The Floating World

I was sixteen, so I guess the whole thing was endowed with that sixteen year-old feeling, which I can’t really describe except to say that new things seemed to be happening all the time and none of them were really that bad.

I didn’t get along with my parents. When I was home, we argued all the time. There was this increasing sense that the disappointment I was causing them was going to become a permanent thing. Up until that point, it looked like it might have been possible to turn things around and go back to being the decent kid I had been. But now I couldn’t seem to halt my progress of becoming a pain in the ass.

The way I saw it, everyone else just couldn’t accept what I knew to be true: we were all pretty much all a bunch of bastards. The only thing to do was to reject everything. You couldn’t even talk to me about it. I had the answer and didn’t need to listen to any more conjecture. Rejecting everything was an easy credo to maintain and I didn’t want anything messing with it.  

Embittered as I was, I was still having fun. I guess that’s what I mean about the sixteen year-old feeling. I learned things that upset me, but I just let them roll off my back. It was the first time I had been able to feel bothered and simultaneously unconcerned about something. I had always been bad at stuff like that and I used to hit every problem head on like a brick wall. My first year of school, I cried every day for the first few weeks. I couldn’t shake the idea that I’d been abandoned. When I was ten and my parents left me at my grandma’s to take a vacation, they’d hardly driven away when I began to convince myself that they’d died and that I’d be alone forever with my autistic sister. I went behind the garage, which looked out over a field that was stubbly with the remains of some kind of crop. The sun was setting. I sat at the edge of the field and planted my feet down in one of the furrows of loose earth. I watched the sun set while I lashed myself with the words ‘your parents are dead’ over and over until tears came into my eyes and it seemed I would grow up with only this gnarled field for love. After years of feeling this way, it was liberating to have finally achieved apathy. 

I wasn’t in love or anything. No girl would have me. There was a girl named Michelle. Everyone actually called her ‘stache as in ‘mustache.’ She didn’t seem to mind. Someone would say “hey, ‘stache!” and she’d come over like it was her name. I got drunk one night and convinced myself that she had something no one could see. She said ‘no’ and I remember thinking that I must’ve been pretty pathetic to not even be able to get ‘stache for a girlfriend. But it didn’t bother me. Like I said, things just happened.

One of those things that I remember in incredible detail was that Ryan and I tried to stay awake for an entire weekend. Although we only made it one night, it changed my perspective. I guess my threshold for spiritual quests was low enough that a single night wandering around in the snow was equivalent to a few weeks in the desert. The weightlessness of the buildings, the way the hulks of frozen snow and light rendered everything inert and useless, it was all the furniture of a floating world and even my rejection of it was decadent.

I’d met Ryan before. He had sold punk records out of his parents’ house. I went over on my bike when I was about 14 and bought an LP and a few 7”s. He was eating pistachios out of a bag from the health food store, which seemed like the weirdest thing to me. He moved to California a few weeks later. I forgot about him until someone mentioned that he’d come back. We all called him ‘Captain’ so everyone was talking about how Captain was back, but I didn’t expect him to remember me. We’d only met once. 

He was sitting on a washing machine, at a basement show one night listening to the bands, nodding his head. A band played a Code 13 cover and dedicated it to him because they’d bought the record in his parents’ basement. I had a few drinks and went up and we started talking. He said my band needed to practice more, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t really even interested in being in a band. It was just something to do. When the last band was hauling their stuff out, we went outside and talked standing in the ruts made in the snow made by the cars, each of us wearing tennis shoes. I was kind of drunk by then. I told him about all the records I bought since I’d seen him last and gave my opinion of each one. Ryan had an encyclopedic knowledge of the DIY punk world and added pertinent comments as to who had been in each band and what they were doing now. He was older than I was and obviously knew much more, but the way he talked included me. He ended every statement with a “right?” like he wasn’t sure and thought maybe I’d know, although I knew nothing and was just some drunk kid standing on a snowy street.

Ryan came over the next night in his dad’s pickup truck. My head was still kind of fuzzy and I couldn’t think of much to say. We listened to a tape of a band I’d never heard of with a name that sounded like it was in another language. I had to keep kicking my feet together. The floor was too far down for the heater to reach and the cold was rising through the rubber floor mats. Ryan asked where we were going and Taco Bell seemed like the most convenient place to suggest.

In comparison to the dark and empty streets, the dining area was as bright as an emergency room. I walked up to the counter, stomping my frozen feet and ordered a bag of bean burritos that had heft like a garbage bag and a cup for water that I filled with orange slice. Ryan didn’t get anything and politely looked out the window when I unrolled the burritos to squeeze copious amounts of hot sauce onto them.

I felt better after eating and the conversation in the truck picked up a little. We went to Meijer’s and walked through the mercantile vastness. No one seemed to be around, the streets, the Taco Bell and now Meijer’s had all been empty. On the way home, we listened to the same tape of the band with the weird name and Ryan told me about the band and their myriad connections to the greater DIY world. I tried to make jokes about the bumper stickers on passing cars.

We started hanging out after that. Ryan moved out of his parents’ place and in with Katrina, then Katrina moved out and Ryan lived with a series of roommates who were never at home. I’d go hang out at his place all the time. He never seemed to be doing much but listening to records, so usually we’d sit on the living room floor and talk about bands. I was always a little nervous he was going to play something really important that I wouldn’t be able to recognize or that I’d mistake one band for another or just say something dumb. But gradually, I started to relax around Ryan. He seemed to be completely free of the latent desire most people have to pass judgment.

Around this time, everything really started to go to hell at home, but I was sixteen so I had that underwater feeling about all of it, like it wasn’t really happening or at least if it was happening, it didn’t matter. My dad moved out. My sister went to live in a home and I have this memory of standing on Ryan’s porch late at night that winter. It was one of those open porches that the snow drifts up onto and gets all stomped down by people walking in and out of the house. The bootprints only go from the stairs to the door. The rest of the porch, with the chairs and ashtrays, is frozen and untouched, like something after Chernobyl. I was standing on this porch. It was late at night, freezing cold out and quiet. I was smoking, trying not to use my hands so I wouldn’t have to take them out of my pockets. I listened to the glissade of cars trundling down the frozen streets, blocks away. I think it was a weeknight. You could almost hear everyone asleep. I looked down the street. The streetlights were so intense there were no shadows. The snow that the plows had piled up was frozen in golden crags. Everything the snow didn’t cover, like the ground under the arborvitae along people’s homes, bedroom windows and car tires looked wet and black. Everything else looked like burnished gold. 

The streetlights vibrated like florescent lights. I wanted to stay out after I finished my cigarette, but it was too cold. I went inside, wrapped myself up in the blankets and my sweatshirt that smelled like smoke and wind and lay down on the old oatmeal-colored couch. I fell asleep immediately, sinking into the crease where the cushions met the backrest and still hearing the blurry hum of the streetlights outside.

The next day we started talking about staying up all night. Ryan said he’d stayed up before for something like three nights in a row. I’d never done more than one. It seemed amazing to me that I’d been so impatient to accomplish the goal of staying up all night as a kid but then, soon after I’d achieved it, dropped the idea of staying up longer as something unworthy of my attention. We agreed to try to stay up all of the next weekend.

My dad called home that week. I hadn’t talked to him since he’d moved out. When I heard his voice on the phone, I handed it to my mom without saying anything for a reply. My sister came home and stayed with us for a few days and then she went back to the group home. I took naps on the couch every day after school and my mom woke me up for dinner when she got home. It was usually getting dark, by then.

I stayed up late and tried to write. I wrote a lot about snow and different kinds of light, waiting so long for the right word that it sometimes took more than half an hour to write a sentence and even then it wasn’t anywhere near what I wanted to say.

That Friday, I walked to Ryan’s after school. We listened to some records and then made dinner: a bunch of sautéed vegetables, brown rice and half a bottle of Bragg’s. I had a few plates and all the rice felt like a brick in my stomach. I went outside to smoke and it was getting dark. It must’ve been early January because it wasn’t much later than 5 o’clock and the streetlights were already coming on. A few cars went by on West Ave. but there were few other sounds.

It was exceedingly cold, so we stayed indoors most of the night watching movies and talking. I went out to the porch every few hours to smoke. Around three am, I started clenching my jaw as a subtle way to keep myself awake. There didn’t seem to be anything to do inside that didn’t involve sitting down in one way or another and, every time I sat, I started to fall asleep. Ryan seemed fine, but he saw my drooping eyes and suggested we take a walk. Not ready to give up on the idea of staying up all weekend so early, I agreed.

Whatever minimal sounds had been drifting around earlier in the evening had been killed. The street had the prickly silence of something abandoned that had not hosted sound in years. There was no wind. About a block away, like a watch’s second hand, I could hear the periodic tic of the traffic light which had switched from red, yellow and green to flashing yellow— north to south— and red— east to west.

Going out into the night was like falling into some huge frozen body of water like Lake Baikal. The snow lay heaped around like slag and our bodies seemed to dissipate in the intense cold. A breath billowed out like a mouthful of cottony cigar smoke; each word we spoke chugged out like a locomotive puff. The snow crunched under our shoes like soft ice between the back teeth.

