La venta Darío

I’m sitting with Carol who sells empanadas and eating lunch at the little table inside her tent. We talk about boxing because I just came from the class. I’m wearing my uniform, half soaked in sweat. My hair and skin is sweaty and glistening in the direct sun. She says she wants to box too so she can have a slim figure. She has a dreamy look on her face asking about the gym and the price of the membership. It’s obvious she won’t go, but she likes to imagine for a moment that she will. Last month she said she wanted to learn salsa and we made plans to go dancing but she never came. She’s from Nicaragua. Her little tent is named Dario, after Ruben Dario himself. Her hero, the pioneer of suffering and dreams.

In the five seconds it takes for me to respond, she can imagine another version of her life. She smiles, looks for away onto the road, in a direction that’s not specific. She can picture herself as that woman. “One hundred… and twenty… a month, but that’s the foreigner price. It’s just the foreigner price, I can ask them…” I try to make my response longer than necessary. She nods slowly, the dream has flown too far, out of her line of vision.

A lot of Latinos make promises they don’t keep. They sell me dreams. I find it infuriating to be honest. But I must admit, there is something beautiful about a fantasy, a dream. It’s not nothing, it exists somewhere, somewhere in that direction in between roads, in between the five seconds. Hope itself is not bad, it is a tenderness towards life that has nowhere to land. It is the dove of Noah’s ark, embarking on a mission, flying relentlessly, in search of land. There are worse habits than hope, much, much worse. 

Some women dream of being my friend. They dream of being me, free from their social duties. Some men dream of being my partner, my confidante. Oh what demons and monsters they could defeat if only they were my hero? They hold those dreams close, too close to even make a step towards making it real. No one makes plans to see me.

My back is sore. I’m the novice of the academy, which means I lose every fight. I’ve been boxing enough times to know it’s not what she imagines. I like it for the discipline. I like it because I find it fun to do something I don’t want to do. I don’t dream about it. My experience of boxing and her dream of boxing are different pleasures, not better or worse, not comparable at all. 

Why do I write? What is fiction and poetry for, is it a bridge between the world of dreams and the world of action? Who am I writing for if not to fly next to them? Flying over ocean to search for a new world, a dream displaced by colonizers. But the dreams include the colonizers too, it includes everyone, that’s what the master doesn’t know, they don’t know what the slave dreams of. No one knows how beautiful those dreams ever were.