The only sounds outside the hut are the occasional swish of a branch giving way as some shadowy arboreal creature moves out in the darkness.
The only sounds inside are the scraping of the nails of an eight-inch rat skittering across the ceiling beams.
(One knows he's eight inches, one saw him before the generator went out. One hopes he's as afraid of one as one is of him)
Think pleasanter thoughts.
{
The streets in Guatemala City, for instance, bursting with neon signs, and gasping with exhaust. Up and down the hills of the city the cars, trucks, buses and cycles pass, black boa of monoxide jetting like the plumed serpent himself into every bypassing nose.
But pedestrians here have learned to be tranquil amongst the gas and commotion. Something in their smiles -- where does it come from? Their communion of saints? The enigma of ancient Mayapan? -- says they will transcend all these irritations. It is a key to their character, it makes life plausible.
What other nation in the world, for instance, would name its legal tender for the rare green bird of implacable flight, the quetzal?
I am thinking of a boy I saw in the market at Chichicastenango, toting a crossbeam over one shoulder like the suffering Christ-boy himself. What would he say?
(He would say, maybe: "A quetzal is a quetzal, and why not. Both are endangered species here.")
{
"The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore."
Psalm 121, line 8. But in Spanish it's only ten words, neatly lettered over the rear-view mirror on one of the hundreds of buses caroming up and down the hills of Guatemala. This is a nation of prayer and the prayerful; one look at the hills and one understands the inspiration, the necessity. It is all mountains here.
If Guatemala were somehow in Minnesota, and our English and Scandinavian forefathers had stumbled upon it first, they would have said To hell with it and called the whole place a national park and charged campers admission to wend their ways through, take snapshots, burn weenies.
Surely no sensible people would live in this rugged place, much less farm its steep inclines.
{
But live there and farm it they do. Over half of Guatemala's people live here in the highlands. Almost all of them are full-blooded Maya Indians -- the same people who centuries earlier built the fabled cities of Tikal, Uaxuctun, and Zacaleu.
Coming down from the highest fields along the sides of the volcanoes at Atitlan, loaded down with firewood, they look up with frantic, near-exhausted eyes.
You panic for a moment, you on vacation, they loaded down, straining the dumb beasts.
But there is that smile again, that crooked and felicitous smile that asks what kind of war could possibly be rolling over the next hill.
And Buenos dias! or Buenos Tardes! These small people, with their life expectancy of 55 years, for whom even the bare necessities -- sticks for fire, water, the impossible centavos the shopkeepers demand -- can be gotten only through unceasing toil, these little people are, so many of them, too big to be envious.
Instructive. Fantastic actually.
{
In San Lucas Toliman there is only one pension, and that is American Pay.
American Pay. Before you decide that that is a shamelessly cynical name for a tourist haven, you should realize it is pronounced "American Pie," after a song with quizzical lyrics by Don McLean which was popular here five years ago.
Now, if they had called the place American Pie, the locals would not have understood, because pie means foot in Spanish. American Foot? No comprendo.
Thus, American Pay -- which to the French tourists sounded exactly like American Country, but that was their problem.
Two points here:
One, with communications between language groups being what they are here in Latin America, no wonder embassies routinely get seized. It's better not to know a language at all than to confuse foot, country, pie and pay.
And two, having brazenly but unknowledgeably courted the tourist dollar, American Pay felt compelled to provide what no other kitchen south of the Tropic of Capricorn would: granola.
Never mind that no one knew what to do with it, or that it looked like it came out of Mount St. Helens. I was like a letter from home.
{
In Antigua we learn of another hardship, el terramoto, the earthquake.
Antigua is the old colonial capitol, and all through the city can be seen the dozens of churches and cathedrals reaching up from the valley floor.
Or, what's left of them reaches up. There is scarcely a spire in them intact after the earthquakes which one by one and century by century brought the princely churches to their knees.
In the 1960s the government finally saw that Antigua with its colonial architecture had major tourism potential, and went to work reconstructing the fallen walls. The restoration was the pride of the entire country until 1976 when an earthquake -- worse than any other, and centered almost precisely at Antigua -- flattened the work of men again.
The quake, in one anecdote, flattened a convent while the sisters were at prayer. Rescue teams, in the face of the catastrophe, decided to leave them where they lay, under the massive slabs.
(Claustrophobia in Spanish means, literally, fear of the cloister. The old tales of Antigua were rife with the sufferings of young girls behind the convent walls. The terramoto gives the pun a third, insidious interpretation.)
The quake was not merely a setback for tourism, however; it demolished the country's frail economy as well. Inflation skyrocketed. There was not enough money to get the country back on its feet. Guatemala turned, as it always must, to another strongman.
{
At the Cathedral of San Francisco in Antigua, besides an interesting crucified Christ made of plaster of ground corn cob, is the tomb of Father Pedro de Bethancourt.
