Tales of a Female Nomad (8 page)

One morning I arrive in the village to work on my weaving. Before I am down the steps of the bus, four teenagers are all over me.

“Tienes que acompañarnos a la playa.” You have to come with us to the beach.
“No puedes decir
no!”
You can’t say no!

Several families have rented a bus for a weekend holiday at the beach. They want me to join them. I am honored by the invitation and excited by the prospect of spending three days on a family vacation.

A week later, the loaded bus picks me up in the plaza at seven in the morning. María has saved me a seat. Three hours out of Antigua we have our first flat tire. The second flat tire comes an hour later. We arrive at the beach community just before dark.

One of the men (there are four) goes off to find us a hotel room and the women spread colorful but threadbare “tablecloths” on the sidewalk. Some of us sit on the sidewalk, others sit on the curb, feet in the street, and we open up the food that was packed that morning. There are fourteen of us in the family group; we take up most of the sidewalk. Other tourists, forced to walk around us, make comments that I cannot translate, but I know what they are saying.

As we sit on the ground, cars blowing exhaust in our faces, we eat, tossing the papers and wrappings into the street. It is hard for me to throw garbage into the street; I can feel the years of conditioning pulling on my arm as I toss. I think about picking up our trash and finding a garbage pail; but I think again. I am a friend, not a teacher. If I pick up after them, I am making a judgment that says I know better than they. Even if I walk with my own garbage to a pail, I am making a statement.

I am an invited guest. I do as they do.

Before we are finished, two girls in braids and white embroidered blouses stained with dirt come by selling drinks in plastic bags. Everyone except me buys a drink. I don’t like sweet, sugary drinks, so I’m carrying bottled water.

Sitting on the curb and spilling over into the street, we are taking up a parking space. Cars drive by looking for parking spaces and honk. No one moves. Then suddenly a car swoops in and nearly amputates five pairs of legs. We jump up, spilling things all over the street. The driver screams something unpleasant at us as he steps out of the car and crosses the street. No one in our group says anything. This is not a country where indigenous people confront the Hispanic population.

Finally José comes back from his hotel search. There are no rooms. His brother-in-law joins him and the search continues. We wait on the sidewalk. An hour later, the men come back. They have found a room . . . one room for fourteen of us.

After a walk on the beach and some splashing in the water, we go to our room. It has one double bed that sleeps five and floor space for six more. Three of us sleep in the hall outside the room.

I am in the hall when the procession begins in the middle of the night. Everyone is vomiting, the babies are crying, adults are dry-heaving. We all go to the beach, which is down a hall and out a door. The ocean tide is coming in. There are drunk noises coming from the bar next door. Under the full moon, thirteen of my family stand, vomiting.

I go into the bar and buy as many big bottles of water as I can carry. As the sun comes up, some of us are back in the vomit-smelling-room-for-fourteen. I decide to stay on the beach. I wrap my eyes in a sweatshirt and try to sleep. By nine, everyone is on the beach, the mothers washing clothes in the ocean, the children playing in the water, screeching with glee in the waves. That night, the room is quiet and the hall is cleaner.

We leave at noon the next day. There is only one flat tire on the way home, but there are no more spares. This time we sit for two hours on the side of the highway. Luckily, no one is selling drinks in plastic bags.

As I sit there in the hot sun, sweating and dirty, surrounded by the adults, holding one of the babies in my arms, and feeling as close as I have ever felt to people from another culture, I realize that I have left no space between me and them, no room for anthropological distance. I feel as though they are family. Their pain is my pain; their joy, my joy. And it feels right.

It is clear that I am far more a mother than I am an anthropologist. This odd and messy weekend has helped me to define what I want to do in my travels: I want to know many cultures . . . from the inside.

Meanwhile, back in Antigua, between weaving, touring, and breakfasting, I have completed a thirty-two-page children’s book called
Stop Those
Painters!
It’s about two guys who can’t control their urge to paint. They begin with walls and move on to chairs and stairs and toys and boys and teachers and cars and trucks and policemen and, finally, as they stand on the wings of a jet plane, they gleefully paint rainbows in the sky. It’s my first book as a nomad, inspired by the colors and the rainbows of Guatemala. I send it off to New York.

