El Coup
by Melanie Faranello
During Ecuador’s revolution in 1997, I was living in Cuenca while back home in Chicago, my father, unbeknownst to everyone, was already sick. I’d rented a small room above a café frequented by Cuenca’s artists and musicians. The room belonged to the café owner—an Ecuadorian woman who lived on the third floor with her husband and seven-year-old daughter. It was barely large enough to hold the twin bed pushed against the wall and the only source of light came from the double doors that opened onto a narrow balcony overlooking the cobblestone street where protestors set fire to tires and masked policemen sprayed teargas. The room’s walls were textured with uneven plaster and painted a pale shade of blue—the color of the sky, afternoons before the rain fell and the fighting paused for siesta.
The people of Ecuador were protesting against their current president—Abdala Bucaram, also known as “El Loco.” I had arrived in the country the previous year with a job teaching English in Cuenca—a vibrant city with European architecture, in a valley surrounded by the Andes Mountains and cut through by four rivers. I’d left home knowing my parents were well, that nothing much would change despite their tearful hugs at the airport as we said our goodbyes. Nobody knew my father had only a year left to live.
The exact month of the revolution evades my memory—one of the difficulties, I found, living near the equator where the months rolled one into the next without the seasonal markers to which I was accustomed having grown up in Illinois. The year in South America was vaguely divided into two seasons—rainy and dry, but in my memory now, the rains came every day. I could do my research, type three easy words into Google search engine and within seconds look it up, but for some reason I resist. I try instead to hold fast to the timelessness, the fluidity that rolled like the Tomebamba River through the city, into the Amazon, into the Atlantic, on and on and on.
Maybe it’s because I’d spent years rubbing a cloth over the details of that time so the edges felt less sharp. Not trying to forget as much as trying not to remember too closely. Yet whether my memories are marked in time by weather given the Midwest’s dramatic flair for it (wind chills or humidity—warnings either way), or whether they are faded over with intention, they have spun a web of connections too complicated for me to fully understand. A photograph of a bull brings back the cold clam of my father’s hand too weak to squeeze mine back. Or a rainy landscape in the Andes and I’m back in the ICU. The quiet pops of the computer become the rhythmic gasps of his respirator.
My five-year-old son recently found a photograph I took one bright and sunny day in 1997 on a mountaintop in the Andes of a slaughtered bull. He stared at the picture without saying anything, studying it as though he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. I took the photograph gently from his small hands and instead told him about his Papou—his Greek grandfather, my father, who he never had a chance to meet. My ten-year-old son overheard us talking and came in the room to listen. I slid the photograph of the bull back inside the worn album marked Ecuador 1997 in liquid white-out along the spine.
So it could have been January or it could have been June, but it was 1997 and two million Ecuadorians were rallying a countrywide strike and protest in hopes of ousting their president. Warnings came from the U.S. Embassy to stay inside, off the streets, out of the protests. But according to my parents reporting via letter, the U.S. newspapers seemed to be crowded with other stories:
Mother Theresa had died. Princess Diana and Prince Charles had gotten divorced. Mad Cow Disease had swept through Britain. And at home, President Clinton had just been reelected for a second term. Madeline Albright was named the first female U.S. Secretary of State. Microsoft, Tiger Woods, Nintendo. Another massive snowstorm descended upon the Midwest.
A black flag waved from my balcony. Black flags waved beside yellow, blue, red striped Ecuadorian flags from every balcony. The local El Mercurio’s headlines were full of promises to overhaul.
Back home in Chicago, my parents looked for more information on what I reported back to them via letter. An inch-wide article cut from an American newspaper arrived neatly pressed between two sheets of paper. A brief description of the unrest outside my window. It occurred to me then the difference in what was real and what was reported. My parents would never know the smell of teargas, the sound of rocks bouncing off riot gear, the sight of flames rising from rubber. The letter was from my father, printed in his slanted cursive on pale blue airmail stationery folded in thirds. Please be well, he wrote at the bottom of the page, Love, Dad. His trademark smiley face with a doodle swirl above its head like an antenna.
I didn’t know then the significance of that phrase, or that I should have been the one returning the sentiment: Please be well.
He was worried about my safety. He didn’t want anything to happen to me. As usual he wanted to protect me. This time from across the equator. He wanted me to be well.
Nobody knew.
I still have a pile of those feather-light letters rubber-banded together in a box labeled DAD. It sits on the top shelf of a closet. For nineteen years, this box has sat on the top shelf of various closets in eleven different homes in three different states. I have never reread any of the letters. Yet I carry them with me. Along with all the letters I didn’t write back.
If any of us had known, would I have stayed amidst the upheaval in this place I was making home? If we had known, would time have slipped even more quickly by? Or would we have gripped so fiercely onto each moment that we would’ve managed to slow it down, reverse the flow? Is time so malleable in our hold? Or is it foolish to think we have this kind of control?
What did I write back? I wish I knew. The letters, however much or little I wrote, no longer exist.
I wrote back, I’m fine, don’t worry.
