We were driving down the coast with two girls who had never seen the island before. It was late in the day and we had to get back to town soon to catch connecting rides, but all the same, we asked our driver to stop at Praia Frances (French Beach) so the girls could get out and look.
Praia Frances is an odd beach. You can't see it until you're right next to it because, at the last minute, just before you hit the water's edge, the rocky coast drops out a meter or two below you, forming a minor cliff. Only in the small space below and beyond the cliff do you encounter fine black sand, reaching out a short distance and then disappearing again under the waves.
The cliff overhangs the rear of the beach and juts out into mini-peninsulas every 10 to 20 meters, creating a series of horseshoe-shaped semi-self-contained coves. This is important.
As we walked out onto one of those peninsulas, I looked down into the adjacent cove. In the back, nestled under the lip of the cliff, I discerned a pair of feet in flip flops. And then another foot wearing a different flip flop. And then movement — slow, rhythmic, circular movement.
At first I didn't believe what I thought I was seeing. Where'd they come from? Hadn't they certainly heard us, or at least felt our car rumbling to a halt on the ground above them? If so, shouldn't they be scrambling to put clothes on? As I turned to one of my friends, my eyes answered my own first question: there was a car parked right next to ours. I just hadn't noticed it.
I asked my friend: "Are they having sex down there?"
He walked out towards the sea for a better view and looked where I had looked. Then we both turned, incredulous, to a Cape Verdean who was with us. He didn't understand our English, but he knew what we were saying, because he just gave a wry smile and nodded in confirmation.
Snuffing my voyeuristic impulse to get a better view myself, I turned my attention to the rest of our group, who had ventured much further out on the peninsula (where they could potentially see deeper into the cove) but were — like normal people — still focused more on the ocean than on the coast.
Then it happened.
One of the girls — the one that has only been in Cape Verde for a week — turned to face the flip-flopped feet. Except from where she stood, she must have been able to see not just the feet, but everything from head to toe (and everything in between). Immediately, her eyes lit up, she gasped, she covered her mouth with her hand, and then she struggled to stifle her giggling as she walked briskly out of the line of sight.
Of course, after that, everyone else had to look too. But M—'s reaction was the best. The sight of sex made her feel the way I think sex should: she laughed like a child, and then she felt happy, knowing, perhaps, that life is a pretty sweet gift even if we only get one.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Thief
A dog with a smooth golden coat just walked out of a building with a piece of buttered bread in its mouth. A man and a woman stood by and laughed at the dog while I watched silently from a balcony. As it passed by me, I noticed rows of swollen nipples drooping from its underbelly. My eyes followed it about a hundred feet, until it disappeared into a gap in the wall on the far side of the road.
I looked elsewhere, but then in my periphery, the dog returned to view. Bread still locked in its teeth, it jumped atop the wall and trotted back in my direction. When it came to a gate, it paused for a tic and then jumped to the other side. From there the dog descended into a field of sugar cane across the street from where I stood.
Propped up against the wall in the corner of the field were about twenty tall bundles of sugar cane leaves. As the dog arrived, two small puppies with exactly the same golden coat emerged from the dark, protected gaps between these bundles. They followed their mother to the middle of the field, jumping at her teats and — when she threw it on the ground for them — pouncing on the piece of bread. As puppies do, they took opposite ends and nibbled at it. One would occassionally try to tug the bread away from the other, but lacking any real strength or determination to do so, they ended up dividing it pretty much equally and then laid down at their mother's side.
I looked elsewhere, but then in my periphery, the dog returned to view. Bread still locked in its teeth, it jumped atop the wall and trotted back in my direction. When it came to a gate, it paused for a tic and then jumped to the other side. From there the dog descended into a field of sugar cane across the street from where I stood.
Propped up against the wall in the corner of the field were about twenty tall bundles of sugar cane leaves. As the dog arrived, two small puppies with exactly the same golden coat emerged from the dark, protected gaps between these bundles. They followed their mother to the middle of the field, jumping at her teats and — when she threw it on the ground for them — pouncing on the piece of bread. As puppies do, they took opposite ends and nibbled at it. One would occassionally try to tug the bread away from the other, but lacking any real strength or determination to do so, they ended up dividing it pretty much equally and then laid down at their mother's side.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Love (again)
I just rode back to my town in the bed of a pickup truck. There weren't many passengers; one ancient man with glassy eyes sat on the bench across from me, and inside the cab there was a woman.
Even these few companions disembarked by the time we crested over the mountain. And so, I thought, it was just the driver and I for the ride down the hill to Fajã. But when I peered into the cab more carefully, I saw another passenger I'd missed.
The driver was an old man, no less than 60, and next to him was a young girl, no more than two. She was curled up on her side, feet toward me, head toward the engine, face toward the passenger door, and eyes shut.
The weather was cool, but the sun was bright. We drove slowly, and yet the wind still blew the hair out of my eyes, so that as we rounded each curve I could see the shift in the angle of light that filtered through the windows of the cab. Chunks of shadow and brightness rocked back and forth in lockstep across the seat, one moment shading the sleeping girl's face and then making it brilliant again.
What I loved was this: Every time the road straightened for a stretch, the old driver looked down at the little girl. If the sun was on her face, he took a hand off the wheel and held it over her eyes. Not that her eyes weren't closed — they were, and I'm sure that in her dreaming mind the blackness was total. But out of concern that she might be burned, or that she might waken too soon, or perhaps merely on the principle that a person shouldn't have sun in their eyes, he protected her.
