Tropical Immersion

Back in Aunt Carmen’s neighborhood, just outside the city center, people sat on stoops on every block, chatting and watching dogs, traffic, and kids at play. There were kids all over the place, around the park and everywhere we went. It gave the city a very happy, safe feel. The sidewalk outside Aunt Carmen’s house was made of checkered, pale red and gray concrete tiles. The house itself had rounded terra-cotta tiles on the roof. Upon entering for the second time, I noticed that the front room was a grand parlor. It was big, probably twenty by fifteen with a fourteen-foot ceiling. Lacey carved wooden ventilation grates snaked around both the ceiling and transoms. Hand-painted roses adorned the ceiling next to the grates. A cobweb-streaked art deco fluorescent light fixture that looked like a cross between a fan and a hotdog steamer hung not quite elegantly from the ceiling. Above the five and a half foot mark, the wallpaper of faded bluebells and mauve and green roses was streaked with water stains. On one wall, Jesus Christ, in a framed portrait measuring two by three feet, raised his eyes longingly toward heaven. A miniature nativity scene occupied one corner. Another framed two by three feet portrait hung on the front wall. In it, Pope Paul VI’s head and hands, which were holding a long chain round his neck, were taken from a photograph. But his white robe and zucchetto (cap) had been cut out of real fabric. White wicker rockers formed a circle in the center of the parlor. Passing through this large, dark, sad anteroom, one entered an open corridor rather like a porch, adjacent to a courtyard. There were grand old wooden beams and pillars supporting arched, wainscoted ceilings. They, and the walls, as well, were painted a damn ugly chalky green. In various places in the ceiling there were frilly circular ventilation holes, even though this area was entirely unenclosed. In one corner, a big shrine to the Virgin Mary was spray-painted silver. A large plastic figurine of the Virgin Mary stood in the middle, sporting a blue mantle and a red crown. Little lights adorned it and meandered around its many statuettes and printed images of Jesus, a bearded God, and Joseph. It had a very eclectic, 24-Hour-Church-of-Elvis feel. On the north wall, shared with the anteroom, were more framed photos of previous popes and family members cut out and pasted on wood or fur with real fabric clothing. Two large murals—one of a thatched-roof house with a flower garden and a woman at a well, another, a few feet away, of a snowy wood and brook—adorned the east wall. Between these two murals, a life-sized, concrete, painted bishop’s head, in profile, jutted out—the godfather of Aunt Carmen’s brother’s kids. Aunt Carmen listened almost constantly to Radio Free Vatican, or at least she almost always had it on. But despite all the religious imagery, idols, and radio, Aunt Carmen did not go around proselytizing all the time. Though certainly straightforward, she was generally very mellow, and very respectful of our philosophical differences. The court featured a garden, which many Granada houses had—a common feature of Spanish colonial architecture. It was like a backyard, except that it was in the middle of the house. The garden was not big, but it was certainly green. Around the garden, there were lots of plants in molded concrete tree stumps. It was so lovely to have the elements and the sky as part of the house! When there was a sudden downpour of about fifteen seconds, it was as if someone had emptied a huge bucket onto the living room. There was plenty of ventilation, I tell you. With the exception of the anteroom, the place was like one big back porch. Wildlife came in and out as it pleased. Little lizards ran up the walls. Leafcutter ants carried off the plants from the courtyard garden bit by bit. Birds flitted in and out. Stray, wild, or the neighbors' cats fought in the area by the TV. The house was an alley, a park, and a refuge. The only truly unfortunate thing was that the house had been split down the middle by a cinder block wall, Berlin-style. The house was originally twice the size, but half of it was sold off to a cousin who wanted “privacy” for his family. I say “privacy” with reservation, because even though above the wall there were five rows of rusty barbed wire, everything that happened on the other side of the wall could be heard: showers, conversations, laughter, radio, television, everything. Shuffling over with her walker, Aunt Carmen brought sheets and placed them on an old brass canopy bed that was in the covered area next to the garden. It was a single bed with tall posts. She had me put a mosquito net over the bed by tying the cords at its corners to the posts. To do so, I took off my shoes and climbed up on the bed, which was about three feet high, getting spent fly carcasses—the leftovers of spiders’ lunches—on my socks. After sweeping the bed off a bit, I put the sheets on it. The bed rattled and creaked, but it was marvelous to sleep there because it was like camping out in style. At the end of this area, there was a disused, rickety stairway. “What’s up there?” I asked. Aunt Carmen said that the house used to have three floors, though when we visited there was just one room up there on something approximating a second floor. “You can go look if you want,” she said. I gingerly started up the pale green wooden stairs, concerned they might turn to termite-ridden dust under my weight. I was nervous, but I felt compelled to see what was up there. Halfway up there was a door attached to the banister with a wire, and beyond that a little landing. I undid the wire, opened the door and valiantly ascended a few steps further, which allowed me to see that there was just the wide, bare, open space with a low ceiling. But as soon as I had stuck my head above the level of the floor, two bats that were grasping the far wall, upside down, let go and flew around the entire space to keep themselves as far from me as possible, and then dropped down behind me to fly out. I looked around just long enough to notice that a saggy single bed and an old sack meekly occupied the space, and that light came in from cracks between the horizontal slats in the wall. Then I booked it on out of there. For supper, Aunt Carmen sent me and Isabella next door to buy some cooked beans for C$4 (C$ means córdobas, the Nicaraguan currency. At that time, C$1 equaled US7¢. C$4=US28¢.). This was not a store; this was somebody's house—a neighbor who sold freshly cooked beans. No sign or anything. I thought, “That is so organic,” in an economic sense. Not the beans, but the fact that we could just go next door and buy some beans from a neighbor—the fact that an informal neighborhood economy existed that had nothing to do with centralized intervention from anybody. Aunt Carmen’s kitchen, toward the back of the house, was like a dusty old vault—twice as long and half again as high as most people’s garages. There was no false ceiling in it, so I could see that the undulating terra-cotta tiles rested on some kind of ancient, brittle-looking cane material. While we made salad, Aunt Carmen made rice in a pot and heated tortillas on a two-burner hotplate. The smell that resulted from heating the tortillas directly on the burners was intensely reminiscent of the smell of the fat, burned pretzels that are sold on the street in New York. For dessert, Aunt Carmen had made cajeta de leche (kah-HAY-tah day LAY-chay), essentially milk, sugar, and vanilla mixed together and caramelized.