The Best Travel Writing, Volume 11

by Rolf Potts

  And then he was gone.

  I saw Willem from time to time after that. On my days off I would find him and we would share a bench in the park, or a computer in the internet cafe. In the coffee shops around town, we drank the local beans. The baristas didn’t talk about the coffee; they were unattached to its farming and the profits it brought to the finca owners.

  Willem showed me the school he went to, where students swarmed in blue-and-white uniforms on the concrete schoolyard. The boys kicked old, slightly deflated soccer balls and the girls bickered over small pieces of colored chalk. When we walked the streets at night, he might dare to hold my fingers in his hand for a moment or hang his arm over my shoulder. Sometimes he kissed me in the dark, in shadowy alcoves off the streets. He never invited me into his home.

  I learned how to talk to Willem without using my voice. Through writing, lip reading, and body language I told him about dating men in the United States, about coming out to my family. I tried to show him the possibilities that I never knew when I was in the closet. I knew it was different to come out in Nicaragua, more dangerous. I wasn’t out in Jinotega either, though I wanted to be.

  Our presence here, we told the teenagers, was an opportunity to exchange knowledge, beliefs, customs, all the things that marked our differing cultures, and to learn from one another. The Jinotegans we met were eager to form friendships with us visiting Americans despite the history of a complex, violent relationship with the U.S. It was from the surrounding mountains that Augusto Sandino emerged to lead the Nicaraguan revolution against U.S. occupation in the early twentieth century. The liberty he fought for was short-lived, however, and not long after his victory the U.S installed a dictatorship that would rule the country for generations. Sandino’s legacy inspired a similar revolt a half-century later. The 1979 Sandanista movement culminated in the fall of the Samoza dictatorship and the civil war of the 1980s between the Sandanistas and U.S.-backed Contras. This war divided Jinotega along fractured lines. Citizens of the same towns and members of the same families placed themselves on opposite sides of a gory counterrevolution. Their memories of this time remain mostly silent.

  On other topics, our friends were garrulous. I grew comfortable talking with them about a general acceptance of homosexuality where I lived in California, but I was not comfortable sharing the details of my own sexual identity. I got the sense that homosexuality, though not necessarily demonized, was not demonstrated. Men might sleep with other men, much in the same way they might sleep with women who weren’t their wives, but they wouldn’t talk about it. This silence was part of a cultural contract I was trying to respect. As staff, our organization had asked us to put our own needs aside for the sake of our group’s efforts. But I was struggling to maintain my own self-respect in my silence. I tried to make it clear I was gay without saying so. I said I was not interested in a wife or a girlfriend, though I didn’t have one. My silence about my sexuality was similar to my silence at church. I would go to mass in Jinotega, even if I wouldn’t say the prayers. It was similar to the silence about the blood staining the surrounding mountains.

  Sometimes I wanted to tell my own story of transformation, my personal sexual revolution, but how small it seemed, how insignificant the history of one person compared to that of an entire people. It took me a while to realize a religion is nothing without its saints, a war remembered most for its heroes. But, still, I never came out that first year. Each time I left Jinotega between job assignments, I told myself maybe I would come out when I returned. While I traveled in other parts of Nicaragua and neighboring countries, I didn’t face the same challenges to coming out, it felt less intrusive to do so.

  The first time I left Jinotega, Willem and I exchanged email addresses to stay in touch while I was gone. The only message I tried to send him bounced back with an automatic reply that I didn’t understand.

  The following year, a few days after our night out at the discoteca, I’m at home alone doing some paperwork when I hear a knock at the door. My breath halts for a moment. The staff and volunteers are off at various worksites. I hope it’s a friendly neighbor but fear it’s the police or a doctor or some other local official bearing bad news about one of the teens. As I rise, the plastic legs of my chair echo a scrape across the cement floor.

