NicaDayz - Drinking against it

Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 15:38:00 -0300
From: jberman@xxx.xxx.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Subject: Drinking Against It
dear gang,

It's tuesday morning and after delivering the 50 lbs of soy seed to the farm (which involved a daring daybreak solo paddle across the river in a two-and-a-half by four foot nearly-sinking craft), I'm back in the bluegreen kitchen light giving myself the 'ole eucalypto vapor treatment, towel on the head and everything to try to fight this cold coming on. It's stir-fry and guitar night over at Jaime's tonight, and then tomorrow I take off again for the rest of the week. We have an IST (in-service training) out at the beach and then July 4th celebrations in Managua at the American School (burgers 'n Budweiser - U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!). So everyone have a good one and I apologize that this week's note is such a downer, but then again, it's not really my fault.

Paz y luz,
Josue

In the book I just finished, 'Islands in the Stream,' Hemingway's hero, Thomas Hudson, is being driven through La Havana, Cuba. It is early in the morning and he is drinking a Tom Collins. "This was the part he did not like on the road into town. This was really the part he carried the drink for. I drink against poverty, dirt, four-hundred-year-old dust, the nose-snot of children, cracked palm fronds, roofs made from hammered tins, the shuffle of untreated syphilis, sewage in the old beds of brooks, lice on the bare necks of infested poultry, scale on the backs of old men's necks, the smell of old women, and the full-blast radio, he thought. It is a hell of a thing to do. I ought to look at it closely and do something about it. Instead you have your drink the way they carried smelling salts in the old days."

This is where I live, right down to the snot and the dust and the tin roofs. This is where I have lived for well over a year now, so it is all quite normal to me. Most of the time. Also, the people in my pueblo have a way of smiling out from under their poverty. Those full-blast radios that are always on in my neighbors' homes play happy music; merengues, salsas, accordion-driven Mexican folk polkas (forget that they start playing at 5:00 in the fucking morning!). I guess when you can barely afford to feed your children each day, you have to keep your spirits up the best you can.

Sometimes, however, the desperate sadness of it peaks through the thin veneer of contentedness. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that everyone in the third world is sad, or that you need lots of money to be happy. That's ridiculous. But I think you do need to be healthy and safe and loved. And sometimes, walking around the muddy puddles that make up my street, dodging dead, fist-sized toads and gray lumps of dogshit, pigshit, horseshit, cowshit, and sometimes even peopleshit, I look into the dark, window-less houses I pass and I get a glimpse of the despair. A tired, exasperated mother, sweeping the dirt in front of her house. A shirtless, drunk father, sitting on his doorstep before noon and looking blankly into the street, unaware of my passing. A dirty, mangy, skeletal dog, loyal to the family that beats and barely feeds him. When I see these scenes, I feel like I'm intruding where I shouldn't be, like I'm seeing them naked or something.

An hour ago, I was standing outside my nextdoor neighbor's house, up on the high curb and talking to don Transito. He is an old, wrinkled, proud-looking man, don Transito, and today he wore plastic green beads around his neck, a light-colored, plaid, longsleeve shirt and a red baseball cap that said "Here Comes Baby!" on it. I had seen him standing in the doorway in the hat, which made me smile, so I climbed up on the curb to take his portrait. When I first moved in last year, don Transito said to me, "Somos dos gatos solteros." We are two single male cats. I liked his style.

Since then, family members have moved in and out of his house. I have no idea of the relations, and I can never keep track of who is actually living there, except for the sounds that carry over my kitchen wall: AM radio crackles, cooking clanking noises, fire snaps from their len~a stove, quiet conversation in the evenings, and the frequent sharp, harsh shouts of a frustrated young mother, followed by a hand striking bare or clothed flesh, and then the inevitable screams and crying of a two-year-old.

While Transito and I were standing on his stoop, talking about the medication he was just given, the young mother emerged from the house and gave me a quick glance. I gritted my teeth and thought about all the noise. The kid was wobbling in front of the house, wearing only a shirt, his little uncircumsized pecker springing around, pointing threateningly. While the mother looked up at me, he slipped and fell head first off the curb, about a foot and a half down into the gutter, which was running with fresh gray-water from two blocks worth of houses. Half of him lay in the muddy street, the other half in sewer water. In the brief moment it took for the kid to realize what had happened and begin to cry, I told her that her nin~o fell. She went over to him, lifted him harshly by the arm and hit him twice on the back, yelling at the same time something like, "What did I tell you?!" Of coure the crying increased into desperate screams to which she responded with another slap: "Callate!" Shut up!

I bit my tongue while the words formed in my head of what I would like to say to her. At the same time the Spanish phrases were forming though, all of my cultural sensitivity receptors also sprung into action. Is this none of my business? Should I just keep my mouth shut? Damnit, why do you have to hit the fucking kid all the time? He fell, for Christ sake, because you weren't watching him, and you punish him for it? She deserves the public embarassment it would cause if I allowed myself to react. Nevertheless, I remained silent and just watched her drag the kid inside. Don Transito also did not speak, but he barely seemed aware of what had just happened. I felt the anger invoked by the sadness of it, and excused myself to go back home.

It was the same anger I felt yesterday when I stepped out of my door and saw the black blobs of motor oil running quickly in the gutter water in front of my house. They flowed past, rounded a little corner, and splashed directly into the river where they pooled together into bigger forms. Gray-black blobs, like lava lamp bubbles, but in really fast motion. As I walked up the street, upstream, around the curves, I saw the two fat, grease-stained moustached men changing the oil of their old truck. Normally, I would leave this be. I try never to preach to people, and I try to give people full respect and the benefit of the doubt. This was totally irresponsible though, and I felt some kind of duty to at least say something. I tried to be polite.

"Que paso," I said, friendly.
"Oye, chele," one of them answered, barely looking up from his work. Hey, whitey.
"Isn't there somewhere else you could put that oil?" I asked.
"This is going straight into the river."
"Don't worry about it, it is nothing."
"But it's contaminating the river."
"It's already contaminated, the river," he said. At this point, he and his buddy were paying more attention to me and four or five kids who were playing with their wooden tops, gathered around to listen.
"Is it going to get better if we continue contaminating it?" I asked rhetorically.
"It kills the mosquitos, the oil," he said cheerfully.
"It kills everything else too," I said.
"No."

"Si, it does. I'm on my way to the school right now to teach the students about our environment. Should I just tell him that the environment is already jodido, so we should just keep contaminating it? Is that what you want your children to learn?" I asked, pointing to the kids listening to us. I had crossed the line of acceptable politeness, I had broken my own rule about preaching, and I felt like a cop, which I did not like.

"Va pue," I muttered disgustedly, and walked away, continuing up the street. A frustrating helplessness overwhelmed me, and I thought about how jodido it all really is, all of it. The toilet of a river, the deforested, nearly desertified hills surrounding the town, the crowded dirt poor houses, and still every other woman on the street pregnant or holding a newborn. And what was I doing about it? I was going to play a nice little game with fifth graders about the parts of the tree, and then sing a song with fourth graders about not throwing trash in the street. I felt very small.

Maybe I would be better off swinging in my hammock with a cold, strong Tom Collins. I could just drink against it all, like Thomas Hudson, drink against the poverty outside my door and let it all crumble in on itself, like it'll all probably do some day anyway.