Lucia Duero
It’s the afternoon of February 22nd here on the Pacific coast of Mexico, in the state of Oaxaca. The town is as still and silent as a dead fish. Fruit and vegetable sellers quietly withstand the heat, an ancient lady kneads the dough for a tortilla under the roof of a ceaseless sky, oysters wait to be swallowed by destiny. Nothing unusual captures my eye, nothing unusual seems to be happening here. Yet under the sunny surface rests an unimaginable, unperceivable universe, and the air carries the news that would change the course of history.
The day I arrived in this town, I spread my weariness all over the place and began to sparkle like a morning ocean, waiting to be consumed by the dead of night. That very night the Russian army advanced towards Ukraine, the geographical neighbour of my homeland, and, strangely enough, the country where I was conceived. Military invasion would begin the following day. A sleepless night merged into a horrid version of timelessness that would mark the next days to come. Since then, a cloud of incomprehensible darkness has swallowed me, as if the world I knew ceased to make sense. I found myself lost in a labyrinth I thought I knew quite well how to circumvent.
I started this sentence with the expression in the meantime, a locution I often used and considered impartial, inoffensive, until I realized its implications in the current situation: in the meantime means not knowing, it means death, it means war. This previously neutral expression acquires a new meaning to me in circumstances when one cannot be neutral, suggesting a state of affairs with an intricate ‘before’ that has not even come to be yet.
It is like a waiting room except you do not know what you are waiting for, and how you ended up there.
In the meantime is also a collection of instances when everything loses sense and we struggle to fabricate a new one. In my own meantime, I drink lemonade with Don S., my taxi driver, while waiting for the fish I came to pick up at Brisas del mar. Don S. points out towards the strait where the drugs from Colombia arrive (not that I asked). “But nothing happens here, don’t you worry. They already bought them all.” If someone is killed, it’s only because they were selling a wrong product or were stupidly defrauded. They don’t touch the tourists.” For I am a tourist to Don S., a tourist that observes all but sees nothing and is untouched by this quiet exchange of goods and capital.
“Pure cocaine that needs to be cut,” he adds, as if I needed to know, and continues by saying that some parts end up in local beaches, available for sale even in the chicken shops, but most end up in the US market. He almost sounds like a tourist guide, as if the drug business, the culture it engendered and the violence it produces, was part of the tourist economy, something exciting to learn about for foreigners like me. The way it blossoms is through sandy beaches that host all the innocent, blameless dancers looking for freedom, a prerogative that can hardly be neglected by anyone.
Nonetheless, when things abruptly stop making sense, another type of sensibility emerges. It is like looking at another you that’s been walking behind you, as if suddenly the reflection in the mirror looked at you instead of you looking at it. No one knew what was to happen during the very first days of the war, or whether the conflict would extend to the neighboring countries. Some people in my homeland did, in fact, leave in fright, only to come back once they had reassessed their next steps. The rumors have it that when the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant was struck, iodine pills sold out in the entire country within a day. My family was paralyzed in shock, trying to maintain calm and act as if everything was under control, while secretly thinking of escaping to Mexico should things further develop. From the very first days of the war my country’s government and its volunteers started to organize and provide assistance to incoming Ukrainians at the border. My friends who knew of or had access to vacant flats offered them to the Ukrainian families, furnished them and made public recollections of furniture or anything that could be used to embellish them. Others shared job profiles of the newcomers seeking work. My little half-sisters have Ukrainian classmates in school now; one of the national newspapers decided to switch the Slovak translation of the Ukrainian capital, Kyjev, to Kyjiv, a phonetic transcription according to the pronunciation by the incoming refugees.
I am here at the coast, far away from where I would like to be despite all the odds, all the logic, anxiously scrolling news until exhaustion, as if my breath depended on every update.
Freedom is a magical word that can be used to justify anything or delude anyone. To fight for an idea, or to cross half of the planet. Is it even possible to grasp such a concept in all its sparkle? Precisely in these unusual, chaotic moments of history, I suddenly realised I was running away from something that was to define me forever, somewhere in the unknown land of the past, take away my freedom, as I would call it then, I ran far away as if running could ever solve the way one inhabits her own soul. Yet unjustifiable nostalgia that cannot, in no way, belong entirely to me due to its magnitude invades me as if my own, interior territory had no borders; as if being here or there did not matter at all, as if the depths of our longing were capable of getting hold of us in another continent. I yearn for the same unattainable freedom I was once fantasising about while I shelter a pessimist, hopeless soul that always dies over and over, only to find itself on strange coasts, drinking lemonade with taxi drivers.
In the meantime, while I wait and cannot stand waiting, the town decides its fate, if we are to believe such a thing is possible, in the local elections. Dry law is imposed, fruitlessly, because there is no law here. The result is not favourable for some, so ballot boxes are robbed. Problem solved. Business as usual. I can keep drinking now. But some did not even mention that elections were taking place, that dry law was imposed, that something was actually going on…or is it? To what point is it possible to dissimulate that nothing ever happens?
In the following days, as the war advances, I could only perceive my empty stomach unwilling to fill itself, nausea, nervousness, anxiety. When asked about the situation, even today, I want to cry and the cry wants me. I hold my tears and try to intellectualize the “topic”. The inability to contribute to what is becoming of history anyhow, and incoherent commentaries on the supposed ambiguity of the conflict, are slowly poisoning me, consuming the last drops of strength I was secretly saving in hope for a future that would count with me.
Three months later, at the end of May, I reach my homeland. On the way from the airport, the radio presenter announces that 100 days have passed since the invasion of our neighbor. All seems still, unchanged at a first glance. Only when a waiter in a local coffee bar does not seem to understand me do I realize she is Ukrainian. Suddenly, I start noticing Ukrainians everywhere: in the restaurants, on the streets, even in the Tatra mountains, spending their free time, waiting for some sort of a resolution, dwelling in the meantime.
I switched positions again: I am here, in the proximity of the war, reading about the violence erupting in Mexico: about the usual killings or narco-government confrontations and feminicides. If there ever was any illusion of safety, it evaporated during these last months. But strangely enough, I feel less anxious being here right now, almost ignoring the ongoing war. Am I slowly getting accustomed to it? Or is it an instrument the mind designs in order to live, to exist, a certain disregard of some sort of neighboring danger?
*
It’s been a few months since I returned to Mexico. I tried to finish this essay several times, I tried to find a moment, an expression that would provide for an epilogue, but there is none. The news no longer justifies the status quo, I keep avoiding the topic whenever possible, as one avoids a locus where we have been hurt, pretending it does not exist, that it never happened. Throughout the weeks, several strangers have asked me: Are you Ukrainian? For we do look alike, especially so far from our homelands. I have met Ukrainians here in Mexico, mostly young girls, and I looked down, just to control what would immediately grow in me: that absurd, incessant feeling one always pushes away, that thing I try to avoid at all cost.
The local media has mostly forgotten about the war in Ukraine, which, in the course of months, in the meantime, has become one of the many wars currently taking place; one of the many places being swallowed as one swallows a tear.