Calpuleque

As I pulled my dinghy up high onto the beach mosquitoes and large flies attacked me with a fury. The adventure of it, this strange uncharted and yet perfect island. A trail ran beside the marsh. I untied my handkerchief from my neck and retied it to cover my nose and mouth bandit style. The place had the smell of something dead and decaying. Squinting my eyelids against the mosquitoes, stopping my breathing because of the smell, I trotted along the trail until the marsh became a wooded stream and the mosquitoes lessened their intensity. At a little pool I stopped and submerged myself, relieving myself of urine in the surprising chill of the slow moving water. The smell was gone, replaced by the woody bouquet of the forest I was entering. A slight breeze played with my wetness that carried a smell of campfire or burning wood.

I sat on a smooth stone and drank from my bottle and looked back at the marsh framed by dunes. The sky was more white than blue, almost blending with the sand. The green of the marsh was toned brownish compared to the verdancy I was in and that lay ahead of me.

I always wished at times like these that I was a real writer and had pencil and pad or whatever you use to preserve my thoughts. There are times that one falls between the boards and wisdom comes like a full plum tree low to the ground. Too many times I feel that I have gained and lost so much by not writing it down.

Just to write this how it is amazing in the tropics that something like a life threatening painful beyond compare mosquito attack can be all but forgotten in the slight freshening of a breeze. Not writing that will probably amount to my forgetting it and it is then gone. That experience is gone.

I walked along the path easily dreamily with an unearned happiness in my chest. The sparkle of the stream, greenness of the foliage, scent of mulch so near all combining to bring energy to a beleaguered soul. Occasionally a whiff of the foul smell of the marsh returned, brought and mixed by the cooling breeze with the fireside breath. It vanished upon receipt but registered a jarring note to an otherwise full and pleasing harmony of senses.

A low rolling drumbeat announced the nearness of people. I hadn’t thought of other people since entering the forest. The drum sound brought a touch of the need to complete a mission; that though I had no idea of what it was, I somehow had a purpose.

I had to slow my pace, which had increased to a trot in the magnetic excitement to get where I was going. I was slowed also by the shrub growth which began to invade the narrowing trail. I began to doubt if the trail actually went somewhere when a lush green rice field opened up to me. Behind the rich carpet of growth soared purplish peaked mountains and a lavender leaden sky accented by puffy brilliantly white clouds. Two streams of smoke angled toward the North, or right side of the picture from both sides of this steep valley.

I took in the vista, my breathing becoming deeper as though in proud ownership of the whole scene before me. My chest was even out. Again, I should have had pencil and pad and there I stood with some primal instinct to claim and a feeling inside me to gather the power to assert my claim. The whole phenomena passed away within a quick two minutes maybe again to be forgotten.

I was beginning to get distracted by the uncertain steps in the course I was following; beginning to wonder why I came ashore at all when laughter had me search its source. Two people, a man and woman, were whispering and laughing in very intimate tones partially hidden behind a dense growth of shrubbery and trees. When I was able to see them clearly they were able to see me. He was a bronze colour and she light brown. Their teeth were as brilliantly white as their loose clothing, he in long pants and short sleeved shirt, she in a long draping dress.

They tried to tell me something in heavy accents of Spanish, something they both laughed at, then upon seeing my I’m-sorry-but-I-don’t-understand smile, they both bowed, saying something to each other and gesturing for me to keep following the path.

‘Buenas Dias’ I said to them, bowing my head slightly, ‘Gracias.’

‘Buenas Dias.’ They both responded bowing and shyly smiling.

I walked on, turning back once to see the two touching fingertips on lips, gently concentrated on the sensitivity of their love for the other.

The path became a dike that separated rich growths of rice grasses. Atop the berm of the dike I still could not see over the height of the green-green growth. The breeze was also blocked, waving the feathery rice flowers above me. The mosquitoes returned in force and I began to trot once more.

I was in a large flat cleaving of stumped rich earth. A village of rounded white huts framed a large circle in the middle of the clearing. A soft ceiling of smoke issued from somewhere among the organised cluster of homes and a soft singing accompanying soft beating of drums.

It is truly amazing to step into a place you’ve never been before, and yet not only know that you’ve been there, somehow, before but that you recognise people and that they recognise you. There they were in front and around me as I entered their midst, graceful people of all sunned complexions dressed in loose whites going about their business in a generally pre-festive mood. The clothing they wore was as individual as the purpose and intent set upon the faces of every person I saw. But, in various stages of cleanliness or age, they all wore white. White shorts, long pants, skirts, sarongs, dresses, all white. The children, those who wore clothes, wore white, mostly stained from games and play.

