The Gringo: A Memoir (8 page)

“Oh.”

“Now you see what I’m saying.”

We both stared down the road in silence.

“Okay, so what’s the plan to help these people you say need the help?” I asked.

“That’s easy: When we get the tourism dollars, we’ll do small projects for them here and there—gardens, things like that. You can help us with that,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

Next I asked him about the other group of guides that had formed years back.

“Them? They failed,” Ignacio said. “They didn’t do anything right.”

“What did people say? How come they fell apart?”

“They just didn’t cooperate with anyone,” said Ignacio. “They thought they could do it all on their own.”

I nodded.

“That’s why we—you know, we’ve studied this—and that’s why we know how to do this the right way. And you will help us, of course.”

“Let me ask you another question.”

“Go ahead.”

“What was the original reason you guys wanted a Peace Corps volunteer? I know all the stuff you wrote down on the application, like helping with community tourism projects and environmental education stuff, but what was the number one reason you decided to ask for a volunteer when you guys talked among yourselves—you and Juan and the group?”

He looked me in the eye and said matter-of-factly, “You’re a gringo. You’re white. You speak English.” I nodded in understanding. “And, well, the type of tourists we hope to get here, they’ll be white people who will speak English. So we wanted you here to be able to tell us the types of things that gringos like to see when they come to a place like this. And, of course, you can teach us English and things like that.”

CHAPTER
14

T
he next week Juan drifted back to the Mendoza farm for the arrival of several hundred bamboo saplings that were to be planted in the wetland. It was part of a province-wide reforestation project, the details of which were fuzzy. This stretch of coast is terribly deforested because several decades back, the government actually encouraged it. In fact, they told people they could have large chunks of land for rock-bottom prices as long as they deforested the property. Clearly, the program was a rousing success: Large swaths of Manabí have been turned into scarred and barren tracts worthy of a
National Geographic
photo spread, but not in a good way.

A truck from the government office in Portoviejo dropped off the saplings in the shade of a tree along our driveway. Juan said he’d be off again—on this occasion to visit his parents’ farm an hour away—and I promised to water the bamboo daily while he was gone.

The next time I was eating upstairs with Homero, I asked him about the bamboo that was going to be planted out in the wetland where he fished every day.

“Ha!” he chuckled. “Yes, that. I’m going to pull that bamboo out if it’s planted.”

“How come?”

“Oh man, you don’t think any of that’s going to work, do you?”

“Any of what?” I said.

“All that crap with the wetland—it’s a crock of shit.”

“Which part?”

“All of it, all of Juan’s bullshit.”

“Haven’t you known about these plans for a while?” I said. “You agreed to it all, right?”

“Yeah, I did. Whatever. It’s a crock of shit. Don’t listen to my nephew. Hey, you wanna go to the whorehouse?”

Lately, Homero had been somewhat of a personal hero to me. On the floors above me, Sandra’s pregnant fifteen-year-old sister had gotten her hands on a giant set of dance club–grade speakers and started blasting reggaeton music at a high volume. Reggaeton is a pitifully grinding genre that gained popularity briefly on the U.S. club-music scene in the mid-2000s only to be forgotten one or two hits later. Unfortunately, that popularity never waned in Ecuador. After the music blasted for about twelve hours straight two days in a row, Homero cut off the power to our house because the noise was bothering him and his family who lived the length of a football field away.

LATE ONE EVENING AROUND THIS
time, I was in Chone and met a man named Roberto who owned a farm near my community. One of his parents was American and, decades before, he’d lived in the States for a year. He offered me a ride home in his truck.

As we rattled over potholes in the dark, I asked him if he had any advice on where I should look for a place to stay after my first few months. (It was a Peace Corps rule that we live with a host family for our first three months, after which we were free to find our own place, as long as the rent was less than seventy dollars a month.)

I think Roberto misunderstood me and instead jumped into general advice for living in my community. “The single most important thing to do,” he said, “is to give the impression that you’re someone who doesn’t drink alcohol.”

