World, the World

by Norman Lewis

  ‘Quiet, isn’t it?’ Myers said.

  ‘Bound to be,’ I said, ‘with half the people still away.’ The main road was empty apart from a few sad farmcarts. In some places they had started repairs and there were ropes across the road and diversions into lanes. In these, hedges that hadn’t been cut back for six years threw down trailers of brambles that clawed at the small bonnet of the Fiat as it poked its way through. England, this April, was an everlasting Sunday morning, lying under a spell of emptiness and silence. Six lost summers in these small towns had done away with colour, leaving faded paintwork and the tatters of advertisements posted on hoardings before September 1939.

  In Andover we stopped for late breakfast in a hotel that had been re-opened only a week before. They were still scratching flies’ wings out of the wood-work in the dining-room. A girl with her face whitened like a geisha’s brought us the rare treat of a boiled egg apiece. Pasty as she was, she still had plenty of flesh on her bones. Londoners these days looked like Romans with high cheek-bones and aquiline noses. Somehow the emptiness and boredom of the years of listening to the distant noises of war had fattened these people. We finished our eggs and the girl was back to offer us two more, which we declined. There was coffee, too, which she warned us was made from toasted nuts, and this, too, we turned down.

  ‘So when are you off to see Ernestina?’ Myers asked.

  ‘Monday week,’ I told him. ‘I’m still on the wait-list for Guatemala City, so I’m living in hope.’

  ‘What made her go there when she took such a liking to Cuba?’

  ‘The cost of living in Cuba went through the ceiling, and only fairly small sums could be sent out from England. She made Guatemalan friends who were going back and they took her with them.’

  ‘Six years is a long time,’ Myers said.

  ‘It can be very long,’ I said,

  Stonehenge was a half-hour further into the morning, a tightly packed megalith cluster throwing down long spears of shadow over the yellow sapless turf. There were pigeons on the stones and many in the sky above, but nothing else in sight that moved.

  ‘Worth the journey?’ Myers asked.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Rather smaller than I thought.’

  ‘But very impressive.’

  ‘Even after Karnac?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The feeling I have is that it’s older. And … how can I put it? More universal. This is not a monument for a cat god, but the sun and the universe.’

  ‘Should have been ravens and crows. Not pigeons.’

  ‘Pigeons are doves. Remember that. They’re just as symbolical. I wonder if you feel moved by the grandeur of these surroundings in the way I do.’

  ‘There’s no way of knowing. Probably,’ I said.

  ‘Atmosphere and mood enter very strongly into the kind of experiments that interest me. I’ve been investigating telepathy in a friend’s flat in Highbury, but so far I must admit without positive conclusions.’

  ‘The conditions were wrong,’ I suggested.

  ‘Well, yes, they were. Every few minutes a tube rumbled past somewhere beneath us in the bowels of the earth. Intensive concentration was impossible.’

  I was studying the monument and thinking about it. Apart from the various cosmic purposes ascribed to it, I seemed to be in the presence of something reflecting the mind of a young child that seeks to challenge nature by unnatural re-arrangements of objects that come to hand, by precarious feats of balancing, as in the case of the colossal lintels here on the standing stones. It was a childish impulse carried to extremes.

  We had reached the central feature known as the Middle Archway, a compound of four uprights supporting three massive lintels. ‘What I’d like you to do is to place yourself against the end stone with your back to it,’ Oliver said. ‘I shall then go to the stone at the far end, which I imagine is about twenty yards away. You will transmit thoughts and I will receive. It is now twenty past ten and we’ll start in exactly five minutes’ time. You could visualise a well-known scene, or select some episode or experience and think about it with every ounce of concentration you can put into it. What is essential is the exclusion for, say, three minutes of all random thoughts. We’ll repeat the experiment four or five times then if you can possibly muster up the patience to cope I’d like to go over it a few times with me on the transmitting end.’

  He went off and I stood against the stone, still wet from frost in the feeble rays of the sun, and did what I could to enter into the spirit of the thing by starting to concentrate. Shortly he was back, smiling and confident. ‘Perfect conditions,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t have been better. Can’t help thinking you went out of your way to make things easy for me. Simple stuff. You were thinking of nude women with fair hair.’

  ‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of an item in yesterday’s Telegraph about a bear holding up the traffic on a Spanish main road.’

  ‘Oh hum,’ he said, suddenly crestfallen. ‘Hold on, though. Wait a minute. Nude—bear—bare. Surely that’s a possibility? Or don’t you think so?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Well, I’m not at all sure. I find it encouraging. Perhaps you’re just tired. Anyway, we’ll have another go tomorrow.’

  Chapter Two

  LETTERS FROM ERNESTINA HAD arrived regularly while I remained in England. They were cheerful and interesting and described life in a Central American republic with such inspired powers of description that friends like Myers urged me to keep them carefully with a view perhaps to eventual publication. I had persuaded her to follow the recommendation issued through the Embassy to remain in Cuba after the outbreak of war, and she accepted that it was prudent and reasonable to put aside any thoughts of return while the blitz continued, especially after bomb damage left the Corvaja home in Gordon Street virtually uninhabitable. Thereafter I was sent overseas and so long as Ernestina could support herself in Cuba, or subsequently Guatemala, there seemed little point in her returning to England. Fewer letters arrived from that time on, and in the period from 1943 to the end of 1944, all news ceased for a period of five months, to be followed by a silence of seven months. This was not an unusual experience, for with changes of sections and theatres of war correspondence was hugely delayed and some letters never delivered. I attempted to break the silence through our Florida section which had some connection in Central America, but their news seemed wary and non-committal: Ernestina had been contacted and was alive and well; no more than that.

  Non-military planes flying in any direction continued to be rare for months after the war’s end and Britishers stranded anywhere in the Americas were warned to expect long delays before repatriation. Flights in the other direction were less heavily booked and I wrote to say that I expected to be able to come to Guatemala in a matter of weeks. This produced a rapid and enthusiastic response, but somehow I sensed a lack of spontaneity in the writing. It was a long letter that seemed almost too literary, too well-written, too full of nicely turned phrases. I could discover in these sentences no evidence of joy.

  The flight to Guatemala was confirmed within a week of the trip to Stonehenge. Ernestina met me at the airport and for a moment I had difficulty in picking her out in the crowd waiting at the barrier. She was smaller than she had always appeared in my memory, the six years had reshaped her face in such a way that she might have been a sister or a cousin, and her stiff, nervous smile probably matched my own. This, I was compelled to admit, was a stranger. Over six years the letters we had written each other had been conventionally informative and cheerful. We had acted as our own censors, but as I well knew the professionals with their scissors left little but banal scraps so that too often not even our literary links had survived.

  A standard defence in such emergencies as this is to keep talking. Everything personal was skirted round, and even any description of the fate of the Corvaja family still sitting in the ruins of their house drew little response. So many of us in Europe had settled to a uniformity o
f crisis. My last experience of life in a foreign land had been Cologne shortly after its near-obliteration in the fire-storm raid when I had watched the flies stream in and out of the holes in the ground. Here in Guatemala City there was an unchallenged normality and stress was unknown. We dined in a restaurant where barefoot Indian girls brought tray after tray of food: ham, tortillas, cheese, dishes of black beans with chillies, joints of grilled guinea pig, meat impaled on little skewers and overflowing baskets of tropical fruit. At one point Ernestina called over the girl who had served her, took a boiled sweet from her handbag, unwrapped it and gave it to her. When she spoke to the girl, who could have been in her twenties, she spoke as if to a young child. ‘Of course they are children,’ she said, clearly intercepting my thought. ‘The hotel doesn’t allow tipping so we like to give them sweets instead.’

  I commented on the interesting ethnic design woven into the serving girl’s garments, all of which I had noticed were different. Immediately Ernestine’s expression took on life. It was a welcome distraction, and we were both on safe ground.

