The Gringo: A Memoir (13 page)

CHAPTER
24

A
t the end of August, everyone in the FODI office was fired, along with nearly all the other workers in the municipality.

A month before I arrived in Zumbi, they’d had an election and the sitting mayor—a man named Raúl—lost. I’d hung out with Raúl a bit, most notably when we were on the same team in a game of pickup basketball and he was smoking a cigarette
while playing
.

The fact that he lost struck me as odd at first since he was in the same party as President Correa, who had enormous support in the area. I later found out that Raúl had participated in numerous extramarital affairs with municipal workers over his five-year term. During his race for reelection, the opposition—a young political novice with a law degree—based his entire campaign on painting Raúl as an adulterer and well-known wife beater (when I first got to town, I was confused by the graffiti on buildings that said “Enough with Raúl and the disrespect to women,” but it finally made sense when someone told me all this months afterward). The opposing candidate’s scathing refrain was that Raúl had been “running the municipality like a whorehouse.” Incredibly, despite all this, Raúl was nearly reelected. The difference-maker on Election Day came from the town of San Pablo, where the young candidate supposedly received four hundred votes from the hundred or so registered voters.

In any event, the new mayor came in and, per tradition, removed all municipal workers who didn’t support him in the election—even the janitors. So all the FODI women were gone and I was left with no one to “work” with.

When I was in Quito, waiting on my site change, Winkler talked to me about working with FODI and warned me that this might happen. “They’ll likely be replaced,” he said. At that point, the election had already taken place; I arrived in Zumbi in the interim while the old mayor still had a few more months left and the new mayor had yet to swear in.

“It’s just the way politics work here, unfortunately,” said Winkler. He suggested that in those first few months, I use FODI to make some contacts within the municipality for work I could do down the road.

Given that conversation, I was pretty confused the first time Winkler called and asked how things were going in the office. I told him I was looking for new projects to do because of the firings. His response: “What! They’ve been fired? Then who . . . I mean, what are you going to . . . I mean, who exactly are you going to be working with? This just isn’t good. It’s no good. We’ve got to find you someone to be working with. And fast!”

AT HOME, THINGS BETWEEN CONSUELA
and Graciela had fully deteriorated. Their screaming matches and dog abuse became more frequent and it was getting under my skin. But I couldn’t move out. When I changed sites, the clock got reset on my Peace Corps–mandated three-month stay with a host family. On top of that, it would likely be an even longer wait for me to find a new place since only program managers or their assistants could approve new housing. The program managers were obligated to visit our sites within those first three months, but between my site changing and Winkler stalling on taking the trip down to my part of the country, I was approaching eight months without a visit from a program manager.

During that time, the household had grown by one: Consuela’s sixteen-year-old goddaughter, Lucia. She came from San Eduardo, a tiny rural community about an hour and a half from Zumbi that I’d visited with FODI and seen more kids walking barefoot through piles of trash. Lucia had come to stay with Consuela and Graciela indefinitely while she finished her high school degree on Saturdays, meaning that six days a week, she moped around the house because Consuela and Graciela didn’t want her leaving without them.

One morning while I was eating alone in the kitchen, Lucia—who mumbled and spoke so poorly she sometimes said four sentences before I figured out what she was talking about—decided she trusted me. She leaned close to me and whispered, “How do you stand it here?”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“You know, with Graciela, Consuela, and the constant fighting,” she said. “Graciela—she’s so . . . mean.”

A few weeks after she arrived, Lucia came to me as soon as Graciela and Consuela had left the house. She told me she couldn’t take the yelling and the fighting anymore and was “running away”—presumably, back to San Eduardo where the rest of her family was from. I asked her why she didn’t just tell Graciela or Consuela that she wanted to go back home, and she said they wouldn’t let her. So she left a note on Graciela’s bed that said she couldn’t stand the way they treated her and was leaving. Consuela came home first and found the note and went ballistic. Graciela was indifferent.

The very next day, Lucia came back. Apparently, she was done running away.

