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.