The Gringo: A Memoir (12 page)

CHAPTER
22

W
hen the days got long and the rain let up and I had nothing to do, I spent a lot of time walking around Zumbi. In case it wasn’t odd enough to have a white American, out of nowhere, living in their community, the town’s inhabitants were now treated to this strange creature wandering aimlessly at all hours of the day without any particular destination.

I passed them as they sat—on curbs in front of dusty streets, on splintered wooden benches in front of one-room concrete houses, in plastic chairs on the sidewalk. And they stared. At me. The gringo.

The town of Zumbi is several dozen acres cut out of the jungle, located on the western end of a 291-square-kilometer county that’s 75 percent deforested. The hills surrounding Zumbi are part of the Cordillera del Condor, a range of mountains formed independently of the Andes thousands of years ago.

From my house, I could walk southward to the other far end of town. I would pass an elementary school with paint peeling off the walls and murals that announced both the glorious nature of Zumbi, the “Ecological Garden of the Amazon,” and an opposition to abortion. I passed store after store, each selling the same things: milk, candy, toilet paper, Coca-Cola, and bread. I passed stray dogs that came after me barking savagely until I picked up a rock and they scattered away; I passed other dogs too hungry to lift themselves up off the sidewalk. I passed a bar that had empty bottles of several exotic liquors on the shelf, but really sold only one drink: Pilsener, Ecuador’s national beer of choice.

I passed by tiny restaurants that served the same thing as the restaurant a block down from them: boiled chicken and rice. I passed row after row of crumbling cinder-block houses, interrupted only by the mayor’s hulking, multistory, brand-new, Mediterranean-style mansion, which was squeezed in between an abandoned lot and a one-room wooden shack on the other side. (The mayor’s annual salary was about $40,000, or nearly fifteen times the salary of the average citizen in Zumbi.)

I passed by miniature hardware stores—lots of them. For a town of around a thousand, there were nearly a dozen hardware stores all selling the exact same products, from paint to barbed-wire to gardening tools. The lack of entrepreneurial diversity is something you see a lot of in Latin America—a guy will open a hardware store simply because his friend down the street has the same business, not realizing that if they each had a unique business, both would make more money—but Zumbi’s oversaturated market of hardware stores was like nothing I’d ever seen. It’s a town where the water and power go out on a weekly basis and people all over the place are coming down with bizarre illnesses, but if you ever need a shovel or a screw driver, you needn’t walk more than forty yards.

I passed by a chicken, or
pollo
, establishment with a sign out front that, due to a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters, appeared to say that they had “Polio for sale.” I passed by a store that sold bootlegged CDs and had converted its back room into a makeshift arcade by setting up a couple of dusty XBOXes with old TV monitors and plastic chairs in front. I passed by children playing soccer, or kicking dogs, or yelling at me in broken English, “Hello, gringo!” or “Good morning, teacher,” even when it was late at night (and even though I wasn’t their teacher). I passed by barefoot drunken men with food smeared on their faces who yelled, “Hey, gringo, come drink, c’mon, just come drink, here have a drink.” I passed by women between the ages of ten and sixty who made catcalls at me.

Four blocks past the park and away from the river, things abruptly turn from city to countryside. Since the municipal building is at the far end of town, it’s surrounded by the farmland that extends from the outer edges of Zumbi up into the hills where farmers grow corn and bananas and cacao, but mostly tear down trees to make room for cattle grazing.

I walked up and down each of these blocks, sometimes saying hello to people only to have them stare blankly back at me.

And one day I walked into an old building on the edge of town that had history books and old newspaper clips about the region (along with a surprisingly large amount of Scientology material). I peeled back the dusty pages and read about the land and the people, going back hundreds of years to when the first inhabitants spilled over the Andes and into this part of the Amazon.

Those first people were the Shuar—an indigenous group best known for shrinking the heads of their enemies after battle. Later, of course, the Spanish arrived—changing the religion, language, and bloodlines in the area forever.

Then I read about the country’s independence, and it explained the strange maps I’d seen hanging in classrooms, with Ecuador’s southeastern border not in its usual spot but instead bulging far out into Peru’s Amazon territory. This cartographic aggression resulted from over a century of border disputes between the two countries that had caused military skirmishes close to Zumbi as recently as the ’90s. The disagreement was ultimately put to rest with a peace treaty in 1998. Now, more than a decade later, for one of the country’s most isolated provinces, Zamora Chinchipe remains heavily militarized, with small army bases dotting the hillsides and lining the rivers in even the most obscure locales.

Zamora Chinchipe didn’t really start to grow until the ’80s, when modern mining got underway. But in the three decades since, its population has increased to only about 75,000, making it mainland Ecuador’s second-least populated province, despite being one of the four largest in land mass.

Zumbi’s county, Centinela del Condor, was the smallest in Zamora Chinchipe. Up until the ’90s, Zumbi had looked the same for several decades. It began as farmland with small houses scattered here and there. Eventually more jungle was hacked away and what is now the location of the central park began to take shape. Soon the church was built and a few other wooden buildings came in around it. But the lack of a car bridge had a moat-like effect on Zumbi, preventing it and everything to its east from developing as quickly as the rest of the province. And nowadays, the only remnant of the Shuar in the area is its name—
zumbi
was the Shuar word for a type of fish that was once abundant in the Rio Zamora—and a tiny Shuar village located in the hills an hour east of Zumbi. When I’d visited the village with FODI, it was the saddest, poorest place I encountered in Ecuador—complete with food being boiled in outdoor cauldrons over burning trash and thirteen-year-old mothers without shoes.

