Quick! What’s the first place that comes to mind if I say: Olympic City USA!?
Wrong, it’s Colorado Springs, CO…or so the folks in charge of our city’s PR would have you believe. While it’s true that we DO have the Olympic Training Center, this is such a closed-off and specialized locale that we rarely think of it as one of the defining characteristics of our city. And yet, about 6 or 7 years ago (nobody seems to recall exactly WHEN…) we started to see the above mentioned slogan appearing, slowly at first, around town. Not long afterwards, the city broke ground on a multi-million dollar Olympic and Paralympic Museum, thus giving credence to our claim, we are Olympic City, USA…there is no turning back…resistance is futile.
The rebranding was just a small part of a much broader campaign to turn Colorado Springs, a second-tier city by most any measure, into a tourist destination. While we have Garden of the Gods, which draws thousands of visitors annually from all over the world, Springs is still primarily known as being a hotbed of conservatism (Focus on the Family is headquartered there) and its not-so-distant cousin, militarism (Air Force Academy, military bases, space force etc etc…), both of which are reflected in the city’s OVERWHELMINGLY white middle-class make-up.
It sucks. I really used to have areas in the city that I enjoyed, but between the above demographic being catered to by endless swaths of identical homes and strip malls, and the nonstop influx of Californians and Texans driving the housing market to ludicrous heights, it started to just be pretty lame. Then the droves of tourists started to show up. Colorado Springs is so unbearably crowded during the Summer months, that we typically end up living our lives within a two-mile radius, just to maintain a grip on our sanity. “iF yOu HaTe It So MuCh, WhY dOnChA jUsT lEaVe?”, the best and brightest ask me from time to time (though to be fair, it is usually in response to my disdain for the country as a WHOLE). Yeah man, I fucking tried, bro.
For the last 7 months, and the next 5, we are living in Punta de Tralca, Chile, a coastal town so small that it isn’t even on most maps. During the month of July, as we were packing up our home to come to Chile, we were commuting every day to the house where we temporarily stayed, right through the busiest part of town, during the hottest part of the day. My hatred for every single second of each commute was tamed only by my knowledge that a quiet, distant, beachside community was our next destination.
And quiet it is WAS! There were evenings where it was almost eerie to fall asleep because all you heard was the barking of dogs and the distant, barely perceptible crashing of the waves. No traffic, no loud motorcycles, no airplanes, no “Was that a firework or a gunshot?”. But now, alas, the tourist season has descended upon our little stretch of paradise, and holy SHIT is it painfully crowded!
I joined a gym. It’s a kinda dingy, VERY hot, super crowded little box of a gym, that blasts reggaeton on a lucky day, and 50 Cent on the less fortunate ones, of which there are several. People show up, do their shit, and get out. There is no wiping down of machines, the bathroom only works half the time, and sometimes girls show up wearing next to nothing and there are no pearl-clutching grannies to tell them they ought to be ashamed (I’m lookin at YOU, Downtown YMCA). One of the primary reasons that I selected this gym is that it sits conveniently at the other end of the beach in El Quisco, the next town over, and the microbus will drop you off right there. This was a trip of about 15 minutes…before the tourists got here.
This morning I stepped onto the bus and realized immediately that it was gonna be one of those extra shitty rides you get in the Summer. Blazing hot, bus smelling like feet and stale beer, and climbing over the other passengers’ stuff blocking the aisle, which sometimes includes said passengers’ own fat asses, spilling out into the walkway. In Chile, we call a traffic-jam a taco (no relation…), and the road along the coast in the summertime is often nothing BUT taco, today being no exception. 28 minutes later, as we were painfully slowly cresting the last hill before my stop at the gym, the bus completely gave out, it’s death rattle sputtering plumes of black smoke which quickly added to the potpourri inside. Dejected, we all climbed out and went our separate ways, knowing that this is Chile and this kinda thing just happens from time to time. Owing to the fact that “Karen Culture” is just about the ONLY thing Chile has not yet imported from the USA (and brown sugar, ironically…), nobody demanded to speak to the manager (though some bus fare was returned).
Being that my gym, as I mentioned, is at the far end of the beach, I have made it a habit to take a stroll along the shoreline before catching a ride home. Ever since the tourists showed up, my walk has been getting progressively longer and longer. What started as a ten minute cool-down stroll, has become an hour-long escape from El Quisco scenario that plays out every time I leave the gym now. Buses are over capacity, their tail ends drooping so low that their mudflaps drag along the road like seaweed in the tide. Colectivo taxis are also full, save for the occasional option of squeezing into the backseat with two other strangers, a less than ideal situation I have outlined in the past. With the amount that I sweat during my workout, I am really doing the other folks a favor. It’s a three or four mile walk from the gym to the house, and just about every time I have left the gym in the past three weeks, I have ended up hoofing it for at least two of those miles before finding a solid ride home.