And to think: she'll never know she was loved today.
Even these few companions disembarked by the time we crested over the mountain. And so, I thought, it was just the driver and I for the ride down the hill to Fajã. But when I peered into the cab more carefully, I saw another passenger I'd missed.
The driver was an old man, no less than 60, and next to him was a young girl, no more than two. She was curled up on her side, feet toward me, head toward the engine, face toward the passenger door, and eyes shut.
The weather was cool, but the sun was bright. We drove slowly, and yet the wind still blew the hair out of my eyes, so that as we rounded each curve I could see the shift in the angle of light that filtered through the windows of the cab. Chunks of shadow and brightness rocked back and forth in lockstep across the seat, one moment shading the sleeping girl's face and then making it brilliant again.
What I loved was this: Every time the road straightened for a stretch, the old driver looked down at the little girl. If the sun was on her face, he took a hand off the wheel and held it over her eyes. Not that her eyes weren't closed — they were, and I'm sure that in her dreaming mind the blackness was total. But out of concern that she might be burned, or that she might waken too soon, or perhaps merely on the principle that a person shouldn't have sun in their eyes, he protected her.
And to think: she'll never know she was loved today.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Something I couldn't handle
It's nearly 10 in the morning when I go to the bakery to buy bread. I'm almost sure that I'm too late, but I decide to go anyway on the off chance that it may be a slow day.
I go the back way, which requires me to pass briefly through the yard of an old woman and her young son (grandson?) Helder. Sometimes the yard is empty, but when I approach, they are both standing outside. I greet them with the usual "bom dia."
Helder, being the friendly, amicable fellow that he is, asks me why he didn't see me at Carnaval in Estância Brás on Sunday. I say that, yes, I did go, but on Saturday, not Sunday. I ask him if it started earlier on Sunday. We're cool.
I walk by him and then come to face the old lady. "Tudo bom?" I offer with a smile. I stop and lean against the wall to give her a moment to respond. She doesn't... at least not to my greeting. Instead, seeing the bag in my hand, she tells me, "There's no more bread, you've come too late again."
She speaks as if I were haplessly convinced that I could still buy bread at this hour, and it's clearly clear to her that the reason I didn't come earlier is because I'm lazy.
Insulted and annoyed and angry as I am at that moment, Helder defuses the situation with his relentless positivity. "Now is the perfect time to get cookies, though," he says. "They'll be hot out of the oven."
Unfortunately, I'm still posted up against the wall, facing the old lady, who begins to inspect my long, flowy hair. I took extreme care to pull it away from my eyes before she saw me, but all the same she can't help herself. She tells Helder and I that it needs to be cut, and says I need to let her cut it.
I often get crap from her about my hair or about coming late for bread, but usually not at the same time.
Disgusted, I do something I've never done in Cape Verde: I spin around silently and walk away without looking back or saying another word. The entrance to the bakery is only 10 meters from this woman's house, but I walk past it without even checking for bread. Thrilled as I would be to buy the last three rolls just so I could throw them at her, I am indeed likely not to find any bread, and I don't dare risk that I might give her the satisfaction of seeing me walk out empty-handed.
I go the back way, which requires me to pass briefly through the yard of an old woman and her young son (grandson?) Helder. Sometimes the yard is empty, but when I approach, they are both standing outside. I greet them with the usual "bom dia."
Helder, being the friendly, amicable fellow that he is, asks me why he didn't see me at Carnaval in Estância Brás on Sunday. I say that, yes, I did go, but on Saturday, not Sunday. I ask him if it started earlier on Sunday. We're cool.
I walk by him and then come to face the old lady. "Tudo bom?" I offer with a smile. I stop and lean against the wall to give her a moment to respond. She doesn't... at least not to my greeting. Instead, seeing the bag in my hand, she tells me, "There's no more bread, you've come too late again."
She speaks as if I were haplessly convinced that I could still buy bread at this hour, and it's clearly clear to her that the reason I didn't come earlier is because I'm lazy.
Insulted and annoyed and angry as I am at that moment, Helder defuses the situation with his relentless positivity. "Now is the perfect time to get cookies, though," he says. "They'll be hot out of the oven."
Unfortunately, I'm still posted up against the wall, facing the old lady, who begins to inspect my long, flowy hair. I took extreme care to pull it away from my eyes before she saw me, but all the same she can't help herself. She tells Helder and I that it needs to be cut, and says I need to let her cut it.
I often get crap from her about my hair or about coming late for bread, but usually not at the same time.
Disgusted, I do something I've never done in Cape Verde: I spin around silently and walk away without looking back or saying another word. The entrance to the bakery is only 10 meters from this woman's house, but I walk past it without even checking for bread. Thrilled as I would be to buy the last three rolls just so I could throw them at her, I am indeed likely not to find any bread, and I don't dare risk that I might give her the satisfaction of seeing me walk out empty-handed.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Love
It's 4:55. I'm sitting down and all I'm doing is watching TV, but she asks, "Where are you going?"
"Fajã," I reply.
"What time?"
"Pretty soon."
"Later? What hour?" She points to the 7 on the wall clock. "This hour?"
I shake my head no.
She points to the 6. "This hour?"
I point to the 5. "This hour."
"Oh," she says, and walks away.
"Fajã," I reply.
"What time?"
"Pretty soon."
"Later? What hour?" She points to the 7 on the wall clock. "This hour?"
I shake my head no.
She points to the 6. "This hour?"