  ‘Every girl is obliged to wear real tribal dress,’ she said. ‘It’s a tourist attraction. The huipils you see here belong to a dozen different tribes and a lot of people come here just to study them.’ She was clearly well on her way to becoming an expert in such matters. I remembered now of mention made in a letter of part-time work for the National Museum. ‘They hope to open a textiles department,’ she had written, ‘and I’m giving them a hand. Unfortunately it’s already late in the day and many of the best designs have been lost.’

  The view through the window was of the avenue, like a film set in colours from Eisenstein’s Thunder Over Mexico. A policeman with an obsidian face stood at a street corner, and an Indian stumbled by on burdened legs. He swore a vermilion kilt and carried the first cacaxte I had seen, a wooden cage strapped to his back filled with cans of Coca-Cola. I commented on this and Ernestina said, ‘You won’t see many delivery vans. They put people out of work. That man keeps a family on thirty centavos a day, which is what he’s paid. Five centavos of that goes to the policeman for allowing him to use the avenue, which cuts a mile or so off the walk.’

  I said nothing. These were the abuses one expected of a banana republic, but the next small surprise came when the girl arrived to clear away breakfast. I had noticed with concern that the contents of an ashtray from a nearby table had been emptied on a plate of untouched food. ‘What happens to all the perfectly edible leftovers?’ I asked.

  ‘It goes into a swill-can, and ultimately into the ravine.’

  ‘God,’ I said. ‘All that food.’

  ‘Sometimes the Indians get at it, but not often, the attitude being if they get free food why should they work?’

  The people surrounding us messed with five meals a day, and I was keen to get away from them. I hired a car and we drove a few miles out of town. I wanted to get the feeling and the shape of the country. All the villages were crammed close to the ground which was the colour of burned brick, but, as in Cuba, the people had taken pots of paint of whatever colour they could find and splashed it over the walls. Of human activity there was little to be seen but the servitude of those struggling legs almost doubled under the terrible weight of their cacaxtes, the wild freedom of zigzagging drunks, and the teams at street corners hammering sad music from their marimbas. Eight volcanoes with menacing names like Fire and Water encircled the city and these paint-plastered suburbs, and the eight perfect cones floated in the soft light over this scene, with vultures like ash from a bonfire drifting hither and thither in the sky.

  The theatricality of the surroundings seemed to do away with evasive talk.

  ‘I believe you enjoy life here,’ I said.

  ‘In a way, yes. I used not to and then I changed. At first I laughed at men who wore spurs even if they didn’t ride horses. Now I accept it as the normal thing.’

  ‘It’s a better life than in England, then?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘As you remember England, of course?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘You can’t imagine how much better you’d find it now. Do you want to come back?’

  ‘Let’s come into the open, Guatemala fashion, and be frank. I’m well occupied here. I do useful work at the Museum, and I have friends. This place is a citadel of privilege of the kind you’ve never known, but I’m used to it. I fit in. Do I want to spend the rest of my life here? I don’t know. The thing is I’m happy enough as things are, and it’s clear that you can manage without me. The only problem is money.’

  ‘It’s bound to be worse now the army pay remittances are at an end, and with the tightening up on sending cash abroad.’

  ‘Pity,’ she said. ‘The investment openings here will never be the same again. You can pick up a coffee finca for nothing. For the first time ever we have a liberal government which promises to give land to the Indians. All the finca owners are mad with terror.’

  ‘And what happens if the government takes your finca away and gives it to the Indians?’

  ‘They’d never do that to a foreigner. It’s out of the question.’

  At that moment it seemed to me at least an interesting experiment, and even, possibly, an exciting one.

  Lazlo and Lena Papas, two Hungarian refugees who appeared to be Ernestina’s closest friends, had worked hard to enthuse her with the possibilities of this finca project. We called on them in their house which smelt faintly of goulash and looked out over what was commonly called El Mercado de los Zopilotes—the vulture market—in the lower end of the town. The Papas were merchants of hope who had left Budapest in haste some ten years before and lived here ever since by a series of schemes that had never brought prosperity but had somehow kept them afloat. They had taken the house in the market because nobody wanted it, and its windows overlooked Indians dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, selling vegetables, and the zopilotes that had been there since the days of the Maya, and were so audacious that they would come flapping down to snatch some edible scrap from the bag carried by a shopper.