(Also, the grave of the wife of the man who discovered California, but she has been punished enough.)
Plastered all around the tomb, higher up along the stone church walls than people ought respectfully to be clambering, are placards and letters and mementos of wood and clay.
"Thank you Blessed Pedro de Bathancourt for getting me through my operation."
"In gratitude to Holy Father Pedro for his intercession..."
"I thank Blessed Father Pedro for answering my prayers, for returning my faith to me."
Similarly, in the large daily newspapers in the city, people take out display classified advertisements to thank Bethancourt for this, that, the other thing.
This summer is an important one for those grateful to the holy friar. The Church in Rome has found favor with his case, and Bethancourt is to be officially beatified. Travel agencies are featuring a July special: Vatican City for two for ten days: Q1,034.
{
The war has been bad for tourism. At the airport a government representative with a clipboard asks if there were any, well, problems encountered during your stay in the country.
No, one says, unless one is the sort who objects to having loaded machine guns pointed at one's nose. I see, she says, writing that down. Was there anything else?
Think pleasanter thoughts.
{
The Indian people living in the jungle by Tikal: do they know that it was them who built these causeways and temples, these cities of macabre and bleached beauty?
All us tourists shell out our money to come to this desolate and uncomfortable isthmus, to marvel at the accomplishments of a people so creative and so single-minded that they mapped the heavens and erected in their humid valley a civilization of gleaming limestone temples without the help of an ox or a horse, without the use of a single wheel (they put wheels on their playthings but not on their carts!), without a single piece of metal, a people interested in the movements of giant spheres through space backwards and forwards for 100,000 centuries of time and interested as well in the idea of the numberless number, the zero, who left us a thousand cities but not a single human name.
These Indians that live here in their little stick huts: do they know who they used to be?
In the Peten one has a choice: one can ponder imponderables or play backgammon. Personally, I don't have the energy to ponder much longer, and anyway, I keep thinking of the boy who bore the crossbeam on his shoulder. What would he say?
(He would say, maybe: "There's no big mystery, mister. In the old days we had Zero. Today we got nothing, nada. Nothing is changed.")
{
Chichicastenango is as far as you should venture into the mountains. Beyond "Chichi" are the guerrilleros, and they are obliged to treat you as viciously as would the government militiamen.
Consequently, the marvelous markets of Chichi are short of customers. Four hundred merchants show up to display their wares for perhaps a dozen cheap Americans. And market day comes but once a week.
So the vendors get desperate, they chase you down the rows, impressing you with their one English phrase ("Good-bye"), inviting you to step into their booth, to touch their fabrics, to consider the special price they offer you because they like Americans in a special way.
(Right.)
One woman is selling wood carvings: bloodied martyrs, the Indian prince Tecum Uman, the Christ child, the Virgin. You admire her work. You take a snapshot of her exhibit.
"One Quetzal," she snaps, putting out her hand for payment. For what, you ask, all we did was take a picture.
But she is seething. It took her maybe a year, maybe two years to make these images. And after all that care, to see the power sapped with the click of a shutter.
One Quetzal, she insists. It is unreasonable (Or is it?)
Behind, the censors stand on the cathedral steps, incense wafting from their burners, thick cloud gathering at the great oak and iron door. What are they doing, you stop someone and ask. "Es costumbre," he answers. "It is what we do."
{
It is dark, the jungle has quieted down, only the occasional drone of a mosquito. OK, all right, sleep, you tell yourself; the quinine will take care of you. Imagine what it's like out there: the toucans have shut their eyes, the monkeys lie curled in the arms of the giant ceiba trees, soon even the secrets of the Maya, fitfully circling out there in the dark like the left-handed hummingbird himself, will join you in sleep.
|
The rear-view mirror said God is Love, but you'd never have known it on that pitiless second-class bus.
It was those Germans who got the day off to a bad start.
I had always thought of that people as punctilious and prudent in managing their affairs. Surely their countrymen would be ashamed of this impolite disorderly group.
We were in the Peten jungle a kilometer or so from the Tikal ruins. Rachel and I spent our days walking through the forest, eyeing the ancient stones, the roots of the ceiba trees gouging the decayed altars.
The Germans, on the other hand, who occupied the hut next to us, spent their days sunbathing, discussing favored ski resorts around the world, and tossing down rums and tonics with twists of lime.
You see, in the jungle -- this is an opinion -- people have to pull together. The jungle is a place for teamwork and civility.
If, say, the gasoline generator shuts off at 9, then everyone really ought to comply by going to sleep. If a group of German tourists insist on singing and joking to a kerosene lamp until, say, midnight, then going to sleep becomes that much more difficult for the rest.