‘Afernoon, Copi’n Pikitorne’, a little girl, bowing from the head in passing, said merrily.

‘Good Afternoon, Capitan Pickthorne’, an older man said raising an open palm and bowing slightly. A string of small fish were dangling from his left hand as he passed along.

A group of children ran across my path giggling at some pursuit in which they were engaged. The cobbler making sandals, the woman selling vegetables, the people sitting under the shade of a round twig thatched roof talking all reminded me of people I thought, no, I was sure I was familiar with. The sun was relentless. I went over to the group talking under the thatched roof.

The village softly curled its residential paths as a snail’s shell, the apex being a larger shaded open sided palapa. The buildings were thatch roofed, most contained two rooms and were white washed rounded structures. A smaller model was also raised above the ground as a food storage structure. Each property was spaced at least 12 meters apart with wide beaten paths front and back. Vegetables greened the borders of the buildings to the mixing with a neighbour’s growth. Greens, spinach, chilis, tomatoes, yams, zucchini, various beans, berries, mango trees, papaya, tamarind, sweet and sour sop, and banana palms waving to the slight of breezes, dwarf coconut trees formed the actual property lines. The properties were neat, a rubbish fire here and there.

The people seemed to be waiting for me. They stood in family poses in front of their homes, each welcoming into their property and their homes. I went into the first three more out of courtesy than curiosity. They were very simple inside, concentrating on a comfortable cooking area, eating area and sleeping spaces. The thatch twig walls provided shade from the sun, which cooled the breeze blowing through the gaps. Being elevated also provided a coolness to the floors where they had laid grass mats which seemed to direct the cooler air from the floors upward to the feet.

Their choices of mattresses or thick cotton mats, chairs of fat pillows, curtains or shutters was the only distinction I could detect of individuality in design. Each home was a structure duplicate of the others. Domed with a clay and thatch roof.

My slightly developed curiosity waned after the third one and I only token glanced into select others. I was drenched in sweat, the birds screamed too loudly, the children were too impulsive, the sky was too white, the smiles too loud.

My shirt was taken off gently. I was sponge washed, towel dried. A white shirt was slipped over my head and extended arms.. A simple shirt with a slit in the top for my head and of a soft cotton fabric for my comfort. My shorts and underpants were taken off and I was sponged again and dried. Loose white cotton trousers were pulled on me and belted firmly in place by a thick leather belt with a large silver rectangular buckle.

All of this bathing and clothing was accomplished with happy chatter, even jokes in a heavy accented Spanish and laughter. I did not feel I was being ridiculed, however, it was more like people simply at work making light of what happened to them on the way there, that kind of thing.

I thanked those assisting me and walked on over to the village border of rice fields. The smell of the tall grasses overwhelmed me with a joyous freshness. I was smiling. Probably if I were on a city street I would have been labelled a fool grinning for no apparent reason. There, I simply joined my hosts who we were mostly smiling at something or leading up to a smile or just coming off one. And it was not the kind of smile that you show at a cocktail party or because of listening to a comedian, or a philosopher... it was just some kind of happiness inside that created the feeling and set the features.

Strange one... you look for reasons to smile to be happy and you never find a consistent one... you find yourself happy and you feel you have to explain it.

Poof, I said to myself, I can’t think of the whys or the feeling will go poof... this is it is all.

The drumming became stronger, the melody more defined, a doo dee doo bop doo dee doo bop, counter-pointed in deep bass.

I half stumbled, half trotted around through the streets of the hamlet, looking probably like a tarot fool and just like one not caring through an innocence in feelings that lightened my chest and straightened my back and pulled me toward the low sky. The clouds sent invisible fingers that pulled or pushed. I was there but not. I was a passenger in my own body.

A door was opened wide which was painted orange. The darkness inside dissolved to show a rounded couch, a small cocktail table with an opened book. An open fire pit was to one side of a centre pole that supported the roof. Mats and pillows lay strewn upon a light middle eastern rug. Kitchen utensils were shelved neatly. An iron bar stood upright, implanted near the pit. Books lined a curving wall book-cased in deep coloured hardwood. Two rooms angled off on either side of the main room each curtained shut in bright orange.

A scorpion ran from me its tail curved, anticipating claws throwing punches as it retreated backwards, protecting its rear I supposed. The scorpion was well away, awash in sunlight, crouched as if hiding.

