Incidents of Travel in Latin America

by Lars Holger Holm

  In Rio Dulce too Barney had some friends at a lakeside hotel—as a matter of fact, due to Barneys’ extraverted nature and apparent need to implicate even innocent bystanders in his amorous escapades, everyone in Rio Dulce, since it was here that his fling with Karen had kicked off, seemed to know about his recent romance. Barney was happy to provide them with some details of the denouement and after that everything returned to normal. He docked his boat and accepted my invitation to sleep in the double room I had rented for some days to come. Our trip, and an unforgettable experience for me, thus came to its natural and calm end.

  We spent some nights hanging out at Sun Dog and this is where we both ran into Bruce, a professional Australian skipper about to set sail to a boat bound for New Zealand on behalf of a client. Bruce, though not intrinsically unsympathetic, made quite a choleric impression and was easily annoyed if one didn’t always agree with him. So although I knew that Barney was eagerly looking for a way out of what seemed to be both a financial and a geographical rut, I was a bit surprised to see that he immediately accepted the offer to become one of two mates for such long voyage on board a 38-foot yacht. Wow, I thought to myself, how are these individuals going to get along in such a reduced space, and for so long?

  Many months later I had to piece together my own version of what subsequently took place based on Bruce’s and Barney’s independent testimony (hence I don’t really know in how far it coincides with a more or less objective truth, if one such is even imaginable in human relations!) As I left Rio Dulce in late April to visit Antígua and, eventually, Lake Atitlán, Bruce was still waiting for some spare part for the boat engine to be properly installed, while Barney had found himself a local lady to distract himself from the painful memory of Karen. Apparently, Bruce, Barney and a third male crew member, finally set out from La Ceiba on the Honduran coast for a voyage that would take them through the Panama Canal, over the Galapagos, the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, etc. all the way to New Zealand. According to Bruce, Barney — and I wonder why that doesn’t surprise me! — had declared that he had no money at all. In response Bruce offered to pay for food and drinks whenever they made landfall (food and drink on board for the crew was already budgeted and paid for by the yacht owner). This may not sound like such a big deal, but then one should keep in mind that even a can of beer easily costs seven dollars on any one of the Polynesian islands, so that expenses, given a certain level of consumption, quickly add up.

  So Bruce keeps paying, which Barney assumes to be part of the deal, until the day they reach the Samoa Islands when, just as suddenly as unexpectedly, Barney spots another lady, a Kiwi, who immediately captivates his attention. As a consequence Barney hits it off with this new acquaintance and moves into a hotel together with her. He’s also seen together with her in bars and restaurants, whereby Bruce, assuming that Barney has simply been lying to him throughout the entire trip about being broke, gets furious. As a consequence of this, in its turn, Barney signs off from the mission, or is being sacked — which amounts pretty much to the same thing given the circumstances — to instead follow his instinct and accompany the Kiwi woman to New Zealand, by plane this time. When I asked Barney about the possible veracity of Bruce’s allegation, he said that it was the lady who had possessed the money and that she had agreed to pay for some of their mutual expenses and forward him the rest to be paid back on a later occasion. I guess that might have been true, but I also knew that Barney had a small pecuniary as well as emergency backup (money he didn’t want to touch for sure) that he never considered important enough to inform Bruce about.

  Judging from the colour of Bruce’s face, as well as the tone of his voice, when telling me his side of the story (this happened on my revisit to Rio Dulce at least a year later) he and Barney are not risking too soon to become best friends again. As far as Barney is concerned I met with him on several occasions in Florida before I even heard Bruce’s version of their mutual trip to New Zealand. Afterwards, Barney had sailed Teleportation from Isla de Mujeres off Cancún (or perhaps someone else did it for him, I don’t quite remember) and had it docked along a pier outside some friend’s house in Fort Myers. Here it was struck by lightning while on sale, right after the visit from a prospective buyer. In the end, though, Barney managed to sell the boat, and then took off to New Zealand again. When I last talked to him he had acquired residency there and worked as a skipper for tourists off the South Island. He described his present relation to the Kiwi woman as friendly rather than passionate. In contrast, New Zealand as such seems to suit his character and temperament just fine. Good wine, good food, beautiful nature and like-minded people to hang out with, as he once summed up the situation in conversation. From our last telephone conversation, no too long ago, I got to know that he was in a state of convalescence from an operation in the knee but nevertheless enjoys very much living and working over there.

