SOUNDS OF LA GUARDIA
La Guardia, Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, April 14, 2007

A hot, windless and sleepy Saturday afternoon. Sitting and snoozing inside our walled patio, I can hear the sounds of the village around us. I am now able easily to differentiate the newer cars, mostly silent, from the big old 1980s models, rumbling and often noisy because their mufflers are gone. The old stake trucks when they go by are deafening.

On weekends there are more hawkers driving around the village streets. They each have a particular call. The plantano seller (i.e. cooking bananas) has a tinny-sounding bullhorn and you can hear him wending his way towards you calling, “Plantenos, Plantenos, Plantenos, Amarillos” really quickly and over and over again. Sometimes he will carry on a little conversation with people on the street using his microphone so everybody gets to hear what he has to say. His wife and one or two children are on the back of the truck. They are a very poor, darkly tanned and somewhat rough lot to look at but are always friendly.

At some point a truck goes through the length of the village blowing its horn. It’s the propane lorry. If you need propane that is your signal to put you tank out on the pavement. He will make a sweep back to exchange a full one for your empty. A 20-pound tank costs about Bs. 4,000 (about a U.S. dollar). If you didn’t hear the truck horn on the first pass, you’ll soon hear the crashing metallic clanking of empty tanks being thrown up onto the metal bed of the truck. Still time to rush out for a refill. Another truck goes through calling out something that turns out to be “Aluminio! Aluminio! Aluminio!” They’re collecting aluminium cans.

Since Easter there has been a regular chink-chink sound coming from the church square. When I check it out I find stone masons using hand chisels and hammers to widen cracks that have appeared in the walls of the one-story parish church. One of the men tells me that, although the paint is still in good condition, the sun and the salt air have opened up cracks in the plaster that are now being filled. Later the church will be repainted. Churches everywhere in Venezuela look in very good shape. They always have a fresh coat of paint. I know that the Catholic hierarchy was initially very opposed to Chávez. With the changing of the guard in Venezuela including the leading bishops, however, and perhaps rather more diplomacy on the part of the Chávez government, the church is looking more kindly on Socialism for the 21st Century. I have seen renovation works over at Valle de Espiritu Santa, the island’s pilgrimage church in the hills, that is being paid for by the provincial government.

Then you hear the chicha sellers. One of them has a rather new four-wheel beach-buggy that he rides while towing his chicha trolley. Chicha is a sweet rice and milk-based drink (rice, milk, sugar and vanilla) that in my humble opinion tastes disgustingly sweet. The whole time he is driving around town, the first chichi man toots his rubber-ball horn like Clarabell on The Howdy Doody Show. The second seller, on the other hand, has a recording of some European children’s song. The tape, however, is really worn out and the sound system is very bad. On weekdays you always hear the chicha men around noon when the junior school down the street is letting out. They station themselves outside hoping that mothers picking up their kiddies will give them a treat. A lot of them do. On weekends chicha men head for the beaches.

I have written elsewhere that village life in La Guardia, is very out-of-doors. You hear the children in the park or on the way to and from the beach after school in the late afternoon and evenings. You hear the neighbours calling out to each other. There are always people of all ages around between sunup and 2200. Señor Oswaldo’s ancient father, in his eighties and, though a trifle feeble, now miraculously healed after his abdominal-cancer operation, sits up under the shade trees for several hours every afternoon and evening. He is usually joined by somebody. When I go out for bread in the morning or head over to the cyber-cafe, there are always two old men, next-door neighbours, sitting on folding chairs in front of their houses opposite the church and the square. They are only a foot or two apart so they can chat and make comments on the passing scene. But each keeps to his own property. I always wave to the elders and greet them with a Buenos dias, Buenas tarde or Buenas noche whenever I walk by. Sometimes I call out “Óla ”. They always wave back and say “Bueenooooo” in that local dialect that stretches the vowels and drops all the S’s. Sometimes they say “Hepela!”, which is local and close to meaning “Hi”, I think.

On weekend afternoons the beach is usually filled with families and kids. We don’t have a fancy beach here like Playa el Agua or Playa el Caribe. No restaurants and bars here. It’s definitely bring your own beer. But the kids seem to be having a good time anyway, the boys turning cartwheels in the sand to impress the girls or all of them swimming out to the anchored fishing peñeros and diving off them again. Sometimes a pickup game of baseball gets started in the sand. They stay out all day when they can. Almost nobody wears a hat here except perhaps labourers who are in the sun all day. Men don’t seem to go bald here either and you have to be pretty old to be grey or white. The kids just get darker and darker from being outside all day. Although they marry young and age quickly from having a poor diet and, in the case of women, from having many children, when they are young they are a beautiful people and the children all seem to be gorgeous.

In between noisy cars or trucks there are minutes of silence when the various birds that come into our garden make their presence known. I don’t know all their names but we get lots of humming birds. They love the blossoms on the aloe verde and the bougainvillea. There are some lovely dove-like birds that live in the perfectly formed date palm next to the house and that sing wonderfully for much of the day. There are jet black birds with yellow eyes and there are yellow breasted birds of various sizes. Although they have never landed in the patio, in the early morning and at sunset several parrots fly chattering loudly around the house. I think they live in one of the big mango trees over near the beach.

Early afternoons, the music at the beer bar down the street strikes up. Over Easter, the government banned sales of alcoholic beverages on Easter Weekend. Clever boots like ourselves stocked up in advance. But the bars were closed and our street was much quieter at night. I swear the bar only has three CDs and we have been hearing them in the distance now for five months. Someone told me that the ban on alcohol sales reduced the death rate on the highways during Semana Santa by half.

Around sundown Luiz, the Chicken Man, opens up his fried chicken place just over the wall from us. If you are hungry even the smell of the grease is attractive. Go out there about 2100 and all the tables set out in the evening darkness around the dark-blue shack will be full of neighbours enjoying their meal of chicken, coleslaw and arepas, the local white-corn, unleavened bread and washed down with a Polar Light, the local beer. The people are quiet but you can hear the low conversational voices over the wall.

If Socialism for the 21st Century actually achieves its announced goals, which are to increase the material well-being of poor Venezuelans and to turn Venezula into a modern, rich country, books will be written about the old life in La Guardia and other fishing villages. They will be books like Akenfield, Ronald Blythe’s oral history of Suffolk farming villages in the 1950’s just as the old manual and mixed farming was disappearing to be replaced by large monoculture industrial farms with lots of heavy equipment, petroleum-based fertilisers, fungicides and the like and, of course, lots of E.U. subsidies. The villages are now emptied out of local rural life and have become at best rural dormitories for city workers. Here o Margarita, if you go to the big up-market shopping malls like Sambil at the other end of the island, it is indistinguishable from any American, European or Canadian shopping mall. The food court has large pictures of the traditional open wooden fishing peñeros that are actually anchored off our beach in their dozens but which have largely disappeared at the well-to-do end of the island. The kids will only know about fishermen from old photos. The living at that end of the island is anyway carefully segregated by economic and social class, the better off and the foreign tourists ensconced behind walls and gates and security guards. They have nothing to do with the real Venezuela. It’s really Newmarket-upon-Caribbean or suburban Los Angeles but with more walls.