News That Stays News

Narrative Particleboard February 21, 2013

Round about three in the morning, Pedro Perez returned from the office, and traded me an inscrutable map for a mostly full container of potentially expired fruit jam of intentionally complex and empirically obscure flavor.  A half an hour later, I was back at work, having missed my appointed rendezvous on account of no driver ever being able to find our B&B.  Some time later, I was aware of being in the airport, having remembered to put tags on my backpack, having passed through security, set an alarm for the stated boarding time, and chosen a seat somewhere near the gate.  Sometime after that, I woke up, and saw that boarding had begun.  At the gate, I met Alonso and Sandy, the one concentrating his impressive and constant effluence of energy to handle the situation, the other chill.  We boarded the JetAirways plane, predictably a turboprop, and

Somewhere around seven, we wandered off the plane.  Alonso ordered up a big car like an Innova, bound for Lake Haven.  He paid, we walked outside, and found a beat-up old jeep waiting for us.

“I got !@#*&ed,”  he declared.  “Where’s my Innova?”

Then we got in the Jeep, and

Somewhere around nine, the driver asked where we were going.  He took the piece of paper we had with directions, looked a the cell phone we’d listed, and dialed another.

“What’s your name?” he asked me.

“Alonso”

I’ve long since learned to answer this question by borrowing a name from another in any circumstance where time is of essence and accuracy might be important.  “Hamete” just doesn’t stick in anyone’s mind.

At this point, Alonso began to laugh, a nearly hysterical laugh colored by the effort of trying to contain a feral contempt.  I recognized this laugh from a few days earlier when, in a state of exhaustion, I was presented with a hopelessly arcane outline for a solution to a simple problem, responded with a simple fix, and was told that thus removing the original problem entirely would be very helpful in resolving some technical aspects of the already envisioned impossibly elaborate solution.  It is a self-righteous laughter, distant kin to the mirth which greets a friend when she pays a trivial but richly deserved price for a small act of idiocy, but blood brother to the laughter that greets an enemy when her deeper vices are called to account.

“What’s your name” Alonso cackled, “Like that’ll help.  What’s your name?”

It can be easy to infantilize a person who struggles to express himself in your language.  To fail to control this instinct is understandable, natural, and deeply unimpressive.  At any rate, we drove on, asked for directions, and eventually found ourselves there, at which point

A boat and a bus ride later, I was skipping rocks from the yard of some old church, terribly ornate in a way I recognize from a two hundred year old chapel built by a wealthy family in among the vineyards south of Rancagua.  (If you ever find yourself there, and are not too morally squeamish, I highly recommend the museum that an arms dealer and wanted international criminal built nearby).  There was an interesting pulpit, perhaps 10 meters tall, and shaped like a lotus flower.  And there was an icon with writing I’ve never seen, somewhat like cyrillic except that it had a character like a 4 and a p stuck together, and another like a two-button mouse.

We made our way back to the resort, where Alonso was highly bemused that I was “extreme” enough to eat lunch with my hands.  I made my way to a hammock, with Chatwin, and talked to Sansón for a

I woke up around 2, and we hopped a boat, where we played a game variously described as “Ace” or “Ass”, and which seemed to consist variously of an elimination round rather like war, followed by a bit of card-counting which I consistently failed to reach.  We stopped by a fish-fry, where we didn’t buy a refilled scotch bottle of distilled palm wine, perhaps because as Alonso informed us it was unhygenic.

“I know because a local told me it was unhygenic”

We stopped for tea and a power outage along the way, and then set back off through the darkness.   Sansón led a spirited rendition of “Show Me The Meaning”, and I tried to explain to a near total stranger why one might date the same person more than once.  In the choruses, the other men joined Sansón en masse.  The stranger tried to explain to me the anxiety of always looking to trade up.  I understood, but tried to find a way to politely observe that I’ve never dated anyone who could be “traded up from.”  On the highest notes, sometimes the women supported Sansón, too.  Sometimes a stranger forces you to give enough context to a story that it makes sense, and in the process you realize more about how the pieces fit together.

Sometimes no one forces enough context on a story for it to make sense.