Yoli stroked her cheek as though caressing a private hoard of knowledge. Amparo caught her wrist. “What was it like, Yoli? What were you doing over there?”
“David was sent here as a consejero . . . ” Completing Yoli’s phrase in her head, Amparo thought: not any adviser, but a military adviser. But militar was the word neither of them could utter. “ . . . After a few years, he resigned from his post at home. He had a pension and he liked Guatemala. He put his money into a friend’s business. They designed products for national defence here in Guatemala, then in Central America.”
“Weapons for the army.”
“Not just weapons!”
Amparo said nothing. She had promised to heal the rift, not wrench it wider.
“It’s business,” Yoli said in a curt voice in which Amparo heard a perfect imitation of her husband.
They looked at each other with evasive stares. Amparo remembered the postcards: Yoli’s only communication during her absence, except for her two phone calls, the first to announce that she had married, the second, three years later, to tell them that she was returning to Guatemala. The alphabet on the postcards’ stamps looked like stretched ears of corn. Amparo had always felt stronger when she learned about other worlds than when she rejected them; yet her resolve faltered. She told herself the war was over. Yet the dead were still dead, five hundred villages had been razed, the culture that had existed before the war could never return, Mayan traditions had continued to fray rather than reviving as Don Julio had said might happen once the fighting stopped. It all, somehow, seemed to be Yoli’s fault. If her sister had conceded some awareness of events, Amparo would have found forgiveness easier. But the anger would not go away. She flung her arms around Yoli as though she wanted to squeeze the breath out of her. Rolling her back against the couch until their heads nodded close enough to one another that their identical strands of long dark hair fell together, she whispered in Yoli’s ear: “What were you doing all those years?”
To her astonishment, Yolanda sobbed. She emitted an abrupt sighing moan. “My big sister,” she said. She gave Amparo a kiss on the cheek. A half-ashamed smile crossed her face. “Don’t worry, Amparo. It was a good life.”
“Where were you living?”
“I was living in a beautiful place. David started a club. There was a swimming pool with a view of the sea. I woke up every morning to palm trees and sunlight. I could eat in the restaurant; I didn’t have to cook unless I wanted to. I could lie next to the swimming pool and listen to music. In the evening I put on my huipil — ”
“Do women wear huipiles in his country?”
“Only in David’s club. He called it The Mayan Riviera. On the wall behind the bar there was a photograph of the Agua Volcano. ¡Qué preciosa! It was almost more beautiful than the real thing. There were weavings and those paintings of Lake Atitlán that they sell to tourists. The cook made frijoles and chicken with avocado. In the evening there was music, sometimes rock-and-roll, sometimes typical Guatemalan music. The Ixil women would sing — ”
“There were Ixil women? There on the other side of the world?”
“David worked in the Ixil,” Yoli said. Amparo slid across the couch, laying her hand on her sister’s leg. “He found these orphan girls in a model village. They barely spoke Spanish. He thought I could speak to them, but Ixil’s so different from Cakchiquel that I couldn’t understand anything. He decided to give these girls a better life.”
“A better life? He took girls whose families had been killed in the war, who had been forced into a concentration camp, and carried them away to the other side of the world?”
“You should’ve seen their apartments, Amparo! And the food they ate! Important men came to this club. Army officers who were fighting the terrorists, businessmen — ”
“The girls were prostitutes!” Amparo got to her feet and looked down at her sister. “You turned traje into a uniform for prostitutes! Is that what you did to our traditions? Anchi jat jech’ël?” She was shaking too hard to move.
“Quiet, Amparo. The servant’ll hear you.”
“Let her hear! She needs to know that she’s working for a man who kidnaps orphaned Mayan girls and turns them into putas!” Amparo got to her feet and shouted: “¡Señorita!” When the servant woman failed to appear, she shouted: “Ke taq re’! Over here!”
