And day broke and I said goodbye to Itzayana as if she were my own sister, Fidel Castro lumped me over to the bus station in his car, I gave him cash for the petrol and he waited till it was time for my bus to Comitán to leave. I didn’t sleep well last night, sometimes I can be asleep but my head won’t stop thrumming, I’ll think about my siblings, my parents’ precarious work situation, to say nothing of my own precarious work situation, and my mind wanders and I reach places full of worms and I dream that I’m trying to get to sleep and I toss and turn and even a wank won’t soothe or lull me to sleep, and I can be transported to any time in my life, I can remember things from the age of three onwards, and one box will lead to another, Russian dolls brimming with smells and voices, keywords unlocking other keywords, beatings, roses, pliers, black grease, screws, my dad’s workshop in La Pintana, the last September 11th spent in Punta Arenas with Óscar Barrientos, Samantha’s house in Tijuana, her family of circus artists made up of brilliant, generous clowns, those social housing blocks in Baja California identical to the ones in Bajos de Mena in Puento Alto, my nan dying in hospital in Rancagua with her enlarged heart and her black lungs, my grandad who always called me his little Pablo Neruda saying to me before he died: Pablo Neruda, never smoke weed and remember there’s always more than one woman, my grandad who had lunch with Fidel Castro in Chile back in ’71, not with our man Fidel from Chiapas, with El Comandante himself, my metal-smithing grandpa who worked for the Corporation of Agrarian Reform, who taught folk out in the countryside south of Santiago to read and write, who wrought iron and had his own blacksmith’s shop, my grandpa who worked the red-hot iron got arrested, my aunts-to-be burned the photos with Fidel, the photos with Allende, sweaty palms and cigarettes running out, that spelling the end of the whole selling beer by the gallon business and that’s how I wind up in the hood at the start of the nineties, you get told it’s a choice between Our Lord Jesus Christ or crack cocaine, and there you are, your plump face fattened on rice and pasta, watching the Andes blaze when the sun sets in summer, school after school, always being the new kid coming in halfway through the year, Pichilemu, Huamachuco, Malloa, San José de la Estrella, Pelequén, Rengo, Monte Patria, Puerto Montt, Comitán is only two hours from San Cristóbal and I still haven’t managed to drift off and my mind is a spinning saucer, hatred, despair and insomnia all occupy precise yet unpredictable positions, there are no phone boxes in Santiago any more, but I once used one for my first-ever call to Bulma to tell her I wanted to go and live in Iquitos just because we’d watched Fitzcarraldo the last time I’d been at her place, and she replied don’t talk shit, long-distance love is a fool’s game, why don’t you come on over Hoghead, and I set off to her place on foot picking up cigarette butts, trying to ferret out a gift for her amid the rubbish strewn around central Santiago at night, a playing card, a doll, a token to represent this night of all nights when we’d fuck or make love or screw or shag for the first time and take it in turns to watch each other sleep and script this live broadcast of what was to become the saga of our struggle to open up the doors to the neozone, but instead I get to Comitán and I buy a ham sandwich and a coke and I’m in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc in no time, just a couple of miles from the Guatemalan border, but when I go up to get my passport stamped the Mexican border agents tell me I have to pay the fee, what fee forfuckssake, the mandatory charge for leaving the country overland, that’ll be 500 pesos, half my budget, fucking pigs man, once I cross the border I won’t have any data on my phone and I won’t be able to keep uploading updates and posts about where I am, I’m leaving Mexico after what feels like five months spent training on the time-lapse camera of the rooftops and I realize the whole of Latin America is one great big hood, they stamp me on through once I cough up the dough and I take a taxi to La Mesilla, the whole border crossing circus, and the taxi driver asks me where I’m headed and I say I want to get down to Nicaragua, and he says all that stuff about the so-called influx of the Nickies to Mexico is a lie, for a while now it’s been the Hondurans who are the ones crossing, all on foot and without a penny to their names, their faith deposited in the North, and when I cross into Guatemala they stamp my passport for a fee of 20 Quetzales and don’t ask to see my yellow fever certificate and I catch a motorcycle taxi to the terminal for buses towards Huehuetenango, Blue Bird buses, a bit like the one Otto drives in The Simpsons, but cherished and dolled up finer than the Virgin of Guadalupe herself, and I climb aboard and head for the back, I always sit up at the back of buses, and I try to blend in, I’m wearing the baseball cap the guys