A month later I hear from my agent. Scholastic wants the book. I will be able to live for five months on the three thousand dollars they will pay me. I decide to go to the States for a few weeks, to visit my kids and my parents.

Mitch has settled in Manhattan after his year in Singapore. I see him several times during my visit. It is wonderful to hear, face to face, his stories of studying and playing in Singapore; of visiting China, where he took classes in Mandarin; of touring Asia with a softball team; and of visiting Bali. He is working as a journalist in New York, and I’ve never seen him so happy.

Jan is still in Colorado, working as a journalist on
The Vail Trail.
I call to make arrangements to visit her, but she tells me that she’s coming to visit me in Guatemala. Great! I can’t wait to introduce her to my world.

I spend a week with my mother and father in Connecticut. They are careful what they say to me about my new life. I know they would prefer to have their daughter married; I also know that they don’t believe me when I say I’m very very happy. They know better; women are only happy if they have a husband. It’s the way life should be. My mother tells me she recently sent a birthday gift to my ex-husband. She doesn’t say it, but she is hoping for reconciliation.

My brother, who is three years younger than I, married and securely settled in a well-furnished home and his own successful business not too far from my parents, takes me to the airport shuttle when I leave.

“Not ready to return to the ‘real world’ yet, huh?”

When I tell him I
am
in a real world, it’s just not
his
world, he smiles knowingly. “I give you another six months. You’ll get it out of your system.”

They do not understand that the more I live it, the more I want it.

But Jan seems to understand. She backpacked with her best friend for six months in Europe when she was a junior in college, and my life is her dream, though I’m sure she would configure it differently.

Two weeks after I return to Guatemala, she arrives. For one month, she plays with the babies, dines with the ex-pats, meets a whole crowd of backpackers, and crafts a young adult novel.

Together, Jan and I travel around Guatemala by bus, and we take a plane trip to Tikal, a Palenque-like Mayan ruins in northeast Guatemala near Belize. The best part of it all for me is getting to know Jan as an adult.

Three days after Jan leaves, while I’m still missing her and feeling an emptiness in my apartment, Henry sits down next to me on a park bench. An Australian agronomist, he has just arrived from Nicaragua, where he has been working for the last six months. He’s fortyish, small, angular, and friendly. He’s in Antigua to take a break from Nicaragua and to study Spanish.

He’s come to the right place. There are so many language schools in town that some days I think every native in Antigua is teaching Spanish. Signs, fliers, posters, children, adults all promote schools and teachers.

Henry’s plan is to study intensively for two months and then go back, overland, to Nicaragua. The Sandinista government has offered him a job advising cooperatives on agricultural matters.

I ask him about Nicaragua. The Reagan government has been telling Americans that the Sandinista government is a serious threat to the free world and that the Nicaraguan people are virtually prisoners of a communist regime.

“It’s a hard place to live,” Henry says. “Mostly because of the U.S. embargo. Every one is hurting. There’s no food in the markets, no medicines, no parts for machines. And no professionals . . . they all left with Somoza. The whole educated class moved to Florida.”

As an agronomist, Henry has a skill to offer. Apparently, there are thousands of Henrys from all over the world who have come to Nicaragua to help out. Ever since I arrived in Guatemala, I’ve been listening to their stories, so different from what I read in the U.S. newspapers.

I’ve been thinking about going down to see for myself, but I haven’t wanted to make the trip alone. It’s a long and possibly dangerous trip through Honduras. And I don’t know how the Nicaraguans would treat an American. It is, after all, my country that is training and arming the Contras, who are dropping American bombs on the people. Henry would be a great escort. I am trying to decide if I can ask him to take me along when he says, “Can you recommend a place in Antigua where I can stay for a couple of months?”

Yessss.

“I have a two-bedroom apartment,” I tell him. “Why don’t you stay with me? It won’t cost you anything, and we can study Spanish together. I need to work on mine too.” Then I explain the string. In exchange for a room, he has to take me to Nicaragua.

