Letter 6: Bucerías symphony

Evening: Gabi and Lucila’s kind inquisitive voices echo down the balcony, as they trim, clean, sweep, laugh, deal with vexed Canadians, fix appliances, and keep this place humming. Ruslan’s ‘Si Señor’ is barely audible from the bookstore. Ponies amble down the cobblestones, three abreast and inexplicably happy about horse stuff, capering, cloppitaclappita. Tocka tock.

A dog howls with such feeling and sostenuto and diminuendo it breaks your heart; the distant bells peal; hammers tap insistently, drills wail, a long pipe is blown to its whistling over-harmonics to signal tamales are for sale, over and over, louder, because I think maybe people are not buying so many tamales this Saturday.

I try to play a Bach cello suite transcription on my flute, and the foot joint falls off; I fix it, and a pad slides off in the heat; the keys are sticky, damn them. A truck passes with the sort of non-synchronized whining transmission you hear in old World War Two movies. Brown sparrows chatter, chasing each other for sex. The geckos have begun to chirp, a more sedate and predatory intonation.

All this distracts me from pain; my spine is disintegrating and it’s time to take more pills for it. I take some tequila too, because who lives forever? I pick up the flute again and play an entirely improvised tune, crying like the dog really, my pain is life, my life is…

I’m gonna get a new flute.

Tamale seller has gone to another block, it is hard to hear him over the competing conjunto and cumbia coming out of construction workers’ radios: Ay ay, mi corazon, that bitch left me.

Did I say the black-fly bites were no big thing? I lied. They have spotted my leg with scabs, so now I diligently spray the greasy insecticide on them. It’s closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, because those flies are on the river, and I’m down by the lapping waves of the bay now, amid mere humble mosquitos. I could swear the repellent mixes well with the tequila in my bloodstream, but if my liver could curse, I probably would need earplugs.

Now a guitar, maracas, how cheesy, right? — but my foot is tapping.

Oh my gods, guns!

No! Firecrackers! Cheers and laughter.