  When I open the door it’s Willem. As I lean in for a hug, he cuts me short with a handshake. Disappointed but not entirely surprised, I take his hand. I hold it like a fragile souvenir. Willem turns his head and makes a motion to someone out of view and a woman walks up beside him. She smiles and sort of bows at me, her dark bangs bouncing over her eyes. I kiss her on both cheeks, a gesture she accepts but does not reciprocate. Her gaze stays lowered. Her fingers are laced in a net across her navel that catches her stare and my stare and Willem’s stare as it holds her protruding belly. She’s pregnant.

  I look back to Willem to ask him who this woman is, but the proud look on his face says it all. White and wobbly, I force a smile, lift my arms and spread them wide like I’m holding my happiness for him high above my head. “Felicidades,” I say, though the syllables come out stunted. Shaking my arms in the air I say it again. Then I hug Willem. I hug this woman.

  Stepping back, I look at the couple. Her head remains lowered, his high. He winks at me. Then he begins to talk to me with his hands, but I can’t understand. To me he’s just dancing, just responding to the beats of the street behind him. I try to keep smiling, but all I can think about is shutting the door and retreating to the quiet of my room.

  Finally, Willem says goodbye. I hug him and the woman again before I shut the door behind them. Sliding to my room, I lie down and try to take a nap I don’t have time for. But I can’t fall asleep anyway and so I just lay in the dark, on a lumpy mattress on the floor. I think about lying in my teenage bedroom when I was the same age as the kids I chaperone here. I remember the boy I had a crush on in high school who I would brush against in benign moments, hoping he would notice, hoping he would look back at me in the same way I looked at him. I wanted him tell me my thoughts. He never did, but there was comfort in his silence. I wonder if my silence about my sexuality here in this foreign place, is an imitation of that comfort from my youth.

  When I hear someone knock at the door again, I’m not afraid or hopeful I’m just a bit numb. I open the door and see Darling, our cook, and her wide amber eyes. She’s here for her regular shift but she looks at me in a way that I want to believe shows she understands that something is wrong. I always joke with her that I’ll marry her, that I’ll be her grandkids’ granddaddy. I call her jaguara because I don’t know how to say cougar in Spanish. She knows I don’t really want a wife, but I’ve still never told her why in so many words, or anyone else here in Jinotega. They know I’m not interested in the daughters, nieces, and cousins they introduce me to. They know my secret but they don’t want me to talk about it, as they don’t talk about their own. Willem’s wife doesn’t want to know about me. She will allow him his secrets as long he keeps them hidden. Perhaps that’s why she kept her head bowed at my door.

  Darling tries a smile and stands on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek. Instead, I take her in my arms. She pats my back with an awkward hand. I let her go, then hold her fingers in mine for a moment before I let her slip away. I watch her swagger into the kitchen as I sit down to get back to work.

  Michael Sano is a wanderer and wonderer from San Francisco. He has spent time living and working in Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Australia. He has traveled throughout Latin America as well as a few other spots around the world. At home, he supports students in their academic endeavors and writes non-fiction and fiction. His work has appeared in RFD Quarterly and Around the World (Harvard Bookstore Press).

  AMY MARCOTT

  Café Tables

  A souvenir becomes a symbol of hope.

  At the end of my first trip to Paris, I had come to the Place du Tertre to buy a painting. I could not afford this. I’d just finished an MFA i
n creative writing and financed my trip with my student loan. But intuition told me that I should not leave Paris without a piece of artwork. I didn’t realize then that I would buy something more significant than any souvenir could be. Something I would have paid any price for: hope.

  I walked around the carré aux artistes twice, dismayed by the caricaturists and the cookie-cutter pictures of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. My flight back to Pennsylvania left in eight hours and a dispiriting panic set in. Not wanting to give up, I made one final lap around the square.

  To this day, I believe I conjured that oil painting wedged between two larger canvases. I’m not sure how I missed it before. It was a café scene, and I knew instantly this was the artist I’d hoped to find. I do the majority of my writing in cafés and have always thought of them as sacred spaces, portals to that meditative space where words I never expected flow into my head and shape narratives that help me make sense of the world.

