Travelogues

Struggling With The Weight Of The Cross, Semana Santa, Antigua

This is the first post of Spin Cycle. The second post is available here.

Hi I’m Robbie, I’m from Melbourne and I arrived in Guatemala four weeks ago looking for an English girl called Katherine.

It may strike you as a bit extreme for someone to trade continents, hemispheres and languages in pursuit of someone they met only once and whose surname or contact details they have never been entrusted with. Friends have gently (or brutally) pointed out that what I am doing in trying to find Katherine sounds a lot like common stalking. I disagree – there is nothing common about it. I prefer to think of it as an Intercontinental Grand Final of stalks. So yes, I do know what I am doing and how it must appear. I’m cool with it - if you give me the chance to explain a little more, maybe you will be too. Some of you may even feel you want to help me in my search.

I arrived in Antigua, a beautiful Guatemalan town of colour, smoke and magic during what I’m told is its big week of the year - Semana Santa. I initially struggled to find my bearings in a town enveloped in the incense, flowers and billowy purple robes of the procesiones that had taken over its cobbled streets. Crowds of hundred of ceremonially clad men, women and children became a swaying, musical river of humanity that rhythmically wove is magic through and between a seemingly endless series of ruined and restored churches. Caught up in this human current and with many of Antigua’s streets blocked off, I often found myself unsure of how to get back to my hostel. As I had yet to begin learning Spanish, I also couldn’t find the words to ask for help. My head was spinning from the profoundest culture shock – just three days before I had been taking a leisurely farewell walk from Fed Square to my home just off Lygon Street in Melbourne. Now it seemed I had entered a different world. I was confused, disoriented and over-stimulated. But I felt excited and alive again – buzzing on a feeling that coming here had been the right decision.

However, the exuberance of Antigua during Semana Santa is at odds with the misery and suffering of the week’s central character. When I first saw one of the (far too numerous to count) representations of Jesus with his Cross that are carried on the shoulders of boys and men throughout Antigua, I felt my growing euphoria briefly fade as I remembered my reasons for coming to Latin America. I looked upon the forlorn, abandoned and soon to be crucified Christ and thought “I know how you feel mate. You poor bastard.”

Follow up:

Three months ago, on my 33rd birthday in Melbourne I became fixated with the idea that I was probably already dead but that, being a slow learner, my body was doomed to pass maybe another 40 or 50 years before registering this fact. A sentence of four or five decades in which every breath, every meal would merely sustain the flesh and blood prison in which my fading spirit and never-to-be-realised potential would remain encased. So far, so grim – my life was a Morrissey album. I think you get the picture – I was pretty depressed.

Initially, I was confused as to how it could be that I could celebrate my birthday with fantastic mates in one of my favorite Brunswick Street bars and yet still be overcome with such feelings of emptiness and despair. My life was pretty good, wasn’t it?

Well on the surface, yes. I loved my house in Carlton which I shared with Jess, a cool English travel agent who has been one of my best mates for 3 years. Every Sunday I walked the few minutes over to Prince’s Park for a knockabout game of footy or cricket with my mates. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays Jess and I started our days with a run around the park. I was successful at work – I was a Money Laundering Officer with a big insurance firm and had been just been promoted to project manage implementing a piece of software I had part designed. I was good at what I did and, for the most part, felt appreciated. I had a good salary. Life was easy.

But on the night of my 33rd birthday, I began thinking that the ease and comfort of my life were just narcotics – I had been too dulled to realise or name the overwhelming sense of failure I carried with me every day. My dreams, though tending to come true, seemed pitifully small and inconsequential – catch more fraudsters, get up to 10k in my pre-work runs, save enough money to borrow even more money (in the last case to fulfill a fantasy of owning a nice apartment in my favorite ‘burb of Fitzroy). It was a long time since I had dreamed of love. My emotional life mostly consisted of vicarious involvement in the lives of TV characters. I was boring myself so much I began marveling at how anyone else could remain conscious whilst I was speaking.

So on the night of my birthday, I toyed with falling prey to a phantom illness that would mean I would have to go home early. But, I knew that would be a shitty thing to do to all the guys who were making an effort to give me a decent birthday. So I stuck with the party, trying to “Smile Like You Mean It” as The Killers were piped through the bar’s music system.

My mood had not improved by the time we reached the Northcote Social Club. I’m not sure which of my friends had picked this particular gig – or what had convinced them that what our group really needed was to be serenaded by a hippy chic with an acoustic guitar. In my alcohol marinated rage and despair I was not really paying much attention to what this particular headline act was even singing. However, the overall vibe seemed to be of wispy heartache, which did not improve my mood.

At some point during the singer’s set, I was rescued from a deep and meaningful with one of our group (reluctantly entered into on my part) by hearing my name being called out. I looked up to work out why (other than the obvious contributing factor that we were all pretty monged) my group was cheering like a group of lunatics and raucously screaming my name. As my eyes moved towards the stage, I registered that the drunken chorus of my name had something to do with the hippy chic with the guitar. She was staring right at us. Or rather, she was specifically eyeballing me. And she no longer seemed to be a willowy hippy with a wounded heart. Her direct gaze, mischievous smile and overall confidence as she beckoned me with one brisk movement of her forefinger had transformed her. She now seemed to be a potent dominatrix - there was nothing for it but to do her will.

By the time I arrived on the stage she had shape-shifted once again. One part playful coquette, the other part willing slave, she surrendered her chair to me and, once I had taken it, lightly and rapidly placed herself on my lap. She did this with some dexterity, as I immediately felt myself pinned in place by a confusion of hair, arms and sound cables. She then turned to me and smiled, brought the microphone between us and started speaking: “So, Robbie….”

