Medicina china

the other night talomé took me to his doctor, a paunchy young chinese man with a practice not far from the maquila. we parked right in front of the gate to a residential street that is next to franklin’s building. the outside is blue, with a tigo (cell phone carrier) advertisement and inside the ceilings are high and the walls mostly bare. besides the medical practice franklin offers acupuncture and tai chi classes.

doctor franklin saw talomé first and gave him a whole collection of bottled something or other that kind of stinks. then i went, even though i don’t really have any problem other than that i’m too skinny. so i told him that my hands and feet are always cold (because it has been freezing this whole week and i left all my good winter clothes in alaska), that i eat a lot and don’t gain weight and that i have poor circulation.

according to doctor franklin i don’t have enough chi in my blood (that’s the jist of it anyways, the diagnosis was accompanied by a lovely, illustrated story about healing wounded warriors before the use of blood transfusions) so i got seven little white balls.

when they’re opened they have these little pellets inside that sort of look like bb shot. i think they might have some cinnamon in them (at least, that’s what i thought franklin said) but i really don’t know. the first day i took them, after cutting through the wax and popping the plastic eggs open, i took them in installments. but they’re really hard to swallow because they move around a lot in your mouth. now i just dump them from the plastic case down my throat. talomé swears he’s better already but my feet and hands are still like blocks of ice…

Iximché

Fontana di Trevi, october

i was sort of afraid of the tourists in rome so i spent the first two days on the outskirts—at ostia antica, the roman port ruins, and at the fishing village of anzio. the second night a lovely woman in the hostel took me for a night tour of rome. we stopped at the fontana and i threw in my coin, but only one. apparently, by throwing in one i get to come back to rome. an additional deposit would have gotten me back to rome permanently, and yet another would have landed me an italian husband. but alas, i didn’t know…

ya llegó el verano

sólo que aquí en verano hace frío. y en invierno hace calor. y yo, sin gorra, y con el pelo casi, casi rapado, me estoy muriendo de frío.

a menos de que por ahí encuentro a uno que me acobije.

eso.

hoy, mucho amor.

este poema me lo envió curro hace minutos. es de neruda y es lindo. www.neruda.uchile.cl/obra/obraversosdelcapitan11.html

La Maquila

i live in zona 2, which is near zona 1, the center of guatemala city. i am re-reading El señor presidente right now and all of the action takes place within a half-mile radius of the house.

four other people live in here, all boys. i sleep in an alcove off of the living room and i have a huge desk to pile all of my books on. i never use desks to work at, only to organize my books and papers. i work at the kitchen table, or on the coffee table.

i live with an ex-cop and a black belt, both of whom are also former priests, a very tall australian and a totally laid-back costa rican. and antonio, a displaced malagueño, who used to live in the maquila, but moved out for a woman. the woman didn´t work out and i suspect he´d rather be back with us. it´s a good set up, overall. and i kind of like being the only girl.

we also live with a bunch of cucarachas. but, as josé (the costa rican) says, "we´re like the buddhists, we respect all life." and since i´m also a cucaracha metida, of sorts, that´s ok. anyways, smashing cucarachas is gross, and insecticide is nastier.

anyways, this entry is dedicated to the boys, who in the midst of about 21 empty gallo cans threatened to find my blog today and disseminate the address via gmail. a ver cuánto tardan...

VI Thesis on the Philosophy of History (Walter Benjamin)

“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”

Pesadillas

Saturday night I went to Antigua with one of my housemates. In a new Jetta, from the decaying centre of Guatemala City to the historic, and well-maintained, plaza of Antigua. We walked around the park at dark, and ate in a lovely restaurant that used to be a funeral parlor. My housemate’s grandfather was laid out there. On the drive back, cresting the hill that separates the old capital from the new, it rained, hard. The road was dark, and the tinted* windows made it seem darker. I felt safe, and dry, and warm, driving fast on the curves of the highway.

I slept fitfully though, with my recurrent memory nightmare that’s plagued me since the very end of May. Or earlier than that perhaps. In the middle of the night I felt something brush the side of my cheek, trace a trail from my temple downwards. In the morning, when I woke up, a column of miniature ants walked alongside my pillow.

*Almost everyone has darkly tinted windows here, which is against Guatemalan law. The idea is that if others can’t see in your car, they won’t be able to tell whether or not you’re carrying weapons. The absurd thing is that during the day most people drive with their windows rolled down anyways.

“Hope is a memory that desires” Balzac

the camera left the house!!

i went out to buy beer for my lovely alcoholic housemates this morning and noticed a bunch of folks gathering in the park for a march. the first in 25 years. this week orders for the arrest of the architects of guatemala´s massacres went out, except one. rios montt, a super powerful untouchable guy, was excluded. so today´s march was calling for his arrest and i tagged along. the last photo is of some street theatre showing rios montt in a cage. everyone cheered.

here everyone is in the centre of guatemala city. luckily, all of the women hid their faces because i no longer have a copy of photoshop...

this is one chant, the other is:

alerta, alerta, alerta que camina
la lucha por la vida en america latina

encarcelado

space. person.

i am trying to decipher how i feel right now, and where to go from here.

i can see how people become agoraphobes, afraid to leave their house. and i don’t even feel safe in this house because i am afraid someone will follow me here. it is so roomy that it’s impossible to have knowledge of the whole structure. the long room where i write used to be a garage and there is an internal patio to my left and two whole stories above me. twelve more rooms. too much space for me to have a handle on all of it. when the boys are home the house changes, they occupy the empty rooms and fill the house, pushing aside the insecurity. alexis, you wrote about this, alone in a cabin on a dark night.

