NOTHING TO DECLARE

by Mary Morris

  In 1542 Cortés dispatched Pedro de Al varado, the conquistador who had slaughtered the Aztecs while they were performing a religious ceremony, to Guatemala. Alvarado proceeded to torture, rape, and kill as many indigenous people as he was able. Bartolomé de Las Casas reported how Alvarado forced Indians to eat the flesh of their dead and killed children, broiling them for eating. According to Las Casas, Alvarado was responsible for some five million deaths—probably an exaggeration, but nonetheless it gives a sense of the extent of the conquest.

  In The Tears of the Indians Las Casas wrote of Alvarado, "How many orphans did he make, how many families did he rob of their sons, how many husbands did he deprive of their wives, how many women did he leave without husbands, how many married women did he adulterate, how many virgins did he ravish, how many did he enslave."

  While I awaited the bus through the highlands, a truck arrived. Women stood by with sacks and pitchers while men began unloading containers of flour and cooking oil, stamped FROM THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in English, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Spanish, and many other languages. I was merely a tourist, but I was also a gringa, a North American, and the deeper I would travel into Central America, the more aware I would become of who I was and of how people identified me with my country. And I would become more aware of my country's role in that region. The irony of these women receiving flour from the United States was not lost on me.

  At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, United States foreign policy in Central America because interventionist again, as it had in early parts of our history. In 1954 the CLA brought about the overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan president, Arbenz, whose platform stood for an end of corrupt rule and a distancing from North American influence. A military dictatorship was then established with the goal of infantilizing and virtually enslaving the indigenous peoples of the northern highlands of Guatemala. These people, however, rebelled. They formed small bands that roamed the hills. They established a guerrilla movement much as they had when Pedro de Alvarado was dispatched by Cortés to conquer these highlands.

  The government would soon make war on its civilian population—a population that had grown accustomed to being made war upon, and to fighting back. Like the quetzal which is their symbol, the Mayan people were endangered. I was traveling in a lull before the storm.

  The bus arrived and we drove through the highlands. The landscape was astounding. It was how I pictured ancient China. Gentle rolling hills terraced in evenly spaced rows where corn and beans grew. In some cases every inch of a hill was terraced, not unlike the terracing of a Mayan pyramid, but here it was a whole hillside, a mountain. Farmers worked in the hills. Women in elaborately woven blouses and skirts carried huge baskets of grain on their heads and waved as the bus drove by. Others bent into streams, scrubbing clothing against rocks or letting down their long black hair to wash it in the cool mountain streams.

  Coming out of a rain shower into the sun, we passed the mountainside village of Zunil. The houses were made of a white clay and the roofs were red tile. The village reminded me of the illustrations in books I'd read as a child—those perfect little villages where everything is peaceful—and I longed to stop. From the road I could see fires burning. I imagined children playing, happy families. I have always tried to picture the life within houses. I especially like to do this at night when I can see a light burning in a bedroom, the blue glow of a TV from a living room, candlelight on the dining room table. Perhaps I long to live in other people's houses, other people's lives. But seeing the village of Zunil, I longed for home.

  If I'd been in a car, I would have stopped, but I had no idea when the next bus would come by. In my mind I attributed not stopping to logistics. I wanted to reach Quezaltenango by evening and Panajachel the next day. But I must admit I was afraid. The line in the guidebook had done its trick. I would not stray far. Looking back, I'm not sure I would have stopped no matter what, and I'm glad I didn't, for Zunil remains fixed in my memory as a perfect place, a perfect village, a place of perfect peace. If I had stopped, probably I would have found something else.

  That evening I wandered the cobbled streets of Quezaltenango—a modern city, but with narrow colonial-looking streets and low adobe and tile-roofed houses. But it was cold and rainy and I had no desire to be outside. Instead I returned early to the dreary room with no windows I had taken in a run-down boarding house. There I fell asleep at seven o'clock, feeling miserable and alone.

