Blog 27-At last Coral with Patria

On my writing dune, alone. Palenque in a rare moment of silence. The sun was approaching from the right, over the Base, and the sea pines glistened pink. Sitting still I felt the ocean move, the pulse and breath of Pachamama. My rotten jobs had not been my personal defeat! I made myself think that thought over and over, like a mantra. After I saw Adela's lecture while webstalking her online, where she said, “in a rational world most of our jobs will disappear”, I had the epiphany that had nagged at my mind for my entire work life. My rotten jobs were not my personal defeat! We were all screwed by capitalism. In collapsing capitalism there was almost no rational work to be had. My writing mission emerged clearly at last: 'the very thing that keeps me from writing is what I must be writing about'. I'd been pushing myself to reread old journals I brought with me. In this new light I was hopeful I would make some sense of them, feel less slimy, sticky shame about them. I was blameless, and I was in charge! I felt a stirring through my whole being, cells and soul. What was it? I was thinking this must be the feeling of power. Just reread what I wrote about day one of the Encampment. What an endless writing amanecida that was, fueled by Patria's powerful cafe con leche and because I hadn't yet learned to fall asleep while Machi was off swarming. Patria told me she learned to sleep while Elpidio swarmed and I will too.
The time had come. I was resolved to start reading my journals from the early burocracy days, before it went full blown into burocrazy and then rogue burocrazy. I was sorting through my flashdrives, trying to reconstruct which was which when Patria finally showed up at my dune to take me with her to Coral. (And rescue me from my writing penance.) I'd waited for her the morning after we ran into each other and every morning after that. I'd even taken myself to Coral alone and run into Anacaona there who'd shown me La Fabrica de Escritores that day. I'd just about given up waiting for her and here she was, almost three weeks later. “Palenque time." She laughed. That was what I got by way of explanation or apology. “We have to go now, before the sun gets blazing. She pulled me up and we walked to my shelter to drop off my backpack. Julia and Taina were just leaving and Taina ran to us, hugged Patria's legs. “Viva la escuela outdoors by the beach." Patria waved and Julia kept walking, on her way to her morning shift at the Senoras' Comedor. Patria pointed to Machi, who lay crashed out in the lean-to. “Lagarto"s crashed out at home too, wiped out from their wade in last night.” I dug Ori's photos from their hiding place in the bottom of my duffel. I waved them at Patria. “Those will do."
To reach the Carretera Naval we walked a different path than we'd taken the day we arrived at Palenque. We made our way through a stretch of the Hillside rain forest, inside a misty dome of low hanging, vine covered branches. The dark path burst onto the sunny gravel road into what was, before so many of us settled here, the Cayo Karaya EcoPreserve. Patria pointed to the weathered old sign, almost completely vined over. “Now it's preserving that most endangered species, the vast majority of humans who are not rich.” I thought about what she said. "It's preserving even the rich. They can't tell in killing us they also kill themselves." Patria laughed loud. "Yes, I don't think their new planet and that spaceship for their 50 families are ready quite yet."
We stopped at one of the old EcoPreserve's overlooks. Patria pointed to the roof of her casita barely visible by the edge of the forest and then we figured out which of the blue tarp lean-tos was ours among the many clustered Beachside. “The shelters of Palenque look particular now, not a random patchwork like when we first arrived.” This old Carretera Naval was a narrow two lane road, nothing like its grandiose name, only a few patches of asphalt remained. Patria explained important traffic into the Base was by sea or air, or from the Arrecife side, where there was an eight lane highway, constantly maintained by the Base.
When we got to Coral we by-passed the plaza civica and took a side street all the way to the Justice Works storefront. It was bolted and locked. I kept meaning to tell Patria I had briefly worked for Justice Works in the City but our conversation always got away. We'd told each other a lot but there was a lot still unsaid. “If they're not in it's actually a good sign that maybe they're actually doing something. They all must have taken the ferry to the City to go to the Tribunal , or let's hope they're at the Base, or even the Camp, doing something useful.” At the pharmacy coin machine we copied David's snapshot and Ori's photo I'd brought with me, the old one from his byline for his column in Verdad. We walked across the street and sat in a small coffee shop, Cafe y Cuentos, on stools, at a counter in the front of what was actually a living room. I stared at the ochre tiles with black filigree designs so like the ones from my childhood home in Ventura. The Senora de la Casa came around from behind the counter to saludar Patria with a kiss and then introduced herself to me. Perla kissed me too.
At the bottom of David's photo Patria wrote DONDE ESTAS? in big black letters with a sharpie. I gave her Julia's cell number from my phone. On Ori's photograph she had me write, Han Visto a Este Hombre?...and my cell phone number. After coffee and pan con mantequilla Perla let us into her home so we could use her bathroom. Patria and I walked around the counter into the living room behind it furnished with a cane seat couch and rocking chairs like my family had in Ventura when I was a little girl. I peeked into the bedroom with an iron bed like the one my parents had slept in in Todos Santos, and studied the old terra cotta tiles of the bathroom floor.