Most people on the block had not shoveled the sidewalks in front of their homes and the path was limited to a narrow gorge where the snow had been trod by people passing in the day, most of them probably going up to the corner store to buy cigarettes or lotto tickets.

The gas station was closed. The Wendy’s was dark and the parking lot that had been recently cleared was already dusted with snow. The traffic lights ticked on and off and drew the world in red and black. And on it went. Down the street, the Little Caesar’s and the liquor store were closed. The Heavenly Ham was closed. 

The concepts behind these places seemed much more obscure with all the storefronts dark and shuttered. Why ham? Why did we need a specific store for ham? And why was it here? It could’ve been anywhere. Was there a reason why they put it here? We shook out heads, uncomprehending.

Unconsciously, we were walking downtown. After Mason Street, the buildings grew by a few stories and you could hear them up there, with their loose hanging fire escapes, cutting through the wind. The lights on the tops of the TV antennae, cast a red glow on the buildings that made them look pixilated. It was colder downtown where the buildings were taller and there were fewer trees to halt the progress of the swelling wind. I had to pee. I would’ve gone outside, but we saw a security guard standing in the doors of an old building, smoking, and asked if I could use the bathroom. A peaceable old guy, he agreed, tossed his cigarette into the street and stood back from the door to let us in. I slipped down the faux marble floors to the bathroom and Ryan talked with the guard. Their voices rising and falling like shadows in candlelight descending a staircase. The building’s echo made all the plosive sounds in their voices pock like tennis balls being overhanded down the dark hallways.

Back outside, I couldn’t tell how far we were from morning. The sky looked mauve-grey. It may have been the streetlights and all the neon floating and squirming through the glass tubes twisted into the soft contours of the word ‘open’ over and over.  

We walked back west, past St. Mary’s, and came out over on Brown Street. Even the gas stations were closed. It was like being conscious for your own blackout, walking down streets that you weren’t supposed to remember in the morning. On Brown, we walked by a bank and started talking about a girl Ryan had met there.

“Yeah,” his words each muffled by vapor, his eyes fogged over under his glasses. “But she works at a bank.”

I thought about this for a while. Imagining a young teller, brown hair pulled back into a bun, subtle indications that she was still young: perfume, horn rim glasses, turquoise nail polish. I saw how she’d be nice to everyone, even to someone with only 82.00 dollars in his account.

“Yeah, but what if she hates it?” I asked in frozen white syllables.

“Working at the bank?”

“Yeah. What if it was the only job she could get and every day she goes in to that 70s-looking building with all the same coworkers who have been there for years thinking ‘God, I’ve got to get out of here’? ”

“Then she should.”

“What if she couldn’t?”

“Why not?”

I ignored this. “But wouldn’t you say it’s possible that you and her could have something in common? What if she likes the same movies you do?”

“Ha.” The laugh came out in ghostly burst and drifted up while the hollow sound of it rang out like a wrench dropped in an empty garage. “I doubt it,” Ryan said, shaking his head.

We talked about the bank teller until we reached the Westwood Mall. Ryan wouldn’t concede to asking her out. I countered by insisting that she was probably one of the most interesting people in town and declared, only half-jokingly, that I’d ask her out if he wouldn’t. I saw myself going in and starting up a savings account on the pretense of talking to her. I saw her driving me around in her ‘90 Focus with the rust around the wheel wells. I smoked cigarettes and changed the stations until the cold brought me back to the present scene and the extinguished McDonald’s sign blocking out a dirty ‘M’ shape against the black sky signaling the beginning of Blackman Township.

We passed the old Jewel Osco and the sidewalk ended. There were no footprints on the shoulder so we walked in the street, stomping to knock the snow off our shoes again. We crossed the railroad tracks in front of the Mopar plant that looked abandoned behind the low wall of snow that had drifted up around it. A grey water tower sagged over the building. In the faint light I could almost make out the FORD SUCKS that someone had spraypainted up there years before.

It had begun to snow again and the wind had abated. The heavy flakes were falling through the dark with the sound of someone pouring salt onto a plate. Neither of us was wearing a good coat and we frequently had to brush the snow from our shoulders so it wouldn’t start to melt and dampen our clothes. A car drove past and a flume of marijuana smoke drifted out, smelling alien in the cold, like a distant jungle on fire. The smell chased the red tail lights down into the dark meadows around the airport, down by the highway on the north side of town, in the direction we were walking.

Any town on a major highway has at least two parts to it: the central shopping area and the chain stores out by the highway. In Jackson, these districts are separated by a swath of empty, treeless land where, in the summer, the grass grows long and turns yellow and, in the winter, the snow lies even and peaceful over the hillocks left by the tufts of long, dead grass. There’s an airport runway out there and, as we walked by, lights flashed over the snow. After the bright flash, the contrasting dark was difficult to navigate and we walked through patches of light and darkness, leaving drunken, lurching footprints behind us. The cars going down 94 were muted by the snow. From less than 300 feet away, we could hardly hear them, but their lights spun through the trees and falling snow like cruising searchlights.

The area between the highway and Argyle St. has a long bight of sidewalk that bridges the empty area. The county had cleared this stretch of sidewalk recently and it still had partially submerged look that concrete dug out of a snow bank often has. In the summer, one often found abandoned shopping carts and the broken ink tags of stolen merchandise scattered along the sidewalk but now there was nothing but a meandering set of bootprints coming from the other direction. The freshness of which indicated that we had probably come close to overtaking this traveler and I wondered how we had missed him and where he’d been going.

At the top of the hill, the sidewalk runs out again over the highway overpass. In the day, it’s difficult to cross the exchange, but at 4 am, we walked across slowly, stepping down from the last plate of sidewalk with the balls of our feet to keep the rising snow from spilling over the tops of our shoes.

On the other side of the overpass, the Denny’s glowed like a candle placed in the window of an empty house. The bottoms of the plate glass windows were fogged up with melting snow, conversation, newspaper ink and coffee steam. Looking in at the hunched forms and the meringue-colored lights, I imagined the rattle of dozens of coffee spoons stirring at once, the crinkling papers and the springy clink of zippo lighters and quickened my pace.

We stomped the snow off our shoes, crossing the recently plowed parking lot. The cars of the third shift waitresses and cooks at the back of the lot were covered in snow, about four inches, like they’d been there for months. Even the side mirrors balanced little caps of snow. By the door, the snow had been knocked off the newspaper vending machines, probably by the guy who stocked the papers—an aspect of the job you don’t really think about.

I opened the door and the jangly, warm sounds of encapsulated humanity came floating out into the dark, like a particularly crackly fire.

A waitress, grabbed two of the greasy, oversized laminated menus from the box by the register and cocked them under her arm in a business-like manner. “Two?” She asked. We nodded. “Smoking or non—?” I looked at Ryan. He nodded, slightly. “Smoking.” I told the waitress and she marched us to the back of the restaurant.

A few solo diners looked up to watch us walk by, but most were too busy watching the snow continue falling outside through the steam of their coffee. The conversation in the air had a showered and baggy-eyed quality, like people still weren’t too sure what they were saying to each other, or what the sense was in talking at all.

The waitress tossed the sticky menus down signaling our table, a semi-circular booth in the back, too big for two people. I ordered coffee, Ryan, orange juice and, to our waitress’ irritation, we returned the menus saying we didn’t need anything else. “That’s all you want?” She asked, clarifying. “Yeah,” I nodded. My eyes burned and I couldn’t tell if it was because I hadn’t slept or a result of all the ambient smoke. I pulled out my cigarettes and put them on the table, waiting until the coffee came before lighting one. Ryan and I didn’t seem to have much more to say to each other. We were tired enough to have retreated into our own bleary thoughts in lieu of retreating into our warm, unmade beds.

When the coffee came, I took a deep breath over the top of the cup and let the steam warm my lungs and face before taking a drink. When I looked up, I noticed that the room was full of older middle aged men. The waitresses were the only women. The men were all slightly slouched in their seats, like they were waiting for someone important to meet them, but didn’t want to look overly-expectant. A lot of them reminded me of my dad and I thought about him living in the apartments across from the jr. high. I imagined him coming in here early in the morning for breakfast with the same filmy expression.

The snow started falling thick and fast outside and the volume of conversation increased a little in wonder. As I watched it, it began to look as though the snowflakes were stationary points of light, like stars, and that we were the ones rushing up into the sky, like the whole restaurant had become unmoored and was racing up to the moon.

Ryan was holding his orange juice like he was trying to finish a thought before taking a drink. The waitresses were thanking the tired-looking men and the bus boys were crashing the leftover portions of eggs and toast and coffee into those big black tubs. The Denny’s kept rising through the snow and each patron that went out for their car, pitched headlong into the darkness. I imagined stepping out of the door and the cold wind fluttering the damp and salt encrusted ends of my untied shoelaces as I fell. I saw my mom float by, her long winter coat sounding like a flag snapping in the wind. I saw my sister in her home, flanked by smoking CNAs like hideous caryatids. And my dad, sinking like a stone, with the same tired look and his hair fluttering up, away from the direction of his fall.

