Yerba mate

Yerba Maté

By Bobby Neal Winters

The mortar and pestle pounding the maté sounded like horses’ hooves on cobble stones as we walked past the corner and crossed Avenida Estigarribia. We then turned and headed east.

This is our last full day. Tomorrow we began travel home. As my cousin Mary told me, "No hay lugar como el hogar."  There is no place like home.

Asuncion downtown wakes slowly. This is the tropics, and the length of day and night vary only a little from season to season. We are still in winter, but the daily high is already in the 90s. At night it cools off a bit. At night you can move without the burning sun staring down at you. During the afternoon you retreat into the dark buildings with their high ceilings. At sundown, after six, you can emerge from protection and live again.

The morning is pleasant. There is a nice breeze and we try to stick to the north side of the street where the shade is. We are south of the equator and must adjust to our new reality.

Others do the same. And everywhere there are men with their guampas and bombillas drinking maté.  

Maté is made of herbs and drunk in a tea.  It is medicinal. It is ubiquitous. It is Paraguay.

We go to the sidewalk market around the Plaza to buy souvenirs. Jean gets a purse for herself and I get a mortar and pestle. We step out of the shade of the market and there is a teenage girl with a mortar and pestle crushing herbs into maté.

We walk past the fancy pharmacy with a large contingent of rent-a-cops and cross the street heading east. On the sidewalk in front of a fancy clothing store, there is a man sleeping in his own vomit on the sidewalk. No one seems to notice. No one seems concerned. None of the rent-a-cops are rousting him. Who is my neighbor?

We go on past.

We ultimately walk past him several times over the course of four hours.

We go to Plaza de Uruguayana and visit one of the bookstores there. We walk out the south side of the park and--of all things--there is a man with mortar and pestle grinding maté.

It is approaching noon now, we are getting hungry. We go seeking a place to get a lomito and succeed. It is good. It is a restaurant and so the lomito is not as good as the ones you get from street vendors who sell them. My rule of thumb is that if you are not a bit scared, then the lomito won't be as good.

We start back to the hotel and pass were the man had been sleeping. He is gone, but I know it's the right place because the vomit is still there.

We come back to the hotel, where the maté man is gone from his corner, retreated into the cool of some dark building.

We do the same.

What You Are Prepared to See

By Bobby Neal Winters

When I first started writing about ten years back, I had a exercise I did.  I found stories in the Bible and wrote them up in modern style.  The one rule I had was that I would be absolutely faithful to what was written in that I would not subtract anything.  I kept the plot-line; I kept the dialog;  I would add flesh to the bone that was there, but I wouldn’t change the bones.

It was a remarkable educational experience.

The first thing I learned was that there is a lot that is open to interpretation.  An example of this would be in the story of Deborah and Barack. We know simply that Deborah was married, she was a prophetess, and she was a judge of Israel.  She lived under a tree known as the Palm of Deborah.

That’s it.

I chose to make her an old woman.  This, I thought, who work better with her character.  As she was living in a male dominated environment, I thought that making her a wise elder would work better.  As this was an age without modern dentistry, I chose to make her toothless.  As a part of this, I gave her the habit of sucking the pulp from pomegranate pieces and spitting out the seeds in a rather disgusting manner.

Because of this, I learned something else: when you mess with other people’s mental images, you get push-back.  I showed this to some of my friends who’d imagined Deborah as a princess between the ages of 30 and 40, with a mouth full of teach and a diadem on her head.  Apparently there is an old painting that depicts Deborah as such.

The artist had been doing his own interpretation.  There is nothing wrong with that.  He had his own reasons just like I had mine.  My point is that my reader had seen that interpretation first and had taken it up as her own and had imposed it over the story.

I eventually carried this exercise out with several Bible stories.  At the end, I decided I would try to put them together as a collection, but they were just shy of what I considered to be book-length, so I decided to fatten them up a little bit.  What I did was to write a short story about a preacher who had been transferred to a church that had once had beautiful stain glass windows. The windows had been painted over by individuals--members of the church, pastors, etc--who found particular stories to be objectionable for one reason or the other.

In the story, the preacher cleaned the paint from the various windows, revealing the story beneath.  Each one of these cleanings served as an occasion to insert a story. ( I admit the conceit of thinking of myself as someone who was similarly revealing a previously concealed story to the reader.)

This not only served as a framework for placing these stories together and working in a bit of didactic explanation as well, but it serves as a metaphor for how controlling information controls understanding.

There is the old story about the three blind men who feel different parts of an elephant and come to different conclusions as to what sort of an animal it is according to whether they feel its leg, ear, or trunk.

