Incidents of Travel in Latin America

by Lars Holger Holm

  By and large it’s interesting to note how widespread homosexuality and, in particular, transgender behaviour is in various parts of Latin America, otherwise perhaps better known for their pronounced macho cultures. There is the phenomenon of the so-called muxes among the Zapotec Indians in the Oaxaca region of Mexico. These are not necessarily homosexual men, but are definitely effeminate such and very fond of dressing up and behaving as women on festive occasions, which in this party prone region means every other day. Paradoxically they form no subculture but are integral parts of the artisan community, known for their skills in dress making and the decorative arts.

  Recently I witnessed the New Year’s celebrations in the Andean town Baños de Agua Santa in Ecuador. Apart from displaying enormously intense and enduring fireworks, this fiesta coincides with hundreds of young men dressing up as women, gathering in groups and performing in improvised street theatre plays. Once again one would perhaps think that the Indians, with their traditional modes of life, would feel estranged by these transgender shows. On the contrary: they are absolutely fascinated by them and cluster day and night around them, laughing, giggling, applauding and endorsing them in every way possible. Even here it’s hard to tell the men who are actually homosexuals fond of cross-dressing from the ones who just enjoy dressing up in this way and act as women on this particular occasion.

  Apart from these and similar events elsewhere, there are also a steady percentage and, so far as I can tell, pretty even distribution of ‘regular’ homosexuality throughout Latin America. Typically gay communities and lifestyles are of course most noticeable in the larger cities, but very frequently more intimate tourist hotspots, such as Nicaraguan Granada, in addition to the ‘regular’ putas also offers ‘putos’, as well as male children prostituting themselves. The latter is of course another sad side effect of cynicism taking advantage of poverty and destitution, but though some foreign tourists certainly are to blame for these abominable practices, some of the worst scenarios, even involving the death of street children, are actually domestic affairs.

  For example, there is the case of Luis Garavito, a Colombian psychopath branded by the press as the ‘worst’ serial killer in recorded history. In 1999 he was finally apprehended by the police. In the subsequent trial he confessed to having raped, tortured and murdered 147 boys between the ages eight and sixteen. However, the total number of his victims may be as high as 300, many cases still pending investigation. Though his accumulated sentence amounted to 1,853 years in prison, the Colombian legal code at the time only admitted a maximum prison sentence of 30 years. One would assume that Garavito at least got that much. But as he showed himself helpful in the police search for the bodies of his victims, and because of his many candid confessions, his sentence was, somewhat surprisingly, reduced to 22 years in prison, with the possibility of an even earlier release for good behaviour.

  Garavito himself has certainly picked up on that last suggestion and in a 2006 TV interview assured that he had been possessed by the devil at the time of his unspeakable crimes, but that he had now become a religious man, even the priest of his own church, and upon his release would start a political career destined to help and raise public awareness of the predicament of abused children in Colombia. It is thus possible that the man responsible for the rape, torture and cold blooded murder of 300 children is soon going to walk the streets again as a free man, if this has not already happened. Whatever the case, I would at least think twice, as a parent, before sending my children to his ‘reformed’ church for catechism...

  Now, this all happens within a legal system where members of the terrorist organisation FARC, responsible for thousands of lethal attacks on civilians, sit comfortably at Fidel Castro’s invitation and expense in Havana, forcing the president of Colombia to go over there to negotiate deals involving complete amnesty for these mass murderers, and where a peasant (this is an actual case) is sentenced to nine years in prison for simply being in the possession of a handgun for his own and his family’s protection. His crime? He didn’t have a license. Here one could really argue that the poor in the end don’t stand a chance to see justice done. Meanwhile a corrupt government unimpededly seeks to strike deals with its even more criminal rivals. In reality the latter, no matter how vigorously the government would like to deny it, make up an integral part of the political and economic system of the country, providing countless people with jobs and money that the official authorities would otherwise have to add to their list of impoverished, though otherwise capable, citizens ignored by the state.

