Bahía Solano, 28 May 2018

Dear friend,

The sound of the many birds who live in this town is keeping me company at this hour. A lot has changed here: people speak openly about narcotrafficking now, and they know which families and which people work in the trade – a trade that sometimes seems more respectable than fishing or teaching. Transporting cocaine by boat is a family business – everyone’s involved. Out in the street, the conversations have changed: people discuss kilos, journeys, who’s in prison in Central America or the United States. Still, you can tell this land has a history of fighting oppression and knows plenty about resistance.

Last night the moon came out where it always does. Radiant, it lit up the same balcony that was here in my childhood, which still contains pieces of timber from thirty-five years ago. The rain falls and makes a river of the earth, the street level rising and the houses seeming to sink inch by inch into the ground. And then neither the shiniest houses, nor the biggest, nor the ones adorned with marble sculptures as white as the product that pays for them, suggest anything close to growth or luxury. This is still a simple town, whose charm comes from the sea and the forest, only now the saltpetre carried in on the easterly winds doesn’t erode the usual materials, instead encountering bricks, tinted windows and high metal fences, which can’t hold out forever and end up going the way of everything else around here: a little dilapidated, rather old, musty-smelling, with green stains spreading from each corner, and inhabited by tiny crabs that leave their own homes and move into people’s houses.

As we’ve said before, this may be the Pacific, but it’s not a peaceful place. Though I should add, my dear friend, that nothing brings me more peace than being here. There are things that come close, as you know: reading with the children, running FLECHO. But deep in my soul I have to accept that nothing and no one else stirs in me what I feel when I’m here. It’s as if every time I inhale I’m taking the first breath of my life.

I walk on the beach at low tide and savour each step because my toes sink into the sand. I swim in the sea, though I prefer looking at it, and in the water I try to float and gaze at the sky, concentrating on the feeling of melting, of being just one tiny thing amid all this, which, I strongly believe, is what has shaped my way of seeing the world, and my character, and my relationship with the water and the land.

The fullness of my soul keeps the words from my lips. I feel I don’t need them as much, and I fill up with silences. That’s why I think the best way of telling you what’s happening is for you to visit one day, so we can look together at this sea that here, unlike on the rest of the coast, always moves from north to south.

Hugs,

V.