We paid the bill and stepped out into the salt-smeared foyer, pulling zippers up, hats down and gloves on. The highway was ahead of us, carved out like a shallow canyon. The muffled sounds of traffic increased as we pushed open the door. “Hey,” I said to Ryan, turning as I pushed open the door. “I bet that bank teller is probably down there right now driving to work. Don’t you think?” A trickle of sunlight was running down the highway on the roofs of the eastbound traffic. Ryan thought about it a minute and then answered. “Yeah, I bet she is.”  And we stepped outside.

Endless Sunday Evening

Last Sunday morning was cool and grey, like it had stormed during the night, only there were no puddles and no vague, half-awake memories of lightening. We went down to the park for a while to drink our coffee and watch the birds flit through the trees and call out to the grey morning. It was Sunday and everyone was still inside. When I first moved to Latin America, I hated the feel of its occluded and penitent Sundays. Alone in Buenos Aires, I was continually distressed to wake up on my only day off and find that the clouds had moved back over the sky (even if it had been beautiful all week) and that everything had closed so utterly as to make the neighborhood look abandoned.  Even the sign boards seemed to come down and the shutters pulled over the shops were battered into anonymity. A walk through the desolate city would reveal nothing more than a few dying pockets of Saturday night: tired-sounding music echoing up from basements, empty Fernet bottles and an occasional gust of dead perfume and spilled beer from a barroom floor.

I have since adapted to the feel of what I have come to think of as a ‘true Sunday,’ after I came to understand the character of the day was not as grim and vacuous has it had initially seemed. Sundays here are like a Norman Rockwell ideal. Rather than the sort of tenuous pause we have in the US—an odd little gap usually filled with the fallout from Saturday’s parties and Monday’s work anxiety— Sunday here is entirely empty. It is a sort of weekly vacation.

In the US, I never tried very hard to choose between Saturday night and Sunday morning. No contest; Sunday was for sleeping through. You didn’t plan anything for Sunday. But the neglected aspect of the day, often dissolved into almost painfully sad evenings that didn’t end until Monday morning. In the US there is no Sunday night, only interminable evening and I spent these evenings trying to understand where the sense of failure was coming from the same way you try to locate a puncture in a bike tire. Somehow in having not changed my situation between Friday and Sunday, it was like I’d missed something important. I’d have to wait out another week before I could try again. But, whatever I was aiming for was never very clear.

In Latin America, Sunday is so universally dead, it’s like the guilt over the weekend is shared by everyone. The stores are all closed, the streets are mostly quiet, but, despite this, there is a feeling that Sunday is the focus of the weekend, like this quiet was all anyone was after and Saturday had been no more than a prelude.

Asuncion is a noisy city. Cheap motorcycles have flooded the streets and many of them have mufflers in poor states of repair, or missing altogether. Cars drive by with megaphones mounted on the hoods announcing that they are selling food or buying old car batteries. A guy rides by on a bike calling out that he sharpens knifes. Construction is consistent. Old diesel buses roar past on low, quasi-brown note gears. Something is always either going up or being taken down. My first year here, the noise got to me. I started to feel skittish, like a dog constantly darting back under the table from the Fourth of July fireworks. It took me a while to trust Sunday, I kept expecting it to turn sour and melancholy on me, but eventually I started to find relief in day’s quiescence.

I am now accustomed to the noise. I’m probably still more aware of it than everyone else, but it doesn’t shake me loose from my mental moorings the way it did after I’d arrived. I am much more aware of the absence of noise that its presence, thus Sunday morning dawns with a sort of beatific quality. Almost no one works and the only people who seem to get up before noon are the elderly. Walking through our neighborhood on Sunday morning, it feels different: dogs play in the empty streets, people lean over their fences talking to their neighbors, every greeting is returned heartily. It’s like waking up in a different city.

Last Sunday, we settled into an awkward wooden bench in the park and poured our thick coffee into our tin cups, a small measure at a time so it didn’t get cold. While still waking up, we attempted subjects of conversation, abandoned them and moved on to others, each more flippant than the last until I found I was soliloquizing on all the places I love again. Sunday here is mutable, it’s easy to imagine it as a Sunday in Siracusa, Italy or Batumi, Georgia on the Black Sea coast, but there is no coast anywhere, only the swampy boardwalk along the river, and I contented myself with going home after the coffee was finished, making a few phone calls and eating some pancakes.

After the pancakes, we went walking down the long avenues of the city toward the botanical garden, but this undeveloped diamond plot of land at the northwest end of the city should not be called a garden. For one thing, it is too large. It is also formless and savagely crisscrossed with sandy motorcycle and scooter treads. In the botanical garden you are more likely to hear stereos playing the latest pop songs rather than bird song. It is something like a sports complex/parking lot that has been pushed back into a neglected stand of trees. You can’t call the place a botanical garden because there is no garden in it, not really, but somehow, the title “botanical” still suits the place as an adjective. There are plants, animals and trees coexisting with the beer cans and the subwoofers. Behind a cyclone fence, I have even glimpsed a neatly arranged medicinal herb garden, in which each plant looks tenderly cared for and every sprout has an identifying plaque. However, this sole vestige of a garden seems to be firmly locked against intrusion. I have never seen it open or anyone else in its vicinity. A better term for the place would be “park.”  

The walk to the park is not pleasant, but after the previous day in the countryside, I felt my tolerance level for the more inane aspects of the city had been raised, or rejuvenated. It was also Sunday so I was expecting the traffic to be mild.

From our apartment, we walked down a street that looks like it has been blazed through a dense and humid jungle. The canopy of the trees still laces across the sky, parrots flit around and squawk in their metallic voices. The street goes nowhere and has been paved with the most haphazard paving stones. Most of them are not flush with the ground but dug in at an angle lifting a sharp corner to the sky. Imagine a street paved with imperfect and broken bricks and you’ll have an idea of what it looks like. The jagged street is uncomfortable to walk on and the cars that drive down it can’t go more than 15 mph without completely rattling loose. There are three mango trees growing up through the paving stones, in the middle of the street. The stones have simply been scattered around them, as if there was nothing to be done. Walking down this street, I am always tempted to envision an entire city built this way: small, narrow streets snaking around heavy tropical trees. The cars would be reduced to such low speeds that pedestrians would have a clear advantage. I think about this idealized city and imagine how quiet it would be, because even during Friday’s rush hour traffic, this street is quiet: no horns, no diesel engines, not even any dogs barking. If the world were more like this, it would make more sense to walk.

We exited this Eden to find ourselves on one of Asuncion’s most traveled thoroughfares. The lighter Sunday traffic allowed the cars racing down the avenue to move much more quickly and as the cheap motorcycles struggled to keep up with this increased pace, their engines screamed under their plastic housings.

_BRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhh_hhh!

As we walked down this wide and noisy avenue, I began to think about how everything masquerading as progress is so inordinately boring: steel skyscrapers, business English, wide streets, new cars, TGI Fridays. Progress blatantly favors those more money and less time. The environment progress creates is a wasteland with air-conditioned shopping malls and condominiums. You drive from one to the other. The stuff in between is just avenue. It is meant to be driven down. If you walk this landscape, you’ll find it has no imagination. The stores repeat themselves, advertising the same oil, soda and snack foods. The passing traffic is the same, it presents no spectacle, only repetition of certain makes and models and the dull thudding of pop songs turned up to maximum volume. Even the colors are hardly varied. Companies could make the cars any color they want, but they insist on using the same colors, like they were trying to get rid of all the extra paint left in the garage. Once in a while, walking, you catch the eye of someone driving by and you regard each other with the same curiosity with which one normally regards animals in the zoo.

The sidewalk is oil-soaked and broken. It seems to have been built on a heap of sand. Approaching the park, the neighborhood becomes more run down, until the sidewalk and even the streets are half-obliterated and covered with grass. The walls lean at crazy angles and while we walked down Sacramento, a chuck of a building front detached itself and slapped onto the sidewalk with a concussive report. After the initial door-sized piece, smaller chunks of plaster continued to rain down for a while and then even these stopped. It was like a demolition, but there was no one around, it was just an empty building collapsing under its own weight, the dust still pluming from where the plaster had fallen. We stopped and waited to see if more would fall, but the building was still. Only the dust of the plaster rose and settled. About ten feet up the wall, the scabrous wound of exposed brick already looked like it had been there for several years.  

“It’s a good thing we weren’t walking over there!” Gina said. I nodded, “Yeah,” and then looked up to make sure that there was nothing nearby that might fall on us.  

The entrance to the botanical garden is set back from a four-way intersection with no traffic light. No one knows where anyone else is going. Buses turn right, motorcycles blow straight through and cars make cautious U-turns. The intersection is managed with mettle, nerve and plenty of horn-honking. The cacophony of this congested park entrance is rivaled by the sounds of the park itself. Dirt bikes roar back through the trees and cumbia music plods like a dancing giant from every car parked out on the grass. The smells of barbecue, cut grass and stale beer abound.