A state of emergency was declared. Schools and businesses shut down. Forty-eight hours: that is how long the protests were meant to continue until Congress made their vote. “El Loco” had been in office less than a year and the Ecuadorian people along with the military and the U.S. Embassy supported his removal, declaring him deranged, mentally unhinged. All this I heard in bits and pieces of talk around Café Vasco’s communal table, along with passionate plans to fight, to march, to overthrow. Spanish language so fast and furious I strained to catch the pieces as they flew by, and patch the holes of what I missed.
More letters came from my parents. I wrote more letters home. Did I reassure them? Promising nothing would happen to me, I was safe, that it sounded worse than it would be? That the protests hadn’t started yet? That I had just come back from the coast where hours upon hours, the village kids ran giant red nets into the ocean to catch shrimp? I could’ve written anything. That the locusts made it hard to sleep despite the tented mesh around the beds. That a shoeshine boy in the plaza asked to see the pictures I was thumbing through while resting on a bench. Mi padre, I explained when he saw the photograph of you and me at the airport before I left Chicago, your arm wrapped tightly around my shoulder as though wanting to plant me firmly in place, never let me go. Your smile proud and hesitant, mine easy and assured. Everything would be fine, we promised one another before I boarded and flew away. The boy asked if I wanted a shoeshine, but I told him no, that I didn’t have any money with me. He asked for the photo of mi padre, but I gave him a miniature box of Tangolo Orange Chiclets instead. When I look at that photograph now, I taste the tropical sweetness of those Tangolo Chiclets and remember how after too short a time the flavor fades away. I wrote to my father. Maybe I wrote that everything was tranquillo, and then in parenthesis translated calm, fine, showing off my Spanish language skills. Maybe I promised nothing would happen to me, that I was safe, that it sounded worse than it was.
How I wished for those very same words when the doctors explained my father’s test results back in Chicago a year later. Nothing would happen to him, he was safe, it sounded worse than it was—I wanted them to say. But they didn’t. Never before had I realized how a downcast gaze, a fold of arms, a clearing of a throat could mean so very much the opposite.
Now I wonder how much more quickly I would have learned given the internet. I spent days cross-legged in the narrow aisles of the Harold Washington Library in Chicago’s South Loop, poring over heavy medical textbooks, reading case studies, research, statistics, looking for some kind of answer, some cause, some solution. Searching for a way those words would be true, that everything would, despite the reports, be fine.
I Google search raspy cough now as I listen to my son in his bedroom through the thin wall that separates us. I read a list of possibilities, pick the most common--a cold. “When you hear hoofbeats think horse, not zebra,” the pediatrician once assured me. I wish for my father his fevers had been a horse. Not zebra. Although zebra sounds tame in comparison. Cone Snail, Black Mamba, Puffer Fish, Poison Dart Frog. Saltwater Crocodile: These will kill you quickly.
More warnings came from the school where I worked urging all foreigners on staff to stay off the streets, out of sight, behind closed doors: do not participate; do not join the marches. We were outsiders, they admitted, acknowledging the differences we previously tried to ignore. No matter how proud I was of my working Visa, I still did not belong.
It was a temperate afternoon in the middle of (March?) (July?), the skies were clear, and a light breeze gently lifted and swayed the black flags. The protests had yet to begin. A calm permeated the still empty streets.
Later, I would remember this calm. The calm before the storm.
I didn’t know then the same thing happened with illness, with death. The doctors used this expression, the calm before the storm, to explain the sudden improvement in my father’s numbers shortly before he died.
It happens.
These are things nobody tells you. Things impossible to know until you do. Things impossible to forget once you know.
When the café owners invited me to join their group of friends to march, I pulled up my hood, agreeing.
After all, I cared deeply about this country and my local friends. I had been earning a salary, paying utilities, eating the traditional foods, buying local produce at the markets, morning breads from the panaderia, plastic baggies of fresh mango juice from the street vendor on my walk to work; I’d been speaking the language with that sing-song flair specific to the city’s dialect; traveling to different regions of the country on the weekends; I’d spent time with Indigenous Quechua families in their adobe homes, holding baby chickens, rounding up cows; I’d spent time picking avocados from another local family’s farm and making juice with fresh stalks of sugarcane. I had grown accustomed to eating trout for lunch and drinking Frey Leon box wine in the middle of the day. I felt I was integrating, like I was becoming part of the fabric albeit still very much on the fringes of foreignness. So yes, of course, I would march. I was grateful for the invitation. I felt initiated.
We headed out in a cluster of black clad protestors down the cobblestone streets past the Plaza de las Flores and the Catedral de la Immaculado Concepcion’s enormous blue cupolas that rose over the city, towards El Centro where the masses were gathering, readying to march.
Back home, my father wrote another letter, this time pressed neatly with a Peanuts comic strip cut from the same newspaper that arrived every morning at the end of the driveway. I remember the comic, but I don’t remember what it said. Maybe it was one I saw recently—a picture of Sally looking at Charlie Brown and Snoopy lounging on a beanbag, saying, “I think I’ve discovered the secret to life.” The next frame, she is resting against the beanbag and the bubble reads, “You just hang around until you get used to it.”
Inside the folded blank piece of paper, he wrote his letter. Signed:
I miss you and love you very much. Stay well. Love, Dad.
Signature smiley face, swirly antenna.