And if they further insist on drying their underwear on a line in front of one's door, blocking off one's faint evening jungle breeze instead of theirs, then lying there, annoyed, innocent, very possibly suffocating, one may come to reassess one's previous opinion of the Treaty of Versailles.
The bus for Flores was due to leave very early in the morning, at 4 a.m. All the sensible people in the jungle camp set their alarms for 3:45: time enough to grab baggage and jump aboard.
The Germans, however, not having packed and having, in fact, left their underwear on the line all night, awoke at 2:45, bumped heads in the dark, fired their lamp, and muttered Deutsch imprecations to the rest of the camp's growing dismay.
Hungry and thirsty, most of the passengers blinked and slumped in the Guatemaltecan-sized bus seats.
But not the Germans. Finally summoning their martial gifts, they commanded the driver to stop at a roadside tienda, marched in, purchased a six-pack of Perrier's, and marched back aboard, clutching their liquids with unlikable, complacent half-smiles.
It was going to be a long day.
{
"No, no, you don't want to take the highway to Rio Dulce," Wolfgang, a traveling friend and an outstanding representative of the German nation, had warned us.
"The road is no good, the trip is, how do you say, very bumpy? Bumpy, yes."
But we bade Wolfgang auf wiedersehen at the crossroads to Belize and continued toward Flores.
The road did not seem to bad at first, and the bus was not overcrowded. Only a few people stood in the aisles.
Indeed, the vicinity was full of workmen, widening the gravel highway. We knew Guatemala is pushing to make Tikal a major new tourism center for Central America, and the highway project was a part of this effort.
So Rachel and I imagined we were the beneficiaries of this campaign, and enjoyed the relative luxury.
Just outside Flores, however, everyone on the bus stood and gasped.
Lying in the middle of the limestone road was a dead man. Over his face lay a handkerchief. Around his head a still pool of blood had gathered. And not more than ten feet in every direction were his fellow workers, raking the gravel, going about their business.
The nearest ambulance was 200 miles away. Whatever had happened that morning on the road from Tikal, whatever machine had squashed that poor man's head, and ruined his family back in whatever village he had traveled from to join this road gang, he never had a chance. His friends, calmly raking to right and to left knew this, thanked God it was him and not them, wished his soul straightaway to heaven and put his body out of mind.
{
The city of San Benito has worse water problems than the city of Worthington, Minnesota, where I live, and which is considering reusing water from its waste lagoons for home use.
Like our city, San Benito is located alongside a lake, about 150 miles from a major city. Population: roughly 10,000.
The problem is that it is situated on the vast limestone shelf of the Guatemalan lowlands, making an effective sewer system impossible.
Accordingly, waste of every kind is piling up in San Benito, and has been for decades. The city smells. Its market, unlike the typical Guatemalan market -- attractive and not entirely without order -- is like one great indiscriminate heap of produce and flesh, with the freshest on top and the most fetid trampled underfoot.
In the back bins, children and the elderly sort through the rotting vegetables for parts still edible.
Guatemala is a poor country, but seldom squalid. San Benito is squalid. We were eager to leave, but dismayed when, approaching the bus that we had heard such nightmarish tales about, it was already full to the exploding point.
I counted 93 bodies on board, not counting two turkeys and an undisclosed number of chickens issuing complaints from a burlap sack. This was on a bus whose maximum capacity in the United States would be 54 or 60.
Happily, a Spaniard architect preferred to be smashed up against us than against any alternatives on board and offered to share his seat.
Less happy were a group of British tourists with pigtails (the men) and save-the-whales T-shirts (the women). The looks on their faces when they realized they would be on their feet all day long on this grueling course was a collective one of dejection.
One passenger was a squat, muscular woman in her forties, the grandmother of a family of five squashed into one schoolbus seat. The grandmother was clearly accustomed to having people yield to her.
In the crowded, quarreling confines of the bus, she simply seized a window seat and planted her sullen and meaty face at the window.
One other passenger was a small man of about 35 who was having difficulty understanding. He did not look well. Every now and then he would nod off to sleep.
The bus pulled out of Flores and onto the road to Rio Dulce. Now we realized what Wolfgang meant by bumpy. The road was simply a strip of the limestone floor that is everywhere in the jungle, the soft stone pitted very badly by the tropical rains.
It is not an exaggeration to say that there was not five feet of smooth road, not two seconds of the entire trip that was not punctuated by a jarring, kneecap-bruising bump.
To make matters worse, the driver was not one to coddle his passengers. He hated the trip as much as they, and his one objective was to get it over with. Therefore he literally raced the bus from bump to bump.
At 30 miles per hour, the bus felt like it was navigating the stairwell of the Statue of Liberty.
But it was not a matter of amusement. Tempers rubbed together in the bus. I overheard remarks from some about us gringos, that we all of us expected deluxe treatment, that we were making too great a show of our discomfort.
