My husband and I and our son Zachary spent a brief time in Nicaragua in the summer of 1999, a few months after our other son, Christopher, visited. This report appeared in the anthology What Mennonites are Thinking 2000 (Good Books).
“In Casas Viejas” by Shirley Kurtz
With five of us and only four kitchen chairs for sitting up to the table, one of the rockers has to do. It’s okay, though—I can loll while munching on Jennifer’s beans and rice and salty, fried plantains, foods her Nicaraguan neighbors subsist on. Well, folks eat tortillas, too, and once in a while a bit of meat, here in this impoverished hinterland where our daughter and her husband are serving as relief workers with Mennonite Central Committee. Jennifer’s been trying valiantly to keep our bellies filled.
She and John insisted on us visiting. “You must come for a month,” she declared, so if she minds having her mom and dad and one of her brothers underfoot like this during the rainy season, she’s not letting on. The tile-floored adobe house, only one room and loft, is cozied with books and lamps, a cupboard big enough to hold all our clothes, and even a rug to put down in the evening after we’ve swept the floor and bolted the shutters to keep out the night bugs and started supper on the little gas stove. It’s too bad about the black plastic. Building the house, John roofed it with lovely half-moon clay tiles, but the night he and Jennifer moved in, it rained. Gritty dirt sifted down, and the water dripped and splashed—they had to set out bowls. That’s why there’s black plastic, now, lining the roof.
These nights, when it’s time to sleep, John and Jennifer climb to the loft. Paulson unties the rolled-up foam for our bed on the floor downstairs, and Zachary stretches out on the sofa. It’s not a real sofa; it’s just a narrow, thin mattress laid atop a wood frame. Afternoons, somebody might lie there to read or snooze. A colorful sheet fits over the mattress and it’s comfortable enough, for “missionary” life.
My sofa at home—well, that’s another story. Upholstered in rich-hued floral tapestry, it’s got deep tufts, plumpy pillows, and arms fat enough to sit on. The only suitable spot for it in the living room, the day the deliverymen came, turned out to be in front of a window, so I worried about the sun causing fading, but at least the sturdiness would allow for children’s romping. Also, the fabric’s glorious, raucous pattern would hide any debauching caused by people’s sweaty rumps. The sofa belonged, if you know what I’m saying. Our house is old-fashioned, with dark woodwork and big, creaky windows—not Victorian, but close enough.
I had to make a lot of trips, hunting for something I’d be happy with.
“We’ll be visiting the neighbors,” Jennifer has warned. “They’re all excited about you coming.” And one day John announces, “Doña Aurora’s invited us all over for nacatamales.” Indeed, one of Aurora’s pigs has been butchered specially for us, so after dark we make our way up the path to Aurora and Humberto’s.
In a gloomy corner of the kitchen, its dirt floor pocked and bumpy, a pot full of banana-leaf-wrapped bundles is bubbling over the fire. Zachary and I sit opposite John and Paulson on old benches to receive the piping hot, greasy treats Aurora proudly hands around. All the time, she’s jabbering away in Spanish. Jennifer translates, perched on the adobe ledge along the wall, beneath the glare of the single light bulb, and sometimes John helps out. Of course they must translate our comments, too; we can’t just be exclaiming “Rica” or “Gracias!” as we spoon out the cornmeal mush and tidbits of chopped pork and potatoes. Even these words we bungle.
It’s okay to eat the nacatamales; they’ve been boiled. We won’t get sick. On account of the awful diarrhea one of our first nights here, after a meal in a grimy cafe, we’re squeamish about anything uncooked.
The day Aurora comes over to our house for coffee, just Aurora by special invitation, she’s dressed up and excited. She plops into a rocker, not the one by the table, and Jennifer slides a regular chair up close for a place to put Aurora’s coffee mug and the little plate of cupcakes I made. We chatter and smile: Jennifer sitting primly, me down on the floor where I’ve a sewing project spread out, and Aurora like a queen in the rocker, savoring each sweet bite of cake.
I searched here, there, everywhere. Synthetic snaggy fabrics, ugh. Odd padded flaps on the sofas’ arms. Ugly boxy shapes, or too spare. Silly ruffles around the bottom, or a pleated skirt too rigid and formal. Nothing quite pleased me. I despaired.
Finally, at a store in Westernport, I spied the oversize flowers-and-tufts number.
It cost too much, though.
I brought home a picture to show Paulson, a bad photocopy—you couldn’t really see. “Even the feet!” I exclaimed. “Big round wooden balls for feet, no dumb skirt! Isn’t it horribly expensive? Can you imagine something so gorgeous?”
