If nobody, except a bunch of university students demonstrating in the capital, has ever heard of ‘human rights’ but everybody knows the word ‘respect’.
If people around you seize any pretext to produce noise (again France, Italy and Spain are given candidates).
If there are scooters and motorbikes everywhere, at all times.
If people attend religious services other than those associated with weddings, funerals and baptisms.
If people dress up in traditional attire year round.
If the bank is either closed or overfilled with people patiently — waiting.
If the banks and companies don’t even bother to invent pretexts for stealing your money.
If you can pay yourself out of nearly every problem.
If there are cheap and good shoe shiners.
If the bar ‘bouncers’ rather try to throw you into the bar than out of it.
If waiters are actually nice and doing their job without dragging their guests into it.
If, as a rule, the paved roads are full of holes.
If you hesitate to brush your teeth with tap water.
If bureaucracy is as complicated as bribing is easy.
If you start to grow patient with everything that doesn’t work and can’t be fixed.
If there’s always another way of doing it.
If the idea of having a thirty years younger girlfriend starts to appear both reasonable and advisable to you.
If prostitution both quickens and saddens your heart.
If you find yourself brooding about what ‘all this would have cost back home’.
If availing yourself of a gun for self-defence at times seem like a reasonable idea (I’m here primarily addressing a non-American reader, as an American one is likely to take such need for granted).
Which brings us right back to the story. As I said, I was at the point of leaving Galéras behind once and for all. Staying at El Cabíto had given me all that I could possibly ask for: a glance into the wilderness from a platform suspended above the ocean, simultaneously providing food, drink and shelter. John, the sympathetic Dutchman and owner, whom I subsequently came to meet with, was at this time still in Europe with his wife and daughters. He had constructed this oasis by instinct, thinking little about how to eventually turn it around financially — just to build a road to get here must have been quite an undertaking. At present the hotel was run by two trusted native employees: Manuel (amiably gay and quite accomplished as a chef) and young Maritza (my guess: 25 years old) and cute enough to know next to nothing about almost everything. Surprisingly she was studying French in some of her spare time, which seemed to be just about all her time. Besides being cute she also gave me a discount, even knocked off a whole day’s rent when I insisted there had been no water in the shower during daytime for three days straight, and no electricity after midnight on any given day. The absence of electric light was mostly a problem on the one dramatic occasion (mentioned above) when I returned home late, and when I had to try to find my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night via slippery stairs.
The basement of my modest bungalow was uninspiring, with moist concrete hanging off the walls and a bathroom providing no more than bare necessities. The bedroom tucked in under the roof on the second floor, although it too was a basic amenity, was a different story. It was part of the attic of the house, and only had room for a double bed with a mosquito net around it, and a chair to sit in. The gable facing the sea consisted of a wooden railing. Sitting in the chair, or even laying in the bed, I had a panoramic view of the Bahía de Galéras, quite especially of the distant and mystic looking Cabo Cabrón. I believe it was under its influence that the land and sea began to also haunt my dreams, as the hours went by and the sun set. To my relief, there were no mosquitos: gone with the wind.
El Cabíto is precisely what the name implies: a small cape and the last outpost of civilisation before one would reach, on hard to find paths, the major Cape defining the eastern limits of the bay, and the legendary Playa Fronton, located just beneath it. One of the attractions of the Cabíto is the air columns which the ocean swiftly presses up 15–20 metres through narrow shafts in the marine basalt caves. The sound of this lends association to some kind of sea monster, rapidly exhaling, and it chills the blood of the visitor at first. Another major attraction is the spray of water produced by the waves as they hit the rocks 15 metres below the wooden deck housing the bar-restaurant. Sometimes, when the winds turn and come heavily in from due north, the restaurant service becomes inoperable as the swell breaks up in rainbow coloured cascades hitting the rock on which the outdoor patio-restaurant has been poised.
