But never, and I mean never, have I had so much trouble sleeping as I did as a volunteer in Nicaragua.
Ironically, my allotted sleeping space was pretty nice. The bed was a real mattress, a luxury I have since rarely seen even in more affluent towns. No doubt it was my host parents' bed, quietly surrendered to me with the sort of selflessness usually seen only in anonymous kidney donors. There were no sheets to worry about; I just sprawled across the bare mattress, travel pillow smushed securely between my head and the wall. For the first couple weeks, my little sisters took turns sleeping with me. 11-year-old Julieta tended to tuck in close behind me, huddled against my back, while 9-year-old Marta was an aggressive cuddler, wrapping her arms and legs around me every night like a spider monkey. I was forever carefully unwrapping her and rolling her over onto her other side, only to watch as, like a perpetual motion machine, she instantly rolled back over and clung onto me again.
At some point, they both stopped sleeping with me. To this day, I sometimes worry that my host mother found out they were disrupting my sleep and ordered them to let me have the bed to myself. It's a stupid thing to let ruffle my conscience, but if I've learned one thing from my mother, it's that you can never have too much guilt or garlic. I feel guilty for stealing a piece of a stranger's pretzel when I was five years old, I feel guilty for things I've done in dreams, and I feel guilty for unintentionally forcing my host sisters to sleep three to a bed.
Our town had no electricity, so everyone went to bed shortly after nightfall. I got in the habit of reading to Marta and Julieta in the evenings - after we watched our novela on our cousins' car battery-powered television, of course. I had brought a stash of Spanish-language children's books, and every night we would sit on the edge of my bed, the girls pressed up close against my sides, and read Dr. Seuss. One of the girls would hold up a little white candle for light, dripping wax on the pages and occasionally "accidentally" singeing a piece of my hair.
One night, during a particularly spirited recitation of Cómo el Grinch Robó la Navidad, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. Snagging the candle from Marta, I turned around to investigate, only to discover that the wall was swarming with ants. Not tiny, harmless ants, like the kind that would later plague my cereal in Granada. No, these were big, black, ass-kicking ants, the panzer division of the ant army. I knew from experience that a bite from one of those bad boys felt a lot like getting hit in the hand with a baseball bat. A baseball bat covered in spikes.
"ANTS," I said, calmly, to my sisters.
"Ants," they agreed. Julieta reached over and flicked one off the wall.
"ANTS. WHERE MY HEAD GOES."
I believed then as I do now that compromise is key to cross-cultural understanding, but I straight-up could not sleep with my head tucked up against the Demon Ant Super-Highway. I began to sleep curled up at the foot of my bed, like a dog. My legs stuck off the edge of the mattress, but who cared? At least I had put a safe distance between my body and the ant battalion, although frequently a handful of them would trek all the way down the mattress just to see how I was getting on.
Then I noticed the scorpions.
Well, okay, I had noticed them before. What I hadn't noticed was that they tended to mosey across the outside wall. The wall I was now snuggling up to every night.
In other words: "SCORPIONS. WHERE MY HEAD GOES."
Reasonably, I thought, I began pushing the mattress away from the wall a few inches. My 15-year-old sister Milagros thought I was insane. "They'll just walk across the floor and up the side of the mattress and get you that way," she said.
"LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING," I replied.
So that took care of the ants and the scorpions. Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come.
One night, I woke up around 1:00 A.M. feeling sick and over-hot. Venturing out to the latrine was not an option; at night, it swarmed with cockroaches the size of small dogs. I resigned myself to hours of misery, hoping vaguely that I would drift back into sleep but knowing enough not to count on it.
Half an hour into my ordeal, I was distracted from my suffering by a strange, clicking, sibilant sound. The house was built into the side of a hill, so that the top of my bed was level with the ground outside. And something was out there, on the other side of the wall. Something...hissing.
"Milagros," I whispered urgently. "Mili! Is that a snake?"
She sat bolt upright. "What? Where?"
I shushed her, indicating that she should listen. A moment later, we both heard it - a whistling hiss that trailed off into a series of clicks.
She swallowed audibly and said, "It's just crickets." She seemed uncertain, and I wasn't buying it. Crickets my ass. Since when did crickets hiss? Or have teeth?
Satisfied with her assessment of the situation, Milagros kicked Marta's legs away and went back to sleep. Whatever my fate was to be that night, I was going to face it alone.
I want to take a moment to clarify that I'm not particularly afraid of snakes. I'm not particularly afraid of earthquakes or axe murderers or deadly nightshade, either, but when brought face-to-face with these things, I think it's only natural to realize with sudden clarity that they can in fact kill us. Some of the biggest assholes in the animal kingdom can be found in Nicaragua - this is, after all, the country that gave us freshwater sharks - and various parts of the country are home to coral snakes, bushmasters, and the good old fer-de-lance, each of which are bound to ruin your day.
Quiz time!
Q: Was the snake outside my house really a horrible, astoundingly deadly pit viper?
A: Unlikely.
Q: Was I, armed with a single drippy candle and my pocketknife, really about to go check?
A: Fuck off.
Throughout that long night, as my stomach twisted and cramped, I listened to the snake slide back and forth on the other side of the wall. The roof was only casually connected to the walls, leaving plenty of room for a determined death-bringer to squeeze through and kill us all in our beds. Could snakes climb walls? I was pretty sure they could. On the other hand, most of my snake knowledge came from Jumanji and The Jungle Book. On the other other hand, it was a really short wall.
Either Disney lied to me about wildlife abilities and behaviors (ha ha, like they'd ever do that), or snakes aren't actually too interested in sweaty, unshowered gringa as a main course. Whatever the reason, the snake didn't slither over the wall that night, or the next night, or the next. In fact, it stayed outside for the next two weeks, jealously guarding its territory every night, until the day I left. I know this because I was awake for every one of those nights. I never intended to stay awake. I would doze off after storytime, then jolt awake a few hours later, my heart in my throat. The bastard was always there, gliding leisurely along the length of wall that separated us, occasionally slowing down as it passed my head as if to suggest that this was the night it would come over the wall and eat my face. I could never fall back asleep, so I would lie there listening to it until dawn, scratching my mosquito bites and amending my mental hierarchy of nocturnal enemies.
In this way, we passed our nights together: the snake moving back and forth along its familiar path, hissing and clicking, and me curled up at one end of my mattress, mud-flaked toes twitching nervously in midair, wondering what else might be hiding out there in the dark.
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