Paulson said the sofa probably wouldn’t fit through the door.
Doña Paula’s living room, the morning Jennifer and I trudge through a back field to visit her, holds stacked-up sacks (maybe beans), tall corn bins, and along the wall, a set of orange plastic seats that could’ve been salvaged from a restaurant or possibly an old bus. In the kitchen I’m provided a battered wood-slatted folding chair. Well, the same as at Aurora’s, “kitchen” doesn’t seem like the proper word. It smacks too much of glossy wiped counters and gleaming plug-in appliances and double chrome sinks with actual faucets and water coming out of them. Here in Paula’s “cooking room,” let’s call it, with the hard, bumpy earth kind of floor, two green parrots swing.
Paula shapes her tortillas one by one, pat-pat-pat, and cooks them on her fired-up adobe stove, and piles them inside a gourd. Beaming, she hands me a little cup of sweetened hot milk. “It’s okay,” Jennifer assures me, right out loud in English. “It was boiled.”
Another day over at Paula’s, they’re making cheese out of a kettleful of raw milk that’s been left to sit. I know it’s ridden with bacteria, because I watched Paula one wet morning out with the cows, kneeling in the manure mud to coax some squirts into a dirty plastic bucket. This is what she turns into cheese. Though I’m the guest, I don’t dare taste a bit of the freshly shaped ball, all the whey squeezed out and a little salt added. I’m still suffering the runs, off and on, just from being here, I guess.
“Not the side door,” said Paulson, wielding the yardstick, after he checked the sofa’s measurements listed on the paper. “Maybe the front door, if I’d remove the storm frame. But then the banister would be in the way, right inside—the banister and big bottom post.”
“What about the window?” I asked, meaning not the front porch one but the extra-large side window high off the ground, facing the garden. I figured the delivery people could drive their truck over the lawn and somehow hoist the sofa through, maybe on ropes. The window sashes would have to be removed first, and Paulson could crowbar the window frame loose. “No,” he declared, “absolutely not.”
When I telephoned to explain the problem, the store folks offered to bring over their loveseat that matched the sofa, from the set on display in the showroom, for a trial run. “If it fits through your front door and our deliveryman is pretty sure there won’t be trouble with the sofa, we’ll place your order with the furniture company,” the woman promised.
The loveseat squeezed through! Just!
Do you think I rested easy then, the next weeks, waiting for those deliverymen to return? Till they actually jimmied the hunky arms of my sofa’ past the doorjambs, wedged it over the banister post, and set it plop down on the floor? No. But at long last, whee! Euphoria! Maybe delirium. When Paulson got home from work he helped me heave it into place in front of the hearth.
Finally I could go buy carpet to match and properly arrange the chairs and lamps and tables and my leafy potted plants. The room wasn’t supposed to look tropical, just plush and inviting.
At Cristela’s, where the women are assembling to mix up batter to bake into cakes to sell for a few extra córdobas, I’m respectfully offered a dilapidated plastic mesh chair, its broken sections restrung with twine or maybe old shoelaces. For a little while I gamely hold Paula’s grandbaby Gustavo, but he’s only thinly diapered, no rubber pants, and when he suddenly leaks onto my skirt I gasp and hand him back to his mother Jeaneth. The others laugh. “To them it’s just water,” Jennifer says. Well, not to me!
There’s a sudden downpour of rain right when all the pans of cakes are ready to come out of the oven, a large adobe structure shaped like an upside-down bowl, built next to the house, and the woman relaying the cakes to safety under the house roof must hold umbrellas and splash through puddles.
I give up on cleanliness, going visiting, after this. What’s the use in setting out in a clean skirt? Anyway, my long, bold-patterned one with its gaudy colors doesn’t show the dirt. Now I just keep it balled up in a corner of the closet, unwashed, to retrieve for each new foray. I merely hold up the hem if Jennifer and I are tramping through mud up some trail or slogging across a creek. Angelina cheerily fixes us sweet rice with cinnamon, generous bowlfuls. We down the same thing at Silvia’s. In Angela’s smoky kitchen, I’m hospitably served more of that hot sugared milk (“It’s okay,” Jennifer insists, “it’s been heated!”) as four hungry piglets circle a plate of scraps on the floor and a hen and her chicks peck at some corn Angela has scattered atop the hard dirt. “We’ve got to get a picture of this,” I hiss, scrabbling for the camera I usually carry along on these visits, and Jennifer steps back to the doorway to get a clear shot: pigs and chickens, and me in Angela’s one wooden chair with its back broken off, hoisting my skirt up around my knees.
