Cut Off

by Jamie Bastedo

  To those on the other side of the planet who sadly had to miss the 20th annual XBS Band Night, I promise to post a video of my performance. It features a reggae version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and a classical version of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” That is, once I figure out how to post a video! No kidding, I’ve never done this. I’d barely touched a computer until I was fourteen. Forbidden, actually. Outlawed. Taboo.

  That’s part of my story. Please stay tuned.

  You’ve read this far, so I’m guessing you might actually be interested in learning more about my music and life and stuff. Feel free to share my blog with your buds who might want to check it out: www.CagedGuitarist.blogspot.com.

  But please remember, I’m a newbie teen blogonaut. How am I doing so far?

  Yours inside the music, Indio r

  CLASS DISCUSSION

  One Monday a few weeks after Band Night, our hippie social studies teacher, Adam Upjohn, announced that the next Friday we would be going to visit a huge foreign-owned mine. “To help understand,” as he said, “what Guatemala does and does not get out of such megaprojects.”

  I looked up from the back of the class. Adam was staring at me. “It happens to be a Canadian mine, Indio, the Eldorado gold mine. Would you happen to know anything about it?”

  “Uh … no sir,” I said, which was more or less true, since Dad never talked about his work, other than to bitch about “the local natives throwing a wrench in the works.” What instantly worried me was that my classmates would connect me with the mine and blackball me as a greedy racist pig.

  Which would be kind of ironic since I’m half Mayan.

  Then it occurred to me that once Dad found out about this field trip, he’d go ballistic and pull me out of school. Which would bring the guillotine down on my budding friendships. And my blog.

  In the friend department, there was now a lot at stake.

  My first blog caused quite a stir, both at school and in the far corners of cyberspace. Teens from around the world asked me how I’d possibly survived so long without going online. Don’t you know that our generation was born with special gills to swim in the cyber sea?

  Or how can a musical prodigy have a normal life? I’ve been chained to a cello since I was four. Any tips on smelling the flowers?

  Or what’s my real nationality? You grew up in Guatemala but say you’re not Guatemalan, so ... what are you?

  Others asked me heavy questions about fate versus free will, as if I was some kind of online shrink. My parents think I’m God’s gift to cricket but I’d much rather play soccer. Help!

  When I started blogging, I never thought much about answering a bunch of questions, let alone how much time that would take. I just wanted to connect with somebody, anybody. Once I figured out how to embed videos of me performing, the comments really started piling up. I spent most of my free hours at school answering them.

  But God, it was worth it.

  What the hell kind of music is that—truly badass classical funk? Whatever. Keep doin it. Sweet.

  God has blessed you with the balls of an artist. Keep them rocking!

  fuckin amazing. im blown away

  Wonder Boy, we’re so proud of you!

  ¿Cómo puedes ser tan bueno, tan pronto? ¿Empezar a practicar en el vientre de tu madre?

  Good question. How did I get so good so fast? Practicing in my mother’s womb? I didn’t bother answering that one. I wanted to feed the mystique. Keep the focus on performing, not practicing, the thought of which made me nauseous.

  People even asked for pix of me that they could use as screensavers or to pin up on their walls.

  How ridiculous is that?

  But of course I posted them.

  A picture of me and my new tousled hairstyle, jamming with a couple of rockers backstage after Band Night.

  A picture of me in my tuxedo, performing “Flight of the Bumblebee” at Xela’s Gran Teatro, my right hand a total blur.

  A picture of me balancing my guitar on one finger while standing on Nevado Huascarán, Peru’s tallest mountain. Okay, so I faked some stuff. I was learning tons on the computer and loving it.

  So there I was in class, wishing this field trip to my dad’s gold mine would blow away, yet curious to see just how bad it was on the ground.

  Adam, who refused to be addressed as “Mr.” like all our British teachers, held up a bunch of news printouts from around the world and read out the headlines.

  Latin Mining Boom: Who wins? Who loses?

