DAY 8... SUBJUNCTIVE RELATIONSHIP & AVALANCHE

DAY 8

Ok, two big realizations: one, the big mountain just out my window…big as in you really have to

get a crick in your neck looking up to see it ..is the big volcano San Pedro (and tonight there is the glimmering of a big moon coming up behind it, so I figure in a couple of days it will be spectacular if we get a break from the rain); two, no one, including the women teachers at the school, wear their traditional dress of huipiles and cortes for the tourists. They wear them because that’s the way they dress and I think they feel beautiful in them and they really do.

Today is the last day of classes for the first week. I love working like this. I revel in the way my teacher, Javier, throws himself into the work and I really treasure the connection we are building which is mostly because of the subjunctive! And that’s because in order to use this marvelous part of the language you have to deal with things that are not reality, but, rather, things you wish were true but aren’t, things you can’t change but wish had somehow been different. So, as a result, you begin sharing feelings and happenings that are full of human longing, regret, and hope for something different. And it occurs to me that this is the way human beings grow closer to each other. So, this is great.

Then there is the 50 something year-old lady veterinarian from Virginia who splashes me with moon-eyed looks and always finds a way to sit with me in breaks. This ain’t going nowhere, lady. Do I need to be more obvious? And yet I understand and wish, for her sake, that I were indeed the met-on-my-exotic-vacation-learning-Spanish-even-if-it’s-only-one-night lover that I imagine she fantasizes about in her life right now. Wait, maybe this is projection? Or transference? Never have been able to keep the two of those straight. She says it’s her birthday today, a decade birthday. Maybe 60? Entirely possible and likely. She is pretty. Very skinny for her pants. Hair expertly colored. She mentions her children. I wonder what the story is.

There was a horrible avalanche here during the first hurricane of the season. Walking along the lake, I come to an area right at the waterfront that is really impassable. It is perhaps a stretch 75 meters wide of mud and sand and suddenly I realize that nothing is growing here, that somehow everything right here has been obliterated and I look up at the volcano and see where the earth came plunging down and realize that right here is where it hit the water. And then later along the road as I walk back to town I see the avalanche for real.
It covered the road by about 4 or 5 feet, there are boulders the size of houses that came down with the mud and clearly visible on the outside of the houses that survived is a chocolate brown smear where the avanlanche passed by. It is as clear as if someone had tried to paint wavy brown borders on the lower part of all the houses. Almost 30 houses were destroyed and one little girl was lost. I wonder if she lies still beneath this new earth or if she were washed out to the lake with her little girl huipile and corte. No one knows.