Memories of Exile. Vignette # 1: Flight

Memories of Exile* Marco Fonseca Vignette # 1 Flight I’d never flown before in my life and didn’t quite know what to expect. But I did know how I felt before boarding the Eastern Boeing 737 airplane that morning at the end of October 1985: I was frightened. I wasn’t frightened of flying or at the prospect of the plane crashing over the Gulf of Mexico on route to Miami, although the thought did cross my mind. I was frightened at the terrifying prospect of me not making it aboard the plane at all. What frightened me when I got to the airport earlier that morning and as I made my way straight to the check-in counter was the fear of being erased. What frightened me to the point where I found myself totally unable to stop my legs from shaking and simultaneously realizing how unconsciously wise I’d been that morning when I decided to wear the one loose pair of tailor-made trousers – a high school graduation gift from my father – out of the two I’d be taking with me to my destination as they managed to conceal the involuntary, almost crippling, shaking of my legs, was the fear of oblivion. For I was convinced and was actually expecting that as soon as I handed my passport over to the check-in clerk, somehow I was going to be surrounded by an entire detachment of National Police and army officers and was going to be whisked away into a secret detention office, right there at the airport, and nobody would ever hear from me again. I fear to be erased from the memory, the small histories, and the struggles of those people I had the fortune of getting to know as I became increasingly entangled in the larger national drama that was Guatemala, with its particular version of the Cold War, with its own internal political bleeding, its own genocide, during the first half of the 1980s. “Disappearance”, after all, was the sort of Kafkaesque fate that had befallen other people, many people, mainly critics and dissenters of illegitimate regimes, in the distant as well as the recent past as they made their way through this airport. And the grotesque prospect of being disappeared reverberated through my body like the memory of an event that had not yet occurred but that, somehow, the particular experience of time I was having that morning enabled me to somehow feel and even anticipate in the boiling of my blood. To my immense relief, however, the check-in clerk handed my passport back to me within a few minutes, without asking any questions, and instructed me very carefully, in that particular way in which check-in counter clerks often and so condescendingly do when they suspect or know that they’re dealing with newbie travellers, about what gate and at what time my departure would take place. But I took this advice kindly, wasted no time in making my way down to the designated gate, and sat down to wait for the fateful and seemingly minute of my departure even though the plane was scheduled to depart in a relatively short hour and a half. Going to the airport that morning was certainly a frightening ordeal. But I had visited this airport – the only one in the capital city serving the double function as Air Force base and international civilian airport – many times before particularly during my early adolescence. Aurora International Airport, as it is officially called, was located not too far away from my middle school, the Normal School for Boys in Zone 13 of Guatemala City, and being only a twenty-minute walk from the school through the back streets and through a few private fences it often became my site of choice for playing hooky several times a month and sometimes several times a week. The airport was the place where I could see all sorts of aircraft, civilian and military, national and international, landing and taking off all day long. This gateway into and out of the country felt to me like a place of dreams and possibilities, of happy encounters and hopeful goodbyes, which I knew there were dreams and possibilities beyond my social circumstances, but clearly not beyond my imagination. But the airport was also the place where as a young boy with absolutely no money I could find and collect one particularly precious and very coveted item among my peers, and do so entirely for free: bottle caps. Not just any bottle caps, but caps of bottled pop drinks from other countries and in other languages. These were the instruments I used, with some of my friends, to play a particular version of marble soccer. Marble soccer is a wonderful game. It is played on a square hand drown on the floor, with the size of the square depending on the mood of the evening or the available space between earthenware stove, beds and dining table. The square represents the soccer field, the bottle caps represent the players in soccer teams, and the marbles represent the soccer balls. This is one of those rare cases where having dirt floors in a house actually represents an advantage over marble tiles because dirt offers more resistance for the marbles, which in turn increases passing precision for the players, and does not require any school chalk or expensive