at the Atlantis gave me pulled down over my eyes (my sombrero from Oaxaca marked me out as too much of a tourist so I left it in San Cristóbal), I have green eyes and if I hold a baby’s gaze for too long it’ll start to throw up, I avoid making eye contact when I pay my fare, I try to speak Spanish in a generic fashion, not swallow my ‘s’s, imitating what Gokú would do, what Bulma would do, a supposed Mexican deportee tries to flog us miniature trees made of wire and tells us to stop ignoring him, and we set off through the misty green mountains and cross a bridge called Valparaíso, Guatemala is an hour behind Mexico, next thing you know we’re crossing a bridge called Democracy, past Sunday Best Funeral Homes, and the landscape is very hilly, it reminds me of the road to Baños Morales or Farellones, but here all the mountainsides are green and you can see houses and farms high up in the distance, homes surrounded by sloping fields, with mountains for balconies, and our progress is slow and set to the sound of banda music, and the driver’s assistant makes his way up to the back of the bus, opens the rear door, with the bus trundling up a winding mountain road, and climbs up the ladder out onto the roof to rearrange the baggage with a degree of poise totally alien to the TurBus way of things back home in Chile, so smug and so cowardly, and I’m not the least bit interested in taking photos, even though I’m right here in National Geographic territory, but even so I can’t help but marvel at the fruit sellers who hop aboard the back door of the bus as it slows down to take the curves, offering bags of fruit for sale, mangos, coconuts, oranges, and I think to myself these could easily be street vendors from La Pintana, and the girls in front of me aren’t speaking Spanish but it’s definitely not English either, and they eat and laugh and throw the plastic packaging out the window, and I tell myself it’s ok, is it really so much worse to throw a plastic bag out of the window than to get all self-righteous about not doing so? Do all the sanctimonious fucking moralists who police and decry such behaviour not know about their own fucking contribution to landfill? Do they really feel so far removed from rubbish tips, missing out on the new shrines of their own modernity? You can all go to hell, and Arjona’s latest song comes on, “she took off her bra to bra-eak my fall,” and I recall that Arjona is Guatemalan, and we reach Huehuetenango and hunkered down beneath my Atlantis basecall cap I head for the nearest ChickenPalace, fried chicken, tortillas and vinegary slaw, anywhere you go there’s fried chicken and as I’m munching away a little girl of no more than five rifles through the restaurant’s dumpster in search of bones and leftovers and I bet you anything some tourist will have got their camera out and started filming the girl picking through the trash for chicken bones so that they can post on Instagram about how the situation in Central America is so dire that little girls have to eat from the trash just to get enough protein, but that’ll teach me to jump to conclusions, the girl was actually gathering bones for a dog with a litter of pups down on the roadside by the tortilla van where her mother or auntie or the lady that looks after her was working, and she fed each bone and scrap of fried skin directly into the dog’s muzzle with such exquisite tenderness and intimacy, just the way we’ve all been known to do for the creatures we most love, that I said to myself sod it, and I got down to my writing and in Huehuetenango’s baroque bus station I boarded another toiletless bus bound for Guatemala City, the journey was meant to be 8 hours and the ticket wasn’t expensive, I’ve come to realize that nothing outside Chile is expensive, because I’ve known for a while now that back home in Chile they’re defecating straight into our mouths and Chileans have grown accustomed to eating shit and paying for the privilege, they love it, everything’s so fucking middling: I’ve got large potatoes and small potatoes for sale here, ma’am, what’ll it be? Just the medium ones. How d’you want your cheese sliced, how d’you want your ham sliced, thin or thick? Not too thick, not too thin, just somewhere in the middle. No siree, if you want to travel outside Chile you have to start by getting to know your own country, support Chilean stuff because it’s Chilean, Chile’s the best country in Chile man, the Atacama Desert this, Torres del Paine that, Rapa Nui the other, like tokens or souvenirs of different economic stages the system will provide, like heading to Paris for the absinthe, to Berlin for the Bear, Mexico City in search of Bolaño, the most tacky still believe in Buenos Aires, still recommend Valparaíso like some kind of rotten cradle of culture teeming with students from Santiago who spend their time learning to play songs from Spinetta’s Artaud on the guitar, yellow bridges and all that jazz, the only yellow thing there are the streams of piss at new year’s, motherfuckers, and our fuzzy notions inherited from