The words been translated as daykeeper, timekeeper, sun keeper, and even time accountant. Most literally, in Cholan it would be sun totaler or sun adder-upper, or lets say sun adder. A sun adder is basically the village shaman, a pagan alternative to the Catholic priest. We figure out whether a client is sick because some dead relative is hassling her, and if so what little offerings she should make to him to shut him up and which herbs to hang around her house for a faster recovery. When should you burn off your milpa, that is, your family cornfield? Is this a good day to take a bus trip to the capital? What would be a lucky day to have the christening? Its all blended up with Catholicism, so we also use bits of liturgy. If you wanted to be a bastard about it, you could say were the local witch doctors. The reason were called sun adders is that our main job is to keep track of the traditional ritual calendar. All the little ritual offerings that we do, even all the Sacrifice Game stuffwhich, if you wanted to be a bitch about it, you could call fortune tellingis pretty secondary.
For the Cholan, things come in pairs, especially bad things. Two years after I got my adder bundle, thats how it happened with us.
One thing about places like Guatemala is that the Conquest is still going on. In Guatemalajust for the barest smidge of historythings had settled down for most of us indigenes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the early fifties, things werent all that bad. But in the summer of 1954 the CIA, at the behest of the United Fruit Companythe Chiquita banana folksengineered a coup against the elected president and set up Carlos Castillo Armas as a puppet dictator. Besides doing everything the Pulpothat is, the Octopus, as we called the UFCwanted, he immediately began an unofficial ethnic cleansing policy against the Maya. UN estimates list about two hundred thousand Maya massacred or disappeared from 1958 to 1985, which gives Guatemala the lowest human rights rating in the Western Hemisphere. For us it was the worst period since the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century.
The U.S. Congress stopped official aid to the government in 1982, but the Reagan administration kept it going secretly, sending weapons and training Guate army officers in counterinsurgency techniques at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning. Maybe a few of them were sincere anti-Communists who actually thought the guerrillas were a threat, but 97 percent of everything is real estate and by 83, when the genocide peaked at around fourteen aborigines per day, the war wasnt anything but a real-estate grab. Theyd roll in, say, Youre all guerrillas, and thatd be it. A year later any producing fields would be occupied by Ladinos.
In the U.S. most people seem to think of the CIA as some kind of sleek, efficient secret society with good-looking employees and futuristic gadgets. Latin Americans know it as just another cartel, big, bumbling, but better financed than most, running errands for the big drug wholesalers and shaking down the small ones. In the seventies and eighties the military built thousands of little airstrips all over rural Guatemala, supposedly to help us disadvantaged types move products to nonlocal markets but actually so they could drop in anywhere, anytime they needed to goose a deadbeat. There were more than a couple around Tozal. One of my fathers many uncles-in-law, a parcelista named Generoso Xul, marked out and burned off a few milpas on common land that turned out to be a bit too close to one of them. By late July Generoso was missing, and my father and a few others went out looking for him. On the second day they found his shoes tied up and hanging in a eucalyptus tree, which is a kind of sleeps-with-the-fishes warning sign.
My father talked to this person he knew from the local resistance, who was a Subcomandante Marcos-like figure called Teniente Xac, or as we called him, Uncle Xac. Tío Xac said he guessed that the Soreanos habian dado agua al Tío G, that is, that theyd killed him. After that my father got all these kids and parcelistas and their kids to watch for the airplanes and write down their registration codes on cigarette papers and bring them to him, and he compiled a pretty long list. A friend in CG checked them with the AeroTransport Data BankGuatemala was so much these peoples backyard that they hardly ever even bothered to change the numbersand it turned out a bunch of them were operated out of Texas and Florida by Skyways Aircraft Leasing, which, it came out much later, was a shell corporation, and had flown out of John Hulls estate in Costa Rica. Hulland this could sound a little conspiracykookish if it werent well documented in, for instance, the 1988 Kerry Congressional Subcommittee paper Private Assistance and the Contras: A Staff Report of 10/14/86, easily available at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, 40 Presidential Drive, Simi Valley, California, under White House Legal Task Force: Records, Box 92768was a U.S. citizen who laundered money and shipped uncut cocaine for Oliver Norths crew. Most of the money went to the contras in El Salvador, but the North cartel, the Bush cronies, and the Ríos Montt groupMontt was the puppet president of Guatemala at the timeall took home millions. My guess is that Uncle Xac was hoping to go wide with the list at some point, either just to focus some attention on the Soreanos, who were a big local family whom everybody hated, or to try to discredit the generals in the next election, which shows you how naďve he was.
