Madrina

Thursday June 24, 2010

I am being watched. Bilde, the four year old from next door has returned with his truck; he hides behind the eclectic row of exotic plants to my left. Through the bushes I see his hands tightly clutching the rope as the truck twirls just above his feet. The clean yellow polo he donned in the mid-afternoon heat has been replaced this morning by a navy blue hoody and a dingy white jacket with a busted zipper. Any advances we made towards friendship during our afternoon chupa have been forgotten overnight, but his curiosity is too strong for him to stay away. I smile at him as he peers through the bushes, then turn back to my writing. I hear the brush of tiny feet on grass as my pen crosses the page. I look up, he stops; the truck sways back and forth a few times before dropping to the ground with a soft thud. Buenos deeeeas I say. The truck raises and Bilde stares without responding. I turn back to my writing. Again I sense movement; slowly, cautiously, he inches towards me until I raise my head. Freeze. I smile and stick out my tongue. Dimples flash as the truck drops and he brings his hand to his mouth, bashfully looking away; I snap a photo and return to my journal. I hear plastic truck wheels slowly gain speed and I'm reminded of a game we used to play in elementary school in which the rabbits could only advance toward their den when the fox had his (or her) back turned. I play along. The truck drops in front of me

Here my journal entry ends mid-sentence as my attention turned to the giggling boy who then sat down beside me. He flipped through the pages of my moleskine and ran his finger along the words, finally asking ¿Qué cosa? I picked up my dictionary to double check the word “journal” before responding; diario, I said, but his attention had already turned to the miniature masterpiece in my hands, it's worn blue and red cover indicative of how often over the years Oxford has been my most indispensable traveling companion. ¿Queeeeeé cooosa? He repeated, slightly awestruck as he reached a tiny brown hand across my lap and pulled the dictionary out of my hands. Diccionario I say, before realizing that a four year-old living in the depths of poverty without so much as a telephone to connect him to the outside world would have no reason to know what a dictionary was. ¿Qué...? He asked, slightly disinterested, as he sped through all 600 pages flipbook-style, causing the bangs that sat neatly on his forehead to dance in the handmade breeze. He giggled and repeated. Un libro, I said (“a book”).

His seven year-old sister bounced towards us on her way to school, a halo of wispy black strands framing her face and her long black ponytail swishing from side to side as she made her way across the lawn. She looked surprisingly well-groomed despite the dust and the jungle, dressed in a clean white blouse and long royal blue skirt that gathered at the waist, creating wavy ruffles through the length of the fabric. As she neared, however, I realized she had not eluded the jungle after all—thick stripes of spotted black mildew ran around the collar, spread across the shoulders, and traveled down the front of her blouse, weaving around the pearly white buttons like the ubiquitous trails of tiny black ants I was constantly trying to avoid (those bites hurt). I thought of the bags of perfectly good clothing I had tossed without a second thought into the large donation bins at the GW in Somerville a couple weeks before, glad to be rid of them simply because they no longer fit perfectly or the style was slightly dated. I sat humbled as she veered to the right with a shy smile and walked up a small dirt path behind the house to the road; she disappeared between (freshly weeded) rows of coffee plants and orange trees and my attention was drawn back to the present by Bilde poking my arm over and over again. As I turned he grabbed my hands and pulled me to standing.

Games ensued for the next twenty minutes and Bilde never let go of my hands as he pulled me in this direction or that. Together we hopped in circles on one foot, he ran round and round as fast as he could as I twirled in the center trying to keep up (and not fall over...). I lifted him up by his hands and he pulled his tiny feet up so he could swing back and forth before I carefully set him down on the tile in a heap, the muscles in his legs and torso limp with giggles.