  In the morning I got the bus to Panajachel. A friend in Mexico had written to a friend of hers named Eleanore McCauley, who lived in Panajachel in the house where Che Guevara had once lived, asking if I could stay with her. I knew little about Eleanore except that she was a Bostonian who'd moved to Guatemala to try to help the Indians with their production of high-protein products.

  We reached Panajachel in the afternoon, and I went with a little map in hand through the muddy streets to find Eleanore McCauley's house. The house was supposed to be across the street from a restaurant, the Pájaro Azul (blue bird), and a horrible discotheque, but it took some stomping through the mud to find it. At last I located the Pájaro Azul and across from it the house where Che Guevara had lived. Pinned to the door was a weathered and rain-streaked note that had obviously been there for many days. It read, "Mary Morris, had to go to U.S.A. Find Patricia." And again a little map.

  The map was very simple and I followed it around the corner to a lovely pagoda-like house surrounded by birds of paradise and assorted tropical flowers. I saw a toucan with a limp wing sitting on a perch but no sign of Patricia. Two other structures were sketched on the map, representing a small guest house and then, a few more yards back, another house on the property. I continued through this paradisiacal setting and knocked on the door of the house.

  A man came out who looked remarkably like my uncle Sidney. "Are you Mary Morris?" he asked. He introduced himself as Walter Weinstein and said he'd been waiting for me. "Eleanore said you'd make it here eventually. She had to go to the States for some legal matters and asked Patricia and me to help you out." He explained to me that Patricia was his landlady. "We expected you last week." He got a rather wistful look in his eye and I could tell he'd been looking forward to my company. "Anyway, the guest house is yours." He pointed in the direction of the small cottage with high windows shielded by a grove of fruit trees, thick with plantains and lemons.

  We sat down on his porch and Walter brought out a tray of fresh fruit juices—mango and orange and papaya—and small cakes. I stretched out in a bamboo chair and sipped the nectar that Walter said his gardener had squeezed that morning. "So," Walter asked, "where are you from?" I told him I was from New York and he said he was from Illinois.

  "Oh," I said, "I'm originally from Illinois."

  "What part?"

  "The North Shore."

  He nodded. "I'm from the North Shore."

  "I'm from Highland Park," I said.

  "So am I," Walter replied. "You aren't related to the Morrises from Highland Park, are you? Sidney and Ruth?"

  "As a matter of fact, you look like my uncle Sidney," I said.

  "Everybody used to say that," Walter replied. "Your parents aren't Rosalie and Sol, are they?"

  "Why, yes, they are," I replied, thinking this was getting very strange indeed.

  "And you went to the Ravinia Nursery School, right?"

  "Right," I said, dumbfounded.

  It tinned out that Walter Weinstein and his wife, Janine, were friends of my aunt and uncle and knew my parents. Janine had been my teacher at the Ravinia Nursery School a quarter of a century before.

  We settled into an afternoon of cocktails and reminiscences about home. Walter told me about himself. He had retired from a nondescript civil service job he hadn't liked and had decided he wanted to live his life differently. He wanted to get away from America and from the bourgeois life, and so he'd given up everything to move to Panajachel. Including Janine. Janine had come down and given
it a try, but she'd been unhappy. Walter seemed to be still in love with her and was hoping to work it out.

  "My life is good here," he said, nursing a pina colada. "I've got this house that I rent from Patricia. I've got a little boat I sail. The natives are nice to me. I can't complain."

  We had talked for a few hours when Walter said he'd make dinner. I decided to go for a walk down by the lake. I had not really seen the lake when I arrived and I wanted to visit the town a little before dark. I told Walter I was going, put my pack inside the Japanese-style guest house, and walked the half mile to the lake.

  Lake Atitlan is famous for its changing hues, the way the light moves across its surface, from shades of aquamarine to fuchsia, from cobalt blue to scarlet. I walked down toward the water through this small town of muddy streets, indigenous peoples, and foreigners such as Walter Weinstein.

