The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  But he could not talk about the chasm that had opened when he was thrown into the back of the blue van. When every simple certainty unravelled in a house of darkness. He could not tell Walter that it wasn’t fear of damnation or the love of God that kept him from killing himself. It was his mother’s Mayan stories about skulls whispering words of love into the ears of princesses, of the dead coming back to inhabit the living. Too many ghosts fluttered the nerves under his skin. He did not want to become one of them.

  His mother. Walter’s morning kitchen sounds — the water poured into a pot, the pot banging down on the burner, the cutlery rattling in the drawer — brought back some of his earliest memories of walking with his mother in the morning darkness up the rutted track to pass between the white gate posts into the green irrigated gardens of Mario Fortuny’s ranch, La Finca Libertad, the sun touching the tops of the hills high above the pastures. Son of an Italian immigrant who had come to Guatemala in the late 1800s, Fortuny ruled his domain like a Medici prince. Or a Mafia don.

  Cesár López, a carpenter, and his young wife had been hired by Fortuny in the early fifties. When the workers occupied the plantation a few months later during the short-lived land reform years of President Árbenz, Cesár told them it was of no use to anyone if they starved the cattle and burned the buildings, some of which he had worked hard to build. Listening to Walter prepare the oatmeal, Álvaro understood for the first time that during those months, his mother had lived in that house as its mistress. Held the keys to its cupboards and helped Cesár keep track of the money and the cattle. A pregnant Q’eqchi’ woman married to an itinerant Ladino carpenter. Because they were outsiders, because Cesár knew something of the world beyond the hills that surrounded the plantation, the farm workers had looked to them for leadership.

  After the Americans ousted Árbenz, and Fortuny returned from the capital with his own little army to kick out the campesinos, he was pleased with the excellent condition of his property. Instead of shooting Cesár, he offered him the position of manager. Knowing what was likely to come, Cesár had declined. Knowing there’d be plenty of work for carpenters rebuilding burned houses and repairing broken furniture. Piecing together from the scraps, coffins. A child of darkness he had called Álvaro, born into chaos of 1955 when thousands of the Guatemalans who had welcomed the Árbenz reforms were being arrested and murdered.

  A good omen, Fortuny had said when he called Cesár to his office, shook his hand, and told him about the birth on the same day of his daughter, Clara. A twin to Álvaro. Here’s to a return to good government and prosperity for both our families, Fortuny smiled, lighting their cigars. Cesár could stay in the village house, Fortuny offered, all jovial good spirits, and his wife could come up to the ranch and work in the kitchen. She could bring the baby with her. Cesár spitting out this story when he was drunk. Behind Fortuny a photo of President Eisenhower hung on the wall. Tucked into the frame a newspaper clipping showed the deposed Árbenz in his underwear boarding the plane to Sweden.

  It must have been hard for his mother to return as a servant. Mornings, she carried the sleepy Álvaro along the rutted track between their house and the ranch. Dust in the dry season, slippery clay in the rain. She’d speak in her own language and tell him stories about her home where the people didn’t gather in villages much, but were spread through the hills living on their own small plots of land. Where the men didn’t need el patron’s permission to plant the corn. Where they were strict about the old ways. The community had a saint’s name and a mountain god and she knew what prayers kept the spirits in balance.

  At the ranch, they spoke Spanish. Fortuny’s father — an Italian peasant, Cesár always said, a useless younger son with no land to farm — married a Ladina. So did the young Mario, leaving him with only a few words of Italian. His wife had none. When the family was in residence, Álvaro slid into the Fortuny children’s lives. Clara insisted that her twin, as she called him, must have his lessons with her and her older brother, Vinicio, in the dining room. At first the distant mother, reading to them in a bored voice. Later, as she came less and less often to the plantation, the children escaped a succession of tutors to play complicated games of hiding, sneaking, and dramatic rescue, Vinicio always pushing them.