Graciela had been growing increasingly bitter since about a month after I’d moved in. In that first month, because everything seemed normal, and the house—remodeled with money her kids earned in Spain—was as nice a place as I would ever find in Zumbi, I signed a rental contract with Graciela that would last through April 2011, till the end of my service. Graciela read the contract, signed it, and welcomed me into their home. She asked me what I liked to eat, and I said, don’t worry, I’ll cook for myself. She asked me how I’d clean my clothes, and I told her I could wash them. I’d already done the host-family scenario twice in Ecuador, so I felt more comfortable as a sort of tenant than as a gringo quasi-family member once again.

Aside from the little water and electricity I used, it was almost like they didn’t have another person living with them. My room was detached from theirs, so they didn’t see me if they didn’t want to. I didn’t have visitors because I had no friends. I wasn’t noisy and even if I were, they couldn’t have heard it downstairs and across a patio. When I was done eating, I washed and put away my dishes, and when they used the kitchen, I stayed out of their way and came back later.

But somewhere in there—perhaps because I didn’t go to church with Graciela every Sunday or because I’d said no thank you to her cooking—she hated my guts.

After making my breakfast one morning and leaving the kitchen cleaner than I found it, Graciela ambushed me.

“I’m trying to get new people to come and live in your room,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. “I thought I’d be able to stay until the date we agreed on in the contract.”

She ignored the whole “contract” business and said that these new people were going to pay her $60 a month—three times more than the $20 I was paying, per the agreement Winkler made with Graciela when he came down to approve the site.

“Okay,” I said, “does that mean that if I pay $60 I can stay?” Admittedly, $20 was a lowball price considering volunteers with “rural” sites like mine were allotted up to $70 a month. Whether I paid $20 or $70 made no difference to me because it was deposited into my bank account separate from my normal monthly living allowance.

“Maybe,” said Graciela. She wrinkled her forehead, and the fake eyebrows she painted on every day arched up comically into two points.

I was pretty sure the prospective renters she mentioned didn’t exist, but I couldn’t call her bluff and risk being homeless in Zumbi until Winkler decided I was important enough to visit. Graciela knew this, meaning a little old Ecuadorian grandmother was successfully extorting $50 out of me for the next couple of months.

After a few days of haggling back and forth, Graciela agreed to let me sign a new contract with her that would raise the rent to $70 (I kicked in ten more dollars than she asked for because it made no difference to me and so she’d shut up about any new bidding wars with imaginary renters). But when I sat down to sign the new contract with her, she changed her mind. Now she wanted $100 a month. I reminded her that I was literally not allowed to pay more than $70, and it was a decision that was out of my hands.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “How about $80?”

“Seriously?” I said. “I just told you that I can’t pay more than—”

“Here’s the thing. If you’re not going to pay what that room’s really worth, you can’t live in it anymore.” Mysteriously she was no longer mentioning the alleged seekers willing to pay $60.

“All right, but my boss from Quito won’t be visiting me until November. He can approve a new place and the soonest I could move out would be the beginning of December.”

Mumbling obscenities under her breath, she agreed and signed the contract. (After I moved out at the end November, no one else ever moved into that room, meaning that by trying to shake me down for the $100 I didn’t have, she lost out on $1,330 over the next year and a half.)

From then on, it was war.

I had a place to live until December, but the final three months there were a hellish ordeal full of other extortion attempts. In Graciela’s boldest move, she tried blaming me for their rising utilities bill. It had risen from something like eight to twelve dollars a month. The only problem with her hypothesis was that during the month in question, I was out of town for about ten days. Meanwhile, two of her other grandchildren (Consuela’s teenaged kids) were in town, one of whom watched TV for no less than eighteen hours a day and frequently left the refrigerator door open. But since I lived in “two rooms” according to Graciela (actually it was just one big one), she screamed and blamed me for the inflated bill.

