Chapter 9: Barrio San Ramón

Chapter 9: Barrio San Ramón

Seven years would elapse before I saw San Ramón again. We had moved out of our home on the main avenue shortly after Cati’s funeral. My parents, like J. Padilla, could not bear to live there after the incident. Padilla gradually ceased contact with them after he left for New York. Once again his phone calls were limited to birthdays. He seldom returned to Managua save to visit his daughter a few times a year, brief sojourns which he reserved exclusively for seeing her and no one else. Consuelita had moved in with her godmother, the now elderly woman who had raised her step-uncles, into a house which neighbored my family’s new home in the Residencial Valle de Luna. She had refused her father’s proposal to leave with him.

“I was born and raised here,” she had told him. “All I know and all I have ever known is here in this city. I don’t belong anywhere else.”

I landed in Managua’s international airport on the first of December. I was returning from a two-week journey in Switzerland where I had been touring a university as a prospective student. Going through customs, a young official took me for a foreigner on account of me being chele, or light-skinned, and tried to charge me a five dollar tourist fee.

“Oh, I’m sorry” she excused herself after I handed her my passport. “Well then, welcome home, Sr. Argüello!”

Exiting the airport, I felt at ease for the first time in two weeks. I was sweaty and unshaven. The electronic doors effortlessly parted for me, letting out a gust of warm air which had a cooling effect on the dew that had collected on my forehead. Smiling childishly, I deeply inhaled the familiar air and drew out a cigarette, patiently smoking as I waited for Óscar.

“Carlitos!” he exclaimed, giving me a firm hug. “Have you been waiting long? The traffic is terrible right now. It’s six o’clock, you know, rush hour.” Carelessly tossing my luggage into the trunk, he demanded I enter the car and make myself comfortable. “Get in, get in! You must be exhausted, coming from… such a faraway place,” he said, forgetting the name of the country I had left for, a nation which barely existed for him, only vaguely outlined on the geographic plane in his mind.

“You must be exhausted,” he let out as he drove. “Isn’t it a twenty hour plane ride? I can’t even imagine! Just sitting on the bus to Costa Rica for six hours kills me! It’s a whole different story when someone else is driving. It’s so boring! Not to mention the bus drivers are always ticos, who—as we all know—can’t drive for shit!”

“I’ve missed you, Óscar!” I said merrily, squeezing his shoulder. “Of course I’m very tired! But I’m also thrilled to be home again. You have no idea how much I missed Managua, how I missed these streets, this breeze!” I exclaimed as I extended my open palm out the car window. “There’s nothing like it in the world.”

“Well, don’t get too attached,” Óscar warned. “With the way things are going here…who knows what will happen. Everything is going to shit! Guess who won the mayorship while you were gone?

“The Sandinistas?” I guessed.

“Nope,” Óscar smiled.

“The liberals won?!” I asked, amazed at the prospect of the Right winning another election after so many scandals and corruption charges.

“Nope,” he repeated with a growing smile.

“What? Then no one won? How can neither of the parties win? That’s absurd!” I remarked anxiously, somewhat annoyed with his gaming.

“They both won—or rather—they both claim to have won. Each candidate is accusing the other of fraud, of miscounting the votes, of stealing the election.”

My parents were happy to see me. Over dinner I told them all about my travels in Switzerland, and the university I visited, in great detail, aiming to satisfy their curiosity quickly and efficiently, so that I, in turn, would gain the freedom to assuage a certain hungering within me that had been growing stronger each day for the past week—the desire to see Consuelo Padilla—the girl who, up until recently, I had not realized I was inexorably in love with.

Showering and shaving in haste, I thought of my first interactions with Consuelo. The first image which came to mind was that of the little girl blushing timidly as her father introduced me to her during one of his early parties in San Ramón. She had meant nothing to me then, a mere social confrontation to avoid like the many others. I recalled her timid, bright brown eyes—a pair of moist coffee beans—eyes which, back in San Ramón, I had only regarded intending to measure the extent that they were her mother’s.

Dressing myself, I could not remember what Cati’s eyes had looked like. I could only see Consuelo’s. Then I thought of Cati’s funeral. Who would have thought the little expressionless girl whose hand J. Padilla tenaciously grasped as he sobbed would be one day become the love of my life. I had thought her cold and insensitive then, but now, the most caring creature that ever lived, the darling of my heart.     

Snatching the car keys on my night table, I noticed Consuelo had left me a voice message on my phone. I listened to her sweet-sounding mechanical voice requesting my presence immediately after I “made it back” biting my tongue with joy. “…And don’t call me when you arrive,” her message concluded, “I want it to be a surprise when you get here.”

