by Noah Richler
Some went off to use the bathroom, done in seconds, then resumed their places, though not before thanking someone for saving their spot in the queue.
Others were drinking cups of coffee, one after another.
Problems with son, problems with rent, problems with having too many problems.
I tried to look right into the eyes of these people, but those who weren’t holding their heads down low appeared not to have eyeballs.
I approached one of the transports and found it odd that no one had laid a hand on my shoulder, the organizers were getting slack.
A line formed quickly, I was the first.
One guy sensed a hint of confusion and tried to take advantage of it as the door opened.
An organizer grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him away.
Everyone started laughing.
Maybe the lines for gas chambers, maybe the lines for mass graves were like this.
I looked behind me for someone that didn’t seem Jewish and tried to see what he was thinking, but he was in a world of his own.
I began to wonder where we were headed and left the line. I went to the front but, tarnished with suspicion, someone from the company was at my heels.
I stared at the sign, the destination the same.
People leaving early, people coming late.
People leaving early, people coming late.
People leaving early, people coming late.
I returned to the line but I’d forgotten to say that I was coming back and someone pulled me out of it.
The end of the line, now. Whatever. Whether you end up sitting or standing, the gas is the same for everyone.
For years I was pushed at home, spend more, spend more, do better than the next guy.
Some pulled devices out of their pockets. Spoke into them. Listened to them.
The driver turned up, we walked calmly on. A woman carrying a child in her arms went to the front of the line and the organizer let her in. Someone at the back hollered why, as we hadn’t been around when the baby was conceived so that she hadn’t given the rest of us any joy. I was in agreement but couldn’t show it.
Don’t say what’s going through your mind. Ideas are valuable.
Take care of yourself, don’t trust anyone, the only certainty is doubt.
Finally we are seated, one next to another, one behind another.
Most were not Jewish — my God, no one was Jewish.
I looked at the back of the bus and saw that the sign that showed it to be from another barrio.
I had a thought and closed my eyes so that it wouldn’t grow. Thinking: it can be so dangerous, eh?
The bus’s destination was the Terminal Bandeira station.
I passed an attractive woman and my cock jerked to before I remembered the Cidade Alerta — “Alert City” — TV news: “Pervert stabbed 50 times in prison.”
Just in time, my cock wilted.
I went to the back of the bus.
I leaned on an aluminum bar that someone had propped up against the last seat.
I looked at the breasts of a plump woman sitting in front of me and imagined a Spanish woman.
You see, I love Spanish women, especially ones with bursting breasts.
Then I thought of my wife. She has small breasts. Even there, good luck’s not mine.
Yesterday, during the course of an argument that is already routine, I asked if it isn’t enough that women have our time, our bodies. They want more, they want our souls, I said.
So what are you thinking, she said. About another bitch, right?
I asked myself what I’d gained from six years at the job. Not a bitch, though the thought struck me as quite a nice idea.
Most betrayals, I wanted to say, are because of women needling us and goading us until really you do start thinking about bitches.
I arrived at work drinking a coffee.
The manager is from Bahia. I always used to put down the boys from Bahia and now I’m paying for it. God is such a bastard.
The manager stares at me and his look says, “I know you came late, and I know you’d humiliate me if you could. But I’m your shit of a manager, and if you take off I’ll fuck up your life and this will start if you decide to have breakfast.”
All in a look, eh? I’m not dumb. I pretended I was off to drink a glass of water and left without having breakfast.
I moved towards the pallets.
The pallets are made of timber for storing and transporting the goods.
Sometimes the trucks are back to back and there are dozens of them — pallets laden with rice, pallets filled with beans.
These days I was unloading two trucks by myself. When I tried to take a break, I’d look behind me and there was the manager.
His eyes were saying, “If you lean on something to rest, I’ll fuck up your life. I’ll eat out your wife right in front of you.”
I worked until eleven. I was almost fainting from hunger. The market is full of food — everything there is a kind of food — but if they see you eating, then you’re dispatched for “just cause.” Even for a pot of Danone yogurt or a handful of beans.
Once, a young boy was sent packing. He must have been about eighteen, and had a newborn baby. They caught him eating a guava, he was fired for just cause.
Eighteen and his employment record tarnished, he’ll never get another job.
It would have been fairer to give him a gun along with the return of his work papers.
I’ve seen dozens of thefts by people who are well off.
Sometimes they’ll take expensive cheeses, sometimes candy or cans of paté.
One time, I remember, a security guard grabbed an old man who was stealing fancy chocolates.
With everyone around, the guard took him to the manager, talking loudly and everything.
The security guard was fired the next day.
The old man was rich. He was full of money and our kind of people mustn’t touch his kind of people, the guard should have known that.
I was even told to pack up a basketful of expensive things for the delivery man to take to the old man’s house.
It was a present from the market, an apology for the company’s “mistake.”
But the poor don’t get the same treatment.
Once, they grabbed a bunch of kids stealing chocolates, one with a chocolate bar under his belt and the other with a box of them.
