Suavemente

            by David Coplan-Castillo

 

Two O’clock in the afternoon in Nicaragua. It rained again that day as it had every other day at Two O’clock. I felt the lukewarm raindrops sting the side of my face as the ocean winds spat them at me. Though the rest of my family had retired to the comfort of our living room, I sat on the front porch. Alone, except for my Uncle’s dog Chancho. I scratched behind his rain soaked ears and he wagged his tail in appreciation.

            I had come out to the porch due to the most recent of the verbal battles I had been having with my mom, I stayed there in the rain because of my foolish 12-year-old stubbornness. I lost myself in the blues of the ocean and wondered how long it would take for my mom to come outside to give me her speech about how she's sorry and didn't mean to hit me when she got mad. But she never did. After giving up on her apologizing, I stood up and awkwardly walked inside past my family and my mother into my room, closely followed by chancho.

            Though she wouldn’t admit it, my mother had been depressed since we got there two weeks earlier. We had come back to Nicaragua to try and find her real father, and when she got news that he had passed less than two years before, it seemed to her as if the rest of our trip would be pointless.

My mother’s life had already been one filled with tragedy. Her birth mother, fearing the exposure of her affair, led my Abuelo (grampa) Mincho to believe that my mother was his daughter. He got word of my grandmother’s affair and confronted her and my biological grandfather with a loaded revolver. He killed my grandmother (my grandfather got away,) and then adopted my mom and got remarried. My mother only found out about all of this a few years ago, in her mid thirties. And since then has excommunicated many of the people who raised me as their own family when I was born there.

I couldn’t begin to comprehend how thirty-six years could be thrown out the window with one huge lie, or how she felt about it. I had been trying to keep her mind off of it, but with an entire country as a reminder of the father she would never meet, I was powerless. She was irritable all of the time, and she became nearly impossible for me to be around. She would explode over the smallest daily obstacles. And even a simple suggestion would be received with quick and solid smack to the face. But being my mom’s emotional pillar meant getting past my own anger towards her attitude, so that I could be there for her.

            But I couldn’t do it anymore, this abuse wouldn’t do anything to make my stay in Nicaragua more pleasurable. And so I finally gave up on trying to fix my mom's problems as I felt the bruise she had left on the right side of my face.

            Later that night, I agreed to let my older cousins take me out to a “real Nicaraguan party.” A horrible plan that bloomed into a great idea. I wondered what I was getting myself into as I rode in the back of their truck past street vendors and prostitutes. The streets in Nicaragua all look like they’ve never been re-paved, there is a busy flow of traffic at all times and never do a pair of seconds go by without a loud honk. The smell in the air is that of thousands of drivers who could care less about smog. The streetlights on the side of the street reflect the exotic palm trees along the side of the road, and the sound of the Managua Market makes me feel right at home. The entire time I try to keep track of where we are going, but keep getting lost in the shapes and styles of the houses and shacks that we pass. Following our stop at the liquor store, we raced off again into the night to commence the drinking.

            After being introduced to my cousin’s friends, we headed into their house. The houses in Nicaragua are amazing, they are all semi-open structures, with wall-sized extravagant entryways where boring Americans would just put a door. The houses are all painted bright exotic colors, and almost every backyard has a fruit tree in it. We went out to the back yard and sat around a table on an extravagent brick patio. As my cousins prepared the drinks, I allowed my eyes to drift around the yard. They moved from the exotic plants, to the Cement wall with broken glass on top. As I tried to remember the name of the girl sitting across from me, my cousin explained some of their Nicaraguan drinking games to me. In Limón, everybody is assigned a number. The point of the game is to say “(your #) limón, medio limón, (somebody else’s #) limón!) without messing up. My inability to understand their rapid way of speech and slang, combined with the cheap tequila, led to me losing nearly every one of the games we played. Peer pressure and alcohol were an entertaining mix, and as I tried to stop the world from spinning around me, I was convinced that it would be a good idea to put my head in a bucket of water so that I could sober up. Didn’t work.

            My cousin’s next ingenious idea was that lying down in the hammock could sober me up. In my mind, this idea could either have ended up good, or funny, so I of course went along with it, slowly and intoxicated, I made my way to the hammock and fell in, letting the soft mesh catch me and wrap around me.

            Within twenty minutes of me falling into my woolen cocoon, I awoke to find two beautiful Nicaraguan girls above me. One was stroking my right eyebrow (but was being quite rough,)  while the other rubbed up and down the right side of my calf and lower leg. Being twelve, drunk, and infatuated with these girls, I was too nervous to move. It felt as though they were running their nails along my eyebrow and leg, half of me wanted to know what they were doing, but the twelve year old half of me saw nothing but good coming from my current predicament, so I lay there falling deeper and deeper into a drunken trance as the two girls groomed me.

