The Long Road to San Martin

I went home after my last class, utterly exhausted. When I first started teaching in Lansing Public Schools as a substitute ten years ago, I remember the way I’d come home from a day of teaching and immediately fall asleep and become totally immersed in it. I didn’t sleep so deeply during the night as I did during the naps I’d take after teaching. I’d wake up with the sun setting in my windows, still bewildered by dreams, trying to remember where I was. It felt like that yesterday, but I didn’t take a nap, I was just bewildered.

Gina’s working at an after school English program up the street. I get out of work around 4 and she gets out around 6:30. Every day, I walk up to meet her after she’s finished work. It’s about the only time I really get any exercise all day.

Our street is narrow, but traffic prone. I put on headphones so I don’t have to deal with the sound of intentionally de-tuned motorbikes. I’ve got flipflops, shorts and a tshirt on; there’s really no reason to wear anything else. I feel slightly unsightly with so much of my hairy skin exposed. Most Thais do not have much hair and I wonder how my pale, woolly legs must seem to them, especially as they drag rubber flipflops down the street, the most ungraceful footwear, requiring the most ungraceful movements.

I shuffle my hairy legs down the street, trying to find something to see other than the row of houses flanking my walk. If you look inside, there’s always one family member sprawled out somewhere. Usually not asleep, but lying there with a phone, watching TV or idly entertaining a baby with some keys or something. There are shaggy tufts of trees beyond the homes but its hard to see them, you have to stop and crane your head in various places on the road, even then, there’s only a few branches, not much worth seeing.

On Donnok, the main street, I walk downtown. The food stalls have spilled out onto the sidewalks. I shuffle through the motorbike traffic, the plastic chairs and the carousing dogs. On the other side of Chon Kasem street, I see the same pair of dogs every day, always headed in the other direction, one black and the other white, moving quickly. They look like people hurrying toward something before it closes. I see them every day, trotting past. I want to admonish them ‘hey, you dogs, you need to get an earlier start!’ I realize how crazy this seems and I go back to purposely directing my attention to the trees. There’s a great slender leafed cloud of forest green pluming up just past the intersection. It looks like a mango, but its mango season and I haven’t been able to make out any fruit on it. It’s too big anyway. If there were any mangoes on it, they’d have to fall about 20 feet to the concrete below, at that kind of height, they all be smashed, nothing to take home.

By the jail and the government ministries, the sidewalk widens and it’s easier to walk. There are no cross streets, no cross traffic to contend with. There’s a tremendous stump in the middle of the sidewalk, it looks like it wasn’t one tree, but 10 or 11 large vines that decided to grow together. The stump is so intricate and vermiform, it still looks alive.

The block crowds in again and I walk past more noodle stalls and one particular storefront that has nothing more than a drum set inside and a few posters on the wall. Every evening, when I pass, a kid of about 11 or 12 is seated at the drums, diligently booming the bass drum, like a technician doing a sound check. I can’t imagine the kind of willpower that must be summoned to keep him from banging on everything at once, but night and after night, there he is, bass drum and nothing else. It’s like he doesn’t even see the snare and floor tom in front of him

.

There are a few medical clinics here, all clustered together. Outside one, a child is squatting and vomiting in the gutter. I look around, no one seems to be with him. He looks incredibly mature, vomiting alone, like drunken college kid on his way home from a party. I feel admiration for this kid, I know, at his age, I would’ve been sobbing “I don’t want to throw up, I don’t wan—“ until overcome by that first bilious wave of chime and carbolic burp.

Just after the kid, someone looks familiar, I look again and realizing it’s my student, I suddenly feel aware of my jangling pale legs and my gouging toenails, curling out of my flipflops like dog’s nails. I stop to talk, there are a few of my students; only one seems interested in talking to me at all. She says ‘hello’ and holds up a bag of medicine. “I just got out of the hospital,” she explains, “that’s why I wasn’t in class today.” I wave off the excuse like I’m fanning away a fart. It upsets me that even outside of class, she is worried about explaining her absence. I ask if she’s alright and she tells me the news ‘wasn’t good’. As she says this Gina walks up. It’s awkward because I can tell the students want to get back to their conversation. They’ve told me what they needed to tell me; I introduce Gina, but, as I guessed, no one is very interested in even saying ‘hi’. The mood at the table is solemn. I manage to say something like ‘well, I hope you feel better,’ not knowing what else to say.

