Blood Lake (3 page)

The corporal meticulously whites out the old expiration date on my
cédula
as if the task required the same precision as etching the Ten Commandments on the head of a pin with a diamond-head drill, cranks it into a U.S. Army-surplus manual typewriter, and the sound of belabored typing brings visible relief to the tormented souls behind me. Even a hysterical toddler becomes strangely pacified by the sound. The corporal finishes, yanks out my card, sticks it back inside the frayed plastic lamination, puts it on top of my growing mound of documents, and pushes the mound towards me. The next
woman on line eagerly squeezes in and places her passport in the corporal's outstretched hand. He isn't even looking up.

I step away from the table and look at the back of my
cédula
. It doesn't say, “Valid Indefinitely.” The corporal has typed in, “
Valida Hasta la Muerte
.”

Good Until Death.

The clock on the wall
still
says 7:00, but I don't care. We finish with the Bureau of Alcohol, Perfume and Cigarettes, and are released into the expectant mob gathered here to meet their aunts and uncles, cousins, sisters, blood brothers, bird dogs, boosters, button men, mitt greasers, mules, ropers, and other connections, their eyes glistening in anticipation of the Boreal riches that they shall come a-bearing. A torrid stream within this hot-blooded human ocean disgorges a cluster of friendly faces, including a swarm of little ones I've never seen before getting caught around my legs. Hands grab my overweight suitcase and I'm caught between greeting a dozen relatives, tipping the porter, and making sure that those hands grabbing my bags belong to people I know.

My uncle Lucho lays his sun-dried hands on my shoulders, smiles, and gives me a powerful hug.

Antonia's been away so long it's all new to her. She soon realizes that riding in the metal cargo bed of my cousin Guillermo's pickup truck is a relative luxury, as she stares at all the other pickup trucks driving along with handmade wooden flatbeds, or no beds at all, just bare axles with bulbous gas tanks whose intake pipes are stuffed with rags, the drive-shafts exposed and spinning.

The road takes a dip and we lurch onto an unpaved section of the highway. A battered blue-and-white-striped bus drives by with the morning rush hour crowd and kicks up a faceful of dirt at us. It looks like about seventeen men are hanging off the sides and back of the bus, and the conductor is actually climbing over them, hanging off with one hand to collect their fares. He nearly loses it when the bus bounces
back onto the paved road. The name of the bus cooperative is Unidos Venceremos. United We Will Win. Not the same as grabbing the M34 crosstown express.

We stop for gas at a crude cement apron, pulling up in front of a flat island supporting three oil-and-grit-covered American gas pumps from the Reagan years, and I have to look twice to realize that the extra zero on the end means that gas prices have hyperinflated by a factor of ten since the last time I visited.
Shit
. So a gallon costs the same fistful of dollars as in the U.S., but in Ecuador that fistful of dollars is a day's pay at minimum wage.

I chip in ten freaking bucks, feeling uncomfortably wealthy, a culpable accessory to their misery, with perhaps a dash of survivor's guilt thrown in, too.

“It's been really bad since the earthquake hit a few months ago,” says my cousin Azucena, who is called Suzie. “It cracked the trans-Andean oil pipeline. Ninety thousand people were cut off from civilization.”

“Lucky them,” I say.

We pull back onto the road, cut in front of a few buses and survive long enough to swing onto the Avenida Quito, heading for the
barrio
Centro Cívico, the proud proletarian stronghold and indestructible pocket of resistance where so many of my family live and breed.

The drab pastel walls of the city are covered with so many faded layers of overlapping posters and paint it all moves like a living skin, melting orange-and-yellow campaign posters hawking candidates with Spanish and Lebanese names for every office in the land, from alderman's dog walker to the supreme office of
el presidente
himself, all tattooed with red-and-black verses expressing the radical opinions of the voiceless hotheads. Then a stretch of whitewash announces a truce between the warring factions to make way for a hand-painted mural of undisputed national martyrs and revolutionary heroes: Jesus, Rumiñahui, Espejo, Alfaro, Che, and a huge painting of Juanito Tres Ojos jumping through a glass window towards me, blood and all.

“Filomenita, what's the matter?” asks Suzie. Heads turns towards me.

“Oh, I'll be all right. It's just that flight must have really turned my stomach.”

Antonia excitedly describes the air pocket in her unique hybrid of Anglo-Spanish as we stop at a light with the huge face glaring down at me.

All I can say is, “That's new.”

Suzie agrees, then her daughter Charito asks, “Why is he called Juanito Tres Ojos?”

“I don't know,” says Suzie. “That's your generation, Filomena.”

So I explain that some say it's because he was so sensitive to peripheral movement it seemed as if he had a third eye in the back of his head that allowed him to see police and soldiers sneaking up on him, and others say that he had the symbolic third eye of the true visionary, who will return one day to lead us to a better future. I don't tell her that some say it's from his preferred method of killing his enemies, by blowing a hole in the back of the unfortunate bastard's head.

Our charted course takes us past an ice cream wagon and nine voices scream out conflicting commands to Guillermo, who pulls a maneuver that would get my driver's license
burned
in New York City, bringing the pickup to a halt in front of the rusty metal wagon. The kids effervesce over the rim of the pickup and converge on the vendor, euphoria personified, as he rings the rack of thick brass bells for them. Oh, to be that age again, where one hundred sucres buys the flavor of your choice and a brief taste of paradise.