  Being compelled to live among Indians as he did, Lazlo set out to extract profit from it and advertised himself as an expert on Guatemalan textiles, eventually becoming probably the only non-Indian, I learned, to be able to interpret most of the symbols woven into Indian garments. These often recorded in compact form the wearer’s tribal history, his or her age-group, profession, status in society and even sexual potency. This led to a badly paid Museum job. Once in a while Lazlo managed to buy a good example of disappearing textile art and sell it on to the Museum, but these days, he said, such windfalls had become rare indeed. Upper-class ladies had started to collect. When they went to market they took cheap, commercially produced blouses with them and, having spotted a fine huipil, would order the market-woman to take it off, and hand her the blouse and possibly five dollars in return. Nowadays Indian women who might have inherited such a huipil from a mother or grandmother, wore it inside out when going to market to avoid such compulsory sales.

  The Papas knew all about the coffee business. Briefly, and for a pittance, Lazlo had been a government inspector of coffee estates, carrying out coffee control on crops for export, and was offered bribes for good reports and threatened with beatings for those in any way critical of the production. He produced samples of different grades for our admiration or contempt. The best buy for anyone wanting to go into the business was in the Altiplano, he said, where soil and climate contributed to the production of what was generally accepted as the finest coffee in the world. He knew of a small finca going in this choice area that was very cheap indeed, and had everything to recommend it, including relative freedom from earthquakes and proximity to the main Quetzaltenango highway. Labour costs, too, were possibly the lowest anywhere.

  ‘So what’s the snag?’ Ernestina wanted to know. ‘Why are they selling it?’

  ‘There’s a widow involved. A woman can’t handle a finca on her own. There was some
trouble with the Indians when Ubico was here, and he hanged a few. But now the liberals are in that’s all cleared up.’

  It would take a day or two, Lazlo said, to get in touch with the people in the Altiplano and arrange to have somebody show us round. I was eager to see the north-west of the country. All the Indians of Guatemala seemed extremely poor, and those of the Altiplano, Lazlo assured me, were the poorest of the lot. This in its sad fashion added to their interest for me, for poverty and isolation had helped to conserve their ancient traditions. The traje, as the traditional dress was called, was to be seen here in its purest form, according to Ernestine’s observations, and many customs and ceremonies that had died out elsewhere with the improvement of communications still took place.

  In the meanwhile I made the useful acquaintance of Julian Berridge, the ceramics curator at the Museum, which possessed a huge collection of Mayan artefacts. Most of these were ceramic objects such as drinking vessels and images recovered from lakes Atitlan and Amatitlan into which they had been thrown as sacrifices to the gods. They all demonstrated workmanship of the most exquisite kind. The Museum’s collection was the start of my interest in the pre-Colombian culture of Central America, and induced me to embark on a serious study of the subject, finally abandoned some years later after it became clear that its range was so vast that it could never be brought to completion.

  It took twelve hours and three changes of bus to reach Santa Maria de la Sagrada Conceptión in the Altiplano. The buses were labelled ‘third category’ and had seven-inch wide seats which were normally used only by Indians who were both small and ready to put up with a minimum of space. Third category buses had a deserved reputation for unreliability, too. In the absence of genuine spare parts during the war years, they had been kept on the road only by miracles of ingenuity performed by village blacksmiths. Lazlo and I were wedged in position among Indians returning to the north, almost all of them in traditional traje woven with the symbols that spoke of the history of their tribe. Some of these were brief: ‘We came from the mountains, we lived by a lake,’ others were venturesome, even challenging, ‘Call us the horse people. Four children per horse.’ Of the Spanish conquest and near-obliteration nothing remained but the respect for this fecund and powerful animal. First the law then custom prevented an Indian from riding one, yet a kind of close mystical association drew Indians to horses, and successful pregnancies resulted even from the spectacle of horse copulation, so frequently illustrated in woven design.