Paraguayan Hammock (Hamaca Paraguaya)

In “Paraguayan Hammock” the lives of Ramon and Candida, the only two characters in this fully-realized short feature directed by Paz Encina, are framed by two questions: will their son return from the neighboring 1930s border war and will it rain? A third unknown also interposes itself- is there a way to get the dog that Maximo left behind when he journeyed to the front to stop barking?

The action plays out primarily in three conversational scenes between the parents sitting in a hammock tied to two trees (rehung each day and removed each night) in a somewhat shady spot beneath the jungle canopy. Already autumn, the relentless summer heat keeps on burning down; drought is the other active character, constant as the barking dog. Rumbling thunder hints at a prospective downpour, but they note familiarly the absence of wind without which there is never any precipitation in this hillside hide-away clearing. With water, the dog might drink and they might know a moment’s quiet, but the minuscule quantity remaining to them is not enough to share.

The restless flight of birds overhead animates Ramon’s wishful divination- the wind is stirring: a hopeful sign; Candida dismisses the omen as another one of her husband’s imaginings. She can no more bear his scripted remarks than her own. Between them lies a great divide of his unbending certainty that soon enough Maximo will again appear before them and her insistence that joining the army was his needless path to certain death.

Flashback to the morning in the relatively recent past on which the young man was leaving for the front: the father cleaves sugarcane as the son reflects on the potential finality heralded by his departure. Nonsense, says the father; doing your duty is what will protect you. The mother, by contrast, tells her son to become one in camouflage with an orange tree in the forest, to take refuge away from the battlefield. In a way that was not yet apparent during the opening hammock scene, a fundamental masculine-feminine dichotomy is here depicted. To Ramon, duty faithfully done is the best guarantor of survival. For Candida, finding a way to escape the world’s arbitrary call is the only proof of caring enough about survival, let alone its possible achievement.

This difference in perspective gives another level to their dialogue when they reunite in the hammock. Now it is fully clear that their words and thoughts are not interchangeable. Though they live within the circular reality of repeated verbal ritual, his arc retains a linear stamp; each duty fulfilled in bright rising to occasion achieves the potential prolongation of life. For her, each external challenge refused is the way to keep life going in its same-ness. The aim of life is never to let yourself be seen, to sink into the protective obscurity of primordial mass, to so identify with the ordinary diurnal that you won’t be singled out, itself the first step toward death.

Ramon has summoned the village doctor, superstitious that the suddenly quiet dog may be dying. If the dog perishes, will it mean that Maximo never returns? The dog needs water, the doctor says; there is no water to spare, says Ramon. Besides, the doctor adds that he has had news from the front: the war is over and life will go back to normal. Of course, there is no way of knowing whether the combatants have been informed of the truce.

The idea that the dangers of continuing combat and the official end of hostilities may not be contradictory makes perfect sense in that the machinations of the political rulers are barely tangentially related to the struggles of regular life. In their own way these sovereign operations are equivalent to the parents’ back and forth dialogue- neither will bring on the rain or their son back home. Each is more like the elemental portions of existence: the negative/positive polarity of electrical impulse, or day and night.

Candida meanwhile gathers some fallen fruit, perhaps as their evening meal. A messenger has come to this nowhere place with news of a young man’s death; he wants to know if the name is recognizable to her. All males in this nameless anti-Eden carry the same name, she says, as if proposing that it hardly matters who may have died. Indeed, the notion that the world would pay even a moment’s attention to the supposed individual identity of the dead is so ludicrous to her that she cannot conceal her contempt for the carrier of the tidings.

It is twilight. The couple comes together once more to prepare for the end of the day. What the viewer has sensed throughout now becomes explicit. Yes, they always bicker, verbalizing their unchanging lines. Nothing can enter their closed world; no effects are possible. Known only to themselves, they live lives neither of desperation nor of potential transformation. There is nothing to await nor is waiting what they have been about. They merely occupy a space filled by the hammock until whenever its stitching wears out. Tonight warrants some morsels of food or not.

Night nears. Candida peels some fruit. Ramon lights the lamp. It is time for the return to their shack. But, wait- Ramon is about to walk off without the lamp and they are both on the verge of forgetting to take down the hammock. Candida gives voice to a glimpse of a future, when they will no longer remember that they have forgotten the markers of the end of day. Then their journey will be finished, if not entirely over. It is the ritual marking of the signifiers of process that stand for the action of life, giving it shape.

In a story which unfolds through the rhythms of waiting, with the intoned words of no greater moment than the silences, “Paraguayan Hammock” proves neither melancholy nor uplifting. Its emotional depth is miraculously carried by the total absence of any emotional charge. Waiting and waiting for are simply sundered, time itself is all that remains.