The Path of the Jaguar

by Stephen Henighan

  She turned the corner into the alley leading out to the Calzada. Laura Pausini’s whine yielded to the manly drama of Ricardo Arjona. Coming down the alley, Amparo spotted her sister Esperanza hurrying in the direction of the bus back to the village. They exchanged a soft, “La utz a’wech?” — “How’s it going?” This was as much Cakchiquel as Amparo spoke in Antigua. Four men from a village farther up the mountainside walked past. The two older men wore Mayan garb; the young men were dressed in bluejeans and T-shirts with English words written on them. Amparo crossed the two lanes of slow traffic on the Calzada and entered the calm cobblestoned streets of Antigua.

  It took her only five minutes to make her way to the Escuela San Fernando. She climbed the broad stone steps, laid in the sixteenth century, that had remained unbudged by all the earthquakes that had rocked the city. Hot sunlight fell on her face. She went through the swinging front door. A pale-skinned nun stood in the corridor, the cries of children echoing behind her. “May I help you?” she said, her voice revealing that she was from Spain.

  “Buenas tardes. My name is Amparo Ajuix. I’ve come about the job . . . ”

  “Buenas tardes. I am Sister Consuelo. Please come this way.”

  As she followed the straight-backed nun down the corridor, Amparo thought: a married woman who talks to others about her husband betrays the sanctity of matrimony. But to confide in a nun . . . that would be like talking to God, like consulting one’s own conscience.

  Sister Consuelo opened the door and admitted Amparo to a small, spare office with a crucifix on the wall. Amparo sat down, wondering what the nun would ask her. As she struggled to remember the answers she had prepared, the thought struck her that confiding in a nun would be no betrayal at all.

  TWO

  “YOU’LL HAVE TO WORK LONGER hours in the market,” Amparo told Inés over dinner, “because I have a job.” She straightened Sandra on her lap. “¡Frijolitos!”

  Laying down her fork, the girl went to the stove. She brought the scuffed tin pot from the dim alcove and scraped the hot black bean paste onto Amparo’s plate.

  “My wife plans to spend even more time away from home,” Eusebio said from the head of the table. “Our daughter will be brought up by strangers.”

  “My mother and my sisters will look after Sandra,” Amparo said, spooning frijoles into Sandra’s mouth. “That’s our custom.”

  Eusebio straightened up. She had undercut his social advantage: the fact that, although his skin was as dark as hers, he was not an Indian. He had grown up in a poor neighbourhood on the edge of Antigua, two generations removed from his last relative who had spoken an indigenous language, a fact which elevated him to the status of ladino, a person of European culture.

  “Yes, it’s your custom that all sorts of things are shared.” Eusebio got to his feet.

  In spite of herself, Amparo stared at him. This was as close as he had come to repeating before others the words he had spoken in their bedroom. He crossed the room. Once she had seen an easygoing tolerance in his slow gait. Sandra moaned and pushed away the next spoonful of frijoles. Amparo realized that she was holding her daughter too tightly. Eusebio snapped on the television and sat down on the sofa with his back to the table.

  “Inés, please take Sandra to Eusebio. Let him look after her while you and I wash the dishes.”

  The girl got up, picked up Sandra in her thin arms, and carried her across the room. Amparo felt her muscles tightening. She concentrated on the image of the Baby Jesus, on Xpiyacoc and Ixmucane making the first people out of corn, the first four men who all took the name B’alam, Jaguar. Behind her Eusebio was absorbed in a telenovela they used to watch together, holding Sandra between them.

  In the alcove, soaping the pots for the girl to scrub in the steel sink, Amparo said: “I’m going to be a teacher. I’ll teach with the nuns.” She handed her the frying pan. “When I started school my poor father worked in the milpa. He had nothing to sell but his corn and no money to buy us shoes. The humiliation! Walking into school in bare feet! I begged my mother to let me stay home — ”

  The volume of the television rose as a pair of illicit lovers exchanged rapturous whispers in Venezuelan accents. Eusebio had always listened to her memories of her family’s rise from poverty. Each telling had been different, each version probing a distinct moment of change, examining an emotion she had not considered before. Eusebio, the shy, round-faced ladino who approached life with more tranquillity and less striving than she, had made her experiences real.

