El modesto misterio

Author: Luis Guillermo Hernandez

Photo: Javier Garcia

Carlos lived for his mother and she proudly requited his fondness. The love of a Caribbean mother, living near the beaches of Triunfo de la Cruz, in Tela, Honduras, and the love of a garifuna boy, a handsome black Honduran almost 20 years old with a dream in his eyes. “He wanted to lift his mother, Isadora, out of poverty…give his mother everything. He was the only son, and here he couldn’t do that, that’s why he decided to leave.”Alejandro, his uncle, says that he still seems to be seeing Carlos when he was a cipote of 11, 13 years old: he milked the cows and herded the neighbor’s cattle through the mountains of his village, hugged his mother, took care of his five sisters and ran to the beach to play with the other cipotes garifunas: the new blood of a culture born around 1635 when Spanish ships loaded with African slaves shipwrecked near the island of San Vicente and the first garifunas swam, released to the nearby shores, to later mingle and expand into what today are Honduras, Belize, and Guatemala. Tall as the palm trees of the Atlantic coast, well built, muscular, with a wide smile and fleshy mouth that display dark tones, Carlos had two passions: soccer, in which he played defense as if he were a professional, and music. He was born the year “Sopa de Caracol” by the Honduran group Banda Blanca won the heart of half of Latin America with a dance known as “Punta” garifuna– “Watbuinegui consup, watabuinegui wanaga, si tu quieres bailar sopa de caracol eh!” Perhaps that was why he liked to dance. He would go to a club in the nearby town of Tela, because there they played modern music like pop, reggaetton, and “Punta” which his mother liked to dance, as well. But Carlos could no longer stay in his village; watching his mother strive for money hurt him – the pride of the black male. “It didn’t suit him anymore. You know what it’s like; one week there’s work, the next there’s none. It was Carlos’ first time, leaving Triunfo.” He expected to reach Miami and his uncles, who had the money to pay the smugglers for getting him and his other uncle Junior Basilio Espinoza across. The night of their departure, having thought that they would find a job at a restaurant or even in the orange groves of Florida, Carlos sported a red shirt with a bright golden eagle and Junior a white shirt. They decided that’s how they would dress to enter the paradise of abundant pay. “Perhaps they were told they would arrive that same night and that’s why they wore those clothes…and with those same clothes on, they were killed”. Alejandro, who’s talking, moves the phone away from his mouth and begins to cough: 72 murders together annihilate any throat, any soul, any possible hope of any country. Almost three months after his departure on August 9,2010, Carlos Alejandro has not yet returned to Honduras. Isadora waits impatiently for her son. “Every day, every week they tell her he’s arriving, he’s arriving, and he never arrives.” The love of a Caribbean mother, she’s waiting to take him in her arms, to sing him uragas garifunas that tell the legends Carlos would have liked to hear about his own life. She will retell the love of a loving young man and then she will proudly return his body to the sands of the coast of Triunfo de la Cruz. 

Translated by: Lucy Riera and Cindy Riano