| My Futile Struggle for Stillness
ZIPOLITE, Mexico — When in mid-March “Quedate En Casa,” or “stay at home,” became the coronavirus rallying cry for the Spanish-speaking world, ...
|
- May 24, 2020
- Help us report in critical moments.
My Futile Struggle for Stillness
I
am isolating in a Mexican village, alternating between being impressed by my
capacity for serenity and wanting to strangle myself for descending into
triteness of Eat, Pray, Love proportions.
By Belen Fernandez
Ms. Fernandez is the author of “Exile:
Rejecting America and Finding the World.”
Credit...Cristóbal
Schmal
ZIPOLITE,
Mexico — When in mid-March “Quedate En Casa,” or
“stay at home,” became the coronavirus rallying cry for the Spanish-speaking
world, I had just arrived from El Salvador to the village of Zipolite on the
coast of southeastern Oaxaca State in Mexico.
My plan was to
continue on to Mexico City and then, over the course of the next couple of
months, to Turkey, Spain, Greece, Lebanon and Madagascar.
I left the
United States upon graduating college in 2003, after the giddy launch of the
war on Iraq had convinced me that America was not any place I needed
to be. I began hitchhiking, inaugurating a habit of haphazard and frenetic
international movement that would characterize the next 17 years.
The itinerancy
was, it seemed, because of a mix of acute commitment-phobia, an aspiration to
omnipresence and a deep envy of people who possess more of a culture than our
soul-crushing consumerism and military slaughter-fests.
For someone
with no fixed address, much less country of residence, “staying at home” was a
novel and initially terrifying concept. A mandatory curfew was not imposed in
Zipolite, but the local assembly voted to erect checkpoints around the village
to restrict access and departures. With only a few thousand inhabitants, there
were no reported coronavirus cases, but the nearby town of Pochutla was said
to have between zero and three, while the number of conspiracy theories was
infinite.
I was issued
an identity card permitting me to travel once a week to Pochutla for
groceries. The Mexican police and Marines were deployed on the beach and
ordered people indoors — a strategy that, mercifully, was never enormously
effective.
I rented an
apartment for an unspecified period and assumed I would careen straightaway
into a claustrophobia-induced nervous breakdown. A coronavirus checkpoint
materialized in front of my apartment, manned by cops and volunteers who would
not let me step out of or, more curiously, into the house without a face mask.
A thick rope was stretched across the road.
Having been in
constant motion for so long, being trapped indefinitely was quite the
conundrum. I braced myself and lived in fear of whatever my mind was preparing
to pull. I ran in circles around a soccer field and plotted what to do in the
event of a real lockdown, which involved hiding in the woods by day and
sneaking to the sea at night. In a recurring nightmare, I was deported to the
United States — where I had vowed to never again set foot, partly in the
interest of my own mental health.
While my
travels brought me into regular contact with the fallout of American
atrocities from Honduras to Vietnam, a smattering of visits to the homeland
confirmed that the United States was a monument
to inequality and corporate excess.
The pandemic
has provided the United States another opportunity to shore up elite tyranny,
persecute black people, deport
migrants, eradicate the notion of health care as a right and carry on with
other national pastimes that predated the plague of Donald Trump.
Suddenly,
then, “Quedate En Casa” sounded like a marvelous idea. Here in quarantined
Zipolite, requisite human interaction has come in the form of Javier, a
diminutive septuagenarian from the central Mexican city of Cuernavaca, who is
also stuck in the village. He spends every evening in a plastic chair by the
sea, smoking cigarettes, drinking mezcal, writing meticulously in a notebook,
and — having recently discovered the internet — listening to Bach on his
cellphone.
On
most nights I join him, and he recounts his activities of the day: Watering
the plants on a small plot of land he owns and distributing mangoes to
whomever he thinks might give him a smile in return. We commit to creating a
better world after coronavirus and work diligently toward that goal by, you
know, staring at the sea. I alternate between being impressed by my newfound
capacity for stillness and simplicity and wanting to strangle myself for
descending into triteness of Eat, Pray, Love proportions.
I purchase two
candles for my new home, some cleaning rags and a bucket for washing clothes,
and feel like the most domesticated, settled person ever. I set about
canceling all of my pending travel tickets. I watch Turkish
telenovelas because when else will I have the time? I stumble across
a quote from the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: “Be still. Stillness reveals the
secrets of eternity,” and auto-strangulation appears imminent.
Previously,
I had preferred to view my peripatetic habits with the help of a quote from
Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, in
which ethnographer Father Martin Gusinde describes the Indigenous Yaghans of
Tierra del Fuego: “They resemble fidgety birds of passage, who feel happy and
inwardly calm only when they are on the move.” Inner calm was never exactly my
forte, but it was certainly a useful excuse for not sitting still and sorting
my life out.
The “birds of
passage” approach also produced a scattered sense of self, as I scattered
belongings across various geographical locations and endeavored to conduct
parallel lives in different landscapes. Ostensibly, then, sweating in place in
Zipolite and watching ants crawl across my stomach is the time to focus on
being one person for a change.
But the
newness of sedentary existence gradually wears off, and my mind begins to
fidget. I start missing countries, cities, and streets like they are people.
By the time I complete my 20-minute morning trek down the beach, I’ve already
transported myself back to Samarkand, Sarajevo, Tunis. I wonder what kind of
person complains about riding out the apocalypse in paradise.
At home I sob
and convulse for no reason, or maybe for the world, or maybe for everything I
have spent the past 17 years not dealing with. And while I still want to be
simultaneously everywhere else, I also want to be still, in Zipolite, forever.
I sit by the
sea with Javier. He assures me that the world will change for the better after
the pandemic, although he hasn’t yet devised a precise solution for climate
change, capitalism or the disruptive machinations of my homeland.
Of course, my
current privilege of stillness — just like my privilege of relentless roaming
— is thanks to a passport bestowed by the United States. And as the secrets of
eternity remain elusive, it seems there are plenty of things to stop and think
about.
Belen
Fernandez is the author of “Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World,”
and a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine.
The Times is committed to
publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear
what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion
section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Experts suggest the creature may have been a feisty, nontoxic, Mexican bullsnake.
