Tag Archives: Juany

Santiago Learns a Lesson

** warning – this article contains ‘bad’ words **

Santiago Puc Arjona felt chastised and furious. An important lesson about drinking and driving, as well as the dangers of littering, had been brought home to him just minutes before, when, while driving back to his home in Merida, he drained the bottle of Corona he had brought with him from his cousins wedding in Tixcacal and tossed it out the window of his silver 1992 Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. The bottle had shattered against the glass in his drivers side door, which was when Santiago realized with some surprise that he had forgotten to roll down the window before throwing the bottle out.

Chinga su madre!” he said aloud, angrily.

Continuing to curse his bad luck under his breath, he pulled off the narrow highway and, checking for traffic, opened the door and stepped out to survey the mess. The remains of the Corona bottle littered the inside of the truck and the drivers side window now featured a rather prominent crack that ran diagonally across it.

Me lleva la puta madre” he cursed again under his breath angrily and proceeded to look behind the seat for something with which to sweep out the glass. Yesterday’s copy of the Por Esto newspaper would do, he decided, and rolling up a section or two began to sweep the glass shards out of the truck and onto the side of the road.

When he was done, and shiny bits of broken glass lay motionless on the grey asphalt, he felt a sudden and very real urge to urinate. Leaving the side of the pickup, he stepped to the front of his vehicle where traffic coming from behind could not see him and unzipped his fly. The relief was blissful as he watered the weeds on the side of the road and he turned his face towards the sun, closing his eyes, to take in the last of the afternoon rays. The buzz from the beer at the wedding had not dissipated even with the adrenaline-pumping moment when glass hit glass inside the truck.  He zipped up and walked back to the drivers side of the pickup taking no notice of a car-full of tourists who turned their heads to see what he was up to as they drove past in a rental with orange Quintana Roo plates.

Snakes are not uncommon in the Yucatan and among them, the boa constrictor is often seen on highways and byways, sometimes making the Local section of the Diario de Yucatan newspaper when a group of police or firemen are called upon to shirk their patrolling duties and is assigned the delicate task of catching one in someones home and then have their photo taken with their prey.

It is less common for a snake such as the aforementioned boa to to slither out of the underbrush on the side of the road and somehow find its way into a vehicle, but today, as Santiago’s luck would have it and while he was happily relieving himself, a boa constrictor did just that, nestling itself comfortably in a space behind (and under, given its size) the bench seat that stretched across the interior of the pickups cabin.

Santiago got in the pickup, turned the key and the 6 cylinder engine roared to life reassuringly. Putting the vehicle in ‘drive’, he pulled out onto the highway and reached the periferico a few minutes later, coming to a stop at the traffic light and completely oblivious to the fact that an enormous reptile was curled up just inches away.

Enter Marco San Pedro de las Asturias de Barlovento Ruiseñor Pesado

Marco San Pedro de las Asturias de Barlovento Ruiseñor Pesado or “El Duque” as he was jokingly referred to by his Yucatecan friends walked carefully along the sidewalk; at this time of the afternoon it was late enough that he didn’t need to be concerned about which side of the sidewalk it was, as the sun had already disappeared behind the buildings in el centro and the temperature, while still very warm, was no longer suffocatingly hot.

He didn’t mind the nickname. It was to be expected, what with that insanely pretentious last name his parents had insisted on bestowing upon him.

Originally from Alicante, Spain, his mother Doña Alicia Ruiz-Señor Pesado and his father Don Marco San Pedro de las Asturias de Barvolento were of royal blood, or so they claimed. They had fled Spain and it’s violent civil war in the late 1930’s, able to do so through their wealth and connections, had come to the Yucatan and settled in Merida in a fine mansion in the city’s center and had pursued their lifelong ambitions of alternately impressing and intimidating those around them, in their minds all undoubtedly of inferior social class and economic means. Doña Alicia was particularly fastidious when choosing worthy companions for her weekly canasta game. Meanwhile Don Marco had opened an exclusive boutique that provided the up and coming society around them with the finest clothing and fashion accessories and had been able to maintain the pleasant fiction that was their royal status in a new land teeming with aspiring socialites and new money.

