Rain at Any Moment . . . If It Wishes
- Lorainne Caputo
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
By Lorraine Caputo:
In Central America, you ask a local where you can catch a bus to where you want to go. You never know where you end up—at a station or a street corner to catch it. In Mexico, many times the distinction between 1st and 2nd class is whether sacks of grain, critters, or people standing in the aisles is allowed. No such distinction exists in Central America . . . or so it seems.
Next to me, a man holds a basket. Within, the chickens’ clawing of wicker fills the void between the minutes on the station clock slipping fifteen minutes past, a half-hour past the time we were to have left from here, Tegucigalpa, to San Macros in southern Honduras. And still we wait in line to board this three-generations-old first-class bus. Tied-off, 100-pound sacks of grain stack one atop another. The smell of diesel, fried plantains, and sweat fill the late-morning air.
Finally, we stumble aboard, many pushing one against another. Passengers slouch in sticky upholstered seats, fanning away the heat with folded newspapers.
I look at the seat number printed on my ticket and at the well-tanned woman who is sitting in it. “Excuse me, ma’am, but I believe you are sitting in my seat.” She turns her head, topped with well-coiffured, auburn-dyed hair, away from me. When I insist, she looks at me through her designer glasses, the graduating tint revealing glimpses of her glare. She humphs, grabbing her expensive purse that matches her equally expensive shoes that match her bright-yellow pantsuit, and moves to the aisle seat. An engraved watch embraces one wrist of her liver-spotted hands pointed by long, manicured nails.
It is cloudy a lot in Tegucigalpa. It could rain at any moment, if it wished. Guns tucked into the waists of several male passengers dully gleam in the weak sun. We begin to pull out into this city’s streets. I glance out the window at the military police guarding banks and government buildings, walking the streets carrying rifles and pistols. Just outside the city, on the razor-wire-topped fence surrounding a military base, a sign cautions: Mined Area.
We pass along a river. Its banks are covered with multi-colored clothes. In the middle of the current, women wash laundry on rocks. Half-naked children splash in the water. Occasionally, a conical oven stands like a beehive outside a home. Women walk on roadside paths carrying water in plastic native-styled jugs balanced on their head. The high mountains and low clouds dance with each other.
The woman next to me closes her eyes, her mind, to these scenes of the countryside. Each time the bus stops for vendors, her nephew demands that she give him this, buy him that. She daintily eats an orange he allows her to have. She pulls a soft tissue from her purse and gingerly wipes her fingers. Then, reaching over me, she tosses it all out the window.
That young child’s chubby legs dig into my thighs. He sticks his chubby arms and gold watch out the window, Rubik’s cube in hand. If it should fall, it is easily replaced. He is about nine or ten years old. He looks his age, unlike so many children here. He counts in English. He babbles and sings nonsense songs to himself. He throws a Payday wrapper out the window.
The mountains ahead are covered with clouds. We rattle past a second-class bus, the roof piled high with baskets, grain sacks, and plastic-wrapped boxes. We climb higher and higher into the mountains. It begins to rain. The fog is heavy, faint headlights point through the dark grey. Our bus pulls to the side of the rocky road to allow invisible trucks to pass, to allow passengers to squeeze through the ones standing in front and descend into the Netherworld outside. The clouds pulse with white lightning.
White-washed houses crouch in the night, their doors open to the cool air. Yellow lantern light from within blurs through the fog. People run inside, away from the pouring Honduran rain.
Wandering troubadour Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator, and travel writer. Her works appear internationally in over 500 journals and 24 collections of poetry, including In the Jaguar Valley (dancing girl press, 2023). She also authors travel narratives, articles, and guidebooks. She is a Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada honoree (2011) and four-time Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. Caputo has done literary readings from Alaska to Patagonia. She journeys through Latin America with her faithful knapsack, Rocinante, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth.
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