Las Frutas


Posted by Patrick Okens

During extended travel, the exotic becoming the everyday. My daily walk past El Valle’s market almost always involves picking up some kind of fruit, and not the same-old bananas’n’apples you get at Loblaw’s.

Papayas, piñas (pineapples) and sandias (watermelons) are slung in my backpack after handing a few dollars to the vendor. At home, they are promptly chopped up. The juice and seeds spatter the counter, cutting board, and my fingers. I swat away the fruit flies eager for their share. These fruit are so fresh and tasty they do not hang around the fridge for long.

The gardener brings in bunches of ripening platano manzanos from behind the house. Think appearance and texture of bananas, but with apple flavour. A breakfast staple of mine here.

Mango trees are commonplace. The ripe yellow fruit drops to the ground with a dull “splat” to rot and get picked at by birds and insects. I pass by one such tree daily, and smell this not-unpleasant fermenting fruit aroma. Another new-to-me sensory experience!


Las Cruces. Crossroads.


Posted by Patrick Okens

Picture pious young Fernando Martins, changing his name to Antonio and setting off for Africa to pursue his vocation as a Franciscan monk. Did he ever consider that he would never make it back home to Lisbon? That his ship would be blown off-course to Sicily? That he would be assigned to a hermitage in Romagna. That he would impress parishioners by eloquently delivering a sermon, impromptu?

Would Antonio have imagined what would happen next? Promotion by Saint Francis of Assisi himself; preaching and teaching at universities in France and in Italy; rising to become a papal envoy, whose sermons were much favored by the Vatican. That he would die, convulsive and grangrenous at the age of 37, after eating some bad bread? I wonder whether he would have struggled against the sin of pride, had he known the heartbroken pope would name him Saint Anthony of Padua less than a year after his death.

San Antonio di Padua, patron saint of Lisbon, lost souls, American Indians, amputees, and animals. Patron saint of mail, mariners, poor people, pregnant women. Patron saint of starvation, travellers, runts and revolutionaries. His name lives on from Texas to Teresopolis to Tamil Nadu. And at the small chapel I pass every day in Valle de Anton.

Think about the closest commercial crossroads to your home. You can tell a fair bit about your neighborhood and society based on what business goes on there. Does it consist of three shopping plazas and a gas station? Three specialty boutiques and a coffee shop? Two fast food joints, a hardware store and an empty lot?

My closest intersection features the San Antonio chapel carving a wedge in the calle El Hato road flanked by the estates of wealthy Panamanians. It is a modest pavilion with a façade covering wood pews, a crucifix and the porcelain statue of the saint holding a child. Alongside, in the shade of mango trees, are some skinny saddled ponies. Tied with lengths of nylon, they wait mindlessly for tourists. Tail twitches, hoof stomps, slim muscle ripples, flies buzz. To the right, a hole-in-the-wall barberia – I’ve never seen it open –  leads to an unpaved alley and the modest homes of the poor campesinos who tend to the homes and gardens of the rich.