  This artist used splashes of color: scarlet and persimmon, cobalt and jade, everything infused with luminous patches that bordered on being abstract. Only under scrutiny did you notice people and tiny tables. In the foreground of one I liked, two ghost-like figures sat together, one in shades of blue, the other in greens and rust. Their small round table glowed yellow, as if with possibility itself. It reminded me of the dreamy blur that cafés can become when I’m in the midst of creating.

  I thumbed through the other paintings. “Vous êtes l’artiste?” I asked the woman sitting nearby, wanting to know if she had painted them. A petite woman in her forties, she had dark hair and pale skin and a pursed-lip look of persistence.

  “Oui,” she said.

  I thought about how to best phrase that I liked her work. “Ils sont très beaux,” I said, then realized that the word for painting is feminine and I should have said elles sont très belles. Despite seven years of French and my strong desire to converse easily, my travels had showed me that I was only useful in restaurants and train stations. Every other encounter quickly stymied me. As a Francophile, struggling with the language left me feeling like I was dishonoring France. As a writer, not being able to find the right words was one of the most troubling fates I could imagine.

  “Combien?” I asked pointing to a painting. The woman rattled off the price and I tried to quickly translate the number in my head then convert francs into dollars. About $125, I figured. A splurge, but at nearly twenty by fourteen inches, it was far bigger than I ever dreamed I’d be able to buy.

  I narrowed it down to two cafe scenes, the one in blue and another, predominantly red.

  “Entre les deux . . .” I pointed from one to another, “laquelle préférez-vous?” She looked at the paintings and I held my breath, hoping I’d spoken correctly. She pointed to the blue one.

  “Pourquoi?” I asked.

  It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand her explanation. For the first time my entire trip, I was having a conversation that didn’t involve the words croissant or le train. It felt momentous. Like I belonged in Paris. This feeling lasted until I asked “Carte de crédit?” which prompted a series of sentences and gestures toward a nearby establishment.

  “Vous comprenez?” she asked.

  The only part I understood was “vous comprenez?” but I smiled and nodded like a dumbstruck fool until she led me toward a storefront then pantomimed the process as she repeated herself. Finally, I understood, though I had misheard the price. It was $250. I flushed, too embarrassed to admit it was beyond my budget. It was art, I consoled myself. It would appreciate, right?

  The transaction complete, she led me up a tall, narrow staircase to an apartment overlooking the square where she’d wrap my souvenir for the journey home. Paintings leaned against the walls in thick stacks. Other canvases hung on a clothesline. She gave me a postcard showing a different café scene and her name on the back. Catherine. I stood enthralled by her productivity. I hadn’t yet published any stories, and though I had finished a draft of my novel, it was still in need of much revision. This was what I wanted: evidence of my creativity, finished and ready for the world to see.

  When I returned home, I had the painting framed and settled into my post-grad life as a writer and lecturer. But within three months, I slipped into a severe depression that left me unable to write creatively for what would turn out to be five years.

  My notebooks during that time catalogue my demise. A typical writing session of ten pages quickly dwindles to one, mostly the opening three paragraphs of my novel. The same sentences, about a fourteen-year-old girl driving alone at night, with slight modifications. Often, I complain that the cafés were noisy or the tables wobbly. I’d been working in these spaces for years. It was I who’d become disagreeable.

  Days when I found it hard to leave the house, I’d sit on my couch and stare at the painting, the smears and bursts of color transforming into shadowy spirits. The whole thing floats on the canvas like a suggestion or a lovely dream. One figure, possibly hooded, watches from the corner. I imagined that spirit as divine inspiration itself and waited for it to find me.

  Weeks of not writing at all became months. I moved to Boston and the painting sat boxed while I mustered the energy to unpack. Unwrapping it was a revelation. I remembered the intuition that had led me to Catherine’s work. Now, the glowing table in the foreground seemed a message.