We bought a bag of popcorn and immediately steered ourselves away from the masses. Large swales of bamboo laced together over the footpath like hands folded in prayer, the fingers interlaced. 

Beneath the bamboo, the earth had been trampled into sand, so fine and heavy it was like walking on a beach. When we came out from the swale, the character of the park had changed somewhat. More people were jogging and the cumbia rhythm pulsed from slightly farther away.

The footpath was wide and sandy and the trees had been scraped up recently in its construction.  To the right, was a dense stand of trees and to the left, the park opened up into its more spacious avenues of trampled grass and baby diapers. A small path opened up in the stand of trees and seemed to burrow into it. There was a sign proclaiming this path to be the Sendero Encantado or something like that, so we ducked under a few low-hanging vines and plunged into the cooler world of dense forest—something Asuncion often hints at but never quiet achieves. There are lots of trees here, but there are almost no places where one can stand in the midst of trees, feel the stirring of their manifold shadows and the leafy coolness that grows up around them: a feeling much like sinking down into a still lake, when the light and sound diminish and the temperature drops, first around your ankles and then rising up past your head the deeper you sink.

We were about half-way down the path when the silence retreated under an incipient whine which seemed to be growing toward a crescendo. Somewhere along our walk, we had disturbed a cloud of mosquitos that were now following us doggedly down the path, like the raincloud that followed Eeyore around in the Winne-the-Pooh stories. In a city where anti-dengue murals are everywhere and malarial warnings are given out as little cards on all arriving international flights, a cloud of mosquitos presents a more intimidating obstacle than it would elsewhere. If, statistically, one out of every, say, 1,000 mosquitos carries dengue or malaria than there was about a 100% chance that at least one of the mosquitos in the cloud was infected. I waved my arms in the general direction of the winged mass, but soon realized the futility in what I was doing and we had no choice but to run.

We broke back out into the clear light of the more frequented paths of the park within a minute or two. A woman, walking with her family, stopped to gawk at us, quite openly, as if by running, or coming out of the woods, we had committed some incredible faux pas that made it acceptable to stare at us, nearly open-mouthed.

We walked on and, unfortunately, soon came to the “zoo” section of the park. The full name of the place is Jardin Botanico y Zoologico. Nearly an entire pride of lions was penned in together in an area less than half the size of one of the soccer fields that are so common here. One of the lions was roaring in a choked way, repeatedly, as if trying to communicate a strangled protest to the people standing around pointing and staring. Nearby, was a lone grey elephant in an even smaller enclosure that had been made still smaller by a moat that had been dug around the unfortunate animal to keep her from knocking down the fence and trampling us all, as she certainly deserved to. I suppose for some, zoos are proof of mankind’s indisputable dominance of the entire animal kingdom, but for me, watching that elephant swing her grey truck back and forth in an area not much bigger than your garage, zoos are monuments to our incredible arrogance and total lack of empathy. Even if you hated elephants in the most passionate way, I don’t know how you could consider the fate of this creature and not feel overwhelmed with pity: stored in a box, like a curio in museum just for us to come and look at. How people ever thought such a thing would be acceptable is beyond me.

We could find no way to go from the zoo but toward the people and as lumpy sound of thudding bass grew I began to feel more annoyed with the whole idea of the park. Like so many other parks, it was just something different for people to drive to and park their cars in. No one was here to walk through the closeness of the trees or to listen to the winds stirring the leaves over their heads. It was a parking lot with trees, a shopping mall with birds.

We left soon after that and started the trip home, but I didn’t leave with the misanthropic impressions that had been stirring in me after the zoo. Rather, I thought of the small, mosquito choked path we had walked. Someone had created it, someone that appreciated the close feel of trees as we did and that someone had made a sign to point it out to anyone that might feel the same way.

And, who knows, maybe the path was created by the same people who stuck that elephant in that cage. It’s certainly possible for people to have dual natures. This thought seemed especially relevant as we exited the park and watched the peace and tranquility of Sunday torn away by multiple families rushing to get home before the traffic. The four-way intersection looked like it had been multiplied by about five. Cars were honking, breaking and peeling out in every direction.  That’s the problem with having a peaceful Sunday: no one is thinking about Monday until it’s already dark and then they’re all racing down the wide streets, headlong toward the beckoning chaos of Monday.

Passengers

 There were no numbers above the seats. I looked down at our tickets and looked back up again to where the labels had been rubbed away. “It looks like that’s a five,” I said, pointing. “This must be 25 and 26.” I tried to move up to find our seats, but other people were getting on the bus, blocking the aisle. “Oh, hell,” I said giving up, “Let’s just sit down here. No one ever checks anyway.” But I was wrong. Almost as soon as we sat down someone came over and pronounced that we were in their seats. Our mistake was that we had sat down in some of the seats above which the numbers could still be made out. We moved to some seats with no visible numbers above them, hoping that no one would make a case out of it. Everyone that got on the bus consulted their ticket and then tried to check the phantom numbers above the seats. Two ladies came down the aisle counting. “Excuse me, miss,” one of the women said to Gina who was sitting in the aisle seat, “you’re in our seats.” “There are no numbers,” Gina shot back. The woman would not give up so easily and began explaining her counterfeit system of guessing numbers from one seat, four rows back, which had one number showing, to determine our seat numbers. It was like hearing an explanation of how an astrologist determines a horoscope: complete bullshit delivered like a pseudo-scientific tone. Seeing that we were not responding, the woman inquired, “What are your seat numbers?” obviously hoping that we would have to admit to having none and having plainly stolen hers. I produced our tickets with a flourish and stated our numbers in the same bullshit tone she had used on us.  She mumbled something, looked around, pointed vaguely to some seats and then, when some other seats opened up she and her companion, seized on them, effectively admitting that her ‘counting’ system hadn’t been real all along, or else she just didn’t care.

It didn’t matter anyway, just before we pulled away, a fifty-something woman, got on and, finding every seat occupied, positioned herself unsteadily next to us. I waited for someone else to offer her a seat, but by the time we started moving, no one had come forward, in fact, the rest of the bus looked soundly asleep. I couldn’t let the woman, probably someone’s grandma, stand there for the whole three-hour trip. The guilt would’ve made it impossible, so I got up and gave her my seat and tried to steal myself for a long ride. It was a holiday weekend and we were going out of town, the bus was sure to be packed.

As we drove out of town, we stopped to pick up everyone waiting on the side of the road, and there were many people, so many that the attendant (who’d been curiously absent when we were all trying to figure out our seat numbers) now appeared and bodily crammed us into back of the bus. The man actually used his hands to shift the standing passengers so that they didn’t take up more than their fair share of the aisle, which was about 12 square inches. We stood two-by-two, back-to-back all the way down the length of the bus. The traffic was terrible, as we were not the only ones fleeing the city for the long weekend. Most of the time, the bus moved somewhere between a crawl and a rolling stop. 

When the driver had to brake, we all toppled into each other like a bunch of bowling pins going down after a strike.

The plan had been to stay at a friend’s place who was out of town, but when we finally got to Villarrica, it was too late to disturb her landlady who had the key. We didn’t even know where she lived and after the arduous bus ride, I was hardly in the mood to go look for her. We’d brought a beer for the bus ride, but due to our positioning (Gina sitting and me standing), had been unable to drink it. Now among the dark lanes of the night-time empty marketplace, I opened the warm beer and took long, desperate pulls, trying to sooth my ragged temper. It was past midnight; I was tired; we had no place to stay and I didn’t even know why we’d come out here; everything looked the same as it did in Asuncion. We’d traveled all this way and still hadn’t escaped the city.

We woke up the doorman at Hotel Centro, who had been napping in front of the TV. He groggily took my name (no passport, no ID) and my cash and gave us two plastic bags filled with folded towels and two remotes, one for the air conditioner and the other for the TV. “Room 8,” he said, but gave no indication where it might be. We wondered around in the dark halls of the hotel for a while before finding the room on the second floor.

Room 8 had a closet, a TV bolted into the wall, two single beds and a balcony, which I immediately dragged a chair onto and set about opening another warm beer in hopes of mitigating the irritation I felt. Somehow, it all seemed so hopeless. We would sleep here, wake up and have a stressful time trying to find a way to get to Colonia Independencia, we probably wouldn’t even make it to the waterfall and, in the end, we’d go back to Asuncion on another crowded bus and I’d have to stand because another old lady would get on right before we took off. It all felt like such a huge hassle for no real benefit. The only thought going through my head as I sucked down the luke warm beer was “we should’ve just stayed at home.”

I felt a little better the next morning after a few bananas and a generous helping of the hotel’s complementary instant coffee. The weather was still mild and overcast, but the caffeine helped and I was beginning to feel less burdened by the situation.

We went down to the bus station and found out the bus to Colonia was to leave in an hour. To kill time, we wandered around Villaricca for a while and then went into café to split another instant coffee and watch the grey day drift past the plate glass windows in the form of tired workers and stray stands of fog.

