I remember things in chunks. Not chunks like the bites I would take off my mother's out-of-the oven cinnamon bread I had buttered, and then rolled around my mouth, or even the chunks of aluminum siding that sheared off the roof of the church next door in a thunder from my stray water balloon, leaving jagged edges and mouths in stunned O's. No, these memories are chunks like the limestone cliff nose that took my father and sister a half-day to approach on an Andean mountain-side; chunks like the bites of sugar cane stalks I would take and suck on until sticky juice dripped onto my 3rd grade uniform the color of a bruised blueberry. Then later, much later, when those chunks have been slapped, chiseled and shaped by winds harsh as the Moroccan ones that shook my bus held together with rust, fervent prayer and the sounds of petulant chickens on my way to Fes, my memories shift and shimmy their way onto paper smooth as river pebbles worn by water that licks ceaselessly in search of a destination. And as the water, this story too flows and finds itself hidden at times, under searing sun in other moments and crashing over boulders to a roar that even now has the capability of drowning out the nightmare dream-scapes which grow in color and depth with every passing year.
But this memory is about a valley that burns. A valley that every year rained down ash and smoke. A valley that saw me shutting the windows of my family's apartment, knowing the next day my brother and I would doodle fantastic shapes on the windows covered in a thick soot, whispering about how we wished fires wouldn't cry so much and turn our thumping city into a gray silent yard of hushed movement.
"Is it weird to draw a big fire from ash soot?" my brother would ask, head craned out over our steel railing twisting like grape-vines, arm extended into space with his finger slowly imprinting on our dimmed windows the shape of a cane-field on fire.
"No, that's where it comes from, right?" I answered, perched even more precariously over the balcony's ledge, where only months before we had hurled down chunks of brick my father had hauled out of the crawl space he was making, oooohing and aaahing at the muffled boom they made and how the small pieces flew across the street.
"What on EARTH on you doing!?" my father had yelled on that sweaty summer afternoon, his body a sheet of sweat from digging and hacking at brick. "You could kill someone!" A yell that rattled around in my brain even then, hanging out over the ledge while I traced long stick figures in the soot on panes that had been clean only hours before the fires had begun.
"Maybe we shouldn't be so far out," I ventured to my brother, but my brother has never known fear, and even this half-hearted warning felt weak to me.
"Come on, I think we have a few boxes of matches left to burn, do you think it's possible to flick them from one end of our room to the other, over the hammock?" I relented, a few moments after our drawing was complete.
"Sure, but if they land, make sure they land on paper soaked in hairspray," Evan responded seriously, "we want the biggest fire ball possible."
Still, silently, the ash fell. The cane fields, amidst far-flung reaches of our Andean valley sheltering Caracas, burned relentlessly throughout the day, enormous puffy clouds of smoke rolling upwards with the fickle wind, then shifting quickly to fall over our city like great balls of dirty cotton. We were forbidden to go onto the roof. "Incidente del bomba de agua" (Balloon incident) was what the church-goers were calling it, and it would be months before we earned enough money from small jobs to repay the coffers. Even so, it would have been nice to take an ash-bath, to smudge it on my childish frame in lines and swirls, like Piggy and Ralph in "Lord of the Flies."
The sun receded quickly, as if shamed from the brightness from the flames, leaving a dark ink to spread across the city while pockets of fire licked upwards on the mountainside. Inside, safe from ceniza de caña, my brother and I flicked matches off the flinty side of matchboxes, watching them burst suddenly into a ball of lit sulfur, then die just as quickly, leaving behind a trail of smoke. Across the room I grinned mischievously at Evan, while match after match sailed over our room's low-slung chinchorro hammock and into darkness.
The burning season had begun.
But this memory is about a valley that burns. A valley that every year rained down ash and smoke. A valley that saw me shutting the windows of my family's apartment, knowing the next day my brother and I would doodle fantastic shapes on the windows covered in a thick soot, whispering about how we wished fires wouldn't cry so much and turn our thumping city into a gray silent yard of hushed movement.
"Is it weird to draw a big fire from ash soot?" my brother would ask, head craned out over our steel railing twisting like grape-vines, arm extended into space with his finger slowly imprinting on our dimmed windows the shape of a cane-field on fire.
"No, that's where it comes from, right?" I answered, perched even more precariously over the balcony's ledge, where only months before we had hurled down chunks of brick my father had hauled out of the crawl space he was making, oooohing and aaahing at the muffled boom they made and how the small pieces flew across the street.
"What on EARTH on you doing!?" my father had yelled on that sweaty summer afternoon, his body a sheet of sweat from digging and hacking at brick. "You could kill someone!" A yell that rattled around in my brain even then, hanging out over the ledge while I traced long stick figures in the soot on panes that had been clean only hours before the fires had begun.
"Maybe we shouldn't be so far out," I ventured to my brother, but my brother has never known fear, and even this half-hearted warning felt weak to me.
"Come on, I think we have a few boxes of matches left to burn, do you think it's possible to flick them from one end of our room to the other, over the hammock?" I relented, a few moments after our drawing was complete.
"Sure, but if they land, make sure they land on paper soaked in hairspray," Evan responded seriously, "we want the biggest fire ball possible."
Still, silently, the ash fell. The cane fields, amidst far-flung reaches of our Andean valley sheltering Caracas, burned relentlessly throughout the day, enormous puffy clouds of smoke rolling upwards with the fickle wind, then shifting quickly to fall over our city like great balls of dirty cotton. We were forbidden to go onto the roof. "Incidente del bomba de agua" (Balloon incident) was what the church-goers were calling it, and it would be months before we earned enough money from small jobs to repay the coffers. Even so, it would have been nice to take an ash-bath, to smudge it on my childish frame in lines and swirls, like Piggy and Ralph in "Lord of the Flies."
The sun receded quickly, as if shamed from the brightness from the flames, leaving a dark ink to spread across the city while pockets of fire licked upwards on the mountainside. Inside, safe from ceniza de caña, my brother and I flicked matches off the flinty side of matchboxes, watching them burst suddenly into a ball of lit sulfur, then die just as quickly, leaving behind a trail of smoke. Across the room I grinned mischievously at Evan, while match after match sailed over our room's low-slung chinchorro hammock and into darkness.
The burning season had begun.
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