I point to the 5. "This hour."
"Oh," she says, and walks away.
Friendship
On the wall at Félix's house, sewn into a cloth, protected behind glass in a picture frame, verbatim:
FRIEND
BE A FRIEND IS
THE MOST IMPORT
-ANT THING
IN THE WORLD
Sunday, January 24, 2010
The Post Office
At 1pm, I go to the post office in central Mindelo, near the harbour.
The mob I'd seen earlier is gone. In fact, no one is there at all except for several attendants. I walk up to the first one and present a Whole Foods paper bag containing four brownie mixes, a can of pumpkin pureé, a bag of brown sugar, a bag of chocolate chips, a chocolate bar, 60 tablets of lactaid, a bottle each of barbecue sauce and Tabasco, and a box of chocolates.
"Good afternoon," I say in Creole. "All good?"
"All good."
"Good. I need to ship everything in this bag. Do you sell a big enough box?"
"How much stuff is it?"
"It's all the stuff in this bag." Realizing that she can't tell how full the bag is, I swing it around to a low side counter and try to support it from the bottom so I can tilt it toward her. When I do that, though, the top crumples in where my hand is supporting it, blocking her view anyway. Of course, she could have just stood up to look inside, but maybe that's asking too much. Maybe she's paraplegic. Maybe she thinks I have rotten eggs in there. I've never shipped a package in this country before, so I certainly don't know the routine.
I cut to the chase. "The bag is mostly full," I explain. "And it's pretty heavy. I probably need your biggest box." She still seems interested in knowing what I'm going to ship, so I start removing items from the bag and stacking them on the counter. She shakes her head — not to me, but to herself, in dissatisfaction — when I pull out the third and fourth box of brownie mix. I get a much livelier reaction with the barbecue sauce.
"No, no, no, no, no," she says as she grabs the bottle to inspect it. "This can't go. No, no, no," she continues, now shaking her head in my direction.
"But it's plastic!" I protest. "It's completely sealed, it's durable," and heck, it probably bounces. I start thinking of the posters in U.S. Post Offices that list all the items you can't send: firearms, pressurized gas containers, chemist-grade acids, and so on. I start to appreciate what a reasonably limited list it is.
"If it breaks," she explains, "it will leak all over the letters and get them dirty." She sways her head lazily from side to side while she says this, as if still saying no. She looks like she's going to rock herself to sleep. I hope so. I like the idea that she would respond to reason if only someone gave her a good, hard pinch.
I keep trying anyway. "But how would it break?" I ask. "Look," I implore as I drop the bottle of barbecue sauce on the counter from a short height (it does bounce a little). "You'd have to smash the box with huge mallet to crack this bottle open. If you're so worried about it, how in the world do you handle your packages anyway? What do you do to them??!!" It's no use. She tells me flatly that I can't send it, reiterating her total lack of interest in hickory-smoked letter correspondence.
"Okay," I concede, "let's just see what fits in these boxes of yours."
Proving herself less than totally sedentary, she gets up and walks to the back of the service area, returning with what appear to be two shoeboxes emblazoned in the red and white of the Cape Verdian correios.
"You can see what fits," she says flatly. "The maximum is two kilos."
"Two kilos?!" I ask incredulously.
"Two kilos per box," she replies. The blow is not softened by this, considering that my pumpkin pureé is a kilo all by itself.
I take the last of my items out of the paper bag, including a large glass bottle of Tabasco. I try to sneak it into one of the boxes, but alas, she notices.
"No, no, no, this really can't go. No. No." She says it so automatically. For a moment she reminds of a young teenager in the face of temptation, who trusts her own judgment so little that she bludgeons her impulses with flat, unthinking denial. Her "no" comes from somewhere deep in her gut. It's like she has the hiccups.
We talk a little bit more, and I start placing items in one of the shoeboxes. To my delight, it's a perfect container for the brownie mixes. It easily fits three of them with room left over for chocolate chips and brown sugar. When it hits the scale, though, she throws out half of it. She continues our discussion of liquids.
"Maybe if you put that one [gesturing at the barbecue sauce] in a plastic bag, it'd be okay, but this one [the Tabasco], absolutely not." Meanwhile, she's taking items out of the shoebox and putting others back in as she searches for the perfect two kilos without going over. It's like a backwards version of The Price is Right in which you already know the value of the showcase but you have to figure out which items it includes. It's kind of fun, honestly. And she includes the barbecue sauce, which means she's decided that she has bigger fish to fry. I begin to doubt that any items are officially prohibited in the correios. I could probably send a chainsaw if it were under two kilos.
"Okay, here's what I'll do," I announce. My gestures are totally exaggerated by this point. I'm at the post office, but I could be telling a story around a campfire. I sort of feel like a mobster making a deal with the police. Here's what I'll do: "I'll put the Tabasco bottle in a nice, thick plastic bag. I'll seal it shut, we'll cover it in cardboard" — she's shaking her head again — "and we'll wrap the whole thing in a nice, big, fluffy sweater, and all that will go in the box, and nothing will ever happen to it."
She repeats her stump speech about the poor, defenseless letters getting stained by my devil-package, but then she says something very interesting: "Now, if you were to use that box [gesturing at a wine-bottle-shaped box behind her], no problem! You just can't send it in this one."
I have to pause for a moment to take this in.
Why didn't you tell me that before???!!!, I hear my brain shout. The lady can't hear it, but I feel fairly certain that if she looked me straight in the eyes she'd see the incredulity reverberating somewhere behind my pupils.