Even closer to the water is a small terrace, carved out of the very living rock, with a long wooden table and a couple of chairs. To sit there and just watch the fury of the elements is a treat in itself. If the sky is clear, not only do the sun’s dying rays turn the caves and the rugged coastline into a tapestry in the Mountain King’s abode, but the arrival of the planets, the zodiac and the Moon is a spectacular royal procession carried out under the canopy of the Milky Way. I was lucky to own this place for five days. I was the only permanent guest, with the exception of a solo-traveling New Zealander, but he was camping out on the El Cabíto grounds, so I didn’t see much of him. Other guests only came by to eat or have drinks.
As for myself, I spent most of my time watching the hours go by in the form of ever changing clouds and their hues. Sometimes I would write for hours on end while the sun hammered the thatched roof, undisturbed by a staff that seemed to have gone underground. I knew the cleaning lady was somewhere around, by all means very discreetly so. As evening approached I retired to my quarters, took a shower, poured a drink and sat in my chair, observing Day and Night change watches: eternal monotony, yet always in a new key and variation. Slowly the forest green faded, the rock turned pink, violet and finally went through all shades of grey, before it immersed itself in total darkness. Soon the land was no more than one silhouette against another — the sea — and a third, which was heaven.
I then solemnly walked the slippery path down to the restaurant surrounded by the sounds of the jungle, the leaves rustling in an inexhaustible trade wind. The idea imposed itself, that I really must have done something right in my life to witness this. I was mostly alone on the deck even at night, since the few other dinner guests would soon empty their cups and retire to the anonymity whence they had emerged. That set the stage for me. I’d bring a glass with me to the lower terrace, lean a chair against the rock and stretch my legs across the table. I’d then gaze into the immensity of my own mind slowly turning into a mirror — of the universe.
There have been moments when I asked myself if my main motivation for travelling is to get away from or finding myself? I now believe it’s neither. Travelling seems to me no purpose in itself. It may be that in the end I’m trying to repeat the trick of Sisyphus, who locked up Death himself in a cellar when he came to get him, and then ran away. Needless to add that the gods finally found out about Sisyphus’ ruse. They got hold of him and condemned him in no uncertain terms. Ever since he eternally pushes a stone up a mountain each and every day, only to see it roll back down into the valley in the evening.
But we’re all like Sisyphus, really, eager to confer some kind of meaning, no matter how ephemeral, on our daily activities. We don’t have much choice to act differently, since a life without some kind of goal is either a total detachment from human existence as such, or a barren desert to traverse without the hope of even reaching the opposite shore. Travelling is also, for the one who tries to gain something from his experiences and encounters, a great academy of life. It makes us naturally tolerant while challenging our convictions and inherited prejudice. By this I don’t necessarily mean that the prejudice is always exactly identical to what modern civilisation defines as such. The
person convinced, for example, that any issue concerning race and origin is but a social construct, and that everybody in this world would reason along the same lines as ‘we’ do if he’d only be given a decent chance to do so, might in fact be in for a big surprise.
For instance, I remember discussing the idea that God resides within Man himself, and only there, with a Dominican musician in the country’s capital. He listened attentively to what I had to say and then gave me some advice: ‘When you travel our country’, he said, ‘try to keep a low profile, because you’re thinking in ways that are alien to us; your opinions, if expressed in the wrong company, might get you into trouble.’ By this I don’t think he meant primarily that God would punish me for my heresy. Some other person might get quite upset though, to the point of actually wanting to physically hurt me. I understood he was right, and that my libertarian discourse in this devoutly Catholic society had all the accoutrements of blasphemy. In other words, what might have appeared an interesting neo-Gnostic concept in a largely atheist, and philosophically trained, European society, here would seem an outrage, not to say an attack on the fundamentals of life itself. To this man, his marriage was a covenant concluded before God, with the Virgin Mary protecting his children from evil.