Marco, the son, was one of 8 children, neither the youngest nor the oldest but somewhere in between and had been raised – as were all the children – to carry on the family tradition of pompous superiority but had committed the grave and imperdonable sin of falling in love with the dark skinned daughter of one of his fathers Mayan tailors. The outrage and dismay caused by this breach of etiquette resulted in his virtual banishment from the family and its fortune, such as it was, and when Marco announced his decision to marry the girl, his mother and father upgraded his banishment status from virtual to real and he was, as they say, ‘cut off’.

He had moved to a relatively new – at that time – area of Merida, the colonia Garcia Gineres, with his new wife whose apellidos were considerably shorter and monosyllabic and found work with a company that commercialized products related to the booming henequen industry. They had raised 3 fine children, two sons and a daughter, who were themselves now married and successful in their own right. Now in his sixties, Marco divided his time between his garden at their Garcia Gineres home and socializing with lifelong friends and acquaintances, many of whom were getting on in years, but who still found time for a game of domino or a weak, tepid coffee at a small cafe in the bowels of the Lucas de Galvez market, in the very heart of Merida. During these encounters, the old friends would discuss the latest local and national political gossip, argue over whether Bush was right in invading Iraq or not and describe their various ailments to one another.

It was, in fact, one of these sessions that Marco had just left, and was now on his way to a bus stop some blocks from the market. He chose to walk a few blocks each time he came downtown as it was his only form of exercise and the walking seemed to ease the pain in his knees that would flare up when he spent too much time kneeling in his garden.

He was walking a little faster now, still remembering with a smile his friend Alberto – “El Caballo Perez” they called him – wagging his index finger as old men do – and giving them all advice about the dangers of mixing Viagra with Red Bull, when he noticed a door suddenly opening across the street and a woman staggering out onto the sidewalk. She clutched at her throat and without saying a word, dropped onto the sidewalk where she lay, motionless.

He heard himself yelling “Señora!” and, without even checking to see if a car, or worse, a bus, was coming, he rushed into and across the street to see what he could do to help this obviously ailing elderly woman who had, from the looks of it, fainted right there in front of what was probably her house. Behind him, a man with a bad leg came to the window to see what was going on, a television flashing blue light on the wall inside.

He reached the woman, now lying in a crumpled heap at his feet and felt his heart was racing, perhaps from the adrenaline charged effort of the sprint across the street or perhaps from the realization that he was faced with a possible life or death situation. Kneeling down he, he noticed cookie crumbs on the front of the woman’s simple house dress and he recalled her clutching at her throat just before she collapsed. At that moment a door in his mind that had been shut for ages opened and he remembered – as if it was yesterday – a medical training session that had been obligatory for all employees of Telas Agricolas Yucatecas S.A. many years ago and what to do if someone was choking. Reaching under the woman he half-lifted her in order to wrap his arms around her from behind, placing his hands under her sternum and applied what he remembered was a technique called the Heimlich maneuver, pulling his closed fists towards himself through the womans chest.

There was a sudden sputter, a cough and a gasp for air from the woman in his arms; a piece of something had flown out of her mouth and onto the sidewalk. “She is going to be fine!” thought Marco as he relaxed his grip and then, when he saw she was indeed breathing, released the woman, who was now sitting up, coughing, eyes watering. She turned to look at him, blinking, in confusion.

Se cayó, señora” Marco explained looking at her, concerned. “Cómo se siente?” he added. The woman could only nod, obviously still in a state of shock from what had just happened. Her breath came hoarsely. “Bien” she replied in a weak, unconvincing voice, between fits of coughing. He was suddenly aware of a voice from the television inside the house; a woman’s voice seductively extolling the virtues of Ponds hand cream.