When we got back to the station, people were beginning to board the bus. We got on and managed to get a seat as a woman vacated it. I was inordinately thankful to have a seat as multiple vendors kept coming through the bus with large wooden trays of sodas and sandwiches, bags of earth and mildew-scented vegetables and other kinds of brick-a-brack like sewing scissors and packets of natural remedies. Standing in the aisle, I would’ve been jostled by each vendor who passed.

We had been waiting on the bus, listening to the myriad calls of the vendors, watching the passing of their wares when suddenly, about half the bus’s passengers, or would-be passengers jumped ship like this bus was sinking. I watched as they scrambled to another bus that had just arrived, they began filling it quickly and I soon saw why. Even as these people struggled to board the bus, it was already pulling away, looking like an emergency convoy with refugees grabbing at it with full-blown desperation. Before I had a chance to gauge the situation or find out where the other bus was going, it was already pulling away, shaking lose clots of passengers and vendors still hawking their wares over the tumult.

We left after about half an hour, reaching Colonia Independencia about an hour later. There didn’t seem to be any town anywhere and we kept getting off the bus, looking around, determining that we were not yet in the right place and then bounding back on before the bus pulled away.

When the driver pointed out the trailhead and we got off, I was a little nervous about the situation for a return later that day. There didn’t seem to be anything in the town and transportation looked really limited. We had decided to walk out to a waterfall, but it seemed like it would be impossible to make it. It was already noon, the waterfall was a two-hour walk away and the last bus supposedly left the area around 4. As it was, we would barely have time to walk to the waterfall, turn around and immediately start back. The feeling of irritation started to come back, this whole trip had been a disaster, we would probably have to stay somewhere for the night again and I wasn’t sure I’d even brought enough money for another hotel stay.

Without discussing any of this, we started down the dusty two-track that led straight back into the green countryside. I wanted to stop thinking about details and just enjoy the scenery, but the clouds were heavy and the silver glow of the sky on the burnt sienna-colored road was giving me a headache. We didn’t even know where the waterfall was out here and this road looked like it went on forever.

As I walked, these negative thoughts began to decrease in severity, until I felt a happy sort of apathy welling up. Walking down the quiet country road, I remembered the quiet mountain roads of Armenia and how I’d often walked them for hours with no clue where I was going and no concern for destination. I was happy only to walk, to perhaps chance upon something new, and often, I did. Even if it was only something small, I always came back from a walk with something that made it worthwhile. Why should things be so different now? The walk gradually became pleasant in itself. The bus schedule ceased to be important. We would find a place to stay, maybe out here at one of these pleasant farm homes. We could offer money for lodging. Who knew what might happen. For the first time in what felt like ages, I was ready for adventure.

We wound through the mown pastures, glancing up from the progress of our feet to watch the lazy movements of the afternoon herds of cattle ruminating in the silver-grey sun. A number of flowers were in bloom and when the occasional motorcycle scooted past, the driver always lifted an arm in greeting. The peace of the place was contagious and many times, I had to stifle a desire to lie down in the grass on the side of the road and take a nap.

The waterfall wasn’t so hard to find. There were signs posted everywhere and the road eventually thinned out to a narrow footpath. At the entrance to this foot path we came abreast with a new SUV, full of sun-glassed woman, the dark lenses corniced with plucked and expressive eyebrows. The driver was clean-shaven, man, who looked like he was probably wearing dock shoes and Calvin Klein underwear. He was holding a large glass of red wine and contemplating the footpath. He rocked the car ahead slightly and then braked as though trying to ease the car out of a ditch. The look on his face was completely baffled, like the owl-eyed character in Gatsby’s library. The man looked like he couldn’t fathom the possibility of a road ending. “I don’t think you can drive down there.” I told him, passing his open window. From the passenger and backseats, the bevy of plucked eyebrows and dark glasses regarded me in a vaguely hostile way. It was obvious they had been cheering him on to continue down the footpath in the monstrous car. “I don’t think it’s wide enough,” I said gesturing to the path, hoping he’d be able to see what was so blatantly obvious if someone else pointed it out. The driver repeated my comments like someone in a grocery store trying to recall a shopping list. “wide enough…” he remarked, one hand still on the wheel, the other cradling his wine glass. The lepidopterous sunglasses and eyebrows from the backseat flashed but otherwise gave no indication of emotion. After we had gotten out of earshot Gina asked “do you think they’ll turn around just because they can’t drive all the way?” I thought for a moment and then answered “I sincerely hope so.”

The day had not been hot, but the low sky and the long walk had brought out a sweat along my shoulders where my heavy bag had been knocking back and forth along the walk. When we came out to the clearing around Salto Suizo, despite the mild weather I was glad to have the opportunity to swim. There were only a few people around: two other young couples, one with their young daughter. We all greeted each other in subtle nods, but everyone seemed to be busy with their own contemplation of the falls. Above us, Salto Suizo was the type of high and precipitous waterfall that dissipated in the air and hit the pool below like a light rain, though it fell in a straight line with no bounding or splashing down the rocks. Each drop was like something loosed from a plane flying overhead with nothing to obstruct its passage to the ground.

Behind the falls there was a shallow cave scooped out of the rock and after taking the scene in, we scrambled up into this rocky maw and tried to sit and contemplate the beauty of the scene, but the sound of splashing water had made me impatient to swim and in a few minutes, I was clamoring back down to change into my bathing suit.

It had been overcast for days and the temperature hadn’t been very high since the previous weekend, but because it never gets that cold here, and because we had been walking so long, it seemed appropriate that we get in the water. The first few steps were feet-numbingly cold and it was only after I flopped in and all my internal organs retreated further into the hidden recesses of my body trying escape the cold that I realized the water was, in no place, more than three feet deep. I alternately stumbled and dog-paddled around the pool, glancing up at the sprinkling water falling from some infinitely distant point of origin in the rocks overhead.

The longer I stayed in the water, the more accustomed I became to the freezing temperature and eventually I felt comfortable in it. I felt the cool water relieving my back of the ghost of its burden: the impression of my backpack seemed to be fading; the light abrasions and the downward pull of the shoulder straps were being lifted from me. Thus refreshed, we climbed out, dried off and opened a warm beer we’d brought while wishing for a thermos of hot coffee instead.

An hour later, we were back on the country road, returning to the small town. The sun had come out, but it was now down around the horizon and the light was restful, striped as it was with unspooling shadows. I knew if we expected to get out of the town, we ought to try to flag down a passing car, but I couldn’t bring myself to give up the walk. When a car passed, I earnestly hoped they would not stop and offer us a ride.

About half-way down the road, I saw something that I am thankful to have experienced. In the light of the setting sun, Gina pointed out a matrix design stretched over the road, something like an invisible net, but at every point of intersection on the net there was a large black dot. Even as we approached, I had no idea what we were looking until Gina solved the puzzle and gasped “those better not be…” and then in a whispered tone of awe “…spiders!” She was right. Hanging directly over us, at six-inch intervals, there was a vast web of spiders stretched across the entire road. There must’ve been 100s of them just above our heads and their vast web continued on into a stand of trees. I had never before seen spiders share a communal web, but here it was, with meticulous arrangement, each of them had plotted their own little square. I wanted to wait for something to fly into it, to see how they would handle dividing the quarry, but the night was cool and there seemed to be few insects out. Perhaps this was why the spiders had decided to economize their efforts. We ducked under the volleyball net of spiders, Gina with great trepidation, and continued.

We were nearing the main road, when another black SUV pulled abreast of us. “Like a ride?” the driver asked and, as I knew we only had about 15 more minutes to walk, I decided to accept, although I did so with regret and every feature of the road we sped past in the car seemed to be robbed of some of the beauty that I could’ve seen if I had been able to walk past it and appreciate it longer.

Back in the town, we learned immediately that there were no more buses for the night. We asked a few people but they all said the last one left around five. I checked my phone to see it was only about fifteen after five. We must have just missed it. “Well,” I said shrugging, “I guess we’ll just start walking and see what happens.” We stopped into a little store to buy supplies in case we had to sleep out in the open, which I fully saw as a possibility and then set off down the darkening road. I had no idea what I was doing, I wasn’t even sure if I was going the right way. The only thing I knew was that we had a long way to go before we would reach another town. I guess, I was thinking vaguely that we would walk until we came to some kind of hotel, I remembered passing a few on the way in.

I hadn’t communicated any of this to Gina, because I was trying not to admit to myself just how untenable my plan was. We started walking and she said “should we try to get a ride?” I shrugged. “Sure.” But I didn’t hold out much hope of getting one. “It’s going to be dark in a minute,” I said despondently. “You can’t hitchhike in the dark.” Gina stuck out her thumb and I walked on, slowly, like I wasn’t sure where I was going. The car passing us made a ‘no’ gesture, but, bizarrely, a car going the opposite way pulled over. “Need a ride?” The man called out. I bolted toward the car like a dog who’d been kept inside all day; my tongue was probably lolling out of my head. Only Gina had enough wherewithal to notice that the man seemed to have another car following him and had, originally, been going the opposite direction. “Do you think it’s ok?” she asked. “Sure!” I bellowed out, jumping into the car. “Hola! Muchas gracias!” I barked.