Henry can’t believe his good luck. He likes the idea of a travel companion; and even more, he is thrilled to be able to live rent free. And I am excited to be pointing in a new direction. It’s time for me to leave Guatemala and move on. I love making deals where everybody ends up happy.

Henry moves in; and one day we invite Doña Lina, my landlady, to join us for dinner. She is talking to me again. She was flattered that I took Jan to meet her. Until then, she hadn’t even nodded hello since I missed that lunch in her house.

And she wasn’t too happy at first about Henry moving in until I assured her that he was neither paying rent nor sleeping with me. His pay-back, I told her, is that he is going to be my escort-over-land to Nicaragua. Our dinner with her is friendly, and good Spanish practice for Henry and me.

Two days before Henry and I are due to leave, Doña Lina stops by to tell us that her nephew, who lives in El Salvador, is driving through town in his truck next week on his way home from Mexico. She thinks he might like our company.

We’d have to delay our trip for two days and detour through El Salvador, but we accept. Neither of us has ever been to El Salvador, and riding in our own private truck sounds like fun.

Antigua has been a good place for me. Filled with friends and “family,” I have met the first challenges of my new life, and I’m more confident than ever that I will thrive.

Nicaragua

CHAPTER FIVE

THE END OF POLITICAL INNOCENCE

Andrés arrives around noon in a red truck with a twenty-foot trailer and a cabin big enough for the three of us. We begin our conversation with family. It’s the universal opener. Andrés and his wife and two preschool children live in the capital city of San Salvador.

Half an hour into our trip, I ask about life in El Salvador.

“I will talk to you because we are inside my truck and no one can hear us,” he says. “In El Salvador I never discuss politics. Even here in Guatemala I won’t talk if I’m on the street. You never know who might be listening.”

El Salvador has been involved in a civil war since 1979. Left-wing guerrillas in the mountains are trying to overthrow the government. Agents of the government “disappear” people who are suspected of being in sympathy with the guerrillas. In 1987, any country trying to fight off left-wing movements gets support from the United States, which is willing to overlook government-sponsored atrocities. The army of El Salvador is trained and supplied by the United States.

“Do you know about the
escuadrones de muerte?
” Andrés asks. The death squadrons, supported by the government of El Salvador. “They came for my brother two years ago. We haven’t heard from him since. My brother was a student. He was critical of the government. One day my brother and four of his friends disappeared. We are afraid to ask what happened to him or they will come for us.”

For the rest of the trip, Andrés tells us horror stories of disappearances and atrocities committed by the “democratic” government.

When we arrive in San Salvador, the capital city, he takes us to a
pupusería. Pupusas,
a spicy mix of pork, cheese, and sausage wrapped up in a corn tortilla, are to El Salvador what hot dogs used to be to the U.S., before fast food came along. You can buy
pupusas
everywhere, in the markets, on the streets, and in
pupuserías.

“Now you will have your first taste of El Salvador,” he laughs for the first time. “Without
pupusas,
El Salvador would not be El Salvador.”

Andrés is relaxed as we drink our beers and enjoy the spicy delights of our
pupusas.
He plays a song on the juke box about
pupusas
and he sings along. We are halfway through our meal when three men sit down at a table next to us. They are young and good-looking, probably in their early twenties.

“Stop talking,” whispers Andrés, not moving his lips. His breaths shorten and his hands begin to fidget. “Don’t tell anyone you are going to Nicaragua,” he adds.

Even without hearing us talk, our neighbors know that Henry and I are foreigners. One of the men asks us a question in Spanish.

“I am sorry,” I lie. “I do not speak Spanish.”

Another man asks in English, “Where are you from?”

“The United States,” I say. Henry, who is from Australia, says nothing, hoping they will assume he is my husband. If these guys are part of the government or members of the
escuadrones de muerte,
my country is on their side.

“How long will you be in El Salvador?”

“Two weeks. I would like to stay longer but I am a teacher and I have to go back to the U.S.,” I say, embellishing my lie. “El Salvador is a beautiful country. The people are very friendly and
pupusas
are delicious.”

The more you lie, the easier it gets. The
pupusa
part is true.

