Letter from Guatemala
By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor
Dear Leelanau,
The mournful roosters of Guatemala call out over the waters of Lake Atitlan, “Oh, lost, where are you,” the sound lingering in the foggy dawn. My neighbor’s roosters in Lake Leelanau say, “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” like the roosters in Mother Goose, and the roosters of Thailand scream, “Now, you’ll die, fool,” like the fighting cocks they are, but the roosters of Guatemala sound like saxophone players.
Lake Atitlan is a deep volcanic lake, considered by Aldous Huxley, among others, to be one of the most beautiful in the world. My Mayan tutor tells me there’s a myth that you can swim to the bottom of the lake and from there out to the ocean. “But if there’s an opening, wouldn’t that drain the lake?” I ask. He smiles, “It’s a myth.”
I have come to San Pedro to study the Mayan language. I’m on vacation from teaching in El Salvador. My one-room school on the shores of Lake Atitlan is roughly twice the size of a telephone booth, with corn stalks walls and a banana leaf roof.
The first day the director is my teacher. I learn that he had been conscripted labor on the coast. The work was hard, the days were long and so the men drank. But he was lucky, he fell in love with a woman who inspired him to stop drinking. He’s a brilliant linguist who speaks fluent English, Spanish, Japanese and several native languages.
The next day the director’s daughter is my teacher. She’s a fast walker. All over Guatemala you see people far up the mountain paths, effortlessly walking with heavy loads, zig-zagging up into the clouds. Today we are walking a narrow mountain trail cut into the cliffs above Lake Atitlan.
“Someone is watching us,” I blurt out suddenly.
She glances around. Neither of us sees anything ahead of us or behind us. On the lakeside, to our left, is a precipitous cliff down to the water; on the other side the sheer mountain face. We look up and see nothing.
Just then a yellow snake raises his head from the leaves and stares at us intently. We stand very still. The snake then slithers back the way it had come, toward the cliff above the lake. We both laugh, the nervous laughter of relief.
“That must have been who it was,” I say. I want to know if the snake is poisonous and she says she doesn’t know.
“This was the trail used by the revolutionaries during the civil war,” she says. “They would come this way to the next town because the soldiers couldn’t follow them unless they came on foot. The soldiers were lazy and didn’t want to do that.”
I am thinking about the family in my home-stay. It is a household where I had learned that the man’s older brother had been killed during the recent civil war, and so he, the younger brother, had inherited all the land. They had been on opposite sides — the older brother had been a revolutionary and the younger brother had been a soldier. I wondered now if the man had killed his older brother to get the land.
That night I ask the man and his wife about the snake. “El serpente amarillo,” he says, “Toxico.” In pantomime he shows me how he kills such snakes with his mattock.
San Pedro is a labyrinth, a town built on a series of concentric hills. I knew my way to the school, and I knew my way to the boat dock. I knew how to walk back along the shore, past the restaurant where the man from Holland had the world’s best collection of books about Guatemala. In the late afternoon I always stopped there for a beer and chilli rellenos and, of course, the books. But one day I got lost. I missed the turn to my home-stay.
That day I walk the trail of volcanic cinders along the lake — past the Dutchman’s restaurant, past the stable where the horses are — for hours. I pass the horse stable twice, thinking that if I pass it a third time, I will stay there, since I know snakes don’t like the hooves of horses and the manure will keep me warm.
I’m beginning to resign myself to spending a cold night on the cindery shores of this volcanic lake when a small boy appears. I see in the distance a gang of ragamuffins from which he has apparently detached himself. They are all watching us. He has the most beatific smile.
“Perdido,” I say, which I hope means something like, “I am lost.”
He takes me by the hand, his grimy wonderful little hand, and leads me up a slope through a grove of trees, and points to my school; from there I can find my home-stay. Perhaps he had been watching me all afternoon, wandering back and forth, and around the circular streets of the circular hills. I give him all the money I have, which isn’t much. He refuses to take it. I press it on him and finally he smiles, shrugs, the universal kid’s sign, for “Whatever, lady,” and walks jauntily back to his friends.
The morning I leave San Pedro I take the usual small motorboat to Panajachel. At 8 a.m. I meet the driver I had contracted two weeks before to take me to Todos Santos. He had been the driver of the van that brought me from Antigua to Panajachel.
This driver was careful, cautious and intelligent. I had asked him on the trip to Pana if he had ever been a driver for the chicken busses, which regularly whizzed past us on blind mountain turns. “Yes,” he had answered. I shot him a quick glance and he added, “for two weeks.”
Why had he stopped?
“I didn’t want to die.”
We had both laughed.
Drivers of the chicken busses, he had explained, are paid according to the number of runs, so naturally they drive too fast for conditions. The over-loaded busses — with people’s belongings, including chickens and once I saw a goat, stacked precariously on top — sometimes careen out of control over the sides of the mountains. You could see a few of them at the bottoms of the ravines. The chicken bus that had brought me to Antigua had an awesomely athletic man, a Guatemalan Usain Bolt, whose job it was to act as the side mirrors. He had hung off the back of the bus — leaning far out to see what was coming — and sometimes ran alongside the bus to get better visibility, and then hopped back on.
Now we wind our way up into the mountains, through endless small towns that could have been in California’s High Sierras except that they’re in Guatemala. The geography is similar but everything else is different. In almost every small mountain town there’s a funeral, sometimes three or four; often the funerals of infants, which we know by the size of the coffins.
Finally he deposits me at a hotel in Todos Santos. In the morning, since I’m an early riser, I find the kitchen, where all the maids, little more than children with runny noses, are sleeping in a heap on the floor around the wood stove. I soon learn that they are required to cook and clean around the clock and are subjected to constant verbal abuse, and probably worse, from their employer.
One morning I encounter a young, American photographer. We spend some time together walking the mountains. At one point I see two young boys in bright red shirts digging a trench with a man in a bright blue shirt, all against the backdrop of bright green fields and in the distance vivid purple mountains. I say, “That’s a good photograph.”
He ignores me and I ignore the fact that he ignored me. When we have walked a little farther he says, “Todos Santos is where a Japanese photographer was murdered. He was a pedophile and was taking pictures of young boys.”
“Good call,” I say.
My faithful driver reappears on the designated morning and drives me back to Antigua. I stay again in the ancient hotel with the silent, dwarfed, hunch-backed doorman who sleeps on a narrow platform above the door. His job, when someone comes to the door, is to climb down a ladder on the wall, slide heavy boards to one side, and thus unlatch the 26-high, six-inch-thick, mahogany doors. The hotel and the dwarf seem like they have been there since the Conquistadors.
It’s late, after 10 p.m., when I go to the fancy restaurant across the street and order chocolate turkey. This is roasted turkey with a sauce of dark chocolate, no sugar, some kind of smoky-tasting peppers and mysterious spices. I think if I eat it where it’s really good, I can figure out how to make it at home. This restaurant, one of the most expensive in Antigua is still only about 20 dollars, including wine and dessert. As I’m paying I see a sign on the counter that says, “President, Clinton, ate here.” Did he eat here when he was president? Before he was president? I wonder if he ever thought the roosters of Guatemala sounded like saxophone players.
Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990). She is currently working on her next book, “The Long Arc of the Universe”.