Because of this, I try to utilize the extra time in El Quisco to do some shopping for the day, so as to not have to leave the house again. Today I walked up to the supermarket in the center of town, where one of the only ATM’s in the area typically has a line out the door. Curiously, there were two lines today, and the much longer one was the queue just to go INSIDE the grocery store, where the lines for the checkout went all the way to the back wall. Nope, never mind. I went to four different vegetable markets looking for basil…no luck. In the end I hoofed it almost all the way home, catching a miraculously half-full bus at the last possible stop, gladly paying the fare across the bridge just to get outta the damn sun. As I sat there, taking in the pungent bouquet of the hundreds of sweaty travelers that had blessed the bus with their presence that day, I thought to myself: “Goddamn, it ain’t just Olympic City, USA…tourist season sucks no matter WHERE you are”.
“I shoot Mr. Allomby a conspiratorial glance. We’re not actually conspiring, but it’s important to look at people like that every now and then because that’s how real relationships are forged”
- Roque Larraquy “Comemadre”
What a strange little book, I am very happy to have come across it. “Comemadre” is essentially a novella comprised of two distinct stories, sharing a tangible link only in passing. In the first, which I found the more compelling of the two, a team of doctors in an Argentine sanatorium in 1907 perform some…interesting experiments on a group of patients led to believe that they are receiving a “miracle cure” for their terminal cancer. The story is told in the first-person, and also involves a love triangle (pentagon, really) with a mysterious and beautiful nurse at the center. I can’t exactly divulge much more without spoiling that central tenet of the plot, but suffice it to say it is a riveting little piece of macabre storytelling that will definitely have you wondering WTF. The second story, centered around a child-prodigy turned adult shock-artist by way of morbid obesity (yeah, really), was certainly not lacking in the grotesque, even if a bit less subdued in scope and depth than the first one. At 150 pages total, you can breeze through them both in a day or two.
“I know that fish, generally speaking, don’t know what’s happening outside their tanks. Still, as soon as I left the aquarium, the axolotls pounced to devour the janitor fish. When I came back to check on them, the axolotls were back on the bottom of the tank. A few days later they finally tore each other to pieces.”
- Mario Bellatin - “Beauty Salon” [Salon de belleza]
This was another quick read, but harrowing and tragic all the same. A reflection on the AIDS epidemic and its disproportionate devastation of already marginalized subsections of society, the book tells the tale of a once drag queen living in their beauty salon on the outskirts of town. The salon, now defunct, has been converted into a place for men, ravaged by an unnamed epidemic, to come off of the streets with the sole purpose of having someone to die near. As the narrator themself becomes infected, they begin to reflect on the glory that once was their life’s work, and the bleak future that awaits the salon’s new tenants in the face of their own impending death. Super uplifting book! But at 70 pages, the depression doesn’t last long.
“Even her face was like ours, though wary and full, like when you got scared. ‘Her eyes are broken, that’s why she can’t close them. You have to lick her eyeballs so she can see or else she can’t see.’ Marina held out her doll; that was the first thing she’s said to us. We stuck our tongues out until the tips touched the cold glass of her eyes. And it was true: the doll could see then”.
- Andrés Barba - “Such Small Hands” [Las manos pequeñas]
Short (sensing a theme yet?) little punch packer, this one. A mysterious girl, the sole survivor of an accident which claimed her parents, arrives at an orphanage for girls. Sensing herself to be unlike them, she navigates the emotions she is not yet old enough to process through the act of bullying and being bullied, both physically and emotionally. My favorite aspect of this chilling story was the alternating voices: one chapter from Marina’s perspective, and the next from a sort of amalgam of the REST of the orphaned girls, which felt much like the “chorus” of a Greek tragedy. The story builds quickly to a conclusion which I did NOT see coming. Big “Village of the Damned” vibes, if only because of creepy kids.
“With their saw arrived the carpenters, and with their clippers the seamstresses, and with their needles the noblewomen, and with their razors did the barbers arrive. And the people arrived in uncountable throngs at the ready with blades suited to their office and, standing but notwithstanding their office and standing, all desired the same thing which was their slice of saint”
- Luis Felipe Fabre - “Recital of the Dark Verses” [Declaración de las canciones oscuras]
Was that a confusing passage to read? That’s how this whole goddamned book was written, and frankly it drove me nuts. The story was great, a fictionalized and darkly humorous retelling of the transport of Saint John of the Cross’s body, or, well…what was LEFT of his body after all of the rabid relic seekers got their “fair” share. The genius of the humorous bits only slightly made up for the tediousness of the prose, with its antiquated word choice and circular punning…it just made this read more challenging than I felt the story required. You ever get halfway through a book and realize you should’ve given up after the first 20 pages? I felt that way about this one, but again, this is just a personal gripe and not an indictment of the novel itself. To add to my task, each chapter centered around particular lines from the aforementioned saint’s poetry, of which I was completely unfamiliar, and only contributed to my thought that this book was not for me. Hats off, however, to the incredible Heather Cleary for translating this thing from the Spanish, during which (she writes in the foreword), she personally ALSO translated anew the said poems of the Saint in order to make the overall translation more cohesive in English. Jesus. That fact alone made me want to atone for my lukewarm feelings towards it by reading the above mentioned “Comemadre”, also translated by Cleary.
That’s it, that’s all! I am starting in on two short story collections by Ecuadorian author María Fernanda Ampuero, and will weigh in on those next week. Keep being awesome and kind to one another, much love from Olympic City, USA Punta de Tralca, Chile!