But the whole issue of whether man was god or god was man faded into insignificance in the light of the spectacle about to unfold. Clearly discernible by the naked eye from planet Earth on a clear night are about 4000 stars in the so-called Orion arm of our galaxy, in itself consisting of an estimated number of 200 billion individual stars. The Orion arm, thus named because it contains the major stellar constellation of Orion, is one of the branches of the spiral galaxy that is our Milky Way. The centre of the galaxy, located beyond the zodiacal constellation of Sagittarius, can only be ‘seen’ through radio telescopes (or other telescopes capable of registering wavelengths outside those of visible light), because it’s hidden behind thick clouds of star forming gas. What we can see, unaided by lenses and mirrors, is but a fragment. But what a fragment! Above a sea in uproar, to the accompaniment of a heavily exhaling sea-monster, stars, thousands of them, covered the sky from east to west. Their background, a nebulous veil, was wrapped like a turban around the head of heaven. Awestruck I felt these stars to be my true home, the ‘place’ in which my soul and spirit really belongs, perhaps even the place from which I came, aeons ago, and to which, my terrestrial chores accomplished, I shall once return.
It may sound presumptuous on my part to claim celestial origin. But I intend no presumption, I only see in the stars a reflection of my innermost longing and feel, in their presence, an immense relief, as though my entire being were swinging and tuning in harmony with the immense distances separating us — from them. I know man as a physical being can’t survive out there. The human spirit, however, there finds its one and true element. That’s all I want and all I need to say in regard to this mystery, by all conceivable standards, the profoundest of them all.
On this lofty note I should perhaps have left Galéras, in this way keeping a rather favourable opinion of its various attractions. But I came back, just a few weeks later, to take up residency in the house I had meanwhile rented (see description above). The first days I spent most of my time stretched out on the large recliner reading. The doors to the terrace were swung open to let in the breeze from the nearby sea — from the small balcony outside the bedroom I had a pretty good view of it above the treetops.
Jean, from the rental agency, had been there to inspect the house and sent his Haitian crew over to do some repair work on the thatched roof. They had also wiped out most of the wasp nests under the beams around the house. However, some of these nests remained and there were still living wasps in them. I decided to take personal control of the situation and on the next day bought a spray can full of insect poison at the local mercado. With this I began my own improvised wasp holocaust. I was pretty sure I had killed them all, but one of the wasps, mighty pissed off with what I was doing, was still hiding behind a beam. As I prepared to withdraw into the safety of the bed room, believing I’d finished them off, he decided he was not going to go down without making me remembering them all forever. ‘Here’s for everything you’ve made to my friends and family!’ he buzzed frantically and charged at full speed, from a distance of three metres, right onto my forehead. The sting itself was one thing. But I know, from experience, that I have but one conspicuous allergy, and that is the one against wasp venom (In Nicaragua I was once bitten thrice by a scorpion, but that didn’t affect me in the least). Some hours went by, but by then half of my face was so swollen and disfigured that I could not have shown myself in public without frightening people. It was like a slimy balloon in which my eye had become completely invisible, only betraying its existence by the quantities of pus expulsed from the socket itself, trickling down my inflated cheek like the sticky juice from some overripe plum violently squeezed open.
That evening (I was stung on a Friday afternoon) and the following day I decided to stay home, licking my wounds. By Sunday evening, however, the swelling had gone down sufficiently to at least make me reasonably presentable to the public under the guise of sunglasses, so I went to the French at Les Tainos restaurant to have dinner. I sat at the bar and talked to several people, none of whom seemed to react to my wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night. I was now definitely over the worst part of this dreadful experience, and I decided to put a calm end to this dramatic weekend by retiring to my quarters and have a last glass of wine under the stars. Back home I lay down in the sun chair and watched the Moon as she slowly emerged from behind a cloud. It was a tranquil evening. My neighbours had gone to bed. The Moon shone on their gardens and on the never finished mansion, still in bare concrete, situated behind the wall behind my head. I had taken pains, before I rented the house, to ask Jean if the construction work next door was in any way going to be resumed in the near future. He assured me it was not. For now it was just another ghost building abandoned in mid-construction because its owner, most likely, had run out of money. I looked up towards the adjacent coral rock and cave towering in moonlight at the back of my own property. This was the only direction from which the unexpected might be expected, since at the end of the other slope of this intensely sharp rock there were no neighbouring villas, nor a wall or barbed wire preventing intruders from gaining access, just a vague terrain overgrown with thicket. On the other side of this dense greenery there were a road and some buildings, because I had previously heard the same local voices making their ways through the jungle at daytime, although I had never been able to see anybody.
