Home Free by Marni Jackson Read Free Book Online

letters. They’re very tender, both toward me and toward our Portuguese neighbours on the hill, Snr. Mario and Sra. Vitoria. An older couple who befriended us. He and Snr. Mario became partners in a hog-raising venture sometime after I left. In one of his letters Chris tells the story of an afternoon he spent drinking with Snr. Mario and a few other men down at the taverna. How, after several copinhos , the men would improvise little rhyming songs about the wine, or that particular day. One was about how time ran backwards there. O tempo volta para tras.
    I know I’ve constructed a romance about it all since then, but why not? There was a man in a white house on a hill, in a peaceful world, where time ran backward. I could have stayed to see what would happen, but I moved on instead. As we tended to in those days.
    I spoke to Brian on the phone, who finally sounded a bit forlorn. He’s having trouble sleeping, he said. He needs that warm back and whirring early-morning brain beside him.
    Last night was cold; I slept under two big duvets. My watch has lost its little turner and (tellingly) is stuck on Toronto time. I take out the latest alarming email from Casey and reread it. I didn’t quite take it in the first time through:
    Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2003 15:36
Subject: Hello from Puebla
    Hi there
I spent a week in San Cristobal, the beautiful, tourist-filled, mountain city in Chiapas. I soon found out that ever since the Zapatistas took the city in ’94, San Cristobal has been at the centre of the uprising. My first day there, I went to see a movie on the Zapatistas and asked someone if they were here to fight the revolution. I soon learned that you shouldn’t really talk about working with Zapatistas in public places—it’s better to talk about hiking and visiting churches. So, I saw a bunch of movies on Zapatistas, La Violencia in Colombia, the massacre of students in Mexico City. I heard the bishop of Chiapas speak—he was very eloquent, and spoke a lot about peace, but I still don’t speak Spanish and missed a lot.
    The revolution is certainly in the air. I met lots of people doing community development work, being peace observers in poor Zapatista villages. There is even a way too hip, revolutionary-themed bar filled with young gringos . . .
    On my last day in town, I went with three Spanish folks from my hostel to visit one of the Zapatista villages northeast of San Cristobal. Part way through the ride in the collectivo, going into the mountains, we met a block in the road. A few cars were lined up, and we sat in the car for a while. Down the road, there was a crowd of people. It took me a while to get the English translation that there was a man in dark green, wearing a balaclava, shot dead in the road. We all assumed the revolution was on. I only saw his boots. There were lots of native people in traditional dress (colourful dresses for women, men in black wool cloth things, some wearing broad-brimmed hats with multicoloured ribbons hanging down). It turns out that the dead man was one of two bandits who held up a car in the night. Supposedly, they only had plastic guns, but the driver being robbed had a real one. The other bandit went to hospital and this one stayed here.
    So it was not Zapatista-related. Just more life and death in the South.
    Bodies on the road. Holy fuck. Now he realizes that I wasn’t crazy to talk about bandits.
    I can see from my maps that Alportel is no more than 50 kilometres away over winding roads—nothing, by Canadian standards. Time is running out before I have to fly home, so I set off in the Corsa.
    I drive through Benafim and Barranco do Velho, winding higher into the mountains, then down through forests of cork trees to a village that people normally speed through on their way north to Lisbon.
    The place appears miraculously unchanged. A man in a brown cap squats by the side of the road with his back against a white wall, warming himself in