by Mary Morris
Roberts' Hill sat on a small hill, about fifty yards up from the beach, on an island paradise of white beaches, coconut palms, turquoise water. It had eight rooms. The rooms had no walls, only screened-in porches with wooden louvers to shut out the wind and the rain; otherwise we were exposed to the outside. For twelve dollars a day we got a room and three very square meals.
"Well," Andrew said when we arrived, "this was a good tip." As I had been packing my bags to head to the outskirts of the island, Andrew and Becky had come to my room. They'd been planning to stay in town but were having second thoughts. "Where did you say that place was where you're going to stay?" And so they had come along.
We got settled and at noon we sat down to a family-style lunch of fresh fish fried in coconut oil, fried potatoes, some kind of greens, warm bread, and custard for dessert. When Andrew saw the platters of food, he seemed to get nervous. "How much do you plan to eat?" he asked me.
"How much do I plan to eat?" I repeated.
"I mean, do you plan to eat a lot?"
I looked at this six-foot-four, hulking man. "Not much," I replied.
Becky was laughing. "Oh, Andrew," she said, "just tell her your problem."
Andrew explained that he had a kind of anxiety attack when he had to eat family style. He came from a family of ten children and there were always thirteen people for dinner. His mother cooked enough food for seventeen and the family was served youngest to oldest. You got seconds when you finished your firsts, which meant that the oldest had to eat the fastest to get more. To this day, Andrew said, he panics when food is served family style.
I asked Andrew what it was like growing up in a family of so many children. He said it wasn't easy. Even his father had difficulty keeping everyone straight. "Once I came back from three months in Costa Rica, and my father greeted me at the airport with 'Welcome home, Jeffrey.' But Jeffrey told me not to worry," Andrew went on. "He said that Dad had been calling him Pinky on and off." Pinky, Andrew explained, was a family dog who'd died several years before.
It wasn't until evening settled in and we sat on the porch, sipping beers and watching the ocean, that we noticed Ted. Ted had been at lunch but he was at another table, and we had managed to miss him somehow. He was one of the strangest-looking people I'd ever seen. Ted had been on the island almost two months now, and one of the first things he told us was that he'd come to Roberts' Hill to recover. It occurred to us later that he'd come to recover from a sex-change operation. The problem was that we could not determine which way the operation had gone. Ted was half man, half woman. He had a woman's voice, beardless features, a man's body type and musculature, no breasts, and what appeared to be a bulge in the crotch of his shorts.
He reminded me of Truman Capote, and he knew everything about anything. He came out on the porch during cocktail hour and, once he realized Becky was a biologist, began telling us about the snakes and ticks that inhabit the island. He described Robert's encounter with a boa, which he said was eighteen to twenty feet long, thick as a coconut palm, with a red comb in its hair. Becky looked bewildered and I could see she was trying to think through her knowledge of snakes to see if such a creature was plausible.
He said he was a medical doctor with an innate sense for the stock market. During our brief cocktail hour he managed to explain how the DC-3 is a World War II plane, to direct us to the best swimming, to tell us about barracuda biting off a man's calf. He talked about head-hunters and cannibals and altered states of consciousness. He went on with Sufi legends and talk of transformation, political intrigue, and the decline of America. In this remote and peaceful place, we would never be able to get away from him/her. No matter what hour of the day or what book sat in our laps, Ted would appear, droning on and on about whatever entered his mind. And that evening as we waited for dinner, listening to the barking of a dog, Ted said the dog had found a boa. And the boas would become mythological creatures to me, like unicorns or baobab trees.
Ted told us about a canyon he liked to swim to. As he was leaving for this spot in the morning, he asked if we wanted to swim along. Though we didn't want to go with him, he knew the way, so we agreed. Andrew noticed that Ted wore a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts to go scuba diving, instead of trunks. In the week I spent on the island, Ted never took off his T-shirt and never swam in trunks, deepening our suspicions that he'd had some kind of surgery.
We swam in shallow water over thick, waving sea grass that continued almost to the reefs. We reached the canyon which was, in fact, like a canyon, and swam through it. At the bottom of the canyon a giant sea turtle was resting, and Andrew dove down and made the turtle swim. The giant turtle, sluggish, resisted at first, but Andrew dove and dove and finally the lazy turtle stretched and tediously swam away.
After several days of eating Ruby's lunches and dinners cooked in coconut oil and swimming on the reefs, Andrew and Becky decided they had to go. They asked if I wanted to come with them. They were going to Huehuetenango, but I had planned a different route for myself and also did not feel ready to leave. I accompanied them to Sandy Bay, where the rich people vacationed. Planes came down from Miami to Roatán and the Americans stayed at resorts on Sandy Bay.
We rented a boat and took it over to the bay, because Charlie, the driver provided by Roberts' Hill, was on a binge, and there was no telling how long he would stay that way. The driver we hired sold shells and he tried to do business with us. He had conchs and shark jaws. He held up a hammerhead with seven rows of teeth—all of which rise up when the animal is ready to kill. The man, a black Carib, said that every fish out there that you ate would eat you. "You have it for dinner. It have you for lunch." Snapper, he said, was bad. "She's go to a thousand pounds and eat a cow." But what they feared, he told us, was barracuda. "Cuda can rip you apart with one bite."
