Geckos

   There are two mountain ranges in Chiapas. The northern range, which is pine-y on top, gets cold at night and while there are plenty of reptiles active during the day, I never saw any geckos. The southern range, which is a part of the Sierra Madre Occidental, is lush and tropical. In fact, as you climb the northern face of this range, travelling south towards Tapachula and the Guatemalan border, you reach a point just past the crest of the mountains where the landscape flips totally, like you’ve just stepped out of a plane in a distant country, the climate changing abruptly and the steam and cloud coming down and with vivid green and broad-leaved everything. This is Soconusco, and it turned out to be full of geckos. The whole south of the country is full of geckos. As I sit here in this hotel patio, I can hear a gecko barking from behind the Linksys wireless router affixed to the wall of the courtyard, right under a brick overhand.

    The gecko sits under the eaves and keeps to himself and eats bugs that enter the home. He is a true friend of the working man. But the call of the gecko disturbs people. The gecko is quiet for long stretches but will periodically emit an uncanny chattering sound, like a bird with no music, a very dry chuckle. It’s a distinctive, staccato bark. It travels long distances on a quiet evening, but more often than not it startles you by coming from immediately over your head. You believed you were alone! This trick, this phantasagorical announcement of arrival, must be where the gecko gets his reputation as a vehicle of the spirit world.

    This shot of two geckos in an intimate embrace I took in Pijijiapan, an engagingly charmless little town on the southern coastal highway, where we spent a night in order to see the Pacific Ocean.

    We decided afterward that it had been worth the trouble, even though we didn’t get to swim. A mini-bus dropped us at the hamlet of Chocohuital, where a couple youths were lolling under an awning at the riverside. To get to the ocean, you have to cross a mangrove estuary which stretches a good long way down the state, kind of like on the coast of Florida. For ten pesos you clamber into a motorboat with one of the kids, and he pilots you out on the channel (or whatever you call this body of water) with a roar and a puff of gas fumes, and as you get nearer and nearer to the other shore, the buffer of land a hundred yards wide that’s supposed to defuse ocean storms, you can make out that there’s almost nothing on this spit of land in either direction. As you climb out onto the sagging dock the kid asks you when you want to be picked up again.

    We spent about three hours. We walked down the beach for a while in a westerly direction, watching the waves come pounding in, meeting a cross-angles, ripping and sweeping. Later we learned a hurricane had struck up in Acapulco. The only signs of life anywhere down the shore were the ghostly little crabs cruising out in the downbeat of the tide, and a washed-up pufferfish, which was probably dead.

   Then we went back to the one inhabited site we’d seen.  A pleasant older woman was running a kind of beach hut, under a big awning. Three sunburnt drunks, a women and two men, were sitting around a table well in from the tide, serving themselves from the family-size beer bottles called caguamas and brooding like Furies. We sat in the sun for a while and let ourselves be hypnotized by the vast glassy tubes rolling in and the surf beating up like mist. When I went to use the bathroom, the older, less-intelligible of the two men approached R and asked her to write her name on his leathery arm in ballpoint. Then he wrote his own name and made a heart around it! What a funny guy! The kid who was scheduled to pick us up never actually showed, but we realized if we stood on the dock and waved across to the mainland, another of the lolling youths would come sputtering over with a motorboat. On this trip we noticed the junior ferryman was sitting next to a bulky black garbage bag and I asked what was in it. “Lifejackets,” he said. I feel like a part of me is still trapped on that spit of land, watching the crabs and nodding to the wheedling drunks, waiting for the boatman.

    Out on the patio here, ants are on to the remains of a bird-eaten cockroach. I see the six scattered legs, the wing covers, and the discarded stump-end of an abdomen--the ‘roach’ as it were. A very pretty little bird is singing and I wish I could identify it. I can see it clearly, there are fine white stripes on its cheeks and on the underside of its tail. It is probably a White-Cheeked something. White-Cheeked Warbler, I bet.