Roger told me that one of his three children was actually Veronica’s daughter from a previous marriage. His kids were eleven, nine, and seven years old. I asked him if he had kids from another marriage.
“I was never married before Veronica, but I had kids with another woman,” he said.
“And those kids live with the other woman?”
“Yeah, she lives further down the road toward Chone.”
“Oh, how old are those kids now?” I asked.
“One of them is seven and the other is one and a half.”
“Okay,” I said. As we were swimming through the water carrying the shrimp baskets with the sun beating down on us, I thought for a moment about the ages of those kids.
“Roger,” I said. “I don’t understand.”
“What?”
“How are your kids with the other woman younger than your kids with Veronica?”
A sheepish little smile appeared on his face. “That other woman was a girlfriend. Kind of a fling,” he said, nodding his head as if we now had an understanding.
“Veronica must have been really upset . . .”
“Yeah, she was fucking pissed,” said Roger.
Then I thought about it even more. “Wait a second, Roger—you had a baby with this woman seven years ago—”
“Yup.”
“—and Veronica got really mad—”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then five years later—two years ago—you have another baby with her.”
“Yeah.” He grinned.
“Holy shit, Roger! What did Veronica say the second time?”
“She was even madder. You know, just really mad. But it’s fine because I told her I was done with the other woman.”
“All done?” I suddenly felt like I was the thirty-three-year-old father and he was the twenty-three-year-old kid.
“Yeah, yeah. It’s all done,” said Roger.
We swam on. He asked me more about my family, about my sex life, about life in general. We caught more shrimp. I could feel my neck and arms getting more and more dangerously sunburned. And we swam some more.
Several days later, Roger was supposed to be at our house at 9 a.m. so we could drive to another town and have a barbeque. At noon, when he still hadn’t arrived, I went over to Homero’s house to lie in a hammock and do a crossword puzzle. Homero’s two-story farmhouse had turned into the only place where I could escape the zoo of screaming kids and get some peace and quiet. While I lay there swinging, I asked Homero if he knew why Roger hadn’t shown up.
“He had a bad night,” he said.
“What happened?”
“He’s in trouble with Veronica.” I stared at him as if to say, You’ve gotta be kidding me. “He was hanging out with a woman that lives up that way. Do you know about that woman?”
“Yeah, he’s told me all about her.”
“Well, he was with that woman last night and Veronica found out.”
“Oh Jesus,” I said. “I thought by now—”
“He never learns.”
Soon Roger and Veronica showed up. She was in a bad mood. She came toward me with a machete in her hand. I put down the crossword puzzle book, jumped up, and backed away. I couldn’t really tell if she was joking but didn’t want to take any chances. She was talking too fast for me to understand but I still got the message. What I could decipher was that Roger’s alibi for last night’s shenanigans was that he was out drinking with me. He’d dragged me into his world of lies and now I was facing the business end of a machete.
Veronica eventually put down the machete—it turns out she was only half serious—and we all left for the barbeque. After that, I never turned my back on Veronica, or the rest of them.
Later on at the barbeque, I pulled Roger aside and told him to stop it with the other woman—or at least not drag me into it. I suggested it in the best way you can to someone a decade older than you. He told me not to worry—he had already cut it off for good.
“When did you cut if off?” I asked.
“Oh . . . later.”
The next time I was over at Roger’s house, I think he felt guilty about all this and had an impromptu heart-to-heart with me. It was right after he’d shown me a boa constrictor he found snared in his fishing net that morning. He now had it trapped in one of his shrimp baskets and was periodically taunting it with sticks. We walked on the trail that led from the fishing boats back to his house when he started talking in-depth about his past and all the drinking and whoring.
It was pretty run-of-the-mill, woe-is-me stuff until he revealed to me that it wasn’t just the drinking. He’d also been smoking weed every day.
“Well, that’s not so bad,” I said. “People can still function while doing that from time to time.”
“Yeah, but I was sprinkling an entire vial of crack on top before I smoked it—and, you know, I was pretty much smoking it nonstop . . . all day, every day.”
“That sounds pretty intense,” I said.
“It was pretty bad. Pretty bad.” He nodded his head and looked off into the distance. “But then I found Jesus, and he’s all I need.”
ANOTHER PERSON I CAME TO trust was Sandra, the cousin divorcee who was one of the newest additions to the house. It was her nightmarish trio of kids who made my life most miserable, but Sandra chose to take me under her wing when it came to things that everyone assumed I was incapable of. Chief among these tasks was laundry.
On weekend mornings, all the women of the house went out back, between the pigsty and the outhouse, under the barbed-wire clothes hanging area, and washed piles of clothes by hand using large tubs. For most men in my community, to be seen doing the laundry would have had emasculating repercussions, but I didn’t have a wife to do it for me. So I joined the women out back.