  I made room in my studio apartment for a similar café table, and I’d sit with my notebook and pen and envision a tide of words rushing forth, my creativity turning incandescent. At most I’d write a couple of paragraphs of stilted sentences before my attention would drift, but at least I was writing.

  On difficult days, I’d look at the painting and remember that the enchanted zone I was currently denied access to did indeed exist. It was there for Hemingway, Colette, Picasso, and the long line of artists who had claimed Paris home. And it was there for Catherine, who’d let me glimpse the life of a practicing artist with her apartment overflowing with canvases. This is how it’s done, she seemed to be saying to me. You will find your way here.

  Eventually, words did return to me, and fifteen years later, I revisited Paris. By that time, I had published stories, signed with an agent, and begun another novel when my first didn’t sell. I had planned this weeklong visit to be a creative retreat to sit in cafés, write, and wander. I also wanted to search for Catherine. I’d Googled her name over the years and found only one mention, in an online gallery. If she was still on the Place du Tertre, I imagined telling her how she had gotten me through dark times; that when language all but left me, her painting was hope hanging on my wall.

  I didn’t know then that I had only a fifty-fifty chance of seeing Catherine, if she was even exhibiting. The nearly three hundred artists annually selected to sell their work in the carré aux artistes share their one-square-meter spaces and display on alternate days. Even though there’s a ten-year waiting list for a spot and some ten million tourists visit the Place du Tertre each year, a part of me hoped Catherine had moved on to more prestigious venues.

  As it turned out, Catherine was sitting right where I had left her, though I recognized her painting’s saturated palette first. Seeing it gave my heart a lift, as if something significant was about to happen.

  But Catherine herself shocked me. Her hair and skin had the thinness of a woman in her seventies. Had I really misjudged her age before, or had time not been kind to her? She wore a brown plaid blazer and buff-colored Oxfords, the androgynous style popular with Parisians. There was none of the pertness that I remembered. Sitting with her chin on her hands, her eyes cast down, she looked bored. Like she had nowhere else to go.

  I considered how to address her, suddenly aware that I had not taken a picture of her painting hanging on my wall. It would have been so easy to show her and say, look, I bought that. Fifteen years ago. I look at it every day.

  Finally, I approached Catherine, exchanged a simple bonjour, and leafed through her paintings. These were slightly more abstra
ct, depicting the arches of doorways and hints of buildings, instead of cafés. I glanced at her twice, wanting her to recognize a kindred artistic soul. But Catherine didn’t look up. I leafed through her work a second time, trying to form the words that would tell her what a profound effect she’d had on my life.

  But I couldn’t remember how to say fifteen years ago—il y a quinze ans? Ça fait quinze ans? Depuis something? Why hadn’t I planned out what I would say?

  I wanted to ask about the changes in her art and whether she still painted cafés, what work lined her apartment walls. But I couldn’t force words out of my mouth. I was too aware that my bumbling French would never convey all I wanted to say. And I wouldn’t understand her response anyway.

  I also couldn’t shake the fact of Catherine, old and tired, sitting in that same spot on the Place du Tertre. In retrospect, I think I feared hearing weariness in her voice, when I needed to know that all the time I clung to her hope, all the time I spent waiting to be surprised again by words, hasn’t been in vain. That the result of a creative life is a feeling of satisfaction and fulfillment, not despair.

  We owe it to artists to tell them when they’ve touched us, but I can only imagine what it would have meant to Catherine. I wish I’d had the courage to tell her in my imperfect French. All I have now is the next best thing: honoring Catherine by using the very language her painting ensured me I’d find my way back to.

  Amy Marcott writes fiction and nonfiction, and her work has appeared in Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, Necessary Fiction, Memorious, Juked, and elsewhere. Her prose has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and been awarded in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Contest, among others. She currently resides in the Bay Area, where she’s at work on a novel and is a member of the Lit Camp Board of Directors. Read her work at amymarcott.com.