Monday, May 12, 2008
Salon Wanderlust presents the second installment in an exclusive excerpt from the unpublished memoir of writer Moritz Thomsen, about his life in Ecuador from 1965 to 1991.
Jul 15, 1998 | TACHINA, 1986: There were two roads in my life at that time -- the one that passed the house and the other, a gravelled road along the property line that separated the pastures from the airstrip. From the upstairs room, an open area with the breeze from the ocean moving through it, sometimes screeching through it, I could sit at the typewriter and watch the people on the airport road some six hundred feet away as they went back and forth between Tachina and Las Piedras, the road fitting neatly into the north side of the house from corner post to corner post the whole length of the property line. The moving figures from the distance, losing their particularity -- their age, their sex, their poverty -- were simply plainly dressed rural people displaying the grace and beauty of their movements. Can you tell the thief from the saint in the black flowing rhythm of a walk?
This particular stretch of road is considered mildly dangerous. Perhaps for this reason, hiding fear, the women, scarcely ever alone, and the young men pass across my horizon with a brave, strutting daring. How beautiful the walk -- the high lifting legs, the generously swinging arms, the head highly held, glancing neither to the left nor right. The hidden thief or the rapist crouched in the grass are symbols of the menace and the possibility of violent and unplanned surprises in the lives of very poor people. The walk across my vision is a symbol of how that life is confronted -- with arrogance, grace and courage. Barefoot, vulnerable to stones, to thorns, they have created out of walking a mythical ballet.
Old men and women, seen as old for the conservative color of their clothes, having nothing that anyone would want, not even a body, move alone with strong but less flamboyant steps. Almost all of them carry half-filled sacks: the younger women in red or turquoise, long legs dancing, daring; the fishermen in scarlet shorts and carrying plastic buckets of fish or shrimp or tomorrow's bait; the children drab and serious in dark school clothes, black pants, blue shirts, the small ones, the workers, walking in pairs with rowed catfish on a bamboo length between them -- on a lucky day they will earn more than their fathers.
These people, bright against the grass, are too far away to identify. I have all the pleasure of watching them without having to know them -- another way of saying, yes, they have beat me; I don't want them too close anymore; coming close they have hurt me too much.
A man in a big straw hat and white shirt moves proudly up the road with the high-stepping walk of a young man; it is pleasant to watch him, to see his future stretching before him. It is only when he has turned in and walked past the house to the river that I see with a shock that it is Benedito, a neighbor. Like so many here who have been badly raised on brain-stunting food, he is mentally retarded, his body is starting to collapse and wither; each day he is a little less able to do the decent day's work that makes him proud. Strange to see him dressed in his men's clothes; he likes the pink or yellow pants, the wild shirts, the silly hats of a thirteen-year-old.
On that distant road, the high road, where detail shrinks, the silver glitter at the wrists of the man with no hands would be no more than the glitter of bracelets, the fancy gee-gaws of a man impelled to celebrate his irresistibility; the bursting rags of the women would be bright pure colors moving sweetly across the landscape; the pot-bellied children half dead with ascariasis would turn into scamps and angels; and the crazy woman and her drunken husband would no longer sadden the day with their torn dirty clothes, her goofy shrieks, their wrinkled faces. From a distance their faltering walk would turn profound from the beauty of their humanity.
You take the low road if you want; for me from now on it's the high road every time.
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