Happy Ant-Heap

by Norman Lewis

  This was his way of telling me of the half-hidden conflict between the nation’s Indian peasantry, whose numbers had been increasing at an uncomfortable rate, and ‘normal’ Guatemalans. Until this, the population had been composed of three million of each, but now, despite their great poverty and their backwardness, the Indians were pushing ahead. He warned me of the existence of a secret war in which no prisoners were taken. ‘Dear boy, there are simply too many of them, and there isn’t enough land to go round. Make sure you read what the President has to say about it in today’s Prensa Libre.’ I did. President Arana announced that the army had liquidated the largest guerrilla movement in Latin America, adding the information that in doing so 7,000 civilians, i.e. Indians, had been killed. Despite the communiqué’s confident tone, the President warned of a continuing struggle. ‘We are virtually in a state of Civil War,’ he said, ‘for with the arrival on the scene of the urban guerrilla, the battle has been transferred to the city.’ Nevertheless, he concluded on a note of optimism, inviting foreigners, whose recent experience of life in Guatemala might not have been entirely a happy one, to return and enjoy a future, he promised, of peace and plenty. ‘We are on the brink of a national transformation,’ he assured them. Guatemala, he reminded readers, had always been entitled the Land of Eternal Spring. ‘Now we face a winter of struggle from which, due to our sacrifices, we shall emerge into a new springtime—that of the soul.’

  Twenty-five years passed, and in January of last year I received a letter from a Guatemalan friend—a successful young author with whom I had corresponded for some time—suggesting that the moment had come for a further visit to his country. Many places long out of reach because of guerrilla warfare were now accessible. He could borrow a four-wheel-drive vehicle able to cope with all but the worst of the dirt roads across the mountains. A few guerrillas were still about in areas likely to be of interest to us, but they were far easier to deal with, he assured me, than the police, contenting themselves normally, if one ran into them, with a political lecture plus at most a request for a few dollars to help with funds. A newspaper cutting illustrated the kind of situation that could arise when, in this case, about 200 motorists had been held up by an armed group on the Inter-American Highway and compelled to listen for two and a half hours to its leader’s persuasive but interminable speech.

  It was a project with immense appeal and in February I took the plane to Guatemala City, joining Federico as soon as possible after arrival in the small mountain town of Chichicastenango. Here, despite decades of President Arana’s accurately predicted war, I was delighted once again to watch Indian notables in the ceremonial Spanish attire of the sixteenth century performing their pagan rites on the steps to the Santo Tomas church.

  My suggestion was a visit to the Ixchil Triangle under the Cuchumatanes Mountains in the north. Its attraction was two-fold. It had always been impossibly remote and it was this remoteness that fostered originality in its arts and preserved ancient customs that had vanished elsewhere in parts of the country reached by better roads. Whatever remained of the artistic impulses of the Mayas of old was to be found in places that were too far from the towns to be influenced by the demands of commerce. The weavers of Nebaj and Chajul could not travel to the markets to sell what they produced. Thus designs remained pure and spontaneous, reflecting in some way, too, the lifestyle of these isolated people.

  We accordingly set out in a borrowed Toyota Land Cruiser heading northwards through Santa Cruz del Quiché in the direction of Sacapulas, shortly after which we would turn off onto the unsurfaced road over the Chuchamatanes leading into the Triangle. Once again Guatemala on a perfect springlike day appeared at its best. It is a country of extreme, often unearthly, beauty, lying in the shadows of thirty-two volcanoes, its towns rattled constantly by earthquakes like dice in a box, its villages peopled by a race who rarely smiled, but sometimes giggled in a foolish way as if embarrassed, as I thought then, in the presence of tragedy.

