The Gringo: A Memoir (6 page)

CHAPTER
10

T
raining ended and our swearing-in ceremony took place at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Quito. The ambassador, country director, and the training manager all gave speeches. We raised our right hands and swore an oath. Then, a fellow volunteer from our training group—Inner Peace Mark—walked to the podium and spoke. The theme of his speech was “heroes.” He said we volunteers were
all
heroes. As he said the word “heroes,” he paused, lifted his head, and scanned the room, looking at each one of us and nodding.

Heroes.

That night, we threw a party at a bar in a trendy Quito neighborhood and everyone got stumbling drunk. Several volunteers who’d been in the country for a while came into town just for the party. One of them walked around the dance floor selling pot out of a fanny pack. Later on, a married woman said she’d had dreams about having sex with me and asked me to make out with her. She tried to crawl on top of me while I lay in a beanbag chair in a room full of neon lights. I said no, thank you. Her husband was sitting five feet away smoking a cigarette and rolling his eyes like it wasn’t the first time it had happened.

In the morning I peeled myself out of bed and took a taxi to the south Quito bus station. The long dark corridor of ticket windows was filled with men screaming names of cities so intensely that you’d think they were trying to talk you out of your intended destination and into going to theirs instead.

I was on my bus for less than an hour when I got a call from my program manager.

“Hi, uh, this is Winkler. What are you doing?” he said.

“I’m on the bus out to my site.”

“Do you, uh, have a minute?”

“Yes.” We were weaving back down the same treacherous road that I’d been heading up when I had my intestinal explosion.

He began reading from a script illustrating the horrors of the swine flu virus and then rattled off a bunch of ways to avoid too much contact and germs. Keep a week’s worth of food stockpiled at your home, he said. And don’t tell anybody in your community that you have the bird flu vaccine in your medical kit.

“You got all that?” he said.

“Yes, thank you.”

“Goodbye.”

When we were an hour outside Chone, the bus driver tried to pass by a tiny white coupe brimming with six or seven people where the road made a blind curve leftward around a small hill. When he thought he’d gone past, he let the bus swing back wide to the right, crashing into the coupe and tossing it against the road barrier. The jolt came from right outside my window. I looked down and saw broken glass and mirrors and mangled doors hanging open.

Our driver kept on going. He didn’t even slow down. Minutes later, the banged-up coupe came roaring after us with pieces of metal dragging on the road, kicking up a wake of sparks behind it. When we reached a straightaway, the coupe pulled in front of the bus and slowed down to a stop, forcing us to pull over behind it.

The driver of the white coupe jumped out of his car, ran up to the bus, and started banging his fist on the door. All the passengers lurched to my side of the bus to see what was happening. The bus driver and his
ayudante
stepped down off the bus and got in a yelling match with the driver of the coupe, whose family was now standing behind him. He wore a white tank top that looked like it’d been stained with motor oil. He screamed and yelled while the women behind him wailed. He pointed to the damage on his car as the bus driver peeked at the side of the bus to see what damage he’d done to his own vehicle.

The yelling went on until it looked like they’d reached an agreement. Both men returned to their respective vehicles. The white coupe followed us all the way to Chone and into the bus station.

CHAPTER
11

W
e arrived just as the sun was going down. Juan was waiting for me at the bus station with a few other certified ecotourism guides. They greeted me and one offered to take my bag.

“Wow, that’s really heavy,” he said, trying to lift it.

“I’m going to be here for two years,” I said.

“Oh, right.”

“But I can carry it if it’s too much.”

He handed the bag back to me. Juan and I hitched a ride in the back of a pickup heading out to La Segua and pulled into the long driveway in the dark.

The population of my host family had grown to almost twenty since my previous visit. One more of Juan’s cousins—a single mother of three in her late twenties named Sandra—was now living there. She was pretty and kind and recently divorced.

And then there was Esteban, another of Juan’s relatives, a slightly cross-eyed guy in his midthirties who had a big potbelly. Juan referred to him as an uncle, but based on my understanding of the family tree, he was actually a second cousin. I could describe this man in several ways, but the day I met him I wrote down one word about him in my notebook and underlined it:
dangerous
.

The room next to mine on the bottom floor now belonged to a man in his eighties who wasn’t related to the family and never spoke a word to me. No one ever gave me a straight answer on who he was or why he was there. He had old, leathery skin and walked around muttering to himself. Whenever he saw me, he waved his hands around in an odd, made-up sign language.

That first night I dragged my two duffel bags into my room and began to settle in. Right away in my dungeon-like quarters, I was jockeying for real estate with spiders, moths, and cockroaches. Within the first week, I reached my breaking point and bought some chemicals to smoke out the critters.

Before heading to the outhouse one night, I sprayed down the room with the bug spray and turned on my fan to create a cyclone of toxic air while I left. When I returned and opened the door, I was hit by an exodus of bugs toward the threshold, like when pepper spray hits a group of rioters and they scramble for the exits. The fumes from the spray were so bad I sat wearing the face mask from my medical kit as I wrote in my journal.

At night I could hear rats crawling above me in the rafters. During breakfast the next morning I mentioned the rats, and Esteban flashed me a smile, exposing several missing teeth and a lazy eye. He was overjoyed to help me with my problem.