Less than five minutes after the men arrive, Andrés says it is time to go. We have not finished our meal and my beer bottle is still half full. We leave.

“I do not trust those men,” he says once we are driving again. His whole demeanor has changed. He does not say another word until he stops in front of a backpacker hotel and says good-bye. Now that we are in his country, he does not want to be seen with us. If we are on our way to Sandinista Nicaragua, we are the enemy of his government. And by association, he is subversive.

Early the next morning Henry and I walk through the streets of San Salvador, past corners where soldiers are hiding behind walls of sandbags, their guns poking through holes between the bags, pointing at the pedestrians. There is no eye contact between the soldiers and the people, no waves or smiles; one is the enforcer and everyone else a potential victim. I find myself wondering if I would be shot if I were suddenly to start running.

There were soldiers with guns in Antigua too, standing stiffly outside government buildings and banks. They were intimidating, but I was never afraid they were going to shoot me. I always felt that they were protecting something, like money or officials. Here in San Salvador, the guns are pointing at me, and I am frightened.

Henry and I leave on the first bus we can find to Honduras, another U.S.-friendly country. When we arrive at the Honduras border, each passenger is taken individually into a room where there are two armed soldiers. I am asked to stand across a table while two men turn the pages of an album filled with pictures of unwelcome foreigners. They look at the pictures and then at me. Up and down, page after page. It takes fifteen minutes to go through dozens of pictures. I am not in the album.

I have recently heard that there is a peace march, made up mostly of U.S. citizens, working its way through the countries of Central America and ending in Nicaragua. I have also heard that the Honduran government is planning to refuse entry to the marchers who are considered dangerous left-wingers, supporters of Nicaragua, supporters of peace. Presumably the marchers are also an embarrassment to the Reagan government, which is bombing Nicaragua. Who knows where the pictures in the album came from. Many of them look like passport photos. I wonder if they were supplied by the U.S. government.

When I leave the room, my passport is stamped and I am told I can go. I meet Henry outside and we walk down the road together. Neither one of us wants to do this alone.

“To Nicaragua?” we ask one of the uniformed, gun-toting Honduran soldiers.

He directs us to a bus that is already filled with people. It turns out that they are Nicaraguans on a chartered bus, returning from a shopping trip to San Salvador. The Honduran government won’t permit Nicaraguans to step on their land. There is a soldier with a gun slung over his shoulder, sitting next to the bus driver, facing the passengers. In his hand are all of our passports wrapped up in a rubber band. We are told they will be returned when we arrive at the border.

In addition to people, the bus is stuffed with shopping bags, boxes, duffel bags, and suitcases battered and new, all filled with things that are hard to get in Nicaragua—things like toilet paper and toothpaste and deodorant, underwear, jeans, T-shirts, light bulbs, makeup, and toys. Contraband that will be sold on the black market in Managua.

During the trip, the soldier never smiles. He never interacts with anyone. He just sits there staring straight ahead, our passports in his hand. The gun is American made.

We get off the bus at the border of Nicaragua. Two soldiers accompany us until we have all crossed over into Nicaragua.

Borders are always a disappointment to me. Going from one country into another should be more than just walking down a road. The color should change. You should go from green to orange like you do on a map. At the very least you should be able to look off into the distance and see a line painted across the landscape. But the only line here is a ragged one of sweaty people carrying lots of bags.

There are no other people once we are in Nicaragua, just us bus passengers and Sandinista soldiers standing in the distance on top of the hills, staring off into the fields surrounding us. They are looking for Contras, the guerrilla army that has been trying to overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government in what has become known down here as Ronald Reagan’s war. The United States is training and supporting the Contras.

It is sweat-dripping hot. The women from my bus have towels or rags around their necks so they can soak up the sweat. I just drip, as though someone is wringing out clothes on my head. From time to time, I wipe the sweat with the bottom of my T-shirt.

“It’s dangerous along this road,” says one of the women. She points to the abandoned customs building where government officials used to check passports and luggage. The building is shot up with bullet holes, and the ground around it is littered with empty sardine cans, old plastic bags, torn wrappers, and some mangled pieces of metal. The reason the Sandinista government had to move the office away is that people were getting killed by Contras who were camped across the border in Honduras.