The servant appeared in the doorway, hunched inside her huipil. Her face shuddered as Amparo spoke to her in Cakchiquel: had the mistress’ sister in a gringo house ever spoken to a servant in a Mayan language? The poor woman wouldn’t know whether the greater offence lay in responding in the language or in failing to respond.
“Our parents were right to be ashamed,” Amparo said in Cakchiquel, her frustration at her ailing vocabulary compounding her fury. “You were one of them, weren’t you?”
“Never . . . I was the boss’s wife. David’s daughters and I, we were off limits. David’s older daughter, Duchi, married one of the officers, but she did it properly, with a betrothal and a wedding . . . ”
“Unlike you, a shameless girl who ran away — !”
“Amparo, did you come to my house to insult me?”
In the doorway, the servant looked past them without seeing them.
Amparo struggled to breathe. “You were a madam in a brothel and you expect not to be insulted? If Mama and Papa find out — ”
“You think too much about Mama and Papa.”
“You’re talking about your parents, Yoli! Where is your respe–?”
“Amparo, you’ve spent your whole life in that compound and you’ve never grown up.”
For a moment Amparo was too startled to reply. “Who are you to say I haven’t grown up? You don’t even have children. You’re still a little girl. It’s only when you become a mother and have responsibilities that you understand the debt you owe your parents.”
Yoli turned away. She must be lonely sitting in this house all day. In spite of herself, Amparo felt ready to forgive her sister. Her head filled with visions of Mayan prostitutes in Ixil huipiles parading around a swimming pool with the sea crashing behind them.
She sat down on the couch and sipped her Coca-Cola.
“I’m sorry,” Yoli said. “I’m not the kind of sister you wanted, am I?”
“I want you to be happy. Who did you talk to all that time?”
“To David’s daughters. They were suspicious of me at first, but by the end we were like sisters. At first I could only talk to David because no one else spoke Spanish. Then he hired a bodyguard who’d also worked in Guatemala. I learned English from television and songs, and talking to the men — I spoke to David’s daughters in English. I didn’t learn their language — it’s too hard — but my English is really good now.”
“Yoli! You could get a job in a tourist agency or a hotel — ” Seeing Yoli smile in an almost condescending way, as though it were she who was young or naive, Amparo said: “You shouldn’t have gone away.”
“That’s not fair.” Yoli’s tone was calm. “Nobody says that about Rafael.”
“That’s different. Rafael had a proper courtship. He got engaged to his gringa, then he got married.”
Four years ago a brother who was a year older than Amparo had helped a blonde gringa with a backpack, who was lost on the streets of Antigua, to find the language school that was arranging her accommodation. Megan, a psychologist from Phoenix, Arizona, had taken a six-month leave of absence to learn Spanish, the language of many of her patients. By the end of her stay in Antigua, she and Rafael were engaged. It made things easier that Megan was Catholic. They married in the village church and again in Phoenix, where they now lived with their baby son. “We all miss Rafael, but he behaved like a gentleman.”
“He didn’t always behave like a gentleman! He used to go to bars in San Felipe. Nobody cares what men do!”
“It’s up to women to make men care,” she said. “Does David come home late?”
“Not usually. Sometimes he spends the
night in the capital.” Yoli shrugged her shoulders. “It’s business.” She gave an idle stretch, riding the flex of her leg to her feet, and asked the servant to clear away the glasses.
The old woman from Santa María stood in the doorway, watching them with a concentration that Amparo found unnerving.
She observed Yoli’s supple lines, the body that cried out to give birth. A rich woman could have as many children as she wished . . . Her sister was rich! “Life is hard here,” she said. “Eusebio and I could be starving tomorrow. My job depends on gringo tourists coming to Antigua and his job depends on a gringo NGO. It didn’t use to be like that, not even during the war. The ladinos would steal our land and starve us and kill us, but our survival depended on us, not on foreigners.” She hesitated. “I think I may have lost my job this morning.” She told Yoli how she had interrupted the manager.
“You think you know better than anybody. I remember how you used to tell me what to do.” Yoli took a quick step that was almost a petulant stamping of her foot. “Maybe you will lose your job.”