One might assume for the sake of the story that these men had been blind from birth and had never seen and elephant and that they had never fully experienced an elephant before even in a tactile way.  If they had, then they might have been able to have an insight from even a partial input.

I gained a greater insight into this during my trip to South America.  Those of you who grew up during the same era as I will, perhaps, remember Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Wild Kingdom was hosted by a fellow named Marlin Perkins.  It featured trips to the African Savanna and the jungles of South America.  I also received a steady diet of other nature programs featuring floats down the Amazon.  Then, of course, there is the by now classic movie Romancing the Stone with the drug dealers and treasure hunters.

Given this sort of input, it’s a wonder I had the courage to go.  My courage was bolstered by those who had been there before me and told me that I could do it.  Indeed, I not only did it, but I took my family with me, and we wouldn’t trade for it.

The thing is that South America is not a fishing village on the Amazon or an alligator farm owned by a crazy drug-lord.  We are prepared to see it that way by what gets through on our TV and movies. The truth is rather more complex.  In Asuncion, Paraguay you can stand in a neighborhood and see a horse-drawn cart collecting trash and a pickup truck with boys in the back texting on cell phones.  There are three centuries going on at once.

Quite frankly, there were times when I thought that, if I knew more Spanish, I could easily go native because I had more in common with the folks there than I did with the folks either in the Northeastern US or on the West Coast.

When only minor excursions out, I’ve lived my life in Kansas and Oklahoma. This is still the frontier. We have a strong, agrarian strain.  On one strip out of Asuncion while I was there, I saw a huge billboard with a couple of cattle on it.  It read “Mas Pasto, Mas Carne.”  This translates as “More Grass, More Meat.”  Having grown up on the farm report, I knew I was among my own kind.

It would be easy for me to go all paranoid here and say there is a conspiracy to make us think of South America and the rest of the world as being backward.  This conclusion awaits a more careful argument.  It is much easier to believe that most Americans live in cities and have a certain filter they put on the rest of the world.  They view South America as backward and so concentrate on what fits that image, filtering out evidence to the contrary.  

The hard truth is that these same people view most of the United States outside of the city limits of certain selected cities as being backward too.

When we go to the movies and watch television, we know that we are viewing fiction, but even fiction is set within a certain realistic context, so it is easy to be led astray.  I have two examples where my personal experience has been illuminating.

In the movie Fletch, starring Chevy Chase, the main character takes a trip to Provo, Utah.  Provo, in that movie, is portrayed as a very small town.  Indeed, it is purported little more than a pig farm.  I took sabbatical there in the academic year 1995-96 and one of the reasons I chose it was my impression that it was a small town.  While I knew it was more than a pig farm, the expectation I had for it was quasi-rural.  Imagine my surprise when I arrived and discovered that Provo, a town of 90 thousand, is located in the Utah County metro area with a population of a quarter million people.  In fact, as most of the population in Utah is concentrated in a corridor around Interstate 15 that is about ten miles wide and a hundred miles long, you could say that it is part of a city of a million.  

An error in the other direction comes from one of my favorite episodes of the X-Files.  It was set in Connerville, Oklahoma and featured Lightening Boy. This was very interesting to me because I grew up twelve miles north of Connerville.  I’ve friends buried in Connerville.  Connerville consists of a couple of churches, a few houses, a cemetery, and the Blue River Bar.  That’s it.

In the X-Files, it had a hospital with rather impressive scientific resources.  There were things pictured as being in Connerville that are not available for a hundred miles in any direction.

And, of course, in each case the picture painted was done that way because of the needs of the story.  There is no harm intended.

But unless you’ve been to Provo or unless you’ve been to Connerville, you don’t know.

The House You Live in

By Bobby Neal Winters

I like watching other people work with concrete.  This may be because my father was a truck driver who hauled bulk cement to road jobs and ready-mix concrete outfits. In the summer, of 2007, we did an addition to our house and I enjoyed watching the masonry crew pour the footings and then lay the cinder block foundation.

Once you have the foundation, you attach a floor to it and then you put up the two-by-fours that frame the walls. Then you put the roof on.  Once the roof is on, you can hang the drywall.  That’s how we do it here.  My house is an old house, so there are parts of it that have lathe and plaster walls instead of the gypsum drywall.

I imagine one can follow a line of historical continuity all the way back to the way things were done in England.

My family and I spent July of 2009 in Asuncion, Paraguay where I was teaching Introduction to Analytic Processes at Universidad Catolica.  We stayed at a bed and breakfast called El Rinconcito while we were there.  During that time, another house was being constructed across the street.  This house was made from brick, and it was interesting for me to see how they did it.  

Instead of just pouring a foundation, they had poured a frame.  They must have had forms in place to hold the concrete in place while it was being poured, but they were gone by they time we arrived.  Within the concrete, they had put four-inch PVC pipe as conduit for plumbing and electrical connections.  