I just nodded and he kept speaking. “The people here, they seem nice, and some of them are. But when they drink, they turn into—how should I put it—ah, they turn into
animals
. Even the ones that aren’t animals, they drink and when they drink they don’t know when to stop and then they’re, uh, dangerous. I don’t know if you drink; when I was your age I drank, a lot. But don’t drink with these people here. Drink all you want with a few of your friends, but the people here are not your friends.” He dropped me off at the end of my driveway and told me to stop by his house anytime I wanted.

THAT SUNDAY, MY HOST FAMILY
and I drove to a river nearby for lunch and some of the uncles began drinking beer. One of them turned into an animal.

While we were there, I managed some good conversation with other members of the family. I finally got around to talking to Sandra’s fifteen-year-old sister, Evelyn, about her pregnancy. I’d been nervous about asking her for some time because, for one, seeing such a tiny young girl pregnant was a startling image, and second, I wasn’t actually sure she was pregnant. All the women in her family seemed to have big midsections, so at first I wasn’t completely positive. Then it was undeniable.

Sitting in the back seat of the pickup to stay out of the heat, I asked Evelyn where the father was.

“He died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. When?” I asked.

“Seven months ago.”

I paused. “Can I go to the hospital when the baby comes?”

“Sure,” she said.

We talked some more and she ran off to go swimming in the river while still wearing her jeans and T-shirt.

Another one of Sandra’s sisters, Rosa, was in town for the weekend and joined us at the river. (Every time someone new showed up to the house, I was assured it was a temporary visit; the only time that was true, however, was with this third sister of Sandra’s.) Rosa had her three-year-old boy with her.

Everyone else was down by the river, either swimming in full clothing with the women or aggressively drinking beer with the men.

I turned to Rosa. “Your little boy is really quiet, not like the others always crying and screaming and fighting. He’s very calm,” I said. After my interactions with the litter of other Mendoza kids, I felt this was by far the highest compliment I could have paid her.

“Yes, he’s a quiet boy, but he’s been more quiet lately since his dad died,” said Rosa.

“My god. His dad—your husband—died? He’s not living any longer?” I said. Since I’d become so accustomed to my host family telling me lies, later to be explained as “jokes,” I had resorted to asking a question several different ways to sift out any misinterpretations.

“Yes, it’s the truth. He died a month ago in an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“An accident with a gun,” she said.

“Was it his gun or someone else’s?”

“His gun. We were outside doing work and we heard a big bang so I ran inside and I saw him lying dead on the floor,” she said. “We don’t know how it happened.”

“I’m very sorry,” I said. “Is it all hard to explain to your little boy? Sometimes these things are hard to explain to kids . . .”

“Yeah, it is. He sometimes asks where his daddy is, or when his daddy is going to come back home.”

A few minutes later I said, “Wow, and Evelyn’s baby’s daddy died, too.”

“No, no,” she said. “He’s alive.”

I pressed her for more information. She said the father was a “bad person” who sold drugs and didn’t want to be a part of the baby’s life. In that earlier conversation with Evelyn, apparently she’d said her baby’s daddy was “dead” in the way we might say he’s “dead to me” (though giving a detailed description of the car accident that “killed” him, as she did, made for a pretty gruesome metaphor).

Back home that evening I asked Homero about the gun accident of his in-law.

“Accident? Ha! Yeah. Shit, that wasn’t any accident. He took a gun and shot himself in the face like a coward.”

“Did you know him well?”

“No. He was just a pussy, you know.”

Homero seemed to be in an honest mood, so I asked him about the rape that happened down the road. He didn’t know anything about it. I also asked him about the armed robberies.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “Look, those families down that way, they don’t have the respect around here that this family—my family—has. That kind of stuff would never happen to us. No one would ever come around here looking for trouble. No way. Nothing to worry about. Ha! Worry! Don’t be a pussy.”