  Playing with Vinicio was, Álvaro came later to realize, like drinking with an alcoholic. It was almost impossible to resist the initial high-spirited invitation even if you knew, the worry niggling inside, that the fun was going to spiral out of control into something stupid, mean or terrifying. Daring Álvaro to ride through the young corn the villagers had planted. Repeating Fortuny’s words about their stupidity, their ignorant ways. Idolatry. Devil worship.

  The threesome: Clara refusing to kick up mud on the freshly laundered clothes spread on the bushes down by the river. Vinicio taunting Álvaro, calling him a chicken. Álvaro, distracting him, making him laugh at his imitations of the workers, his mother, even Fortuny. The sweeping gestures as he shaved, as he hitched up his trousers and adjusted his balls. The way he settled back in his chair to listen to scratchy opera recordings.

  When Cesár was home, Álvaro’s world was another way. His mother made tortillas instead of biscuits for their breakfast and he had hot milk instead of chocolate. They listened to his father’s stories. He was a restless man, raised in a Catholic orphanage, taught his trade and released into an itinerant life, picking up jobs as he travelled through small towns and villages all the way down to the capital. He’d even been to the Atlantic coast where they grew bananas and the air was so wet it felt, he said, like you’d been caught in a magic rain that never fell, just hovered in the air. He spoke of a world not tied to the ranch and carved Álvaro a parrot which his mother painted blue and orange.

  Álvaro had loved the magic of his father’s saws. The lathe he lugged home on his back one day, treadling square blocks of wood into buttons, knobs, balls, spindles, the pale wooden heads for the dolls his mother decorated. She twisted together a paintbrush out of dog hair and drew delicate eyebrows, little red lips, and bright blue eyes onto the wooden heads, transforming them into people, some of them surprised, some laughing, some angry, and many quiet faces that gave nothing away. His mother’s own.

  The way she could keep things hidden, she should have been a priest. All through his childhood, she had prepared him well. How to behave at the ranch. How to behave around his father. In the village, where his father’s Ladino background, his mother’s different customs, and her work in el patron’s home separated him from the other children. Her eyes worried when he rode off with Vinicio, trailing his guilt and his longing. She had struggled to keep his divided spirit firmly attached to his body. Taking him down to the river, she’d light candles and incense and call his spirit back from wherever it was she thought it had gone. The relief when she finished and stood him between her knees to feed him pinches of egg and chicken, his spirit warming to the taste of hot food.

  In the small room in the centre of the house on a quiet Vancouver side street that brought together a group of Oblate priests joined in their service to the misery that flourished just a couple of blocks away, Álvaro laughed at the thought of asking the priests who prayed for him every day if they knew of a nearby river. Of a Mayan spirit healer. The priests spread out each day, one to the mission, one to visit the prisons, one to counsel the drunks, each taking turns celebrating mass for the parishioners who trickled into the church next door. They were so few for the work that needed doing, he felt guilty: for the food going into his mouth, for the time he threw the lemon pie out the back door to splatter on Walter’s wheelchair ramp, for the days he curled into a ball and spit out words. Get away. Get away. A part of him standing outside himself, hands hanging at his sides, aghast and helpless.

  While the others muttered about his needing professional counselling, Walter was like a seminary soccer coach. Walk it off, he’d say if you twisted your ankle or doubted your faith. When Álvaro emerged from two days curled up in bed, his back to t
he door, Walter handed him a knife to chop onions. In the garden, he handed him the hoe. Root out that pigweed, he’d say. Now let us pray, he’d say and Álvaro would bow his head as if he were doing just that.

  There were moments Álvaro felt as young and hopeful as he had twenty years earlier when he and Walter drove those highways another five hundred miles north of Vancouver, so empty between the mountains. The lightness of the air upon his skin up there was a memory he’d never lose. The flies drifting in the swirling currents above the creeks, fish rising to them. Walter would take Álvaro to the Indian fishing camps to say mass. He’d cast his hopeless line just downstream from the nets, always one old Indian giving him advice, the others shaking their heads, laughing as they plucked their nets clean of the big red salmon. They were as unlike the Indians of the movies as his own mother’s people were.