  For an hour or two it was easy going in the familiar surroundings of villages of clustered adobe huts and little rectangles of cultivation high on the mountainsides, frequently so steep that the peasants who worked them hung on to ropes. Sometimes we passed an army patrol, their faces transformed with the sudden ugliness that comes when peasants are turned into soldiers, marching well spaced to avoid destruction by a single volley. Despite all the twisting of the wheel to keep on an even keel, the car bucked and rolled and once in a while a void appeared between its front wheels, into which it dropped lopsidedly with a crash before hauling itself out. Pyramided hills zigzagged away into the jagged sky-tracery of the high sierra. We crawled round the edge of the landslides left by the 1976 earthquake, then the village of Nebaj, a sprawl of greyish adobe huts, came into view.

  Suddenly, life was there bubbling up again in the sallow light and narrow streets. Women with pink mountain cheeks, in the most brilliant of blue huipils (blouses) and skirts, marshalled tiny, wistful piglets and scuttling ducks. The weaving on their garments ran riot in colour and design. Surrealist horses with green faces and red eyes carried their foals, and on each foal perched a quetzal bird in all its colours, with the longest of tails. It was a sight wholly unexpected after the desolation that had struck the village fifteen years before, when it had been the headquarters of the EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor) and the army had exacted a terrible retribution. Nevertheless, the blaze of peasant colour for which Nebaj was famous had survived the human slaughter.

  We found the villagers kind and hospitable. They fed us with eggs and black beans and sold me a splendid huipil and we spent a cold, dark night in a hut before setting off in the early morning.

  Chajul, principal objective of the journey, is the most isolated of the three villages of Ixchil. Suddenly the landscape had changed under the blue Alpine light, for it was covered with grasslike moss over which boulders had been scattered, torn by earthquakes from the cliffs. The topiary of the winds had carved trees into strange shapes, and stopping once to admire the austere enchantments of the scene, I raised a cloud of grey butterflies among the pines.

  In the thirty-odd miles to Chajul we saw not a single human being, not a building of any kind, not an animal. It was accepted that of the 450-500 villages destroyed in the troubles, many had once existed in this area. This journey was through countryside rescued from every trace of human intrusion and then, suddenly, the great white church of Chajul appeared among the hills, although there were strenuous miles to be covered before the houses clustered beneath it came into sight.

  They proved to be low, windowless and painted in strong shades of crimson, purple and blue. The church dominating this inanimate scene had been built, as so many old Guatemalan churches were, at the top of a flight of steps on an eminence, in order to attract worshippers of old by what was hoped would remind them of a Mayan pyramid. We left the car, climbed the steps and found ourselves in a vast crepuscular cavern-scented interior containing nothing but half a dozen dark and contorted saints, hung in cages from which they gesticulated despairingly, as if in hope of escape. A naïve, crudely painted picture, some ten feet in length, had been propped against the open door. This was of naked corpses disfigured with horrific wounds, although all the faces were devoid of expression. NO OLVIDAD NEUSTROS MARTIRES (REMEMBER OUR MARTYRS), the lettering said.

  From the top of the church steps we looked out over the mist-layered forest to the black triangle of a mountain top across the Mexican frontier. Twenty-five thousand refugees had fled there to shelter either in camps or in the houses of Mexican peasants as poor as themselves, who had received them willingly and looked after them, in some cases for fifteen years. It was this panic-stricken exodus, perhaps, from which Chajul had never recovered, and it had left an aftermath here of silence and emptiness. The sensation for me was heightened by the savage colours of this place, painted on walls as if a backcloth for a tragic drama of the past, which indeed the history of this village was.

  In 1979 the Guatem
alan Army undertook a series of operations described as punishments in the districts of Ixchil, Ixcan and other areas in which guerrillas were in action. Peasants believed to have sheltered guerrillas or to have supported them in any way were rounded up, interrogated and, as generally alleged, tortured, and then put on display in some convenient village—in this case Chajul—where all the local inhabitants were assembled to watch the punishment inflicted.

  What took place in September 1979 in Chajul has been described in chilling detail in Rigoberta Menchú’s book, An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Despite the extreme horror of the account, no official denial has ever been made as to its veracity, and in the changed climate of Guatemala the book can now openly be offered for sale.