  Another thing Barney told me some months after we had sailed through the Gulf of Honduras, was that only weeks after we had anchored overnight in Laguna el Diamante, some Honduran pirates attacked a yacht right inside that tranquil bay, killing its captain while, for some unknown reason, sparing his daughter’s life. Also, Barney’s former girlfriend Karen had apparently found herself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and been both raped and robbed and then thrown out of a car somewhere outside the town of Rio Dulce.

  As for myself, I have a keen memory of being invited, in the middle of the night, into a small motorboat to continue the celebrations of some local girl’s birthday. Our party sets off down the river. But no later have we reached the middle of the lagoon than the birthday child gets hold of a loaded gun. Comprehensively drunk, as well as hysterically laughing, she starts to discharge bullets into the water and up into the air. Two of the gentleman standing at the aft of the boat, while helping the girl to aim (I’m lying down in the prow with no chance to move anywhere) seem to notice that the event has made me ever so slightly uneasy, so one of them says: ‘Don’t worry Senor Lorenzo, he’s a lawyer and I’m a hydro engineer. Everything is cool.’ I suppose this declaration was meant to assure me that since he and his friends belong to an educated class of people, a stray bullet dispatched from a drunk woman’s hand would never dare to err in my direction. But how they could be so sure of that to this day baffles my mind, still capable of reproducing the sound of a gun magazine being emptied as we drift down a stream of pitch-black water, paradoxically named the Rio Dulce.

  15I read about all this in an interesting book called Bitter Fruit: The Story of an American Coup in Guatemala, by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer.

  Antígua

  Antígua, the ancient capital of Guatemala, is a colonial town in the heart of Central America. It is therefore also one of the must-go places in the country and frequented by tourists all year round, with usual peaks during the holidays. I too had been to Antígua a couple of times when I finally decided this might be the best place for me to improve my Spanish at one of the many Spanish language schools offering courses to foreigners. To this end I had rented for three months a rather spectacular apartment at the southern end of 5 Avenida Sur. It was one of five apartments in a complex that had once been a finca built by monks in the 18th century. Its present owner was, and to my knowledge still is, the gentleman, doctor of microbiology and enthusiastic horticulturalist Miguel Torres. The apartment itself, like the four others in this building facing on one side the avenida, on the other the interior courtyard and garden as well as the Doctor’s own villa, was composed of two very spacious rooms. The one at the bottom served as a combined dining room and kitchen and had artful arches and niches made from ancient bricks. There was a huge lustre hanging down from the high ceiling over a rustic looking kitchen table and iron bars to protect the likewise high window from unwelcome intrusion. A tiled staircase with railings in wrought iron led up to the bedroom, spacious enough to accommodate ten double beds if necessary. But it only had one,
and one TV set, initially located so far from the bed that one would have needed a telescope to clearly discern the images.

  There was an adjacent bathroom that looked like a boudoir taken out of Snow White’s castle and transposed to Latin America by a time machine. The shower, including the bathtub, had warm water provided by yet another one of these potentially lethal electric appliances connected straight to the plumbing. The whole apartment was permeated by a very characteristic scent. Once I got used to it, it wasn’t unpleasant, but something quite characteristic, like the fragrance and taste of Proust’s Madeleine biscuit. It was rather a scent of the past, of the long history of the building itself, a mixture of humidity and Earth slowly impregnating the brick walls and then again exuding from them, the smell of wooden beams, of oiled furniture and the wax used to shine the floor. I’m sure that if I ever entered the premises again the feeling I had while living there would return to me and reconnect me with a period of my life in which I was still wrestling with the question of how to have the cake while eating it, not yet fully realising that there is no way one can feed all the needy in this world and still have enough bread for oneself. Unless one is as good as Jesus of course, effortlessly turning stones to loafs and water to wine.