We waited for the transport to take Andrew and Becky to town, and the transport was very slow, but at last it came. While we waited, we sat under a palapa sipping Cokes. On the beach two boys were having a knife fight. Vultures sat like spectators in the trees, watching them.
"Be careful in Huehue," I told them. "You know there's trouble there."
"And you be careful where you're going," they said.
The minute they left, I wished I'd gone with them. I thought perhaps I'd made a mistake by staying. I felt sad and empty to see them leave and I wondered how I would fare on the rest of this trip.
A new couple arrived, Lawrence and Felicity. They referred to each other as soul partners and said they were bonded in a spiritual way. Ted and Lawrence and Felicity seemed to have a great deal in common and over lunch all they talked about was spiritual bonding. I missed Andrew and Becky already.
In the evening Ted sat on the porch, talking to me about civil rights. "I've been punched in the face because of the way I look," he admitted. "I know I look strange. I've been refused hotel rooms." Ted was bitter about America and he said he had no intention of going home. He told me he was on a spiritual quest and was in the process of becoming a Sufi. He said that Omar Khayyam was a Sufi, and he believed that Dag Hammarskjöld was as well. He talked on about dervishes and dreams and memory and the meanings of stories. He told me a strange tale about a man and a donkey with ginger in his anus, but I didn't get the meaning, and he told me to meditate on the story and the meaning would come to me. But I've forgotten the story, and the meaning never came.
I felt troubled and restless all night long and I couldn't sleep. I was besieged as if by ghosts. A tremendous sense of loneliness came over me and I wondered if I wouldn't always be alone. If I'd spend my entire life alone, without a true traveling companion. This thought terrified me and kept me awake. It wasn't yet dawn when I got up and went outside. I sat on the porch, watching for a redheaded woodpecker with a white feathery crown, indigenous only to the Bay Islands, which Becky used to sit and watch for, and now I sat, waiting for the sunrise and for the woodpeckers to reveal themselves to me.
I had thought to myself the whole time I had been
away that there would be a moment when everything would become clear, when I would understand what I had not understood before. I had been waiting for a clear moment when I would know that I'd traded cruelty for kindness, passion for companionship, anger for love. But now I knew that it would not happen this way.
As I sat out on that porch, I understood that growth comes over time. Change happens step by step. All along things had been changing inside of me, bit by bit, in small, imperceptible ways. It had been subtle, not sudden. It had been happening over time.
Before breakfast I put on my gear and went out alone in the ocean to swim to the reef, something I knew I shouldn't do, but the water out to the reefs was only about four feet deep and there was no danger of drowning. I swam for about a quarter of a mile in the warm, clear water until I realized that I was quite far from shore. In the distance I saw the now shrunken palmettos, the tiny guest house.
As I swam back, a school of blue jacks came toward me. And behind the blue jacks was a barracuda, thick waisted, several feet long. Its well-toothed jaws opened and closed as it fed in their school. The barracuda passed me and I kept swimming. I thought of Ted's tales of cuda and what the Carib man had said. I swam steadily until I noticed that now I was surrounded by the school of blue jacks—thousands of them, all around me, little blue fish, hurrying away. Turning my head slowly, I found the barracuda, its eyes set, its mouth opening and closing at my heels.
I have been told that if an animal confronts you, often the best thing to do is surrender. You cannot outrun or out swim it. It will probably maul you, but you will live. But reason left me and my stubbornness prevailed. I ripped a gold chain from my wrist, in case the glitter was attracting the barracuda, and let the bracelet, a keepsake, float out to sea. Then I took a deep breath and I swam. I swam in fast, steady strokes, at every moment expecting the cuda to rip through the muscle of my calf or tear off my heel. I swam and swam, breathing, hoping, believing, and when I reached the shore, I pulled myself up and collapsed in the sand, breathless, safe.
THINKING THAT THERE MIGHT BE SOME MAIL OR messages for me, I entered the United States Embassy in Tegucigalpa. I walked past several armed Honduran guards, through an extensive electronic device, into a Plexiglas bullet-proof chamber, where a man, himself encased in Plexiglas, asked me for my passport.
Once I was inside, this letter awaited me, dated November, a few months before:
Dearest Mary,
We assume you are well and taking good care of yourself. We, of course, are concerned, especially when we have no idea how to contact you, but I know you have a good head on your shoulders and won't do anything foolish.
Everything is fine here, though Mother had a touch of the flu. But she's getting stronger and recuperating. No need to be concerned.
I've been busy, busy, busy. We've got a new f. C. Penney going up and a big mall in the works in Waukegan. And there's talk of more in Milwaukee and points north. We've come up with a new concept. Put it all under one roof. I know that sounds crazy, but it might work. No more snow, no more rain. You just drive into an underground parking lot and you're in one gigantic store. Anyway, we're trying the idea out on the town planners in a few states and if we get the go-ahead, we're on our way.
