The Gringo: A Memoir (17 page)

CHAPTER
32

C
hristmas was coming. And it was close to a full year since I’d seen my brother. He was midway through his final year of law school, and four months before, he bought tickets to come visit over the New Year. We planned to spend a couple of days at my site—more than enough time for him to get the gist of how I lived—then fly to Cartagena, Colombia, for a week on the beach with another friend of ours. I was looking forward to showing him what my life here was like, but I was much more eager for Colombia, which would finally be a vacation for the both of us.

As if it weren’t depressing enough being alone and far from family on Christmas, the sights and sounds in Zumbi didn’t make it easier. Despite being highly Catholic, the Ecuadorians didn’t think much of Christmas. Fair enough. After all, the American brand of Christmas is not really a religious one. There was something about the alternating heat and downpours and the few weak attempts at decorations—a fake tree lit up here, some pathetic tinsel there—that made this extra depressing.

One day, Steven, the twelve-year-old who lived across a courtyard from my new apartment, asked if Santa was real.

“Of course,” I said.

“And he makes all the toys on Christmas?” he asked.

“Well, actually he has a bunch of little helper people,” I said, a direct translation for “elves” not coming to mind, “and he just delivers the toys on Christmas Eve.”

Steven nodded as if it made perfect sense. “And he goes to all the homes where you’re from?”

I nodded.

“Then why doesn’t he come to Ecuador?” he asked.

“Well, sure he does, he goes everywhere,” I assured him.

His mother walked out their front door to chime in. “No, he’s never come here,” she said matter-of-factly. She wanted to know why. I assumed she was playing along, just like me.

“Well, maybe it’s because he doesn’t speak Spanish,” I said.

The look in Steven’s eyes told me that this made perfect sense. But the look in his mother’s eyes revealed the mistake I’d made. She, too, thought that Santa Claus really delivered toys to Americans on Christmas. This thirty-two-year-old mother and her young son couldn’t understand why Ecuador wasn’t as lucky to be graced by his jolly presence. I’d flippantly given them an answer to a major question in their lives.

Over the following year, as Steven became a teenager, I attempted to compensate for this conversation by giving some straight talk whenever I got the opportunity. When he asked if Superman and Spiderman were real and living in the States, I said no. He responded by informing me that I was full of shit and of course they existed.

MY BROTHER, ANDREW, WAS FLYING
into Guayaquil on the twenty-seventh. I decided it would be too disheartening to actually stay at my site on Christmas day, so I got on a bus for several hours and headed to a hostel in Vilcabamba where I could hang out with some backpackers who also found themselves far from home on Christmas. Vilcabamba is one of Ecuador’s few non-beach, non-Galápagos destinations that tourists pass through with any sort of regularity (and even then, due to the fact that it’s fourteen hours south of Quito, ten hours from Guayaquil, and six hours from Cuenca, it’s not exactly a hot spot of tourism). I figured that I’d find at least some English speakers to talk to. On Christmas Eve day, I got on a 5 a.m. bus out of my site.

The weather in Vilcabamba is nearly always perfect: mild, dry, and sunny. This time it was no different. I relaxed by the pool and met the travelers there. The group was your typical cross-section of globetrotters you’d find anywhere: some Canadians and Australians, a couple of Brits, and some Europeans—usually German or French. They were all friendly.

I had plenty of opportunities for the same conversation I had every time I ran into other foreigners: I ask them how long they’ve been passing through these parts. They give me a rundown of their journey and time in South America. “And what about you?” they ask. “Oh, I live here,” I say. Sometimes, depending on where I am, I’ll point my finger, “About a five-hour bus trip in that direction.” Then comes the scripted conversation about my Peace Corps experience. And what an experience it must be! Sometimes they’ll ooh and ahh and comment on how difficult that time and distance away probably is. Even the ones who aren’t interested do a magnificent job of pretending. The Americans have all heard of the Peace Corps and most of the foreigners have, too; most are legitimately interested in what my life here is like and why I chose to do it.

At the hostel, I was having this conversation by the pool with an Australian man my age. He was a hulking sort of guy—the type I imagined being in a brutal Australian surfer gang. After I described what I did and what it was all about, he said loud enough for the others lounging around the pool to hear, “That’s really something! There’s U.S. power at work, doing good around the world. You only ever hear bad things about them yanks—fighting everybody’s wars, being arrogant—but look at this guy here. Ha! That’s incredible!”

His passion embarrassed me a little. There was a Canadian couple nearby and I could feel them rolling their eyes. I’m not sure if it was because of the Australian’s monologue or because of his manner itself. He was loud, bordering on obnoxious. But I liked talking with him. We talked some more that afternoon. It reminded me how the reputation that Americans have gotten overseas for being loud, rude, and disrespectful—being the “ugly American”—was wrong or at least outdated. In my experience, if anyone has filled that role, it’s the Brits or the Aussies. Perhaps in backlash to knowing this stereotype haunts us, most traveling Americans I see try hard to be reserved, polite, and hyper-aware of local customs. I suppose there are many who would prove me wrong, but then that’s the problem with stereotypes.

As the sun went down, everyone ate and then migrated to the bar.