Maybe I wrote back about the weather, or an interesting mask I bought at the market, about the painting an artist gave me of an Indigenous woman playing a flute, a yellow butterfly perched delicately on her shawl-covered shoulder; or about my class and the students and the trip we took on the last day of their semester up a mountain to have a boom-box, salsa dancing, lots of soda drinking party. Did I write about my appreciation for siestas and new taste for plantains, and popcorn in my soup? About the pesky mouse that scurried across my bedroom floorboards at least once a night and lived in a tiny hole in the corner of the room?
I did not write about the bull. About riding in the crowded back of a pickup all the way up the bumpy dirt road to the private mountaintop ceremony where I witnessed a group of young men wrestle the enormous bull to the ground. Or how I watched them slit its throat with the dull blade of a small knife, sawing through the beautiful black hide until it blossomed over in a fountain of red; they cheered with victory—man over beast, they had won, as they dipped a metal mug into the mass of blood, into the open neck facing skyward, a huddle of men holding each of the beastly four legs down to the earth; I passed the mug as they drank the bull; I watched the organs spread upon the grass; its gray stomach bloated like a balloon, I heard the warm puncture before spilling forth; the skin left out to dry and eventually worn draped around the shoulders of the host; the liver, the kidneys, the pancreas—organs I only learned of a year later when the doctor spoke of my father and explained the path of metastases.
I wrote that I missed him, too, and signed off that I was fine.
Never did I write back to him Stay well. Never did those words even hint at themselves as something to say.
How I long for that oblivion now. That assurance which makes reaching for that phrase an impossibility.
Those two words were as foreign to me as any language I’d never heard before. They belonged to the abstract. A concept which by its foreignness had no access into my thoughts. Stay well belonged to that realm. Those words might have been Ongota, or Liki, or from any other dying language that would have absolutely no way to enter my mind. Not even belonging to Quechua, whose language I didn’t know, but whose few words and phrases I had acquired. Not even a hint.
He was my father. He had always been well.
If I had known, I would have written an entire letter with only those words filling up every space on every line front and back like pleas. Prayers I never knew to pray.
Stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well…
As we headed towards Parque Calderon, the city’s central plaza, groups of the black clad protestors crowded alongside indigenous people and business professionals as the streets began to fill. People from all of Ecuador’s socioeconomic classes were coming together—students, old people, children, Indigenous people, business men and women. Giant papier-mâché heads of “El Loco” were propped on tall sticks, lines of people marched with large hand-painted banners—“La Lucha!”, “Fuera El Tirano! Fuera Bucaram!” while shouting the messages in unison.
The warnings continued from the U.S. Embassy: Stay indoors. Refrain from participating. Do not talk about United States politics.
When I joined the masses, I scanned the crowd and recognized only a few other foreigners, one of whom was my friend I clung together closely with as my group marched in rhythm to the drumming and the chanting.
I first saw the man in the trench coat on Louis Cordero and Simon Bolivar, at the corner of the Parque Calderon. I noticed him before he noticed me. He wasn’t chanting. He wasn’t marching. He had a strange expression on his face—a glazed look as he scanned the crowds. He didn’t look Ecuadorian. But he didn’t look like a foreigner either. Something about him made me double-take as I moved closer to my group. I would remember that later, the chill that entered me before I was quickly swept forward through the plaza.
When I wrote my parents again, I imagine I told them about the marches, about how it was truly inspiring to see the racial and socioeconomic divides overlooked, to see all the people from every class unite against a common cause. In my twenty-four-year-old idealism that looking back now probably made my father smile seeing the earnestness of un-jaded youth still believing, I wrote that it was proof of humanity. Proof that injustice falls way to the common good. Proof that discrimination can cease to exist if we all just come together as one uniting force. I sounded like a revolutionary, he would’ve said in return. I’m glad you are safe, he would write. I didn’t write about the man in the trench coat or what happened when he noticed me. Because even then, I wanted to believe in goodness. That nothing bad would ever sneak up on me, or on my father later, tap him on the shoulder, flash him a glimpse of the end of his life. Kaboom.
Unlike me, my father couldn’t just run and be saved.
The man’s Spanish was from elsewhere. Not the singsong accent to which I had become accustomed in Cuenca. Though I couldn’t place it. Coastal? I wasn’t sure. Somehow, I had separated from my group, and it was just me and my American friend trapped under the passageway. When he tapped me on my shoulder, I shuddered before I turned. His eyes were cloudy and darkened with rings. He smelled sour. His drunkenness made it difficult to understand him as he sputtered. He was pressing us backwards, trapped against the brick wall of the underpass. I remember his mouth. A knotty moustache. Thin lips. Dirty. A missing front tooth.
He pressed us further against the bricks. This time in his mangled Spanish, I recognized the words American, and Bill Clinton. Only then did I realize he had picked us out as foreigners, North Americans. The embassy’s warnings came flooding into my mind. In the chaos of the protests, nobody noticed us pressed there in the underpass. Then he opened his trench coat. I flinched before I knew what I saw. Nobody heard his wild cackle when he spread open the trench and gripped it like wings. He wavered like a drunken bat. Two large glass bottles were stuck inside his pants waistband, the tops plugged with dirty rags. Later, I learned the name for them. Molotov cocktails. Petrol bombs. Poor man’s grenade. Nobody saw the spit fly from his mouth as he stammered again those words I understood. American, Bill Clinton, mixed in a confusion of Spanish gabble. I shook my head, no, no, answered in some nonsense broken French. How are you? Do you speak French? Bonjour.