our parents about travelling alone, when you don’t know who’s going to be meeting you off the bus, taking the plunge on a hope and a prayer, and the window of the bus is a spooling film of parked trucks, houses by the roadside that I’ll never get to visit, and it starts to get dark and suddenly we come to a village where loads of people get on, the driver’s assistant gets out plastic buckets and puts them up and down the aisle for more people to sit down, but on a steep incline, as we go around the bend, the bus brakes unexpectedly and all the people sat on buckets fall over and are flung onto the floor, a man swears at the assistant, demands to know why we’re being treated like animals, what happened to a little respect, I’ve got a mate who’s a cop and you haven’t heard the last of this, and he gets out his phone and makes like he’s talking to the police and the assistant explains to the outraged passengers that these guys always kick up a fuss to dodge having to pay their fare, and an old lady tells him off for having beer on his breath, and he replies madam, I’m a god-fearing man, I haven’t touched a drop in years, and I get out my hipflask of rum and night falls (I’ve got a window seat and have no intention of giving up my spot), twists and valleys, volcanoes and misty mountains, and I always feel uneasy whenever I arrive in cities I don’t know at night-time, without access to my phone, without knowing the people I’ll be staying with, in this case the Guatemalan poet Yaax Temoatzin, who Itzayana hooked me up with, Yaax is having a book launch this very evening in Guatemala City (or Guatemala or plain old Guate, as the people here call it, just like they refer to Mexico City as Mexico, wouldn’t it be nice if Santiago were known as Chile) and I try to calculate our speed of travel and it looks like I won’t be arriving in Guatemala until ten at night, two hours after the start of Yaax’s book launch and three hours later than I’d imagined, and I reckon my remaining cash should just about stretch to a night in a cheap hotel if I can’t find Yaax, but that would leave me completely broke until tomorrow when I can get to a Western Union to withdraw the money wired to me by a theatre director in Santiago for the adaptation I did for him of a work by Roberto Arlt, and I get off when everyone else does, light a cigarette and realize I’m shaking, I make my way over to a street corner, read the address of the book launch that I’ve got jotted down in my notebook, commit it to memory and try to get a grip (what the hell did I go reading Rodrigo Rey Rosa right before coming here for, layer upon layer of filth in my mind, a shoebox containing my own severed foot) and I ask a taxi driver how much to take me to Zone 1 and he quotes me something more or less around the figure I’d been told by the man I’d asked earlier on the bus, you’re free to keep smoking in the taxi if you like the driver says and I thank him and the Guatemalan night unfolds across the windscreen and he drops me outside the bar in question, I go inside with my backpacks and the place is heaving and a guy I presume is Yaax is reading a poem that involves saying the word "sixty-nine" over and over, a few minutes later the reading ends, everyone claps enthusiastically, I buy a can of Ice lager and watch Yaax signing books from afar, a song by Alex Anwandter comes on and the walls are plastered with flyers for the event in question: 3rd Annual Festival of Queerpoetics “The Politics of Pleasure and Desire – launch of Central America’s first anthology of LGBT/Queer literature” and Anwandter is followed by Javiera Mena and I think to myself this is all getting a bit too Chilean, man, it’s like being back at Blondie Bar in Santiago, then when Yaax finishes signing books and I go up to him and say
“Hi Yaax, my name’s Juan, I’m a friend of Itzayana’s…”
“Juan! How’s it going, did you make it ok, how was the journey…”
“All good, I’m fresh off the bus…”
“Have you met my pal Gustavo yet?”
“No, I’ve literally just got here, I missed your reading…”
“Right this way…”
Yaax is barely pushing five feet and he’s as skinny as a teenage goth, emo-style, the ceiling of the bar is decorated with open umbrellas which make it feel like it’s falling and he leads me over to a little table where he introduces me to Gustavo and the pair of girls he’s sitting with.
“Ladies, this is Juan, a poet from Chile who’s on his way to Nicaragua no less.”
I say hi. I head to the bar to get more beer.
“So you’re Chilean,” says Gustavo.
“Guilty as charged.”
“Whereabouts from?”
“La Pintana.”
“I can’t stand Santiago. I’m from Antofagasta.”
“Are Chilean guys still your type, Gustavo?” asks one of the girls.
“I haven’t been with a Chilean for years and I have no intention of feasting on that shit again.”
“You’re Chilean?” I ask.
“Yeah, but I left when I was young, when I was about 22, I’ve spent most of my life in the US, but I’ve been in Guatemala for a few years now.”
“What are you going to Nicaragua for?” the other girl asks me.
“I want to try and interview Daniel Ortega.”