  San Juan del Sur and a return to the pleasure of crustaceans

  While we were still in Nicaragua Ricardo, Tonia and Sarah expressed a wish to meet with me again in San Juan del Sur, where, as I said, they were heading next. However, when I got there some days later they had apparently travelled on towards the mountainous region of the north. At the last hotel I visited on Ometepe I had been the only guest on a beach primarily frequented by a cow herd on its way to or from its grazing grounds. The water on this southward side was less wind driven and consequently calmer, but it wasn’t really any pleasure to take a bath in the turbid water; instead I regularly went back to the absolutely delightful Ojo de Agua for my swims.

  What I did enjoy on the other hand was the serene silence of the place and the splendid sunsets over the mainland. Thus it was not until reaching San Juan that the tables turned, the ocean being as inviting as the noise in the streets grew unbearable: Nicaraguan youths have a habit of celebrating la Fiesta de la Virgen Immaculata by detonating veritable bombs in her honour, and this goes on, day and night, but preferably at night, where hitting the bull’s eye is to send a bomb fifty metres up into the air and detonate it there at four o’clock in the morning. Ricardo, having once been a cheese selling street boy himself, tried to explain this as ‘their culture’, to which I immediately delivered the heart-felt reply: ‘No, it’s their lack of culture!’ That said, let us rather turn back to the ocean and the peaceful contemplation of the same.

  The swell of the Pacific entering the bay of San Juan has an average amplitude of eighteen seconds — I ignore what distance that would make between the wave crests, but I have personally, standing in the water, counted the seconds passing in between the breaking of these waves. So that’s just about its frequency: eighteen seconds of silence between the roars every time a wave that might have travelled several times the circumference of the Earth makes a landfall. The phenomenon instilled in me a sensation of unfathomable vastness second only to that produced by the thought of the universe itself and its wave lengths. The Pacific, in this sense, is a well chosen name for this elemental entity. To my imagination it seems too grandiose to even allow for the existence of gods or goddesses, at least such of ‘only’ superhuman European stature. Even Allah and Jehovah seem like petty tribal idols in comparison. It would take something like the rough monolithic Easter Island statues to give this immensity ‘a human face’, and even so it remains impersonal, enigmatic, and indifferent to man and his destiny in the highest degree.

  So, in order to protect themselves from this mass of divine indifference, the local community has raised a huge statue of Christ in genuine fiberglass on top of the northern rock. It is like a more modest version of the Christo of Rio de Janeiro, but it’s still very impressive, if not designed in the very best of taste. It’s also lit up in the night and from my terrace up on the hill, at the opposite end of the beach, I had a crystal clear view of our Lord and Saviour any time of the day. It so happened that one of these coincided with New Years’ Eve, the early part of which I had decided to spend in splendid isolation. An oil barrel cut in half served as a barbecue on the terrace and the guardian of the compound — oh yes, this time I happened to live in a gated community located above the commercial harbour area. To access it one had to pass through the poorer part of town where the streets at night are as dimly lit as they’re conspicuously empty.

 
On a hillside dominating this part of town Italian Roberto — originally from Lago di Bolsena in the heart of ancient Etruscan country — first had a house built for himself and then married a young Nicaraguan woman (or if it was the other way round). Then he invested in a series of bungalows which he rents out to strangers like me. The only access to the complex is by way of an extremely steep asphalt road. It is abruptly barred by a huge iron gate which doesn’t have any smaller door in it. There is of course also a heavy chain to keep the gate together and a padlock that has to be opened and closed even after a dozen Flor de Caña. If that operation fails, there is in the last instance always the armed guardian in his cabin opposite Roberto’s house. Before he would descend it was in my best interest to make him understand that I was not one of the louche local elements so as to prevent him from pointing his gun at me. But the good man was well aware of the intricacies of that gate and this is where I come back to where I was: it was precisely he who helped me collect some dry wood to light up my barbecue for my own, very special New Year’s Eve Party.

