mariposa negra

Last night while we were eating dinner, the duena (landlady) came to talk to my host mom. The corner convenience store had just been robbed. My roomates and I stared around the table at one another, frozen to our seats. The store is not 75 feet from where we were sitting, and we had heard nothing.

I thought about the night before, when I had walked there alone at 10:30pm, to buy apple juice. I remembered the bored-looking clerks, two of them, young men, who explained to me that one of the refrigerators was broken so if I wanted cold juice, I would have to buy apple, and not grape, as I had originally asked for. I thought about what could have happened if I had chosen to go a day later.

We briefly considered not going out that night, but decided to go dancing anyway. Spent the night dancing (or in my case, trying to dance) to salsa at a club called Casbah under the arch.

Today at lunch, Dona marta told us that there is a black trash bag tied to the door of hte store in the shape of a bow or butterfly. The clerk had not just been robbed--he had been shot dead.

It seems to wrong that at the exact moment I was sitting down at dinner, discussing where to go dancing that night, less than half a black away someones life was slipping away.

There are 200 violent attacks, mostly robberies and mostly in the capital, on the camionetas (chicken buses) every day. Every other day or two the newspapers fill up with the count of people who had been shot dead on the buses that day. Last friday, there were 12. Yet every afternoon, the buses roll by, packed to the gills with passengers and laden with luggage tied to the roof.