  The news of what was to happen had been spread through a wide area, and on the day before the army’s punishment was to be administered to the suspects held in custody, Rigoberta, her father and mother crossed the mountains, walking all night to reach Chajul. Rigoberta’s sixteen-year-old brother was among those to be punished in the presence of several hundred Indians brought in from other areas. Chajul was surrounded for the occasion by 500 troops and among them were a squad of Kaibils—commandos entrusted with work of the kind envisaged.

  The village square under the church had been chosen for the staging of the final scene, and it was announced that any inhabitant failing to attend would receive the same punishment. The prisoners were paraded before the assembled crowd and their clothing was cut from them to display the tortures they had suffered. Rigoberta says that, due to his maltreatment, she had difficulty in recognising her brother, although her mother was able to convince herself that he had smiled at her. With the officer’s long lecture on the political niceties of the day at an end, the prisoners were led away to a level space among the bushes at the side of the church, and the village audience was forced under guard to watch the last episode of the drama. Petrol was poured over the victims and they were set alight. After the burning Rigoberta, still watching closely, records: ‘The bodies kept twitching…they kept twitching about.’

  At the back of the woods, women in scarlet huipils. and skirts now slipped in and out of houses. ‘Where are all the village menfolk?’ I asked, remembering then that the question hardly called for an answer. Federico’s reply was heedless of sinister overtones. ‘Some of them are still in the woods,’ he said. ‘They’ve been there half their lives, but they’re beginning to come out now.’

  It was well over twenty years since I had seen anything of Guatemala City, apart from the surroundings of the airport, and now, having parted company with Federico for a day or two, I returned to it in the certain knowledge that great changes would have taken place. After the Second World War, when I first got to know it, the city continued to live fairly comfortably in the past. Landowners of the old school had their boots polished four times a day, and might wear spurs, although they had never ridden a horse. Visitors could be shocked at the sight of an Indian porter staggering up a leafy avenue with a chest of drawers strapped to his back, because it was cheaper to move furniture in this way than to hire a wheeled vehicle. The barefoot Indian waitress at the Palace Hotel hoped to be tipped with a wrapped sweet. Guatemala City of old had some wonderful survivals, including the market of the Zopilotes (small vultures), which not only cleaned the place up but could be taught good-natured co-operation in games of chance, as friends who lived there discovered, by throwing edible scraps into an expectant huddle of them and betting on which bird would carry it off.

  Apart from musicians playing marimbas on the street corners it was a quiet place in those times. Nowadays it had become an inferno of traffic, with crashed cars piled one on top of another at the roadside. A big M shining mistily through the smog not only provided faint illumination but reminded Guatemalans, who had lived until now almost exclusively on chicken and rice, that a new future with McDonald’s had arrived.

  Regretfully, however, I was to decide that my once-favourite colonial capital had become sinister and possibly cruel. The guidebook warned travellers to book their hotel well in advance. ‘The city,’ as it puts it, ‘is not a pleasant place to wander about looking for a room at night.’ There was talk in the paper of new-style kidnappings carried out by gangs of enterprising youths from El Salvador. These slipped across the border for a working weekend in Guatemala, conducting their operations rather as though applying a fast-food-restaurant approach to the abduction business. Likely prospects were snatched from the streets, held for the shortest possible time and released on payment of a quite small ransom—$500 being the average demand. Federico’s family had been unfortunate in this respect, for his mother had been held captive for six months and released only when the family’s resources were exhausted.

  The old capital, Antigua, always regarded as the most relaxed place in the country, was only an hour away by taxi, so I decided to go there and spend a few days in surroundings renowned for their tranquillity. The hotel recommended was of unusual interest for it had been built at immense cost on the ruins of the Convent of Santo Domingo, destroyed in one of the earthquakes for which Antigua has earned a melancholy reputation. It was dark by the time I arrived, with the hotel full of shadows and the lighting in the cavernous reception area so faint that I found it difficult to read the paper I was given to sign. Rooms were reached at the end of long passages in which dark saints, salvaged from the ruins, waited as if in ambush in their niches. Overpowered by the atmosphere, the guests talked in lowered voices. The Santo Domingo, I learned, was about a half a mile from the town’s centre but, enquiring of the direction to take, I was dissuaded from going in search of bright lights by a warning that it was better to be off the streets by eight, and it was now coming up to nine.

