by Norman Lewis
In these poor Indian villages the people settled uncomplainingly, and without the distractions of hope, to the hard life. The bus stopped at a market to cool down. Porters bent under their cacaxtes trotted in to unload their baggage then refilled the vacant space with the stones piled there for this use. It was their belief that muscles should never be left idle. We climbed down to stretch our legs, spreading a local silence among the Indian crowd who followed us with their eyes without turning their heads. Lazlo, who spoke Maya-Quiché, picked up an occasional sotto voce comment. The Indian’s absence of facial expression, he said, concealed subtle thought processes and much wit.
The long drag up into the Altiplano ended abruptly in a bedraggled cluster of yellow shacks under a mountain scarred all over from the conflagrations of slash-and-burn cultivation. ‘Ixta-huacan,’ Lazlo said. ‘Famous for Mexican smugglers and iguana baked in clay.’ The driver put us down, turned back with a desperate squawk on his bulb horn, and went off. A tall, disappointed-looking ladino came out of the cantina accompanied by a child dragging a hawk with a broken wing on a length of string. The man cuffed the child softly away and approached to introduce himself as the agent charged by the widow with the sale of her finca. He walked with the suggestion of a swagger picked up from Western movies and in local style wore four silver rings on the fingers of each hand. He had picked up some English by working in a fish-freezing plant in Belize. The finca was six miles away, he said, and if we were ready he would drive us there. He ducked out of sight into a ruined shed, re-emerging a few moments later at the wheel of a car—once an old Ford saloon, the top of which had been cut away to turn it into an open tourer. Harness bells had been strung round the edge of the body, and from these as soon as we started off came a prolonged festive jingling that was out of place in these surroundings.
We bumped and slithered for an hour through the red dust before stopping outside a square windowless building with an entrance covered by torn sacking. We climbed down from the car and the Ladino pulled aside the sacking for us to pass through. I found myself in a yard of the kind to be seen anywhere in the East or the slums of a Mediterranean city. There, it would have housed odds and ends of machinery or household objects for which it was hoped that, sooner or later, some use could eventually be found: a car axle, an engine block half buried in litter, a ruined tyre, a chicken coop in need of repair. Here, poverty of a different kind possessed nothing surplus to immediate needs and nothing ever to be dumped and forgotten. A search for the purpose of this place recorded fire-wood stacked in a corner, a slab of stone with an iron ring in it, a ram’s skull, and steps in a wall that led nowhere.
‘Santa Maria de la Sagrada Concepción,’ the ladino said, with a touch of pride and a flourish of a beringed hand.
‘Where’s the village?’ I asked.
‘This is village,’ he said. ‘All peoples living in same house.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘Now they are in the mountains looking for food. If you call them to work and give them food they will be glad.’
‘Is this place run with child labour?’ I asked Lazlo.
‘It comes into it in most fincas. The planters always tell you it’s the Indian system. At first the Indians find them light jobs to do round the house. And when they’re a little older they’re supposed to help collect food in the fields or woods. “Why should we worry?” they say. “It’s the way the Indians do things.”’
The ladino nodded his agreement. ‘Young children very good for coffee picking,’ he said. There was a pause between sentences while he organised the wording of what was to come with eyes raised as if for inspiration and the tip of his tongue, as bright as coral, appearing momentarily in the opening of the full, dark lips. ‘You may beat them if they don’t work fast,’ he said, ‘and their fathers will be pleased.’
‘Don’t take any notice of that,’ Lazlo said. ‘That’s meant to impress you. Indian parents no more beat their children than ours do.’
‘At what age do they start?’ I asked.
‘In the finca, normally at eight.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘I’m totally against it. If we manage to get something going my plans are to start some sort of reform in the hope it might spread.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘It’s something we’d better discuss before we get much further.’
The ladino had sensed disapproval of the harsh disciplining of child workers.
‘Coffee-picking not hard,’ he said. ‘They will kiss your hand if you say they may work for you.’