On Christmas Day of 1982 I had another episode of pneumonia following blood loss and my parents took me to the Sisters of Charity Hospital at San Cristóbal. Supposedly I was ranting and raving. There was one of the younger nuns, Sor Elena, who kind of looked after me and kept asking how I was doing, and I thought she was really great. Im sure Ive thought about her every day since then, maybe even every hour, at least when Im not in one of my fugue states. Todo por mi culpa, all my fault. Four days after I got there, on la fiesta de la Sagrada Familia, December 29, 1982, Sor Elena told me that government troops had surrounded Tozal and were interrogating the Cofradias, that is, cargo bearers or charge holders, who are a kind of rotating committee of village elders. Later I found out more. It had been a market day, when almost everybody had come into the village. A white-and-blue Iroquois helicopter with loudspeakers materialized and circled around and around like a big kingfisher, telling everyone to assemble in the plaza for a town meeting, where they were going to give out assignments for the next years civilian patrols. By this time the soldiers had already marched in on two barely used dirt roads. According to my friend José Xilochor, as we called him, No Waywho saw some of it from a distance, hardly anybody tried to run or hide. Most of the soldiers were half-Maya recruits from Suchitepéquez, but there were two tall men with sandy hair and USMC-issue boots along with them, and the squad was commanded, unusually, by a major, Antonio García Torres.
Only two people got shot to death in the plaza that day. My parents and six of their friends got loaded into a truck and taken to the army base at Co-ban. That evening the troops burned down the community center with eleven of the more resistant citizens alive inside it, which at that time was the terror tactic of choice. It was also the last time anyone I know of saw either of my brothers, although its not clear what happened to them. Much later I found out that my sister had eventually made it to a refugee settlement in Mexico. The troops spent two days forcing the citizens to level the village and then loaded them onto trucks for relocation.
Tozal is one of the four hundred and forty villages the Guatemalan government now officially lists as destroyed. The final count names thirty-eight people as confirmed dead and twenty-six disappeared. I figure its about 90 percent certain that my parents would have been tortured by what they call the submarino, suffocation in water, and probably kept in these tall barrels they have where all you can do is squat (todo por mi culpa) and look up at the sky. One witness said that my father died when they were trying to make him talk by putting an insecticide-soaked hood over his head. Whether this was what killed him, or whether it even really happened, is still not clear. My mother, supposedly, was, like most of the women, forced to drink gasoline. Their bodies were almost certainly dumped in one of the eight known trench grave sites
in Alta Verapaz, but so far the Center of Maya Documentation and Investigation hasnt matched any remains to my DNA.
Retardedly enough, it took me years to start wondering whether my parents might have sent me away because they guessed thered be trouble. Maybe it was just my mothers idea. Shed used the Game before to find out whether there was any current danger from the G2, that is, the secret police. Maybe she saw something.
A week later the nuns got an order to ship me and four other kids from Tozalincluding No Way José, who became my oldest remaining friendto la capital, that is, Ciudad Guate, where, eventually, wed be sent on to relocation camps. I barely remember the Catholic orphanage because I escaped the first day, although it wasnt much of an escape since I just walked out the door. I found my way across town to a much better-funded childrens hospital called AYUDA that was administered by the LDS, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or, as they dont like to be called, the Mormons. There was a rumor they were sending kids from there to the U.S., which at the time I visualized as a garden of earthly delights with french-fry bushes and rivers of dry-ice-cold Squirt. There was a hugely tall woman with bright hair at the back door who hesitated for a minute and then, against regulations, let me in. I only saw her a couple times after that and didnt learn her name, but I still think about her when I see that shade of chrome-yellow hair. Later, when I was listed as a probable orphan, they transferred me to something called the LDS Paradise Valley Plantation School, outside of town.
It took a long time for me to get any idea of what had happened to my family, and in fact I still dont know. There wasnt any one moment when I knew my parents were dead, just an endlessly swelling blob of revolting acceptance. Saturdays at the PVPS were free and relatives, if any, were allowed to visit with inmates in a back classroom, and every Saturday morning Id borrow a math book from the upper grades and go in there and just lurk in the back in the cool hug of two pea-green cinder-block walls and a pea-green linoleum floor and just keep an eye on things. Nobody ever showed up trying to find me. La mara, the gang, made fun of me about it but I was already getting oblivious. I still have trouble with Saturdays, in fact; I get antsy and catch myself looking out the window a lot or rechecking my e-mail ten times an hour.
I was at PVPS for nearly two years before I got into their Native American Placement Programwhich is partly a refugee-adoption foundationand, just after my sixteenth tzolkin nameday, that is, when I was eleven, a family called the Řdegârds, with a little financial help from the Church, flew me to Utah.
To give the devils their due, the LDS actually do a lot of good things for Native Americans. For instance, they helped the Zuni win the biggest settlement against the U.S. government that any Indian nation has ever gotten. And they run all these charities all over Latin America, and this is all despite the fact that the Church was still officially white supremacist until 1978. They believe that some Native Americansthe light-skinned onesare descendants of a Hebrew patriarch named Nephi, whos a main character in the Book of Mormon. But who cares what their motives are, right? They looked after me and many others. I couldnt believe how rich the Řdegârds were. Running water was one thing, but they even had an unlimited supply of angelitos , that is, marshmallows, in both the semisolid and the semiliquid forms. I kind of thought the U.S. had conquered us and I was a captive being raised in a luxurious prison in the imperial capital. It took a long time for me to learn that by U.S. standards they were lower middle class. I mean, these are people who say supper instead of dinner and even dinner instead of lunch, and who have a wall plaque in the kitchen with a recipe for Baby Jesuss Butter n Love Sugar Cookies, with ingredients like a dollop of understanding and a pinch of discipline. And out there theyre considered intellectuals. So its taken some work for me to become the jaded sophisto I pretend to be today. Still, Mr. and Mrs. Ř were nice, or rather they wanted to be nice, but they had to put so much energy into retaining their delusions that there wasnt a lot of time for each individual child. Also, my stepbrothers were horribledeprived of mainstream TV and video games, theyd relax by torturing small animalsbut of course the parents thought they were Gods chosen cherubs.