Tempted as I am to see for myself what marvels of cardboard engineering have been incorporated into the bottle box to allow it to withstand the sadistic abuse of local mail handlers, I merely grab the glass Tabasco bottle and set it aside. After all, I'm on a 30-minute lunch break. I only have so much time to argue.
"Okay," I say. "Glass goes separately. What about the rest of this?"
She resumes her puppeteering. My chocolates, sugars, and other foods dangle from her fingers, each one briefly taking center stage on the scale. They shuffle from box to box as she searches for the right set, but none of them seem to play well together, and one by one she casts them aside.
When at last she finagles one box under the two-kilo limit, she tilts it toward me and announces it: "You can ship this."
I look down at one brownie mix, the sugar, the chocolate bar, the lactaid, and a whole lot of empty space. I can't help but think that it seems so lonely in there.
"Isn't there some way I could ship all this stuff together?" I ask. I have an urge to point out how much more likely it is that stuff will break if the package has extra room and its contents are allowed to slide around, but by this point I realize that my powers of reason are no match for her steely adherence to postal dogma.
"No, the limit's the limit. You just have to use more boxes. Shall I get you some?" she offers. I ask her about the price, and it turns out to be somewhere around 700 escudos per box. Since I'd need at least four boxes, that comes out to about $36 for sending 12 lbs. of stuff less than a hundred miles at standard speed. High seas robbery.
For a moment I just stand there, flustered and unsure what to do. Then the clouds part, and she says something that is beautiful to my ears. "Maybe you should try sending via encomendas."
Actually, at first I don't know what she's talking about. "Encomendas?"
"Yes, it's next door, at CVTelecom. I don't know what kind of condition this stuff will arrive in, but you can send everything in one box."
I pause for a moment to take this in.
Why didn't you tell me that before???!!!, I hear my brain echo. But at the same time I'm happy to learn that I might not need to swarm my recipients with multiple care packages, so I ask her where to go. She points me in the right direction and repeats something about CVTelecom, the national phone monopoly.
Perplexed, I ask for confirmation. "Encomendas is part of CVTelecom? I can ship large packages at the phone company?" She seems to respond in the affirmative. "All of this can go in one package? Even this?" I ask, pointing at the Tabasco bottle.
Her eyebrows peak. "Well, I don't know about that."
Good enough. I throw all my items back in the bag and turn to leave. More out of instinct than out of genuine sentiment, I thank her for her help. Unexpectedly, her gruffy, disinterested air vanishes in an instant and she says something along the lines of, "I'm sorry we couldn't help you here, but it was a pleasure talking to you. Have a great day!" It's as if we haven't been arguing for ten minutes. As if she hadn't, in fact, felt that I was interrupting an otherwise quiet lull in the flow of postal customers. As if I weren't the letter-correspondence saboteur that my liquid-mailing ambitions clearly prove me to be. The moment we stop doing business, she starts acting like my best friend.
Baffled, I walk out.
After a few steps in the right direction, I come to a little storefront. Inside is a little desk, and behind it, a hallway that leads back to the bowels of the post office. I still don't entirely understand what the lady meant by encomendas, but if it's the large-package department of the post office, it makes sense that it would be in the same building. Plus, there's a CVMovel logo on the large glass window.
I go inside, but no one's there. I stand expectantly for a minute or two, ogling the computer and all the other expensive stuff lying around that I could easily steal. I reason that nobody would leave this space unattended for too long, and I expect somebody to pop out from the hallway any second. I know people are back there — I hear them talking, and I even see one or two rushing past. But my bag of stuff and I get ignored.
Doubt creeps in. I wonder if I'm in the right place. I walk outside again and circle around to the back of the building, where a third door opens up to rows of post office boxes. I call out through a small slit. An attendant appears, and I hold up my bag to show him what I need to ship. I've forgotten the word encomendas, so I struggle to ask for what I need without knowing its name.
"I want to ship all this stuff in one box," I explain.
"Go to the post office, it's around the other side."
"I was just there. They told me to go somewhere else." What's the word? I think to myself. Amendoas? No, no, those are almonds.
"I don't know," he says. "Go back there."
Not quite ready to go crawling back there, I return to the storefront and muster up the courage to call out for help. It still takes me a minute or two before I'm loud enough to get anyone's attention, but eventually a young girl emerges. I have the same conversation with her as I did with the P.O. box clerk, but because she's not speaking to me through a slit, it somehow goes better. She's not any less confused about what I'm asking for, but she's helpful enough that she's willing to work through it. She walks me back to the post office and talks to the two-kilo evangelist while I stand back at a suitably sheepish distance. The lady says encomendas, the girl understands immediately, and we walk out again together.
As we pass the unattended storefront, I marvel again that the computer in there somehow manages not to be stolen. I also marvel that this girl is abandoning her job for several minutes just so she can guide some lost foreigner around town. My projected sense of professional duty and my continuing sheepishness both make me wish that she'd just give me better directions and leave me to find the place myself, but she seems intent on walking me all the way there.
We go towards the giant CVTelecom building across the street. Once we're alongside it, she points through the light-blue wrought-iron fence and I see a small sign that says "Encomendas" beside a ratty, non-descript side door. I feel even more sheepish when I realize that the postal clerk probably thinks I couldn't find this giant building, when in fact I knew perfectly well where it was and simply never had occasion before to take inventory of its contents. No part of it looks like a public entrance, and the whole thing is surrounded by that fence. The girl leaves me at the gate, where I walk past a guard to get inside.