The roof was framed by four-by-sixes and constructed out of ceramic tile.

When we first arrived, they were in the process of laying the brick. Each of the bricks was six inches by six inches square and two inches thick.  They would’ve stopped about any bullet you could’ve shot at them. Before we left, they had the exterior walls up and were putting stucco over the brick.

I feel safe in guessing that the PVC pipes within the concrete framing is a fairly recent innovation.

One weekend while we were in Paraguay, we took at tour of eastern Paraguay where the old towns have such names as Jesus, Trinidad, and Encarnacion.  There are old missions in this area which were abandoned in the 1700s.  In looking at them, I saw a continuity in the architecture with the house across from El Rinconcito.  I imagine there is a continuity in construction techniques as well.  

These old missions, with the churches, the monk’s quarters, and the walls surround them, were built by people who’d come over from Spain and brought their techniques with them.  Those had come from the old Roman/Mediterranean tradition.  

It sort of reminded me of a book entitled The Shape of the Liturgy by Gregory Dix who follows the shape of churches as they evolved from the Mediterranean-style homes used as church-houses in the early Christian era to the sorts of churches I saw in Paraguay in the old missions.

Every generation learns by watching the generation before it.  We hope to keep the good stuff and to add to it what is needed for the present age.  The PVC pipe as conduit in the concrete framing struck me as a clever solution to marrying the solid construction of the ancient era to the modern amenities of indoor plumbing, electricity, and even computer network cables.

When I visited Siberia, during June of the year 2000, the group I was with was taken on an excursion to to the village of Balshoye Galoustnoye.  While there, we visited an American ex-patriot who was building his own traditional Siberian home.  It was made of huge logs from the larch tree.

There was no foundation as we understand it and the larch logs sat on the ground to allow for the expansion and contraction due to the extreme winters.  The logs in the wall were made to fit together tightly and the cracks were sealed with mortar to keep the Siberian wind from whistling through.

In the middle of the house was a huge oven.  It was designed so that the grandmother and the baby could sleep on top of it.

Each of the houses I’ve described has a particular appearance on the outside.  They represent particular styles that are recognizable to folks who’ve been around the block a time or two.  What you see on the outside builds particular expectations for structure on the inside.  You see the stucco and the tile roof, and you expect the connections going back to the Caesars.  

This sort of architecture manifests a depth of knowledge that has been tested by time.

The Siberian home embodies wisdom as well.  It doesn’t have the grandeur the brick house picked up through the various empires on the northern rim of the Mediterranean, but it embodies the simple wisdom of survival.

In my mind, these the houses in Asuncion and in Balshoye Galoustnoye are represent a deep, durable sort of reality that I hold dear.  When we juxtapose the typical American house against these two we see that it is something different.  There is more emphasis on the surface in the American house than in the depth.  This is not necessarily meant as a criticism; it is simply an observation that might be a window to another aspect of the real world.

The sheet rock and two-by-fours that form my walls are descendants of the lathe and plaster.  The lathe and plaster hearken back to the chinking between the logs in an house not too different from the larch house in Siberia.  When sheet rock is hung, there are gaps between the pieces.  These gaps are first taped and then mudded over in the same spirit that stucco is put over the bricks in the brick house in Paraguay.  Pipes and electrical wire and run within the walls between the sheets of drywall, and you can put insulation in between as well.

But what is on the outside doesn’t necessarily tell you much about what’s on the inside.  There are thousands of different types of siding each designed to give a different impression.

Transito

We are in Paraguay. I have showered, eaten, and slept. After about thirty hours of travel, those activities are essential.

The leg of the flight from Atlanta to Buenos Aires was one of those overnight jobbies. You are supposed to sleep, but this rule is honored more in the breach than in the keeping, to coin a phrase. For my part, I am six feet three inches tall and weigh many hundreds of pounds. The folks who designed the plane used something which was the length of my femur to measure the distance between the front of my seat and the back of the one in front of me. Eventually, I turned over on my side and got a bit more comfortable with my feet hooked under the seat in front of me. Try this in a straight back chair sometime and you will apprecate my abilities.

We landed in Buenos Aires at 7:45 and were there until 1:20 (13:20). It is an old airport and the manner in which it has be kept up reminds me of Oklahoma. Let ye who have the wisdom understand. There were people walking around in the airport wearing surgical masks because of the swine flu. Apparently there are many cases of it in Argentina. From there it was a short hop to Asuncion.

We were met by our host Celeste at the airport. She took us to her home in her king-cab pickup truck. She showed us our rooms and arranged a snack for us. We went to bed early. I am pounding this out before coffee, which I will now go to seek.