I also met an Australian woman my age who’d been traveling alone in South America for a few months. She was skinny but gorgeous, with curly auburn hair, fair skin, and dark eyes. We drank liquor all night and talked about South America. Somewhere between whisky shots, the clock struck midnight and it was Christmas. With my head spinning, I went to bed in my cabin and she in hers. I remember just wanting to lie down next to her and smell her hair. That would have been nice.

I woke up on Christmas day and got on the Internet while eating breakfast in the hostel’s dining area. I sent an email I’d prewritten to a doctor back home—the father of a fellow volunteer I’d contacted before about my medical difficulties. He said he would try to connect me with a “team of urologists” he worked with in the U.S. The email began with the usual greetings, then continued with a rundown on the entire history of my illness—from the first electric jolt of pain in my testicles to the trials I’d gone through since then, complete with throbbing nuts, an aching prostate, and a rectal sonogram. My hope was that I would have some answers after the New Year. If not, that one-year-in-country mark in February was looking better and better as a time to throw in the towel and take my aching man parts back home with an excuse to leave that no one could ever blame me for.

While online, I read news websites for the Christmassy stuff and for an update on the world. Most of it focused on the fact that we were getting ready to say goodbye (or, more appropriately, good riddance) to another decade. Everyone was coming out with their top-ten lists for this or that—movies, sports events, political goings-on. It seemed to me it couldn’t have been a worse decade. The “zeroes” or “aughts” essentially began with the September 11 attacks, and then descended into wars, a worsening environment, and, to cap things off, a financial disaster that sent ripples around the world. During this time, we of course got iPods and HDTV, but no solutions to any of the things that mattered. In all, it was a decade so disastrous, it’s probably fitting we could never even agree on what to call it.

The one glimmer of hope before I left for Ecuador was the election of Obama (like him or not, his election did say something about our country), but lately even that was beginning to feel like a giant letdown. I wasn’t the only person struggling to see what had actually changed about the way we did government.

Using the fast Internet to catch up on the news wasn’t necessarily a good idea.

I got away from the computer and went to the pool. I drank rum and smoked Honduran cigars with a guy from Detroit who’d been traveling everywhere south of the United States for the last six months. He was in his thirties and had saved up for almost ten years so he could drop everything and backpack around Latin America. He said he was spending about twenty dollars a day and could afford to go on for another six months.

That night was more low-key than the previous. I beat a German guy in the championship match of a ping-pong tournament and won a fifth of rum to take home with me. I went to bed early and left the next morning as the sun was coming up. I planned to take the bus back to Zumbi and prepare for my brother’s visit before turning around the next day and heading for Loja, where I’d catch a plane to Guayaquil to greet Andrew when he landed.

CHAPTER
33

T
he prop plane I boarded for Guayaquil had room for eighteen passengers. As we ascended out of the valley west of Loja, I saw a beautiful patchwork of sugarcane fields cradled by the dry landscape. The plane immediately banked up to get over the high mountains surrounding the valley, and seconds later, we were in the clouds.

The trip from Loja to Guayaquil is ten hours by bus, but forty minutes by plane. We landed in the late afternoon, and I killed several hours at the airport until my brother arrived. Seeing a member of my family for the first time in nearly a year was almost too good to be true. We hugged and then hustled to find a taxi.

We planned to sleep a few hours at a nearby hotel since we had an early flight back to Loja the following morning. At the time, I didn’t want to spend a minute more than we had to in Guayaquil.

I never liked the city in the first place—big and dirty and filled with people who reminded me too much of my neighbors in La Segua. But also, we’d been receiving crime updates by email lately and many of them occurred in Guayaquil. In addition to emails from Pilar about Peace Corps–related incidents and warnings, we’d gotten several from the Regional Security Officers with the U.S. Embassy. The crimes were increasingly gruesome—and more and more of them were involving the same express kidnappings that the volunteer described to us during training.

A recent case concerned two American couples and was like most other express kidnappings, except that at the end, the two wives were raped before being dropped off with their husbands in the middle of nowhere. Reading that email turned my stomach. It made me even more cynical about Ecuador’s hopes of tourism becoming the lifeblood of its economy.
Who’s going to come here if you can’t safely use a taxi in the country’s richest city?
I thought.

This was all circling through my head, but fortunately my brother and I were together in that city for less than seven hours.

Andrew came bearing gifts of magazines, flavored sunflower seeds, and a new pair of shoes. I barely slept and the next morning we were up and out of there. Andrew took one look at the plane (the very one I’d taken the evening before) and shook his head laughing, “You sure about this?” We both smiled and talked about the thrills of the developing world.

The plane ride was quick and easy. Then we hopped on a bus for the four-hour ride to Zumbi.

I’d taken the bus between my site and Loja so many times, I’d almost forgotten that the twists and turns down shoddy roads at lunatic speeds could be startling for a newcomer. Andrew took it in stride, often shaking his head in disbelief. I, for whatever reason, felt the urge to let out my frustrations with the various nuisances. At one point, we were stopped for half an hour while a beer truck that had just crashed was cleared off the road. Shattered bottles were littered everywhere. Foamy beer washed across the pavement.