Back in Ixtahuacan we found there was no chance of getting to Guatemala City that day so there was no escaping the cantina’s dormitory, which was clean and quiet enough although it had to be shared with two other travellers.
Before returning we discussed the events of the day in the bar over several tequilas which encouraged Lazlo’s expression of altruistic views.
‘My hope would be to start a movement,’ Lazlo said. ‘Many planters are reasonable and humane people. The Church might even give us its blessing. The word would get round. This could be the start of a big thing. What do you think?’
‘I’m not convinced.’
‘You mean you don’t see yourself as a coffee planter?’
‘Not at this moment’
‘Is it the child-labour thing?’
‘That’s certainly part of it.’
‘The first thing I would do would be to push up the minimum age,’ Lazlo said.
‘To what?’
‘Say, ten.’
‘Two years one way or another hardly count. It’s still child labour.’
‘And cut the working day to eight hours. To some extent we’d be falling in with government policy. There was a reference to labour abuses in the President’s inaugural speech.’
‘Julian Berridge mentioned it the other day. He said that nothing would be done.’
‘You have to remember this is the first liberal president this country has ever had.’
‘As soon as he does anything to scare the hard-liners they’ll get rid of him. Berridge gives the liberals three years. Let’s suppose you manage to start the ball rolling with your one-man land reform, and get yourself known as a liberal supporter, what’s going to happen to you when the liberals are no more? The answer is you’ll be wiped out.’
‘Whatever Berridge thinks I don’t feel like giving up,’ Lazlo said. He drained his glass and in local style sprinkled salt in his palm and licked it off. ‘If necessary I’m ready to take a chance on my own. The time has come when I feel I have to do something with my life.’
At that moment a tall, elderly man advanced on us, stooping a little as he came through the doorway. I was struck by the fact that he was wearing an ill-fitting tropical suit of the kind rarely to be seen in Guatemala where members of the white upper-class -as this man clearly was—are careful about their appearance. He smiled through a ragged moustache in the process of going grey, and held out his hand. ‘Edmundo Rios,’ he said. ‘I’m the owner of this establishment. I’ve just been told I have English-speaking guests. Happen to have spent several pleasant years at Cambridge. Do either of you know it?’
‘I live fifty-odd miles away,’ I told him.
‘Wonderful,’ Rios said. ‘I was in Foreign Affairs here until recently but took early retirement after falling out with the late General Ubico. All the better for it. Good climate, splendid mountain walks and pleasant people. I gather you’re up here to look over a finca.’
‘We’ve just come back from Santa Maria,’ I said.
‘Were you favourably impressed?’
‘The buildings were in a run-down condition. That was all we saw. If we decide to go any further we’ll have to call in an expert to go over the finca itself.’
Rios stroked the bridge of his nose in a local gesture expressing doubt. ‘You would do well to do that,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘This is none of my business but I feel a certain degree of
responsibility where foreign visitors are concerned, especially those from England.’
‘The price asked is very low,’ Lazlo told him.
‘It has reason to be,’ Rios said. ‘They will take less. Were you told any of the history of the place?’
‘Nothing. We only know that the owner is a widow. We didn’t see her.’
‘No mention was made of trouble with the Indians?’
‘None at all.’
‘The price is very low because there is a dispute with the Indians. They have a claim at Santa Maria. The government doesn’t accept it, but the way they see it you’re on their land.’
‘What form does the trouble take?’
‘They come in the night and cut through the roots of the coffee trees. At first you don’t realise what’s happening. A tree goes here and another goes there. Then you notice all the leaves are falling off. You call in a specialist and he breaks the news. They’ve cut through the roots, he tells you and holds out his hand for a hundred quetzals.’
‘Is there any way round this?’ I asked.
‘You have to settle it. If you’re smart you ask for a meeting with the heads of the families, and they bring one of their priests along, and he burns copal to their god and you drink three or four shots of aguardiente together. You say to them, “I admit this is your land, but I want to pay rent to you to go on using it. You can send all your children along to work for me and I’ll pay them thirty centavos and give them five tortillas a day.”’
