Language from Ben & "Redes"

Here is a link to my friend Ben's recent update. His comments articulate some of my own thoughts about language, but succeed better than I have managed before in clarity and concision. Brazil was a markedly creative time for me as well, which inspired writing and autobiographical fiction that I had fallen out of the habit of writing. Even now, my fiction tends more toward the fantastic than the realistic and lacks the cut that autobiographical work usually contains. I wanted to post a story I wrote there, from the time we spent living on an Landless People's Movement/MST community, Palmyres II (the spelling of which eludes me at the moment).

As always, reposted with love to Ben.

Note: The word "rede" refers, usually, to hammocks, but it is also similar to "net" or "network" and is used for "internet" sometimes.

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Redes
18 April 2008

I woke without knowing it, the thin sheet spun and twined around me like a thick, patiently breathing python. Air had gathered stiffly in the room, rough and heavy with the death of the fan. As I spun in my waking the great boa constricted and I could not breathe, and I thought desperately of slowly broken ribs and asthma. I coughed and felt it on the inside of my arm, a hot gust and small splash of spittle crashing into my skin. My eyes opened to the unwelcome ambient light from the main room, spilling over the incomplete (never-complete?) wall and seeping around the edge of the door-less doorframe.

I gasped before unwinding the sheet from around my arms and between my legs. From somewhere inside the mosquito net came a buzz and I swatted at emptiness. The net was structured by a rectangle and the edge had small frills like a doily or child’s dress; small tears further punctuated the small holes. It felt like a cheap imitation of a four-post bed, like a toy for children and not something to save a day’s work or teetering lives. As I shifted, kicking slightly along the edge of the bed, my skin ran along the net making it sing faintly.

Sitting up only aggravated my lack of fortitude. My head ran wild for a lasting moment, then the stirred humidity circled about to collide with my face in a sad mimic of a breeze, and the sheet fell like iron on my lap and legs. With one hand I yanked off the sheet and threw it to the foot of the bed, with the other I pulled at the tucked edges of the mosquito net. Across the room my host-sister, one year older than me, stirred but fell back to sleep. Somewhere on the other side of the wall a cow bemoaned its generous lot. Outside the net and my bed, I walked in the dark, with a mild daze, for the kitchen door. When I stepped into the hammock with my host-brother, two years younger than me, it began to swing and he woke to murmur at me.

“Como? Quem é?”

“Eu, só eu. Banheiro, banheiro.” And he rolled over and fell back asleep. In the next hammock my host-brother’s uncle (it seemed inappropriate to claim him as my host-uncle when I couldn’t remember his name) snorted and snuffed in air in between snores with the inharmonious sounds of unrelieved congestion. The day before he had sneezed and I ached with a sympathy sneeze, while he just shuffled his nose around, sneezed four more times, then five more times, then once, and then three times again, without ever acting to seriously change the situation in his nostrils. I almost threw tissues at him. The whole affair smacked of the absurd: the creation of something large and daunting, of a joke or taunt, out of something small and petty. I hated the possibility of insisting on one custom as superior to another, though in this case it seemed the locals had the wrong idea entirely. I had said nothing and thought for a moment that his snores were just the continuation of the frustratingly unending battle with his sinuses.

Light flooded out into the dirt-floored kitchen, the tough little survivor kitten scurried to the dark behind the door, and cast itself onto the table against the house wall. When I reached for the flashlight I knocked it over and it cackled with laughter as it jumped and danced on the floor. Inside someone snorted and outside a sow trumpeted its own dream-heavy response. I swept my hand down and picked up the light, somewhere noticing the long, eight-legged shadow cast on the floor. I forced myself to forget it, or whatever the mind does when it insists on the impossible.

On the other side of the little gate that kept out the sow and piglets, and some of the other nighttime concerns, I clicked on the flashlight, stepped over the trail of always-wet mud, and strolled to the outhouse. Despite its regular and real functionality, I was unable to move past the whole notion of the outhouse; it is temporary and small, smells of human waste, likely grows terrible microbes and pathogens, and is something for construction fields and arena rock shows, not for a home. It was never too difficult to make use of the facilities, but the notion that this is how things work here went far beyond my comprehension. In some way, the idea of a Port-a-John as a house necessity just made me laugh and gag slightly.

Afterward, I rinsed my hands from the plastic faucet outside and stood for a moment, looking out at the community and thought for the time of where I was. All of this had been made in the course of a decade; a whole community had grown from next to nothing into a school and real stores and real houses. It had, in fact, made homes. The language lacks a difference in the two words, but I know the difference and I think my brothers and sisters would understand it, too.

Tomorrow I would leave, having only briefly crash-landed here and now all-too ready to leave again. We moved with an external determination through this landscape, through this world of people we had only known in documentaries and books about global poverty. In many ways these families were poor; they were being deprived of many basic social services, there water was dangerous at times, treatable and avoidable diseases were major problems, and I couldn’t forget the public urination for long. In other ways, it was easy to see wealth, the wealth of families and of the community, the interest in making something rich in opportunities and choices, the faltering and uneven passions for making a new place in the world. They were pioneers politically, socially, and ecologically; though it had been decades since “wilderness” grew here.

The televisions flashing telenovelas had blinked off hours before. Somewhere near the main road a bar played music, though most of the dancers and patrons had gone to bed. The music was fast and maddening, like a fever or a seizure, but had the sharp inspiration of movement, the mutual goal of moving others and being moved. Somewhere a rooster crowed and one returned its call; so it was past three in the morning. (We quickly learned the joke of the picturesque call of the rooster at dawn. Roosters call out competitively, and here it seemed they started at around three o’clock and continued until mid-afternoon.) Some houselights shone light into the soft, velvet blue night; perhaps my friends were sleeping with the lights on. A faint, old scent of stewed chicken hovered in the breeze, and then smothered by a moist and uncomfortable earthy aroma. The stars were spotty from high, wispy clouds and a thin, partial ring of refracted moonlight slowly formed and faded.

When my youngest host-sister had learned of my departure—now only a few hours away—she expressed distress. I shared her sadness, but then I flashed with a secret smile that my brief stay had rippled into her life. I am a traveler here, a visitor and often a guest, and my time is perforated with goodbyes. Perhaps it was a little cruel, to come and go so quickly, with only the time to make my existence known, and then smiling that at least that had happened. Sitting up in my netted bed, I felt the clear extensions of feeling, of knowledge, of life between her bed and mine, like a vine or vein trading a thin, ethereal fluid between us. And then I felt for further extensions; to my older sister and my brother, rocking slightly in his hammock, to my friends I had only made months ago in other houses in the community, and they had their own channels to their families. The wind shuddered in from between the roof and the wall and I thought of home, of my adopted one here with the sisters in two other cities, of my father working in small towns nearby. Briefly, with the knowledge that all things turn that way, I thought of my real home and how they were pulled here too in some way, pulled here by me and by the people I know here, though a phone call is an email is hardly clear evidence of that, just a hint, like a dream or a collision in the night.