  Blood-stained Minerals

  Guatemala’s Eldorado Mine: All that Glitters is Not Gold

  Hidden Hegemony: Canadian Mining in Latin America

  Katie put up her hand. “What’s a … hegemony?” she asked. If you look carefully at the photo of me jamming, you’ll see a girl with long chocolate hair and a square, serious face, drumming on my guitar case. She kept wiggling her legs in time with our music and I found it a little distracting. In a good way, I mean. That was Katie with the nightingale’s voice. A banker’s daughter from Toronto, Canada.

  Adam stroked his 70’s sideburns. “Hmm. Any takers?”

  Tang from Hong Kong sat up straight and inhaled sharply. He had all the answers but seemed allergic to raising his hand.

  “Yes, Tang?”

  “Hegemony. The dominance or control of one group over another, sir.”

  “And who’s controlling who in this context, do you think?”

  Modesto flicked a hand at Adam. He’s one of the Guatemalteco rockers I played with after school. We were even thinking of starting a band. “With all respect, sir,” he said, “I would say it’s the Canadians screwing the Guatemalans.”

  An outbreak of barely controlled laughter.

  I caught Katie’s eye and felt my cheeks flush.

  Adam almost smiled. “Interesting. You think so, in spite of the mining dollars that help support this very school?”

  Modesto laughed. “A few computers? Soccer trophies? That’s token, sir. Optics. Window dressing.”

  “I see. Let’s explore this topic further on Friday, shall we? Please prepare two interview questions before we set out for the mine.”

  Adam waved a couple of fingers at me as we piled out of class. “Indio, can I talk to you?”

  “Uh … sure. What’s up?”

  “This mine trip. You okay with it?”

  “Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Adam took off his glasses and wiped them on his psychedelic tie. “It’s just that … your father—”

  “Does he know we’re going?”

  “I’m not sure. We have our own contacts. Villagers, not miners.”

  “Oh.”

  Adam put his glasses back on and studied me like one of his aquarium fish. “You could skip this field trip, you know. It’s not like it will be on the Social Studies exam.”

  “No, I’ll go. It’s just that …”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, maybe I could just be Joe Student for the day? Like, everyone doesn’t need to know that I’m—”

  “The mine owner’s son? Certainly, Indio. I can respect that.”

  “Do you have to tell my parents where we’re going?”

  Adam gave me a sly look. “On paper this is simply a field trip to some K’iche’ villages in the highlands.”

  My mother’s home turf. My father’s mine. I’d never made the connection.

  “I’m cool with that,” I said.

  “Tickety-boo, Indio.” Adam gave me a firm British handshake. “Joe Student it is. We’ll see you Friday.”

  ELDORADO MINE

  I managed to tiptoe through the rest of the week without spilling the frijoles about Friday’s field trip. I stuck to my practice schedule, even putting in extra hours. I tried my best to focus on Luiz’s home-school ramblings. I kept my nose clean. Dad seemed oblivious to the fact that kids from the school he sponsored were going to snoop around his mine.

  I passed a good chunk of those nig
hts lying awake composing my next blog post or planning my next video. Of course, with no access to a home computer, I had to hold all this in my head, or get up ten times to scribble down ideas before they faded from my burned-out brain. I worried that the field trip might interfere with my regular twice-a-week posting. Already there were hundreds of teens around the world expecting it and I couldn’t let them down.

  I was still waffling about the trip the night before when I had a steamy dream about Katie. Her long chocolate hair on my chest, warm breath in my ear, locked legs, the whole bit.

  That clinches it. I’m going.

  I slept through my alarm Friday morning. It was only thanks to Juan Carlos’s racecar chops that I made it to school just as our bus was pulling out. He cut in front of it and screeched to a stop like he’d just nabbed a small army of narcos. Even slapped a portable red strobe light on the car’s roof for extra splash. Before I jumped out, I made him promise he wouldn’t tell my parents about where we were going. He pulled out his Beretta handgun and made the sign of a cross over it. “On pain of death, amigito.”

