Praprá

David, Laura, Lea, Francesca and I dressed up to go out. David sported a brown leather jacket, all the women looked elegant, and I wore my Grandfather’s moleskin jacket tailored in 1964. The occasion was the celebration of the Christmas holiday where all the people from Mérida return from music schools in Boston and New York, the high rises of Miami and the metropolis of Tokyo to their mountain city. The restaurant we attended was sparkling, each minutiae of the design a testament to pop art: paintings of Technicolored house pets (think Cheshire cat) with human mouth and eyes painted on their chests; a wall with 3-D arrows; chairs that, though interesting, were ultimately impractical. The food was expensive (Salmon in orange sauce for 180 BS. ($13) was the cheapest item), their menu included something called mesclun and the live music was provided by a jazz trio trained at University College NY and Berkley. I sat across from David who bemoaned, as he rocked to the music, his unfulfilled desire for beer (the restaurant sold only wine). People came and went with explosive greetings as David and I conspired to find another source of beer, which we did at a pizzeria four blocks away. As I walked and drank in the street with David at 10 p.m., we talked of politics. I jokingly assured David that only after deciding that writing poetry was a tough business did Barack Obama become a politician and in reality he would like nothing more than to sneak beer into a fancy Whitehouse dinner. To the disapprobation of the woman in the group, we returned with more in our pockets and found our tepid food on the table, having arrived ten minutes before.

The following night we went out again, this time to the colonial homes in a different section of the city. The walls of clay and gravel of the remodeled houses span a meter wide while great beams of wood converged and crossed to a courtyard square that left the full moon in view. Outside the restaurant where the same jazz band was playing, we waited for innumerable friends of Laura whose occupations of classical pianists, translators, filmmakers and clothing designers left my tongue somewhat twisted. They and we left the restaurant to a home of a famous filmmaker whose hair and nose and occupation screamed Jewish but in reality just gets a regular perm and has an unusually large nose. I spoke for a time with a professor of art history about Simon Bolivar, saying occasionally, “interesting… the evening is quite beautiful…. I am from Maine… Do you know Maine?” or mentioning, since it always guarantees a gasp of interest, that “the temperature back home is -15*C”.

The city of Mérida is bustling with young people, containing Venezuela’s largest and greatest university. The art scene here is alive and vibrant and laughs in the face of the dangers that restrict so many to the confines of their guarded homes. They are radiating from this small Venezuelan city to all points in the world, and trust my luck to find the people in the middle of it, reassuring me of my location and renewing my resolution.


Frase Del Día: Muñeco Del Año Viejo

Every few hundred feet on the street, several children come begging for coins. Behind each is a dummy with clothes stuffed with straw. The children ask for money so that they might replace the straw (pasto) with fireworks and on this day, the 31st of December, destroy the last year to make room for the new. When I said that sound dangerous, the others in the car said, “Of Course” and continued searching the radio. The drunkards in the town like to dress up like the Muñecos, guilting passersby into giving money for the next round.