Mary Carmen.

---

Panajachel, later during the night.
Por todos los dioses imaginados por el ser humano, this was unexpected and is getting totally out of control.
Peter and Michael are already drunk out of their collective skulls, Nora is getting to that state where she'll take off her clothes and starts dancing again singing softly in her Louisiana accented french. We've moved to the bar's garden and spent the better part of the night exchanging travel stories from the weeks we're seperated. My travel partner James is sitting opposite me, his impressive beer belly portruding from under his T-shirt and beads of clammy sweat dropping down his frown, his skinny arm possessively around the shoulders of Mary Carmen who is sitting on his lap, her coal black eyes doing a hard job to lock with mine.
While I do my very best to draw her portrait in my sketch book with char coal that is just as black as these darned eye pupils of hers, my inner mind wanders back to that chinese restaurant back in Guatamala-Ciudad where they ripped me off with El Gallo beer that came in chinese beer bottles and where the cockroaches were as brave as siberian tigres.
It was there and then when I first met that crazy bitch who came over to my table asking me in pretty good english if I knew a cheap place to stay telling me she came from the USA. I first thought she was just another street hooker who happened to speak some english. One of these many poor souls with hungry kids at home, empty bellies that need to be fed so poor mom has got to get out in the streets of that dirty metropolis, the way I've seen it in Thailand last year.
I offered her a drink and a few quetzales hoping she would leave me alone after the drink and a sketch in my travel jornal.
Instead of getting rid of her I found myself in a taxi on the way to the Ritz Hotel, the most expensive hotel in town, where we picked up her stuff, an enormous amount, and then went over by overloaded taxi to my hotel, the cheapest joint in town where she dumped it all in my cockroach invested room, where she took off all her clothes so she could take a shower - no water in the shower - right in front of me, a complete stranger she met only hours before.
It was then that I realised she was as nutty as a fruit cake, probably suffering from serious brain damage, I remember how she followed me to Antigua despite my objections leaving all her stuff in that dirty room.
With a mental start I get back to the present when Nora places her well shaped bum squarely on my knees, black arm around my shoulers, her hot and feminine voice inside my ear "enough drawing for one night, Hans, we wanted a party tonight, remember"?
We leave the gringo bar, a table full with empty one litro El gallo bottles testimony to our beer drinking prowess, behind. We all want a party and where better to have a party but a local bar up in the centre. It is the end of the Semana Santa and the beginning of the weekend so things are bound to be lively tonight.
I've a very strong suspicion tomorrow's hike I had planned is off. In fact I believe I have once more entered a new chapter in this crazy trip.

---