The manager gathered all the employees together to witness what was about to happen, to watch as security started to humiliate the boys, making them eat all the chocolate at once until they threw up.
People didn’t want to see it, but the manager made us look.
The boys vomited up everything, so the market lost the chocolates anyway.
In my section, I couldn’t keep up. The more I replaced a product, the more people would buy it.
The pasta ran out, I fetched the crate, and when I got to the rice it, too, was almost gone.
Once I replenished the rice, the beans and oil were almost out.
Every time I would try to get by with the cart, people complained. It was bothering everyone.
I was all sweaty when the owner of the chain of markets and the manager stopped in front of me.
I could read in the manager’s eyes, “Now I’ll fuck up your life, I’ll pull out your eyes and shove them up your ass.”
The owner of the chain was conducting a surprise inspection, don’t you know. Dotting the i’s. Crossing the t’s.
He looked me up and down and mumbled something to the manager.
“Unfortunately you’re right, Chief,” said the manager. “We tell them to maintain good personal hygiene but they’re idiots, these people.”
“Fine,” said the owner. “But everything has a limit, this man stinks.�
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The manager ordered me to the washroom and told me to take a bath and put on deodorant. I went.
I washed for a good ten minutes, borrowed deodorant from a butcher and used it on my armpits, then put on the same sweaty, smelly clothes.
It was the end of the month and so I walked down the hall. The place was crowded but I couldn’t hold back the tears any longer, if I had seen the manager I would have punched him.
Faster and faster I walked down the corridor and when I arrived at the gate to the market I looked to the light outside and kept on walking, I walked to the end of the street. I was free, truly free.
I didn’t want to go back but my wife kept bugging me and insisted that at least I get the monthly basic food basket they owed me.
So I went to the front desk, and asked for it. The clerk frowned at me as if I had stolen something of hers. “You have no right,” she said.
I persisted and said that I had worked almost the whole month.
She repeated: “You have no right.”
I left, and decided to take a bus to Ibirapuera Park.
I’d always thought the park so beautiful.
I saw a lovely fountain tossing water into the air.
The fountain was like me, tossing things into the air.
Years later, I learned from a friend that the fountain was very costly and that it had been paid for by the chain owner who’d refused me the food basket.
Translation by Jane Springer
The old ways are not lost because they are contained in the vessel of language and in the harbour for stories that is the territory in which the stories are told. The ambit of these stories — the limit of the territory — is ‘home’, and if you are Mexican and indigenous then your mother or father may have buried your umbilical cord in the yard of the adobe to make sure you return to it. A dog child to the Arctic, a dog child to Mexico, instructed through stories and the very pull of the womb.
When a teacher in a rural school asked her fourth-grade students what their first memory was, writes the Colombian-Canadian playwright Beatriz Pizano, a boy named Michael gave a detailed account of his birth — of travelling to the hospital, stopping at a gas station, of the song that was playing, and the conversations that took place in the car. The teacher herself was able to confirm this, as she had driven Michael’s mother to the hospital, where she died giving birth.
Is it possible that we have memories from the womb? That the story, not just of our own, most recent life, is written on the body?
RETRACING THE STEPS
BEATRIZ PIZANO
Colombia and Canada
Pastorita, the healer is preparing a cure.
My lover has just been bitten by a dog after trying to stop a fight. I had promised him that nothing would happen to him while he was here in Colombia — even though we had just crossed three wars zones and a bomb had exploded on a highway — because this place is my version of paradise. But now we are miles away from a hospital, and without running water or electricity. Only a battery-operated radio connects us to the world outside. To prevent any infection, or God knows what else, Pastorita takes some leaves from her garden and grinds them with the most important ingredient: hair from the ass of the dog that bit my lover. It wasn’t an easy task.
As Pastorita is about to apply the unguent on the wound, she gasps: “Alguien va a mori, se esta despidiendo”. Someone is about to die, their soul is saying good-bye, retracing the steps before it leaves this land.
Two days later, Pastorita is listening to “mensajes de la region,” messages on the radio, and hears that her sister-in-law has just died.
Whom do we touch when we retrace our steps, I wonder.
It is a cold night in my hotel in Bogotá and I wake up from a recurring dream: a woman, her belly full with child, attentively watches the horizon. Only tonight, she turns and looks at me, allowing me to feel familiarity — and yet her face, it’s not recognizable.
Unable to go back to sleep, I head out to El Dorado airport ahead of time. In the lobby I meet an elder from the Amazon, la Abuela — grandmother — Lucía. We had been introduced, briefly, the night before, at the closing of the theatre festival.
She sits next to me without saying much. Then she starts:
When Elder Huitito Varguitas was a boy he fell very sick, she says. Su mamá llamó al Shaman. The Shaman sat by his bed praying. Hasta que se convirtió en un colibrí, he became a hummingbird, and flew to the sky and asked the creator whether or not the boy should be cured — o si debería regresar al cielo — or if he should return to heaven. The creator sent a message: it was not his time yet.