Then we scraped free against the wall and ran.
We ran as fast as we could back towards Café Vasco. Back towards the uneven plaster on my blue painted walls. Towards the narrow balcony from which I would watch from a distance. He was one bad cell in the otherwise unified group. One bad cell threatening my life.
That was all it took, I learned on the aisle floors of the Harold Washington Library a year later. The musty textbooks on my lap. One bad cell to turn against the common good. It didn’t seem right. Or fair.
The man in the trench coat didn’t follow us, or if he’d tried, I was sure he was too drunk to get very far. No bombs were reported. The protests ended. Two days later, a military coup was in effect. The people had won their fight and ousted “El Loco.” A confusion of power resulted in the days that followed. Who would be the president? Congressional leader Fabian Alarcon, Vice President Rosalia Arteaga, the military, Bucaram himself claiming the movement illegal, until finally it went to Alarcon.
When I finally got back to the café, I unlocked the heavy front doors and ran up to my bedroom. The streets were thinning. I sat on the bed and waited for something to happen. After awhile, I cracked open the balcony doors to let in some light. The clouds were moving. The rain would come soon. The fighting would pause for siesta.
Down the hall from my bedroom was a small kitchen with a portable gas stove attached to a propane tank. On the counter, a mango, a peach, two soft bananas. The shelf held a row of old film canisters filled with spices, and two instant coffee jars—one holding sugar, the other rice. I filled a pot to boil a peach. Using the lighter, I tried to start the stove, but the tank kept sucking back its flame. Instead, I poured the remains from a near empty box of Frey Leon wine into a mug. From my balcony, beside the waving black flag, I watched the cobblestone streets below.
Soon, the clouds moved in, and the rain began to fall over the tile roofs. The streets cleared and siesta arrived.
When I think back now to that man with the Molotov cocktails, I remember the bat trapped in my closet. Later that year, I had moved out of my room at the café and into an apartment on the third-floor walkup above an outdoor market at Plaza San Francisco. I remember lying on the single mattress on the floor, listening to the bat I’d trapped inside the free-standing wardrobe which I had turned around and pushed up against the wall. I listened to wings flapping against the wood, like a ticking bomb, wondering what I would do about the intrusion and how I would ever get the nerve to release it.
I have no memory of how long the bat stayed inside the closet, or how it finally got it out. I only remember the sound of it trapped. And the feeling I had watching the large wooden box of the wardrobe like it was about to explode. We were a foreigner and a bat trapped inside together.
If I had known then what I later knew about my father, I might have made a symbol of it, seen it as an omen of what was to come. Did the bat mean death? The wardrobe, its coffin? But when we found out, it was too significant for a metaphor. Nothing, not even fancy language, could turn it into poetry, make it any better.
I didn’t take siesta. I didn’t sleep. I was still shaken by the man in the trench coat. I drank my mug of wine and tried not to think about what would have happened if he’d lit those bombs. I waited for the sounds to return below my balcony. The glorious, promising, unifying, life-affirming sounds of freedom and protest to rise upwards, float towards my balcony where I’d grab hold and shout back in unison.
I was grateful for this city where even in the midst of a revolution, there was lunch, and siesta, and the predictable fall of afternoon rain. These were things you could count on.
How I’d come to appreciate even more those things you could rely on when suddenly you couldn’t. The things that were so predictable, they became the foundation to the chaos. When you can no longer count on things that at one time seemed a given (my father would always be well), these smaller things became weighted with gratitude that rarely reflected their mass: The clock. The way the second hand keeps circling. The sun, everyday how it rises. The light. The rain. Even in the dry season. Every afternoon, siesta. Even in the middle of a political revolution. The foundations. The earth beneath our feet. All of it holding us steady.
My two sons change microscopically before my eyes every day now, and I cannot see it until they are two inches taller, a foot taller, a shoe-size bigger. It happens every second of every moment every day and I cannot see it until I do. I hold on and I let go, simultaneously.
There is so much I wish I could explain to them about time and space and how one day in 2017 when you are forty-three, it might be 1997 and you might be twenty-four, or 1998 and you are twenty-five, and how today you are all the yous that have lived each day up to now, and you cannot change the past even though the past may change as you grow, and nothing about that makes any sense, yet it happens and you fall subject to the webs that sling themselves unseen around and through the continuum, subject to this connective tissue of memory. Instead, I watch them play, their innocence a thin protective sphere surrounding them, and pray for it to last.
I longed to rejoin the protests. I longed to feel I was deeply engrained in the fabric of this country. I longed to justify my belonging by the fact I had begun to dream in Spanish, that sometimes I would forget the English word and use the translated equivalent in my letters. I was thinking and living in rhythm with this city surrounded by the Andes, just below the equator.
But the truth was, I would go back one day, back to the Midwest, back to the jarring shift of one season into the next, back to the divisions of time, to the slow unraveling of one language into the next, a turning inside out. And no matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise, this would never become more than what it was, it would never travel along the Tomebamba river and make news across the Atlantic, it would only ever just one day be a story.