I think it was at this point that my heart stopped. I had spent the day convinced I was already dead, but it was only at that moment that I experienced the sensation of my body coming to a stop and dissolving away. I know that for about a minute we engaged in some getting to know you small talk for the benefit of the audience. But I don’t think I was really present for that conversation. I felt disembodied – or rather partly disembodied. It felt that my spirit and pit of my stomach were all that was left of me.

Some might think the reason for this out of body experience was the predictable cliché. And it was true that, looking at her properly for the first time I noticed that I was finding her to be heartbreakingly beautiful. But there are a lot of beautiful looking girls in Melbourne - something about this one was different.

Her auburn hair, that danced playfully around my neck as she interviewed me, was woven with an eclectic mixture of beads, feathers and threads. Not something you normally see a lot of working in an insurance company. The deep brown of her eyes and soft caramel of her slightly rounded face would normally arrest the attention of any heterosexual male given the privileged view I then enjoyed. Yet all my attention was transfixed by the teasing promise of her mouth.

The brown freckle on her lower lip was a source of intense distraction to me as I was pleasantly pinioned to her chair and dazzled by the stage light. I struggled to resist an irrational urge to attempt to wipe this freckle from her lip as if it were a smudge – imagining first using my thumb and, if that failed, making a second attempt with my mouth. While she babbled her flirtatious on stage patter, I caught brief flashes of the tongue-stud that rotated in her mouth with a slow, hypnotic eroticism. My eyes continued to trace the movements of that tongue-stud once she started singing “Happy Birthday Mr Robbie” in a breathy pastiche of Marilyn Monroe that was camp, knowing, self-parodying – and totally, utterly and impossibly sexy.

By the time I had returned to my mates (body and spirit re-united to transport me the hazy 10 metre journey from the stage), I was already nursing an irrationally deep grief about not knowing which, if any of the many personae - flower child, flirt, ingenue, goddess, whore – was the real animating spirit that inhabited the frame I had so recently been holding on my lap. I expected I would never know – though for the remainder of her set I began listening to her lyrics – that now seemed much better than I had previously credited – in a vain attempt to find out.

I experienced a strange form of emotional exhaustion once she had completed her encore and left the stage. It now felt right that I go home - I no longer thought I would be bailing on my mates. My all consuming despair of earlier that day had changed – I was feeling neither happy nor sad, just confused and wrung out and needing some quiet space. As I was about to announce my departure to my group, I heard from behind me a playful English voice ask “So Robbie, I hope you are having a good birthday…”

I had no idea why she should want to walk over to talk to me. She told me later that she had liked the way I had held her on stage. She also told me that her name was Katherine – a distant relative of the odd moniker that she goes by on stage and which I now can’t remember correctly. From the moment she came over to me, I was gripped with a terror that she would leave. This anxiety was not something I expected – I was, as of that day, a 33 year old man, not a 16 year old adolescent. It had been years since I had been nervous in the presence of a woman.

Part of my terror probably arose from the dark thoughts I had been feeling for most of that day – I could picture her eyes glazing over with the far away longing of the stoned, stupified or terminally bored as soon as I started talking about my life. But I caught a lucky break, she became playfully fixated by the possibilities provided by my job title and between us we created a parallel life for myself of exuberant absurdity. Robbie the Money Laundering Officer was a high ranking official in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Chechen Mafia, he traveled the world with his trusty Hotpoint washer-dryer, which he used to revitalise $100 bills who had entered into therapy complaining in whiny New York accents that they felt “used and dirty” before bawling with foetal like helplessness that all they really needed was a hug and a fresh start. That is the short version.

This career is sadly much more interesting than my actual job of authenticating insurance policies - as were many of the other tall tales we co-created. Katherine and I spun webs of lunacy for two hours – the sort you can only invent with someone you really click with. Predictably, having established that we had that magic spark – something I had not felt for a long time – Katerine told me that this was her last night in Melbourne. She was leaving for Sydney in eight more hours. From there she would fly to Latin America to begin living the dream that she had been nursing for years – exploring that magical continent to learn its music.

It was a little later, when we were back at my house that she caught me off guard by saying “come with me.” Stupidly, I decided it would be safer to assume that she was playing with me, so I deflected with a bullshit line about the Chechen Mafia having inflexible employment contracts. She didn’t say anything to that response, just gave me a searching look and changed the subject. When I woke later that morning she left me a brief note surrounded by a love heart - “you should have said yes” was all it said.

The next few weeks were awful. I felt like a damned soul that had repudiated its last chance of redemption. I cursed my stupidity. For the first time in my life I endured a sustained period of depression. It was truly a terrible time – way out of proportion with what was just a chance encounter over a number of hours. And then I got a post card from Guatemala. “Hail Robbie - My favorite Criminal Mastermind!! Have arrived safe and sound and am already busy volunteering and learning Spanish. This is a wonderful country - you’d be happy here, you dummy, K”

I quit my job the following day. As you now know, I am now in Antigua. In her postcard, Katherine did not share an email address, phone number or anything else that might be of practical help in finding her. I am honest enough to know that this lack of contact details must have been a conscious decision on her part - hopefully motivated by an infuriating romantic idealism rather than a desire to wreck my mental health. My last few weeks of trying to discover if she is still in Guatemala while lacking even her surname has been an uphill battle. I will write about that another time. For the moment, I just want to let readers of this blog give a bit of background, so that if they think they know Katherine they can get in touch with me or maybe just ask her to read this blog herself and leave a comment for me.

I am here. I am saying yes.

Robbie.