Yaax comes over to us, the belle of the ball that night.
“Juan, what do you wanna do now? I’m only asking because us queers are gonna go take this party elsewhere, you’re more than welcome to tag along if you’d like, or if you don’t fancy it then Gustavo is heading home and you can go with him, you’ve been travelling all day.”
“Believe me I’d like nothing more than to go party with you but I’m pretty much dead on my feet here. Plus I’ve got all my stuff with me. I’d probably better go hit the hay.”
“Say no more,” Yaax says and turns to Gustavo to arrange for him to take me back to theirs. We’re going to get a lift with an anthropologist who, I’m told, uses tools of quantitative analysis to track hate speech and threats made online against Latin America’s LGBT community. On the way home she tells us someone stole her car battery last night.
“But the ladies and I have our shit together and we’ve got all our whatsapp groups for plotting away in,” she went on, “so I raised the alarm about being stranded with my car and a bunch of them turned up to flank me by the roadside while we worked out what to do about the battery.”
“Good stuff,” said Gustavo.
The anthropologist drops us off outside a car wash and we say our goodbyes. I’d been about to kiss her on the cheek by way of farewell but she went in for a handshake instead.
Gustavo and Yaax live inside the car wash, on the second floor of a building erected inside a car park. Ask me where I live and I’ll show you a car park, as the Mónica de la Torre line goes. It’s a big room with its own bathroom, they’ve got a double bed and Gustavo says there’s a mattress and some blankets I can sleep on at the foot of their bed.
“Cool,” I reply.
Before heading to bed we have a cup of tea and Gustavo tells me he used to live in New York and that there are more Guatemalans living in the US than in Guatemala itself.
I’m about ready to drop by this point. I ask Gustavo for the wifi password and flop down on my mattress on the floor, before drifting off I text Bulma: I’m in Guatemala, it’s been a long day, all good.
I take a selfie, but I don’t send it.
I set up a whatsapp group with Itzayana, Fidel Castro and me. I write: all good, love you guys.
I take another selfie, but I don’t send that one either.
monday 10th september 2018
I got up at 7am and had breakfast in a bar in the centre of town. I was waiting for the Western Union office to open. The tv was tuned to CNN and Trump was talking. I felt sick, I wasn’t hungry, but I needed to eat something to settle my stomach. Eggs, beans, bread, orange juice, coffee. Eating was a struggle. On CNN they went on over to sports. The Western Union here is a branch of the Bank of Guatemala where you can’t go in with sunglasses or a hat and you can’t use your phone inside. The security guards have submachine guns. You could be the lucky winner of a set of saucepans of every conceivable size if you nominate this as your designated branch for withdrawing funds wired from the US.
I headed over on foot to the part of town where the buses for Managua leave from. My plan is to travel from Guatemala City to Managua non-stop. It’s 24 hours straight, crossing the whole of El Salvador and that little stretch of land where Honduras borders on the Pacific. I’ve tried reaching out to a number of Nicaraguan poets but it seems they all went off social media back in April during the protests against Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista government that resulted in over 300 deaths.
“Where to, amigo?”
“Managua.”
“Today?”
“Yes.”
“The Julius Caesar leaves at one o’clock. Thirty dollars.”
There are only two buses. I’m told they go once a day and that the one next to us has just arrived and the drivers are going to rest up until it’s time to leave again tomorrow, in other words Tuesday.
“What’s the deal in Nicaragua?” I ask one of the drivers of the Julius Caesar, who’s lying across his seat with his feet up on the steering wheel.
“Where are you from?”
“Chile.”
“Got your paperwork in order?”
“Sure thing, passport, the works…”
“You should be fine then, it’s other Central Americans that have the most trouble getting in. What are you going to Managua for?”
“Tourism.”
The driver shifts in his seat and motions for me to come on past and pick a spot. It’s only 9am and there are already people aboard the bus trying to get a bit of shut-eye. There’s no toilet, no air con. I pay my $30 and from his pocket he produces a roll of masking tape and sticks a strip onto the back of my chosen seat with my name on it. I stand there expectantly waiting for some kind of ticket or proof of purchase but no dice. I don’t push it. I walk back to the boys’ place. They’re sitting in silence at their computers, typing away.
“I paid my fare to Managua but they didn’t give me a receipt or anything,” I report.
“That’s the way it is round here, everything’s done by verbal agreement, all casual like, but don’t worry, they won’t be planning to screw you over or anything,” Yaax replies.