‘What happens if you’re not smart?’
‘If you’re not smart you go to the police. The widow at Santa Maria lost her husband that way. The couple bought the finca cheap and the Indians let him go on selling his coffee at good prices because they thought he didn’t know the rules of the game. When they cut through the tree roots as a warning this man gave the police commandant ten quetzals and he caught a couple of Indians and broke their legs. After that all was quiet for a few months then the husband disappeared. The story went round that they threw him down the Tajamulco volcano. I don’t necessarily believe this story, but that’s what they all say.’
Next morning Rios saw us off on the bus.
‘So what did you finally decide about the finca?’ he asked.
‘Nothing at all,’ I told him. ‘There are one or two points we want to take up in Guatemala City. After some of the things you told us last night I’m a little less keen, perhaps, than I was.’
‘This is an interesting part of the country to live in,’ Rios said, ‘even if the finca’s a doubtful proposition. Let me make a suggestion. Why go into the coffee business and stop sleeping at night? I’m moving back into the city in the autumn and this hotel is for sale very cheap. You could buy the hotel and have nothing to worry you. The darned Indians aren’t going to throw you down a volcano for running a hotel.’
The next day but one, Thursday, brought with it the beginning of Easter’s transfiguration of the city’s life. Suddenly the streets fell calm. Forty days of Lent had dutifully passed in a pious lack of activity. People ate less as directed, stayed in bed when they could, and emerged from their houses in the cool of the evening for visits to nearby churches and shrines. The Indians put the last touch to the preparations of the splendid processions with which they would take possession of the streets on Sunday. As one had explained to Lazlo, ‘When the Lord is crucified the rains will fall.’
Ernestine had missed the exhausting journey to Santa Maria because she had an infection. We met again at the Papas’ house in the vulture market, where the matter of the finca was to be discussed. Lazlo, always the optimist, would have been happy to go ahead, the only problem being the considerable one of raising the cash. He had learned how to live with Indians, he claimed, and I believed that he was right. Lena, as usual, went along with her husband. In reality it was Ernestina who would have been the backbone of this project. Her opinion of primitive societies in general was lower than Lazlo’s, but she was a born organiser and if anyone could have got the thing off the ground it was she. But I doubted that she would have stood up to the isolation of Santa Maria. Lazlo was close enough to the Indians hardly to have been affected. For Ernestina the isolation offered its threat in two forms, the first of the place, and the second of the people.
I was the only real, entrenched pessimist. Most of my time since our return had been spent mugging up on the discouraging history of the country, which only confirmed what I had already begun to suspect.
Fourteen families, the book said, were generally believed to rule Guatemala, and perhaps a thousand more shared between them most of what was left of the national wealth. Most of the top autarchs genuinely believed themselves appointees of God. It was a religious tenet and those who opposed it were considered political heretics who deserved extermination. Nobody could explain how, in a country in which all elections were assumed to be fixed, the liberal president had come to power, which to the ruling conservatives made it all the more sinister. Some suggested it was part of a foreign plot. Distantly I could hear the rumble of tumbrils. I could not believe in the possibility of democratic collaboration in coffee growing with emancipated Indians, and this I said.
My flight back to Europe was booked for Easter Monday, and this meeting was followed by a discussion with Ernestina about the future. She remained uncertain about her intentions and wanted time ‘to sort herself out.’
Chapter Three
I FOUND MY MOTHER to be suffering from the after-effects of influenza and also the frailty to be expected of her age. Once she had recovered her energy and spirits, it became clear that she felt like a change of scene. It was arranged that she should go to stay with Welsh relatives in Carmarthen.