All of a sudden I became nervous. “What will I say to her tonight,” I thought. “Does she feel the same way I do?” I turned the latch of my window hoping to get a view of the night sky, as if the moon and stars were indicators of the evening’s social forecast. Suddenly, my anticipant gaze was cut off by a brick wall immuring a miniscule patch of bluish grass spotted with orange cigarette buds and one withered potted-plant. I was shocked. “But why am I shocked?” I asked myself, realizing after a moment of profound vexation what had occurred.

Opening my window, I had expected to see the view allotted to me during my childhood. I had expected to see the night’s black canvas sprinkled with golden lights—lights emanating from the city below, from the innumerable celestial spheres above—the immaculately painted, pale cerulean, wrinkled reflection of the moon upon the lake. Perplexed, I shut the window and walked out of my room with the faint feeling I was turning a blind eye to something important.

Making my way through the tortuous hallways of our home in Valle de Luna, I could not help but recall the architectural simplicity of my old home in San Ramón—that one, long, L-shaped hallway which connected every room in the house just as the Carretera Masaya linked each neighborhood in New Managua—the hallway which had made it so difficult for me to get by unnoticed during those noisy Monday nights when the muffled voices of the poker players would infringe upon my silent solitude until one in the morning.

Closing the front door shut, I thought of how utterly meaningless this white-walled maze, this abode I had called home for the last seven years, was for me. Only that which I could associate with San Ramón—with my formative years—could have any real significance for me, and currently, I could see all of it—everything from Esperanza’s coarse earth-colored hands gently enveloping lime green iguanas as they descended from the ripe, orange-blotted mango trees, to the flawlessly symmetrical yellow chevron stripes on the impeccable main avenue, to the moonlit leaves effortlessly dancing on the tight-rope eucalyptus branches in the cool night breeze, to the proud triple-pillared monument, shy and sturdy under the immense penumbra cast from the glimmering palace whose image still involuntarily comes to my mind upon hearing, “Versailles,” to the queen of that palace, Caterina, enchantingly dressed in dark green, decked in gold like Cleopatra, up to the barely discernable gleam of Father Hammond’s wristwatch through the dark church window on the peak of the hill—I could see all of it—all of San Ramón, intricately embossed and reflected, in the shining pupils of Consuelo Padilla’s eyes.

I discreetly parked my car a block away from Consuelo’s house. I walked stealthily, taking care to not make the slightest sound, so I could surprise her by knocking on her windowpane. I knocked three times and at last witnessed the brown eyes which I long thirsted for. She was the very apotheosis of Happiness. She kissed me before I could speak. Even as a story-teller, I lack both the ability and audacity required to begin describing the emotions I felt as my lips touched hers at that moment.

 Love invariably renders the affected tongue-tied. On the eve of her death, we can only speculate which words Cati would have selected and juxtaposed to depict her love had she not been equally silenced by its innate ineffability. We suspect that if she had been able to articulate words that night, her phrases would have been comprised of paradoxes. Love cannot be classified into the same taxonomy of emotion because it is the only amphibian among them. It is unique in that it alone can be experienced by the soul, as well as the body. Even as its ethereal essence is absorbed and digested, even as our soul translates its holy cadence into feelings discernable by the body, its original substance remains beyond us the very instant we perceive it as an emotion. 

Love can only be expressed in an ancient script, a lost orthography devoid of known intonations and pronunciations. It is as impervious to recovery as the original language of the Rosetta Stone, the only perfect language, forever lost to humanity the moment it was transcribed and etched upon the stone, as dead and distorted as a fossil indicating the existence of creatures which can now only exist in our imaginations. And yet, lost as the language was, on this particular evening, Consuelo and I somehow managed to speak Love fluently. We seldom said a word to one another.

My excursion to San Ramón, however, did not take place until many days after this evening of love. About two weeks later, I received an unusually early phone call from Consuelo. She had awoken in a panic from a nightmare minutes before dawn. She had remembered it was her diseased mother’s birthday and called me immediately. She asked me to drive her to Colinas de Paz to see her grave in the morning.

“I’ll be there in five,” I assured her, somewhat ashamed of having forgotten myself.  

It was still early when we arrived. There were dozens of gravestones. The cemetery’s high rate of occupancy caught me off guard at first, but as Consuelo began paying her respects to her mother, I concentrated on mourning with her. Consuelo and I gazed at the name inscribed on the tombstone for about twenty minutes, and then she wished her mother a happy birthday, took my hand, whispered a prayer, and, shedding a single tear, placed a bouquet of light blue flowers on her gravestone.  

A heavy silence dominated the drive back. It was clear Consuelo was on the verge of weeping the whole way, and as I parked in front of her house, she hid her eyes from me, thanked me, and opened the car door to get out.