Ha estado en el Amazona maestra Beatriz, she says. You have been in the Amazon?
No, I answer, trying to control my tears, not understanding why I feel as if I’m about to burst out crying and won’t be able to stop my tears, not until the end of times.
Come to my home, Abuela Lucia says.
I travel by motorboat on the Amazon River, the longest highway I have seen. I arrive at Puerto Nariño, Colombia, in the land of the Ticunas — peoples of the land and water. No cars or motorcycles are allowed. I’d been expecting another kind of jungle though I really don’t know what kind, perhaps a version of Steven Spielberg’s Anaconda.
Dogs roam the town, their bodies covered in sores. A little white mutt is in such bad shape that I smell rot as he passes by. I learn that only the week before, in anticipation of the formal visit of yet another useless government official, the army rounded up forty dogs and shot them all. This walking cadaver escaped the massacre.
Up the main cemented path that leads to the house of Abuela Lucía, a Jehovah´s Witnesses “Kingdom Hall” stands high. A drunken Ticuna, sitting across the street on this hot summer afternoon, yells at each convert as they walk in, “We don’t need their gods, can’t you see? We have the jungle.”
During my first night in the jungle I dream of the woman watching the horizon. Only this time she’s singing a lullaby in a language I don’t understand.
The following morning I give a theatre workshop to the women from the Mowacha association. To begin, I ask about Ticuna lullabies but they tell me that they don’t remember any. I’m in shock. I insist, but no one among them seems to be able to remember, though they do know that their mothers learned the songs from their mothers in times before. Waira, a singer and dancer, says she’s going to try to sing one but that she needs help from her fifteen-year old daughter.
Waira sits on the floor and asks her daughter to pretend she is a newborn in her arms. She rocks her back and forth until, slowly, a lullaby enters the space. All the women look at each other in recognition.
Yes, yes, that is it! They cry, tears brimming in their eyes, before we are interrupted by the arrival of the Abuela Lucía.
It is time.
All the women rapidly gather their things and organize into groups. Abuela Lucia turns to me and, in a soft voice, says, “Maestra Beatriz, venga con nosotros.” Come with us.
It is the third birthday of Abuela Lucía´s granddaughter. Today, we shall pierce her ears and introduce her to the languages of body painting and dance. Today, the women will re-enact a ceremony prohibited by the Church for more than a century.
La Abuela Lucía is the keeper of knowledge. She knows the language, the plants, the ceremonies.
We travel deep into the jungle where there is no more cement. We arrive at La Maloka — the spiritual house, the ancestral path, an umbilical cord that connects the communities to the great white river. We drum and dance the day and night away.
Exhausted, I lie down in one corner of the Maloka as the festivities continue. I have lost all sense of time. No more, are there dividing lines between day and night.
A silence awakens me. At least, I think I am awake. I am in the land in between. I am not born yet. I am not dead yet. I can’t be remembered or forgo
tten.
I follow the voice of a woman singing a lullaby, crying. I recognize her voice. I step outside the Maloka to meet her. She stands on the lookout with her swollen belly, watching … watching for them to arrive. She knows it will happen before it happens. Just as she has always known what will happen before it happens. She has always known what came before.
The woman walks into the ocean as a pod of a thousand dolphins surround her. Their shrieks can be heard all across Abya Yala, and with such strength that her ears pop and she goes deaf. The baby yells in her belly but she can’t hear anymore.
She had seen all this in her dream — and now she sees it happening in front of her. The day the great pink dolphin from the white river crosses into the river of salt, dividing lines will spread across Abya Yala.
And three ships appear on the horizon.
Knowing what is to come, the mother rushes to tell the girl in her swollen belly all the things she needs to know — that she needs to remember: many will come for the land, for the gold, and they won’t stop coming until they have consumed every mountain, even the greatest Paramos from Abya Yala. Brothers will be killed and disappeared. They will lose their names, and their bones, and their mutilated bodies will be spread across the land so that none can find their way back home. Our peoples will become NN’s, no names, False Positives, desaparecidos, immigrantes, refugiados ...
But the women, the women will rise. The Manuelas Saenz, the Policarpas Salavarrietas, the Juanas Azardi, the Bartolinas Sisa, the Micaelas Bastidas, the Gertrudis Bocanegra, the Manuelas Cañizares, the Javieras Carrera, the Luisas Cáceres Azurduy, The Rigobertas Menchús, The Angelicas Cho, The Madres of La Plaza de Mayo, The Madres de Nicaragua, The Comadres del Salvador, The Madres de los heroes, The Martires de la Nicaragua Sandinista, The Madres de Soacha, The Chiefs Theresa Spence, The Jessicas Gordon, The Sylvias McAdam, The Ninas Wilson, the Sheelahs McLean —
Only the mother can’t complete the list because the men descend from the three ships, cut her tongue out, and open her stomach, releasing the child into the world. As the water turns red, the dolphins carry the child away.