  “And . . . ?” Inés said, as though expecting her to continue.

  “Finish the washing,” Amparo said.

  Her daughter was asleep in her husband’s arms. Inés finished the washing up, then retreated through the door leading to the adjoining shed that Amparo’s brothers had renovated into a servant’s room. Amparo looked past her husband. Their bedroom, its double doors closed, lay behind the television; the room their daughter would share with her brother or sister was next door. Amparo crossed the cool tiles until she stood behind Eusebio. She lifted Sandra off his shoulders. He gave a start. His eyes reproached her for a second. He watched the television.

  Sandra, waking, began to sob. “You don’t want to be with Mama?” Amparo murmured. “Come with me, mi vida, your Mama loves you.”

  She put her daughter to bed, sensing the little girl’s apprehension at the brisk movements with which she undressed her. As Amparo turned to leave the bedroom, Sandra said: “I’m afraid, Mama. Don’t turn out the light.”

  Amparo sat down on the bed. “I’ll tell you a story,” she said. “My grandmother told me this story when I was a little girl. To tell this story right, you must tell it in Cakchiquel. You can’t tell it in Spanish because it is the story of how the Spanish people took our ancestors’ land.”

  “When did they do that?”

  “In the 16th century. But of course our ancestors did not call that time the 16th century. They used a different calendar.”

  “What did our ancestors call that time?”

  “I don’t know, Sandra. I’m very sorry. I don’t know the Mayan calendar well enough . . . ” She paused. “I will tell you the story.” She wondered whether she would be able to get through the formal Cakchiquel of the oral storyteller without making a mistake. As she prepared to speak, she realized that the television had been turned off. The house was silent. The ceiling light in the main room had been extinguished; only the lamp next to the sofa was on. Eusebio was listening.

  Sliding across the bed to hold Sandra in her arms, she said: “Pa ri q’ij Jun Junajpu’, xe’oqa ri Xexa’ Winäq pa taq qulew. Ri q’iy re’ xtikir k’a ri kamisanik, ri eläq, ri meb’a’il chi qakojol. Pa ri q’ij re’ chuqa xeyakatäj ri qati’t qaMama’ richin ma nki’ya ta ki’ chi kiwäch re winäq re’. Chi koköj chi nima’q xkichäp k’a ri oyowal xeb’e pa taq q’ayis richin nikiya ruchoq’a ri lab’al . . . ”

  She pronounced the words with care, reviewing their meaning in her mind: One day, says the writer, the foreigners, the ladinos, came to our land. That day the massacre began, the theft, there were little orphans among us. On that day also our ancestors rose up, they did not let themselves disappear, they confronted those people. Young and old were seized by rage, by anger. They went off to the mountains. They left behind the products of their work, their woven clothes.

  She did not translate her words aloud. Sandra would have to work out the Cakchiquel for herself. Amparo kissed her daughter good night and turned out the light. She walked past Eusebio and into their bedroom. It was so late when he came to bed that she was barely conscious of his weight on the mattress. She curled around her belly until sleep claimed her.

  THREE

  SISTER CONSUELO WATCHED HER TEACH the girls, standing next to the green blackboard at the edge of the courtyard. Amparo finished the lesson by leading the children through the alphabet. As the little girls in their checkered skirts and white blouses walked to the door, the young nun came over and took Ampar
o’s arm.

  Crossing the courtyard beneath the bright sunlight, Amparo heard the echoes return: the silenced voices of those who had died when the Spaniards came, the voices of the first nuns who had prayed here in Latin more than four centuries ago, the grumbling of the earthquake that had emptied the city two centuries later. She felt history rise like an adobe wall between her and the Spanish nun at the same time that she was touched by the nun’s gentleness, her freedom from prejudice. “I think you will be a good teacher, Amparo. One can see that you are accustomed to talking to children.”

  “In Guatemala we’re surrounded by children.”