I listened to the steady fall of rain drumming against clay roofs. I remember waiting for the time to pass, feeling comforted by knowing above all else it would do just that—keep passing. And I remember years later, feeling dread at this very same concept when all I wanted to do was stop it and hold on.
Siesta silenced the comforting sounds for a couple hours and when the noise finally returned, it was life again on the streets below.
The people of Ecuador were protesting against their current president—Abdala Bucaram, also known as “El Loco.” I had arrived in the country the previous year with a job teaching English in Cuenca—a vibrant city with European architecture, in a valley surrounded by the Andes Mountains and cut through by four rivers. I’d left home knowing my parents were well, that nothing much would change despite their tearful hugs at the airport as we said our goodbyes. Nobody knew my father had only a year left to live.
The exact month of the revolution evades my memory—one of the difficulties, I found, living near the equator where the months rolled one into the next without the seasonal markers to which I was accustomed having grown up in Illinois. The year in South America was vaguely divided into two seasons—rainy and dry, but in my memory now, the rains came every day. I could do my research, type three easy words into Google search engine and within seconds look it up, but for some reason I resist. I try instead to hold fast to the timelessness, the fluidity that rolled like the Tomebamba River through the city, into the Amazon, into the Atlantic, on and on and on.
Maybe it’s because I’d spent years rubbing a cloth over the details of that time so the edges felt less sharp. Not trying to forget as much as trying not to remember too closely. Yet whether my memories are marked in time by weather given the Midwest’s dramatic flair for it (wind chills or humidity—warnings either way), or whether they are faded over with intention, they have spun a web of connections too complicated for me to fully understand. A photograph of a bull brings back the cold clam of my father’s hand too weak to squeeze mine back. Or a rainy landscape in the Andes and I’m back in the ICU. The quiet pops of the computer become the rhythmic gasps of his respirator.
My five-year-old son recently found a photograph I took one bright and sunny day in 1997 on a mountaintop in the Andes of a slaughtered bull. He stared at the picture without saying anything, studying it as though he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. I took the photograph gently from his small hands and instead told him about his Papou—his Greek grandfather, my father, who he never had a chance to meet. My ten-year-old son overheard us talking and came in the room to listen. I slid the photograph of the bull back inside the worn album marked Ecuador 1997 in liquid white-out along the spine.
So it could have been January or it could have been June, but it was 1997 and two million Ecuadorians were rallying a countrywide strike and protest in hopes of ousting their president. Warnings came from the U.S. Embassy to stay inside, off the streets, out of the protests. But according to my parents reporting via letter, the U.S. newspapers seemed to be crowded with other stories:
Mother Theresa had died. Princess Diana and Prince Charles had gotten divorced. Mad Cow Disease had swept through Britain. And at home, President Clinton had just been reelected for a second term. Madeline Albright was named the first female U.S. Secretary of State. Microsoft, Tiger Woods, Nintendo. Another massive snowstorm descended upon the Midwest.
A black flag waved from my balcony. Black flags waved beside yellow, blue, red striped Ecuadorian flags from every balcony. The local El Mercurio’s headlines were full of promises to overhaul.
Back home in Chicago, my parents looked for more information on what I reported back to them via letter. An inch-wide article cut from an American newspaper arrived neatly pressed between two sheets of paper. A brief description of the unrest outside my window. It occurred to me then the difference in what was real and what was reported. My parents would never know the smell of teargas, the sound of rocks bouncing off riot gear, the sight of flames rising from rubber. The letter was from my father, printed in his slanted cursive on pale blue airmail stationery folded in thirds. Please be well, he wrote at the bottom of the page, Love, Dad. His trademark smiley face with a doodle swirl above its head like an antenna.
I didn’t know then the significance of that phrase, or that I should have been the one returning the sentiment: Please be well.
He was worried about my safety. He didn’t want anything to happen to me. As usual he wanted to protect me. This time from across the equator. He wanted me to be well.
Nobody knew.
I still have a pile of those feather-light letters rubber-banded together in a box labeled DAD. It sits on the top shelf of a closet. For nineteen years, this box has sat on the top shelf of various closets in eleven different homes in three different states. I have never reread any of the letters. Yet I carry them with me. Along with all the letters I didn’t write back.
If any of us had known, would I have stayed amidst the upheaval in this place I was making home? If we had known, would time have slipped even more quickly by? Or would we have gripped so fiercely onto each moment that we would’ve managed to slow it down, reverse the flow? Is time so malleable in our hold? Or is it foolish to think we have this kind of control?
What did I write back? I wish I knew. The letters, however much or little I wrote, no longer exist.
I wrote back, I’m fine, don’t worry.
A state of emergency was declared. Schools and businesses shut down. Forty-eight hours: that is how long the protests were meant to continue until Congress made their vote. “El Loco” had been in office less than a year and the Ecuadorian people along with the military and the U.S. Embassy supported his removal, declaring him deranged, mentally unhinged. All this I heard in bits and pieces of talk around Café Vasco’s communal table, along with passionate plans to fight, to march, to overthrow. Spanish language so fast and furious I strained to catch the pieces as they flew by, and patch the holes of what I missed.