  I mentioned that the compound was situated above the commercial port. One of the advantages with this is that the local fish dealers are all close by and their catch cheap to come by. I believe three pounds of fresh lobster tail — some smaller some bigger — cost me something like 12 dollars. These I had cracked open with the aid of a hammer and a knife and marinated in olive oil, garlic, black pepper, fresh coriander, red hot pepper, salt and lime. Evening come they had been soaking in a refrigerator environment since the day before. The ice box also contained two bottles of Argentinian white wine and after sunset I began to prepare my feast by opening the first of them while waiting for the moon to cast her silvery net into the bay. Christ with his outstretched arms was lit up on the mountain and so was I down in the valley.

  I assume the reader is familiar with the fragrant scent of for example hickory. What I had in stock was a whole range of such fragrances released from the embers of tropical wood. Once I had obtained a Luciferian glow, I put my lobster tails to work on the grill — all of them. I left them sizzling on either sides for a while and then carefully poised them on my plate while filling up another glass. There was bread on the table and I poured a noisette of home made mayonnaise on a separate plate — lime goes without saying. Then I went on the attack and believe me: since there were no human witnesses to my debauchery, I didn’t bother too much about my table manners. I simply stuffed myself with one chunk of juicy, fumigated lobster tail after the other. It was an enjoyment so intense that I have no idea whether minutes or hours elapsed before I had satiated myself and emptied the second bottle of ice cold white wine — I like it that way, especially in the tropics! After having contemplated Christ in moonlight through the rosy curtain of inebriation and carnal self-indulgence, I brought myself together, emptied the glass and descended to hit the celebrating town, passing on the remaining pound or so of grilled lobster tail to the night guardian, who was happy to receive such a treat during his lonely night shift.

  From the rest of the evening I have vague memories. I recall negotiating my way past the hotel guard at the lower entrance of the town’s luxury hotel. From its terrace, poolside, I finished off the last night of the year with gin and tonics that had turned kaleidoscopic from all the fireworks, in an ambience of chatting tourists and an American gentleman of a certain age flying high on champagne and Viagra, ready to take on not just one, but two or three of the stunning escort girls making up his suite, thus, perhaps, ever so slightly overrating his stamina. As for myself I eventually found my way home, sober enough to watch my steps all the way to the iron gate. Once there I was at my wits’ end and I called the guardian to open it for me, feeling that this would in some sense make us even. Speaking of even, I might even have had a final nightcap, or two, on my own terrace to top things off — but that I can’t clearly remember. The day after I was simply too tired to do anything, which by the way is not so easy to do as some people might imagine, since doing and nothingness really constitute a contradiction in terms. The only real way to do nothing is to be nothing, which simply is another contradiction in terms, leading nowhere.

  That said, let’s finally return to the Darién, Bay of Urubá, Colombia. Here I was, again in the possession of shrimp. With a freezer/refrigerator (I never quite understood what it was originally designed to be) that was only up and running for six hours a day, there was little time to lose even though its insulation was so effective that the interior of the box would actually withstand 18 hours of daily exposure to the hot outside air without turning meat, fish and poultry inedible. But I figured it was not a good idea to tempt the devil and proceeded to quickly marinate the shrimp. Then it was just to wait. Evening come, these creatures too turned out to be absolutely lovely. I tossed them in with spaghetti in a sauce I had reduced from their shells together with whatever vegetables available and white wine from which I extracted my stock. I was happy with the result and the aphrodisiac effect of all these al dente cooked shrimp was not lost on Asíle either, who henceforth would begin spinning a whole yarn around the one and only ‘Gran Papi Camarón’ and his prowess.

