Davi never spoke. Davi only snarled. Every word. His cute family nickname was just a euphemism for the true ruffian, Porfirio, that lay beneath the surface. Davi’s ancestors, the Guarani, were peaceful tribes, content to subsist off the yucca that grew in their thick subtropical jungles and to spend their evenings by the fire, laughing and passing around a cup of yerba mate, their bitter stimulant steeped in boiling water. They lived far too deep inland to lose sleep over the venomous trickle of marauding conquistadors slowly infecting the coastlines.
Then came the monks. And it all started…
Not Davi. Davi was more like the cruel gauchos of Argentina, one country over, those rough plains cowboys known, even by Charles Darwin, for taking sublime, wicked pleasure in slitting a man’s throat to watch his life drip away.
The serpent is understood as a symbol of evil, likely due to the unfeeling, lifeless eyes which evoke the primeval danger they posed to our ape progenitors. Davi’s was a viper’s stare. He was the personification of Kaa from the Jungle Book, yet without the seductive, serpentine whisperings, his gruff lack of tact failing to mask that he wanted nothing more than to squeeze the life out of you.
The only known picture of Davi, well-placed in his natural habitat.
I had been with him in the woods at twilight, picking out slender acacia branches for firewood, and observed as his gaze led his machete to the same spot with murderous precision. You would tell him a joke, and he would stare with coldness for several seconds, like you had just sullied the honor of his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother at once, until the tension was broken by his laugh, really more of a hacking cough.
A century before, Paraguay was defeated in a disastrous war against a combined force of Brazil, Argentina, and the Banda Oriental, today’s Uruguay. In the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay lost about two-thirds of its male population. If only Davi would have been alive then. Charging into battle with nothing but a jagged knife in his teeth, he would cut down the entire invading force, switching to his bare hands once his knife broke in a man’s ribcage.
But I was his friend, and therefore a made man. We would walk around proudly on nights out on the town, needling in the static heat through youths massing in groups around dilapidated benches hemming the one, lit road. Should anyone look at me crooked, I had no doubt he would pummel that guy into the same dirt I had used to build the makeshift ovens in Davi’s village, expecting nothing from me but to escape together into the night, away from the weak, yellow streetlights buzzing with mosquitos and moths….
So it happened that I got the shits. You can’t escape it—even natives curse the summer months, the epoch of squatting extra wide over an elliptical divot in the latrine, hoping that your aim is good and there’s no splashback on your shoes. Who am I kidding?…splashback on your bare feet.
This den of horrors is no freaking picnic.
And just like the Paraguayan soldiers a century ago, most of whom died from dysentery, I chugged cups of mate, in a desperate attempt to stop up my bowels. This is the folk remedy.
I suffered with it for a while. I didn’t want to admit to anyone that the life-sustaining water that my body held was flooding my intestines in a vain effort to flush out bacteria in searing, liquid bursts. I would have gone insane had I been rubbing my delicate, 1st world ass with American toilet paper, so with the sand-papery wood-pulp stocked in latrines here, I quickly degenerated into a depressing case of the “fuck it”s.
In this state of extreme emotional weakness, Davi asked how I was doing one morning. I said one word: “Sick.” And he asked with what. Of all the people to spill my guts to, he was the last one I would have imagined. The torrential explanation of my symptoms gushed out of my mouth, just as rapidly as uncleanness had previously evacuated from other parts.
I looked up, expecting to see utter disdain for the pathetic excuse of a man Davi was looking at. Instead I caught his face falling. Sincere worry crossed his face, and two seconds later he was firing up his motorcycle, looking at me in shock, fiercely yelling, “Why didn’t you tell me? Let’s go!”
In five minutes we were careening over muddy bumps on a dirt road, the impact of each dip felt keenly in my system thanks to a motorcycle completely devoid of shock absorbers, only making my stomach grumble more.
An hour of that torture and we were at a clinic in town, Davi listening intently and wide-eyed to the doctor’s orders, apparently trying to remember every last letter of every last word. A quick trip to the pharmacy across town, and I was packed full of all the illicit, foreign Imodium my body could take. Davi smiled that he had helped his friend, and I spent the rest of my time in Paraguay with thankfully solid waste.
Lesson learned: Tough guys can be soft on the inside. Don’t risk your life because you’re too afraid to lose face, especially when the closest hospital is an hour away.
-Another story from Peter (Tempe, AZ), poopin’ his guts out for Peace (Corps) in South America