We walk back down the sidewalk strewn with plastic chairs and forehead-high awnings, hardly able to talk to each other, walking single file, ducking and frequently stepping on and off the curb. “Here,” I say and go into the 7-11. I get a fountain Coke, 24 ounce cup with lots of ice and continue walking. At the first gap between the stores, I step off the sidewalk, take the small bottle of Fernet I’ve brought and pour it in the Coke. Gina smiles. “Happy almost-Friday” I say and take a gulp.

...

I wake up early and the roosters are crowing. The crickets are chirping and a few unknown insects are making another kind of ratcheting sound, like the crickets but louder; it sounds like a cat meowing behind a creaky door rocking back and forth on its hinges. The birds seem to be trying to answer the roosters in their own language, chipping, whistling and brassy, like a song fed only by the bright tropical fruit they eat. In the other apartments, I can hear people getting up, sighing, rattling plates around and flushing their toilets. A man coughs, once, uses his whole mouth for it, like he’s trying amplify the sound to wake someone else up. A few motorbikes go by tearing the stillness and then dribbling engine sounds down the road.

I’ve turned on a single lamp. It looks like evening in the apartment with the oily streetlight darkness in the windows and the lamp’s light getting caught in the shiny polyester curtains. The refrigerator makes no noise, I notice.

Back in Armenia, seven years ago, the evenings were so bad, I would call them lonesome, not lonely, like a country song. I used to go out for a walk every evening, watching the sun set over the mountains and noticing how the grass at their base looked whirled and perfect like the hair on a tennis ball. I knew it wasn’t really like that up close, but it always made me want to go and check. The shadows ran down the mountains, like something spilled at the summit, until the darkness covered the tennis ball grass. I returned home, climbed up into my kitchen window overlooking the mountains, put on this song by Wilco and smoked a few cigarettes. I’d actually sigh out loud, amplifying the sound like I was trying to wake someone up. I did the same thing every night, hoping the dark tableau would absorb my feeling of isolation.

In the morning, I woke up and read before the same window, the overflowing ashtray at my elbow, unemptied from the night before.

The way I miss people and places, isn’t something I carry around with me like a stone anymore. I never noticed it changing. For years, living abroad, I felt like I was walking across the surface of the moon, forever looking up at the ellipse of marbled blues and whites—the celestial, unreachable America. It’s not there anymore. The once distant colors are all around me now, reaching up to the sky in leafy extensions, sheltering singing birds and the cochlear folds of orchids.

My sense of home as a place to sigh after on a cloudy night is gone. It’s here now in the bright blue fan of bird wings, the wave of banana leaves lashed by the rain, rats playing on piles of garbage. It was in the clayey red soil clinging to the mandioca roots in Paraguay, the sun-bleached bridges over the Rio del Plata. The November clouds resting on the face of the Caucasus Mountains, pulverized with snow and time.

A friend of mine once told me I looked like the revolutionary hero San Martin and after that I went around like focused Narcissus gazing into the leaden eyes of countless statues and paintings of the general. I saw nothing of myself in his cleft chin and dark eyes, but gradually, I watched his eyebrows flex in a familiar way. His forehead knit like he was contemplating me. In La Quiaca once, I stopped short when I saw they’d constructed a statue of me, a little thinner, maybe, but there I was, or there he was. It was hard to tell the difference. Afterward, I kept the tendency to try to see myself in things. I stopped seeing myself as someone apart. I gradually began to see, the greatest things and the saddest things, the incredible sights to take in over a lifetime, they all had familiar aspects.

In this early morning kitchen, the ratcheting insect sounds and the plashing of jungle bird calls, I just slouch into it all, like a couch I’ve gotten too comfortable in. I don’t feel lonesome; there’s nothing to be lonesome for. My thoughts stir and settle and eventually remain fixed on one idea: ‘what would those mountains looks like now?’ Or were they some kind of touchstone for unfamiliarity. I hope so; The only thing I’m lonesome for these days is unfamiliarity and I’m lonesome for it in the worst way.

The light runs down the fiberglass roofing next door, drains slowly into the room. It’s time to go to work. I go to the bathroom and there’s San Martin looking at me in the mirror, his eyebrows arched in a way I don’t recognize. He looks utterly unfamiliar.