Across the street, Don Arsenio had opened the front door to his house and was standing, watching intently, completely oblivious to his television or the fact that he was not wearing more than an undershirt and ragged shorts. A few more passersby had gathered and they too, were watching from the safety of the opposite sidewalk, and from that group a heavy-set woman accompanied by a small child, a girl of about 7 or so, quickly checked traffic and crossed quickly over to Marco and the now calmer Juany, still sitting on the sidewalk. In her hand was a cellular phone.

Acaba de llamar a la policia” she said excitedly to Marco, her eyes not leaving the woman sitting in front of her “dicen que ahorita vienen” The little girl stared at the strange sight of a grown-up sitting on the sidewalk.

Marco nodded. “Le ayudo entrar?” he asked the woman on the sidewalk, motioning to the open door of her home. Doña Juany nodded and tried to get to her feet. Marco took her arm, helped her to her feet and gently escorted her inside, where he found a chair in the sala and sat her down. He turned off the television, silencing the strident, nasal voice of a woman making a pitch for a skin-bleaching cream.

An ambulance appeared moments later, lights flashing, its appearance heralded by sirens which had been thankfully turned off as it came to an abrupt halt in front of Doña Juany’s home. The heavy set woman enthusiastically filled in one of the paramedics with the details as she had seen them, while two others went inside the house to check on Doña Juany. While Marco explained what he had seen and done, the paramedics checked Doña Juany’s pulse and made sure she had not hit her head. When asked if she would like to be taken to the hospital ‘para que le revisen‘ Doña Juany shook her head vigorously and it was decided that she was fine, no injury to the head and so, no danger of a concussion and, after a brief interrogation of Marco’s relationship to the woman and jotting down the particulars, the three of them left, pulling away in the ambulance that now only sported a smaller, more discrete number of red and blue lights flashing on its roof.

Marco pulled up a chair, sat down in front of the woman and asked if there was someone he could call. He felt it would be unwise, as well as somehow discourteous, to leave the poor woman alone after her fright. Doña Juany, now regaining her composure, replied that yes, but that her phone line had been canceled and that the nearest phone was at Maria Inés corner store down the street; she scribbled a phone number in pencil on a slip of paper napkin and Marco stepped out to find the grocery store and make the call.

Doña Juany – A Long Day

The plastic Coca Cola-red chair scraped along the colorful tile floor as Doña Juany dragged it through the sala and out the front door, setting it down on the sidewalk just outside the entrance to her old house. She glanced back inside for a moment, making sure she had turned off any lights she wasn’t using and then sat, wearily, in the cool, late afternoon air.

It had been a long day, washing day that it was, and she had spent an inordinate amount of time washing the clothes as she had always washed them – by hand – in the large batea behind her kitchen.  Of course now with her mother and father gone, there was not much to wash except for her underclothes and some house dresses she wore around the house and to the market when she went to buy the day’s provisions and yet, it had still taken what seemed to be longer than usual. Then she had painstakingly pinned the washed clothing to the lines strung criss-cross just beyond the batea only to have to rush out an hour later when it started to rain. It rained long enough to get all the clothing wet and of course everything had to be rinsed again to prevent it from smelling bad when it finally dried. The clothes were now hanging in one of the empty bedrooms, drying slowly on nylon lines tied to hammock hooks.

All this washing and hanging, combined with a three-block walk to the corner grocery store and back to buy some detergente and a jar of instant Nescafe for her morning coffee, had left her tired. She recalled Maria Ines, the owner of the shop, mentioning something about the weather and how the rainy season had finally come and what a relief it was, especially for the campesinos who were waiting to plant their corn as this year the dry season had lasted so long and what if the rains didn’t come and the seeds would dry and so they were waiting expectantly and… Maria Ines talked a lot, and this morning Doña Juany had not felt like engaging in much conversation, so she just nodded or shook her head depending on what Maria Ines was saying. Finally she managed to pay and left, leaving Maria Ines talking to another, more interested customer who had just walked into the store. He was one of those older gringos that had recently moved in, spent what must have been a fortune on renovating an old house and now spent his days strolling the streets smiling at everyone and drawling out “buenos dias” in a thick American accent without a care in the world.

