I’ve been slacking. It’s been a while since my last post,
even though so many things have happened and I wanted to write about them
all. I wanted to write about Dia
del Professor, when the kids of 5B
blindfolded me and Miss Cecelia, their head teacher, led us to the classroom
and then threw confetti and popped balloons. About how after we all ate cake, and they didn’t believe me
when I told them that we don’t have teacher’s day in the US, or student’s day
either, or no, not even Dia del Nino
(which is essentially mother’s day for kids).
I wanted to write about how to the
school celebrated Teacher’s Day with a lunch for all the teachers in the
eleven-school network, about how we took a bus with plush seats an hour south
of Santiago and the teachers danced in the aisles until one of the inspectors,
the one who always makes announcements at breakfast, told them to sit down and
be quiet. The restaurant was
beautiful, a low-sitting, ranch-style building that opened into a wide green
lawn. The meal began with pisco
sours and salad, and their there was the main course while they called names
for a raffle and then dessert, but the real fun began when the raffle was over
and the wine opened and everyone who wasn’t outside smoking was dancing, the
old teachers and the younger ones, the media teachers and the ones who teach basico, Chemistry and literature and computer sciences and,
of course, English. We danced
until one of the other inspectors, the woman with the dark curly hair who all
the students are afraid of, tripped on the stage and fell. Her glasses bounced from her face and
swung, tethered to her body by the beaded safety chain. Someone helped her up and she put her
glasses back on her nose and continued dancing, and everyone else went back to
dancing too, and we danced until the band left, heading for their own bus, and
for a moment I thought we were going to keep dancing, bouncing between the
empty speakers. We didn’t, of
course. We went to Bellavista for
beer.
I wanted to write about last
Sunday, when I took Gala, my roommate’s golden retriever, out for a walk. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the
fountain in the plaza in front of my apartment building sparkled. I hadn’t even made it out of the plaza
when I saw them, the crowd coming down Arturo Prat. It was a perfect day for a walk, but now there would be
carabineros and tear gas and smoke bombs, and I looked more gringa than ever
walking a blond dog. I was about
to head back inside when I noticed that the crowd wasn’t normal, that they
weren’t banging pots with heavy spoons but that instead they were staggering,
walking down the street with wild, uneven gaits.
I
paused, stepping back towards the fountain so that I could watch them pass and
still be close enough into run to my building if I needed to. I waited, peering at the slow moving
figures down the street, and it wasn’t until they were only a few yards from me
that I realized what they were.
Hundreds of people dressed as zombies. Wearing ripped clothes, covered in fake blood, staggering
like zombies. While I stood by the
fountain, a few of them tried to climb the gates in front of the huge church
that sits across from my plaza.
Gala, as well trained as ever, sat down and sniffed at the air, looking
bored. The zombies groaned and banged
on the metal and probably got fake blood on the stairs, but they didn’t ever
really get close to scaling the fences.
I don’t really think they were trying.
Apparently
a “zombie walk” is a fairly normal thing—at least, it’s something that happens
in cities all over the world. I
didn’t know this, and so spent at least ten minutes watching the zombies
stagger by my plaza, trying to figure out how this could relate to the student
protests. There had to be some
connection between the undead and those denied education, between life and
university, right? Later, I read
in the newspaper that although 2,500 people had participated in the zombie
walk, it didn’t have an organized political message.
After
about fifteen minutes Gala and I left, walking away from the zombies and then
turning north. Of course, when we
got to Alameda, no more than ten minutes into our walk, the street was
closed. This time, I stood behind
the carabineros who were redirecting traffic and watched the humongous crowd
wave flags that exclaimed La Alegría de Ser Catolico!—The Joy of Being Catholic! The same newspaper said that almost 40,000 Catholics
participated in this event, and it could easily be true; all I know is that
wide Alameda was swollen from sidewalk to sidewalk, and that when I watched
carefully I could see a few lost zombies, staggering and stumbling through the
crowd.
But since this a blog, I feel like
I should be talking about things that happened recently—today! Yesterday! Or,
at least, this week. So I’m going
to tell you about the run I went for on Sunday, sticking to the shady side of
Santa Isabel until I hit Vicunna Mackenna, turning left to run through Parque
Bustamante.
It
was a perfect day. Warm, but not
hot. The sunlight sparkled, the
shade was dappled. The
breeze, light and warm, kissed my cheeks as it slid by, carrying tiny white
flower petals with it, just-bloomed springtime petals that had jumped into the
wind and now floated, dancing their way down through the air. There was a ferria at the south end of
the park, the vendors spreading their secondhand clothes and hand-made jewelry
across colorful cloths, and their wares seemed to sparkle, the same cheap rings
they sell in every part of the city now shining brilliantly. I ran past, glad I hadn’t brought any
money with me.
In
the center of the park is a library/café, a building with tall windows and a
wide, open terrace looking out onto a long pool. I don’t think you’re supposed to swim in the pool—it’s long
and shallow, more of a fountain really—but it was full of kids, splashing and
jumping and yelling to each other.
There were a few dogs in the pool too, probably strays, panting happily
in the shaded corner.
The
city should build more of these pools for the dogs, because as I kept running I
noticed that the strays that are everywhere, sleeping in the parks and on the
sidewalks and chasing cars on the side of the road, looked cleaner than normal,
and happier too. And usually I
hate pigeons, but on a bench at the north end of the park a homeless man sat
cradling one in his hands, cooing to it softly, and as the bird sat quietly and
let him it was almost cute.
I reached the end of the park and
turned around, running back south, when the man with the bicycle cart fell in
beside me, slowly pedaling the heavy weight of the piles of snack bars and
cookies, chips and soft drinks. I
stopped to let him pass, and that was when I realized that it was a day when
everything was beautiful. Not just
the trees and the sky and the long shallow pool, but everything. The bags of lays potato chips hanging
from the bicycle cart swung slowly back in forth, moving to the beat of the
man’s pedal strokes. They
glimmered, those plastic bags of papas fritas swaying in the sun, as if they were something special.
The plaza pre-Zombie invasion
One week later, the church still looks exactly the same
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