  I grabbed my sweet little three-quarter guitar out of the back seat and hopped on the bus to a round of hoots and applause.

  Twenty songs and two hours later, our bus filled with disgusting blue smoke and ground to a halt on the shoulder of a narrow mountain road. We sat in the long grass eating our bag lunches, singing more tunes, and throwing rotten figs at passing trucks. I was just tucking into the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” when our replacement bus arrived from Xela.

  We stopped at a village balanced on top of a steep ridge that fell away into nothingness. After a gut-busting four-hour journey, we were all feeling like caged monkeys, but Adam motioned for us to sit down as he let some local guy on.

  We kept going.

  Compared to some of the skinny campesinos we’d seen out the window, the guy we picked up looked pretty well- off with his fancy leather jacket and professor glasses. But he had a serious bruise on his cheek and had to struggle to keep his balance under a pair of crutches.

  Adam introduced him as Miguel, our guide. I never got what happened to him but, from what we heard later, it was easy to guess. Someone working for my dad’s mine probably roughed him up.

  We got our first glimpse of the mine as we drove through a patchy eucalyptus forest. Between gaps in the trees, I could make out a bunch of oil tanks, dirt piles, and scummy ponds.

  “We drove four hours for this?” I asked Adam.

  “Just wait,” he said. “Remember, our focus is on the villagers.”

  We wound our way up another ridge. The forest suddenly disappeared and we stopped beside a bare-naked mountain. We poured out of the bus, took a big stretch, and stared at my father’s mine.

  Miguel told us that most of the gold was found deep beneath these mountains. Some had been poked full of tunnels and shafts that went down over a mile. Far below, long ore trucks were lining up, like wasps at a nest, waiting to enter a tunnel. Other mountains had simply been blown up, Miguel said, as he hopped on his crutches to the edge of a yawning hole that I couldn’t get my head around.

  Miguel explained that this was the main pit, now as deep as the mountain was once tall. I latched onto a bush with one hand and gazed down to the bottom at a tiny bug of a truck. Miguel was telling us about all the four-story-high dump trucks it took to haul away the mountain, when I realized I was looking at one.

  “Whoah!”

  He traced his fingers through the air, moving up from the base of the pit to where the mountaintop used to be. “¿Muy grande, no?” he said. “Fue una montaña sagrada.”

  There was a buzz from my classmates as they got how big that mountain once was.

  I felt a warm bare arm next to mine.

  Katie. “What’s he saying?”

  Her Spanish was pretty sketchy, having just arrived from Toronto a month earlier, so I was happy to serve as her personal translator. “It was a big mountain,” I said. “A sacred mountain.”

  Our next stop was at the edge of a village that looked like it, too, could soon be eaten by the mine. Miguel led us through a pasture hopping with goats. Some local kids stopped kicking their homemade soccer ball, a scrunched-up blob of newspapers wound up in string. They stared at us. I was suddenly aware that our Reebok hi-tops and blue blazers must have looked pretty strange.

  We gathered in front of a rundown adobe house like you’d find anywhere in rural Guatemala. We learned that what made this house special is that it’s perched next door to Canada’s Eldorado Mine. On the property line, in fact. Living in this house was a woman Miguel said you don’t want to mess with, even if you are a multi-billion-dollar company. Diadora Itza, who he introduced as a “verdadero luchador de libertad.”

  “A what?” asked Katie, who had glued herself to me.

  “A true freedom fighter,” I whispered. “Activista, shit disturber.” Even though we were at the back of the mob, I purposely whispered so Katie had to move closer to hear me.

  Diadora came out carrying a big plate of champurradas, a traditional sesame seed cookie. She was a slight woman who could’ve used a few cookies herself. She presented them to Adam, who gave her a big smile, grabbed two big ones, then passed them on. While we all towered over her, she sat down on a log beside Miguel and began to tell her story. As soon as she opened her mouth, I felt a warm tingle down my neck. She was speaking K’iche’, my mother’s native tongue.

