statistics is that the country is one of the largest importers of Scotch Whiskey in the world (I read this in a book and have heard it many times in conversation although I’ve checked three scotch whiskey websites and have found nothing that actually confirms this). Down in the basement of this fancy shopping there was a sort of faux wine cellar that looked like a Disneyland version of the Poe story The Cask of Amontillado. Walking down the faux flambeaux-lit stairs, I imagined that I was sure to find some ridiculous cache of scotch whiskey at the bottom. The dim room had a rich, earthy smell, probably from the innumerable wooden boxes that lay open, disclosing bottles and magnums of all kinds of wines. There was a desk in the back and a well-dressed clerk who I expected to swoop down on me like Dracula with a goblet of brandy, but he never even glanced at me, moreover, for all the booze, there was hardly any whiskey to be found, a few bottles of Jura that had really stupid designs on them, making them look like a whiskey that Enya had designed.

After los shopping, I went over to the mosque on Boqueron st. I had noticed the place the last time I had been in town and meant to take a look around it to see if there were any Lebanese or Syrian stores nearby.

From faraway the mosque had a rubbery, Gaudi-like look that only increased as one got closer, which I think was due to the thick type of paint that had been used. The sluggish looking paint and the non-linear planes of eastern architecture combined to produce a solid building that looked like a giant inflated bounce castle. The mosque itself was unremarkable and without a minaret. It was positioned in front of an apartment block like it was standing guard. At the entrance of the building was a Lebanese shop with a bunch of nargiles in the window, plastic bags still wrapped around the glass bases and wooden mouthpieces.  I went in and puzzled over the unpriced food products. As elsewhere in CDE, the products were priced in US dollars when they were priced at all. I asked about the dusty cans of dolma. “Cinco dolares,” I was told and promptly put the one down I was holding. I walked to the back of the store and found a pile of ‘I love Lebanon’ hats. I considered buying one until I remembered that I wasn’t in Lebanon. I looked around for ‘I love Paraguay hats,’ but there were none to be found.

I left the mosque/store/apartment building swinging a bag filled with olives, cans of hummus and fava beans and tahini. I passed several more stalls and was adelante’d in to view the Ben 10-themed socks John Foos tennis shoes. The town was all torn up for the Pope’s impending visit. The few pedestrian areas had been obliterated, forcing everyone to walk over tangled orange plastic fences and heaps of sand. A large part of the central park had already been overhauled and was now studded by an obscene number of streetlights (like the new ones in Encarnacion).

For lunch, I ate a can of baba ganush in the park with some olives and bread. After my class was over, I wandered around under the blazing park lights which had come on by midafternoon. In the long shadows created by the stark white lights, the place looked brand new and manicured, absolutely unexotic, nothing like what it’s location on the map seemed to suggest. Children played on the playground equipment and people in spandex chatted and powerwalked past. It was just like everywhere else.

At 6 pm, I got back on the bus and went back across the countryside which, by then, was darkened like the wings of a theater where the actors wait to enter the spotlights. We rushed through these shadows and hanging curtains, seeing nothing but the TV screen scorching the darkness before us.