in the street, after monday’s lesson, i always look behind me. continual right-left backwards glance to take in what’s going on, who and how many are around me. i long for a rear-view mirror (seriously!). even still… there are too many stories of other people not getting involved. it’s the saddest thing, really, fear and powerlessness. translated as apathy.

and i hate the “solution” as i’ve seen it. car windows are tinted, dark, and people i love have guns in their homes. the rich have their enclaves, heavily gated and guarded. parts of avenida de la reforma, shopping malls and teenagers driving cars full to the brim with bodyguards. big guns. everywhere. at first i thought that—as shitty as this is—it made me feel safer, but today i realized that it doesn’t. more than one gun means the possibility of a gunfight.

my body feels different to me here. i know part of it is just the residue of monday’s surprise, but it’s also my body hearing every story that’s been told to me since i arrived. today i noticed that i cringe when i leave the house. because there’s nothing that will make me feel safe here. and i am craving that illusion. for me this is a shock: the mobility i had in paris reduced drastically by fear. a fear part paranoia, heightened by imagination, yes, but marinated in reality. i haven’t ever left the house with my camera. i never carry a bag. i don’t leave the house after dark.

for people here, i suppose the change has been more gradual for them. for those without, maybe not as much—they still can’t go to the shopping mall in zona 9. for those with some, they avoid buses and have to take taxis. because gring@s are far from being the only targets. the streets are lonely after dark. markets, parks, avenues, highways have less traffic. and yet this is life. i remember thinking the same thing in the west bank, going through yet another checkpoint staffed by belligerent and hostile IDF: this is life. and remembering that as scared as i was by the obnoxious soldier asking me the same damn questions about where i was going and why i was here i would still make it across. and some of the passengers—work visas and all—wouldn’t. and many, many others can never cross at all.

so i feel afraid. and pushed out. into this house, off of the street, away from the night, without my “things” (earrings, obviously, but also necklace, camera…). and i also feel the paranoia i felt at the checkpoints and in the tel aviv airport and i recognize it as paranoia. still. here there are too many stories. and too many guns. and too much impunity. and too many dead. i think, as in salvador, there are more deaths now, due to crime (both miliary organized narcotrafficking and random shit) than there were during the war. and this is life.

and i can go home. which, honestly, is what i consider every day, every time i hear another story or read the newspaper or watch the yellow news. and then i think about the injustice of that which—while far from obligating me to stay here—highlights all the more how this seething, voracious capitalism isn’t just economics. it’s the organization of space. and how your body feels.

crap. a republican is in the house. my state, my lovely red state, voted its true colors again yesterday. palin it is. when will home ever be the utopia i want it to be? (of course, utopia does not equal blue, but hell, at this point i´d settle for libertarian...)

iliamna and fog in kachemak bay

writing....?

beautiful, treacherous mudflats.

the catacombs have been a tourist attraction in paris since the middle of the 19th century.

yup. bones in an old, damp, dark quarry. 7 euros.

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roma, de noche

i haven’t been back here for more than two years. and here was never home. it only now occurrs to me that all of my trips here—even the first, when i had to have an actual visa, and a letter from my parents because i was fifteen—have been some sort of tourism. learning-spanish tourism, accompaniment-in-a-village-before-the-peace-accords tourism, buying-novels-for-research tourism and, now, hanging-out-in-a-polluted-and-very-dangerous-city-while-i-write-about-a-guatemalan-author-who-spent-most-of-his-life-abroad (in the "first world")-anyways tourism.

tourism in europe is easier, obviously. i blended in well enough in france, felt like a local with my croissant routine and the easy navigation of the city. it was still easy in rome, even though my tourist existence was superfluous to—and threatened by—the throngs of religious pilgrims and tour groups.

i am curious about the expats who live here, work here, and somehow survive on guatemalan peace industry wages (NGOs, aid organizations and foreign embassies). are they still tourists? and the woman from lansing that i met on the plane, a conservative housewife with nine children and enough missionary zeal to adopt an additional child, a guatemalan “orphan”. or is she on a business trip? **

my unsettlement here is maybe about freedom of movement. guate is different now, more dangerous, and i’m not to take the bus, or walk around after dark. i am identifiable no matter what i wear or how i speak or how many tortillas i buy. and yet i am here, walking around—safely or otherwise—in this city. i can speak spanish—with whatever accent—because half my life ago i studied here, and i flew here on an easy flight from detroit. and so i move. and so does the partner of the woman who video-chats next to me, working in the states. but no one would call him a tourist.

**the adoption situation here is wild, and i’m only beginning to figure it all out. international adoptions were almost halted last month, because of major concerns about trafficking and child theft (yes, seriously, i’m not talking about organ snatchers or chupacabras here, but babies stolen from their families in marketplaces and villages), but the lawyer lobbyists were able to challenge it on “constitutional” grounds. babies are big $ here, and handled by private organizations with few legal checks and balances.

caricias callejeras

salí de casa, rumbo al centro. quería comprar fruta en el mercado central. caminando por la sexta avenida, entre los puestos de ropa, cds pirateados y gente, siento dos manos acariciar mi nuca y llegar a las orejas. sentí un calor, agradable, y después un jalón ligero y el retiro de las manos. me salió un "ay" suave, por la boca.

ya me han advertido, bastante, acerca de robos en autobuses, en la calle, en la casa. tengo un miedo nervioso y un estrés tangible. salí de la casa sin bolsa, sin mochila, sólo yo, alta y güera, avanzando en la acera.

cuando las manos se retiraron volteé y vi la espalda de un señor cuarentón, algo bajo, y gordito, de chamarra azul, escapándose por la calle. yo seguí adelante igual, sin decir nada, sin gritar, el calor ahora una leve irritación provocada por la falta de tres aros de oro.