Through the flaking paint on the front door, she heard the baby crying. Raquel stepped forward with the child in her arms. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you move your weaving. I can’t leave her alone . . . ”
Amparo kissed Raquel’s mud-brown long-armed daughter on the forehead. “She’s so big. And barely a month old!” As Raquel ushered her inside, she said: “Is he really coming to see you?”
“Yes,” Raquel said. “I’m able to see my lover, unlike all the women who never see their husbands. If I hadn’t acted on my fantasies, I’d still be waiting for Jorge to come home.”
“Is that all you want to tell me?” Amparo said. “After I’ve lost everything?”
Raquel brushed Amparo’s sleeve with a cursory caress, as though maternity had rendered her brusque. “The world we fought for is gone. You’ve always had a mixture of cultures, Amparo — like my daughter. Don’t be afraid to let who you are guide your life.”
Too upset to continue the conversation, Amparo left. The next week she turned over the job of chairing the Cakchiquel Women’s Savings Club to Esperanza. She went to Antigua and scoured the spots where Mayan women who lacked licences used to sell their weaving to tourists: the courtyard of a ruined cathedral that was open to the public, a small park a few blocks from the centre, the entrances of various tourist attractions. In every case, the informal mini-markets had been closed; whitearmbanded tourist police walked their beats to ensure that the selling of textiles was limited to souvenir shops and licensed stalls. She went to see Don Teófilo, but he could offer her only odd hours with individual tourists. The Canadians and their little Chinese professor had not come back this year. “And Don Ricardo?” Amparo asked, keeping her voice steady.
“When I asked, I was told he’s no longer in Canada.”
He had moved to another country, like Sister Consuelo and the señora gringa. He was immersed in someone else’s problems. All these people had cared about her country, but their care was spread too thinly over the surface of the world. Only she could look after herself. Her responsibilities stood before her mind’s eye: Sandra and Pablito, Mama and Papa, her debt to Yoli and David, her duty to Eusebio. They appeared to her as chores on a list, all of secondary importance to the throbbing reality of her senses, her abilities that craved an outlet, her determination to thrive. She felt as crushed by the news that the Canadians were not returning as by the loss of her stall. She had got used to those quieter gringos who wanted to make the world better even though they did not talk about God. The Canadians’ arrival in Antigua every January had become her life, just as volcanoes and June rains and God and Ixmucane were her life. Her existence was slipping away from her, driving all of her habits, even Eusebio — the Eusebio she had loved, not the hectic voice on the phone — deeper into the past.
The next time he called she warned him that next Sunday she might be away. He went quiet. She reminded him that she had no income. He became furious. She didn’t realize how hard it was for him to save money! After being fired from his job bagging groceries — he never explained why — he had been unemployed for weeks. Now he was cleaning windshields at a gas station. “I have to feed the children,” she said, “I have to pay for Sandra’s colegio, I have to pay back the money we owe Yoli for your coyote. I give her money whenever I can, but we still owe them more than thirty-eight thousand quetzales. You don’t — ”
He hung up.
TWENTY-ONE
IN ESCUINTLA, A FILTHY LADINO city near the Pacific Coast, she could sell her weaving without paying a licence fee. She met other Mayan women who were doing as she was, extending Mayanness to the least aboriginal corners of Ixim Ulew. At the end of the day five or six of them would share a room in the cheapest hotel behind the market. Before falling asleep on the floor on her weavings, she called home on Ricardo’s cellphone. She made sure that Sandra had cooked supper for her brother and helped him with his homework. Her stomach twisted at the thought of how Pablito was struggling at the terrible village school. Sandra did her best to help him, but she spent much of the evening cooking and cleaning. More and more, she looked after the house on her own. Mama had gone over to help her at first; now, when Amparo returned to the compound, her mother praised her daughter’s maturity. “Ri ixtën roto’ ri rute’. The señorita helps her mother. She puts her little brother to bed like a second mother.” Mama’s words followed her on long bus trips, making her feel guilty each time she reprimanded Sandra for her adolescent boldness.
When Mama wasn’t there, Sandra was alone with Pablito. Soon after Amparo lost her stall in the market, Inés, overcoming her fear of men, ran away with one of the clerks at the hotel. They disappeared from Antigua; it was as if the girl had never passed through her life.
The next summer, on a rainy day in Escuintla, the man at the stall next to hers invited her to crouch beneath the tarpaulin he had strung over a wooden frame to protect the stainless steel pots he was selling. As they watched the rain pounding the market’s aisles to mud, he told her that she was a very beautiful woman. A bolt of terror shot through her. If it hadn’t been for the rain she would have left. She looked at him with care. He was a ladino in his late thirties, broader shouldered and lighter skinned than other men she knew, with narrow features and the trace of a moustache. “Has your husband gone north?” In spite of the unwelcomeness of this question, she felt sympathy beneath his words. “Does he have a woman there? Children?”