  Women passed, their hair wrapped in colored beads made from polished stones found along the lake's shores, beads that were the same colors as the light reflected on the lake, which glistened in the setting sun. They wore bright red and green shawls across their shoulders, with infants wrapped inside. The men of Panajachel wore plainer clothes, white shirts and dark trousers. This has been the case in Central America since at least 1932, when El Salvador's General Maximiliano Hernandez Martínez ordered the massacre of all males in native costumes. About thirty thousand people died in this event, called simply la Matanza, the massacre. In recent years in Guatemala, with the renewed slaughter, women have also adopted Western dress as a means of survival.

  A group of women, accompanied by young girls, also in bright dresses and shawls, stopped me. The women held up long strands of beads and tried to sell them to me. I paused and for a few moments we bargained, not seriously, though. They dangled the beads and draped them over my head. I laughed and said they had to make me a better price. They said that tomorrow they would make me a better price. Spanish was a foreign language to these women. Their native tongue was Quiché, and some of them spoke English, French, or German as well as they spoke Spanish. They were good traders, but with me, at that moment, they were mainly having fun.

  I asked where they came from. Pointing up the hill, they told me they were returning to their village just above Panajachel, called Sololá. The following year I would read in the newspapers how the people of Sololá had been killed in terrible ways. The lucky ones had fled to Mexico and are probably still living in refugee camps.

  Patricia arrived later that evening with the crippled toucan, whom she introduced as Calamity, sitting on her arm. An enormous silver dog named Toscanini, with one blue eye and one gray, followed her. "We were expecting you." Patricia smiled at the toucan and patted the dog. "We knew you were coming soon," she said rather mysteriously.

  Patricia was a woman touched by some spirit. She was a large Nordic-looking woman who loved animals and was usually followed by a cat or a dog or had a bird perched on her arm. Calamity, she explained, had been found in the jungle. Some feather traders had tried to capture her and had broken her wing. An Indian brought her to Patricia, who adopted Calamity and made her well. Patricia was known as the St. Francis of Panajachel. But to me she was a somewhat distant woman with a cold streak. I never quite made contact with her, though I tried.

  As we sat down to dinner, Patricia volunteered that she believed in the teachings of Sai Baba. She said that in front of her very eyes he had produced from thin air a golden locket with a picture of Shiva on it. Behind her, Walter winked.

  Walter had made a kind of stew with rice and beans, which was quite good. "Have you been here a long time?" I asked Patricia.

  "Twenty-five years," she told me.

  "That's a lifetime," Walter said. He had been there four years and now he told me he was thinking of going back to the States. "There's trouble here," he said. He repeated what I'd already heard. That a priest had been killed across the lake and that there'd been killings near Huehuetenango. "People predict that all the indigenous are in for trouble."

  "A lot of Americans are getting ready to get out," Patricia said, looking toward the highlands, distracted. "But I'll stay."

  "You will stay? No matter what happens?"

  Patricia moved her hand in front of her face as if brushing cobwebs away. "I've seen God come out of thin air. I believe whatever happens is meant to happen."

  Tell that to someone in prison, I wanted to say; tell that to someone being tortured. But I was a guest and Patricia was not of this world. Walter could see I was getting annoyed with her and he switched the subject. "What are your plans?" he asked me. My only plan was to cover as much ground as possible. I wanted to travel as far as I could through Central America and then fly back from whatever country I'd made it to. Walter asked me where I thought that would be.

  "Either Salvador or Honduras," I said.

  "Well, if you go anywhere," Walter said—and he was already sounding a bit dubious about my venture—"I'd go to Honduras. There's trouble there, but there's trouble everywhere else and a lot more of it."

  "Yes." Patricia nodded, now struck by the reality of the journey I was making. "I'd go to Honduras if I were you."

  On Sunday I set off to the market in Chichicastenango. Walter said that the market was just for tourists and I should spend a relaxing day by the lake, but I had heard about it for so long and so I had to go. The packed bus left Panajachel at about eight and by ten we had arrived.