Needless to say, I never converted to the LDS. Or got helped to understand, as they put it. That is, made to realize that one had been a Latter-Day Saint all along. According to the program they werent supposed to do that to you until you were a little bit older, and by then I was beginning to realize that baptizing your long-dead ancestors and laying on hands and wearing Masonic long johns wasnt entirely normal behavior, even in El Norte. They even took me to a Catholic church once or twice, but it didnt have the right smell or the right saints in it or offering bottles all over the floor, like in Guatemala, so I said dont bother. They were cool enough about it, in their way. In fact I still call Ma and Pa Ř every once in a while, even though I cant bear them. When I ask about my stepbrothers theyve always each just sired another brace of twins. What with the combination of ideology and fertility drugs down there, they multiply like brine shrimp.
As an alternative to becoming a living saint, I got steered onto the extracurricular-activities track. I started with the Chess Team and the Monopoly Team. The folks at Nephi K-12 forced me to play the cello, the orchestras most humiliating instrument. I wasnt good. I thought music was math dumbed down. I hid in the library a lot, taking mental pictures of dictionary pages for later retrieval. I learned to read English by memorizing H. P. Love-craft, and now people say I talk that way. I politely refused to bob for apples at the school Halloween partywell, actually I dashed crying out of the multipurpose roombecause I thought I was about to get waterboarded. I got involved with the Programming Team, the Computer Games Team, and the Strategy Games Team. Youd think that someone on that many teams would have had to talk with the other students, but I didnt. Most of the time I got to stay out of real PE because of the hćmo thing. Instead they made me and the other cripples sit on mats and pretend to stretch and lift weights. The only sport I was ever really good at was target shooting. The family were all gun nuts and I went along with it. I joined the Math Team, even though I thought it was silly to think of math as a team sport. Its like having a masturbation team. One time my math coach gave me a stack of topology quizzes and was surprised that I aced them. He and another teacher tested me a bit and said I was a calendrical savant and that I calculated each date at the time, unlike some who memorized them, although I could have just told them that myself. Its not really a marketable skill, though. Its something about one in ten thousand people can do, like being able to lick your own genitals. Around that same time I got involved with the Tropical Fish Team. I built my first few tank systems out of garden hoses and old Tupperware. I decided that when I grew up Id be a professional chess player. I wore my skateboard helmet on the bus. I decided that when I grew up Id be a professional Sonic the Hedgehog player. I appeared, as J, in a study in Medical Hypotheses called Hyper-numeric Savant Skills in Juvenile PTS Patients. I decided that instead of learning to play the cello, Id learn to build cellos. I listened to the Cocteau Twins instead of Mötley Crüe. I made my first thousand buying and selling Magic cards. I acquired a hillbilly nickname. I did Ecstasy alone.
New treatments got my hćmophilia under control, but in the meantime Id been diagnosed as having posttraumatic-stress-disorder-related emotional-development issues, along with sporadic eidetic memory. Supposedly PTSD can present like Aspergers. But I wasnt autistic in all the usual ways, like for instance, I liked learning new languages and I didnt mind exploratory placement in novel pedagogic situations. One doctor in Salt Lake told me that PTSD was a blanket term that didnt really cover whatever I had, or didnt have. I figured that meant I wouldnt get any scholarship money out of it.
In September of 1988 an anthropology grad student from BYU, Brigham Young University, came to speak at our junior high school and redirected
my life. She showed videos of old kivas and Zuni corn dances, and just as I was falling asleep she started showing Maya pyramids, and I sat up. I got my nerve up and asked some questions. She asked me to tell where I was from. I told the class. A few days later they let me and the other redskins out of school to go to a Native American Placement Program scholarship conference that she was chairing in Salt Lake. It was in a gym at the high school and included things like flint knapping and freestyle face painting with Liquitex acrylics. A student teacher introduced me to another professor named June Sexton and when I told her where I came from she started talking to me in pretty good Yukateko, which really blew me away. At some point she asked whether Id ever played el juego del mundo, and when I didnt know what she meant she said it was also called alka kalabeeraj, the Sacrifice Game, which was close to a word my mother had used. I said yes and she brought out an Altoids box full of curiously red tzite-tree seeds. I couldnt play at first because I was having something that I might identify as nostalgia, or the poor second cousin of nostalgia, but when I got it back together we played through a few dry rounds. She said a mathematician colleague of hers was working on a study of Maya divination and would love it if I could teach him my version. Sure, I said, thinking quickly, but I couldnt do it after school hours. Anything to get out of PE.
Brian D'Amato Page 4
