Blog 2-At La Fabrica de Escritores

After our lunch Anacaona and I walked back from Migajas straight to the Fabrica de Escritores. Off the plaza the main street narrowed. We passed pink, turquoise, and yellow row houses. I stared deep into the darkness of the houses through double doors open wide onto the street and caught glimpses of dark wood rockers with cane seats, moorish tiles with intricate filigree designs, potted arecas with long spiny leaves. I slowed down. "I feel like I'm walking through Los Santos where I lived when I was a little girl." Anacaona pulled at my hand and laughed."Well, you haven't traveled back in time, you're not in Ventura, and you can't be staring into people's houses." She set our pace.
The street became the carretera. I realized I'd noticed almost nothing on the way to Coral. We passed dusty olive green scrub. The road was mostly packed red or ochre dirt but a few patches of concrete survived. She insisted we walk off road into the scrub and past it so she could show me the Manantial under a canopy of tall evergreens with shiny oval leaves. The little spring in the brush had been fitted by the old Ecopark with a spigot long before there was a Palenque, an encampment, an occupation. We made it to Palenque in just over 15 minutes. My walk that morning, terrified as I had been, had taken me almost twice as long.
We filled our water bottles. I said llave de agua instead of pila de agua for the spigot. "Llave is Venturan Spanish. I always forget you were born there." She wanted to know all about me being both Venturan and Karayan and I found myself telling her my mother had been Karayan and my Father had been a Venturan evangelist who'd met el Lider during La Insurreccion. “Using one of his evangelistic missions as a cover my Father delivered the money the clandestinos raised to buy the Caiman yacht." Anacaona stopped and looked at me. "This is history that's never been written. The rebels bought the yacht they used to invade the coast by Palmivilia because of your father. I have to write this story for Verdad." She set off again. My story made her walk faster and faster. “He risked capture and torture and after all that he dragged you and your mother al exilio?” I could barely keep up with her. She was almost in tears. “You'll have to tell me more. I have to write this story.” We almost galloped into Palenque.
When we got to the Fabrica de Escritores there were a few people writing on laptops, sitting in wooden armchairs or at small tables. "It's a kind of tabernaculo!" I spun slowly in the center of the open walled circle, looked up at the thatched roof held up by weathered palm trunks. There were dozens of power strips and tables of many sizes and heights, movable, set up around an open center where there was a circle of chairs, now in disarray, left in the random grouping made by whomever last gathered there. "I'm home."
She pushed two wooden armchairs together, settled with her laptop into one of them and offered me the other one. Shehelped me make my own page on the TODOS website and showed me how to make tiles, enter text, embed photos and video. She looked away from me and bent over her laptop. "I have a deadline in two hours on my profile of Padre Ezequiel for this weekend's magazine supplement to Verdad."
I sat and stared at my laptop as it booted. She glanced at me and asked why I looked glum. “I do? I feel dread when I write, overwhelmed. I have a deadline too, to finish my story, and the story of my story: I'm old enough to die.” She shook her head, pressed my hand, grinned. “We imagine that writing is an isolated act. But we don't write alone, we write with everyone who has ever written. Picture them writing along with us. Writing is a joy, getting to write is a joy. Palenque is the place to find la alegria de luchar, and La Fabrica, is the place to find la alegria de escribir.”
After we'd been writing half an hour or so Anacaona called out, “There is an empty space, enter it.” The five women and men joined us. Two had been writing at small tables scattered in the space. The others, like Anacaona and I, were sunk into big wooden armchairs with a tablet, a laptop, or a paper notebook propped on lose boards. She looked at each of us and stopped at me. “This, as most of you know, is our way to call a reading. This one is a quick check-in. We share a word, a phrase...remember our minds are connected no matter how singular, even lonely, our thinking can feel...”
The others pulled together a circle of chairs around us. She walked to a bamboo podium, took a stick covered with feathers and stone beads. She sat and placed the stick on her lap. She read, "Palenque is an encampment of Hope, said Padre Ezequiel." Just then her brother Lagarto jogged into the Fabrica from Beachside. He waved to me as he sat on the arm of his sister's chair. He was one of my Palenque friends. The afternoon our little human pod of four first arrived in Palenque he saw us struggling to anchor our huge blue tarp, brought us wood and tools, and helped us build our shelter. He'd even brought along a friend to work with us. Lagarto turned out to be Anacaona's brother, Patria's son, the boy Machi and I had known as Elpidio twelve years ago. Thin and tall, in the green t-shirt and brown shorts he always wore, perched on the arm of her chair, he did look like the lizards he was nick-named for.
He leaned over his sister and looked at her laptop screen as she went on reading. “ 'In the midst of all the chaos and the cacophony, Palenque is an encampment of hope,' said Padre Ezequiel, liberation priest of La Virgen de Coral.”
I expected more but she stopped, looked at each of us until Lagarto nodded, still studying his phone. When he looked up, for just a second, I saw the liquid brown eyes of the little boy I'd known peek through Lagarto's guarded gaze. She passed him the stick. He looked at each of us then down at his phone again. “Anacaona tells me some of my text messages to her are poems. She calls them haiku. Maybe sometimes I believe her.” He looked at me and laughed. “Don't tell Machi.” Amazing! Lagarto blushed! I could see his already dark skin darken as he read slowly, marking each breath. “Permanent dark night, Rio Guacabon closes its eyes, River dreams it dreams.”
He passed the stick to the young woman sitting across from him. He didn't look at her. I studied her crown of coiled hair into which she had braided red ribbons. She pointed to the butterfly tattooed on her left shoulder and to me she said, “Me llamo Tanama, butterly in the language of the Tainos.” She read, “The three boys couldn't resist going into the cave although (or because) they had been told they must not.” I wanted to know more but she didn't explain. She passed the stick to the woman beside her and across from me.
“Soy Elba Luz.” She read in a loud, firm voice. She was in her 60s, not much older than me, with jet black curls. “Last night was the hundredth night of my candle-light vigil by the Beachside fence of the Karaya Navy Base. We've been hundreds; we've been a dozen; last night, just me. I was discouraged. But how can I be discouraged about things that have not happened yet?” She glanced at me but I looked down. She gave the stick to the tall, thin man to my right. He wore an ancient, pale yellow guayabera, almost see through just above the hem. Guille bent toward his heavy, ancient, laptop, and read in a discurso voice, “Hacia donde Palenque? Are we coincidence, accident, disruption, fringe situation, or pre-revolutionary mass movement?”
There was no one left but me. He smiled at me, a huge smile that showed perfect, too white, false teeth. He offered me the stick. Anacaona looked at me, saw my fear, and waited. For at least ten years, since I'd started working at the burocrazy, I hadn't read my writing in public. She took my hand and said, “This is just a glimpse into your mind, our mind. Read any sentence, even one sentence, even one word.” I took the stick, scanned what I'd been writing at Migajas and transposing to my laptop, and I read, “Do I write the present or the past, the thing I want to notice or the thing I don't want to forget?”
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