Washing the clothes was easy and self-explanatory, but in an attempt to hold some sort of rank over me, the women constantly pointed out ways I was doing it wrong: I wasn’t getting the water from the well correctly; I wasn’t rinsing the clothes thoroughly enough; I was mixing incompatible colors, such as white and off-white. Sandra saw herself as my savior and offered a helping hand. I humored her. She enjoyed helping the poor gringo.
Doing our laundry side by side and talking became a tradition that I enjoyed. Sandra was a treasure trove of need-to-know information about our community. For instance:
A week before I came to town, a local girl was raped on the side of the road in broad daylight. This was one of the reasons the family I lived with forbade me from walking alone outside the property after nightfall. It was also why they got incredible looks of concern on their faces when I would leave to go jogging down the road in the mornings.
“Be careful,” they said. “People will hurt you.”
Also, since I’d arrived, there’d been a string of armed robberies at houses in La Segua. They took place farther down the road toward the coast—it was a distance of less than a mile, but the family talked about “farther down the road” like it was a different universe.
“Is this something we should be worried about?” I asked.
“No,” said all the aunts. “This family has respect in this community, so no one would ever even try to come onto our property and hassle us.”
Sandra told me that back in December, a few months before I arrived, they’d had a spree of gang-related broad-daylight murders in the streets of Chone. It got so bad that all bars had to close down for a few months. I’d talked about this with Juan, too. Even he was afraid to be outside after dark—in Chone or La Segua.
Was this something we should be worried about? I asked.
Again, the answer was no. Things had toned down since then.
Still, almost weekly we heard news of someone in a nearby community getting decapitated after a drunken argument and a machete fight. These stories, like the shootings, were verifiable in the local newspaper and usually the result of long-standing family rivalries or revenge for such high crimes as letting a cow wander o
nto someone else’s property. Sandra talked about these other places like they were hell on earth; I’d been to a few of them around the outskirts of Chone, and they looked about the same as my community.
What it all amounted to was that people in the region seemed to be adept at living up to their reputation for barbaric violence. Back in training when I’d heard that this area was the “most dangerous part of the country,” I thought it was more of a folkloric warning—the way people talk about the Old West. I assumed that stories about people resolving their conflicts with the same tools they used to clear brush was something that happened either back in the day or farther out in the boonies. Apparently this wasn’t the case.
But apparently I had nothing to worry about.
Sandra also liked sharing general wisdom and life advice with me. She said I should find myself a woman there and stay forever. Then came the generic conversation about girlfriends I’d had in the past and the sexual habits of gringos. When I told her it’s not unusual for gringos to have sex before marriage, she looked disgusted. “We—people here—don’t have sex before marriage.”
The following day, Sandra’s unwed, pregnant sister arrived from out of town for an indefinite stay at our house. The pregnancy was seven or eight months along, and the sister had turned fifteen just a few months back.
CHAPTER 13
When Juan disappeared for days at a time, his departure was quick and mysterious. I’d wake up and he’d be gone without a trace.
But when he was around, he was ubiquitous: He would ask me for money; knock on my door at 4:30 a.m. to ask if I could do his cousin’s English homework (I told him not to knock that early again unless there was a life-threatening emergency); ask to borrow my camera indefinitely; stare at me without a word, nostrils flared and eyes glazed over, as I ate dinner; and watch me through my window while I slept as he “fed the chickens” at the crack of dawn (I caught him doing this several times).
After going away, he’d always reappear a few days later and announce that we had lots of work to do. Periodically, his group of guides would get together at the Mendoza house. Juan would do all the talking. Mostly the discussion revolved around setting the agenda for other meetings that would happen at an unspecified time in the future.
At the first official meeting of the Association of Ecotourism Guides of Humedal La Segua, I introduced myself and explained the role of the Peace Corps volunteer. I described that I’d be there for two years, that the Peace Corps’ purpose was to do development projects in other parts of the world, and that it was also about a cultural exchange of sorts. I explained that as a natural resource conservation volunteer, I was to work with their group but also to find some community projects on the side. (I had actually given this little speech several times in Juan’s presence, and every time I made the last point, he became visibly uncomfortable, the veins in his mammoth-sized neck bulging and his nostrils flaring more than usual.) I finished by telling them about the interviews I’d have to do for my Community Assessment Tools presentation. At that news, Juan began to squirm in his chair.
The other six guides said they were really happy to have me there. They appeared interested in where I was from and how I could help them. Besides Juan, who was president of the group—the “maximum authority,” as he put it—there was Ignacio, the vice president. He was a classmate of Juan’s at the university and also a recent recipient of a degree in tourism.
Ignacio and I got along. He was a workout enthusiast who, when he wasn’t pumping iron, was cultivating an encyclopedic knowledge of Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme films. When I’d see him for the first time in a day, he’d often greet me with a broken-English version of a signature line such as “I am the law.” He would throw it out there in Spanish and then road test his elementary English. He was heartbroken to learn it’d been over a decade since I’d seen a movie starring either of his idols.