  “Most of those children don’t study. Yet you, who are from a village, have a good education. How did that happen?” Sister Consuelo indicated a bench. They sat down.

  “I always wanted to learn. I didn’t want to get married until I had become a real person. When I was a little girl I hated school . . . so many children and the teacher absent or drunk . . . I will never send my children to a state school! No matter how poor I am, I will pay for them to come to a school like this one. “

  She glanced over; the nun’s expectant face bid her to continue. “When I finished the six years of school my father had stopped growing corn and got a job as a truck driver. He never drank; he saved his salary. He bought the plot of land next to our house, then the plot next to that one. We all worked. I went to a trade school for girls to learn sewing and more writing and arithmetic, then I went into a Korean maquila in the capital and sewed shirts. Hours of sewing every day without being allowed to talk to the girl next to me. I felt like I was dead. I was coughing all the time, I’d almost forgotten how to think.”

  “Did you pray to Our Lord for his counsel?”

  “Always, sister. I saved money to help my parents because my father was fencing in the land he had bought and building a compound for the family, with five small houses inside the compound. I worked in the maquila for two years. After the first year, I started taking night classes towards my secondary diploma, but I kept missing them and falling asleep because I was so tired. Finally my father said: ‘If you are serious about doing this, take the time and do it.’”

  Sister Consuelo looked away, staring in the direction of the old Tzutujil groundskeeper who was sweeping the far corner of the yard with a reed broom. “You owe a great deal to your parents.”

  Amparo nodded. “When I signed up in at the Escuela Díaz de Castillo in Antigua, my father paid. I left the maquila and got a job in El Tesoro waiting on tables.” She assumed that she did not need to mention Don Julio. “I did school work all night. I finished when I was twenty. I was the first person in my family to receive a secondary school diploma. My sister and one of my brothers have followed me. Three of us, out of ten children. Few families have so many high-school graduates. My youngest sister, Yolanda, could be the fourth. But she’s seventeen and is too sociable . . . How I hope she doesn’t fall in love!” Noticing Sister Consuelo’s troubled gaze, she said: “In Guatemala it is very dangerous for a girl to fall in love.”

  “Human love is always ephemeral,” Sister Consuelo said. “The only love of which we may be certain is that of the Lord.” She looked away from the building that combined school and convent. Amparo watched the nun take in, as if for the first time, the shape of her body. “After the love of the Lord, the next best is the love of a mother for her child because it is selfless and because it is a tribute to the Virgin’s love for the divine infant. You wish to have many children?”

  “Yes, sister.” Amparo looked at her black leather shoes, scuffed by the dust of the courtyard. She did not dare tell Sister Consuelo that in spite of the firmness of her faith, in this detail she could not follow the church’s mandates. Mama had given birth twelve times. Yolanda, born when Mama was forty-three, had almost killed her. Mama never would have had this last child if not for Papa’s belief that a man loses respect unless his wife gives birth every year. Amparo had been ten. She remembered Mama’s groans, the doctor rushing in to help the midwife, the door slamming shut behind them while she stood outside holding her sister and her brother. They waited all night for the news that they had lost their mother. In the morning she was alive and the gasping child who would grow up to be a disobedient girl had joined them. A week later, when her mother emerged from the bedroom, her face was strained and she walked with a stiff, rollicking gait, her spine wrenched out of shape by this final ordeal of labour. Amparo, knowing she could not escape marriage and might one day even desire it, promised herself that she would have no more than two children. “But I also wish to work. I wish to progress.” She halted, afraid she might have offended the nun. “Not to progress in the world — I only want enough money to support my family — but to do work that is not boring, to help people and to develop as a person.”

  “We must be content with the work God allots us, Amparo.”

  “Yes, sister.” Amparo looked at the green-painted slats of the bench.

  After leaving work, she walked down the broad steps of the Escuela San Fernando and turned into the cobblestoned street. Glimmering white cloud had smeared the summit of the Agua Volcano. Beneath the cloud, the cone’s upper slopes had been drenched a darker shade of green. Amparo distinguished the miniature coils of grey unfurling from distant fires. The feeling of connection to a landscape that was halfway to God mingled heaven and earth before her eyes.