It’s in Maribel’s house, though, where I spy the kitten.
Maribel’s large, dirt-floor living room is bare except for the hammock strung up in the middle of the room and, along the wall, a bench. Jennifer sits there and Maribel carries in an old chair for me. She’s animated and talkative and pretty, combing and fluffing her bangs and spraying on underarm deodorant (or maybe it’s perfume—she squirts it right on her shirt) because we’re going next to her mother-in-law’s. I guess Maribel’s morning chores made her sweaty—we found her down in the stream scrubbing laundry, and after she finished we hiked along up to her house and helped drape the clothes atop the woodpile to dry.
As for Maribel’s cat, it’s the ordinary scrawny Nicaraguan variety, a little yellow thing. It pads across the room and, over in the corner, paws delicately, the way cats do, and then squats to do its business.
It’s been several years now. My affection hasn’t much diminished. It’s not that I still feast my eyes on my prize every time I pass through the living room. I just, well—I’m still invested. I’m a little bit scarred by something that happened one shivery night, when was it, last fall? Paulson had brought in one last load of stove wood before coming upstairs to bed.
Sometime in the wee hours, burrowed under the covers, I heard the yowling of a cat. We had two toms at the time, so I supposed they were fighting out under the moon. I got up to go to the bathroom, then, and when I reached the door to the hall an awful stench assailed my nostrils.
Descending the staircase warily in the dark, I heard more meowing. Suddenly, a cat leaped off the sofa. “Paulson,” I called, horrified. “Paulson!”
The animal must have sneaked through the kitchen door, past his leg, when he was carrying in the wood.
A nightmarish few hours ensued. The cat had sprayed its tom scent all through the downstairs. On hands and knees Paulson and I crept around sniffing carpets and furniture. We even found puddles on the kitchen floor and up on the table. We scrubbed and scrubbed, but at daylight the house still stank. I called a neighbor, who loaned me her bottle of Pine-Sol, and I poured it on straight, thoroughly dousing the soiled areas. So now the house really reeked. Exhausted and beside myself, I figured the ruin was total, permanent, forever.
Fortunately, I underestimated that Pine-Sol.
The other incredible thing, in case you wondered: the cat hadn’t sprayed my sofa.
Thank God, life resumed it normalcy—my treasures intact, my house brimming with comforts, my heart laden with the all-consuming cares of this world.
The women come one afternoon for a get-together on Jennifer and John’s porch, Jeaneth hauling along baby Gustavo. They clump together on benches and a chair or two I’ve dragged outside, but soon Jeaneth darts into the house and heads for the sofa. She’s asking me for something, speaking in gobbledygook. “A plastic bag,” Jennifer explains. “She wants one to spread under the baby, you know, in case.” Oh. Why, of course. I hurry off to find one.
I rip open the bag so it can be laid out flat, to protect more area. Carefully I tuck it under Gustavo kicking his legs and grinning widely, his eyes huge pools, dark liquid brown. So Jeaneth understands, whew. She realizes the rules are different here on account of the fancy furnishings, more than enough chairs to put around the table (if you count both rockers), even a rug. She has some respect.
The night we arrive at the farewell meal the women have planned, over at Doña Paula’s, with us due to leave in a couple of days, we peer around in astonishment. Scrounged tables have been pushed together and spread with cloths, and benches positioned round. Paula must have asked the others to bring any dishes they own, for many places are set, each cheap mismatched plate with utensil laid next, and the food already ladled out. Bottles of soda crowd the tables, and motley so-so-washed cups. Everybody’s gibbering happily.
“Drink the soda out of the bottle—don’t pour it in your cup,” we warn each other aloud, keeping bland looks on our faces, and “Better not eat the shredded cabbage.” But we pick the meat off the chicken bones and lick our fingers greedily and exclaim warmly, “Rica, rica! Gracias!” Angelina makes a speech, and then Doña Paula; they’re pleased we came to visit and proud as roosters. I feel bad about the cabbage—I mean, leaving it on our plates. But what else to do? Even if the food here is washed, the water is teeming with germs. Getting diarrhea again would be too awful. There’s too much at stake. But gracias, gracias! We can at least show our appreciation.
Back home again at Jennifer and John’s, the shutters bolted, lamps lit, and rug unrolled, Paulson fixes our bed and Zachary flops onto the mean little sofa. Ah, the sweet relief of these underpinnings—the ease.
Sweet relief, but still the worry. Too much at stake. Next it could be moths, or rust.
© by Good Books (www.GoodBooks.com). Used by permission. All rights reserved.
