Verónica Puche

Such as my great uncle, eaten by a shark is a project of photographs and short stories. The title refers to an unfortunate and ridiculous event in which my great uncle leapt into shark-infested waters in order to impress a girl. His disappearance led to a massive search. Only his left leg was found.
The main source of inspiration for this body of work comes from my family archive of images as well as oral and written histories. I collect, recreate, and merge stories in order to reconfigure them into new narrative possibilities. My pieces are in conversation with my family history, nationality and personal experience resulting in a portrayal of several juxtaposed realities. My dual Colombian and Nicaraguan heritage leads to questions about the complexity of identity in Latin-America.

UNO

One morning I looked at my phone and saw the photo of my great uncle Guillermo. Somehow it became the phone’s wallpaper, but it was not a photo that I had taken. I had no idea how that photo ended up there. Immediately, I texted my brother Guillermo in Bogotá, thinking he had something to do with it. It could have been one of his classic pranks.

I went to Monteria to visit my grandmother. She was laying in bed with her eyes closed and two pillows placed under her legs for better circulation. Nine years ago, she lost mobility of her lower body due to two consecutive falls in which she hit her head. Her health declined drastically, to the point where she reached a minimally conscious state. Words no longer came out of her mouth, not even that year, in which she turned 96. It was very sad to see her like this.

The photograph of my great uncle Guillermo hung in front of grandma’s room, inside an old wood frame, next to the hallway. The only known picture of her brother was this deteriorated image of a handsome young man with an impeccable mustache. Humidity and time had caused the paper to peel off and his face seemed to be fading away. I looked at my phone and saw that same photo as wallpaper. “Strange!” I said to myself.

Although mysterious and somewhat peculiar, the story about how my great-uncle died is a tragic one. It was 1944, in Puerto Colombia, the country’s biggest port at the time. This place was known as a rendezvous point where young people gathered to party and have fun. Being a young energetic man, a drunk Guillermo jumped into the water, allegedly trying to catch the attention of an attractive girl. He never resurfaced. Those waters were known to be shark-infested, especially at night. The next morning his left leg was found, with his brown leather shoe still on his foot. It was all the authorities were able to recover. He received a proper Catholic burial even though his coffin only contained the leg.

In honor of his memory and against her husband’s will, my grandmother gave her first son his name: Guillermo.

TRES

I went to the gold mines of Bonanza and Rosita in the east part of the country, near the Atlantic Ocean. The first contra revolutionary armed groups in Nicaragua were beginning to appear in that area. The region was inhabited by the Miskito people who were not very revolutionary, but they weren’t Contra. When I arrived at the mine, I observed that the majority of the miners were Miskito. The Miskitos are an indigenous group with peculiar habits: being nomads, they never remained for more than a month in the same place. They also used to take the names of people they liked, for example, if my name was Guillermo, suddenly their transitory name would become Guillermo until the next day when they would find another person whose name was Steven, then the Miskito would change their name from Guillermo to Steven and so on. This was a complex situation because at one point, a single Miskito could own more than twenty different names. This behavior was recognized during Somoza’s regime, when the mine was controlled by the Americans, who decided to assign them numbers instead of names in order to have some control of the situation. From that point on, any given Miskito’s name became a steady, solid number.

Upon my arrival, I realized that the Miskitos in charge of running the mine were capable, hard workers. It was a wonderful administrative organization. How were illiterate people able to have such a wonderful accounting system using only three numbers? I told my comrade that since their accounting system was so efficient and simple, it would be great to build a more complex one directly based on theirs. But the young Sandinistas said that everything that coexisted with imperialism was evil and had to be destroyed and replaced with a new revolutionary system. To my astonishment, they began to destroy everything, in a series of euphoria-fueled violent events. The word on the street was that everything needed to be changed.

The new man. The new revolutionary man was able to make huge sacrifices, and the Nicaraguans knew it and were very proud of their revolution. They felt superior to the rest of Latin-American countries, which were not only incapable of change but still living under military dictatorships. To some extent, we (the foreigners) admired and even envied the Nicaraguans, because they made it and we didn’t.

CUATRO

Former high school classmates reunited in commemoration of their 45th year of graduation. They all gathered in front of La Asunción school in León, Nicaragua, waiting for the nun to ask her superior if they could enter the school’s chapel. Ten minutes later the nun came out justifying the negative of her superior by saying – it’s complicated, we have graduation day tomorrow and the floors are being cleaned. The floors! In that instant one of the former students remembered her last year at the boarding school: Near León, the Cerro Negro volcano was active at that time, it was 1969. Large quantities of ashes flew all over the city, covering the central patio’s floors of the school. Outside, people had to use umbrellas in order to avoid the ashes and all of the cotton fields around the town were lost. The nuns, who were known to be particularly cruel, made the older students sweep the long hallways with small brooms as a sort of penance. Weirdly enough, at dusk they decided to take the young girls to the rooftop as an example of Catholic “benevolence”. The view was more than astonishing, and the best way to understand it would be to imagine having the best seats at the theater while a volcano performs a special show of fireworks, throwing lava from the top of the cone and creating a magnificent river of bright, reddish fire that branched downhill.

Due to the nun’s refusal to let the former students into the school, they all have a group picture in front of the façade.

CINCO

EXTERIOR DAY VOLCANO SLOPE – 35°C

Adjacent to the volcano, boiling mud bubbles emerge from the ground as malodorous gas surfaces through the ground’s vents. Small local girls pick up the mud and put it in small plastic bags to be sold as a powerful beauty elixir. Several selling points in precarious locations are seen from a hundred feet away, on more stable terrain, where many tables are crammed with pre-Columbian ceramics and figurines.

Victoria finds herself surrounded by a group of child vendors, and asks a question to one of the ladies behind the stands:

VICTORIA

So many broken ceramics… where do you find them?

LADY VENDOR

You see the land surrounding the volcano?

Victoria nods.

LADY VENDOR

That’s where.

VICTORIA

Just like that? You guys just take the ceramics?

LADY VENDOR

Well… yes. At night. Some local villagers simply grab the remaining pieces of buried ceramics after the tractors stop working on the sugar cane crops. Almost everything is broken by these machines!

VICTORIA

Have you ever found a whole vessel? They must cost a fortune!

LADY VENDOR

Yes, I have. A priest bought it. It still had some colors on the surface and even some bones inside. It was a really beautiful one. I sold it because I got scared one night, when a mysterious grieving sob came from inside of it, but no one was around