But hey, this is how you ship packages in Mindelo.
The encomendas office is on the bottom floor of the CVTelecom building — it might even be considered the basement level, since the building is on a slope, but the office itself is wholly above ground. When I walk inside, I immediately feel better. The service counter is made of unpainted wood, and so are the desks in the narrow service area behind it. All the posters on the wall are at least 15 years old, and most of the equipment lying around looks older. The space is lit by sun streaming in through the windows. You can tell by the posture of the clerks that they're never very busy. There are no rigid high stools. Everyone leans against walls, or sits in low lime-green office chairs with worn-out padding and small tears in the seams.
The lady who comes to serve me is in her fifties, and though she is clearly Cape Verdian, she carries herself like a Brazilian. She is bigger, but not plump. She ambles slowly and wears only slightly too much makeup. She looks like she thoroughly enjoyed the privilege of raising every one of her children.
We start with the same niceties as in the post office and I go through the same ritual of laying out everything on the counter. While I do, she leaves to look for shipping boxes. Her and a male clerk come back a few minutes later with several boxes, all of which — they happily share with me — they swiped from CVTelecom's trash pile. We pick the largest one. The man expresses doubt that we can fit everything in there, but then he walks away and leaves us to it.
The lady grabs the brownie mixes and starts carefully packing the box. When I reveal the Tabasco bottle, I hear a familiar refrain.
"No, no, no, no, no."
"It's okay," I defer, "don't worry about it. Let's focus on the other stuff."
"You know, if this breaks, it'll make a real mess."
I'm about to repeat that we should ignore the Tabasco for the moment, but then it occurs to me that it won't be in my interest for everything else to fit nicely in the box while the Tabasco stands by the wayside. It needs to be included, and I need to defend its inclusion.
"I just got back from America," I tell her. "I had four of these glass bottles in my duffel bag, and you know how baggage handlers are. They pick up bags and launch them against the ground. These bottles had no special protection, but they all survived without a scratch. They're strong bottles. Are you sure I can't send it in a box if I protect it well?" I start repeating my sweater idea.
"No, probably not," she repeats, but clearly — miraculously — she's actually thinking about how to solve the problem. She retreats to the back of the office and returns a moment latter with some air-filled plastic packaging, which she wraps around and tapes to the bottle. I can hardly believe what I'm seeing. Then, huzzah!, she puts it in the box.
She proceeds to put everything else in the box, too. Everything. It's quite a delicate ballet. For a moment I'm certain that the box of chocolates aren't going to fit, which I'm almost happy about because it means I'd get to keep them for myself. But she takes out several items again, finds space for the chocolates below, and at the end of five minutes she is taping shut what is perhaps the densest cube of food that the Cape Verdian postal service has ever seen.
When her magic is done, she presents me with the address/customs forms, which I fill out in quadruplicate using carbon paper. She watches me until I'm about half-done, then walks off for a moment. Suddenly she comes back and admits a mistake: they actually need five copies.
No problem, I say. I finish up the quadruplicates and begin manually filling out a fifth copy. As I do, though, the lady walks away and sits down at the desk in the back of the service area. She opens up the top drawer, shuffles through it for a tic, and pulls out something I can't quite see. Looking up periodically from my papers to watch, I see her swivel her chair around to face a mirror near the window. The item from the drawer is then revealed: it's a small makeup brush. She lifts it to her face, focuses her gaze intently in the mirror, and begins shaping her eyebrows.
While I'm filling out address forms.
I have to stop for a second because I find it so difficult to write and, at the same time, refrain from bursting out in laughter. I try to imagine a postal clerk in the states dolling herself up while I write the address on a Priority Mail box, and it seems inconceivable, which only makes me happier to find myself in a place like Cape Verde where such outstandingly absurd things happen all the time.
We chat a little more as I write a note and stuff it under one of the taped flaps. I mention that I live in Fajã on São Nicolau (a different island), and we find out that she's the sister of one of my neighbors.
I write down her name. As she tightens some twine around the box, I promise to tell her sister that she says hello. I've missed lunch, but my package is on its way, and my love for Cape Verde is renewed.
The mob I'd seen earlier is gone. In fact, no one is there at all except for several attendants. I walk up to the first one and present a Whole Foods paper bag containing four brownie mixes, a can of pumpkin pureé, a bag of brown sugar, a bag of chocolate chips, a chocolate bar, 60 tablets of lactaid, a bottle each of barbecue sauce and Tabasco, and a box of chocolates.
"Good afternoon," I say in Creole. "All good?"
"All good."
"Good. I need to ship everything in this bag. Do you sell a big enough box?"
"How much stuff is it?"
"It's all the stuff in this bag." Realizing that she can't tell how full the bag is, I swing it around to a low side counter and try to support it from the bottom so I can tilt it toward her. When I do that, though, the top crumples in where my hand is supporting it, blocking her view anyway. Of course, she could have just stood up to look inside, but maybe that's asking too much. Maybe she's paraplegic. Maybe she thinks I have rotten eggs in there. I've never shipped a package in this country before, so I certainly don't know the routine.
I cut to the chase. "The bag is mostly full," I explain. "And it's pretty heavy. I probably need your biggest box." She still seems interested in knowing what I'm going to ship, so I start removing items from the bag and stacking them on the counter. She shakes her head — not to me, but to herself, in dissatisfaction — when I pull out the third and fourth box of brownie mix. I get a much livelier reaction with the barbecue sauce.