When she wasn’t extorting me, she was tearing my wet laundry down from the clothesline and piling it on the ground or telling me I kept the light on in my room too late or sneaking up on me while I was in the kitchen and telling me I was making toast wrong.

BESIDES CONSUELA, GRACIELA HAD ANOTHER
daughter living at the house whose name I never learned. She was mentally handicapped. Graciela restricted her to the confines of their property in the same way—and I truly wince at making this analogy, but it happens to be spot-on—they did with that ogre-looking guy in the movie
The Goonies
. The daughter never said a word to me, or even looked at me, but spent her days wandering around in their yard collecting rocks and muttering violently to herself. I always said hello to her, but she never acknowledged me.

The one time I witnessed this daughter make a move beyond the property and out to the sidewalk, Consuela and Graciela lurched after her yelling, “You don’t want us to have to call the police if you wander off, do you? Then we’d have to bring you back and lock you up.”

The days and weeks passed and I became somewhat immune to the daily fighting between Graciela and Consuela and the fact that they were both becoming unhinged. They fought about money. They fought about who should discipline Consuela’s brat teenagers for not helping around the house. And they fought about the fact that Consuela used Graciela for free babysitting while she went out and partied. (She partied a lot, with lots of men, and the whole town talked about it.) Graciela was upset about the partying in particular; she thought it was no way for a woman in her midthirties—with three kids by three different men, all out of wedlock—to be acting.

While Graciela dealt with me somewhere in between the way she treated her dogs and her handicapped daughter, Consuela was always really nice to me—perhaps even too nice.

Sometime in those first couple of months, I learned that Consuela had a gringo fetish. Before running for city council, she had worked with another Peace Corps volunteer in my province. When the volunteer took her to a meeting in Quito, Consuela got drunk and slept with another young volunteer.

None of this surprised me, but it explained why Winkler came back from his site inspection in Zumbi and told me that the family was eager to have a gringo in the house. He described Consuela as especially “delighted.”

Now she would traipse by my bedroom at night wearing nothing but a bath towel, revealing a figure that three births had not been kind to. She’d smile seductively, exposing some missing bicuspids, and ask why I never invited her up to my room.

I smiled and said I liked my privacy.

CHAPTER
25

A
nd then something happened. It was at the time when there was no work for me and Graciela was giving me the stink eye.

During those hot days, I began experiencing a certain pain. It originated in my testicles and ripped through my torso and down my thighs like a lightning bolt. It also shot out from my prostate, reaching deep inside me and clenching every organ and tissue and vessel.

It was true pain.

I felt the first jolt while sitting at a computer in the municipal building and immediately became light-headed and confused. Continuing every hour, then every half hour, the pain pierced and throbbed and ebbed in and out. It came on in surges like a cattle prod had been injected into my veins. When the lightning bolts blasted out from my testicles and prostate (I began calling this my “man plumbing”), I got so nauseated I had to lie down.

After three days of this pain, I put my pride on the back burner and called the Peace Corps doctor in Quito. He asked me all sorts of questions that included words like “shape,” “size,” “tenderness,” and, finally, “discharge.” He quickly ruled out the clap because that requires sex, which I wasn’t having. (However, this didn’t stop people in town from consistently floating rumors that every new baby in town belonged to me. Explaining that I’d been in town just a few months, not nine, did little to convince them otherwise. It got to the point that I was beginning to think that they believed I had some sort of gringo superpower that enabled me to impregnate woman by merely looking at them.)

The doctor told me I had to travel to a nearby town the following day to give a urine sample. That night the air was cool and the town was silent. Too dizzy to read, I lay in bed sweating, my balls throbbing, waiting for the morning to come.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, I TRAVELED
twenty minutes by bus to Yantzaza for the urine test. It was strange for two reasons. First, I didn’t get to pee into a cup. Instead, I needed pinpoint accuracy to fill a tiny test tube about 1.5 cm in diameter. After I filled it, I had to wash my hands.

Second, the lab technician—a smiling woman in her thirties—had a swastika tattooed on her inner wrist.

