IT AIN’T ALL GRAND
La Guardia, Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, Monday, January 08, 2007

The Christmas/New Years/Epiphany season has come to end. After nearly a month the streets this morning are full of children, scrubbed and turned out in their blue or khaki uniforms, on the way to one of the schools scattered around the town. The weeklong barrage of fireworks was still going on last night. But there are no longer as many rockets going off and there are increasingly longer periods between explosions. Things may be getting back to normal. As on person said here, we need a break between Epiphany (Three Kings) and Carnival at mid-February.

With my brother and my cousin visiting with their wives we have been undertaking little tours around the island: la Restinga (a boat trip through the mangroves to the west of us here in La Guardia; a tour of the Museo del Mar, the small but comprehensive marine museum at Boca del Rio; a trip up into the eastern hills that included the island’s capital, Asunción; the pilgrimage town of La Valle de Espiritu Santu; lunch at a mountain restaurant with a view down to Porlamar; a jaunt to “Pueblos de Margarita”, an open-air historical museum depicting many aspects of earlier life on the island. Since my cousin and his wife are leaving at mid-week, we shall also attempt to see Juangriego, visit a couple of beaches and one or two other spots of interest. Nearly every day when the sun has dropped a bit from its zenith, we troop down to our local beach like dicks for a late afternoon swim before coming back for drinks and an evening meal.

Since I have my laptop back again, my daily walks over to the cyber-cafe have declined. I find I am getting less exercise and am perhaps becoming less “visible” in the village. Our strategy since arriving here as the new “gringos” in town has been to make ourselves as well-known and visible as possible and to introduce ourselves to the local people. Since the house we live in is one of those Latin-American, middle-class, walled-in mini-fortresses designed to keep threats to person and property out but which in fact also tends to keep one isolated, we made a compensating effort to get out, to shop locally and to greet all and sundry as we went along. This also gives us some contact in the village. Our logic is that, quite aside form the chance to meet people, from a security point-of-view we are less likely to be thought of as “them”, and perhaps people will also help keep an eye on the house and on us.

This has definitely paid off. Kitty-corner from us lives Seńora P. and Seńor S. S. looks after the housekeeping aspects of Jens’ posada (B&B) where I am also helping out while Jens is in Europe. P&S are delightful people and they have quite a number of family visitors at present from their native Columbia. Since life in most houses here in La Guardia is conducted basically in the open air, and since their house opens towards ours, they see a lot of things from the outside that we cannot see from behind the walls. When the car would not start the other day, for example, S. and his friends were over in a flash: Miguel, a visiting friend and an auto mechanic, and A., their son from Columbia who is a truck driver, played around with the carburettor until everything was running smoothly again.

S. and family have also been trying to educate me about being aware and alert. The passive security of our mini-fortress is quite good. The actual living quarters can be closed off at night or in our absence using iron gates and, in best Latin-American fashion, all the windows are secured with sets of bars. The patio, too, is surrounded with twelve-foot concrete walls topped by spikes (thank goodness not that offensive-looking broken-bottle motif one sees so often). So, passively, I guess, we are well off.

In terms of security procedures, however, we are perhaps not so careful. True, since our front door gives access straight into the house rather than into a forecourt, we keep it locked at all times even when we are at home. At night when we retire we also lock the iron-grate gate giving on to the patio. I try to remember not to carry much money with me when I go out and not to have much in the house either. S. saw me once at the Chinese grocery store across the street when, by chance, I had a couple of hundred-thousand Bolivars in my pocket for a later shopping expedition to SIGO. I innocently pulled out the whole wad and peeled off a small bill to pay for my purchase. “Don’t do that,” S. came over to the house to warn me, constantly swivelling his head around the while like in a prison movie. “Always have just the proper change ready.” H was making graphic demonstrations of people putting a knife to my throat. I have been more careful since then.

My strategy of keeping contact with the neighbourhood, however, is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, P. and S. and their large family keep an eye on us and the house. Visitors who are trying to find us are directed by neighbours and shopkeepers in a friendly manner to the house; we are the only gringos around so it’s not too difficult. The house is occupied day and night, i.e. it is not one of those abandoned or unoccupied beach houses, which are now closed up and barred following the end of the Christmas holidays. Lights are on inside every night and we now have external lighting both in the dirt alleyway next to the house and at the front. The patio is also lit all night.

But, several times now we have been the object of the attention of …… well, somebody. When we had the Swedish kids staying with us, we had Peeping Toms on two consecutive nights. They pulled themselves up on the iron grate around the air conditioner outside and were peering through the tiny window high up in one of the bedrooms. They could never have been able to climb through there because the windows are just three-inch little glass circles. To spoil the view I subsequently painted over the windows with some thinned white paint whilst still letting in light.

In another instance, S. pointed out to me that someone had set up a makeshift step-up made of a plastic beer crate and a tree branch to allow themselves onto the roof. It was still there in the daylight. Strangely, it was on the side towards the main street.