I gather up my things and get my two backpacks ready to go. I tag along with Yaax to the supermarket and decide to nab a few bits and pieces for the ride while I’m at it: bread, cheese, ham, a litre of water, a bottle of coke and three mini bottles of Quezalteca liquor, orangina flavour.
I take a couple of selfies with the boys.
Yaax hails a taxi, haggles the driver down for me, and I’m off. Before getting in, I give them both a hug. I thank them for everything. When I climb into the taxi, I catch my arm on a bit of jagged metal poking out of the doorframe and get a nasty scratch, bleeding all over my white t-shirt, when I get to the bus station about five guys yank open the car door and start shouting MANAGUA! MANAGUA! MANAGUA! and I almost lose my shit and start getting all flustered MANAGUA! MANAGUA! MANAGUA! I try to pay the taxi driver MANAGUA! MANAGUA! MANAGUA! the guys keep trying to grab my bags MANAGUA! MANAGUA! MANAGUA! I tell them to cut it out, chill the fuck out for chrissakes MANAGUA! MANAGUA! MANAGUA! the guy from Julius Caesar Lines shows up and says leave the Chilean alone, he bought a ticket from me earlier. I try to have a smoke, I’m shaking, I see two white dudes with a hipster air about them, I ask if they’re going to Managua.
“Yup, I am,” one replies.
“You too?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to Managua for? Things are pretty hairy down there.”
“What better reason.”
“Are you a journalist?”
“You could say that.”
“I worked for the government, I received threats on Facebook, I can tell you all about it. Are you travelling on your own?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll help you out, you can count on us, no sweat.”
“Cool, thanks. There’s a general strike on today, isn’t there?”
“Is there ever not.”
The guy’s name is Santiago and his mate is a Guatemalan guy called Carlos Alberto. Santiago himself is a Nickie. He says he’ll tell me all about what’s been going on in Nicaragua once we’re on the road. We get on to check out our seats only for me to discover a lady pretending to be asleep in the place where my name tape was supposed to be. They’ve swapped me to a spot in the middle of the bus, aisle side. Santiago and I end up miles away from Carlos Alberto. Our bags are stowed up at the back. I don’t exactly blend in around here and that’s my number one concern right now, before it’s time to get on I can’t stop chain-smoking, up on the bus everyone keeps swearing, calling everyone else a motherfucker and I keep thinking it’s about to come to blows, I wonder what their problem is, what’s got everyone so worked up, and the old ladies are the most foul-mouthed of all: motherfuckin’ mutt, motherfuckin’ Mexican mutt who can’t drive for shit.
The windows on the bus are wedged shut, we crawl out of Guatemala City in a haze of humidity, my knees start aching right away for lack of legroom, and we commend ourselves to the saints, the tv cycles through three action movies one after the other, all jam-packed with explosions and deaths and blockbuster-style dialogue, clipped and to the point.
“Quite the bloodbath,” says Marcia, my neighbour in the window seat.
“Yeah, I reckon at least ten guys a minute die in this film.”
Marcia laughs.
“Where are you from? You’re Chilean, aren’t you! My dad was Chilean, from Valparaíso.”
I don’t believe her, I assume she’s having me on, that she must be some kind of con artist.
She fishes out a scrap of paper dated 1955 from her handbag and shows it to me. It’s her dad’s ID card.
“Can you read it out to me? At my age I have trouble making these things out,” she says.
Her dad was a teacher and he was Chilean alright. I’m put in mind of people like Gabriela Mistral who went around teaching all across Latin America.
“And what brings you to these parts?” she inquires.
“Tourism. Seeing what’s what.”
I settle down to try and get some sleep but the movies are too loud. Just before nightfall we arrive at the border and cross into El Salvador. At 10pm we stop at a gas station to eat and make use of the facilities. I try to buy Santiago a beer. But I realize I don’t have any dollars on me and he ends up paying for the two of us. I ask him if he smokes.
“You betcha, check out my stash,” he says, unzipping his bag to show me all the cigarette packets he’s picked up in Guatemala, different flavoured ones like chocolate, grape, strawberry, lemon.
“I meant marijuana,” I say.
“What, you’ve got weed on you?” he asks incredulously, his Nickie accent suddenly shining through.
‘Yeah.’
“I can’t believe it! You brought marijuana with you across the border?”
“Yeah, but only a tiny bit. I’d forgotten all about it ’til just now.”