Just in front of us, the pigtailed Englishman and his annoyed environmentalist friend peeled and fussily devoured orange after papaya after banana, while the hulking grandmother looked at the fruit with undisguised covetousness.
And of course the British were being just fastidious enough about the process to justify the gringo sentiment that was flourishing in the back rows.
Meanwhile, children and the French Hoss Cartwright were having sport with cataplectic little man, who had lost consciousness and slumped in his seat. They would lift an arm and let it drop again lifelessly, then howl with delight at their own wit. The other passengers thought it was legitimate fun, drizzling Orange Crush down his shirtfront and calling him drunkard.
Worse, however, the man had dozed past his stop. He had wanted to go seven miles from San Benito. Now he was almost 100 miles past it. When the conductor jostled him awake and asked for his ticket, and he had none, the conductor pulled him to his feet and began forcing him backward toward the emergency exit.
The man was awake now, but to a reality straight out of Kafka: he did not know where he was or what he had none, he had no money, no friends, he was being accused of something he wasn't responsible for, and laughed at by people who didn't understand him, and finally physically hurled from this busful of bruised, uncouth and impatient people.
Plus he was sticky all over from the Orange Crush.
Thrown from the back, he cried and ran after the bus and climbed back on. The conductor whirled and came at him again. "Mi paquete!" he cried. "My bag!"
So the bus stopped again while the conductor showed him bag after bag from the luggage rack. No, that isn't it. No, not that one. It became apparent that he wouldn't recognize his bag if he saw it, that he was stalling for time until he got a better idea.
Finally the conductor led him to the door again. He hopped down, then turned again and raced after the bus, his eyes bugging. The conductor, having had enough, jumped down and with one swipe clubbed him alongside the face, bloodied his nose and knocked him down, a pathetic figure on the white lime road, now dwindling in the distance.
And over the rear-view mirror was the bus' motto: Dios es amor.
{
The hours passed. Not quickly or pleasantly or smoothly, but they passed. Every hour we put another 30 kilometers behind us, and every hour a few more bruises to ankle and kneecap and skull.
Gradually, the landscape began to change from the flat jungle plain to craggy hillock. The change was scarcely a relief, however, as the bus groaned uphill, spitting slag after it, and flirting precariously close to the shoulders, beyond which loomed space, more space, and a valley floor of stone.
The grandmother, who had fought so cussedly for her seat at the window, was fingering her rosary beads.
For m part, I was thinking of all the 2-inch Associated Press stories we used to get at the Globe about bus bursting into flames in the canyons or Latin America. We used to use these stories for filler, to make the more important stories fit on the page. No big deal. And now I was feeling like filler-fodder myself.
Around 3 in the afternoon the bus halted at the garita station. A soldier with sawed-off machine gun boarded the bus and peered into a few faces and stepped down. Then the driver announced something in Spanish.
I thought I had misunderstood but I hadn't. All male passengers were to get off the bus and forfeit their passports.
I shrugged. These security checks were routine. But then we stood there in line, and I examined the other men's faces, young and nervous and displeased. If even one of them didn't have his papers in order, or were recognized....
The corporal's thumb rested on his trigger.
Oh, it is easy to be contemptuous of their problem. Their silly political upheavals and their disco armies of kids with pegged pants and tommy guns.
But when the gun is looking back at you, eye to eye with the Grave Possibility, then you're the silly one, and your silly contempt.
The sun bore down on us as we stood in line and one by one surrendered our papers. My Spaniard architect friend seemed to have a problem. Guatemala has broken off relations with Spain, I thought. I considered coming to his assistance, then fantasized myself saying the wrong thing:
"Listen here, soldier. I'm an American journalist, and everything you do here will wind up in a major publication back in the United States, so I advise you..."
Blam. Thud. Fantasy concluded.
{
We reboarded. Exhausted, we jolted along another sixty miles, another three hours.
By now the lime dust was everywhere on us, our hair was stiff with it. Children were bawling inconsolably. The English leaned glumly into one another. The grandmother had emptied two coconuts in two strong draughts and slept now, head slamming unmercifully, rhythmically -- and strangely peacefully -- against the bus window.
We came to a river. We were asked to get off the bus, take all our luggage, cross a rickety plank-bridge as best we could, and reboard another bus -- whose passengers had been waiting for us for over three hours -- on the other side!
But the long day, the long road was almost behind us. It was dark when we pulled into Rio Dulce, a salty roadside town on the estuary of Lake Isabel.
It was good to hear the engine die, good to put weight on your feet again, and straighten our American-size limbs.
We brushed the dust from our suitcases, asked directions to the nearest pension and, though there was no water there to drink or to bathe in, we thought ourselves terribly lucky indeed after our long day's journey across the wilderness to rest on those heavenly cots.
August, 1979
"A masterpiece of explanatory journalism!" - New Orleans Picayune |