Then, last night, Sunday, while we are all sitting out in the patio after dinner around 2000, enjoying conversation and the night breezes, the cellphone rings. It is a neighbour telling me sotto voce in Spanish that there are some hombres on our techo and that she has called the policia. All this takes a while to get across since I do not know what the Spanish word “techo” means (roof). When I finally figure it out, I go outside to have a look. YYY, her son, a robust guy in early middle age, is sitting nonchalantly on the wall in front of the Chinese shop and watching the house. I walk over to talk to him. It appears the hombres have already climbed down. A few minutes later, two young bucks, I should guess to be around 16 to 20 years of age, come strutting casually up from the direction of the beach past the corner where we were sitting. “That’s two of them. Don’t look at them directly”, he warns. “San muy malo!”

The policia show up – thirty minutes later (the police station is about 300 yards away so they were either busy elsewhere or drove here via Polamar!) Three young constables arrive in a Land Rover but my Spanish is strained. I go with them to my neighbour to let her explain. But, when she arrives at the door (perhaps she has been woken from sleep), she seems fearful of even being seen talking to the police. They don’t press her so I do not know what she said. After telling me to call 171 on the cellphone if there is any more trouble, the policemen eventually leave. (The next morning a young policewomen in mufti also comes by as a sort of follow up. I make sure she shows me her police ID. Maybe I am getting smarter.)

In all this I think I may have reacted almost completely in the wrong way. First, perhaps I should not have left the house at all but waited for the police to arrive and possibly nab the culprits in flagrante. By going out I probably tip our hand and scare them off. On the other hand, they probably heard me talking with my neighbour on the phone and perhaps figured it out themselves. Anyway they are already off the roof and down when I go out. Then, considering my neighbour’s later reaction when talking to the police –she seemed actually frightened-, I may have compromised her and her family. Maybe they are afraid of reprisals by the punks and the cops will not be able to protect them. They have to live in this neighbourhood, after all. On the other hand, when I think of it, so do I!

It makes me somewhat nervous to think that up to four guys are up on our roof early in the evening when there are still lots of people around and we are sitting quietly outside on the patio. If they were just dumb kids trying to have a peep, that is bad enough. But, if they had more serious things in mind, - an armed robbery, perhaps while the house and we are vulnerable – we would have been wide open. Pretty damned cheeky when you think of it. I am also not sure that they can be kept off the roof altogether without stepping up the passive security measures to include barrier electrical wires around the roof. These are really ugly and tend of course to increase the fortress-isolation aspects of the place. Of course, more lighting around and over the house, possibly with movement sensors and alarm lights and bells, might help. Given the Peeping Toms and one or two other signs, somebody maybe keeping an eye on us as targets and that is even more worrisome.

Friday, 12 January 2007

A day or so later our little incident has been nearly forgotten though perhaps I am a little more alert and aware. I drop my cousin John and his wife Margie off at the airport on Wednesday noon and we are now down to three of us in the house.

It was so great to have them. John and I are the same age and were great friends when we were children. But, of course, our lives go separate ways, we have a lot of work and family claims on our time as the years go by not to mention that he and I have lived on separate continents for nearly all of our adult lives. Now we have more time and can sit and chat. We easily solved several major world problems while we were together; what’s the big deal?. Of course, nobody is interested in the opinions of old farts like us so the world will have to suffer along on its own.

The weather has turned a little muggy and windless and we have started getting night-time showers again. This is the “rainy season” though it is not much to brag about. Last night it rained off and on hard during the night and gave our new patio drains a real workout. They functioned perfectly and cleared the water away as fast as it could come down. But the workers will have to come back and patch a leak in the tile roof over the “library” and add something to stop water rising through a water stanchion in the dining room. These are both fixable problems.

I need now to get my articles finished and get farther along with the other writing projects I have started. Maybe I shall get my Christmas Letter 2006 finished. Christmas Letters are useful for keeping up with widely-dispersed family and friends. But they are difficult to write if you want them to be interesting: you have to give the newsy bits about family, relate one’s activities over the past year while avoiding sounding like a, well, a Christmas Letter. You know, things like, “Little Johnny is rising to his educational challenges and big things are expected of him in the coming school year.” This is Christmas-Letter-Greek to report that Johnny was booted out of high school as a discipline problem, was on parole and has only been admitted back after pleadings from his parents and threats by the school administration that he will be incarcerated if he disturbs the peace again. “Cousin Jill is settling in to life as a single,” means Jill broke up with her boyfriend who caught her sleeping with her brother-in-law while her hubby was out at work. But you cannot actually say these things! If I had actually got around to writing one, there might have been times in the past when my Christmas Letter would have sounded like Peyton Place. At least it would have been interesting reading. Maybe I could invent a fictitious family and write about them. No more school teachers, bank employees and company executives. Actually, I could create a figure out of my older brother who has become a colourful, tobacco-chewing, Gulf-Coast fishing-guide type. A few loose women would be needed to make it really fictional. So few of them around and so much time!

Maybe I could add a few off-colour jokes. A man, for example, comes in for his regular therapy session. He is naked except that he is completely swaddled in Saran Wrap. The psychiatrist studies him for a moment and says, “I can clearly see you’re nuts!”