Ometepe is the largest island in one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world, Lake Nicaragua. Two volcanoes, Conception and Maderas, form the island. According to legend, when one of the volcanoes was due to erupt the inhabitants refused to leave their homes, preferring death to separation from their island.
We were late for the ferry. At least, that is what I understood as we tumbled over a broken road in the back seat of the crucifix-swinging, holy-rollin’ taxi. Broken words in Spanish bounced around me as I stared confusedly at the bony horses that stood lack-eyed at the sides of the road.
Their furry coats were rolling up at the pointy edges of hip and shoulder.
The greasy labyrinth of the driver’s moustache and his yellowed teeth were flipped back at me by the rear view mirror.With the next bump I realized I had eaten one too many oranges that morning and tried to extract my sweaty thighs from the hot plastic seat. I lifted the heavy bags piled on top of us onto the floor. I reached for the knob to roll down the window and, when it was opened, leaned out the window for a gasp of dust-laden air.
I choked on exhaust as a truck swung past us. The dust was everywhere, in our cheeks and in the skin of our shoulders. Between our toes it was turning black. But it was refreshing to lean out the window if only to escape the burning smell of the taxi and the colourful icons that cavorted above the dashboard. I watched the wooden stalls and lean-tos, the sturdy legs of women passing with their various burdens, the lines of blue sky strung above the action. We rumbled past. It was like watching an early film; a single strip of paper spun quickly and viewed through a small slit from the other side. Only we, the mechanism for viewing, seemed to move. Everyone and everything else was immobile; a long lonely frieze of humanity.
Out of the puzzle of people, places, sun and soil I finally realized that we had stopped. A few thousand colones in the surprisingly immaculate palm of the driver and we were on our way. Hauling our few belongings onto our throbbing backs we saw that ahead was the lake and the promise of water. Young, boomerang-thin boys threw themselves off the pier while ships docked and workers yelled around them. They leaped so forcefully that they froze momentarily at the zenith of their arching jumps to shout something inarticulate at their comrades. “OY,” “YE,” “VE,” “YA”… The boys were creating poetry out of sound. Their leaps were also art.
Two girls — dark hair falling out of ponytails, crooked-biting bright-white teeth and sundresses — popped their heads up from behind a green hedge near a house. The sun was in my eyes and the dust in my throat. Their skinny shoulders were bare and glowed. I felt like I could hold those girls in my cupped hands like water. Like fireflies — liquid light in thrashing thorax. Like tiny characters in a snow-globe. Even now, exposed in the sunlight, their glistening black hair gave them the appearance of upward movement against the backdrop of the falling-green leaves of the trees that stirred behind them.
“Hello,” they said in clear English. The girls giggled and waved. The girls were teasing and embarrassed. Surprised by the greeting and dazed by the sun, I reflected their innocent smiles. I was startled at hearing my language spoken by their strongly accented treble voices.
I smiled my brightest smile and waved back, “Hello!” Then the girls were gone. Melted and washed away by their laughter.
They were laughing at me, at my ridiculous language, and my ridiculous response to a ridiculous word. To them, I was ridiculous. I smiled.
I was confused when he frowned and walked on. “Can’t you see they were laughing at you?”
My smile burned, hotly self-conscious, and I looked anywhere I could- our shoes, the road ahead, the trees on either side. We walked away from the direction the girls had run, flinging their sun-browned legs behind them. We walked on together. The dust was in my eyes and sun in my throat.
Buy my beans. They are good beans. Smiling his gap-toothed smile the old man leaned towards us proffering a burlap sack of beans.
“…Cordobas, very cheap.”
I glanced quickly into the dark red pile weighing his bag and shook my head awkwardly.
“No. Gracias.” he said for us, shaking his head to emphasize the point, and yet the man’s large smile showed no sign of comprehension.
“Cheap,” the man said, again. Like the sound of a bird in the morning, curious and impersonal.
They were cheap. Those little beans he offered us were so cheap. Really almost nothing. To us it would make little difference. To him, perhaps, so much. But there was the question of need. We didn’t need the beans, we didn’t know what to do with beans, we didn’t want the beans, in fact if we had bought them we would probably have given them to someone else, or even back to him. If we had eaten nothing but beans, they could have sustained us for a week. What if we had traded precious money for those worthless beans.The beans were not magic. Nothing of fantasy or fairy tale lurked around the man. He wore a faded, red, University of California tshirt over his sinewed and sculpted flesh. His shoulders were puckered brown and sweating under the solid sun. He was staring us complacently in the face asking if we would like to have what he could offer. No. We repeated by word and action. That was it. Unceremoniously he turned and walked off on the dusty afternoon road. His bag of beans was slung over his back. We waited for the bus as the afternoon withered. As the sun lost its strength the distant trees lining the lake receded. Meanwhile the roadside grass seemed to reach higher to bathe in the last light. The insects sighed and breathed in. They were silent for a split second before they changed repertoire from the constant hot buzz of day to the low swish of night; the sound of twilight being chewed.
A cloud of dust appeared down the road to our right. Possibly it was our bus heading back on the road that led to the village far away left. We settled back on our heels at the side of the road to wait. As horned leathered shapes emerged from the dust cloud our hopes were stifled. For a few minutes, only shapes were visible: a cubist painting of stretched triangle of shoulder, sagging waist in curving line, of hard brittle hoof.