markers. We played this game by hand, using our fingers to push the marbles around like soccer balls and make passes by hitting our own bottle caps and not the opponent’s, thus slowly or rapidly – depending on one’s skill – moving forward up the field and eventually scoring on the opponents goal net which we would make ourselves from a piece of chicken wire. As in the real thing, we divided marble soccer into two time periods, each period lasting about fifteen minutes, and with our players switching sides after the intermission. I could’ve easily put together various teams of bottle cap players with locally available pop drink caps, without going through all the trouble of skipping school, going all the way to the airport, risking being kicked out by security guards for loitering, and then lying to my parents about the whole ordeal – as I would often do about all of the most important affairs of my life. But this would mean resigning myself to using locally manufactured bottle caps and that was simply not good enough for an adolescent with World Cup-inspired internationalist aspirations. Bringing a whole set of players into the life of my tenement, risking school detentions and even jail on trumped up charges of loitering or worse, straight from the airport, and mostly with English names, was a much more preferable, even heroic, alternative to sticking with the local, rather prosaic, and cheap-looking options – even when in fact they were manufactured by local franchises, probably using the same manufacturing equipment, owned by the same foreign companies whose bottle caps I went through so much trouble to collect at the airport and which were inconspicuously - almost unconsciously - brought into the country by newly arrived American or European tourists only to end up in garbage cans. But to me the airport was like a gold mine of precious international treasure, considered garbage by tired and jetlagged passengers, but which I regarded as the real thing from abroad, the perfect line-up for a game of marble soccer in the middle of a poor tenement in 1970s Guatemala City. Memories of my childhood were, however, the last thing on my mind when I finally learned, about two months before my flight to Canada in October 1985, that I was going to have to go to the airport and take an initial flight to Miami. How am I going to get to the airport? How am I going to make it through customs? Am I going to make it to the airplane at all? What if the airplane can’t take off? These and other thoughts rushed through my mind when the Canadian Embassy finally had a definitive answer for me: my application for refugee status had been approved and, with a quickly issued Ministerial Permit, I was going to be able to travel to Canada and go to a place called “Quichener.” Yes, that’s how I spelled it on the small pocket agenda I had with me always on hand. I’d never heard of Quitchener before, never learned about this place in high-school geography, and if the subject of Canadian history was ever covered in any of my classes, and I don’t remember it at all, I would’ve probably missed it while playing hooky and collecting bottle caps at the airport or hanging out at the zoo. For that’s how I made through primary and most of high school in those dreary and darks years of the 1970s. Anything that I had actually heard about Canada when I was growing up, in fact, was pretty much vague and mostly from involuntarily listening to early morning news on shortwave radio - my father was a fan of the Voice of America Spanish newscast at six in the morning every day and, as a bonus for him, this was one of his least laborious ways of getting my brother and me out of bed and ready for school at 7 in the morning – it was that Canada was Montreal. So the fact that the name Kitchener comes from Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, a British field marshal, and that this town in southern Ontario got this name in 1916, having been called “Berlin” before that, was totally unknown to me. In fact, I didn’t even know how to spell the word Kitchener. And Spanish, being not only a phonetic language but also my mother tongue, very much dictated how this word was supposed to be spelled out and pronounced and thus, with a Spanish accent, “Quichener” was born in that imagined north-of-the-north country of my destiny. Soon after the news of my impending flight to Canada, when anything and everything Canadian finally caught my attention, I realized that Canada was not just Montreal. It wasn’t until after my arrival in Kitchener that I realized that Canada was everything I thought I could never have, the place I thought, as I walked into the airport on that dreadful morning in October 1985, I was never going to be able to reach. At last, the airplane landed safely with me on board at Pearson International Airport on that late afternoon of that typically Canadian autumn day. I had finally arrived. * This is draft version of a future autobiographical work. Not to be reproduced, reprinted or published without explicit permission from the author. Comments/question welcome at marco at marcofonseca dot net.