And Quito especially-wedged into a valley of volcanoes, layered with pre-Inca, Inca, and Spanish cosmology, and quite literally as close to the Sun god as an Earth-bound person can get. Quintos en Quito: Magical realism is best connected to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s books but the Colombian writer was simply surfacing a way of seeing the world by many in these parts, born partly out of a syncretism of Catholicism and indigenous beliefs and a history where life was often lived on the edge, subject to paroxysms of nature and politics. Que te vaya bien, he said, which seems a fitting wish for all the world today. And I had a revealing conversation with an Uber driver who told me of his recent experience getting arrested in Texas for immigration issues, being transferred between detention centers four times, and finally being flown back to Quito from Georgia a month later-shackled-in a plane with some 100 other Ecuadorians with similar problems I was near tears when he dropped me off 20 minutes later, though he assured me he bore no rancor against anyone and was simply grateful it happened to him and not his kids. I shared a wholesome meal and a delightful couple of hours with a friend I’ve enjoyed getting to know better. Today I said goodbye to my Spanish teacher of the last month and the other teachers and fellow students (from Australia, Denmark, Canada, and the U.S.). On a day in which we heard news of man’s capacity to hurt others, I am more keenly aware of how humans can also connect in the best and most ordinary of ways. It all came to a bitter end when the novio of one of Mercedes’s sisters arrived with a perro grande and before anyone could say “no coma esa paloma,” there was a dead bird, a sheepish dog, and a family in shock. The dove came back one day with una esposa, and then later, with hijos, to which he all gave names. That dove followed him everywhere he went, and it would sway when he played the guitar in the afternoons (though it may have been because he’d always give the bird a bit of his liquor). Mercedes Prado was my teacher this week ( Cristobal Colón Spanish School) and while we worked on the past perfect and the imperative tenses, I was also learning about the protest singer Mercedes Sosa, the burial rituals of the imperial Inca, and my teacher’s father, a noted sculptor from Ibarra who could communicate with animals and once rescued a dove with an injured wing, nursed it back to health, and named it Juan. It’s not just about being able to communicate well in another tongue, but hidden in the folds of language are the secrets of culture and history, and social connection. Those neurons in the brain aren’t firing as fast as they used to, but I’m enjoying being a student.
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