"No, no, no, no, no," she says as she grabs the bottle to inspect it. "This can't go. No, no, no," she continues, now shaking her head in my direction.
"But it's plastic!" I protest. "It's completely sealed, it's durable," and heck, it probably bounces. I start thinking of the posters in U.S. Post Offices that list all the items you can't send: firearms, pressurized gas containers, chemist-grade acids, and so on. I start to appreciate what a reasonably limited list it is.
"If it breaks," she explains, "it will leak all over the letters and get them dirty." She sways her head lazily from side to side while she says this, as if still saying no. She looks like she's going to rock herself to sleep. I hope so. I like the idea that she would respond to reason if only someone gave her a good, hard pinch.
I keep trying anyway. "But how would it break?" I ask. "Look," I implore as I drop the bottle of barbecue sauce on the counter from a short height (it does bounce a little). "You'd have to smash the box with huge mallet to crack this bottle open. If you're so worried about it, how in the world do you handle your packages anyway? What do you do to them??!!" It's no use. She tells me flatly that I can't send it, reiterating her total lack of interest in hickory-smoked letter correspondence.
"Okay," I concede, "let's just see what fits in these boxes of yours."
Proving herself less than totally sedentary, she gets up and walks to the back of the service area, returning with what appear to be two shoeboxes emblazoned in the red and white of the Cape Verdian correios.
"You can see what fits," she says flatly. "The maximum is two kilos."
"Two kilos?!" I ask incredulously.
"Two kilos per box," she replies. The blow is not softened by this, considering that my pumpkin pureé is a kilo all by itself.
I take the last of my items out of the paper bag, including a large glass bottle of Tabasco. I try to sneak it into one of the boxes, but alas, she notices.
"No, no, no, this really can't go. No. No." She says it so automatically. For a moment she reminds of a young teenager in the face of temptation, who trusts her own judgment so little that she bludgeons her impulses with flat, unthinking denial. Her "no" comes from somewhere deep in her gut. It's like she has the hiccups.
We talk a little bit more, and I start placing items in one of the shoeboxes. To my delight, it's a perfect container for the brownie mixes. It easily fits three of them with room left over for chocolate chips and brown sugar. When it hits the scale, though, she throws out half of it. She continues our discussion of liquids.
"Maybe if you put that one [gesturing at the barbecue sauce] in a plastic bag, it'd be okay, but this one [the Tabasco], absolutely not." Meanwhile, she's taking items out of the shoebox and putting others back in as she searches for the perfect two kilos without going over. It's like a backwards version of The Price is Right in which you already know the value of the showcase but you have to figure out which items it includes. It's kind of fun, honestly. And she includes the barbecue sauce, which means she's decided that she has bigger fish to fry. I begin to doubt that any items are officially prohibited in the correios. I could probably send a chainsaw if it were under two kilos.
"Okay, here's what I'll do," I announce. My gestures are totally exaggerated by this point. I'm at the post office, but I could be telling a story around a campfire. I sort of feel like a mobster making a deal with the police. Here's what I'll do: "I'll put the Tabasco bottle in a nice, thick plastic bag. I'll seal it shut, we'll cover it in cardboard" — she's shaking her head again — "and we'll wrap the whole thing in a nice, big, fluffy sweater, and all that will go in the box, and nothing will ever happen to it."
She repeats her stump speech about the poor, defenseless letters getting stained by my devil-package, but then she says something very interesting: "Now, if you were to use that box [gesturing at a wine-bottle-shaped box behind her], no problem! You just can't send it in this one."
I have to pause for a moment to take this in.
Why didn't you tell me that before???!!!, I hear my brain shout. The lady can't hear it, but I feel fairly certain that if she looked me straight in the eyes she'd see the incredulity reverberating somewhere behind my pupils.
Tempted as I am to see for myself what marvels of cardboard engineering have been incorporated into the bottle box to allow it to withstand the sadistic abuse of local mail handlers, I merely grab the glass Tabasco bottle and set it aside. After all, I'm on a 30-minute lunch break. I only have so much time to argue.
"Okay," I say. "Glass goes separately. What about the rest of this?"
She resumes her puppeteering. My chocolates, sugars, and other foods dangle from her fingers, each one briefly taking center stage on the scale. They shuffle from box to box as she searches for the right set, but none of them seem to play well together, and one by one she casts them aside.
When at last she finagles one box under the two-kilo limit, she tilts it toward me and announces it: "You can ship this."
I look down at one brownie mix, the sugar, the chocolate bar, the lactaid, and a whole lot of empty space. I can't help but think that it seems so lonely in there.
"Isn't there some way I could ship all this stuff together?" I ask. I have an urge to point out how much more likely it is that stuff will break if the package has extra room and its contents are allowed to slide around, but by this point I realize that my powers of reason are no match for her steely adherence to postal dogma.
"No, the limit's the limit. You just have to use more boxes. Shall I get you some?" she offers. I ask her about the price, and it turns out to be somewhere around 700 escudos per box. Since I'd need at least four boxes, that comes out to about $36 for sending 12 lbs. of stuff less than a hundred miles at standard speed. High seas robbery.
For a moment I just stand there, flustered and unsure what to do. Then the clouds part, and she says something that is beautiful to my ears. "Maybe you should try sending via encomendas."
Actually, at first I don't know what she's talking about. "Encomendas?"
"Yes, it's next door, at CVTelecom. I don't know what kind of condition this stuff will arrive in, but you can send everything in one box."