  One of the things I did bring to Antígua from Europe, or perhaps from Miami, where I had had yet another stopover, was a tenacious flu that soon after my arrival in town sent me to bed, where I remained for a good week, only gathering enough force to go the grocery store from time to time. Even as I began to recover I was very tired and would preferably spend many hours in bed. I also mustered enough energy to attend Spanish classes. As though Spanish grammar is not complicated enough as it is, in my feverish state the verbs and their conjugations began to heave in my brain like the ingredients in a boiling broth.

  Speaking of grammar, I should at least mention my formal Spanish learning experience with a few words. The classes took place in a wonderfully secluded and tranquil environment. It was a garden next to an old church and the racking of the poor students’ brains over the proper use of the two (2!) forms of subjuntivo pretérito pluscuamperfecto was accompanied by chirping birds and colibris relishing the nectar of wide open flower cups. My female teacher was very patient with me and I really tried to be a good student. With hindsight, and after having taken language lessons from other people educated by the post-colonial school system, I do have some objections to their method though. It is based on a rather inflexible curriculum where one is supposed to go through all the different forms of conjugations that exist in the Spanish language, which is extremely hard to learn by heart even in the case of the regular verbs, and a living hell as far as the irregular, and of course more prevalent ones, are concerned.

  What I have come to realise, as my Spanish gradually improved, is that it is perfectly OK in everyday situations to stick to a few past tenses and not try too hard to find the one which would be the most appropriate one to use in formal writing. But the frequent interchangeability of for example pretérito imperfecto, pretérito perfecto simple and pretérito perfecto compuesto in everyday language is such that everybody will understand what you mean if you just use one of them. As a beginner in learning a new language you’re as little served by a dazzling array of grammatical possibilities as a person ignorant of the art of cooking benefits from having a hundred different ingredients. Let us for the sake of illustration take one of no less than two Spanish verbs signifying ‘to be’: Ser.

  In first person singular ‘I am’ is ‘soy’. In pretérito imperfecto (‘I was’) it’s ‘era’, in pretérito perfecto simple (another variation on ‘I was’) it’s ‘fui’ and in pretérito perfecto compuesto (‘I have been’) it’s ‘he sido’. Now, once you finally master the subtle difference in the application of these — and this normally only happens after long and assiduous conversational practice — you can of course begin to try to play around with them. But I don’t think it’s really helpful to an intermediate level student to know in how many ways he can actually go wrong when speaking.

  To make the situation even worse we also have the other verb for ‘to be’, which is ‘estar’, and where ‘I am’ (estoy) is conjugated in the above mentioned past tenses as ‘estuve’, ‘estaba’ and ‘he estado’. All these forms are frequently used in both spoken and written Spanish, but for the relative newcomer to the language it’s bewildering having to choose between the following translations for ‘I was’: era, fui, he sido, estuve, estaba and he estado. And we haven’t even started to talk about the other cases (you, he/she/it, we, they), about future tenses or past tense conditional variations such as ‘If I was (were)’...