The guide named Carlos was about five foot five and 225 pounds, with a rat-tail hairdo crawling down his neck. He was a big fan of Bon Jovi. He was not, however, much of a fan of anything pertaining to the wetland. That, and his lack of a tourism degree—or any schooling beyond the fifth grade—made me wonder why he was in the group. He lived a short way down the road from the Mendoza farm and was always hanging around.
I recognized the thirtysomething woman I’d met briefly during my site visit, who was joined by another woman of about the same age from the next town down the road. She had a raspy voice and was always smiling.
There was also a man in his late twenties named Darwin (a common name in Ecuador), who claimed to be a lawyer, but spent all day riding up and down the road on a child-sized bicycle.
The last member was a young guy whose name I could never remember. The first time I met him, Juan pulled me aside and warned me that he couldn’t be trusted. I asked Juan for details and all he said was, “Look, he can’t be trusted. There are certain things you can’t say around him—I’ll tell you about that later—but just remember not to trust him.” Nevertheless, he was a fully registered and licensed ecotourism guide in Juan’s association.
IN THOSE INITIAL WEEKS, I got dragged around, primarily between La Segua and Chone, for more “meetings.” A lot of it was further gringo show-and-tell, but I didn’t mind it much at first because it kept me busy. At the time, I occasionally got on the phone with other volunteer friends of mine and heard about how they were sitting inside all day reading books, dreading having to go outside—because of shyness or culture shock or the heat—and do something (such as their Community Assessment Tools interviews).
One night Juan and Ignacio informed me that the next morning we’d be taking a two-hour bus ride south to the provincial capital, Portoviejo, for a meeting at the government office of tourism. Ignacio pulled me aside as we were about to go home for the night. He had a somber look on his face.
“Grigsby, as you know, we’re a new organization that is just beginning . . .”
“Yes,” I said.
“And someday our group is going to have money—a lot of money. But right now we don’t, so we were wondering if tomorrow you could pay for our bus fare.”
“How much will it cost?”
“Umm, about $1.25 each way, so $2.50.”
“So neither of you guys have $2.50?”
“Well, uh, you see, um, yeah, we do.”
“You do?”
“Yes, we do. Of course we do!” he said. “Of course we have $2.50! What did you think?”
“Then why do you need me to pay for you if you have the money?”
He looked at me as if I was the one who just didn’t understand.
“Okay,” he said. “We have the money for the bus, but that’s not it. Also, we’ll need lunch when we get down there.”
“All right, what’s lunch, another $2.00?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure, I’d be happy to help out, but you don’t have another $2.00—$4.50 total?”
“No, I do—we both do. Of course we do,” he said. His face twitched in what could have been a wink or a grimace.
“Then it sounds like you guys are all set.”
“Oh yes, of course.”
Portoviejo was another sweaty inland hell. The meeting turned out to be Juan printing a few pages of something off someone else’s computer, signing it, and then handing it to a woman behind a desk. We also picked up some Department of Tourism materials like Galápagos postcards and free calendars. Before we left Portoviejo that afternoon, I went into a music store and spent eighty dollars on the only steel-stringed acoustic guitar I could find.
The one other time I saw Portoviejo was a few weeks later when we returned as part of a tourism expo. Groups of guides from different attractions in the coastal region had table displays showing off what their area had to offer, with fancy brochures and trinkets and posters. At our table, Juan’s papier-mâché model of La Segua’s wetland sat on a Styrofoam block. It was a little embarrassing, but when some fellow guides f
rom different places informed us we could visit them for free in the future, Juan declared the day a success.
After a few consecutive weeks of nonstop meetings that weren’t really meetings, I told Juan it might be more efficient if I spent some time introducing myself around the community and doing my interviews while he took care of his errands himself. I did the best I could to explain that most of his errands were “one-person jobs.” I knew that by coming to a third-world country and talking about using time efficiently, I was fulfilling the most typical gringo stereotype. But an entire month of Juan wanting to be next to me at all times—insisting that he accompany me into Chone to buy toilet paper or demanding that I come to his university with him so he could get a document signed—was unbearable. He harrumphed and protested, saying that I needed to be everywhere he was because we represented the Association of Ecotourism Guides of Humedal La Segua together. But Juan eventually gave up and slunk away. It turned out to not matter, because soon after, he disappeared again.
I took the opportunity to get out in the community.
The predetermined Community Assessment Tool interview questions included all sorts of things, such as what conditions their houses were in, how many people were in the family, and what they did for a living. It also had questions about family income and local resources.
For the volunteers in our group more inclined toward conspiracy theories, this assignment set off some red flags, given that Ecuador was in the oil-rich Amazonian region that had been exploited for years by foreign companies. “Think about it,” one volunteer said to me months later. “Our government is eventually collecting all these reports that include the vital statistics of these small communities that in some cases sit on top of extremely valuable resources.” I suggested that if someone in the State Department was actually taking a look at CAT reports from Peace Corps volunteers in Ecuador, we had bigger problems to worry about.
The Gringo: A Memoir Page 6