Amparo got to her feet. “I wish I could do a divination.” She looked at a shawl hanging on the wall. On a shelf above the television there was a photograph of a childlike Yoli and a vigorous dark-haired David standing before a tree with a crooked trunk. Photographs of two light-skinned young women with dark hair and hooded eyes followed, then a photograph of a staring toddler. Next to the photographs stood a golden candelabra. She stepped past Yoli, skirted the television and lifted the elaborate candlestick off the shelf. “We could use this . . . It wouldn’t be as reliable as with a curandera or a daykeeper, but it would make me feel better. Please, Yoli . . . ” She heard her voice rise. At what point had Yoli become the dispenser of benefits and she the beggar?
“We can’t, Amparo. I don’t have any incense.” She flashed her most provocative smile. “Why would I have incense?”
Amparo turned towards the kitchen. “¡Señorita!” she shouted to the servant. “Q’o pom? Is there incense?”
“Ja. I have incense,” the servant said, entering the room. She hesitated. “I have coral seeds and crystals, too.” Her Santa María-accented Cakchiquel, clogged with extra syllables that sounded like pompous flourishes, made Amparo smile.
“I need a divination. But I don’t know the Mayan calendar.” She heard her voice catch. “If only our parents taught us better!”
“Señora,” the servant murmured. “My father was a daykeeper. I’m not initiated, but . . . ”
“Amparo! You can’t! Not here.”
“Why not? We’re in Ixim Ulew, no? We’re in our country, we can follow our customs.”
Yoli sat down on the couch. She whispered: “Doña Manuela came to us when she married a soldier in a unit David was advising.”
“Those Santa María women! They can’t resist soldiers.”
Doña Manuela came into the room holding a small cloth bag. They hesitated. The most convenient place to perform the divination would be on the table in front of the couch. But servants did not sit on the couches they dusted. Manuela set the bag down on the television. As the three of them crowded together, Amparo felt the differences between them, imposed by foreigners, peel away. The older woman opened the cloth bag and spread the seeds and crystals across the plastic top of the television’s casing, avoiding the ventilation grille at the back.
“We need candles.” Amparo picked up the candlestick.
Yoli caught her wrist. “We can’t use that. It’s from my husband’s religion.”
“We’re using it for a religious ceremony.” She looked at the eight-branched candlestick with the holder which, Yoli explained, as though this made clear why they shouldn’t use it, held a candle with which one lit other candles. The candlestick glimmered between them in the large-windowed brightness of the living room, its branches swarming like the limbs of a golden squid beached on the sand at Monterrico. Amparo set the candlestick down on the television. “Your husband’s candlestick is in Guatemala now, so it’s going to become a little bit Mayan.”
Doña Manuela went to the kitchen and returned with candles and matches. She set candles in two of the central stems of the candleholder and lighted them. She stuffed two more holders with incense, which she set alight. Grey-white tendrils rose into the air; their odour lifted Amparo out of herself, like a childhood experience recaptured.
Doña Manuela spoke in Cakchiquel, invoking Ixmucane and Xpiyacoc, and thanking Tohil, the god of fire, for providing flame for the candles. She closed her eyes; her mouth grew pinched. She emptied the contents of the bag onto the top of the television. The seeds and crystals made a rattling sound. Amparo remembered that she must place coins — the fee for the ceremony — on the empty bag. She found three quetzales in her pocket and laid them on the cloth. Manuela continued to murmur as she mixed the seeds, invoking Hurricane, the bringer of rains, who destroyed the world at the end of each cycle of human existence and provided the fertility for life to begin again. Manuela’s right hand rotated over the bundle of seeds. “We thank the sheet lightning and the rain, we borrow from the lord of the damp mists, the lord of the breezes, the lord of the mountains. We borrow their knowledge of the weather of the future . . . ”
The servant hunched forward. Her hand struck with jaguar-like quickness, seizing a fistful of seeds. Yoli shuddered. With her left hand, Manuela brushed aside the remaining seeds and crystals. She distributed the seeds in her right palm over the top of the television in lots of four in parallel rows, then counted the days of the calendar. She was reciting neither the old Long Count calendar used for historical dates, nor the lunar calendar of 360 days plus five days of peril, but rather the 260-day ceremonial calendar divided into thirteen weeks of twenty days each. The names of the days rang against her ear. Doña Manuela counted one day for each lot of seeds. Amparo inhaled the sweet incense.
