I had been in Zipolite for more than two months when I learned it was called la playa de la muerte.
I arrived in mid-March from El Salvador, via Mexico City and Oaxaca City. In Mexico City I slept on the airport floor until scolded for uncivilized behavior by a security guard. From Oaxaca City I embarked on what I assumed would be a short bus ride to Zipolite but turned out to be seven hours of mountain curves and speed bumps taken at high speed. My stay in the village was meant to be brief. I was rendezvousing with Marwan, a friend from Lebanon—Mexico being one of a select group of countries that doesn’t make life hell for the Lebanese visa applicant—after which I would continue on to Turkey-Spain-Greece-Albania and a slew of other places, in keeping with the essentially schizophrenic itinerancy since I abandoned the United States 17 years ago.
The pandemic brought to a halt any aspirations to motion. Marwan was able to return to Lebanon on a series of flights that the Lebanese embassy in Mexico City assured him was his last chance to get home for the foreseeable future. I had no home but was committed to avoiding the homeland at all cost. I rented an apartment on the main road into Zipolite from the nearby town of Puerto Ángel and prepared myself for what seemed to be an inevitable claustrophobia-induced nervous breakdown after so many years of being constantly on the move.
As if the prospect of having to sit still and deal with myself weren’t awful enough, a coronavirus checkpoint was erected directly in front of my house. It was one of many such checkpoints throughout the region, manned by a fluctuating array of civilian volunteers and policemen. Heavily armed Marines were added later, when it was determined that the first two groups were disproportionately focused on eating and not sufficiently intimidating to aspiring violators of the quarantine. The checkpoint and I got off to a rough start. On the day of its materialization, I was not allowed into my house for lack of a face mask. Numerous futile appeals to logic and a near-aneurysm later, I was taken aside by a policeman, given a disposable mask, and told to wear it within ten meters of the checkpoint, after which the need spontaneously expired.
I was under de facto 24-hour surveillance. An act as simple as lighting the gas stove in the kitchen was liable to elicit loud and teasing speculation from the permanent band of eavesdroppers about what I was cooking for my supposed novio, who although never showing himself in the flesh was a constant source of speculation. Granted, the checkpoint did have its uses, like whenever I needed a jar of hot sauce opened or a wasp killed—a feat requiring two cops, one civilian, and a frisbee—or a coconut sliced with a machete, and despite the initial friction I gradually got used to stepping over a rope every time I went outside, just as I also grew accustomed to the rotation of upbeat songs about the coronavirus with which someone somewhere had decided to inundate radio waves. READ MORE AT EVERGREEN REVIEW.