Imi, 18 December 2001

Good afternoon young friends, Ludvika, Alrika, and AnaSara.

If you mostly enjoy interesting or well-written letters, maybe you shouldn’t bother with this one. Life in Imi is pretty dull these days. Also, the bus that will take this package to your parents could arrive here any minute. Read on, if you don’t have anything better to do (like watching mud dry, for example).

This month I’ve been working 8 to 10 hours every day clearing land for corn and peanuts. It is hard, never-ending labor, and wears me out. The injustice is that I’m not sleeping well. Unlike earlier this year, the problem isn’t insomnia (a word here meaning ‘chronic inability to sleep’). The problem is visitors.

There’s the two-legged variety. I don’t know when Don Gregorio sleeps, but it’s not at night. He’s visited me several times between two and four in the morning, to borrow rope and seed, or just to be sociable. Back when Faustino was sick (he’s getting better), his little brothers came by all the time to request medicine, candles, and other stuff, or again, to be friendly. They always arrived just as I’d gone to sleep.

As Alrika knows, my guests may also have four legs. A loud snuffling woke me up much too early Friday. The door was wide open and a filthy pig was scarfing (a word here which means ravenously gobbling) my peanut seed. (Pigs, or porcus omnivorous, are stout, artiodactyl mammals raised to be skewered on a spit and roasted; their single ambition is to take preemptive revenge on humans – even vegetarians like me. Besides eating peanut seed, they carry trichinosis, the disease that made Faustino so sick he almost died.)

Springing from my bed in the dark, I charged the larcenous little porker. Instead of making for the door, he ran further into the room. He knocked over my vegetables, a bag of corn for the horses, and the compost bin. I finally trapped him under the reversible plow and hoisted him up by the tail. I’m afraid I heard something crack: maybe like stiff fingers cracking, maybe like tail-bones breaking. Anyway, I hauled him outside and hurled him upside-down over a small cliff and into a thornbush. Maybe he won’t come back.

The six (or eight?) legged invaders are ants of some sort, or maybe termites. They live under the brick floor and come out at night. It’s no fun to forget they’re there. If you step on them in bare feet, it feels like you stuck your foot in something wet. Then they bite, and it hurts.

Well, since I get along fine with the spiders, that’s about all I have to say. Even if you’ve made it this far, you probably have much better things to do than continuing reading this letter.

It wasn’t clear at first how many legs I was dealing with last night. I was awoken after midnight by a rustling near my head. Usually it’s just a toad, but I got out of bed and lit a candle. The noise came from behind a box below the table, so I moved the box. And there I saw what looked like a little snake, about 15 centimeters long. Well, that scared me silly. I grabbed a hoe and thwumped at it. This was a mistake: it went into a frenzy and moved so fast I knew I must perish (a word here that means go rotten and turn into a soggy mess).

Whatever it was, it stayed in the dark under the table while I danced over to get my machete. I gave it a pretty sound whack, but it kept moving. It went over to a pile of cardboard boxes, where I thought it would be harder to catch, so I stabbed at it again. This time it fled into the light. It was coming straight at me, but much worse, I suddenly saw that it had legs. Lots of them, long, pink, multi-jointed, and shielded. It ran towards my bed, and I hit it so hard with the sharp side of my machete that sparks flew off the brick floor, and I saw I'd severed the whatever-it-was two. Which slowed it down a lot, but neither head nor tail died.

Eventually I managed to get both writhing halves in an 18-liter bucket. I clamped the lid shut and piled a few bricks on top, just to be sure. It took me a long time to get back to sleep. The thing left all kinds of poop and body parts on my floor, and even now, five hours later, after sweeping it all up, I’m still tiptoing around the stains. Even now, five hours later, the two parts are alive and twitching. And even now, something about those 23 spikey pairs of clawing legs is very scary.

Don César calls it a “ciempiés”. He says its sting can kill a grown man. “Difícil de matar,” he adds (like I didn’t know), “hay que quemarlo.” Faustino’s grandmother doesn’t agree. She calls it an “apeusa” and contends that burning it will only attract others seeking revenge. Would you please research centipedes for me? I need to know what poisonous varieties there are in Bolivia and what can safely be done with their parts. Meanwhile, I’m seriously considering moving to Lappland (a region of northernmost Europe inhabited by Lapps and reindeer, with no lilliputian multiped assassins pussyfooting about under the bed).

I’m sorry this was such a long, boring letter, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

./Phineas