Here's a clipping I thought you'd like to see. It's a car that was driven by your friend Linda. As you can see, she drove it off the road and the car flipped over three times, but somehow Linda only had scratches. She was wearing her seat belt. That seems to be what saved her. Goes to show you can never be too careful. Keep that in mind, wherever you are.
As you can see, there isn't much to tell here. You are leading the exciting life. For us, it's business as usual. We think of you constantly and miss you. I won't say we don't worry, but we know you'll be all right.
Mother keeps a map of Central America on the wall. Whenever we get a card or letter from you, she makes a red check. In this way, we are charting your course. Most of the time we have no idea where you are, but we try to figure it out, given the direction of where your cards are from.
We hope you will decide to come home soon. I am sending copies of this letter to our embassies in Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama, but not to Salvador or Nicaragua, because I know you won't go there. Mother joins me in sending all our love.
Dad.
NICARAGUA HAS MORE ACTIVE VOLCANOES PER square mile than any other country in the world. When I arrived, they were all smoldering. It is the feeling one gets in Nicaragua. A sense of everything bubbling, boiling beneath the surface. It seemed like the fitting metaphor for this country that had just been victorious over its dictator. I had wanted to go to Nicaragua since the Sandinistas had come into power, and when the opportunity presented itself, I went.
I joined a small group of people interested in culture and we were to stay at a cultural center in Managua called the Hotelito, the little hotel. Though I was unaccustomed to this type of group travel, it was the only way for me to see Nicaragua at the time. We were assigned a guide, a petite blond woman named Tamar. Tamar came from Uruguay, where she had been imprisoned and tortured. She never discussed the details of her torture or imprisonment. She had left her own country when she was freed and had come here to work for the revolution. And that was all she'd tell us.
We drove in a bus through downtown Managua, which consisted of buildings separated by open fields. "Where is the center of the town?" I asked. Tamar looked at me and smiled. "It is everywhere," she said. "Since the earthquake we have not been able to rebuild. That is Somoza's fault. Do you know what he did? He took the blood that was sent by the Red Cross and he sold it. He put the money into his Swiss bank account. That was when the people really began to hate him. When he sold the blood."
Each day Tamar had an outing planned. The markets, a farm co-op, a fish farm. We visited cooperative stores that sold folkloric art and government agencies in charge of such things as elections and civil defense.
We journeyed into the Fifth Region, an area where there were said to be two thousand contras and much military activity. We were taken to a hospital, where I visited the maternity ward. A woman showed me her baby, only two hours old. In another ward a boy of about eighteen, whose stomach had been blown away in a contra attack, pulled back the covers and showed me his wound. "I am not a soldier," he said. "I work on a farm."
On the bus back to Managua I sat beside Tamar. "Are you happy here?"
"I have never been happier," she replied.
"What makes you so happy?"
She looked at me as if I were insane. "We are working for something. Our lives have meaning."
At dusk I walked through the neighborhood near the hotel. It was a poor neighborhood—houses with no water or electricity, dirt floors. Children followed me. I carried pens and pencils, key chains and candy, to give as gifts. I handed them pencils and pens. One little boy reached up and gave me a kiss. Then he ran away into his house. He came out again with a small Sandinista flag. He gave this to me as a gift. I gave him some American coins. Again he ran into his house, though I called for him to come back. He returned with a small kerchief. I said, "I will only give you something more if you promise not to go get me something else." He agreed. I gave him an Empire State Building key chain. He ran home again, though I shouted once more.
This time he returned with his mother. Is he giving his mother away, I wondered. Instead, she gestured toward her house. "Please be my guest. Come into our home." They each took me by the arm, leading me inside. The house was modest but comfortable. One room was a living room, kitchen, and den. The other was a bedroom, where it seemed that four people slept. "My husband," the woman began, "died fighting in the revolution. The government gave me this house. We are very happy here."
"And the government? You are happy with them?"
"It is a government like all others." She threw her head back, laughing. I had thought she was an old woman, but now that I saw her laughter I realized she could not be much older than I. "What can I
say? And my husband died, so it is difficult. But we have more now than we ever had before."
"So you are happy with the government."
"I am happy with our revolution," she said firmly. "But these are difficult times." She extended her arms. Her children flocked around her, grabbing at her skirts, and she held them to her, as if for dear life.
A few nights later we attended an FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) rally, where a quarter of a million people were shouting, "Nopasarán" (they will not enter), and "Un ejército" (we are all one army). We are one people's army.
Tamar kept inching her way to the front, dragging me by the hand, until we were almost at the grandstand, and in front of me were the members of the junta. Daniel Ortega was speaking about freedom. He spoke of the elections that the Nicaraguans planned to have. He said, "A vote means to vote for the heavens, the land, the people, the flowers, the stars, the sun."
I turned to Tamar and heard her say, "Arturo, it is so good to see you again."
She embraced a man of about forty-five. He had a head of salt and pepper curls and piercing steel-gray eyes. "Tamar, I have not seen you in so long."
"Well," Tamar said, "we have been busy in cultural affairs."
"And I have been busy with the military," he said with a laugh. Tamar introduced me to a subcomandante of the revolution.
"He is one of our great heroes," she said softly, and I understood from her tone of voice that at some point she had cared for him and something had happened.