  Admittedly, ‘shrimp’ is not exactly a term of endearment by which most men would like to have their family jewel referenced. Luckily there’s shrimp and there’s shrimp. Some are even called Jumbo! After having savoured several of these particularly succulent and fleshy animals I thus felt inclined to interpret Asíle’s insistence on calling El Capitán by such a family name, as a compliment, and decided to adopt her suggestion as a relevant designation. From this very moment and onwards El Gran Papi Capitán Camarón was to be an integral part of our intimacy, not only offering a perfect pseudonym, but quite literally turning him into a personality of legendary stature, later to be confounded (at my enthusiastic behest) with Captain Morgan, who alone in the tiny isolated Caribbean island of San Andres is said to have had 52 wives and sired 53 children with the same — I have the story, rendered in an inimitable Creole twang, straight from the mouth of the female guide at the San Andres Island House Museum: ‘Whodattfo?’ (For whom is that?): ‘Dattfome!’ (That’s for me!). Yah Man!

  As time went by I did indeed make some attempts to aggrandise El Gran Papi Capitan Camaron even further by promoting him to El Coronel Cola de Langosta, but for some reason that superlative never quite gained the same notoriety as Capitan Cameron, and so, ‘willy-nilly’, I had to acquiesce to that particular title, notwithstanding that the Coronel was sometimes respectfully mentioned in this context as well.

  But ours wasn’t just an empire of the senses under the auspices of raining frogs. For me, and I suppose for Asíle too, the sojourn in Triganá was also a propitious time for peaceful recuperation. Since there was less to see and to do in the immediate surroundings, we soon found ourselves in rather meditative moods — I would typically spend most of the day laying in the hammock in our bungalow, listening to the birds, watching the hours go by and the sun come round, while reading Octavia Paz’ critical essays on artistic modernism and the crepuscule of the western avant-garde. I had found the volume in Rita’s home and realised I must bring it with me without further ado. Theft? No, since I was the one really needing to read that book at this moment and it wouldn’t be missed, its absence not even noticed, the book having been put on the shelf by an unknown hand in the first place. Meanwhile, Asíle had turned the extra bed into a day sofa on which she was reading too — a younger Spanish writer the name of whom I have forgotten — occasionally interrupted by me asking her to help me explain the meaning of a Spanish word or the intricacies of an idiomatic phrase.

  Paz writes a very clear and intelligible prose though, and his essays on modernism in art and poetry are to my knowledge some of the very best works in the genre. It was simply delightful to have his voice as a spiritual cicerone in the jungle. His voice reached me all the way from Mexico and I have always envied Latin American writers their prerogative of being able to mix mor
e or less radical political agendas with both deep emotions and aesthetic concerns without becoming too pathetic. The reason for this, I believe, is that emotion is at the core of Latin literature. This certainly doesn’t prevent Paz from also being an important art critic and thinker, which is where so many poetic natures have found a kind of spiritual home when the initial élan of youth and folly has abandoned them. I’m not in the position to judge his poetry with any authority, but then there is only one writer in the entire world whose poetry, taken as a whole, I can truly say I enjoy to read, and that is Baudelaire’s. But he too was an astute art critic and I have always relished his essays on various subjects just as much as his poems. Which goes to say that poets invariably make the best literary critics — not to say the only ones!

  We entertained a silence shared. Often I found myself content to just notice her move about, take a shower, comb her hair, put something together, take something apart, all of which she did with innate feminine grace and discretion. I can’t remember what we talked about, although I know I would ramble for an hour and then listen to what she had to say for another. But it was all in tune with the surroundings, conducive to let any thought and feeling sink into oblivion as soon as it had been uttered. It really was one of those places, remote one could say, even though cell phone calls would always come through impeccably, reminding us that we were actually still within civilisation’s ambit. As for us, we had entered a different mode in our communications. It was as if we had always known each other and yet also knew that we would always remain strangers. Strangers simply in the way man and woman must remain strangers to one another. To me Asíle is deeply enigmatic. Even her occasional female banalities, such as pretending to be offended by a straying word, just struck me as eternally feminine. Whenever she chose to have a mood, I simply refused to give in, knowing that whatever I had said was neither meant to be hurtful, nor, and more importantly, could it with any reasonable justification be interpreted as such. And sure enough, her moods would come and go like tropical squalls. What she really felt and thought about what I had said I never knew, and I also found it best that way, knowing that to ask a woman for her ‘reasons’ is an indecency.