“How does someone manage to get into an accident like that?” my brother asked.

“Easy,” I said. “Ecuadorians were driving, that’s how.” And it all came pouring out like this probably because I normally had no one to share these everyday absurdities with.

Though he was older, I couldn’t help feeling like I was looking after my brother while he was there. First off, he spoke no Spanish. So I fretted about translating everything. And I stressed about making sure our trip went smoothly and making him feel comfortable and not letting things fall apart on his one and only visit to my alternate universe. I got all worked up feeling the responsibility.

When our bus stopped at Zamora, midway between Loja and Zumbi, Andrew hopped out to run to the bathroom. I gave him the nickel it would cost to use the facilities and I told him to hurry. For a country with a flimsy relationship with time, bus terminals were the one place that had little margin for error. I knew the bus would pull back out of the station in just a minute or two.

When the gears shifted into reverse a minute later and Andrew still wasn’t back, I stood up, my fists clenched into white knuckles, looking to see if he was on his way back. I began sweating. I didn’t see him, but the bus hadn’t begun to pull all the way out just yet. Right when I was about to yell at the driver to stop and wait, I saw my brother walking up nonchalantly, as if there were time to spare. I felt like yelling at him, “What the fuck! You can’t dillydally around like that, you gotta hurry, man. Don’t do that to me again!” But I managed to hold it in.

“Wow, he was getting ready to leave,” Andrew said. “Did I make you nervous?”

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging it off with a chuckle.

My paranoia and protectiveness carried on when we got to my site. I’d only been in the apartment a month. It was scant for furniture: In the main room, just a desk, a table, and some plastic chairs; in my bedroom, just a crappy mattress on a bed frame it didn’t fit and a splintery dresser I piled my clothes into. For now at least, it was the bare bones. And when we walked in, the apartment stank: While I was gone, a rat had eaten the poison under my sink and crawled inside the wall to die.

I wanted my brother to get an impression of how I lived. But with him finally there, I was embarrassed. When I saw him walk out the front door to my outside bathroom wrapped in a towel and wearing my ragged sandals to take a shower, or hunch over at the too-low sink with the garden-hose-looking faucet in my kitchen, or struggle with the smell of the dead rat that was decomposing in an unreachable space in my wall, or trip across the shredded linoleum on my floor, or look at my foam twin-size mattress with a sinkhole in the middle, I was reminded of where I lived. It pissed me off. All I could hope was that the cats didn’t choose that week to unleash another volley of piss down from the rafters. (When I told my new landlady about the cats pissing through my ceiling, her response was, “There are no cats here.”)

Andrew offered to buy me a nicer chair. He couldn’t stand to see me sitting at my desk in the ass-numbing plastic patio chair I’d bought for six bucks.

“No!” I said. “I don’t need a new goddamn chair.” I felt lonely just saying this out loud. Perhaps it was the ego factor of feeling like I needed to rough it, but I sure as hell wasn’t in the mood for anyone’s help—and certainly not their pity.

“What’s your problem? I was just offering to help,” he said with a scowl that made me feel worthless. “It’d be my gift to you.”

“It’s because I feel like with every comment it seems you’re reminding me of what a shit hole I live in. Whether it’s the chairs or the crappy linoleum floor or the shit food, or the way Zumbi moves in slow motion . . .”

He shook his head and we were quiet for a while and let it drop.

Zumbi was, indeed, moving in slow motion—even more so than usual. The heat was so heavy and strong that stepping outside into the white glare didn’t feel anything like the damp Amazon that my brother was expecting. I showed him everything there was to see rather quickly, and not surprisingly, there wasn’t much else to do. One afternoon, we went to the derelict soccer field at the local high school and tossed my football around. I’d brought the ball with me from home a year earlier and this was the first time I’d inflated it. The next day we went on a hike and got a good view looking down on Zumbi from up in the foothills. We turned around to head back when we both felt like we were getting heat sickness.

For a spare mattress, I’d borrowed a two-inch-thick roll-up thing from a neighbor and put it on my floor with a sleeping bag. My brother was so uncomfortable the first night that I offered to take it the next two. My bed wasn’t a huge upgrade or anything—especially since I had only one sheet at the time—but he seemed pleased.

Several months later, I would grow comfortable in that little apartment, once I had time to make it mine. After those few days with my brother, though, I was happy to leave it—and Zumbi. Our last night there, we both lay in our beds talking late into the night. He couldn’t go to sleep and my balls were flaring up. I talked a little bit about how much pain I was in and how I’d thought about Early Terminating because at least at home I could sit in pain with some relative comfort around me.

I wanted to say so much but couldn’t get it out. I didn’t know where to start. I felt disconnected from everyone and everything. It was suffocating. But I kept it to myself and we spent the late hours talking about all the places we’d traveled to together and how, by far, this felt the strangest. We talked about that and whatever else came to our minds that didn’t cause too much laboring to get out in the open.

I was relieved to lock the door behind me and head out on my first real vacation in a year. Andrew pointed out that this was probably the first time in history that anyone had been relieved to go
into
Colombia because it meant they finally could, as I’d said,
let their guard down
.