Sometimes the plantains were fried, sometimes blended and formed into small cakes, sometimes filled with melted homemade cheese. The rice was mixed with a beef stew, or spiced tomatoes, or chicken in a yogurt sauce. At breakfast, lunch and dinner there was always fresh juice – orange, tomato, guava, tamarind or papaya. If I ate too quickly, Jacqui would push some of her food onto my plate. After a few days I learned to leave just a little bit behind.
Plantanos frying in the kitchen
I spoke a tentative Spanish, and neither of them spoke English. At first, I found my self responding to everything they said with either “Si”, or “Gracias”, but with the help of Google translate we met somewhere in the middle. Jacqui is a former school teacher, and my Spanish grammar seemed to provoke bad memories. Often she would frown, throw up her hands in frustration and say, “Oh, Scott!”
Jacqui runs a small gift shop named after one of her daughters. Her own crafts are among the souvenirs on the shelves. She takes glass bottles, cuts them in half, grinds them down and etches images of Galapagos wildlife on them. One is sitting on my dining room table now.
Guillermo is a lawyer. His office is his livingroom, and a large billboard out front advertises “Las officinas de Guillermo Paz, Abogado.” Clients call at all times of the day. One who arrived during dinner sat patiently in a chair by the front door until we were finished eating. One morning, a couple that ended up shouting at one another apparently was discussing a divorce. Guillermo is known not just in town but across the islands. We were walking in Santa Cruz together and several people accosted him as if he lived across the street.
My cherry birthday cake
The city streets in San Cristobal don’t have names, or at least they don’t have signs. If you want to go somewhere you simply use the name of the family. Instead of giving a taxi driver an address, I say, “La casa de Guillermo Paz, por favor.” Telling my taxi driver I wanted to go to the Blue Evolution dive shop was useless until I added, “Where Wendy works.” When we returned from a trip to Santa Cruz, Guillermo got in the taxi and said simply, “Take us home.”
During dinner one night I mentioned that my birthday was in a few days. When I awoke for breakfast in a few days, Jacqui had set out a small homemade cherry cake, inscribed “Compleanos, Scot”.
I met a lot of the Paz family and friends during my visit. His parents came to dinner once a week and occasionally the pastor and his wife dropped by to eat and play dominoes. The last weekend in Galapagos, I went with Guillermo and Jacqui to visit their daughters in Santa Cruz – a bumpy boat ride of about two hours. There were so many people it was impossible to keep track of who was married to whom much less match the children to the parents. The children were adorable. Leveraging my lack of Spanish, I had them on the floor in giggles by asking them with all seriousness whether their dog was a cow, a cat, a chicken or a sea lion.
Jacqui inside a giant tortoise shell
The food was delicious – homemade sausage at the grandparents house and an ersatz paella at their daughter’s home. While they were preparing dinner, they asked their housekeeper to take me to the market, but I convinced her to go to Tortuga Bay instead. What I didn’t realize was that the walk from the road to the bay was almost an hour. By the time we returned we were drenched and long out of water. She is 17 and works for the family as a nanny, housekeeper and occasional cook. I noticed that she had words tattooed on the outside of her calves. She told me they were the names of her two children.
By the time I left, I felt a part of the family, though Jacqui admonished me the last day not to come back until I could speak Spanish fluently.
