A Day In The Life By Manlio Argueta

Not a day goes by when I’m not up at five in the morning. When the rooster has crowed a dozen times, I’m already on my way, when the sky is still dark and only interrupted by the birds chirping, I get up. The clarinero flies over the hut, saying clarinero-clarinero. I don’t need anybody to come and wake me up, the clarineros are just such early risers, shouters, and waker-uppers. In any case, I figure out when to get up on my own. I have a trick for being on time: the little holes between the poles that make up the wall. The poles of my hut are tihuilote, it’s a tree that’s all over the place around here that bears large fruit. The only thing is that they are quite brittle and have to be changed frequently. We like the tihuilote because it doesn’t attract the ants. The ants eat the wood, totally demolish it, and they’re hard to get rid of, you kill one here and tomorrow they’re somewhere else; so they keep fucking up the poles of the walls until they’re full.