After twenty minutes of hopping and twirling and lifting and running I was feeling pretty well spent, and as luck would have it at that very moment Bilde's father came over to take a gander at the gringa himself. I introduced myself and asked his name; jibberish reached my ears as he put together a string of words that had to contain more than me llamo Guido. I nodded slowly and smiled, bringing the conversation to an awkward silence before he pulled out the faded photo album that had been tucked under his arm. Guido on one side, Bilde on the other, we thumbed through page after page of family portraits taken in a variety of settings; each photo was described in what I'm sure was great detail by Guido, and was often even augmented by Bilde, but I understood almost none of the stories and descriptions they so lovingly recounted. Asking politely for him to repeat what he had just said was completely useless: his thick, back-country accent was more than my rusty Spanish could manage. I made myself feel marginally better by thinking of my late grandmother's farmhand Orvilee, who, though I sat politely through hours of conversation he had in “English” with my father and grandmother on her farm on Dark Hollow (pronounced “Holler”) Road in Tennessee, I never understood a single word that he said in the twenty plus years that I knew him.

Guido kept coming back to a photo of a younger version of himself with his wife, a baby girl, and an older man. The baby wore a long white dress and her face and head were adorned with what looked like several strings of little white baby's breath flowers. He kept pointing to the older gentleman and speaking. It's like he's trying to tell me something....I thought to myself and almost laughed out loud. I tried to use the clues I'd been given....baby, white dress, flowers, photo, South America. I looked up baptism in my dictionary. Bautismo? I asked. He nodded and again pointed to the man, and the background with a verbose stream of unintelligible dialogue; I strained to hear padrino, hermana, La Paz, and teléfono. He got up and started walking toward their house without stemming the stream of (one-sided) conversation; Bilde grabbed my hand and pulls me along after him.

I sit timidly on the edge of a hard straw mattress in a one-room home that is substantially smaller than my kitchen in Boston. Judging by the lack of fold-away cots and/or extra blankets, the small bed underneath me sleeps a cozy five each night. Sunlight streams through the open seams between the roughly cut boards that make up the walls of the hut, running vertically from dirt floor to palm-leaf roof. As Guido searches through a pile of belongings that lay untidily atop a small wooden structure in the far corner (and by “far” I mean I can almost tap it with my foot if I straighten my leg out from where I'm seated), Bilde shows me with great pride the short list of treasures his world contains: the truck, a flashlight, a ball, a shoelace, a cup. He disappears out the door and comes back a short while later with a mouth full of yucca before sitting beside me on the bed and picking at the plastic on the bottom of his filthy white flip flops. Guido finally pulls a clean yellow envelope from the pile and steps closer to me as he pulls out a baptism certificate for both Bilde and the older daughter, pointing to various lines on the paper. He pauses as he points to names labeled padrino and madrina (godfather and godmother) and underlines them a few times with his finger. I smile and nod, feeling accomplished as he confirmed that I had indeed heard him speak those words earlier. He then points out that he does not have the same certificate for the baby. I again hear the words hermana, La Paz, madrina, bautismo, and teléfono as he gets up and points to a weekend in July on a calendar on the wall. Gaining confidence after my recent successes with what I now fancy to be Nancy Drew-like deduction skills, I nod. I think he is telling me that they will be going to La Paz in July to visit his sister, where they will have their baby baptized. He tells me it would be great if I could attend, as a bit of cultural immersion during my stay here. How nice! I think to myself as I write down my name and the phone number of the office in La Paz and hand it to him. He seemed perhaps a bit overly excited and grateful for the slip of paper but I didn't think much of it. Several minutes of cloudy conversation and hesitant nodding followed as an uneasy feeling in my stomach started to grow. At one point he got up and pointed to the calendar again and waited for me to respond. I nodded politely. Satisfied and excited, he shook my hand and sent me on my way with a shirt full of freshly picked mandarinas, saying that he would come bring his wife to meet me as soon as she got back.

Over lunch I asked Teodoro what he knew about baptisms in Bolivia. He went into a long dialogue about 

how children couldn't be baptized until they had a godparent who had agreed to care for them both morally and financially to supplement what the parents were able to provide. Hmmm.... He went on to explain that there were several organizations in Bolivia that connected Bolivian children with Americans who provided supplementary funding each year to help pay for their Bolivian godchild's education, wardrobe, schooling, etc. Oh dear. He concluded by saying that he was the godfather of Bilde, and that Guido and his wife were always looking for godparents for their children. Right. Suddenly everything made sense...