I pause for a moment to take this in.
Why didn't you tell me that before???!!!, I hear my brain echo. But at the same time I'm happy to learn that I might not need to swarm my recipients with multiple care packages, so I ask her where to go. She points me in the right direction and repeats something about CVTelecom, the national phone monopoly.
Perplexed, I ask for confirmation. "Encomendas is part of CVTelecom? I can ship large packages at the phone company?" She seems to respond in the affirmative. "All of this can go in one package? Even this?" I ask, pointing at the Tabasco bottle.
Her eyebrows peak. "Well, I don't know about that."
Good enough. I throw all my items back in the bag and turn to leave. More out of instinct than out of genuine sentiment, I thank her for her help. Unexpectedly, her gruffy, disinterested air vanishes in an instant and she says something along the lines of, "I'm sorry we couldn't help you here, but it was a pleasure talking to you. Have a great day!" It's as if we haven't been arguing for ten minutes. As if she hadn't, in fact, felt that I was interrupting an otherwise quiet lull in the flow of postal customers. As if I weren't the letter-correspondence saboteur that my liquid-mailing ambitions clearly prove me to be. The moment we stop doing business, she starts acting like my best friend.
Baffled, I walk out.
After a few steps in the right direction, I come to a little storefront. Inside is a little desk, and behind it, a hallway that leads back to the bowels of the post office. I still don't entirely understand what the lady meant by encomendas, but if it's the large-package department of the post office, it makes sense that it would be in the same building. Plus, there's a CVMovel logo on the large glass window.
I go inside, but no one's there. I stand expectantly for a minute or two, ogling the computer and all the other expensive stuff lying around that I could easily steal. I reason that nobody would leave this space unattended for too long, and I expect somebody to pop out from the hallway any second. I know people are back there — I hear them talking, and I even see one or two rushing past. But my bag of stuff and I get ignored.
Doubt creeps in. I wonder if I'm in the right place. I walk outside again and circle around to the back of the building, where a third door opens up to rows of post office boxes. I call out through a small slit. An attendant appears, and I hold up my bag to show him what I need to ship. I've forgotten the word encomendas, so I struggle to ask for what I need without knowing its name.
"I want to ship all this stuff in one box," I explain.
"Go to the post office, it's around the other side."
"I was just there. They told me to go somewhere else." What's the word? I think to myself. Amendoas? No, no, those are almonds.
"I don't know," he says. "Go back there."
Not quite ready to go crawling back there, I return to the storefront and muster up the courage to call out for help. It still takes me a minute or two before I'm loud enough to get anyone's attention, but eventually a young girl emerges. I have the same conversation with her as I did with the P.O. box clerk, but because she's not speaking to me through a slit, it somehow goes better. She's not any less confused about what I'm asking for, but she's helpful enough that she's willing to work through it. She walks me back to the post office and talks to the two-kilo evangelist while I stand back at a suitably sheepish distance. The lady says encomendas, the girl understands immediately, and we walk out again together.
As we pass the unattended storefront, I marvel again that the computer in there somehow manages not to be stolen. I also marvel that this girl is abandoning her job for several minutes just so she can guide some lost foreigner around town. My projected sense of professional duty and my continuing sheepishness both make me wish that she'd just give me better directions and leave me to find the place myself, but she seems intent on walking me all the way there.
We go towards the giant CVTelecom building across the street. Once we're alongside it, she points through the light-blue wrought-iron fence and I see a small sign that says "Encomendas" beside a ratty, non-descript side door. I feel even more sheepish when I realize that the postal clerk probably thinks I couldn't find this giant building, when in fact I knew perfectly well where it was and simply never had occasion before to take inventory of its contents. No part of it looks like a public entrance, and the whole thing is surrounded by that fence. The girl leaves me at the gate, where I walk past a guard to get inside.
But hey, this is how you ship packages in Mindelo.
The encomendas office is on the bottom floor of the CVTelecom building — it might even be considered the basement level, since the building is on a slope, but the office itself is wholly above ground. When I walk inside, I immediately feel better. The service counter is made of unpainted wood, and so are the desks in the narrow service area behind it. All the posters on the wall are at least 15 years old, and most of the equipment lying around looks older. The space is lit by sun streaming in through the windows. You can tell by the posture of the clerks that they're never very busy. There are no rigid high stools. Everyone leans against walls, or sits in low lime-green office chairs with worn-out padding and small tears in the seams.
The lady who comes to serve me is in her fifties, and though she is clearly Cape Verdian, she carries herself like a Brazilian. She is bigger, but not plump. She ambles slowly and wears only slightly too much makeup. She looks like she thoroughly enjoyed the privilege of raising every one of her children.
We start with the same niceties as in the post office and I go through the same ritual of laying out everything on the counter. While I do, she leaves to look for shipping boxes. Her and a male clerk come back a few minutes later with several boxes, all of which — they happily share with me — they swiped from CVTelecom's trash pile. We pick the largest one. The man expresses doubt that we can fit everything in there, but then he walks away and leaves us to it.
The lady grabs the brownie mixes and starts carefully packing the box. When I reveal the Tabasco bottle, I hear a familiar refrain.
"No, no, no, no, no."
"It's okay," I defer, "don't worry about it. Let's focus on the other stuff."
"You know, if this breaks, it'll make a real mess."