More letters came from my parents. I wrote more letters home. Did I reassure them? Promising nothing would happen to me, I was safe, that it sounded worse than it would be? That the protests hadn’t started yet? That I had just come back from the coast where hours upon hours, the village kids ran giant red nets into the ocean to catch shrimp? I could’ve written anything. That the locusts made it hard to sleep despite the tented mesh around the beds. That a shoeshine boy in the plaza asked to see the pictures I was thumbing through while resting on a bench. Mi padre, I explained when he saw the photograph of you and me at the airport before I left Chicago, your arm wrapped tightly around my shoulder as though wanting to plant me firmly in place, never let me go. Your smile proud and hesitant, mine easy and assured. Everything would be fine, we promised one another before I boarded and flew away. The boy asked if I wanted a shoeshine, but I told him no, that I didn’t have any money with me. He asked for the photo of mi padre, but I gave him a miniature box of Tangolo Orange Chiclets instead. When I look at that photograph now, I taste the tropical sweetness of those Tangolo Chiclets and remember how after too short a time the flavor fades away. I wrote to my father. Maybe I wrote that everything was tranquillo, and then in parenthesis translated calm, fine, showing off my Spanish language skills. Maybe I promised nothing would happen to me, that I was safe, that it sounded worse than it was.
How I wished for those very same words when the doctors explained my father’s test results back in Chicago a year later. Nothing would happen to him, he was safe, it sounded worse than it was—I wanted them to say. But they didn’t. Never before had I realized how a downcast gaze, a fold of arms, a clearing of a throat could mean so very much the opposite.
Now I wonder how much more quickly I would have learned given the internet. I spent days cross-legged in the narrow aisles of the Harold Washington Library in Chicago’s South Loop, poring over heavy medical textbooks, reading case studies, research, statistics, looking for some kind of answer, some cause, some solution. Searching for a way those words would be true, that everything would, despite the reports, be fine.
I Google search raspy cough now as I listen to my son in his bedroom through the thin wall that separates us. I read a list of possibilities, pick the most common--a cold. “When you hear hoofbeats think horse, not zebra,” the pediatrician once assured me. I wish for my father his fevers had been a horse. Not zebra. Although zebra sounds tame in comparison. Cone Snail, Black Mamba, Puffer Fish, Poison Dart Frog. Saltwater Crocodile: These will kill you quickly.
More warnings came from the school where I worked urging all foreigners on staff to stay off the streets, out of sight, behind closed doors: do not participate; do not join the marches. We were outsiders, they admitted, acknowledging the differences we previously tried to ignore. No matter how proud I was of my working Visa, I still did not belong.
It was a temperate afternoon in the middle of (March?) (July?), the skies were clear, and a light breeze gently lifted and swayed the black flags. The protests had yet to begin. A calm permeated the still empty streets.
Later, I would remember this calm. The calm before the storm.
I didn’t know then the same thing happened with illness, with death. The doctors used this expression, the calm before the storm, to explain the sudden improvement in my father’s numbers shortly before he died.
It happens.
These are things nobody tells you. Things impossible to know until you do. Things impossible to forget once you know.
When the café owners invited me to join their group of friends to march, I pulled up my hood, agreeing.
After all, I cared deeply about this country and my local friends. I had been earning a salary, paying utilities, eating the traditional foods, buying local produce at the markets, morning breads from the panaderia, plastic baggies of fresh mango juice from the street vendor on my walk to work; I’d been speaking the language with that sing-song flair specific to the city’s dialect; traveling to different regions of the country on the weekends; I’d spent time with Indigenous Quechua families in their adobe homes, holding baby chickens, rounding up cows; I’d spent time picking avocados from another local family’s farm and making juice with fresh stalks of sugarcane. I had grown accustomed to eating trout for lunch and drinking Frey Leon box wine in the middle of the day. I felt I was integrating, like I was becoming part of the fabric albeit still very much on the fringes of foreignness. So yes, of course, I would march. I was grateful for the invitation. I felt initiated.
We headed out in a cluster of black clad protestors down the cobblestone streets past the Plaza de las Flores and the Catedral de la Immaculado Concepcion’s enormous blue cupolas that rose over the city, towards El Centro where the masses were gathering, readying to march.
Back home, my father wrote another letter, this time pressed neatly with a Peanuts comic strip cut from the same newspaper that arrived every morning at the end of the driveway. I remember the comic, but I don’t remember what it said. Maybe it was one I saw recently—a picture of Sally looking at Charlie Brown and Snoopy lounging on a beanbag, saying, “I think I’ve discovered the secret to life.” The next frame, she is resting against the beanbag and the bubble reads, “You just hang around until you get used to it.”
Inside the folded blank piece of paper, he wrote his letter. Signed:
I miss you and love you very much. Stay well. Love, Dad.
Signature smiley face, swirly antenna.
Maybe I wrote back about the weather, or an interesting mask I bought at the market, about the painting an artist gave me of an Indigenous woman playing a flute, a yellow butterfly perched delicately on her shawl-covered shoulder; or about my class and the students and the trip we took on the last day of their semester up a mountain to have a boom-box, salsa dancing, lots of soda drinking party. Did I write about my appreciation for siestas and new taste for plantains, and popcorn in my soup? About the pesky mouse that scurried across my bedroom floorboards at least once a night and lived in a tiny hole in the corner of the room?