  But most of the time now he felt like one of those fish struggling under the surface of the water. Every shadow a threat, every kind word hiding a hook. Like Vinicio’s voice — all lies, he told himself, his head buried under the pillow, his body clenched in a tight curve. Like his father’s rage.

  By 1965, Guatemala’s turmoil had entered their home; his mother was learning to read from the catechists who had come to their village. A crucifix appeared on the household altar and a little radio hung on a nail in the kitchen. Vatican II had done its work and the priests were speaking to the poor. Their message of social change didn’t go unnoticed by the Guatemalan army.

  Cesár came home from his trips angry at all the coffins he was building. Not the ones for the women in childbirth, their tiny babies wrapped in their arms. Not the ones for those killed in the buses rolling over into the ravines. He knew the details of every death, he said, and it was once again as bad as the days after Árbenz. Mutilated bodies dumped beside the road, the families silent. He’d been as far as Mexico, he said to his wife. We should go now. These people here, he spit, some said she spied for el patron. Others said he spied for the guerrillas. If things get bad and I’m not here, you’d have no family to hide you, he told her.

  If they left here, she’d say, there was only one direction she’d go and that was back to her village where she’d be welcomed but she wasn’t so sure about him. Sometimes Cesár was drunk. Sometimes there’d be blows. Álvaro would go to the pile of lumber behind the small goat pen and sit there with his school books until it was quiet inside. He’d wish for the days with Clara at the ranch, his father back on the road. Wishes he could never reel back in.

  On Cesár’s last visit home, the guerrillas had stopped him on the road. They told him how the Americans were using the dupes in Guatemala to try to bring poor Castro down when all he was trying to do was feed his people. The guerrillas were honest soldiers, the liquor in him yelling now. Álvaro’s mother hushed him, crying. Álvaro curled up on his mat in the corner and wished he was brave enough to sneak up the long track to Clara asleep in the deep softness of her bed.

  The next morning, Álvaro had helped his father replaster the house. As they mixed the mud, his father warned him to not speak of anything he’d heard the night before. A talk, man to man. It could endanger any of them. It was time Álvaro came with him to see the world. Time to get him away from the sad little plantation village, those rich brats and their spoiled ways. Time to teach Álvaro his trade. Álvaro was packing the mud into the narrow gap that had formed around a window frame when Cesár stopped talking. Turning for another handful, Álvaro saw him staring at him, a frightening pain on his face. Álvaro stepped toward him, wiping his hands on his pants, reaching out, asking what’s wrong? Are you hurt? The pain changed in a lightning strike to anger. Cesár shoved him away, yelling for him to stay back, el bastardo. Don’t touch me!

  Álvaro stood outside in the sun, the mud caking on his hands, listening to his father yelling at his mother. I have seen those hands before, he yelled. I have seen them closing in fists to bash some poor bugger whose cow stumbled into his pasture during the night. Álvaro’s mother crying, sobbing, begging. His father whispering. I have seen them fluttering like las mariposas over the breasts of some little puta he has found in the fields. The boy looked down at his hands, the skin dried and wrinkled like that of an old man, and wondered why his father called him a bastard.

  And then his father was gone, leaving the house half plastered and his tools hanging near the door. His mother refused to answer his questions. Don’t speak of him, she said, her hands quick to strike. When the tools were sold and the lathe disappeared, something, he knew, was irrevocably broken.

  Álvaro rubbed his face and scrubbed his hair with his hands. In the small chapel next to his bedroom, the other priests gathered to say morning prayers.

  Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will proclaim your praise.

  He waited, as he had every morning since his arrival. George’s rich voice carried the hymn. Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away; they fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.