The man who gave us a ride turned out to be the ideal person to get a ride from, an interesting conversationalist who owned his own campground/restaurant. (He took us there, but didn’t pressure us into staying, despite the fact that we were totally at his mercy.) He drove us 30 km back to Villarrica, conversing on various subjects the entire way. We were having a good time talking, but as we drove further and further into the night, I began to worry that we had really inconvenienced him. I had promised him some kind of payment for the ride, but I was earnestly beginning to wonder if I even had enough to give him. When we got into Villarrica, he drove us around, pointing out a lot of the sights and finally dropped us off at the bus station. In the end, he wouldn’t accept any money, although the round trip that he would have to take for us, would probably took him over an hour; I don’t even know how much it would’ve been for just the gas. Before we parted ways, I remembered that he worked in the capital (where we live) during the week and had said that he’s always wanted to study English, but never had the time. I offered to do some classes with him and he seemed happy with this as a fair trade and I was happy to have something to offer him other than the dullness of money.

The bus station was dead and the Asuncion bus was to leave in 15 minutes. We got our tickets, a couple cans of beer and settled down to watch the dogs roam around the place, sniffing at the garbage and each other. Soon the bus pulled up and after a few minutes, not even half-full, we pulled away from the station and into the quiet night. I struggled against sleep for a moment, but soon collapsed under its pressure, like an old barn giving out under the weight of a heavy snow.

     

   

The Tyranny of Image

“This isn’t as big of a deal as I thought It’d be” I told Gina standing outside our apartment, looking at the crowd of people forming to see the Pope. “I thought there’d be really dense crowds and lines wrapping halfway around the city.” My point of comparison had led me astray. The last time I’d had any kind of papal involvement had been in Italy when John Paul II died. In hours, Rome had doubled in size, people slept on the streets, forming tent cities and the lines to see his body were interminable. For weeks, huge crowds gathered at St. Peter’s to watch the smoke from the papal chimney. We waited for the white smoke to announce that a new Pope had been chosen.   

When the crowds finally cleared the streets and returned home, it was as if the city had undergone some profound change. Even a city as timeless as Rome, that has witnessed the changing face of civilization nearly since civilization began was affected by the events in the Vatican. I assumed that a city like Asuncion would be absolutely shocked by Francisco’s visit. Teams of construction workers had been working overtime to repave certain crumbling streets. Volunteers were cleaning up the small piles of trash that accumulate here and there. The newspaper vendors were giving away free Pope flags (the kind you attach to your car) with the purchase of a Sunday paper and the supermarkets were selling t-shirts and souvenir coffee mugs featuring the Pope standing alongside the Paraguayan flag. The city, usually troubled only by the occasional roar of an unmuffled motorcycle or a late night karaoke party, seemed on the verge of exploding into sensationalism.

In many places, Asuncion looks fairly modern. There are collapsed buildings and shattered sidewalks here and there and abandoned cars rot in sidestreets, but in most places, the city looks fairly progressive. Most people, when thinking of the Paraguayan capital would probably expect much worse. But Asuncion’s progressive face belies the reality. When it rains here, everything floods. Minutes after the beginning of a heavy rain, the sewer grates are belching forth geysers of fetid-smelling grey water. In order to make the sewers more efficient, the grates are removed and cars frequently fall into them. Along the riverbank, the hovels are abandoned to the rising water and the poor move further into the city, setting up plywood shacks to sleep in, bringing their livestock with them. On the edges of parks and soccer fields, shanties hang at crazy angles, barefoot kids run around and horses tear at the grass. When it rains, most people stay in. The streets quickly turn to rivers, even expensive houses flood and, often, the power goes out. The city is not well equipped to handle the rains, even though they come every year. Based on this observation and what I remembered of my time in Rome, I wondered how it would fare with a flood of people. After all, Francisco is the first Pope from Latin America, born in neighboring Argentina, and this is his first visit to the continent. 

As he wasn’t planning on visiting Argentina or Brazil, I figured these people would be coming to him in the 1,000s or even 100s of 1,000s as it had been in Rome. Under this sudden deluge of people, I imagined Asuncion struggling like it does against the water but with a much more chaotic result.

A national holiday was declared for the Friday and Saturday that the Pope would be in town. The institute I work for was closed as was the café where Gina works, to give you an idea of the scope of the event. Living near the Embassy of the Hold See, I expected the pilgrims and media to begin arriving by Thursday or even Wednesday, but by Thursday night, hardly anything had changed. There were a few more police out and some yellow and white flags had been strung up, but the streets were quiet. Friday, the people came out, but there didn’t seem to be too many. I’ve seen bigger crowds making their way to sports events. When the SF Giants were in the playoffs a few years ago, I saw bigger crowds walking around SOMA than I saw here on Friday.

It was easy to enjoy the day off. Even living at the epicenter of the action, we were able to go about our lives as if nothing exception was happening. But perhaps because we had been anticipating such massive crowds, or maybe just through sheer force of laziness, we spent most of the day inside, reading.

Saturday, Francisco was scheduled to be going out of town to visit the holiest cathedral in Paraguay in the town of Caacupe about 60 kilometers away.

In the early morning, when we went out to have our coffee, we saw the crowds assembled to see the Pope as he passed by. It wasn’t difficult for us to move through these crowds and soon we were in the park, drinking coffee and listening to the birds sing like we always do when we have a day off. The only difference was the occasional rumble of a helicopter passing overhead. The park even seemed more empty than usual. For the hour we sat there, no more than two or three cars drove past. Even the scratchy calls of the parrots seemed to have drifted off somewhere else.

After spending the previous day in and drinking too much coffee, we decided to take a long walk, down the length of the coastanera, through downtown and into the neighborhood of Sajonia. It was an ambitious plan, but with a mild and sunny Saturday stretching out before it, there seemed no better possible use of our time.

When we started out, there was still a light breeze drifting out from the shadows of empty houses and the dense, leafy canopies of the mango and jackfruit trees. I put on a long-sleeved shirt and was comfortable until we walked out onto the sun-exposed porch of Asuncion, the costanera.

I think ‘costanera’ might be a southern cone (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay) term. They used it in Argentina as well, but no one outside this area seems to be familiar with it. A costanera is what we would call a boardwalk in the States. It’s a promenade that runs along a body of water, but while in the States we would usually associate such a thing with a beach, here there is usually only the walk itself. Many of them run along rivers and for, whatever reason, there is seldom anyone swimming. Part of Asuncion’s costanera runs along a wetland area that would be uncomfortable to swim in unless you liked brackish, methane-rich water and being poked by big clumps of reeds. 

Further down, they’ve constructed a man-made beach that looks like it would make for decent swimming, but there are signs posted forbidding it. The signs give no reason, but everyone tells me it’s due to pollution. Little kids are frequently seen ignoring the signs on hot days and although I would like to join them, I am not brave enough to face whatever might be in that water.

It was hot along the costanera and extremely empty. After walking for a while, I unbuttoned my long-sleeve shirt that had been comfortable back into town where all the empty homes and dead cars seem to seethe with cold, dusty air in the winter, despite the sun. Eventually, in the bright, unmitigated sun of the costanera, I just took my shirt off. I’m still adapting to wearing shorts and walking around with no shirt on, but living in Paraguay, where temperatures frequently reach above 100 degrees and humidity is high, I have had to make certain concessions. There comes a point where one just looks ridiculous wearing jeans.

There are usually guards posted along the costanera. Much of the area used to be a slum, and even now, much of the shanty housing as only been pushed back behind the sidewalks and cotton candy vendors to a thin strip of trees and stagnant water between the city and the river. On clear, windy days, kites made from garbage bags and other refuse items fly over this area and barefoot kids occasionally run into view with their arms raised and their faces turned up to the sky.

To keep the kids from bothering anyone who’s come to walk along the costanera, the guards stand there tirelessly with zoned out looks on their faces. I say ‘hi’ to them but they never return my greeting. Either they are not allowed to, or they’re just jerks. As we walked along, watching the ragged kites rise and fall before the city’s skyline we began to joke about the bored-looking guards. “Oh my God,” Gina suddenly said, “what if one of them told you to put your shirt back on?!” and the moment she said it, I knew it was going to happen. The next cluster of guards we passed (two sitting on a bench) one raised himself up a little and asked me, somewhat politely, if I would put my shirt back on. I complied without argument despite the fact that we were spitting distance from the beach.

There is more hypocrisy in authority here because the rules are much more vague. Yeah, in the States you might get pulled over for nothing, but here, cops will ask you to do anything they can think of. I really wouldn’t be surprised if one were to ask me to spit out my chewing gum. They function on whims and ideas of morality and personal interpretations of the law. I really doubt that there’s anything that says that I have to wear a shirt on the beach, but something about the situation seemed inappropriate to the guard and he had been sitting out in the sun for hours and probably no one had walked by (the costanera had been surprisingly deserted). He wanted to justify his presence.