“What flavor do you want?” asks my uncle Lucho, pointing Antonia at the long list of flavors advertised in cracked paint on rotting plywood. She says, “Chocolate.”

But the vendor's out of chocolate. He's also out of mint, cherry, and yerba buena (now
there's
a flavor you can't get in the U.S.), so Antonia settles for
babaco
. The man opens the top of the cart and starts digging out some off-white icing.

Then a scream tears the moment in half.

I turn in time to see a filthy teenager running up the block towards us clutching what can only be a purse he's just snatched. Before my dull brain can fire up, Guillermo lunges for the kid's legs and brings him down onto the rough concrete sidewalk, where they roll around like a drunken octopus flailing its legs spasmodically. I step in to help, and he kicks me in the face with surprising strength for such a skinny boy, as Uncle Lucho pushes in and gets an iron grip on the kid's neck, and the solidly built woman arrives and starts hitting him with her shopping bag.

I remember when Uncle Lucho was strong enough to single-handedly lift a jeep out of the mud.

“You okay?” my female cousins say, helping me up.

I'm rubbing my face. The ice cream man gives me a chunk of ice to put on it. This street is a central artery, and the efficient Guayaquil cops show up in no time in their dark blue pants and clean white shirts, and want us all to make statements. Only I don't want to. My family explains that I just got here, and that the other woman is the real victim, and she's the one who's going to bring charges, so that's okay with the cops, though they do give me a closer look than I'd like. Everyone's happy, except the skinny kid, who, as my vision clears while they take him away, looks to me like he hasn't eaten in days.

My aunt Yolita hurries out of the Correa family store and wraps her strong arms around me, solid countrywoman's arms that have been lifting crates of vegetables and cases of beer since I was small enough to sleep in a cardboard box under the cash register.

“You look great,” she says.

“Yeah, getting kicked in the face does such wonders for my appearance,” I tell her. She stops my mouth with a broadside of kisses and hustles me under the iron bars and into the family business, which is an all-hours corner grocery and liquor store in an untamed slice of the
barrio
, with a full-sized floor-model commercial cooler that I would like to crawl inside of right
now. You can keep your fax machines and wireless e-mails. Hot showers and cold beer are all I ask of civilization.

I return her compliment. She's still a great beauty, but she was an absolute knockout at sixteen, before she started popping out little Correas at the rate of one model per year like a Ford factory. Most of the fleet are at work already: Lucho Correa Jr. is a dentist at the free hospital, Carmita is a secretary in the offices the Ecuadorian Navy, Manolo and his wife Patricia make clothing in a third-floor workshop, Suzie has her own store selling plastic bags of all sizes, and César is watching the family store.

Then, living on the second floor, there's my other set of cousins, Ronaldo, Victor and Bolívar Mendez, who are off mixing cement at a construction site; Luis, who's clawing his way up to a law degree; and Fanny's in the U.S. working for Leona Helmsley.

“We're going to kill the fatted calf for you,” says my uncle Lucho, winking at me. “Tonight. After work.”

“Sounds great. But listen, I've been traveling for eighteen hours and I'd like to take a shower before I hug anybody else.”

“
Ay, que vergüenza
,” says Aunt Yolita. What a shame. “There's no water.”

“Are you having trouble paying the water bill?”

“Not just us, the whole city,” says Uncle Lucho. “It's been out since last week.”

A steaming tropical port with three million people, and there's no water? This place just got less civilized.

I ask: “How—?”

“Trucks deliver drinkable water every couple of days,” says Suzie.

“If they feel like it,” says Uncle Lucho, dipping a chewed-up Styrofoam cup into a large blue plastic storage drum and filling it with water for me to drink.

“No thanks,” I say. I've been away too long, and have lost my resistance to what passes for “drinkable” water in these neighborhoods.

“We boil it,” Suzie explains.

The barrel holds about twenty-five gallons. So a typical person lives for a week on the equivalent of one flush of water in an American toilet.

“Do you have any mineral water? I'm dying of thirst.”

“Of course, of course,” says Yolita, opening up the cooler and removing a frosty bottle of Guïtig.

“Just a minute,” says César, who is using the bottle opener to serve the customers.

“Never mind,” says Uncle Lucho, putting the bottle cap between his teeth and biting it off with one pull. He hands me the bottle and spits the cap onto the floor. Antonia is impressed.

“Don't be
cochino
,” says Yolita. “Offer her a glass.”

“This is fine.” Aah …

Two caramel-colored men in oil-stained T-shirts are sharing a big bottle of Pilsener beer on the sidewalk in front of the store. They are already sweating. I check my watch. It's not even 9:00
A.M.

“Come here, Filomenita,” calls Guillermo. “I got something for you. Give me your watch,” he says, already unstrapping it from my wrist.

“What?”

He shushes me, makes my watch disappear and replaces it with what looks like a shiny, new Rolex.

“There!” he says, excessively triumphant. “Welcome back.” Guillermo kisses me on both cheeks.

Now I get a good look at the watch. The name, when observed closely, turns out to be Rolux. The factory where Guillermo and seventy-nine other underpaid Ecuadorians grind out imitations of expensive foreign products, mostly for export.

“I'll wear it with pride,” I say, swinging my wrist up with a showy snap to check the time.