What I didn’t read about the history of the area, I learned from listening to some of the old men I passed on the streets. They were among the original settlers who’d come to build roads or mine for gold or shoot at Peruvian helicopters decades ago. And they had watched as bridges got built, roads got paved, and more people moved in.

CHAPTER
23

I
was adjusting to life in Zumbi. By late August I’d spent more time (eight weeks) in my new site than I had in my coastal nightmare. I also eclipsed the half-year-in-country mark and somehow convinced myself this milestone meant something.

It didn’t.

The days were long and I had less and less work with FODI. The constant rain from my first months in Zumbi gave way to a penetrating jungle heat. Shop owners would hang large plastic tarps in their storefronts to shield themselves from the blinding sun. Zumbi usually moved in slow motion, and the heat slowed it down even more. Even the buses passing through town were never in a hurry to get anywhere. They idled near the side of the road for up to forty-five minutes, filling the most crowded street in town with gasoline fumes.

Because I didn’t feel entirely comfortable cooking in Graciela and Consuela’s roach-infested kitchen, I would eat out at the roadside cafés frequently. It was a good way for me to meet people in the community. Plus, a full meal was dirt cheap. For just two dollars, I’d get a heaping plate of chicken and rice—with a serving of questions on the side.

“Where are you from?”

I told them.

“Ah, American.”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here?”

I explained.

“Do you like it here?”

Early on, I would answer this question by playing into their intracountry xenophobia: “I was living on the coast and I had some security issues, so now I’m here and I like it much better.”

“Yes,” they’d say. “Bad people on the coast. Can’t trust ’em. Bad, dirty, violent people. Here, the people are nice.”

Then they’d lay into me with the real kickers. And it would go something like this:

“Is the United States bigger than Ecuador?”

Or: “Does the United States border an ocean?”

And then: “Have you met Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

“Actually, yes,” I’d say, and they’d ignore me to jump to the next, apparently rhetorical, question.

“Which part of the U.S. are you from?”

“A state called Colorado, in the West,” I’d say.

“I can’t pronounce that,” they’d say. “Cow-loo . . . what?”

“It’s a Spanish word,” I’d say. “You have a province here that used to have the same word in it—
Santo Domingo de los Colorados
.”

“Oh, Colorado,” they’d say. And then, “Do you have black people in the U.S.?”

One night while I was at one of the two watering holes in Zumbi, I put my beer on the table, looked at the wall, and saw a Che Guevara poster. It was taped up between ones of Christina Aguilera and MTV’s Lauren Conrad. I asked the owner if she liked Che.

“Love him,” she said.

“So are you a fan of Rafael Correa?” I asked. Correa, their president (and University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana alumnus), is known as a leftist.

“No, no,” she said. “I voted for—” She named one of the other half-dozen dudes who had just run unsuccessfully against Correa. The guy she named was to the right.

“You voted for the right-wing candidate?” I said.

“
Sí
!”

“But you think Che is the man?”

“
Sí
!”

ONCE, IN A RESTAURANT, I
had a conversation that went like this:

Teenage girl: “Where are you from?”

Me: “The U.S.”

Girl: “Ah, and do you speak English?”

Me: “Yes, it’s our country’s primary language.” (Had I been in a more chipper mood, I might have added the surely mind-blowing statistic that the U.S. also had thirty million
more
Spanish speakers than Ecuador.)

Girl: “Cool, do you speak Spanish as well?”

Me: “Yes . . . wait, what?”

Girl: “Spanish. Do you speak it?”

Me: “We’ve been speaking Spanish the entire time I’ve been sitting here.”

Girl: “So do you speak Spanish?”

Me: “I guess not.”

I finished my meal in silence.

I TRIED MY BEST TO
rotate between the very few eating venues in the town. Only on one occasion did my dining experience force me to boycott a location.

As I was finishing the food on my plate, the cook/waiter (he was the only other person in the restaurant at the time) came from behind the counter and sat down across from me. He had long hair and looked like an emaciated version of Carlos Santana.

“Gringo?”

“Yes.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No.”

“So then what do you do?” He smiled with raised eyebrows and the vaguely detached look of someone who had no idea how creepy he was.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you do to . . . you know?”

“Are you asking if I go to the whorehouses?” I said.

“Maybe.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Oh, I see. So then what do you do?” He made an exaggerated jerking-off motion with his hand.

“You want to know if I jerk off?”

His eyes widened, like I’d just breached some taboo subject.

“It’s only because I heard gringos have big ones.” He motioned with his hands about a yard apart and then brought them together to suggest a girth that would make even a mare wince.

“Really?” I began pushing my chair out to stand up and leave.

“I bet you have a big one. Do you have a big cock? I bet you’ve got one, don’t you.”

I stood up.

“Have I offended you?”

“Oh no, not at all,” I said, starting to walk out.

“I’m very sorry,” he said, “it’s just that—” He motioned again with his hands suggesting a whale-sized member.

I headed for the door. I forget whether I paid.