The government moved the people too—the ones who used to live in the disintegrating shacks along the side of the road, the ones who used to farm the fields that stretch into the distance. Too close. Too dangerous. Good fertile land that used to feed people has been abandoned.

After about a twenty-minute walk, everyone stops. We are to wait there for a ride to the new customs office. Some Sandinista soldiers join us, guns slung over their shoulders, smiles on their faces. They are kids in their teens. The people share snacks with them, and exchange greetings. The Nicaraguans from my bus do not think of these soldiers as the enemy; they are treated like family.

I share a bag of peanuts with two soldiers. When they ask me where I am from, I tell them, but I am nervous. The Contra bullets that are killing them are U.S. bullets fired from U.S. guns.

“No problem,” says a baby-faced soldier who can’t be more than sixteen. “It isn’t the American people who are doing this to us. It is your government. You are welcome in Nicaragua. When you go home, tell your people we want peace.”

After forty minutes of standing in the hot sun and fifteen minutes packed upright, like a giant bunch of asparagus, in the back of a pickup, we finally arrive at customs, a bunch of wooden shacks and rusty trailers. Henry and I are sent into different lines. When it is my turn to enter the first shack, the soldier inside asks me for my passport. Then he begins to fill out an entry card.

“What is your profession?”

“Writer.”

The corners of his lips curl up into his mustache. “Me too. I’m a writer. I write poetry. What do you write?”

“Children’s books.”

“How nice. Do you have any with you?”

I look at the long line behind me as I fumble through my backpack. I pull out three books. He turns the pages of
Why Can’t I Fly?
Then he looks up.

“I have a six-year-old daughter. May I take this home for her?”

I know that customs officials are always looking for bribes, but everyone has told me that Nicaragua is different. Besides, I am hoping to share my books in classrooms and neighborhoods all over the country. I don’t want to give them to the first person I meet.

“I brought the books to share with the children of Nicaragua,” I say. “And I haven’t even met any yet.”

“Okay. No problem. I understand.
Que le vaya bien.
” Have a good time.

And he passes me on to the other shacks and battered trailers for more questions and baggage inspection.

Twenty minutes later, I am walking along a dirt path that leads back to the main road, where Henry is waiting for me. As I walk, I watch a group of soldiers behind one of the trailers. They are playing a tape of break-dance music and two of them are dancing. Their guns are lying on the ground. I am so engrossed in this different breed of soldier that I don’t notice the three boys and a girl approaching from behind.

“Buenos tardes,”
say the four scruffy, barefoot kids. Good afternoon.

“Cómo se llama usted?”
asks the biggest boy. What is your name?

When they hear my answer, they smile and nod to each other. Then the big one speaks again. “Would you read us a book?”

And there, late in the day, on a dusty path in front of the Nicaraguan customs office, I sit on the ground and read them a book.

A pickup and two buses later, we reach Managua. Henry, who will be living in government housing and working for the agricultural department, deposits me in the foreign-tourist part of town, and we say good-bye. I’m on my own.

I check into a motel: dark rooms, shared bathrooms, lumpy beds, and cheap (three dollars a night). The place I choose is the cheapest and most dilapidated among the hotels, but it has a common room, which seems like a good place to meet people. There are backpackers draped around the couches when I arrive.

“Hi,” I say, introducing myself to the crowd. After we’ve been talking for a while, they invite me to go dancing with them—live music under the stars.

“Sure,” I say. It’s my new credo: Say yes to everything.

The parking lot turned into a dance floor is packed and sweaty. The crowd, all Nicaraguan except for the eight of us, is young and active and swinging to
salsa
and reggae and American rock. Hips are gyrating sensuously and the dancers are smiling, as reflections of mirrored balls and flashing lights whirl around their bodies.

When I first arrive, I am hoping to stand in the background and watch. Not a chance. There is an excess of single guys, and if you are close enough to watch, several hands and smiles greet you wordlessly at the beginning of every new dance.