Back at the pharmacy we made 20 copies of each sign on the copier, one at a time, coin by coin. We walked back to Justice Works and taped David's and Ori's photos with Patria's tape on the wall.
“Now, let's go to Guardia hangouts in Coral.” We put up photos by a bar called La Llorona. I could barely see two guardias in their green fatigue uniforms, leaning against a narrow wooden bar. We taped more photos on the wall by the door to the fonda Migajas across from La Plaza, where I had sat with Anacaona. "It's name sounds pitiful, Crumbs, and it's such a cheerful place." She waved at the small tables covered with flannel backed vinyl cloths. I studied the faces on the wall, mostly men, photos and copies, some just up, others faded and tattered. Patria dug among them and showed me the photo of her son Guarionex who used to be Tomas. I looked closely at the photo of an unsmiling, long faced man. “I might recognize Tomas if I see him. He doesn't look much like the boy I knew but he looks like his brother Lagarto, with bigger eyes and darker skin.” She removed the photo from underneath several more recent fliers and taped it back on top. “I believe he's in the Camp. Or I want to believe. I keep waiting for Guardias to see him and tell me he's there.”
She looked at her watch, said she had to go. I wasn't expecting her to send me back to the Encampment alone. I watched her walk into a side street. She said she had to see a friend, but didn't ask me along. I was disappointed. I'd assumed we'd be having a long lunch at Migajas, walking back together, and going to her Casita again so I'd paid even less attention than I usually did to landmarks. I'd been looking forward to our picking up our constant conversation. I guessed if she wasn't bringing me along her friend must be a lover.

Lost, Found!
I felt lost, standing alone on the Coral street corner at the Southeast end of the Plaza, where Calle Amargura intersected Calle Esperanza. I laughed out loud, como una loca my mother would have said, because certainly, that had to be the spot in the universe where I most belonged, where bitterness made a corner with hope. I headed the way I thought we'd come and soon was literally lost but I didn't care, yet. Coral looked so much like Todos Santos that my fascination overwhelmed even the panic rising in my chest. I walked the narrow maze of cobble stoned streets of Coral, no sidewalks, pastel colored houses wall to wall, doors flush to the street, so beautiful to me it brought tears to my eyes. Like Perla's living room in Cuentos y Cafe, they reminded me of Todos Santos, the City where I'd lived as a young girl in Ventura. Probably Todos Santos and Coral had been colonized by Spain at the same time. I stepped around huge rain gouged holes on the hard packed red dirt streets. Rain torrents had floated the adoquines away from each other, laid them in odd patterns on the street.
I imagined I was walking toward the sound of the surf, toward Palenque, but found myself again at the plaza. No longer lost I collapsed onto a bench faint from relief. So I'd been walking in a circle. I sat for a few minutes to slow my racing heart by breathing slowly and deeply. I picked a bench across from La Llorona and Migajas, and watched young Guardias go in and out. Some studied the wall of photographs of the Desaparecidos. I was in a trance of watching and hunger when someone sat himself beside me on the bench. “Doña Marina, bendición.” He leaned to kiss my cheek. I turned to
hug Franz, overjoyed to see him. Only then did I realize how close to full-out panic I was. He invited me to join him for lunch in Migajas. Before we went inside the fonda I showed him the photo of Ori Patria and I had just put up on the desaparecidos wall.
He was welcomed like a friend by the dark skinned, smiling woman I'd met with Anacaona. Franz kissed her on the cheek and introduced her as Dulce, la duena. "We know each other." She touched my arm and held my gaze then drew me in for a hug. She remembered I liked the table by the door. She wiped it for us and we sat facing the street, the Plaza, the glorieta, and the Catholic church on the other side of the park. I studied the design on the vinyl flannel backed table cloth, black with clusters of huge purple grapes, and balanced my knife on my fork. I stared at the bench I had been sitting on. Franz said, “I haven't found your husband yet but that doesn't mean he's not there.” I searched my back pack and handed him one of my signs. "Show them this." He looked at it closely. “You realize he may not look anything like this.” He asked me for one more copy. “I'm not everywhere. But our people are everywhere. Somebody will have seen him. If he's there we'll find him.”
That phrase, 'if he's there', silenced me. I could feel him reading me. “Is there a reason he would be in the high security sectors?” He didn't need to say it, the high mortality sectors. He kept looking at me. “A month ago several Island freedom fighters went on hunger strike.” I nodded. “What did they do with them?” Franz had ordered two lunch plates for us and now our young waitress, whom he introduced as Rita, the daughter of the owner Dulce, brought a mound of rice and beans and pulpo. Thinking of Ori on hunger strike made me push my plate away. “They have them near the Camp hospital, where they can force feed them. We've got people there.” I didn't dare ask him who is “we.”