The Scared Stiff

4

Sabanon is prettier from a distance than up close. It’s on the Guiainacavi River, a small meandering stream, tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the Orinoco, up in Venezuela. Sabanon is built inside one of its elbows, so that the slow-moving brown water glints past it in the sunlight on three sides.

The main approach to town is from the fourth side, the north, the road down from San Cristobal, which here is crumbling two-lane asphalt. The first bit of the city you see, and beautiful it is, is the gleaming white steeple of the church of San Vicente, where Lola and I were married. That slender white spire striking up out of the deep greens of the jungle makes it look as though there must be a giant knight on horseback down in there, at the very least. But what’s down in there, as you soon see, is Sabanon, a crumbling cluster of low buildings in the brown embrace of the river.

The town is made of wood, most of it decades from its last paint job, though here and there some owner has recently gone mad with purple or carmine or ocher, creating a little extravaganza you can’t look at directly until after sunset. The town has a population of four thousand, and there are maybe seven satellite dishes perched on roofs, one of them belonging to my in-laws, which we gave them three years ago when I thought I was, or would soon be, rich.

There’s only the one paved road, coming into town, running straight through it to the river, where it becomes a thick-planked wooden dock flanked by a fish market and gasoline storage tanks. The other streets in town are packed dirt, parallel to or perpendicular to La Carretera, “the highway,” which is what the locals call the main drag. None of the other streets are named.

The Tobón house, painted fuchsia at my expense when Lola and I got married and at last beginning to fade, thank God, was two blocks to the right of La Carretera and one block from the river-bank. Two stories high, built on stilts, its exterior walls vertical wood planks, its ground floor is partly enclosed to hold the freezer and hot-water heater and some guns and fishing poles and Madonna, the brood sow. The open part of the downstairs contains boats and stray concrete blocks and pieces of automobile and the vertical lines of plumbing. The family lives upstairs, in a number of airy connected rooms.

The trip from the airport took just under two hours, so when we drove into town, around four-thirty, the shadows were deep black and stretched out long from right to left ahead of us, making the sunny parts of town even brighter and more intense. Then we turned off onto the Tobóns’ street and our only fellow traffic was dogs, mostly parked in the middle of the road. Arturo honked and yelled and laughed and steered around the dogs, who knew him and therefore ignored him, and parked beside the fuchsia house. In the sudden silence I could hear Madonna grunting her complaints the other side of the fuchsia wall beside me.

“Mi casa...” Arturo said, and grinned at me, and raised an eyebrow, and waited.

“... es su casa,” I said, and pointed at him.

“And don’t you forget it! Come on, let’s have a beer.”

We collected our luggage and went around to the outside staircase, to see Mamá and Papá crowded together in the doorway at the top, two short wide people grinning broadly and yelling at us in Spanish. Up we went, and dropped our luggage so we could be hugged and kissed, and then picked up the luggage again to take it to “our” room, a small corner storage room that was converted, sort of, to a bedroom whenever we’d visit. There we changed into shorts and tops and went back out to be handed our first beers.

We sat in the living room, a big airy space that got some morning sun but was cool and shady the rest of the day, soft breezes moving through the glassless windows in two walls. Arturo had gone to another room, but now he came back, carrying a white legal-size envelope. “Here you go, Felicio,” he said.

With a flutter of excitement, I opened the envelope. The one piece of paper inside was thick and folded in thirds. I unfolded it, and looked at the birth certificate of Felicio Tobón de Lozano, born to Lucia Tobón de Lozano on July 12, 1970, in Mother of Mercy Hospital, Sabanon, Guerrera. Father, Alvaro Tobón Gutierrez. Birth weight, six pounds, one ounce.

We’re going to do it, I thought. This makes it real.

Arturo laughed and whacked my shoulder. “Monday,” he said, “we’ll go up to San Cristobal, get your driver’s license.”

“Make me legal,” I said.

Arturo thought that was very funny.