“Wait,” I said, grabbing hold of her wrist. “Are you going to be alright? Do you want me to stay here with you a while?”

“You’ll leave, too, won’t you?” she asked, turning her melting eyes towards mine, and without waiting for a response, freed herself from my grip and hurried to her front door, where she struggled to distinguish the correct key through her impaired vision, blurred by sorrow.

During the long hours which followed, I could think of nothing else save Consuelo’s eyes. Nothing could me more important. My entire past was grounded in them, and beyond that, they had become the living vessels of my dreams. These two invaluable gems comprised my life’s savings. They were the crystal balls on which I now saw my future, and the blissful fortune they had once revealed had been obscured by the perilous clouds of an impending storm—a great deluge—an apocalypse which would prove far worse for me than Noah’s had for him, for both our worlds would be destroyed, but the good Noah would survive by piously making his Ark for God, while I, pagan disciple of Aphrodite, would surely perish a heathen, having made gods out of two brown arks in Consuelo’s eyes.

Catching but a glimpse of her dolorous countenance I had discerned the delicate mortality of dreams, and refusing to submit to fortune, I resolved to devote myself entirely to the safeguarding of those precious jewels.

“I won’t go!” I thought. “I won’t go! There is nothing for me in Switzerland.”

It was dark out, and I was as nervous as I had been on the night of my arrival, before going to see Consuelo for the first time in two weeks. Above the moon shone brightly, courageously, and I set out for Consuelo’s house. The dismal expression on her face had not changed since I had last left her, but I managed to convince her to come along with me.

“Where are we going?” she asked, closing the car door.

“San Ramón,” I exclaimed, “We’re going to San Ramón!”

Neither of us had ever considered returning to San Ramón after her mother’s suicide, but it would have never occurred to us that we would be unable to return. Oddly enough, we were lost, and neither of us could remember which turn on the Carreterra Mayasa led to our old neighborhood. Stopping at the entrance gate of a new Residencial, I asked two security guards for directions. One of them had a thick mustache and the other was wearing a black baseball cap. The mustached man cringed in confusion at the sound of the name San Ramón. 

“Residencial San Ramón, you say?” he inquired. Then, rubbing his fingers through his mustasche, apparently deep in thought, he continued to repeat the phrase over and over again: “Residencial San Rámon…” “Residencial Sán-Ramon…” using different intonations each time he said it, waiting for the words to sound familiar to him, as if his memory was akin to slot machines in a casinos, and he could not be rewarded, even with partial prizes, unless the same exact figure appeared to him three times in a row.

This mindless repetition frustrated the man in the black cap, and he angrily lifted his face from the newspaper he was reading and cried, “Enough already, pendejo! You sound like a damn parrot! He means the barrio! What do you mean which one? The one with the nice church at the top, you imbecile!”

Then, turning to me he said, “You’re not too far, chele. Just get back on the highway and take the next right. If you’ve been there before you’ll recognize it in no time. But if you happen to come across a fat maricón outside the convenience store there, make sure you tell him Rafa wants his money back. Damn good-for-nothing fatso owes me a three-hundred pesos! He probably spent it all on quesillos and potato chips by now! That son of a good-for…”

“I can’t believe it!” Consuelo exclaimed as I drove away, “Half a decade ago, San Ramón was the most respected neighborhood in all of Managua, and now, people either have never heard of it, or know it as the barrio with the exceptionally nice church!

“The capricious zompopos are at it again!” I interjected, “Every couple of years Managua becomes New Managua again…never any planning. No planning whatsoever!”

I followed the black-capped security guards advice, taking the next right on the highway as he had told me to, but in the near utter darkness of the streets, I began to lose faith in his directions. Soon we were driving up a slope, and I became hopeful again, confident that, no matter how much San Ramón had changed, it must still be on the same hill. At a crossroad, Consuelo spotted a corner store, where a large man was sitting shirt-off on the ledge.

“Which way to San Ramón?” I asked, and without the slightest change in his expression, he pointed towards the sky—a gesture which I concluded could only signify I should take the most inclined road upwards.

No more than a minute later, as I swerved around a half existent speed bump, I finally recognized our surroundings. “We’re on the main avenue!” I announced.

“Impossible!” responded Consuelo. “Where are all the eucalyptus trees then?” 

The stagnant silence I had thought permanently dispelled gradually made its way back into the car like suffocating heat seeping through the closed car windows. We were, indeed, on the main avenue of San Ramón.