“Ahau, Imix, Ik, Akbal, Kan . . . ” The servant, now invested with the presence of gods, paused to murmur: “At her legs, her arms. At her legs, her arms . . . ” The strength of the lords of the weather filtered into Amparo’s arms and legs. “At her legs, her arms . . . ”
Amparo had never stood more firmly on her feet.
Doña Manuela reached the last lot of seeds, bowed her head and gave thanks to the lords of the weather who had lent her their foresight and their knowledge of time to give her this glimpse into the future. Continuing to stare into the pattern of seeds, she said: “The augury is complete. The first news is good. The wind blows over the mountains, the sky is clear.” Her clotted Santa María pronunciation made her announcement sound both portentous and absurd. “You will keep your job.”
Amparo did not rejoice. She sensed that the news was not simple.
“Beyond this time in which you have work, the weather is full of storms. Your life will be marred by dangers, the path forward is not clear and may not be lengthy. You will endure these trials and find the path which is yours only with help from your family.”
. . . may not be lengthy . . . What would happen to Sandra and Pablito without her? As she bowed her head and shuddered, a ferocious embrace pinned her. For the first time in ten years, Yoli was hugging her like a sister.
THIRTEEN
NEXT MORNING, AS PABLITO WAS moaning that he was too sick to go to school, the phone rang. “Amparo? Teófilo Contreras here . . . Amparo, the canadiense manager — ”
She looked at Sandra and Pablo: they would need new clothes before the rains came. “Please forgive me, Don Teófilo! It was a mistake. I’m so ashamed — ”
“Are you willing to teach him? He wants to learn Cakchiquel.”
“Oh, no, Don Teófilo, it’s very difficult to teach Cakchiquel!”
“The doctor insists. Amparo, you’re my only maestra who can teach Cakchiquel.”
“As you wish, Don Teófilo. Thank you very much for the work.”
“What a stubborn woman!” Eusebio said when she put down the receiver. “You’re afraid he’ll fire you, then he offers yo
u work and you tell him you don’t want it.”
She scowled, but it was no use: they were laughing at her. She hugged her daughter and her husband. She ruffled Pablito’s hair. For these three people she would do any work in the world.
On Monday morning she arrived at Escuela Tecún Umán twenty minutes before classes started at 8:00 AM. She was surprised by how relieved she felt to see the Canadian girls — there were only four boys — milling around at the foot of the winding staircase. It appeared that Don Teófilo might be right: the tourists would return to Antigua and they would all have work. She kept her ebullient mood hidden as she sat down opposite the manager. It was important, especially when teaching gringo men, to begin on a formal footing.
“My name is Amparo Ajuix de Hernández,” she said, stressing the married woman’s de, “and I apologize for interrupting your talk.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, opening a notebook in front of him. He responded to her name by mentioning that he, too, was married. His wife had stayed at home in Canada where she had a busy career. He shook his head, as though resuming his focus on Guatemala. “Did you give my regards to Doña María?”
The fixed stare of his small blue eyes unnerved her. “How do you know Doña María?”
“I’ve worked in Guatemala before, with refugees. A group that fled to the Pacific Coast during the war — ”
“Did they end up living on the side of a volcano?”
“Yes,” he said. “Those people. Somebody suggested your village might help, and sent me to talk to Doña María.” He laughed. “I have to say that she was quite unhelpful.”
She leaned closer. The manager was like the men who used to come into El Tesoro.
The Path of the Jaguar Page 9