“How do they do it?” she thought “they just start speaking Spanish without knowing even basic grammar or tense and they could care less how it sounds”

Doña Juany, when she was much younger, had met some American exchange students who were studying at the Rogers Hall school under the supervision of those crazy American nuns – they wore shorts for their sports classes; what kind of nuns did that – and when an opportunity had presented itself to talk to them, Juany had remained silent, afraid to utter anything in English because she was positive her pronunciation was so bad that she would not be understood or worse, laughed at. The girls were nice and had spoken to her in Spanish – such as it was – and she would answer them in Spanish, yearning for the courage to try out her English but that courage never presented itself and the opportunity was lost. Since then she had forgotten most of it and had only recently started to think about English when the neighborhood began to repopulate with the recently arrived Americans.

Across the street, Doña Juany could see Arsenio, the neighbor with the bad leg, moving about inside his living room. His windows onto the street were open to take advantage of the cool air and she could make out a television in the corner of the room. It looked like some sort of telenovela was on and Arsenio was settling down in a rocking chair in front of the TV to watch it.

Besides her neighbor Doña Betty who seemed to live alone with her adopted malix, there was another house a few doors down that had been fixed up and was now owned by two men who spent a lot of time away from Merida. They would be gone for weeks and then, suddenly, be back and then there would be dinner parties with lots of other gringos. Unlike the typical Mexican party, however, Doña Juany noticed that these parties usually started – and ended – early and by midnight the whole affair would be over. One of them was called George, or Jorge as he like to call himself, who seemed friendly enough on the few occasions she had crossed paths with him but the other one she didn’t know because he didn’t seem to get out much. She suspected they were gay. Why else would two grown men live together without any women around? Around the corner was another couple, probably in their 50’s and she had heard they were from Washington but these people did not throw parties or go out late. They mostly stayed home venturing out only to visit el mercado on Thursday mornings when it seemed they did all their grocery shopping for the week. Normally they left on foot, but most times returned by taxi on account of their many sabucanes full of fruits and vegetables.

A few other houses in the area had “Se Vende” or “Se Renta” signs on them with local phone numbers and foreign sounding names and occasionally a gringo in one of those fancy cars would pull up in front of them, step out onto the sidewalk along with a foreign couple – the wife emerging from the back seat, husband from the passenger front – and they would go inside. After a while they would come back out, get into the fancy car and drive away. So far, no one had bought anything for some time. This was another reason D0ña Juany was convinced that her house would never be sold. If those places, many of  which were still in decent shape were not selling, there was really no hope for the crumbling family home that she had taken care of all these years.

With a sigh of resignation, Doña Juany got up and took the red plastic chair back into the house, closing the door to the street behind her. An hour or more had passed and it was time for her novela. She didn’t much care for the earlier soap opera, the one that Arsenio was watching across the street, it was just too melodramatic and the protagonist was far too old for the part of the galan. The actress playing the part of the novia could have been his daughter for crying out loud.

She turned on a table lamp and the television and found the right channel. Then she went to the kitchen to prepare a cup of te de manzanilla and found a package of Canelitas cinnamon cookies and returned to the sala with her cookies and tea to watch her novela.

As the violins and crashingly symphonic music started, accompanied by flowery script and images of flowing haired actresses atop shining horses and men with creased foreheads turning dramatically towards the camera, Doña Juany sipped her tea and swallowed a bite of cookie.

She swallowed again, but somehow the cookie was not moving. Another swallow, nothing. She suddenly felt the urge to take a deep breath and knew she couldn’t because her windpipe was blocked. Thunderous orchestral music came from the television as Doña Juany dropped her cup of tea on the tile floor – it smashed into a thousand porcelain pieces – and the package of Canelitas slipped from her lap as she made an effort to get up, clutching at her throat. She made a croaking sound as she tried to cry for help staggering towards the front door. Flinging it open she felt herself becoming dizzy, sparkling lights in her peripheral vision and she sank to her knees and onto the sidewalk.

Behind her on the small television in the dimly lit sala of the tired old house, a sensual female voice was announcing an exciting new body spray.

Everything went suddenly very black.

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