1) Have you ever met any particular "character" in your life, someone unforgettable, who was able to affect your life strongly? Tell us your story.

I seldom travel, and when I do I feel the need to compensate by going “off the map” to parts of the world so far-flung and remote that their memory will be completely my own.  A middlebrow selfishness is woven into the notion that I don’t care to examine too closely.

 

In 1993 Tim and I were in a passenger railcar on South America’s only wood-burning train from Asuncion, Paraguay to Lake Aregua, a rustic weekend spot popular with overworked gobernistas.  Although only ten miles from the capital, the train was proceeding at an ox-cart clip - slow enough for a group of uniformed parochial students to apple-bean the local species of peccary, or wild pig, squarely between its milky eyes with regularity.  Each of the engine’s two railcars had its windows permanently welded open, and conversation went by shouts over the clang of the engine and, more unnervingly, the drone of cicada bugs that rose up from beneath our cane benches.  Fresh air was a blessing though, and no one complained.

 

Paraguay is Kansas: although surrounded by some of the most diverse populations in the world, the country lies smack in the geographic center of the continent and its people are as similar as can be, all displaying the same glowing skin, level brows and Shangri-La simplicity of manner.  It had taken me three days to realize that the looks of astonishment that followed me, the only black woman “in country”, and and lily-white Tim as we walked through the city were more of the space alien variety than proceeding from any kind of malevolence.

 

Into our web of outsiderness few wanted to venture, and on this day Tim and I had the last three rows of the railcar to ourselves.  The train had made one of those inexplicable stops in the middle of a forest clearing that marked all our travel in the region, and young boys appeared from nowhere lifting bags of cut fruit to our window.  Then we were off again, and ahead of us a man appeared at the sunlit doorway and came down the aisle, using what looked like an animal goad instead of the seat railings to steady himself.  He was black-haired and cadaverous, and it struck me how few really old people we’d seen on the trip so far.  The wiping out of his generation didn’t tally, date-wise, with my capsule understanding of Paraguay’s recent wars and coups.  I made a mental note to find out why.

 

Don Roberto took the bench in front of ours and positioned himself with his back to the wall facing us.

 

“May I kiss you?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said may I kiss you?”

 

The first of his queries was in Spanish, the second in lightly accented English - light enough to entirely belie the first impression Tim and I had of this humble campesino.  Considering my reception over the previous days, the proposition would have been less shocking if Don Roberto had directed it to Tim.

 

“You speak English,” I said, expert at the gentle letdown.

 

“Ah, pues…” and without preamble he launched into a two-hour story that, when done, would never leave me.  Even with its river-borne meanderings, its grounding shoals of digression and occasional backwaters of needless detail, it had the ring and sonority of a story perfected over years of repetition.  I can put myself back on that train and hear its metallic groans with perfect accuracy, but I remember Don Roberto as a whisper.

 

He was twenty-six when he and his friends left the snakefields of Paraguay’s outback Chaco region for Brazil, Mexico and the United States, where news of vast oilbeds had reached the world more or less simultaneously.  Wiped out by the long aftermath of civil war in what was arguably the world’s most ardently Catholic country, Paraguayans still held to the old belief that security - work, a trade - came before marriage, and forbade their daughters to run off alone or worse, unmarried with a man on the elusive prospect of work abroad.  The upshot was a male exodus and national turning inward that the country still feels the effects of.

 

Roberto was luckier than most.  At an airstrip in Goias Brazil he met a wildcatter who flew him back to Texas.  There he found work as a roughneck outside of Midland and married.

 

Lynn was his life.  She had grown up in Mississippi the granddaughter of a black sharecropper and a housemaid.  She taught Don Roberto English and schooled him in the unwritten Texas codes regarding Mexicans (falling as he did under that description), the rules for black women, and for Mexicans married to black women.  Social invisibility had its advantages: in the sixteen years he and Lynn lived together the white jefes never fired him or gave him trouble.  “And they saw her when she came for me.”

 

They’d had no children.  He lost a thumb on the rigs.  Once they’d vacationed in east Las Vegas and climbed a mountain to the snowline.  They both drank.  Life was an adventure with her.

 

What I remember most were his eyes as he told us.  Dry and unsentimental, they seemed always to be looking into us, measuring us for a fit.  Could we really understand the feeling, the buried scintillation he had known just living with her, walking home with her in the late-afternoon heat? 

 

And then just like that, our train pulled into Aregua station.  We gathered up our things and said a hasty and inadequate goodbye to Don Roberto.  We walked down a narrow flagstone path that was fragrant with wild jasmine and bordered by yurt-like terracotta cottages all the way down to the shore.  When we reached the water we heard the whistle of the train’s engine, more toy than locomotive.

 

We hadn’t asked Don Roberto what happened to Lynn, whether she came back with him.  We’d sat still like children at a storyteller’s feet, thrilled to be connecting, afraid to engage.   But Roberto had the air of a solitary and we thought things had probably ended sadly for him.  I said I wished I had let him kiss me.  Tim joked that he probably used the story every weekend to letch on visiting gueras.

 

We never forgot him.  When we returned to the States, Tim and I took an apartment in Cantonese Chinatown.  We worked the same graveyard shift and arrived home to the pre-dawn thrum of a hundred sewing machines.  We walked the Arroyo Seco every Sunday morning, past the golf course.

 

Diane Hicks