(en Espanol - google translation)
A man sits in the dirt. He stares at the sprocket on the ground. It is open. The bearings are as worn as the reddish brown skin on his shaved head and his sun-worn face. His shoulders, back, and arms bear the same witness of his five decades in the tropical sun working in the fields, traveling the roads, and sitting on the banks of the reservoir waiting for a flicker of motion on a line, and then a tug, and then the taut stretch giving him the hope of another few bites that evening of the small fish that the warm muddy waters had to offer him.
But before him was the problem. The path to his reservoir of sustenance was not a direct one to any bank of the lake. Rather, it was a roundabout way, up his graveled street to the so-called highway, cracked and potholed with decades of tropical heat and tropical storms, but with nary a truckload of tar or gravel to fill the holes or cracks which season after season grew deeper and wider.
But the miserable highway was still the best route to travel to the north part of the dam and then across the spillway and then through the forest paths down the isolated west bank, where he could see anyone appear on the distant other side and not be too obvious about what he was doing. It was also important that he be on his bicycle and in the still dimly lit dawn of the road and on the isolated paths so as to not arouse the curiosity of the later risers who might see him departing the road and crossing the spillway later in the morning.
Arriving at the west bank in the early dawn he would hide his bicycle and then cast his lines, weigh them a foot from the waterline, and then run the lines up the beach to a tree where he would sit watching for that hoped flicker on the line. As the sun rose it would glare off the water and into his face but shading his brow he would persist in his careful view of his lines and scanning the short to his left and across the water to the other side and back to the shore on his right, even as he listened for the sound of any voices or footsteps that might be approaching him from the grove of trees behind him.
As the sun rose higher, his wrinkled face could relax from the glare, and removing his shirt he would wipe the perspiration from his forehead as the hours of rising temperature mixed with the tropical humidity embraced him as his daily dis-comforter. And so in the soaking heat he watched and waited for the lines to twitch and for anyone to appear on the horizon while every thought a man fishing has ever had was as free as a breeze crossing the water to cross his mind and then depart as another entered.
But on this day the sun was already risen and hot on his back as he sat behind his house staring at the sundry of metal before him, without the parts, or tools to fix the mess and get him to that solitary quiet place on the water, alone with his thoughts of the past and hopes for the future. And so his thoughts were not of those that breezed in and through his mind but rather as a rock pounding from the inside out in a desperate unanswerable plea as to how he was to repair this ancient relic of a Slavic empire largess, to a regime his parents generation welcomed and bestowed upon him as a birthright, that now left him as its heir in a deprived, desperation for a simple part to a bicycle.
And so he sat in desperate deprivation, cursing his lot and as all men in his state asking the simple question shared by all who suffer, “Why?”