CHAPTER
15

W
hile Juan was away, I conducted a few more door-to-door interviews, but the heat and lethargic pace of life sapped most of the energy from my bones. I would wake up, do push-ups and sit-ups, finish a crossword puzzle, visit the outhouse, take a bucket bath in the cool well water, then walk upstairs for breakfast. This was all before seven o’clock. Then I’d retire to a hammock to blaze through more reading material. I’d finished a biography of baseball player Roberto Clemente and was on to
Undaunted Courage
, a story of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

At lunchtime, I sat and ate in the kitchen with all the aunts and uncles. The dangerous-looking one, Esteban, still hadn’t gotten tired of the “I kill gringos” line, which to him remained laugh-out-loud funny. At the end of the meal, they got grave looks on their faces and asked why I would never finish my food. I explained that, for me, piping hot soup on a ninety-five-degree day didn’t hit the spot. “You gringos are so strange,” they’d say.

I was getting accustomed to eating while having a dozen or so people stare and critique my eating habits. But during one lunch of getting stared at, I let my pride get the best of me. It was the first time it happened in Ecuador. I was saying something and mispronounced the word “refrigerator.” They all laughed.

“What is it?” I asked.

One of them told me I was saying it wrong. I tried to correct myself.

I got it wrong again. They all roared in laughter once more, especially Sandra, who seemed to take a strange pride in the fact that my vocabulary had this giant shortcoming. Everyone else got over it and stopped laughing, but not Sandra.

“So then how am I supposed to pronounce it?” I said.

She laughed more and began pointing at me.

“Ooh! You don’t know how to say it!” she whooped.

And so I said, “How many languages do you speak?”

IN THE AFTERNOONS I’D RETIRE
to the hammock again, after having exhausted the realms of conversation with various family members. I could barely get through some of those days, even with an afternoon nap. Most nights I was getting close to ten hours of sleep, yet I still felt like I could return to bed immediately following breakfast. I was beginning to wonder if this was what serious malnutrition felt like. The plates they served me were heaping with food—a Chimborazo, they would call it, in reference to the country’s highest volcano—and I would walk away from the table with my stomach aching it was so full. But since it was filled mostly with rice and other empty carbohydrates, I was starving forty-five minutes later.

During the time I was feeling so tired, one of the girls upstairs—Juan’s eighteen-year-old cousin with the enormous-to-the-point-of-discomfort breasts who was always making eyes at me—came down with dengue fever. Already prone to hypochondria, I went into a tailspin with this news. First, I tried to convince the family not to toss the house’s gray water outside from the second story. I explained that the moat of shallow standing water was a breeding fiesta for mosquitoes that bit us and transmitted things like dengue.

“But they don’t bite us. They only bite you,” they would say. “You’re fresh blood.”

I blew a hole through this theory by pointing out that it was one of their nieces, not me, who had dengue. I was trying to make sure no one else got it, I told them. Eventually I gave up. I gave up with this the same way I gave up trying to get them not to throw their trash and used diapers out the windows, creating a biohazardous wasteland between the back of the house and the berm leading down to the polluted Chone River. They laughed at me.

The mosquito business was particularly discomfiting for me since it meant I basically stayed indoors from dusk till dawn. Previously, I’d been trying to spend as much time as possible outdoors, especially in the late evening. The darkness inside my dungeon-like room heightened my loneliness. I spent long nights lying in that bed, sweating through the sheets under the mosquito net, thoughts ricocheting around in my head.

“What the fuck am I doing here?” I’d ask myself. “I’m surrounded by people I can’t trust.” I was worried about all the strange violence and afraid that I’d gotten myself trapped.

Life here is so damn bleak. Everything about it. The hopelessness, the fatalism. I thought about how back home—back in “real life” I’d say, trying to convince myself there was a difference—people would sometimes feel stuck. But you’re never really stuck; it’s an illusion. The people in La Segua, though—they were
stuck
, in more ways than I would ever know. They were born here and would die here, never knowing that something existed outside this life.

I thought about the times I’d lain in bed in my other life and felt alone or lonely; in La Segua, I realized that was a silly lie. I came from a world and a generation where for the most part I could write my own ticket. But in La Segua I was in the darkness and it was exactly where I was supposed to be. Something had brought me here. I had come looking for something. And now I was searching in that darkness—for something I could feel but not touch.