I did not write about the bull. About riding in the crowded back of a pickup all the way up the bumpy dirt road to the private mountaintop ceremony where I witnessed a group of young men wrestle the enormous bull to the ground. Or how I watched them slit its throat with the dull blade of a small knife, sawing through the beautiful black hide until it blossomed over in a fountain of red; they cheered with victory—man over beast, they had won, as they dipped a metal mug into the mass of blood, into the open neck facing skyward, a huddle of men holding each of the beastly four legs down to the earth; I passed the mug as they drank the bull; I watched the organs spread upon the grass; its gray stomach bloated like a balloon, I heard the warm puncture before spilling forth; the skin left out to dry and eventually worn draped around the shoulders of the host; the liver, the kidneys, the pancreas—organs I only learned of a year later when the doctor spoke of my father and explained the path of metastases.
I wrote that I missed him, too, and signed off that I was fine.
Never did I write back to him Stay well. Never did those words even hint at themselves as something to say.
How I long for that oblivion now. That assurance which makes reaching for that phrase an impossibility.
Those two words were as foreign to me as any language I’d never heard before. They belonged to the abstract. A concept which by its foreignness had no access into my thoughts. Stay well belonged to that realm. Those words might have been Ongota, or Liki, or from any other dying language that would have absolutely no way to enter my mind. Not even belonging to Quechua, whose language I didn’t know, but whose few words and phrases I had acquired. Not even a hint.
He was my father. He had always been well.
If I had known, I would have written an entire letter with only those words filling up every space on every line front and back like pleas. Prayers I never knew to pray.
Stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well stay well…
As we headed towards Parque Calderon, the city’s central plaza, groups of the black clad protestors crowded alongside indigenous people and business professionals as the streets began to fill. People from all of Ecuador’s socioeconomic classes were coming together—students, old people, children, Indigenous people, business men and women. Giant papier-mâché heads of “El Loco” were propped on tall sticks, lines of people marched with large hand-painted banners—“La Lucha!”, “Fuera El Tirano! Fuera Bucaram!” while shouting the messages in unison.
The warnings continued from the U.S. Embassy: Stay indoors. Refrain from participating. Do not talk about United States politics.
When I joined the masses, I scanned the crowd and recognized only a few other foreigners, one of whom was my friend I clung together closely with as my group marched in rhythm to the drumming and the chanting.
I first saw the man in the trench coat on Louis Cordero and Simon Bolivar, at the corner of the Parque Calderon. I noticed him before he noticed me. He wasn’t chanting. He wasn’t marching. He had a strange expression on his face—a glazed look as he scanned the crowds. He didn’t look Ecuadorian. But he didn’t look like a foreigner either. Something about him made me double-take as I moved closer to my group. I would remember that later, the chill that entered me before I was quickly swept forward through the plaza.
When I wrote my parents again, I imagine I told them about the marches, about how it was truly inspiring to see the racial and socioeconomic divides overlooked, to see all the people from every class unite against a common cause. In my twenty-four-year-old idealism that looking back now probably made my father smile seeing the earnestness of un-jaded youth still believing, I wrote that it was proof of humanity. Proof that injustice falls way to the common good. Proof that discrimination can cease to exist if we all just come together as one uniting force. I sounded like a revolutionary, he would’ve said in return. I’m glad you are safe, he would write. I didn’t write about the man in the trench coat or what happened when he noticed me. Because even then, I wanted to believe in goodness. That nothing bad would ever sneak up on me, or on my father later, tap him on the shoulder, flash him a glimpse of the end of his life. Kaboom.
Unlike me, my father couldn’t just run and be saved.
The man’s Spanish was from elsewhere. Not the singsong accent to which I had become accustomed in Cuenca. Though I couldn’t place it. Coastal? I wasn’t sure. Somehow, I had separated from my group, and it was just me and my American friend trapped under the passageway. When he tapped me on my shoulder, I shuddered before I turned. His eyes were cloudy and darkened with rings. He smelled sour. His drunkenness made it difficult to understand him as he sputtered. He was pressing us backwards, trapped against the brick wall of the underpass. I remember his mouth. A knotty moustache. Thin lips. Dirty. A missing front tooth.
He pressed us further against the bricks. This time in his mangled Spanish, I recognized the words American, and Bill Clinton. Only then did I realize he had picked us out as foreigners, North Americans. The embassy’s warnings came flooding into my mind. In the chaos of the protests, nobody noticed us pressed there in the underpass. Then he opened his trench coat. I flinched before I knew what I saw. Nobody heard his wild cackle when he spread open the trench and gripped it like wings. He wavered like a drunken bat. Two large glass bottles were stuck inside his pants waistband, the tops plugged with dirty rags. Later, I learned the name for them. Molotov cocktails. Petrol bombs. Poor man’s grenade. Nobody saw the spit fly from his mouth as he stammered again those words I understood. American, Bill Clinton, mixed in a confusion of Spanish gabble. I shook my head, no, no, answered in some nonsense broken French. How are you? Do you speak French? Bonjour.
Then we scraped free against the wall and ran.