This wasn’t my first swastika encounter in Ecuador. I’d spotted them carved into chairs, written on the backs of bus seats, and graffitied in alleyways. When I asked people if they knew what the symbol meant, they had no clue, which I guess is slightly less dangerous than knowing and still using it anyway. I attributed the swastika ignorance to the fact that no one around there read books, let alone twentieth-century world-history texts. If most people there couldn’t name their previous president, it would be unfair, perhaps, to expect them to know who the Axis was in World War II. Nonetheless, I would have at least Googled the thing before I permanently dyed my skin with it. I decided that the lab technician likely wasn’t a Third Reich enthusiast, but if she were, it might explain why—ha, ha—there were no books around.

The lab results said the following: Somewhere deep in my man plumbing was some sort of micro bacteria wreaking havoc. I called the Peace Corps doctor with the results, and he said I should go into the free public health clinic in Zumbi and get a physical exam. The next several days included many calls back and forth between the doctors at my site, me, and the doctor in Quito. Because of Peace Corps policies, I couldn’t see a doctor at site, or anywhere, without permission from the Peace Corps.

All the doctor visits were stressful. I mostly waited around in pain and brushed up on my Spanish medical vocabulary. When it came to dealing with Ecuadorian doctors and my man plumbing, I didn’t want anything lost in translation. On the phone with a friend of mine, I said, “Man, I can’t believe this dictionary doesn’t have the Spanish translation for ‘vas deferens.’”

The first local doctor I saw was a beautiful Ecuadorian woman about my age. My conversation with her was brief because she said I had to come back after the weekend and see a specialist who wouldn’t be in until Monday. She sent me on my way with some ibuprofen and instructed me to take 1,200 milligrams a day for relief.

It didn’t help. Over the weekend, I writhed in pain and boredom. The only times I left my bedroom were to briefly go downstairs to the kitchen and bring some food back to my room, where I lay in bed sweating and moaning. On Sunday, I lay there late into the day until I heard violent noises down on the patio. I rolled out of bed and hobbled to the window to find Jack and Benji snarling in an intense dogfight. Jack was about to rip Benji’s head off. Blood was spurting from Benji and covering Jack’s muzzle.

Just then Graciela stormed out of the kitchen wielding a broomstick. She began beating Jack so hard that the broomstick snapped in half. She picked up the broken end and kept beating him with it. When the fight finally broke up, she dragged Jack over to his usual post and tied him up, then beat him some more and started filling the washbasin with water. It looked like she might be getting ready to drown Jack to death. I’d seen some grisly mammalian slaughters in my half year there, but I never imagined I’d see an old lady finish off a snarling dog with her bare hands.

Instead, she threw buckets of water at Jack and began beating him again. Later, I suggested to Consuela—for about the tenth time—that they should just train Jack to be a little nicer. She just laughed, as usual, and said, “No, he’s just bad,” which, ironically, is the same thing she’d told me earlier about her five-year-old son who’d had problems acting out.

ON MONDAY THE SPECIALIST GAVE
me a checkup with what might have been the only pair of latex gloves in the building. Before the exam, he left the room to look for them and returned minutes later wiggling his fingers in the air in triumph. The doctors here, I decided, weren’t all that bad. It was just the facilities that made you want to shower immediately.

The specialist prescribed some antibiotics in pill form as well as more ibuprofen and a heavy medicine that would be injected. Also, he said, I needed to go to Loja for a more thorough exam.

“What kind of exam will it be?” I said.

“An ultrasound.”

“Excuse me?”

“An ultrasound,” he said. “Like they do on pregnant women—”

“Ah, yes, I know what it is—”

“—except on your testicles.”

He stood up and told me there was one last thing I could do to ease the pain. He said I should fill a bowl with hot water and soak my testicles in it—yes, just like a teabag. In an up and down motion, flexing his knees, he stood in front of me and demonstrated exactly how I could go about dipping my testicles in the bowl.

I let this sink in, then got on the phone to run it all by the Peace Corps doctor.

