The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [75]
The sun was at the heart of it, impassive, granting its twelve hours of sunlight to all equally. Yet its constancy made it seem a foreign sun, very different from the one that had once merely tanned my skin and warmed my face. Because Guyana is just north of the Equator, daily, throughout every month of every year, the sun is at its strongest, rising at 6:00, setting at 6:00. It often seemed to pulse with white light, and it is this sensation that I remember most, a constant rippling that emanated from this blinding yellow ball in the sky.
From the sun came the heat, which bore down separately, an unwelcome layer resting on me, as willful as another being. It felt like many small children clinging to my body: one at my hip, two on my legs, another splayed across my chest and head. At first they are manageable, benign, but they soon begin to get heavy. You can’t put them down, they are clutching at you. Other times it seemed a parasite. My body was inhabited. I became a complex system for the simple act of diffusing heat.
My burns always surprised me. They seemed to appear from the inside out, a new layer of skin forcing its way to the top, then peeling off in delicate ribbons. My fingertips, as they had applied the lotion, were often visible in the outline of crimson. In a vain attempt to stem the pattern, I once sat under an awning for hours at a school event. My colleagues laughed at me at the end of the day: Miss Katrin, like ya still get red! Every part that wasn’t covered—my face, arms, and neck—was singed. I learned later that I had been burned from the reflection of the sun off the grass.
While the sun was of constant concern, it was flying insects that taught me the most about the life and death of the body. Sunlight and heat are general conditions, but the attentions of a fly or mosquito are a personal torment. They act as one unit, one encompassing blight: one fly is all flies, one mosquito all mosquitoes. It is rare to spend a moment in Guyana when something is not flying or landing near or on you. The air I breathed was often a swarm; I swallowed more than I care to remember.
Every time a fly walks on you it is a foreshadowing of your death. Tropical flies are persistent and, after awhile, there is no energy left to brush them off. They are satisfied to just watch and circle, like buzzards, exploring every crevice of your body to determine how useful you will be to them if you die. At first it is a ticklish feeling not entirely unpleasant, but each time you have to accommodate its legs, its disregarding death-filled eyes, you lose a little bit of your body. Flies leave you with no dignity. Their work is to scavenge you, even as you live.
Mosquitoes are a constant reminder that to live is to suffer. Malaria, passed by mosquitoes and endemic in Guyana, does not usually kill you. One type of the disease, falciparum, will make you very sick, with skyrocketing fever and jaundice. The other, vivax, quietly enters your liver, forever. Mosquitoes are a kind of religion in Guyana, demanding rituals for prevention and destruction. Weeks are spent clearing standing water, where they breed, patching holes in nets, burning toxic green coils inside and enormous pyres out. Regardless, the air is thick with them for months on end.
Regions of Guyana close their schools during mosquito season. A friend recounted being chased by swarms, carrying repellent with her as an urban woman carries mace. On a boat trip across the Berbice River, I once watched as the back of my companion’s white shirt was spotted with twenty, then thirty, black dots. I brushed them off; twenty more appeared. They are most active after dusk, but at times I