We light up. Marcia pitches up and suggests we all go smoke together at the tables down along the side of the gas station shop. We follow her over and I get out one of my bottles of Quezalteca.
“Well now, Ms. Marcia, does our lad here not have the most stunning eyes or what,” Santiago says to her.
“Gorgeous. My dad was Chilean as well and his eyes were just like that too. I’d set you up with my youngest daughter, she’s 25 now, but she’s only gone and turned Sandinista on me, the silly cow, I haven’t spoken to her in months.”
The bus drivers signal that it’s time to get back on. We hasten to finish our cigarettes and climb back on board. Marcia and I carry on working our way through my Quezalteca supply.
“Thing is, the brother of a girlfriend of mine, this Nicaraguan guy who’d gone to live in the States, lost his wife, and we ended up adding each other on Facebook, so far so good, I was single, free as a bird, and one day he goes and asks me to marry him, on Facebook messenger this was, said I’m 65 and I’m in need of a woman’s love, because a man without a woman is like space debris drifting in the void, those were his exact words, quite the poet as you can see, he treated me like a lady, had a nice way of putting things, said all this sweet stuff, sent me poems he said he’d composed specially for me, and one day he goes and sends me two thousand dollars and a ticket to Miami, he wanted me to fly out to meet him so we could get married, told me he’d bought a flat and a car just for me, he’d even gone and got me a whole new wardrobe…!, and there I was all excited like about starting a new chapter, finally getting the hell out of Managua, though I did once live with this guy in Panama for a year, that’s a whole other story, I can’t even bear to go there, and so there I am, Juannie, arriving in Miami, only to find that the guy’s a… FUCKING WRECK! I was so mad, Juannie, the guy had lied to me, he was seventy-five! 75! And to be honest that wouldn’t be such a problem for me, after all he’d only lied about his age, because the stuff about the flat and the car and the clothes, that part was all true, I’m 55 and I’ve been married three times, I have five daughters, you’d fall head over heels for my youngest, mark my words, but the stupid cow’s only gone and turned all Sandinista on me, anyway, I wouldn’t have minded about the guy being older and all that, but, Juannie, he couldn’t get it up! Not even so much as a semi! And there’s me being all understanding and seductive like, acting like I was in love with the guy, but that same month I made friends with some other Nickie girls on Facebook and one night we all met up for a few beers, nice and relaxed like, in fact I was home before midnight, and this guy already had my bags packed and out in the street waiting for me, kept saying I’d disrespected him by going out to intoxicate myself in the company of unknown individuals of god knows what sort, that I was a classic Nickie golddigger, and for me, Juannie, to have to listen to garbage like that, when I’ve worked all my life to give my daughters a future, only for a decrepit piece of impotent shit I barely even know to come along and say something like that, well, that’s something I simply cannot abide, I like beer and I like a good shag, I’ve worked my whole life, all three of my ex-husbands beat the shit out of me, Juannie, this face you see before you ain’t what it was ten years ago, back before I decided to get my eyebrows tattooed on, before I had boiling water thrown in my face, and then for this guy to come along and treat me like a piece of shit, like an animal, no, siree, I ain’t scared of poverty no more. I’d’ve had to be soft in the head to even so much as consider staying with that two-footed monstrosity.”
The lights on the bus go down and “Don’t Dream It’s Over” comes on at full blast.
Marcia starts singing along in impeccable English.
“As for now, Juannie, there’s a guy waiting for me in Managua who I’m not going to let slip through my fingers, though I know he’ll get away in the end, he’s forty years old and his prick is worth its weight in gold.”
We both cackle. I crack open the last bottle of Quezalteca and Cindy Lauper comes on over the loudspeakers. Marcia sings along perfectly.
“Do you speak English?” she asks me.
“A little.”
“Come on then, let’s hear you sing.”
“Hotel California” comes on.
I draw breath and clear my throat, but before I can start singing I burst out laughing.
Santiago is in the row behind us, towards the back of the bus, crammed in with a gaggle of teenagers and an evangelical priest. They start yelling at the driver to change the music. Others chime in and start demanding the air con to be turned on, and at one and the same time we’re hit by a blast of fresh air and the sounds of “Catalina” by Taiwan MC and Paloma Pradal, a version of “La Macorina” by Chavela Vargas sampled over a reggaeton beat, and everyone puts their hands up in the air, nobody’s in the mood to sleep any more, by this point everyone’s friends with everyone else, kneeling up in their seats, twisted round to face their fellow passengers, sailing through the few hours it takes to cross El Salvador as the crow flies, but the lights come back on, the music goes off, one of the assistant drivers, presumably the one with the gift of the gab, asks for our attention.