I went along with the request, it was hot and I was tired. I didn’t want to argue with the guy, but the whole thing soured my mood a little. Nobody likes being told what to do, but being told to put your clothes back on by someone who’s barely old enough to shave is beyond irritating. We walked the rest of the costanera saying little. Everything started to annoy me: the military boat made from what looked like scrap metal bobbing in the polluted river, the cheap boots that swallowed the cuffs of the solders’ fatigues, the captain with his swagger and big belly, the unprofessional way the military guards stared at us. It all looked like a ridiculous farce and I wanted to say so. This is what I think tourists from developed countries will always be guilty of. No matter how hard they try to join the developing world while traveling, riding local buses, eating local food, etc., if the country they are visiting tries to flex its muscle over them, no matter if the country is Columbia, Morocco or Nepal, they will always reveal their lack of respect for the country’s laws. Developing countries are allowed to have their revered customs and traditions superior even to those in the developed world, but their soldiers and police will always be ridiculous and lamentable for their impotence.

We walked through downtown and into Sajonia. The sky had begun to darken and it looked as if it might rain. My resentment was waning, but I didn’t feel as good as I had when we had set out. The grey sky and the obstreperous freight of passing buses left me feeling bored and vaguely irritated with Asuncion. Gina and I started talking about San Francisco taquerias, tamarindo aguas frescas (sweetened, Mexican fruit juice drinks) and salsa verde. The familiar California day dream began, but I banished it before it could become anything worth entertaining.

We passed Carlos Antonio Lopez Park and the sun started to edge out around the clouds. Some little boys were crouched down by the fence, hiding from someone, presumable two teenaged girls who stood a ways off looking around confused. The boys gestured to us as we went past. They seemed to be saying “don’t tell them we’re here!” which was great. We went into the park and walked around the spiny palo borracho and the mottled guava trees. Little kids were playing soccer on a field with little goals, just above them, some teenagers were playing in the sand of a slightly larger field. The whole park seemed to rise to a point, amongst the trees. We climbed to the top, naturally to see what was there. As we came out of a grove of trees, we noticed a police officer in his authoritarian black, faux-Kevlar vest sitting at the pinnacle of the park. I wondered if perhaps he would tell us we weren’t allowed to enter, but we continued walking, thinking it best to wait and see what he said rather than give up before trying.

We got to the top, about 10 yards from where the cop was sitting. I said ‘hello’ to him and he returned the greeting. I noticed he was smoking, but as it’s common here, I didn’t think much of it and then, after we’d taken a few steps away, it hit me, the unmistakable scent of weed smoke. The poor bored bastard probably had to hang out in this quiet park all afternoon and with no shirtless people to bother, he’d fired up the joint he’d brought along to ease the boredom, right then, two meddlesome foreigners had to come traipsing over the hill. No wonder he’d been the first cop that day to return my greeting, we’d caught him and his guilt brought him down to our level. He couldn’t afford not to return my greeting. He wasn’t any better than me.

I guess that’s what I’ve always found so annoying about authority, in countries both ‘developing’ and ‘developed,’ everyone commits faults, everyone has weaknesses and no one is morally superior. Yet, humans seem to crave hierarchies and if they can’t use something natural (like strength) they’ll impose something artificial (like rank). In one’s own society, you obey authority because it seems natural, but try to go somewhere else and buy into someone else’s power structure and you quickly realize how ridiculous and artificial it is.

The cop seemed embarrassed to have been caught, but we didn’t make it too obvious that we’d noticed. We climbed down from the hill, rambled around the park a little more and then turned back toward home, where the crowds were already amassing to try to catch another look at the Pope.                     

Tell the Truth

It’s usually quiet here on Sundays. Yeah, sometimes the guys from the construction company across the street are working, banging their metal pipes around and throwing stuff into the back of a waiting truck while they bawl orders and jokes at each other. When the truck pulls away, there’s that long, low ripping sound of a diesel engine whirring too quickly into life. And in the afternoon, down the block, you can here everyone’s music playing at once while they wait for their barbecue to finish cooking. Of course there are also the sounds of kids playing, mothers yelling and men laughing. In the evening, a few cars plod down the street with slow, bassy stereos. Now and then a dog barks. But these are normal, Sunday sounds, nothing like the Monday through Saturday crush of traffic that sits just below my balcony rumbling, honking, yelling zooming and calling into loudspeakers. With Asuncion’s preponderance of cheap motorcycles, nearly every 5^th vehicle that goes under my windows produces an engine noise of at least 100 decibels. Because there are no stop signs, drivers on the street, especially motorcyclists, beep their horns going through four-way stops. In the early morning and the evening, when there is less traffic, every few minutes there comes a roaring of an unmuffled motorcycle pushing up the hill followed by two blasts of the horn, one at either end of the block. Then there are the ancient Mercedes-Benz buses that come roaring after them, belching black smoke, sounding like something burrowing under the ground at a rapid rate rather than something easily passing over it. The numerous nearby construction projects add to the cacophonous quality of the area. Heavy machinery backs up beeping incessantly, backhoes dump 1,000s of pounds of concrete and twisted rebar into a dented truck with a sound like tanks crashing into each other at top speed.

I can bear the noise because I know on Sunday the world will quiet once again and become beautiful. On Sunday, people you pass on the street are more inclined to return your greeting. On Sunday, neighbors down the block sit in the shade and pass the time. When I skate by, all sweaty and disheveled, I stop and talk about the weather with them. I go down to the park and watch the dogs, strays and pets, parade by with their tails up. Even the birdsong in the trees has something mellow about it on Sunday.

Last Sunday, I was enjoying the typical peace and gentle rhythm of the Day of Rest. Gina and I went out to brunch with some friends. At home, I made some Skype calls and then went out skating. I know I’m getting old as far as skateboarding is concerned, but I still enjoy the movement and discovery of it. Even as decrepit as I am, I occasionally surprise myself by suddenly doing something I was previously unable to do. Last Sunday was such an occasion, and the new trick stoked the fires of my interest and I stayed out into the evening, bounding across the parkinglot, up and down the curbs feeling like a 14 year-old.

When I got back in, I was exhausted, but it was a pleasant exhaustion. I took a shower, made dinner and stretched out to read. Gina had gone to work and I had the place to myself. By the drowsy lamplight, I was beginning to nod off when some pop music suddenly exploded above my head, like when you turn on a radio not realizing it’s at full volume. I sat up and grumbled. Directly above our apartment there is a rooftop terrace. There’s a grill and a picnic table and it’s a really great place to enjoy a nice meal or to have a drink if you have some friends over. Not everyone uses the terrace for such relaxed purposes. On Fridays, Saturdays and even the occasional Thursday, other residents of the building have brought their stereos up to this terrace and blasted music and yelled until after midnight. Usually if we shut our bedroom door it’s not too bad, but because of the closeness of the roof, it’s still annoying as it feels as if the people up there were partying in your living room—especially if they start trying to dance around. But, as I mentioned before, I can tolerate these things because I know Sundays will be quiet.

Although I’m still not entirely sure what the unspoken rules of Paraguayan society are, I was pretty sure that not partying late on Sunday was one of them. Sunday and most week nights after 10 pm, my neighborhood is almost eerily quiet. When I heard the music start from upstairs, I assumed someone had just gone up there to drink a few beers and say goodbye to the weekend with a couple of friends. I didn’t think there’d be any big party, but I thought I’d get my laundry (we put it out on a rack on the roof to dry) just in case things got a little rowdy. I didn’t want my clean shirts to be flapping around next to a bunch of chainsmoking drunks.

I went up the stairs for the laundry. As I expected, there were only three or four young guys on the roof. They were sitting around the table, looking like decent people. We exchanged ‘hola’s and ‘como te va’s and I went back downstairs carrying the laundry rack. I settled back into the couch with my book and was just about to forget about the music upstairs when suddenly, it was challenged by a much louder music coming from the street below. I thought it was just some kid out showing off his sound system, but the car stopped in front of my building. The music continued playing and then people started yelling. The guys on the roof responded, yelling back. Then the door below opened and what sounded like a heard of water buffalo moved up the stairs. “Great,” I thought. “This is turning into a party.” But I still felt protected by statistics. It was Sunday, things like this just didn’t happen.