We ran as fast as we could back towards Café Vasco. Back towards the uneven plaster on my blue painted walls. Towards the narrow balcony from which I would watch from a distance. He was one bad cell in the otherwise unified group. One bad cell threatening my life.
That was all it took, I learned on the aisle floors of the Harold Washington Library a year later. The musty textbooks on my lap. One bad cell to turn against the common good. It didn’t seem right. Or fair.
The man in the trench coat didn’t follow us, or if he’d tried, I was sure he was too drunk to get very far. No bombs were reported. The protests ended. Two days later, a military coup was in effect. The people had won their fight and ousted “El Loco.” A confusion of power resulted in the days that followed. Who would be the president? Congressional leader Fabian Alarcon, Vice President Rosalia Arteaga, the military, Bucaram himself claiming the movement illegal, until finally it went to Alarcon.
When I finally got back to the café, I unlocked the heavy front doors and ran up to my bedroom. The streets were thinning. I sat on the bed and waited for something to happen. After awhile, I cracked open the balcony doors to let in some light. The clouds were moving. The rain would come soon. The fighting would pause for siesta.
Down the hall from my bedroom was a small kitchen with a portable gas stove attached to a propane tank. On the counter, a mango, a peach, two soft bananas. The shelf held a row of old film canisters filled with spices, and two instant coffee jars—one holding sugar, the other rice. I filled a pot to boil a peach. Using the lighter, I tried to start the stove, but the tank kept sucking back its flame. Instead, I poured the remains from a near empty box of Frey Leon wine into a mug. From my balcony, beside the waving black flag, I watched the cobblestone streets below.
Soon, the clouds moved in, and the rain began to fall over the tile roofs. The streets cleared and siesta arrived.
When I think back now to that man with the Molotov cocktails, I remember the bat trapped in my closet. Later that year, I had moved out of my room at the café and into an apartment on the third-floor walkup above an outdoor market at Plaza San Francisco. I remember lying on the single mattress on the floor, listening to the bat I’d trapped inside the free-standing wardrobe which I had turned around and pushed up against the wall. I listened to wings flapping against the wood, like a ticking bomb, wondering what I would do about the intrusion and how I would ever get the nerve to release it.
I have no memory of how long the bat stayed inside the closet, or how it finally got it out. I only remember the sound of it trapped. And the feeling I had watching the large wooden box of the wardrobe like it was about to explode. We were a foreigner and a bat trapped inside together.
If I had known then what I later knew about my father, I might have made a symbol of it, seen it as an omen of what was to come. Did the bat mean death? The wardrobe, its coffin? But when we found out, it was too significant for a metaphor. Nothing, not even fancy language, could turn it into poetry, make it any better.
I didn’t take siesta. I didn’t sleep. I was still shaken by the man in the trench coat. I drank my mug of wine and tried not to think about what would have happened if he’d lit those bombs. I waited for the sounds to return below my balcony. The glorious, promising, unifying, life-affirming sounds of freedom and protest to rise upwards, float towards my balcony where I’d grab hold and shout back in unison.
I was grateful for this city where even in the midst of a revolution, there was lunch, and siesta, and the predictable fall of afternoon rain. These were things you could count on.
How I’d come to appreciate even more those things you could rely on when suddenly you couldn’t. The things that were so predictable, they became the foundation to the chaos. When you can no longer count on things that at one time seemed a given (my father would always be well), these smaller things became weighted with gratitude that rarely reflected their mass: The clock. The way the second hand keeps circling. The sun, everyday how it rises. The light. The rain. Even in the dry season. Every afternoon, siesta. Even in the middle of a political revolution. The foundations. The earth beneath our feet. All of it holding us steady.
My two sons change microscopically before my eyes every day now, and I cannot see it until they are two inches taller, a foot taller, a shoe-size bigger. It happens every second of every moment every day and I cannot see it until I do. I hold on and I let go, simultaneously.
There is so much I wish I could explain to them about time and space and how one day in 2017 when you are forty-three, it might be 1997 and you might be twenty-four, or 1998 and you are twenty-five, and how today you are all the yous that have lived each day up to now, and you cannot change the past even though the past may change as you grow, and nothing about that makes any sense, yet it happens and you fall subject to the webs that sling themselves unseen around and through the continuum, subject to this connective tissue of memory. Instead, I watch them play, their innocence a thin protective sphere surrounding them, and pray for it to last.
I longed to rejoin the protests. I longed to feel I was deeply engrained in the fabric of this country. I longed to justify my belonging by the fact I had begun to dream in Spanish, that sometimes I would forget the English word and use the translated equivalent in my letters. I was thinking and living in rhythm with this city surrounded by the Andes, just below the equator.
But the truth was, I would go back one day, back to the Midwest, back to the jarring shift of one season into the next, back to the divisions of time, to the slow unraveling of one language into the next, a turning inside out. And no matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise, this would never become more than what it was, it would never travel along the Tomebamba river and make news across the Atlantic, it would only ever just one day be a story.
I listened to the steady fall of rain drumming against clay roofs. I remember waiting for the time to pass, feeling comforted by knowing above all else it would do just that—keep passing. And I remember years later, feeling dread at this very same concept when all I wanted to do was stop it and hold on.
Siesta silenced the comforting sounds for a couple hours and when the noise finally returned, it was life again on the streets below.