Before long, my Dad got us a real house to live in and we moved out of La Paz and into Calle José Contreras No. 4. This was a big cinderblock house, light green with white trim, with a small front yard and a big back yard and a cinder block wall around the property. One time it rained so hard my Dad had to knock a hole in the wall with a sledge hammer or we would’ve been flooded. There was a hibiscus hedge inside the front wall and that was neat because you could pull out the hibiscus stamens and suck on them and they were sweet as candy. We had a mango tree and a lemon tree, I think, in the front yard and in the back there was a banana tree and a papaya tree. In those days we all got mahogany brown and ate lots of fresh fruit, just like the tropical natives we were fast becoming. But the tree I liked the most was the big tamarindo in the side yard. It was big and old enough to climb in and I was soon up in there pulling tamarindos (tamarisks) off the branches, peeling off the tough, brown skins and sucking out the brown seeds inside with their sweet, sticky coating. There was also a lemoncillo tree. Lemoncillos are round with thin, green shells you can crack open with your fingers and inside there’s a round ball covered with pale greenish-yellow hairs that are also real sweet. Green or brown, you just pop ‘em in your mouth, suck ‘em dry and spit out the seed. Candy on a tree. Pretty amazing. Inside, the house was cool and spacious with a foyer large enough for table and chairs, living room, dining room and, in the back, a kitchen and a laundry room with a hallway down the middle to the back door. Upstairs, there were two bedrooms in the front, one for my parents and one for my little sister, a bedroom in the back for my big sister, a huge bathroom and a very interesting room in the middle, like a long hall, that had a map of the world painted in Mercator projection on one long wall. My Dad explained to me a little bit about the projection so that I understood that Greenland wasn’t really bigger than Africa. The map was very well done with each country and its capitol named. There was only one mistake we could find and that was Venezuela was misspelled Venezeula. This room was to be my bedroom and also my Dad’s “ham shack”. This is where I fell asleep to Morse code and HI8BE broadcasting by short wave radio around the world. For some reason they like their bathrooms big in the tropics. Maybe they don’t get all hot and steamy that way. Don’t you just hate it when you sweat like crazy as soon as you step out of a hot shower. What’s with that, anyway? This bathroom had all the regular fixtures around the walls, plus one: a bidet. If you don’t know what that is, I can’t tell you. At this point I’m not even eleven yet. Anyway, as far as I know, my Mom just floated flowers in it and sometimes washed her feet. The middle of this large, green-tiled room was empty. My parents tried to think of something to do with all that space, but I guess they couldn’t think of anything. My Dad built a partition around the toilet so more than one person could use the room at the same time. Otherwise, it would have been a waste of space. The other thing about living down there in C.T. is we not only had a big house, but we had servants. We had Ana, the cook, who lived in her own cinderblock room built into the back wall, a maid, who came by every day or so and Jim, who came by once a week and did the gardening and shined everybody’s shoes. With Dad a Major in the Air Force, we were a straight middle-class family back in the States. But down here we’d moved up a few rungs. I got to know Ana pretty well. She sorta looked out for me. Her name was Ana Redman and she spoke English like a southern black American, as well as Spanish. She might have come originally from Louisiana. When I came home from school, I’d always go back in the kitchen and have a bowl of cereal while Ana had rice and red beans. She always had her own pot on the back burner. One day, not long after we’d moved in to our new home, I was walking around, exploring my new neighborhood, when a group of young Dominican boys started following me and calling out to me in Spanish. They were saying something like, “Watti trompi! Watti trompi!” and I knew it didn’t mean, “Hi! How ya doin’?” I managed to get back home without having to run for it and I went right back to the kitchen and asked Ana what “Watti trompi” meant. She wrinkled her brow and she crinkled her nose and she scratched her head and she said she didn’t know. Then she thought a little bit more about it and she got it. “Trompar” is the verb to fight and “watti” was just them trying to say, “want to?" in English. “Want to fight?” I pretty much knew that was what they were saying, but it was nice to have it explained to me. Ana was good for that.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 18:58:53 +0000
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