I was glad I’d gotten my laundry off the roof because the crowd just kept coming. The front door of the building has this lousy pneumatic hinge and the thing slams shut unless you stand there and ease it closed. It’s a big metal security door so it seems to rattle the entire building when it shuts. As the party guests continued coming, the door was slamming every minute. Up on the roof, just above my head, people were stomping around. Not just walking around but actually jumping, galloping might be a better word. Occasionally something would impress them and they would all yell out at once in a chorus of wild abandon. I was beginning to get annoyed. This didn’t sound like anything suited to Sunday. People had to work in the morning and this was flagrantly disrespectful to the other people living in the building.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is not uncommon in Asuncion, which is also known as the mythical land of do-as-you-please. Never before have I seen such an incredible class disparity. Elsewhere, I have seen the proverbial brand new Jaguar driving down a muddy village road. I have seen the rich man enter a building with his sunglasses and entourage. I have heard people whisper about the things the rich have gotten away with, but everywhere I have been, from Kosovo to Columbia, the rich had to live, more or less, in the same society as the poor. In Asuncion, the rich have created their own world. They live in mansions, in tinted Land Rovers. They have their own stores with armed guards posted at the door. When they drive through the streets, they drive with impunity and reckless abandon, like an army with a flank exposed. I have seen the rich at social events. I have heard them speak. They are people accustomed to having their desires carried out quickly and with no complaint. It’s in their bearing, in their walk and facial expressions. I have seen them bodily move people when they are obstructed. So accustomed are they to getting their way, I have seen them yell out their order while still waiting in line and walk away in the full assumption that it will be carried out. These are the adults. Imagine if people like this had children that they spoiled rotten and then imagine the children becoming selfish and semi-nihilistic teenagers and now you have some sort of idea who was on my roof that night. Disrespect meant absolutely nothing to them.

Gina came home around 10 o’clock and didn’t seem to mind the noise. She was happy to be home from work, but I, who had been lounging on my ass all day, was already beyond frustrated. The noise level was increasing. The music had gotten louder and the partiers kept getting worked up into chanting in that moronic ‘oooh, oooh, oooh’ way, jumping up and down while they did it, which just beneath them, sounded like a continuous crash, like something big falling over again and again. Everyone had to yell over the bass laden pop music. I was beginning to bristle. Just as I had closed the door behind Gina, another clot of these revelers came whooping up the stairs, I opened the door and went out to the landing to tell them to be quiet as they passed by. Just to say the equivalent of ‘hey, guys, come on people live here, ya’ know?’

Speaking a foreign language depends so much on your audience. When you sense your audience is receptive and forgiving of your mistakes, you don’t worry about making them. When you’re not worried about making mistakes, you tend to make less. Anyone who’s ever had their boss look over their shoulder while performing some task at work understands this concept. When someone is hovering, you tend to make ridiculously stupid mistakes precisely because you are worried about making mistakes. No matter how comfortable you become at speaking another language, when you are facing someone who seems even remotely hostile, language becomes a slippery thing that you have to wrestle down, as you try to pin it, you become aware that the person you are trying to communicate with is laughing at your struggle. This makes the struggle worse. The more frustrated you become, the harder the language struggles. It’s a vicious cycle. In order to avoid this, when being confrontational, it’s best to stick to single words so you don’t have to worry about grammar or syntax.

In my bare feet and my Adidas shorts, I stepped out onto the landing and hit the noisy group off as they came around the bend in the stairs. I did my best to belt out a well-rounded ‘tranquilo!’ with a local accent. The girl who was leading the parade glared at me and continued up the stairs. She might as well have walked through me, ghost that I was to her. There was a classic thick-necked lout behind her. He looked like a walking rectangle. When he kept yelling, I called for tranquility again, thinking maybe he hadn’t heard me, but of course he had, it’s just that he grew up with parents who bodily moved their servants around and laid on the horns of their Ranger Rovers at poor people walking across the street. This guy’s only way to relate to strangers was with ‘how dare you.’ As he rounded the stairs, he reached out and gave me a condescending pat, a pat like you would give a dog or a baby. I stood there, aghast, literally aghast. When she saw me to speechless, Gina started to yell from the doorway, but I turned and waved her inside “you can’t talk to these people,” I said. I tried to act calm, but my blood was boiling.

I went inside and pretended to read, but I was so angry I was having a difficult timeeven breathing normally, let alone making my brain process the words on the page. I wanted to go upstairs and just start throwing punches. First I’d punch that bastard that patted me. Then I’d punch all the guys that kept yelling and whooping up there like a bunch of damn gorillas and I’d kick over their stereo to rid the world of their stupid music.

This might sound a little extreme, but it was now after 11 and these people cared nothing for the other people in the building. They had just taken over like a bunch of sacking Vikings or something. The screams continued in the stairs. The front door kept slamming. The music was blasting and everyone was shouting in an unrestrained drunken way. And no one up there cared because they knew no one was going to do anything about it.

In the States, when this sort of thing happens, people go over and talk to their neighbors. Usually the polite thing to say is “I wanted to talk to you before I called the cops.” I have never spoken to someone who wasn’t at least somewhat appreciative of this courtesy. Of course, the implied threat is that if they keep making noise, you will call the cops. Not that I actually would, but the threat gives weight to your words. Or it would if I’d ever had to tell anyone in the States to be quiet. A little noise doesn’t normally bother me and usually there are neighbors much more sensitive than I to noise levels. As a result, by the time I’ve even noticed the sound of a party, someone else has usually already complained. In Asuncion, this doesn’t happen. I knew that there must’ve been many other residents of the building trying to get to sleep or just relax and enjoy their evening who were also annoyed by the party but I knew that none of them were going to go and tell these people to shut up. I’d never heard anyone ever complain to partiers before, even if they would complain about them afterwards. There’s a defacto rule here that you don’t get involved in things that don’t directly concern you. So in a sense that noisy brats on the roof had already won. They were free to terrorize us because their business didn’t concern us. They knew no one would complain. As for calling the cops, well I’ve never heard of anyone calling the cops for anything here.

I wasn’t exactly running up there either. From all the yelling, I could tell that everyone, or at least all the guys up there were pretty drunk. It was also apparent that they didn’t care what they were doing to the people in the building, so why would they listen if I went up there and told them to shut up? The rooftop terrace also had no door, so there was nothing to knock on, no neutral doorway from which to address the revelers. I would’ve had to just walk into the middle of their party and start yelling.

I don’t think the party was annoying Gina as much but she could tell that I was worked up. She kept saying that she would go up there and say something. I knew she would, too and I couldn’t stand to think of her talking to those drunken meatheads with me waiting downstairs. I realized I’d backed myself into a wall. I couldn’t stand to let those spoiled brats think that they could just come over and act like this whenever they wanted. None of our neighbors were going to say anything. I didn’t want Gina to go up there. The only option was that I go up there and try in shaky Spanish to tell them all to shut up or get out.

I worked out a plan, I’d find out which of them lived in the building and I’d talk to that person, who’d have perhaps slightly more invested in not pissing off the neighbors. I stood at the door, but afraid to hesitate too long, I was soon going up the stairs, moving into the dark, whooping torrent toward the roof.

The terraces lights were all off and in the darkness I made out a forest of moving bodies, most of them stood together in pairs. The table was covered with bottles, scatted yells punctuated the scene, like the partiers were using them to locate each other in the darkness. A grey female face swam up to me out of the darkness bearing a confused expression. “Quien tiene su departamento aca?” I asked. She pointed to a blue collared shirt standing at the edge of the terrace. I swam through the smoky, booze-sweet darkness to the shirt. “Estas viviendo aca?” I asked the blue shirt, already floundering with my Spanish. From somewhere just beneath his chin a female voice answered. “yo vivo aca.” I looked down and saw that the blue shirt had his arms wrapped around a bleached blonde with a puffy-looking face.  I talked to her a minute. I told her the party was too loud. That is was a Sunday and people had to work in the morning. I asked her which apartment was hers and finally her name. She said it and blue shirt lurched forward, finally coming to life. His eyes were all but rolled back into his head. “Y soy su novio!” His booze-soft mouth having a hard time with the consonants and leaking air, spittle and vodka and energy drink. “Y tu nombre?” I asked, looking the dope right in the eyes, trying my best to convey my contempt for him, hoping that he’d try to do something so I could punch his eyes the rest of the way into his head. Of course I knew that punching him would do no good and would probably get me killed before I got out of the party, but, damn, I was sick of these entitled-acting people. When I asked the girl to quiet down the party, she kept saying “ahora mismo” in this too-bright girl scout kind of way, but for the time I bought it and went back downstairs, thankful to have at least shown these people that not everyone in the building was going to tolerate this shit.

An hour passed before there were any signs of anything changing. The music and yelling continued as before. I lay in bed thinking about all kinds of things I could do to intimidate these people into leaving. Gina slept peacefully after her long day of work, but I lay there, still grinding my teeth when something finally broke and argumentative shouts spilled out onto the street. The roof emptied out like someone had pulled the plug on a bathtub full of jerks. Loud, argumentative sounds now rose from the parkinglot below. I went to the window and saw no girls. It was only guys, blue shirt among them, throwing a cooler around and running up and shoving each other. The shoves started as playful, but they seemed constantly on the verge of turning into fights. The language of the rectangles had degraded to ‘puta’ and ‘maricon,’ which was all they seemed to be saying. They were yelling at each other and at the puffy faced bleached blonde. Maybe even she could finally take no more of their lummox behavior and kicked them all out. Their protest in the street was too drunken to last long and eventually they got into their huge trucks and laid on their horns as they drove away. I could hear the bastards for blocks and blocks until they finally receded into the dark, bewildering night.               

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.