That afternoon, he came back to the house with a box of rat poison, complete with a skull-and-crossbones warning label. He got up on a ladder and scattered the pellets about. And then we waited.

During the night, I was awakened by the sound of rats asphyxiating and vomiting to death above my head. I would hear some raspy screeching sounds followed by a plopping noise. For several mornings after that, I’d get up and sweep dead rats that had fallen from the rafters out the front door. When the old man in the room next to mine saw me doing that, he used his sign language to insist that I leave the rats by the front door for him to take care of. He would scoop them up and walk off, muttering to himself.

CHAPTER
12

A
s a survival mechanism, I constantly assessed the people I met and categorized them into two groups: those I could trust and those I couldn’t.

One I trusted the most by far was Homero, the uncle who lived in the small house on the other side of the rice field. He wasn’t the oldest of the army of Mendoza offspring, but he struck me as the most responsible. His young daughter acted like less of an animal than the other third-generation Mendozas wreaking havoc on the farm. Even more amazing, I suppose, was that Homero had just
one
child.

Since Esteban had begun answering every question I directed his way with “I kill gringos for fun,” it was a relief to swing in a hammock in the afternoons and talk with Homero. He was legitimately interested in my life and the first person I met in La Segua who caught onto the fact that what I was doing was hard. On Sundays, he drove me in his giant yellow pickup truck—which required a hot-wiring maneuver every time it was started up—down to the far end of town to watch local soccer games and drink beer. After a few beers he would start asking if I wanted to go to the whorehouse with him, and when I said no, he’d call me a faggot.

His pickup truck didn’t have a functioning radio, so he sang to himself while driving. He was a really big fan of Queen and often launched into a long monologue about Freddie Mercury.

“Unbelievable!” he said. “All that talent and fame and money. He could have fucked any woman in the world but instead he decides he wants to be a faggot. Too bad.” Homero just shook his head saying what a shame it was. Before long he’d resume singing in broken English: “I just want to be free!”

In the mornings, Homero walked across the field between the houses, sort of strutting with his potbelly wagging side to side underneath his tank top, and join us for breakfast. In earshot of his old and feeble mother, he’d end nearly every meal by saying, “Come on, let’s go to the whorehouse.” If he didn’t attack my heterosexual bona fides, he just tsked and shook his head like I was making some grave error. Following maybe the twentieth invite and refusal, I asked, “Aren’t you afraid of getting diseases or anything like that?” After several weeks in La Segua and about a hundred conversations just like this, his answer truly stunned me.

“That’s what condoms are for,” he said.

A CHARACTER WHO WAS ALWAYS
teetering on the brink of trustworthiness was Homero’s younger brother, Roger, whom I’d decapitated a chicken and dined with during my site visit. I learned very quickly that he was fun and kind. In my first weeks in La Segua, he and his wife were exceedingly generous in always inviting me over to their house and cooking me dinner. In typical coastal style, he, too, would hike his shirt up high on his chest, exposing a giant round gut. We always joked that he was eight months pregnant. He loved the Discovery Channel, which was one of the two or three channels people in the area could pick up through their antenna. The result was an impressive ability to transition between asking me if the United States was in Europe and then saying something like, “Did you know dolphins are the smartest mammal on earth?” Roger was also a good fisherman and recovering alcoholic. And he was—even by Ecuadorian standards—a chronic adulterer.

One day at breakfast, I bargained Homero down from a trip to the whorehouse to a trip out on the wetland with him and his fisherman buddies. Roger was included in the group. I jumped at the chance for a bonding experience that involved zero risk of venereal disease. It was a good way to really get to know the community I was supposed to be a part of—not to mention the wetland. Also, this was during a time when Juan had disappeared for about a week straight without telling me how long he’d be away or where he’d be.

Out on the water after the sun had just come up, I looked around at the foothills in the distance and had a profound sense of joy that this was the gritty land down south I had come here for. It was actually one of the first times in Ecuador that I felt like I was in the Latin America I’d always envisioned. For the month at site leading up to this, I was feeling as though I’d entered a very dark and disturbing place where people spoke nearly unintelligible Spanish and treated me like an incompetent. Those first weeks felt like a vacation mixed with a nightmare—and the two were blending together to the point where I couldn’t tell the difference.

After my transcendent gaze in the distance, I looked at my immediate surroundings and saw a group of about eight fishermen of varying ages strip down to their tighty whities and proceed to play grab-ass while making jokes about one another’s mothers and calling each other faggots. In a bathing suit and T-shirt, I was unprepared for my morning out on the water and would earn a gruesome sunburn.

I teamed up with Roger and we swam around the shallow water, setting up traps for shrimp after we’d helped with the big fishing nets. When it was just the two of us, we talked about all sorts of things. He, too, was disappointed about my lack of appetite for whorehouses. I asked him if he indulged and he said yes, “But only to drink beers.” Right. For coastal men whose wives had them on a short leash, this was their “I only read
Playboy
for the articles” denial of participation. With the intimidating way his wife, Veronica, forced me to murder that chicken back in May, I got the idea that she didn’t take much shit from her husband.

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.