April 25th

Today would have been my great-grandmother Eva’s 125th birthday.

On a more contemporary note, today is San Marcos Day, all over the realm. Here in this San Marcos (Sierras), the stores are all closed and most of the people kick back digesting yesterday’s Easter steaks and cheap waxy chocolate eggs. But the Gauchos, both pseudo- and neo-, are out in full force. They’ve dawned their boots and their berets and their fancy chaps and they ride their handsome steeds around, looking completely out of time, until their cell-phones goes off with an Eminem ring tone. Or maybe Chakira. In the afternoon, they gather in the lot beside the church, along with the most celebratory of the town’s paisanos, and fire up a ten-foot-long grill to sell barbecued chicken by the half or the whole. There’s also wine available and Fernet and Coke served in former one-liter plastic water bottles halved down the middle. A hammered old man sings to a back up CD and a dozen couples dance chacarera and paso doble, kicking up enough dust to block out the sun and make me choke on my chicken. It’s a typically criollo sight, earthy and without pretense, and I wipe my dry, priveleged eyes and fall even deeper in love with this place.

But a part of me can’t help myself. A undoable slice of my mind keeps flying back towards The Other San Marcos, La Laguna, Guatemala, my former Home and the seat of the bulk of my nostalgia. There, an entire town, an entire Lake of Mayans, and a bunch of motley ex-pats too, are coming out to celebrate Saint Mark the Evangelist. But ironically, this is the one day San Marcos’s incessant evangelizing will cease. Today is a party day and even if the irritating religiosos wanted to keep preaching the word of their angry god, no culto’s loudspeakers are powerful enough to compete with the turn-it-up-to-eleven sounds of marimba and human merriment.

Days, weeks even, before the 25th, bombs and firecrackers start going off at all hours of the day and night. The locals, some of the poorest in the Americas, love to spend their microscopic sums of money on explosives—not visually pleasing fireworks, no Roman Candles, no Horsetails, nothing sparkly, just earth-shaking, eardrum-popping bombs, driving the dogs and the meditators to seek some peaceful shelter. (Futilely, of course.) Then there’s the marimba. The fucking marimba. From the Muni on the hill or from the basketball court in the middle of town, sometimes at the same time, Metallica-sized stacks of speakers stream live these ten-piece, xylophone-centred bands from about six am until three or four in the morning. And there is no escape for anyone unless it starts to rain or the electricity goes out. (Both very likely at some point, but neither will last long.) The only real cure for Feria is to bite the sound bullet, embrace the insanity, and join in the fun.

When I lived there, I loved San Marcos Feria like a child loves to be wrapped in her mother’s arms. This is what I wrote the last time I was there:

“I felt summoned by the Feria. I could tell the rain was just about to begin but I set out anyway. I had to hear the music up close, see the musicians in their tired matching suits and their funny little almost-in-sync moves. I caught a glimpse of the Big Act’s sexy dancers running out the back of Suzy’s restaurant. I saw Bartolo trying to hold up Isaías’s father (or maybe it was José’s uncle) and I saw another dozen late-stage drunks obliterated by cush. But my heart swelled and my eyes filled and I found it ALL SO BEAUTIFUL. I smiled as I passed the fetal alcohol family and I found them BEAUTIFUL too. The pile of pink-tinged dog shit that a bit of rain revealed to be a plastic bag that some hungry mutt couldn’t help but ingest, then expel. BEAUTIFUL. The half-tree all marked up by ritualized machete slashes. BEAUTIFUL. The bald-necked chicken running wildly through the feet of the passersby. BEAUTIFUL. The cheap Chinese chachkas, the trash and the bombs, the hand-powered Ferris wheel and all the drunken human destitution. All so beautiful today, or as beautiful as ugly can get. It expands in my chest and I feel like I’m going to choke on it. The rain falls at perfect angles and the sun is almost out and a part of me will surely die when I leave this place.”

In the end, I left and that part of me did not die, but just crystalized into a slice of blissful, purgatorial nostalgia.

What more is Home, anyway?