The streets were covered in rubble and the vehicle shook as we passed over sharp crevices in the concrete. Between them, a dense line of automatically sliding billboards had taken the place of the old eucalyptus trees. The advertisements looked like a row of electronic bushes, planted for their ability to be visible in the darkness. At the end of the boulevard, the three run-down pillars of Padilla’s monument looked dark and desecrated. A grotesque woman had been depicted in red spray paint over the plaque, her limbs extended to the uneven street. The ghastly crimson figure reminded one of the Pythia, giving the impression that you were looking at a thoroughly defiled version of the ruined temple in Delphi. Consuelo kept her gaze downwards, actively avoiding the sight of her old house which still towered above.

“You can’t see a thing. Don’t worry about it.” I tried to comfort her.

The palace appeared to blend in completely with the darkness at times, but as clouds passed over the moon, it would reappear, first as a jet-black silhouette against the dark blue night, then as a dimly illuminated haunted house. Even in the darkness, I could discern the house had remained uninhabited since Cati’s suicide. The exterior was largely strangled by vines, and the bushes on the balconies had becomes overgrown trees. Their roots, fingering through windows and boards, had uplifted the entire second story.

Turning on the roundabout, I came to a stop where my old, L-shaped house had been. There was a grey, concrete wall in its place. Then, looking around me, I noticed that I could not distinguish any house on this boulevard from the other. Each new resident had constructed the same grey, cheap, brick barrier around their home. “I guess you have to be careful in the barrio” I thought, letting out a soft sigh.    

“Why did you take me here?” Consuelo suddenly asked.

“Well… I guess… I guess. I suppose I wanted to remind you of our childhood—You know—to try and cheer you up or something. I didn’t think it would be this… ugly.” I replied apologetically.

“Well, we left. What did you expect to happen? Look around you. This is what happens to things you stop caring about.”

I continued driving back around the ruined monument making my way upwards towards the church. The farther we ventured from the main avenue, the more horrid the houses became, while the streets became increasingly broken. Most of the homes here were hovels and shacks, and I felt the term barrio inappropriate again, but this time because I found it euphemistic, this was a shantytown, a slum. I locked the car doors, and continued my ascent to the peak of the hill.

Finally we reached the church, which was surrounded on one side by a new cemetery, and on the other, an open field. This mirador was as close as I was going to get to my old view from my backyard, from my window.

            Consuelo noiselessly followed me up the peak, constantly remaining two paces behind me, sympathetic to my desire for solitude, and yet, unable to leave my side. Reaching the top, we gazed into glimmering cityscape. To our side, dozens of sullen gravestones and crosses stood silently watching over the same city we were, ostensibly contemplating similar thoughts. Behind us, lay the sunken ruins of San Ramón, broken and isolated like an abandoned city after the passing of an earthquake. Before us, the stretching city of Managua expanded throughout the obscure slopes like fairies caught in a giant spider’s web, blinking throughout the dark forest.

All of a sudden, blackness permeated all around us. It was as if the wind had blown on the wick of the world’s last candle, and everything vanished—Old Managua, New Managua, Carreterra Masaya, San Ramón, the lake, the gravestones, and Consuelo—gone in an instant. I did not flinch, and for a moment I also ceased to exist entirely. Consuelo, spooked in the pitch black, managed to grab hold of one of my hands, intertwining her fingers with mine, as I persisted to stare deep into the void before us.            

            “The government is rationing power again. Don’t be afraid.” I tried to console her.

            “But I can’t see thing—nothing at all—I really think we should go…I’m scared.” she admitted as fear overcame her pride.

            I tightened my grasp on her hand, pulled her in front of me, and wrapped my arm around her waist, gripping her body like a long shield against the night.

            “No, really, I don’t feel comfortable—I’m really scared. It’s simply too dark. I can’t even see you. I think we should go.”

            “We aren’t leaving,” I said, sternly but softly. “We’ll see it through, together.”

            I could feel her tears trickling down my arm as she tried to keep from sobbing. In time, the dense clouds above slowly released their hold on the moon, and the darkness gradually illuminated our surroundings in a soft sapphire light. Soon, the cool mountain breeze picked up, and I loosened my hold on Consuelo, but she continued gazing forward. When she finally turned around, the color of her skin was—just for a moment—utterly indistinguishable from the tones of the moon itself.

Her eyes—recently cleansed with tears, dried in the fresh mountain gust, and glossed in the moonlight—shone like polished diamonds from her slim, cerulean face. In the darkness she had bloomed blue like a Hindu goddess. Even as she had become deity for me, and I, deified in her eyes, I still recognized the spell of immortality would not last long. I knew I would eventually leave. Yet, I continued to reassure her nonetheless, whispering, “I won’t go. I’ll never leave,” as rows of city streets began lighting up behind her.