Signs, Wonders, and Ecuadorian Elvis

We have friends here in Merida. It was already a polyglot crew, but now we seem to have inherited a Poligano posse as well.

Poligano is a fraccionamiento, or perhaps a colonia in the northwestern part of the city. No one calls a neighborhood a barrio here. The older sections of the city are called colonias, and the planned developments are called fraccionamientos. Poligano isn’t much of either. It’s an area with a mix of building styles, almost entirely single family homes. It’s where real people live. Working class, and mostly poor. In many ways, it’s the polar opposite of the colonia of Santiago, where we live. We live south and west of the main part of the city, which we can walk to. Poligano is towards the northeast corner of the city. You can’t walk to anywhere from there but more Poligano. Our new Poligano friends exhibited a brand of friendship I recognize, but only dimly, like a black and white movie on a VHS tape. It has not been on offer in the country of my birth for a long time.

They are cousins of one of our original friends here in Merida. They have a big family and get together at the drop of a sombrero and party down. They decided to throw my wife a surprise birthday party. She never caught on, even after it was well underway, because she couldn’t envision something like that happening to her. It had to be explained to her that this party was in her honor, and these people had gathered to celebrate it, as if she was three years old.

Their house is one in an endless row of mismatched masonry dovecotes. It’s hacienda style, I guess, but only technically. The front of the house is a big iron gate, nothing more than a heavy screen. The front room is a garage, sort of, but garages are tiled here, and rarely used for parking cars. The streets are skinny and filled with cars that have seen better days, but will see many more days anyway. For instance, across the street was a glorious 1970-ish VW bus, painted various fetching shades of pink (by brush and roller). It had four flat tires. On either side of it were cars fifteen years newer than our old Volvo back in the states, so I’m not sure exactly what you can infer from that.

The garage had long tables set up in it, lots of mismatched chairs, and a television of the size that would make your children invoke the Geneva Convention if you tried to make them watch it. There were cheap speakers screwed to the walls, the ghost of boomboxes past, I guess, ready for a fiesta at all times. On the wall was a shrine to Our Lady of Guadeloupe, surrounded by Christmas lights. It’s a staple around here.

I tell you what, you have not lived until you are taken in, like stray cats, and eat tacos prepared in a kitchen with no running water (until it rains again, and the cistern fills up), and put yourself outside of arctic cervezas that sweat only a trifle more than you do in the heat. You dance and sing along with an Ecuadorian Elvis, hired to bring his karaoke machine and perform. Was he good? I told him that if he was around when my mates and I were still performing pop song covers back in the day, we’d have put him out front and in five minutes we’d make a grand a night, and two on the weekends. He replied that it wasn’t important, because he was an electrician all day, and didn’t need the money, really.

So Marcello the Ecuadorian Elvis sat on his drum seat throne, clutched his sequinned microphone, and held court for three hours. The crowd ebbed and flowed the whole time, extended family showing up, young men immuring themselves in some interior chamber and playing video games, venturing out for Cokes and cake. At one point, a handful of people were delivering a refrigerator to the house next door from the corroded bed of an ancient Datsun pickup, and danced and sang along on the sidewalk to some slice of Saturday Night Fever that Marcello was improving.

Ecuadorian Elvis was a riotmaster, and got each and every person to get up and sing, either with him, or against him, or next to him, but it had to happen. My wife, who is the shyest person on earth, manufactured the verve to sing Walk on By like the little angel she is. Then Marcello did the impossible, and made me bellow out New York, New York, because to an Ecuadorian, Maine is New York. I was informed that fourteen stray cats were found dead the next day, but I maintain the evidence of my guilt is tenuous at best. There was no indication that they took their own lives, for instance.

And lovely Elsie baked my wife a glorious cake and we all sang Happy Birthday in Spanglish.

We took an Uber home, late, the only long drive we’ve ever had in this town. The car was an MG of the sort you can’t buy in the US. It was an elegant four-door sedan, with leather seats, and the air conditioning set on stun. The city passed by, Egyptian-style in the side windows, an endless scroll of nightlife and fast food and cantinas, dog walking, lovers walking hand in hand, with scooters and buses fighting for primacy in the roundabouts, until we arrived home.

As we turned the key in our lock, the iron grates of the house across the street opened up with a metallic groan, a party with twenty people appeared seated in their garage, and an honest to goodness Mariachi band started playing.

It’s just like that here. Happy birthday, Mrs. King.