A Wake and a Visit from Spiderman

I have a friend at the instituto, Isolina, who is the groundskeeper/janitor.  She rakes the leaves and sweeps and mops the walkways and waters the plants.  I’d guess she is about 45 years old.  She has a little son, maybe eight years old and some grown children, too.  Isolina worked for Doña Candida making rosquillas several years ago.  I brought her Christmas cookies last year and she lights up when she sees me.

This week Isolina’s father died as I found out while visiting Candida’s sister yesterday afternoon.  He had been in the hospital in Somoto and had died of a heart condition at age 80 that very morning at 11 o’clock. There would be a wake that evening at his house.  The next morning he would be buried. Internments happen fast for obvious reasons in this hot climate. I thought I should go to the wake for Isolina’s sake, but frankly I was scared. I don’t know anything about mourning traditions here and although the community is used to seeing me around, I felt I’d be a real oddity at the wake, maybe an unwelcome distraction.  But friendship trumps fear.   I found out that the appropriate amount of time to stay was between 15 minutes and a half hour.  I figured I could handle that.

I entered the small adobe house to find Isolina sitting in a plastic chair, one of 5 or 6 set against the wall, most occupied by fellow visitors.  She was sobbing. Her face was covered by a little terry towel and someone was trying to comfort her.  When I appeared the comforter gladly stepped aside and I took her place.  “Ah Carol,” wailed Isolina, “my papa is dead, my papa is dead.  I will never see him again.”  She grabbed me around the waist, burying her head in my chest,  and held tight as I bent over to cradle her head and pat her shoulder.  I kissed the top of her head and said how sorry I was.  I don’t know if that was the right thing to do.  When I looked around people were staring.  Maybe I was too physical or maybe they were just taking in the oddity of the situation.  Isolina and I rocked back and forth for a while.  I don’t know how to say this without appearing insensitive, but she really wasn’t crying—there were no tears-- but she was grieving aloud nonetheless. After a bit I thought I probably should step aside.  I told her I’d sit down for awhile and she offered me a chair.  I had the first moment to see where I was and what was going on.

The house consisted of a single small adobe room with rough dirt floor and no windows, although there was a front door and another out to the back yard where the kitchen and latrine were. There were people out back cooking and talking; one of them, I learned, was Isolina’s mother.  From time to time, people came in carrying sacks of food, bread rice, and beans and walked them through the house out to the back.  The one room house had a single electric light usually, but that day there were two more electric light bulbs atop two rough carved wooden posts .  These were placed on either side of a coffin, open to show the face of the deceased.  On this hot day there was a fan directed at the coffin. People were milling around outside and from time to time children would come in and out.  Once two small boys sidled up to the coffin to look, but Isolina shooed them out. 

The visitors began to take their leave of Isolina and she thanked them for coming.  One stopped to look at the deceased and make a sign of the cross.  Isolina and I sat there quietly for a while.  I asked her a couple of questions about her family.  She wasn’t sobbing anymore.  When a new visitor appeared, I took the opportunity to leave, stopping at the coffin briefly, long enough to see that the corpse was not made up.  There was white cotton in its nose and mouth. Dead.

Later I asked Candida what would happen that night.  Isolina’s father was a member of the “culto”, the Nica name for evangelicals, and the members of that church would be at the house in the evening.  The family would be there all night, providing coffee and bread for the visitors and feeding the extended family that would be staying over till the morning. Isolina will be back at work on Monday.

Sobering afternoon.  That evening, though, during coffee hour, I was amazed to see Spiderman cavort by the gate to the house. He was swooping down crouched low sending out webs in good Spidey style. I did a double take.  I never see children playing imagination games here.  And I have never seen a child in a costume, even the kinds my kids made from kitchen towels safety pinned to the shoulders of their shirts. Spidey was little Freder who lives on the corner.  His birthday is this week and his aunt from Matagalpa brought him the Spiderman (pronounced Espiderman) costume from the big city. There was a shirt, pants and a head hugging cloth mask. I was so happy to see him playing like that and he was happy to show me the costume and the mask.  We practiced making webs with the right finger action and he was off stooping down the street.

Freder makes me wonder what is up here with the dearth of pretending. Pretending seems to me such a basic part of childhood, so essential a part of being a kid, that I wonder how Nica children get on at all without it.  What are they missing?  It’s like my feeling about the fact that they don’t read books, like something essential is missing and its loss must have serious developmental effects.

Or maybe I’m just not observant enough.  Maybe pretending is going on all around me and I just don’t see it till it has a costume. Maybe what seems essential to me is just customary in the States. Maybe there are parallel ways of growing to happy adulthood, one not better than the other, just different. Don’t know.   I’m going to do more investigation of this one and will let you know.