Some Fragments

Sunday, January 16th

I'm inside the COCEPRADIL training compound near Calendria, Honduras. I'm in a cabin inside the compound. I'm on a cot inside the cabin within the compound. Mountains surround us, because we are in them, and aside from a furrowed fist of granite rock I photographed several times in different daylights earlier, trees cover the mountains. The sky outside the compound in the dark beyond the walls is deep with stars behind constellations. I know because I snuck off to see while the others watched TV. Orion, usually low and near vertical, stands midsky and horizontal here. Earlier I saw Drago and Cassiopeia, but no others I can remember.

The bed is comfortable but the sheet keeps coming off the straw mattress, and I worry briefly about spiders and bugs and then laugh to myself because I don't care about spiders and bugs. Something inside the room and up in the ceiling keeps chirping and clicking loudly. At first I think it's a bird, but I remember suddenly as a small child seeing what I took to be a dried leaf hanging upside down in Great Grandma's rose arbor; I poked it with a piece of twig and it unfurled like a veined tan flower to reveal a small angry rodent upside down which made that exact click and chirp. Great Grandma heard my yelling and hacked at the bat with a rake until its oozing smashed corpse lay still. In the cabin with me are my wife, already asleep despite the cold, and a young woman who is a senior at a Jesuit college in the Northwest, on her way to do a semester abroad as a CRS intern. I am awake because I had a strange and potent dream, a dream I thought was happy whilst I dreamed it but upon conscious consideration I know it's actually not, and I say to myself "This is a sad dream," but then I wake up and think "I thought I was already awake." Now I'm listening to the sounds of the forest and I fear missing out on part of the experience of being here if I fall asleep again.

In the morning, though I don't know it yet, I'll see a procession of villagers following a saint's effigy up the mountain road. Their singing will cause me to hush the others who are talking because it is beautiful as the river, as the wind, as the dogs barking and the hawk a mere dark blot on the blue dome above. Yellow birds with black wings and strange small blackbirds with long tails flit and twitter, but only after dawn.

A cock crows regularly throughout the night, and is answered by four or five more distant crowing calls down the valley. As the crowing continues, dogs respond, and finally a cat which sounds like he's mimicking the cock bleats a bizzare croak outside the window. Frogs and crickets.

In the morning, again it's not yet here, our breakfast is cooked over an open wood flame by locals who don't speak Spanish but some ancient indigenous language. I eat the beef they cook for me even though I don't eat beef, because when the poor offer what they have to refuse is sinful. They stir fabulous coffee in huge metal pan and infuse it with hot unmolested milk straight from the source. The Indian at the stove is smoking a rolled cigarette and she shares it with me. We have no language but I know what the smoke is when I taste it and she knows I know and people who know this are the same everywhere. I'd like to lick a toad but don't.

Before dark we had a half hour to tour the town and five of us walked back along the not-quite road and over the chasm spanned by a plank bridge and into Candelaria. The church is perhaps Catholic but I can't be sure and it is dedicated to the soldiers. Evangelical Christianity is on the rise in these parts. The square upon which the church sternly sets is decrepit and filthy but is filled with sturdy old trees and beautiful children. Bullet holes in the plaster painted a bright taupe, cobblestones upset and tumbling in rainfed ravines. The Jesuit school student from Washington state asks some children if she can photograph them, and a few moments later a tall man with dried apple skin appears in the doorway. He's 93, and wants his photo taken, and when she shows him the back of her digital camera and he sees there his own face he works his toothless mouth into a smile. Within minutes the day is gone and we are in the dark walking back across the bridge.

Monday, January 17th

In Gracias are thermal baths and when we arrive we think no one is there and we get in the water and under a bridge which spans the pool we discover we've interrupted a local couple who are fucking in the steaming water. The guy asks me if I'm Mexican in Spanish and I say no I'm American and he thinks this is funny. His girlfriend is very beautiful and looks like my wife. They speak Spanish to my wife as does everyone here because they think she is perhaps from Peru. Somebody buys us beers--the brand is local and is called Salva Vida and I think that's very appropriate. We float in the water for hours under a leafy canopy and it's almost one in the morning before we get out. The CRS country head is an Irishman who's served in Haiti and Angola and he's something of a daredevil and keeps climbing high up on the stone walls and diving into the baths which are not deep. The major gifts officer from Philadelphia is holding his hands out of the water because they are pruned. This gesture looks lecherous. We drink many many beers, and the Hondurans with us--the civil engineers and drivers and project managers--are drinking Cuba Libres and they remember coming here as children.

Wednesday, January 19th

In San Pedro Sula we arrive late and are advised to stay in the hotel because we're on the square and downtown is not safe after dark. Cha and I immediately leave the hotel and walk to the enormous Spanish cathedral, which closes as we approach. As in Manilla and Teguz and Gracias there is a statue to the mothers of the nation with a fountain. Unlike in Gracias, there is no statue of Lempira who was deceived and killed by the Spaniards and whose name is now a region and a currency. Cha poses at the fountain for a photo and I hope there are no Guatemalans on the plaza behind her because of what the tour guide at Copan told me.

We have a seventh floor room with a balcony overlooking the plaza and a heavy rain is falling and it is dark out and warm for the first time in two days and I say "I like this balcony" and Cha asks why but I won't tell you what transpired there. I am sad to leave. I like nothing more than going places, and nothing less than leaving them.

XXV

Your tongue thrums and moves
Into me, and I become
Hollow and blaze with
Whirling light, like the inside
Of a vast expanding pearl.

--The Love Poems of Marichiko

(translated by Kenneth Rexroth)