  Schoolchildren streamed past in their uniforms, buffeting tourists unaccustomed to walking on rounded stones. The thought of an evening at home made her mouth taste bad. She turned in the direction of the park.

  The old Chinese man had retired since her last walk through the centre: his hardware store had become a hotel; there were two new cafés owned by gringos. The girls serving in the cafés had good educations and spoke a little English. Amparo would make sure that Sandra learned English; the truth was, she wanted to learn it herself. She feared that if she expressed her desire to Sister Consuelo, the nun would condemn her worldliness. Don Julio had grasped her hunger to understand. That was why, even though they had barely spoken since she had disappointed him, she must go to see him.

  FOUR

  THE FOUNTAIN IN THE PARK reminded her of the days when she had been Don Julio’s brightest hope. The blond backpackers sat on benches among the low shrubs and the women in their dark blue huipiles — Cakchiqueles, too, but from Lake Atitlán — unfolded woven goods for the gringos’ admiration and sold them at inflated prices while the ice cream vendors pushed carts over the cobbles and rang their bells. She had barely walked through the park since the beginning of her pregnancy. Glimpsing the white façade of the Cathedral through the eucalyptus trees, she paused for an instant’s reminder of peace and forgiveness before she turned towards El Tesoro.

  Located half a block off the park, El Tesoro specialized in selling pancake breakfasts with enormous side dishes of sliced fruit, dark local coffee and mango or papaya licuados to tourists who sat at tables of varnished wood in the shadow of the covered interior courtyard. Next to the restaurant was a handicraft store selling local coffee in small, expensive bags, woven goods of indifferent quality, as well as postcards and guide books in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian. The front room of El Tesoro was a bookstore. Many of the books were in English. After she had completed her secondary school diploma, Don Julio had suggested that she move from waiting on tables to working in the bookstore. Amparo felt a gulf of uneasy wonder. She, the daughter of a woman who could barely read, working in a bookstore! And one where many of the books were in English. They were not, Don Julio explained, the sort of books read by tourists. The bulk of his stock was about Guatemala. Amparo marvelled at the discovery that gringos had spent years studying the civil war or religion or land use, or, to her astonishment, the history, archeology, language, and traditions of Mayan people. She leafed through the pages, recognizing the word “Maya” and an occasional place name or photograph. A feeling of rage and triumph surged up in her. If foreigners who wrot
e books in English found the Maya worthy of meticulous appreciation, who were the ladinos to despise indigenous people? She had always been active in her community, in the market and in women’s groups affiliated with the Catholic Church. After Don Julio moved her to the bookstore, she had worked even harder to promote her culture.

  “But Don Julio, I don’t speak English.” She was terrified of jeopardizing this opportunity, but she respected him too much not to be honest.

  Don Julio gave a quick nod from behind his steel-rimmed glasses. His manner was commanding but not arrogant; his years in exile had softened his ladino presumption. A student in the 1960s, Don Julio had fled the country at the beginning of the civil war. He had completed his studies in Mexico City; he lived there for years. In 1990, when the fighting had contracted to remote areas of the highlands and intellectuals had ceased to disappear in the night, he returned to Guatemala. An uncle had left him part of the income of a coffee plantation. Don Julio used the money to buy El Tesoro. The restaurant and the handicraft store made the business profitable, he confided, but the bookstore was his treasure. That was why he had located it at the front of the building: visitors must walk past the books to reach their food or souvenirs. “You do not need to speak English,” he said in a soft voice. “The clients who are interested in these books are professors and students. They speak Spanish. They will be pleased that the woman serving them is herself Maya.” She spied a flash of cunning in the flex of his silver brows. As much as a compliment to her abilities, the offer was a strategy to give Don Julio’s business the face he wished it to have in the country that was coming to be as the civil war receded. Her rueful exasperation yielded before the hopeful thought that if Don Julio was promoting the integration of Mayan people into postwar society — they all knew the war must end, even though at that point it was not over — others might do the same.