A Latin reverie

It was rather intersting but it turned out as another dream.

A Latin reverie

 

We’ve been traveling in a bus full of tourists me and my partner. That’s how it all started and was rather short. Hardly a second passed we got off in down town of some South American city; or was it Central America, Guatemala or Costa Rica, I love Costa Rican coffee, the odor of its incredible aroma is embedded in my brain.

Uniformed young women and men were strolling around, armed up to their teeth, carrying sub machine guns each one of them �" it was quite scary. We entered a crowded restaurant with the hope of changing the atmosphere, but all the tables were occupied with these uniformed young women and men. We couldn’t get rid of them it seemed.  We sat on a bench like low wall,  a big glass pane rose right behind our backs. Some of those who sat in front turned to watch us laughing. We looked back and saw out there in the street, right behind the glass pane three threatening uniformed thugs. They were very close to us, as close to the other side of the wall as we were inside. The one in the middle raised his leg, as if he was about to kick the glass wall, and shatter it on top of us. We rose to our feet very nimbly and stood facing them between the first tables and the wall. A few young men attired in plain cloths appeared, shouting slogans in Spanish; a passing waiter whispered in our ears: ‘they’re against the government,’ in our native tongue… Suddenly some of the sitting uniformed men rose and got hold of them, and were dragging them outside.

‘They’re lucky,’ whispered again the waiter. ‘They’ll face a firing squad instead of being hanged in the central prison.’

My partner said she wants to go to the central prison, I didn’t object or even said a single word; we must have been very used to each other.

We were walking between two railroads, on a very narrow path. They were not common railroads but two deep parallel grooves on each side of us. We heard a rumbling noise and I said a train is coming. It came very slowly, hardly moving at all. The people sitting next to the windows watched us surprised, looking straight in our faces at the same level, so deep and low the train was.

We had nothing to do there, that’s what I’ve thought, and indeed we were on a pavement leading to an impressive villa, we were very close to it from the start. We met three or four couples on the porch, and they greeted us smiling talking to us in our language.

There was a huge empty frame on a stand of about four feet long and two and a half wide, it stood in front of us. It must have been a mirror frame though empty; then a young handsome man appeared, a real dandy attired in a white suit, had glistening short black hair. It must be the villa owner, I thought. He came closer on the other side of the empty frame. As he reached it he raised his leg and kicked it forward in our direction, through the empty frame, and right afterward he simply vanished.

‘Our bus is here,’ someone said. They rose to their feet all of them, moved towards us; we turned around, crossed a road and there was the bus �" and then and there I woke up.

 

© Haim Kadman 2009 �" all rights reserved