  The problem with the Spanish education program, as I have encountered it in several Latin American countries, is that it begins with an extensive introduction to all forms of conjugations and expects me to be able to digest and integrate it with my intellect. Meanwhile, my capacity to actually understand what the man or woman in the street actually says is rudimentary and my vocabulary restricted. To make a long story short, sweet and to the point: I sincerely think the near-religious insistence on grammatical completeness in the earlier stages of Spanish training is counter-productive and apt to discourage many people from pursuing further studies. Although I am, with hindsight, grateful that someone had the patience to guide me through the grammar jungle — it has indeed paid off over the years — I still believe much more emphasis should be devoted to actually teach the student colloquial phrases and example sentences. Special, very special and close, attention should also be devoted to how Spanish words and phrases are usually pronounced as opposed to how they’re written. The general tendency of any native Spanish speaker is to eliminate a number of consonants and vowels that people with Germanic mother tongues would consider indispensable for clear pronunciation. To Hispanics it isn’t, and it’s my pleasure to present in the following a representative list of words as they are written on the one hand, and as they might be pronounced by a Latin American person of average education — although I have had ample opportunity to confirm that supposedly better educated people too often speak in this general manner.

  In my continuous and permanently ongoing research of the mysteries of Spanish, I have come to the conclusion that as far as consonants go, only the very hard core ones, such as t, r, p and c (when pronounced as k) are strictly indispensable as initial letters to make a spoken word or phrase comprehensible to other native speakers, whereas consonants such as b, d, f, l, m, n and v not only are frequently interchangeable but often just dropped.

  First of all, of course, there is no noticeable difference in the pronunciation of b and v. Second, m and n too are notoriously confounded (hence Jerusalén — no problem!). A third instance is the phonetic resemblance of d and l. The letter s, if it doesn’t happen to be the first in a word, is simply cut out whenever possible. Thus, what we foreigners would believe to be buscar (to search) — because this is how the word is written and according to rule is supposed to be pronounced (buscár) — instead becomes bucar.

  The list also includes many foreign, predominantly English words associated with the modern world of computation, and how they are likely to appear in ‘traditional’ Spanish pronunciation. By studying them, a lot of confusion can be avoided and you will hopefully find yourself actually understanding the language and its colloquial use much better. By all means, they will amuse you. In the left column you’ll thus find the words and phrases correctly spelled (English translation, if needed, within parenthesis) and in the right column how they are sometimes likely to verbally come across in several Hispanic countries.

  Investigar (investigate)Inbetigar

  El celular (cell phone)El cedular

  La InternetLa internes

  Un e-mailUn emelle

  El Golden Gate (the bridge in San Francisco)El golengay

  Nueva YorkNueva yor

  Washington DCGoasinton dece

&nbs
p; El Wi-FiEl guifi

  El whiskyEl wicki

  El vodkaEl bolka

  La estatua (statue)La estuata

  El monumentEl menemento

  Verdad? (really?)Beldá?

  Vamos para allá! (Let’s go there!)Vampaya!

  El teléfonoEl teléjano

  El SkypeEl eskipe

  El YouTubeEl yutuve

  Las fotosLas afotos

  La cameraLa carama

  La moto (motorcycle)La amoto

  Donde vas (where are you going?)Chondeva?

  La escuela (the school)La ecuela

  Despues (afterwards, later)Depué

  El FacebookEl fejboo

  La televisionLa pelevision

  El futebolEl efutevol

  El espaguettiEl epagetti

  El TwitterEl twister

  El coctélEl chotél

  Los pancakesLos panekekes

  AmorAmó

  Mi amorMi mó

  El sandwichEl sanduiche

  Esta bien‘ta bjeng

  Mister Muscolo (Mr. Muscle, detergent symbol)Mitte Muculo

  EnsaladaSalada

  La peliculaLa pejicula

  El WesternEl bestern

  El aguacate (avocado)El guacate

  El spaEl esplá

  La gaseosaLa gaciosa

  La hamburguesaLa emburgesa

  La piñacoladaLa piña de escolada

  El cheese cakeEl cheské

  El GoogleEl gogle

  GooglearGoglear

  El G-mailgamajl

  El apanado (breaded food)El panádo

  El Hotmailhomell

  La Aroba (@)La erova

  Entonces (thus)Entonce

  El WhatsAppEl guasá

  El vinoEl bino (but of course!)