  He had tried to join them. But he couldn’t get through the prayers without weeping or raging. Lashing out. Everyone distressed. When he was ready, Walter had said, and they left him alone. But they knew he listened through the thin wall, sometimes with his head buried in the blankets, some mornings as he stretched. Did push-ups. Sit-ups. Squats until his knees swelled, the skin so tight it almost burst. Some mornings, quietly like this, sitting on the bed, his feet on the cool linoleum.

  That morning he wondered if their prayers were getting through. The exhumation dreams were from a time when he was still intact. When the bones of his body, cushioned in muscle and sinew, connected with nerve and blood vessels, carried him, blind as he was, about his business in the world and in the spirit. The time when nightmares did dissolve upon waking and he could remember much of his childhood with fondness. When God was in the world with him.

  At daybreak, be merciful to me, O Lord.

  Prayer was what he missed the most. Collective prayer. The way it had first come alive when he was a novice, kneeling with the others and feeling its power as a physical presence, a flush of heat and exultation, the whole community of Oblates, of Catholics, of Christians praying around the world, one group picking up as another left off, as if their prayers and the turning of the world were one thing. But now there were places he could not bear to go and they were places that prayer took him.

  George’s voice hushed to a dramatic whisper. For two days now I have experienced a great desire to be a martyr and to endure all the torments the martyrs suffered.

  Álvaro groaned as he realized what day it was. October 19. The celebration of Isaac Jogues and Jean de Brébeuf, martyrs. He covered his ears, but the words seeped through as George’s voice rose in passion.

  Let me so live that you may grant me the gift of such a happy death. In this way, my God and Saviour, I will take from your hand the cup of your sufferings and call on your name: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!

  Álvaro flung open his door and stood wild in the arched entrance to the sanctuary. The men sat in a semicircle, Walter with his eyes closed, his head tilted to catch the words.

  My God, even if all the brutal tortures which prisoners in the region must endure should fall on me, I offer myself most willingly to them and I alone shall suffer them all.

  George’s joyful eyes met his. He thinks I’m responding to his little ministry, Álvaro raged, struggling not to speak his fury. George proceeded to the responsory.

  Through faith the saints conquered kingdoms and did what was just. They secured promises and were strong in battle.

  The others responded. All of them have won approval for their witness to the faith.

  “God tried them,” George began and Álvaro shouted the phrase’s completion, making it a question. “And found them worthy of himself?” He flung his derision, an explosion, into the midst of their contemplation.

  “Álvaro, you forget yourself!” Walter’s voice was harsh. He struggled to his feet, clutching at the walker.

>   “You think torture is some kind of test? The fire that tempers the steel of your faith. If my faith was strong enough, I’d be the better for it. I’d show the bastards, wouldn’t I? They’d want to eat my heart while it was still beating, wouldn’t they? Grab hold of my strength.”

  Álvaro’s anger was a powerful antidote to the hallucinations, but they were breaking through. His ears were filling with the ringing laughter of the dark house he tried to keep shut up inside himself. The smell of lemons and death filled the small room.

  “You think you know anything of evil?” he yelled, feeling the contempt suffuse his body and swell the clanging in his ears. “You think God finds us worthy?” He could see George’s lips moving but could hear nothing over the clamour inside his head.

  George moved toward him, a hand reaching out. Álvaro twisted away, banging into the doorway. “Don’t touch me,” he cried. “Ever!” He lunged for the light coming through the barred window in the back door. He wrenched the door open and stumbled outside as angry voices rose behind him. George’s cry chased him into the garden.

  Through the darkness that always followed the ringing laughter, Álvaro found his way to the stool he’d placed behind the garden shed, a shadowed spot where he could sit out of sight of the house or the church or the back alley. He hunkered down while the pain and terror rolled through him, tumbling him like the earthquakes tumbled boulders, breaking him even as he broke everything he came in contact with.

  †

  It was the cold ground under his bare feet that brought him back to himself. They burned with an old pain that the gravel made worse. Beside them, his shoes and socks. Someone had placed his jacket over his shoulders. Their kindness suffocated him.