  Next morning the doubts and misgivings of the previous night were dispelled by the brilliance of the day. More churches, monasteries and convents had been crammed into a relatively small area here than anywhere else in the Spanish colonial possessions, and, although many had been thrown down by the terrific earthquakes of 1717, 1751 and 1753, the shining façades of such buildings that had survived floated above the city. Antigua held a refulgence of a special kind, softened by shadows from balconies and eaves, and above all the vast misted shape of the volcano that formed a background to so much of the city.

  It was a Sunday and I walked down to the Plaza where, as was to be expected on this day in any Latin American town of standing, most of the innocent pleasures of life were on display. The Indians had flocked in to sell their weaving, to watch the clowns, to allow conjurors to take plastic balls from nostrils and ears, to listen to the evangelist talking about hell, and to squat in family circles in the gardens, keeping their innumerable children amused. Above all this place resounded with music of an exciting, even violent kind. For the first time I realised that the insistent, shrilling pipe-music of the mountain tops, everywhere in South America, also exists in Guatemala. A group of youngsters who might have been coming here from among the llamas of the altiplano of Bolivia were in frenzied action with panpipes and flutes, over the hugely amplified percussion of a marimba through speakers fixed up on the wall of the neighbouring police station.

  The quietest attraction of this day, and out of hearing of these excitements, was a solemn pilgrimage just around the corner to the shrine of Hermano Pedro in the Franciscan church where stickers, in gratitude for his most recent miracles of the hundred or so performed annually, are stuck all over the walls. Among new additions were thanks to the saint for saving the driver of a car from death after a wheel had fallen off, and for a widow’s vision of her husband in paradise, noting in her little tribute that some rejuvenation in his appearance had taken place after death.

  I amused myself in and around the Plaza until about 6.30 p.m. when, with the day darkening, the music came to an end. Now the clowns wiped the paint from their faces and packed up their gear. In half an hour it would be dark. The streets were beginning to empty and Indian family groups had already curled up in nea
t ancestral fashion under the arcades where the foreign backpackers sprawled among them. I wondered how many Indians were enjoying the experience. A friend who spoke fluent Maya-Quiché and had employed an Indian couple to look after him had heard them refer to their employers as the male, or female, ghosts. I learned from him that some Indians sincerely believed whites to be malevolent spirits, in whose power Indians found themselves temporarily entrapped.

  Accustomed to the scene in the social centre of other Latin American towns, where the joys and sorrows of life are prolonged almost indefinitely after dark, I was a little disquieted by this abrupt ending to the day, and it was with reluctance that I took one of the last taxis back to the Santo Domingo.

  The next day I was told that the best hope of more cheerful lodging was to be found in the Calle de la Concepción. This was almost a foreign colony in a single street, with European-style restaurants that stayed open until ten, including an Italian one run by a Neapolitan who offered to sing to his customers on Saturday evenings. There were as well several promising guest- houses, but all were taken over by Americans who had come down for the winter. The American proprietress of one rang a friend and found me a room. It was hardly any distance further from the centre than the Calle de la Concepción, she assured me. Why should this be of importance? I asked, and she told me that Concepción might be a little better in the matter of security. Two or three armed robberies happened daily in Antigua, according to the newspaper, she said, and a Spanish student had been stabbed only a few days before. ‘This is really a little town within a town,’ she said, ‘and we aim to keep it that way.’

  The house she thought I would like was on a street of fine old buildings, with little passing traffic and a minimum of street lights. It turned out to be rather grand. Servants came and went softly, branches loaded with exotic blooms drooped over the pavement of a vast courtyard, and there was an inspiring view of the tip of the volcano over a wall. It turned out that apart from the staff I was the only occupant. The police station was only a stone’s throw away in the direction of the Plaza, but there was no comfort in its proximity, for the English-language newspaper, the Guatemala Weekly, reported that an armed robbery had taken place outside it only a few days before.