“Ummm, yeah, Grigs, this is all good. Take the antibiotics for ten days. You can buy it at a local pharmacy,” said the Peace Corps doctor.

“Okay. And this one that’s supposed to be injected? What’s that all about?” I said.

“Oh, right. To buy that one, go to the next town over—for political purposes.”

“
Political purposes
?” I said.

“Right, well, it’s like this: Even though you don’t have an STD, that medicine is sometimes also used for patients who do. Therefore . . . just so you don’t have any gossip swirling around your town, go and buy that medicine somewhere else.”

“Oh,” I said. “Good idea.”

Before going in for the shot, I went back to my house to rest. Not only was I sapped of energy, but I also had to mentally psyche myself up for what was looking like a large injection.

While taking my temperature (I was also battling a terrible fever), I dropped my thermometer on the floor, emitting a mercury spill upon impact. This sent me into a small panic until I realized I was already getting a healthy dose of mercury in the tuna I bought there, which probably wasn’t dolphin safe in the first place. I cleaned up the Hg the best I could and returned to the doctor’s office.

When I arrived, word had already spread that the gringo was going to receive a shot. As three doctors and several nurses crowded into a room, I lay on a cot, pale-faced and drenched in sweat. There was no translation in my dictionary for “vasovagal.”

Into the room came the beautiful young doctor from the week before.

“You don’t look too good,” she said, smiling.

“I don’t do well with injections,” I said.

A few of the nurses turned around; they all asked what I was talking about.

“You know,” I said. “I get dizzy when I receive injections. I lose color in my face.” (This last sentence almost certainly didn’t translate the way that I’d hoped.)

“That’s weird.”

“You’ve never seen anybody who didn’t do well with injections?” I said.

“Tons of ladies come in here from the
campo
and they’re just fine,” they all said.

“Well,” I said, “this is something that happens with gringos.”

“Aha,” they all said, nodding to one another like they’d finally gotten to the bottom of this mystery.

The young doctor leaned over to my left arm to administer the shot.

Before she pricked me, I said, “You guys use brand-new needles, right? Totally clean and everything?” By now even my limbs had lost all color and I could barely keep my eyes open. My heart was pounding in my ears and I felt like I was going to faint.

“Oh yes,” they all said. The doctor showed me the package that had contained the needle.

After a few minutes of the hot doctor slowly injecting me, she uttered that she’d “lost the vein” because I was “too nervous.” She said maybe someone else should do it.

Another nurse took over and the medicine was finally injected. Some color returned to my arms and hands. I got a free Band-Aid. I staggered out and went home. For the next couple of days, I continued to live in seclusion in my bedroom, only telling people that I “wasn’t feeling great.”

I SPENT THE REST OF
that week not working—or even leaving the house—and secretly bringing pots of stove-heated water from the kitchen outside and up to my room for the scrotum soakings. Graciela spotted me carrying the water once or twice and looked at me suspiciously, but never asked for details.

Three days later, I went to Loja for the nut ultrasound. With the lightning bolts of pain still striking out from my testicles and prostate, it was one of the longest three-hour bus rides of my life.

This time, as I lay on an exam table with my shorts pulled down below my thighs, I actually began laughing. Even as the pain continued with me lying there, I laughed maniacally at what I’d gone through. The doctor covered my scrotum with the same clear gel that normally gets smeared onto pregnant bellies. I held a towel in place to keep my penis out of the way of the ultrasound wand.

The first thing the doctor did on the computer was derive all my testicles’ statistics, including mass, density, circumference, diameter, and volume. During the course of the ultrasound, the doctor took several sonogram portraits of my testicular topography. A few of them looked like black-and-white Doppler shots you might see on the Weather Channel—a Category Four storm brewing somewhere between Bermuda and Nassau. After the exam, he printed out the results—the images and nut stats—on a giant sheet of x-ray paper. I’m not much of a collector, but I quickly decided it was by far my best travel souvenir.