Then the eyes were also visible and we felt fear. We retreated quickly through the tall tickling grass and climbed the wood and wire fence that separated the grass that was owned from the grass which was not. Posed for further flight on the splintering wood we watched as the disinterested female mob approached. We were silenced by this groaning mass of life meandering lamely down the twilit road. Then, weaving in and out among the lurching flesh of that solemn procession, a boy appeared on a maroon bicycle. He must have been about 8 years old and as he moved among the gigantic beasts he slapped them with a switch, not cruelly but from a careless ennui. The cows took no notice but plodded ever onwards. I looked over at my fence companion. He smiled at me as if to say, “See, no problem!” but also sheepishly because he knew that I knew of his quick intake of breath and remembered the pressure of our hands as we scrambled onto the fence. The boy did not see us, or, if he did, he did not acknowledge our presence. He continued his arching circles and bowing figureeights amongst the cattle like a bird flying swooping circles of confinement.
I remember watching a parrot fly like that in an aviary: flapping then gliding and flapping again…
Peddle…peddle…hold…The boy navigated effortlessly between the dusty limbs and weathered cruel haunches. As the herd passed, the horns gave way to swishing tails. The last to pass were two calves trotting down the road to our left. It was dusk.
The bus would not come tonight.
We began to walk and though we were walking faster than the bovine crowd had gone when it passed us, we never caught up with the boy and his half-starved charges. They were absorbed by the night, or they had begun to gallop - the little boy pedaling furiously and viciously using the stick against grinding legs. However it had happened, the mysterious disappearance of the herd gave us a feeling of vulnerability. The night fell quickly and we fumbled forwards. In memory I see us preceded by a circle of concentrated yellow light falling on the road ahead, an invisible hand holding a flashlight. In reality there was only the glow of stars and a faded sliver of moon, casting the roadside grass in silhouette and turning the dust beneath our feet to shining grey powder. A car passed us and zoomed in the direction of the mad ghost-herd. The headlights showed the beige of flies, mosquitoes and moths whirring around us. The light gleamed a moment then it was night once more. Blinded, I saw nothing but fasttraveling pinpricks of light ahead as the car traveled on. I closed my eyes to avoid the complete darkness of our surroundings. In front of us on the road I imagined a pile-up of metal bone and light fragments, broken glass and flag-flapping hide and a boy weaving lazy circles through the mass of wreckage on a worn maroon bicycle. How long had I been sleepwalking? I became again aware of my surroundings, his hand, and our feet on the dark and dusty road.
That night I felt I was sleeping with a ghost. Walking abruptly, I looked over at his sleeping form as if I was looking at a void, as if he was no longer there. In that moment he seemed to me a poor imitation of himself.
Glancing, spinning upwards and suddenly sitting I leaned slowly over the mattress and moved, one spring at a time, to the edge. I knew I could not wake him. Bare feet extended and made contact with the concrete floor. I ran forward to the dark door - my naked legs and arms made pale yellow shapes in the light, like passing cars in the darkness. The light from the street shone on my skin through the window in patched blue. Opening the door I shivered and reached my arms around myself to touch my elbows and the back of the sweat-dampened t-shirt. I was not cold but the warm breeze reached into me and I quaked in the darkness. Sitting my thighs on the concrete balcony, I mangled my legs until they dangled through the iron railings. The street was empty. Below, the bar made sounds of nightend.
Clinking glasses and muffled words issuing form large bodies were lost in the ethereal noise of late-night radio. On the horizon the sky was becoming pale blue behind the triangular shapes of volcanoes. Behind me, behind the door, behind the room, it was still black, but increasingly emptied of stars as the blue became imperceptibly brighter. A skin-thin dog padded below me, its mongrel tail sailing behind it. I raised my hand to push from my face the hair that had not dried to my sweating forehead.
Reaching backwards, my hands found the metal ashtray that in the day was too hot to touch and tipped the remnants of past cigarettes onto the pavement below. The ashes fell quickly and disappeared into the now-visible grey of cement. I realized that birds were chirping as I twisted my body to reach for the plastic table and the cigarettes that lay on top of it. I pulled one reflectively out of the case, staring at its surprising whiteness- like teeth in blacklighted bowling hall, like skeletal-fish at the bottom of the ocean. I pulled the lighter out of the case and lit the rough end. Blinking to remove the fire’s light etched on my retina, I blew gently on the smouldering end of the cigarette. He is here, but absent, I thought. I can see not only who he is now, but who he will be, as if I am looking at him from the future, when he will be no longer by my side, or seeing my own past, when he wasn’t yet there. By filling his space he was becoming a ghost of himself, a reflection of what he would be when he was no longer lying beside me.
I watched the smoke spin away from me into the early morning air and saw the smoke form arms reaching out to grasp nothing. Those are my arms, I thought, reaching for him. Maybe I am the ghost, and he is the air I inhabit. Leaning my head forward until my temples rested between the bars I looked down through my pale thighs. My feet were far away, swinging softly. Farther below my suspended feet, ash was camouflaged as concrete. The smoke filled my head and made me long to sleep again. I smothered the cigarette in the ash-tray and extracted myself from the railing.
I stretched my arms high above my head and padded back to bed where he was warm and smelled like sheets.