But I wasn’t going to be overly worried about that. I closed up my house by carefully checking all doorways while also making sure the divided iron lattice before the French terrace doors was secured by its middle with no less than two sturdy locking devices. I then went to bed. Although there was indeed a large fan above the bed, I felt that having the sea breeze bring in the scent of moonlit tropical gardens and salty mermaids would make a perfect accompaniment to my sleep. So I went over, opened the door to the miniscule balcony, situated slightly above the slanted thatched roof over the terrace, and left it ajar. The natural fan produced proved to be just perfect and I fell soundly asleep.
It might have been two hours later, I’m not exactly sure. But from what I felt to have been deep sleep, I woke up discovering two silent, human-like, silhouettes standing next to my bed on the other side of the mosquito tent. I didn’t have much time to think, but it was enough for me to realise that these two figures were hardly the two mermaids I had conversed with at the French bar, nor some friends of longer standing. I don’t know either what the plan behind my sudden move could have been, but I think it’s an almost instinctive reaction on my part, for example, to try to get personally and physically out of a car that has been stopped for inspection at a border control.
Now this was some kind of border, and an insurmountable one at that. I just
stood up, and in the very next moment I towered right before the two burglars, trying perhaps, to get past them, or even hoping that they would be sufficiently scared and leave. I might actually have scared, or at least surprised them, because out of the darkness something hard and heavy hit my head several times in rapid succession. I’m not sure how the light came on after that, but it did. At this point I just stood there, like some defenceless animal in for slaughter, with blood streaming all over me, the iron taste of it in my mouth, trying to quickly determine how badly hurt I had been so far. The only wound I was aware of at this time — since I traced its fleshy furrow with a finger — was a deep cut across my forehead. Perhaps I was surprised to still be conscious; indeed, to be alive. I had the feeling that my wounds were not actually life threatening, at least not yet. But I was bleeding profusely, and the thug who had been handling the machete now also put a knife to my throat, while still holding on to the machete with the other hand, motioning me towards the staircase leading down to the living room. I didn’t put up any further resistance. As an answer, he weasel-like moved in right in front of me. He had very shiny, unpleasant looking eyes, but his speech was, if not sweet, at least short and to the dagger point. He hissed: ‘Dineeeroo!’ I indeed noticed that he wasn’t shouting at me, rather coarsely whispering. This was also the first time I got the feeling that he too was a bit scared. But his colleague, bigger, darker and dressed in camouflage, didn’t seem to be moved by the circumstances in the least. Throughout the entire encounter this was the thing that intrigued me the most: how could he be so sure that I would be unable to inflict any damage on them? It was almost an insult, the way he calmly moved around, turning his back at me, even crawling on the floor with his big butt turned in my direction for long periods of time, looking for my money.
Still today I don’t know if he did this because he knew he could kill me in the blink of an eye or if he was plainly stupid. I wish I would have had the guts to prove myself right in my suspicion, but then again, there were two of them, and as soon as I’d turn to either of them, the other would have come after me. And I was still bleeding. Heavily. They had wanted to tie me up with a rope, but I got them out of the idea by actually leading them straight to my money. It was hidden in such a special place that they must have realised immediately that this was it. I had placed my wallet in the middle of a small folding ladder.
Incidents of Travel in Latin America Page 12