            The rest of the night was a blur, flashes of people laughing, music, glasses clinking, swirling lights, and more laughing.

The ride back to my cousin’s house was amazing. I remember lying in the back of his truck, looking up at the thousands of stars that littered the sky and watching them shoot past. I leaned my head over the side railing to see where we were headed, caught eyes with an overly friendly prostitute for a second, and hid back in the truck bed. The rest of the trip I rested my head on the side and watched the white lines in the street race by us as we sped down the road.

 We got to my cousin’s house, one block around the corner from my own, I decided that I could make it home myself, and didn’t hesitate to brush my cousin’s hand from my shoulder and mutter something incoherent even to my own ear.

“Estas bueno para caminar wey?” (“Are you good to walk bro?”)

“Mire, mire, mire, mire… estoy bien, no te preocupes por mi! Yo se donde vivo wey!” (“Look, look, look, look… I’m good, don’t worry about me! I know where I live bro!”) I responded.

 I watched him go inside his house, and after hearing laughter inside I walked off in what I thought was the general direction of my house. Ten minutes of walking and I realized that all of the houses around me looked the same…. But wait! Out of the corner of my glazed over eye I saw my cousin’s house, salvation.

“Knock, Knock, Knock!”

“Ey… Donde se fue mi casa wey? lo perdi.” (“Hey, where’d my house go man? I lost it.”)

Four or Five minutes of stumbling and my cousin had located my missing house, he gently opened the door, handed me back my key, and turned around in the direction of his house.

“Aqui estamos, duermate, lo necesitas.” (“Here we are, go to sleep, you need it.”)

            Two O’clock again, more rain. I woke up to the sound of it on my window, slipped on a pair of shorts, and made my way down the hall to the kitchen. My mom threw a glare at me as I walked by, but as if caught in midair, her closed lips turned into a smile, and then into an all out hysterical laugh. Confused, I walked into the kitchen and noticed my reflection in the handle of the refrigerator.

            Slowly, I put my hand up and in terror felt the space above my eye where my right eyebrow once was. Now there was nothing but stubble. My right leg where the girl had been rubbing me was the same, hairless.  I stormed out onto the front porch, ready to kick my cousin’s ass, and as I looked at chancho’s tilted head and confused face, I broke out laughing.

            I believe that there are a lot of things that you can’t dwell on and hold anger towards somebody for, especially if it’s funny, so I laughed. I heard more people laughing inside with my mom and thought I heard somebody say eyebrow in spanish, so I hid in my room.

            The rest of the trip felt like a new vacation, my mom’s attitude changed, and she treated me completely differently. I was no longer the burden that I had been to her earlier, I was instead her son and felt like that. And instead of feeling awkward and out of place, I was the center of attention as my mom would laugh with her friends and point at my missing eyebrow.

            “Poopi, enseña lo tu pierna donde lo hicieron!” (“Poopi, show them your leg where they did it!”)

            Later on in the day we went to the house of some friends to have dinner and laugh again at my non-existent eyebrow. We sat down around a table covered with huge plates of food. Nicaraguan cuisine can save me from any stressful day. The old smoky familiar flavor of Carne Asada (grilled skirt steak,) the powerfully sweet plantains, on a warm bed of Gallopinto (rice/beans/onions,) with a little bit of salad and a fat slice of Queso Frito (fried cheese.) The smell is almost as good as the food itself, and it fills the entire house with the most delicious odor.

            I reached up and felt the hairless spot above my eye with one hand while I bit off a piece of the Carne Asada I had in my hand. I looked up, and as I caught eyes with my mom, I mentally flinched. The way her eyes burn through you when she’s mad would have you hiding under your bed. And the tone of her heavily accented english changes from sweet to serial killer in a second. It was something I had become used to during our trip, but this time was different. Something in her eyes made her seem so fragile, and actually a little nice. I wasn’t used to this.

            “Te amo.” (“I love you.”) she said quietly before going back to her conversation and leaving me there dumbfounded.

            We got home later that night and walked silently to our own rooms. I laid there in my bed, watching HBO in Spanish and paying no attention to the english subtitles that flashed at the bottom of the screen. In the other room I heard my mom dancing to her semi-okay, somewhat bearable music, no doubt with a smile as big as mine on her face. Outside, rain fell against my window, and as I fought Chancho for space on my own bed, I slowly drifted to sleep and wondered how long it takes for eyebrow hair to grow back.