“Have you been to the mountains, to the rainforest? You have? To the mountains, but not the rainforest. We can go together, I know of a place where you get a guide to take you through … we can see termite nests in the trees, swing from vine roots high above the forest floor … we can trek by the trails and eat fish straight from the Amazon … we can kayak and white water raft …you’ve thought about this, have you? You’ve seen this in your dreams?”
I recall Yelena’s words as I set out with Karen for the bus station. The man with the dusty taxicab, who welcomed me to Manta, inquires, with a grin, whether I’ll be back.
“Wet season will soon be here,” he says in Spanish, looking skyward. “Still, many places of this country remain flooded from El Niño.”
“I will be back to see the wet season,” I reply, boarding the bus with Karen. Yelena and Annabelle, sadly, are gone. My copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron, which I hold beneath my arm, plunks with a cloud of dust onto the street. Quickly retrieving it, I place the worn volume in my backpack.
I will go to Peru some day, I say to Karen as we find our seats on the bus bound for Quito. I don’t explain to her how my father never had such intense dreams as he had there. It was because of the thin mountain air, my father said, a lack of oxygen combined with what he called the spiritual energy of the place. He dreamed of oversized condors with supernatural energies laced with gemstones and jewels, of the beginning and the end of the world, the end coming with fire-breathing dragons flying over barren landscapes. He dreamed of angels allowing him access to a telephone which he could use to talk with anyone, living or dead, which he used to talk at length with a friend of his who had died in a motorcycle accident. I told my father something he didn’t like because he said it was something my mother would say, and in fact my mother had taught me once that speaking to the dead is abhorrent to God and that the reason for King Saul’s death was his consultation first with the witch of Endor and then with the spirit of Samuel.
Karen says nothing for a long time. I know what she is thinking. We’ve had the conversation only hours before. We couldn’t go to Peru now, even if we had the time, as we wouldn’t get past the Ecuadorian-Peruvian border. They’re at war, those two countries. It’s too dangerous to leave to go anywhere, the Señora told us, adding that we should stay very close to home and try not to leave our apartments for at least a week or two.
“The protests against the government will happen soon,” the Señora said. “I have seen them before many times. The police fighting against the military, both fighting the people. You wait, it will happen.”
“I’ve seen it too,” Karen added, “the tear gas and the tire fires lining the streets and the highways, the guns, the police with their plastic shields.” She explained further, detailing the looting and mass protests, this government only having been in power for a few months of a four-year term, armoured military vehicles bouncing down the roadways looking for aggressive protestors and perhaps hoping they find none.
We had to beat these protests, and get away before they began, I said....
We pass through the mountains, our ears plugging and then crackling clear as we go up and up, past the side of cliffs again, past their sheer edges. We suddenly stop. We are stuck in mud. The wet season is not here, just the weather leading up to it, the remnants of another storm that must have brought gusting winds and torrents of rain.
After the bus driver’s lengthy struggle through the saturated earth, we are moving again. We pass by mountains of mud, sheer cliffs of it, and drive beside homes buried by landslides. We see children and their parents with buckets, emptying the dirty water from their once-proud residences. The roof of a home and the top of a palm tree protrude out of a small lake. This place has been hit hard. Someone aboard the bus says the words “El Niño.”
We move toward the mountains. We walk from the muddy bus station, both of us cold, and Karen dons a sweater. Removing my wrinkled and dusty rain jacket which is stuffed into my backpack, I put the jacket on and watch as the mountains fade into the evening.
The sounds of celebration, perhaps made by conspiring protestors, keep me awake throughout the night.…