My feet blended with the dust of the beaten street and my ankles had sweat streaks marked brown in the ash of my dry skin. I looked at the palms of my hands. Soiled dark in the creases, sharply defined creases. Small and large mounds adding emphasis, through the muscle underneath, to any work, chore or pleasure that needed the contact for the touch I tried to give. Around the palm and the light hued flesh of my fingertips glowed the golden richness tanned deeply, of my outer skin surfaces. I looked around me at the smiling and grinning faces, the occasional hee-haw, the growing rumble of a chant.

A great woman stood before me in the darkness of a poled tent.I think she used the pole as a pathway down from the blackness. What blackness?, I questioned myself. Understanding or maybe comprehending is a better word to describe the myriad of thoughts affecting me through a feeling sense, nothing visual. But, it was though other knowledges were passing me by.The great woman stood directly in front of me and sprayed me with liquid air. I inhaled as much as I could.

‘We are the clowns,’ she said to me and around to the white swaying figures around me, ‘the true buffoons of the Almighty Lords.’ I understood what she was saying though I am sure she was not speaking in English. ‘They play with us and if we are aware of the game it is then possible to piece together some of the rules. The Lords might want you to play consciously, then they will make the rules available... only the rules will be in their language and you will have to make a game of translating, or more pointedly, absorbing their language. Their language is not to be interpreted, only absorbed.’

My heart was pounding rapidly, drowning out the drum-sea waving rhythms. Grains of light were rising speckled along the pole’s path into the darkness of the tent. I floated, feeling presences brushing through and about my body.

‘The cowardliness’, a voice within me softly spoke, ‘of us is a false one, one that says we should find that spot before we get too old and settle upon that spot until we die a natural death, that is after living a natural life in that one spot.’

The darkness lightened into browns and golds that separated each fibre of the thatched roof. I was again with my feet on the earth, the ground pulsated the rhythm of my heart.

‘We are cowardly’, the voice resumed as I defined and read each golden hued palm braiding, ‘in our march toward depth in perception. Many other levels come our way and we talk our way to the grand threshold.’

I was smoking a black pipe, a top hat nudged, unbalanced on my head. I had a long black skirt on. It had big white dots. I had a tuxedo tailed jacket over my bare chest. My cane, which I swirled eloquently overhead, was the colour of my skin tipped with whirling silver.

I wanted money which people gave me in Peso bills and which I stuffed greedily in my pockets.

I wanted a bottle which appeared in my hand, I swallowed and sprayed air on the opened mouths. The people became clearer momentarily. I could identify facial features, individual gestures, rings, bracelets then a swirling mass once more... except for one. A woman danced for me. Her eyes were closed and she was lovely. Her body undulated pulling at my loins. I twirled my stick above us and circled her bringing her urgent body to mine, slipping past her, pulling her to me, slipping past. People threw coins and gourde bills in the air and at my feet. She was racked with sensual spasms that lifted her off one foot, almost falling she would gain the other foot and tilt to falling, then the other way she would go. My cane was pointing first this way, then that and she would follow to the wild beat of my heart. I stopped her, willed her still, willed her back bent head just above the ground. I lifted the skirt of her dress and the soft layers of her petticoats. Her lushness was thrust toward me. I opened my loose fly and placed my hard cock upon her clitoris, pulling backward and forward., rubbing it with my urgency. She shook. I inserted slowly to the full and moved into an exploding darkness of dull luminescence. Instead of feeling spent, emptying, I felt as though I was pulling out her juices to fill me. She laid down and was asleep. I was twirling my cane and I was happy, like a child who was an adult.

Then the great woman danced in front of me.

The great woman was now dressed in a billowy white blouse and trousers and had jumped down from the ceiling. She danced before me with a concerned expression on her smooth face. Her long raven hair was matted, streaming black seaweed. She pointed to my crotch and my protruding organ. I quickly tucked it back in and closed my fly, my passions suddenly sapped. I was tired, barely able to keep my eyes open.

My cane was gone and I was again dressed in loose whites. I felt ashamed of the wild nastiness I had enacted. I was ashamed in front of all these people as witness. But, the drums still paced and my heart again throbbed replacing the drumbeat with my own cadence.

I smelled the sea but could not see it, knowing that I was well inland. I looked into the woman’s eyes, unable to speak but willing my concern about being landlocked to her. She smiled.

‘Trouble is a voyage by land’, I heard from behind me. I turned and saw nobody, turned back and the great woman was gone. I was alone on a hard cot under a tree.

I slept and she entered my dreams.

‘You are the man of my dreams. You are.’