“Just up ahead we’ll be passing a police check-point and we respectfully ask those travelling with us today, in the interests of encouraging the Salvadorean police to kindly refrain from searching our luggage and holding us up two hours or more on our way to Managua, to be so good as to consider each donating a dollar so that we can give a little something to the border agents and avert this needless delay, we’d appreciate your generosity, at your discretion, of course.”
Santiago signals to me not to contribute, but I do. To be on the safe side.
They end up stopping us for over an hour anyway but they don’t perform a full search.
And almost all of us had coughed up.
Marcia starts showing me photos of her five daughters, and then right before my eyes clicks over onto a special separate folder.
“These are the photos my eldest daughter takes of me to use on my online dating profile.”
Make-up and angles showing the face to its best advantage, composition of shot, mise-en-scène. That noble mortal quest for the fountain of eternal youth: the image. You may have the visuals but if you’ve not got the attitude to match, you’re screwed, man. Luckily in these photos Marcia has visuals and attitude in spades.
“But isn’t love just so scrummy, Juannie,” she went on.
“People can’t live without love,” I agreed. I regretted it instantly.
“Yes, they can. People without love in their lives may not be in the majority, and there are plenty of people who can get by on just a tiny bit of love, or even no love at all, for long periods of time, and live to tell the tale, but it’s as if they’ve been poisoned, and they want to poison others in turn, telling lies, thinking they can just buy their way out of their lack of love, that money is an excuse to treat you like an animal, but I don’t see it that way.”
“But is that kind of person really capable of love?”
“Some people are only capable of loving when there’s money involved.”
At some point in the early morning we arrive at the Honduran border. A guy asks if he can borrow my phone charger. I hand it to him. His name is Ernesto.
“I’m trying to google how to claim asylum in another country, I want to be out of Nicaragua by the end of this year at the latest.”
Santiago and Marcia come over. Cigarette packets are proffered.
They ask me what Chile is like.
“It’s cold. In the winter the mountains are all snowy. It’s such a narrow country that you can be in the snow in the morning and in the sea in the afternoon in the course of a single day. The landscape’s really varied and in the cities the drivers are considerate towards pedestrians. There are beaches where you can still go camping with your girlfriend without fear of being robbed or murdered. Chile’s a country you can still hitchhike your way around and the people there aren’t bad, a bit stupid at times, sure, but not bad in and of themselves. In Chile the sunsets and sunrises are loooooong, but Chile’s not Chile’s…”
“Chile’s not Chile’s?” Santiago cuts in.
“You heard me. Chile’s not Chile’s. Chile is Chile only in name, on the surface, Chile’s that guy in those American-style gated communities who everyone’s jealous of because he comes and goes from the US as he pleases, like that Quico character in El Chavo del Ocho.”
“What, you mean Chileans can travel freely in and out of the US?”
“More or less.”
“Let’s all move to Chile then!” Santiago chimes in enthusiastically.
“If you ever want to come to Santiago just say the word and you can crash at my place. It’s no bother at all.”
We get our passports stamped and cross into Honduras.
The mood mellows and everyone tries to settle down to sleep. Marcia leans her head on my shoulder.
Shortly before sunrise we arrive at the Nicaraguan border.
“If the police start asking questions, don’t mention anything about being a journalist…” Santiago mutters as we climb down off the bus and traipse over to get our entry stamps.
“Please, sir, I’m just a lowly humble student, here for a little spot of tourism, pure and simple…”
“Attaboy. All the same you better write down my number and address in Managua just in case, say you’re with me, but for the life of you don’t say you’ve come here to sniff around…”
I copy down Santiago’s details in my notebook. We queue up outside the border guard booths. I’m the only non-Nickie on the whole bus. I hand over my passport to a weary-looking woman in uniform. She sees my passport and pauses. Her eyes flick from my photo to my face.
“What brings you to Nicaragua?”
“Tourism.”
“One moment, please.”
She disappears with my passport. They’ve already stamped entry for everyone else on the bus. I head out for a cigarette. It’s starting to get light. The birds are singing. Wildlife is stirring. The drivers of the Julius Caesar are napping on bits of cardboard laid on the ground alongside the bus. An hour later a hulking great policeman with an intimidating air about him, as broad as he is tall, emerges and asks which of us is the Chilean.
“That’d be me.”
“This way, please.”