By chance the move fitted in with my plans. I had gone recently for a medical check-up where the doctor informed me that I was suffering from the peacetime aftermath of the constant and sometimes frenetic activity of the war years, and advised me most emphatically to adopt a more active and demanding life-style. I was to keep moving, revert as far as possible to the health-giving occupations the army had provided, be on the alert—ready to spring into action both by day and night. ‘But it’s not necessary any longer. I don’t need it,’ I objected. ‘Your body and your brain do,’ he said. ‘Do you enjoy sport?’ he asked and I shook my head. ‘How about horse-riding, tennis, squash?’ I couldn’t work up an enthusiasm, I told him. ‘You like the countryside, you tell me. You could go for long hikes.’ Knowing myself, I told him, I would never keep it up. A final suggestion was rock-climbing, which had some appeal for me. At least the scenery might be good. He was delighted. ‘As it happens it’s one of my principal interests,’ he said. He usually climbed in the Grampians where the climate imposed a valuable test with the added stimulus of risk. I was no masochist, I told him, and he recommended Pembrokeshire, where he had also climbed, ‘and you get your kicks the easy way’.
The area particularly recommended was only thirty miles from Carmarthen, where my mother intended to stay for the rest of the year, so I set out to find a suitable cottage somewhere along the Pembrokeshire coast. I was all in favour of Pembrokeshire, where the people lived on boiled mutton and bacon you had to wash the salt out of before cooking it.
To my amazement, on consulting a Carmarthen house agent I was told that he had nothing of the kind I was looking for on his books. What he could offer was a castle and he read out a few of the overwhelming details. It possessed four turrets, each containing three bedrooms, a banqueting hall flanked by six spacious living-rooms, ample servants quarters below stairs, an exceptionally large kitchen, wine cellars, and the usual offices. It was furnished, he had been informed, but not in a lavish style. The rent was £6 per week. This struck me as low for what was on offer, and he said that the demand for castles was limited, to some extent due to the impossibility of finding staff in these days. Castles could be awkward to live in, he thought, and the people who occasionally took them, sometimes organised themselves so as not to occupy more than a mini
mum of space. The castle in this case had not been occupied for the past five years.
I pressed for further details and it turned out not to be a castle at all, but St Catherine’s Fort in Tenby, situated on top of a rock about thirty yards offshore in the bay. It had been bought as a speculation by a local solicitor who had attempted to change the name by painting Tenby Castle in huge black letters on a fairly small rock surface facing the town. There was no legal way of stopping this piece of impudence, although Tenby Post Office refused to accept letters carrying this address. The solicitor meanwhile ignored letters addressed to St Catherine’s Fort.
Going to Tenby to view the property, I found it roughly as described. Among minor additions to the agent’s description was the inexplicable presence in the banqueting hall and rooms of the corpses of many small birds, some of which had been so long dead that they had virtually turned to powder. Letting myself in through the fake baronial doors, the first thing that met my eye was a gigantic bearskin rug, the head gazing up at the visitor with penetrating yellow eyes. The flat roof was home to innumerable nesting seabirds among the deep stench of guano deposits accumulated over a half-century.
When I took the place the agent seemed surprised, and it was only at this second meeting, and with my signature already on the document, that other disadvantages of life at the fort came out. I learned that there were no deliveries by any tradesmen, due to the difficulty in hauling goods up the steep and slippery steps cut in the rock. Likewise mail had still to be collected from the post office. He could find me a housekeeper, he said, mentioning that she was a missionary of one of the many obscure religious sects of the area, who would bring with her a daughter who was understudying her. Inconveniences might arise when she asked for days off to preach at chapels, where sermons were not only preached on Sundays but on weekdays. At some time during this conversation he mentioned a general belief that the fort was haunted by more than one ghost, and I told him that I imagined that that could well be the case. There was a special warning, ‘Watch out for the tides,’ he said. The rock was cut off by the tide for six hours at a time. This meant that you were frequently imprisoned at times when you had hoped to ‘go ashore’. It was important to remember that if you failed to beat the tide closing in when you decided to return, the shore visit would be prolonged for six hours longer than intended.