  With Miguel translating for her into Spanish, she explained that she had no big demands. Just the basics, like clean water and air. “Sólo quiero vivir en paz con mis animales.”

  Katie elbowed me.

  “Uh … right. She just wants to live in peace with her animals.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Listen.”

  Diadora’s problem was the gold under her house. And her goat pasture. And the skimpy forest beside it that helped shield her from the machine noise and dust and flying rocks tossed up by the mine. She pointed to a big dent in her tin roof where a boulder had landed after an especially big explosion.

  Katie pointed to several ugly pockmarks beside the door. “More rocks?” she said, looking at me.

  “What?”

  “Go ahead, ask her.”

  I did, in K’iche’, kind of showing off.

  Diadora got pretty worked up when she answered me. Even started crying.

  “What, what?” Katie said.

  “Not rocks,” I said. “Balas. Bullets.”

  The company’s problem was that Diadora refused to move. Worse, she organized protests against the mine. Against what some villagers felt was the end of their world. She told us that since the mine arrived, her village had seen more robberies, more prostitution, more drugs. In just five years, the number of bars in the area had gone up from nine to ninety.

  Miguel shook his head. “Más violencia también.”

  “More violence, too,” I said to Katie.

  Diadora told of receiving a knock at the door late one evening. “Dos hombres musculosos” were waiting for her behind it. Two muscular men.

  They said they were travelers.

  She didn’t believe them.

  They asked for beds.

  She refused.

  They asked for coffee.

  She gave them coffee.

  They paid her with a bullet in the head.

  Her neighbors found her lying in a pool of blood. They got help.

  When her neighbors went home, they found their houses sprayed with fresh bullet holes.

  “It’s a friggin’ war zone!” Katie said. “Did she say who those guys were? Like, were they Canadians?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean … I don’t know. Does it really matter? It’s all about the company.”

  My father’s company.

  Diadora pointed to her right temple. That’s when I noticed a dark shadow there, a little pit, shaped like the ones they took gold out of. That’s where the bullet went in. It tor
e through her right eyeball and grazed her nose, carving a notch that goes white when she frowns.

  And this woman had a lot to frown about.

  After three months in Guatemala City’s best private hospital, paid for, strangely enough, by CanaMine, she returned home to find more trouble. “Cuando regresó, descubrí que habían cortado mis pipas de agua.”

  Katie looked at me in shock. “Her water pipes?”

  I discovered that Katie understood more Spanish than she let on. My days as her personal translator were numbered. “Yeah,” I said. “She came home to find somebody had cut them.”

  “Y habían cortado las gargantas de mis cabras.”

  “Goats?” Katie said. “What happened?”

  “Slit their throats.”

  Diadora buried her face in her hands. I saw tears leaking through her fingers.

  “¡Qué dolor,” she cried. “Qué dolor!” What pain!

  What happened next made a lot of my classmates go green.

  Diadora suddenly lifted her head and started poking around her right eye. “¡Mira!” she said in Spanish. “¡Esto es lo que la mina ha hecho a mí!”

  “Look!” I whispered to Katie. “This is what the mine did to—”

  Something dropped into Diadora’s other hand.

  Katie covered her mouth like she was going to puke.

  Diodora’s glass eye sat unblinking in the palm of her hand. It glared back at us, at me, the mine owner’s son.

  If she only knew.

  A girl about my age ran out of the house and put her arm around Diadora. There was something about her that stopped my breath. The tight orange and black kerchief around her head.

  I pulled away from Katie, from the mob of students, wanting to hide. I stumbled over a root and landed flat on my ass, almost squashing a goat that galloped away, bleating like crazy.

  Now all eyes were on me, including the Mayan girl’s. Nervous laughter from my classmates. Even some clapping. I gave my best stage bow, trying to hide my face from the girl.