La Cucaracha - part 1

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Either I’m hallucinating from the malaria medicine, or that cockroach is the size of a rat. It’s two feet away on the counter, daring me to make a move. I’m just going to keep typing and hope that when I look up again it’ll be gone… Nope, still there. He’s a curious little guy. I can tell by the way his antennae are whirling around, like he’s taking my measurements. Not to mention the wiggling mandibles, and those blank, yet soulful eyes.

This is our first visitor to our new apartment in Managua, and I’m glad Kate is snoozing;

she falls asleep a bit earlier than me. I’ve been working on my computer (ok, playing video games) in the light of a candle, to the sound of monsoon rains. She will likely discover the cockroach in the morning, or one of its siblings, and action will be required. She will thrust a boot into my hands and point me towards the cockroach, claiming it is my duty as her partner and male to protect her from this creature. The carapace cracking beneath the boot will sound like biting into an apple.

But we will coexist, for now. Truth be told, I feel a special kinship to this, my first cockroach. Pop culture has taught me roaches are a colourful, highly-intelligent species, inclined towards music and dancing in strange, Bacchanalian rituals A Wikipedia search, to contrast, demystifies the insect into an extremely common pest, whose feces can cause respiratory problems for people sharing the home. I stare at my new friend accusingly. It meets my gaze. I blink first.

The next morning Kate is up early and something is wrong. I can tell because of her spine—it’s straighter than the legs of the stool on which she’s perched. She sips coffee deliberately. The garbage can has the lid flipped up a few feet away and Kate is very pointedly not looking at it, and definitely not at the rat-sized cockroach resting on the can’s lip twirling his antennae at her.

There was a crunch like an apple being bitten. Then, a debate. Kate wanted to move instantly, and I argued we should have the place fumigated, and stay. Did we not have an obligation to “slum it” a little, experience Nicaragua like a local? Or should we expect conditions commensurate with our status in Canada: well-educated professionals? How attached are we to our privilege, anyway?

We slept another night in the roach motel, tossing and turning as the pests – real or imagined – skittered over our bodies, and drank our beading sweat. They ran their antennae lovingly over our bare skin. They cavorted in our armpits and scurried into our ear canals – as if our minds were theatres and our dreams projected onto screens.

 

The next morning when the sun rose the roaches scurried under the cupboards and Kate and I started packing our bags. We don’t need to be fully pampered and are willing to make some sacrifices “for the experience”, but we also want a refuge that is comfortable and welcoming. This town – a poor man’s Gotham City – is hard and strange enough.