Bailando

*a post taken from another blog. See Construction page. This entry is from 2022, in Quito, Ecuador.

They are dancers here. Merengue, Cumbeye, Salsa. In the school where I intern, I watched the third graders dance the San Juanita. A line of small girls and boys facing each other, peeling off to their respective sides, coming around again to meet and cross in the middle. Tiny, trotting legs and bobbing heads, tap-tapping in strange rhythm to the shadowy, guttural tones of the old ceremonial music.

This near incongruity pervades the culture of Ecuador. The pomegranate and turquoise tones of the Indigenous dress and the warm hospitality of humitas and café. The people are both here – utterly elegant, but with a kind of deep, damp, human elegance born from warm earth.

I met the owners of a tiny outdoor restaurant in the park this week – married for 41 years, owning the restaurant for the same. They told me to come back the next day and taught me how to make Watita, an Ecuadorian plate of peanuts and potatoes. “Riquisimo” as Jorge deems it. I fed green oranges to the jugo machine as birds chirped in rhythm to its grinding and the cadence of conversation caught me up. I listened to the lazy lull of the regulars, drinking juice of mora and eating almuerzo here for years and years.

In another kitchen I made oatmeal cookies. I watched the dance of broken Spanish and American galletas and slipping through an impromptu salsa lesson on the floured kitchen floor. My belly remembers both the cookies and the laughter.

Everyone dances here. Even the mountains. I love shooting the riverbed between them high in the tour bus. The utter richnesses of green envelope my sight, dotted with scraped places where the cows roam. The widespread tilt of the horizon, the edges, the angles, are flung like the limbs of a dancer with perfect, teetering precision.

Last night, I sat on my slanted roof with the city lights flung like stars below. In the slow, cool wind and the yellow street light, saxophone notes rose on the air. Someone played from the other roof, invisible to me. I saw for a moment – the whole desperate, undoing dance of those stars, those stars that are families and lonely abuelas and bicycle lamps. The notes rose and rose, became, fell, gathered, rose again. A passion – terribly quiet, terribly beautiful – grew, flowered, and fell in them. They gathered me with them, gathered me into the dance, let me become a star in the sky, sitting on my red, cobble-clay roof, sniffling in testimony to their poignancy.

I cried on that roof. Cried because of the One playing who I could not see. Cried because the notes say what we know – that the life in the stars is beautiful and burning. I cried and was glad to cry, because the dance pierced me and I wanted to feel. The notes fell for the last time. I watched a man walk down the yellow lighted street, swinging a black, rectangle case past the dumpster. My heart ached, for one strange, yearning moment, for that face to turn up towards me.

I have watched Christ dance in these broken streets. They are dancers here. So is He. I have learned that about Him this summer. He was here before me, loving them, working, walking the streets. That picture swings in my mind of the black case against the graphited dumpster under the yellow lamps. When everything is dark to me there will always be a Man on the roof, playing the saxophone. I can’t see Him, but I hear the music of His Hands and live waiting for the moment when the Face turns.