I'm about to repeat that we should ignore the Tabasco for the moment, but then it occurs to me that it won't be in my interest for everything else to fit nicely in the box while the Tabasco stands by the wayside. It needs to be included, and I need to defend its inclusion.
"I just got back from America," I tell her. "I had four of these glass bottles in my duffel bag, and you know how baggage handlers are. They pick up bags and launch them against the ground. These bottles had no special protection, but they all survived without a scratch. They're strong bottles. Are you sure I can't send it in a box if I protect it well?" I start repeating my sweater idea.
"No, probably not," she repeats, but clearly — miraculously — she's actually thinking about how to solve the problem. She retreats to the back of the office and returns a moment latter with some air-filled plastic packaging, which she wraps around and tapes to the bottle. I can hardly believe what I'm seeing. Then, huzzah!, she puts it in the box.
She proceeds to put everything else in the box, too. Everything. It's quite a delicate ballet. For a moment I'm certain that the box of chocolates aren't going to fit, which I'm almost happy about because it means I'd get to keep them for myself. But she takes out several items again, finds space for the chocolates below, and at the end of five minutes she is taping shut what is perhaps the densest cube of food that the Cape Verdian postal service has ever seen.
When her magic is done, she presents me with the address/customs forms, which I fill out in quadruplicate using carbon paper. She watches me until I'm about half-done, then walks off for a moment. Suddenly she comes back and admits a mistake: they actually need five copies.
No problem, I say. I finish up the quadruplicates and begin manually filling out a fifth copy. As I do, though, the lady walks away and sits down at the desk in the back of the service area. She opens up the top drawer, shuffles through it for a tic, and pulls out something I can't quite see. Looking up periodically from my papers to watch, I see her swivel her chair around to face a mirror near the window. The item from the drawer is then revealed: it's a small makeup brush. She lifts it to her face, focuses her gaze intently in the mirror, and begins shaping her eyebrows.
While I'm filling out address forms.
I have to stop for a second because I find it so difficult to write and, at the same time, refrain from bursting out in laughter. I try to imagine a postal clerk in the states dolling herself up while I write the address on a Priority Mail box, and it seems inconceivable, which only makes me happier to find myself in a place like Cape Verde where such outstandingly absurd things happen all the time.
We chat a little more as I write a note and stuff it under one of the taped flaps. I mention that I live in Fajã on São Nicolau (a different island), and we find out that she's the sister of one of my neighbors.
I write down her name. As she tightens some twine around the box, I promise to tell her sister that she says hello. I've missed lunch, but my package is on its way, and my love for Cape Verde is renewed.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Happy new year
I walked, and when I stopped I chose a place that I already seemed to know. When the wind blew, it sounded not like the hearty, deep thrush of Eastern oaks, spruces, and maples, nor quite like the sweeping rustle of grasses on an open plain. I was surrounded by the canopies of eucalyptuses (I was at the top of a hill, and their trunks reached up from its side), and their sound was freer, lighter, higher. As each drooping cluster of leaves crackled, the vibrations were cast out into open space and bounced off of hundreds of other clusters before reaching my ears. The shadows they cast, too, were full of gaps that shifted around in the wind, allowing the sun to pass through and warm parts of my skin, but then shading those spots again just before they started to burn.
I did know this place. I had grown up with forests like these. Even the smell was exactly the same. Of course, to realize the connection was to admit that no amount of pretty description could ever clarify whether I liked the place because of what it is, or because of what it made me remember. I believed it to be beautiful, I really did, and it saddened me not to be able to know that I was right.
I did know this place. I had grown up with forests like these. Even the smell was exactly the same. Of course, to realize the connection was to admit that no amount of pretty description could ever clarify whether I liked the place because of what it is, or because of what it made me remember. I believed it to be beautiful, I really did, and it saddened me not to be able to know that I was right.
Happy 2009
I sat down to watch the soccer game, but what I ended up watching was the soccer ball. I saw it in full relief, with every acceleration, every shift in angular momentum, every hard stop precisely articulated. No feet, no sweat, no passing. Just a black-and-white sphere thrashing about chaotically in its wakefulness.
I stood up silently when it was clear the game had ended, and with the players, I shuffled out through the main gate. Except I wasn't with them. I wasn't shaking hands or saying hello to anybody. We just happened to occupy the same space. I started to walk downhill, but then so did they, so the farce of togetherness trailed on a while longer. Nobody could tell. It was night. The only light was from the soccer field. As we walked away from it, we cast tall, gently bobbing shadows that criss-crossed each other on the pavement ahead of us. This, too, transfixed me. I recognized a friend behind me by his lanky amble — everything came in so clearly. I felt the way I do when I stare at somebody's reflection in a window because it's easier not to get caught eye-to-eye. It felt like cheating. But I liked this view better anyway; it seemed truer. Nobody can lie about their shadows.
I stood up silently when it was clear the game had ended, and with the players, I shuffled out through the main gate. Except I wasn't with them. I wasn't shaking hands or saying hello to anybody. We just happened to occupy the same space. I started to walk downhill, but then so did they, so the farce of togetherness trailed on a while longer. Nobody could tell. It was night. The only light was from the soccer field. As we walked away from it, we cast tall, gently bobbing shadows that criss-crossed each other on the pavement ahead of us. This, too, transfixed me. I recognized a friend behind me by his lanky amble — everything came in so clearly. I felt the way I do when I stare at somebody's reflection in a window because it's easier not to get caught eye-to-eye. It felt like cheating. But I liked this view better anyway; it seemed truer. Nobody can lie about their shadows.
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