He leads me into a little room bare but for two chairs and a lightbulb.
“Take a seat.”
The policeman remains standing. Behind him I glimpse the red and black of the Sandinista National Liberation Front flag.
“You’re a journalist.”
“Huh?!”
“You heard what I said – you’re a journalist.”
“No, I’m not, I’m a…”
“Yes, you are. What are you doing here?”
“Just exploring…”
“Exploring what.”
“Nature and stuff. I’m a student.”
“Studying what.”
“I’ve been studying in Mexico.”
“Studying what.”
“Mechanical engineering.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Managua.”
“Where are you staying in Managua.”
“At my friend’s place.”
“What friend.”
“A friend I’ve been travelling around with.”
“Where did you meet him.”
“In Guatemala City, at a party.”
“Where was this party held.”
“Somewhere in the centre, Zone 1, if memory serves.”
“You look like a journalist.”
“I promise I’m not.”
“Is your friend here?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him to come in.”
I get up from my chair. Santiago must have had his ear glued to the door and practically comes flying into the room when I turn the handle. He immediately gets asked for his name, address and occupation.
“I used to work for the government,” he says.
“Where.”
“Here, look.”
Santiago produces some documents. The policeman studies them carefully.
“Where did you two meet?” the policeman asks Santiago.
“At a party in Guatemala City, officer, and quite the party it was too! I had no idea Chileans could dance like that!”
The policeman remains stony-faced. Silence reigns.
“You can only have 30 days and you’ll have to pay $13 extra,” he says. “How much cash are you carrying?”
“I think I’ve got about 1000 Quetzales on me, I haven’t changed into Córdobas yet, but I’ll be getting some money wired to me once I’m in Managua.”
“Who’s sending you the money?”
“My sister.”
“Who’s your sister?”
I make up a name, he jots it down in the notebook he’s been using to keep a record of our discussion.
“You can go now.”
Santiago and I head back out into the cool air and both immediately light up. I thank him.
“Welcome to Nicaragua,” he replies.
The bus isn’t due back on the road to Managua for another couple of hours. I share my bread and cheese with Marcia, Ernesto and Santiago. The customs officials proceed to subject everyone’s bags to a mandatory search, they have us all line up alongside our luggage. Next to me is a girl with five enormous bags of god knows what.
“I’m freaking out, I’ve got a little baby bird in here,” she says to me.
She’s clasping a shoebox with air holes bored into the lid.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t start singing when the police come past,” she adds, laughing this time.
The bird stays quiet and we load our luggage back on and hit the road, spirits are high, people are striking up conversations again, Santiago’s crew is larking about.
“For chrissakes, what the hell were you playing at with that stupid canary, missy, for crying out loud…” Perla, the potty-mouthed old lady, snarls at the girl with the bird. “And as for you, you sonofabillionbitches with whores for mothers, ya lousy Mexican excuse for a driver, TURN ON THE AIR CON, OR ARE YOU TOO BUSY SCRATCHING YA OWN ASS? Ya good-for-nothing Mexican, d’ya need me to come up there and scratch your miserable little butthole for you, ya Mexican scumbag? Gee up, why dontcha, you drivelling idiot, you’ll be sprouting hooves next if only you weren’t so calcium deficient! I’m gonna come up there myself and give you a good thrashing, ya lousy Mexican mutt, you’ve got us all shitting ourselves to death back here, assface, next thing I know you’ll be trying to come onto me!”
The whole bus bursts out laughing. Even the aforementioned Mexican up in the driver’s seat. The reggaeton comes on and the crowd goes wild. But the bus breaks down. It’s ten in the morning on September 11th 2018 and we’re all huddled together beneath the shade of a tree at the side of the motorway. The heat and humidity are merciless even at this hour. It’s midday before the fault’s repaired and we’re on our way again. On the approach to Managua, when the air con’s finally packed in and the drowsiness becomes overpowering, some of us settle back down for another snooze. I’m just trying to get some shut-eye myself when Marcia bids us farewell. Her stop is before Managua proper. I wasn’t quick enough to think to tell her to add me on Facebook.
Santiago comes over and sits down beside me. The outskirts of Managua consist of patches of reclaimed wasteland with ramshackle houses flying the flag of the Sandinista Front. We drive past a statue of Salvador Allende, murals of the Ramona Parra Brigade flash by.
“It’s September 11th,” I say to Santiago.
“Sounds about right.”
“It’s an important date for us Chileans.”
“How come?”