  Chichicastenango is the hub of the Quiché Maya highlands. In the town itself about one thousand ladinos, or Spanish descendants, live. But in the hills around the town some twenty thousand Maya dwell, and on market days they come into the town to sell their wares. Outside of the church and market, Chichicastenango is nondescript—low rain-damaged dirt-floor houses; small shops that sell gum, candles, and Fanta; and cantinas.

  I wandered through the market where mostly women, often with children clinging to their breasts, shawls wrapped around them, sold small coin purses, sweaters, embroidered ponchos, skirts, huipiles (embroidered blouses). They bartered in broken French, English, German, and Spanish, and giggled among themselves in their own tongue.

  I paused to buy a purse from a woman. She wore beads in her hair and the traditional skirt. But instead of a huipil she wore a Donald Duck T-shirt. I stared at the T-shirt in disbelief. "Where did you get that?"

  She displayed it for me proudly. A North American, she told me, wanted to buy her huipil and he gave her five dollars plus this T-shirt in exchange. I asked if this was common practice and she said yes. "Many North Americans want our blouses. So we trade them for the blouses they bring."

  I wandered over to see the Dominican monastery and the famous St. Tomas Church. The monastery was the place where in 1690 the manuscript of the Popol Vuh, the book of Quiché Maya mythology, was discovered, and where Father Jiménez worked on its translation. It is one of the few books left to us, since many Mayan mythologies were destroyed in Bishop Diego de Landa's infamous book burning in 1562, in which many of the secrets of Mayan beliefs and culture were destroyed because they were considered heretical. The mysteries of these people have been lost, and what little remains comes to us through the Popol Vuh.

  At St. Tomas the ceremony was under way. On the steps of the church, Maya knelt, incanting in their own tongue and burning copal candles, flower petals, and a thick incense. Inside, Mass was in process. The Maya of Chichicastenango hold firmly to their pagan beliefs. A number of years ago they made an arrangement with an ingenious priest. The Indians could pray to their own gods on the steps of the church. Then they would go inside and pray to the Christian god.

  I could not help but think, here in this ancient village, confronted with indigenous women in Donald Duck T-shirts and men on the steps of churches, praying to pagan gods, what reality had been for these people for the past four hundred years. In these highlands, which have been called both Tierra de la Guerra (land of war) and Verdadera Paz (true peace), their struggle has been long and intense.

 
; At the Border

  ON THE ROAD TO GUATEMALA CITY I HAD TO change buses at Chimultenango. I got off the bus. A man was urinating into a ditch by the side of the road. An old woman, descending from the bus, recognized the man. "Hola, Pepito," she said to him. The man, recognizing her as well, waved back with a smile, his urine streaming into the gully.

  I waited at the side of the road, by some small stands where tacos, Chiclets, and warm Fanta were sold. A boy slept on the embankment. Three policemen came by. They kicked him, poked him with their sticks. They kicked him harder and he woke screaming, pleading for mercy, as they dragged him off. Everyone looked away.

  A girl of about sixteen with a baby wrapped in a shawl on her back had a small stand of candy, cigarettes, and cigars. She wore native clothing and smoked one of her cigars. "Is it a good cigar?" I asked her, surprised to see a girl smoking one.

  She explained to me that it was a cigar girls smoked to bring on images of their future husbands. "Are you married?" she asked. I told her I was not. "Then you must try one." She laughed, handing me a cigar.

  I told her no, thank you, I wasn't interested in such images. I walked on, but still the bus didn't come. I walked back again and said I'd try. "Here." She gave it to me for a few cents. She held a lighter and I lit it. I took a puff but nothing happened. "So?" she asked.

  "Nada," I replied.

  "Try again."

  I did. This time an image came. I saw someone tall with soft brown eyes, older and bald. A nice smile, benevolent eyes. The image sharpened. There were books and papers. A studious man. Then I saw tennis rackets, boxer shorts. Piles of dishes and a Sunday afternoon football game.