“My husband doesn’t have another woman,” she said.
“How do you know?”
She shrugged her shoulders, feeling a chill in her stomach at the thought of how far away her Eusebio had gone. She stayed there next to Pedro. They spoke all day, the rain having driven away their customers. He told her that he had grown up in his father’s hardware store. Then his father had begun to drink; they had lost the store. “Now, you can always find me here, selling in the market.” In the evening she dropped her wares in her hotel room, then went with him to a bar where she drank the first Gallo beer of her life. It tasted like dark river-water swimming with pyrites. Her head turned light and her thighs felt heavy; Pedro’s moustache took on an enticing curve. On the television over the bar, the host said: “To discuss the day’s political events, we have our regular commentator, Edmundo Rodríguez . . . ”
Comandante Vladimir. Though he no longer used that name, she would always remember the thrill of possibility, of the world opening wider to accommodate ways of thinking other than the military way, that had gripped her the first time she had seen him on the small screen. Watching him now, heavier in the jowls, his moustache greying, she imagined she saw a calculation in his eyes that had not been there when he had appeared as the spokesman for the guerrilla. “The Peace Accords were good to people like him,” she coughed, “just not to the rest of us.”
A wash of her youthful energy revived as Pedro responded to her with a smile and drained his second Gallo. He told her about his business, raised his hand to order a third beer, then, as she stared at him, waved the waiter away. “That’s enough for one evening,” he said with a smile whose softness made her head reel. She told him how the mayor had taken away her licence. He grasped the horror of this experience as no one else had. He walked her back to her hotel. As he took her hand, she felt herself completing the closeness of their conversation. When he led her into a gap between two houses, she felt the heat of his beery mouth on hers like a consolation. The warmth of his hands on her hips stirred her womb into a fury. She sought the bulk of his body, grappling against him with a sob. Three years! She started to kiss him as hard as he was kissing her. She was trussed up in his heat when shrieks erupted next to her ears. Two teenage girls, stopped on the sidewalk, were laughing at them. The younger one looked like Sandra.
“We’re covered in mud,” she said, holding him back. She glanced down at her spattered black skirt. As she stepped out from beneath the overhang between the houses, rain washed her face without cleansing it.
He gripped her elbow.
“Come with me. I have a room — ”
“I’m a married woman — ” She didn’t go on, determined that he not see her in tears.
In the doorway of her hotel she allowed him to kiss her, aware of the kiss as a farewell. Her enjoyment of his mouth appalled her. It didn’t matter what Eusebio had done over the last three years, she was his wife. She went to the room where the other women were asleep, and lay down on her bundled weaving. Her damp skirt made her teeth chatter. She felt revolted. She was a señora. Imagine the shame if she got pregnant again. At her age! It wouldn’t have been like Raquel and her gringo. She would have tipped Sandra and Pablito deeper into poverty by adding another mouth to feed. Pedro . . . A man whose name she had learned only a few hours ago. She had never allowed Ezequial to do more than hold her hand and put his arm around her waist . . . During the five years when Eusebio had been her novio she had never pressed her body against his with such voraciousness . . . She had been young then, a virgin whose body lacked a wife’s knowledge; now she was a wife with married knowledge and shameful needs that had no outlet.
When the other women turned on the light at four thirty, she groaned with a headache. They laughed at her. She brushed dried mud off her skirt and pulled together her wares. She followed the others to the market in the dark, then slipped away to the yard where the buses waited. She travelled in silence, looking out the window at the world God had made. The thought that she had repaid Him for His bounty by staining her marriage refused to leave her head. The sickness was as unforgiving as her headache, which throbbed harder as the cloudy morning broke around the flanks of the volcanoes. Fumes from the bus’ leaky exhaust drenched the back seats. Her fall from grace had sprung from a self-centredness that was the result of having been left alone for three years. Even as she clenched her teeth, insisting that Eusebio was to blame, she knew that she must take responsibility. She prayed in the rattling seat of the bus. In matters of sin she always prayed to God; Ixmucane and Xpiyacoc responded to her longings, her need to defend her family, her quest to fit herself into the arc of the world. Now Hurricane peeped down at her from the heart of the sky. Your life will be full of dangers, the path forward is not clear and may not be lengthy. You will endure these trials only if you have help from your family. Her path was her own, that of the jaguars she wove into her red bags. The jaguar was her nahual, though she could divulge this to no one. Only Doña Manuela had perceived this identity.
If she died, all that would matter would be the life she bequeathed to her children. Her family had lifted itself through hard work from poverty to a level of basic security, even moderate prosperity; but advancement through hard work was no longer possible. The families that were advancing now had fathers who earned dollars in the north, or brothers who ran drugs for the maras.
If only Eusebio would send his remesas like other men!
And if he didn’t send them? What was the best security she could give her children?
For the next week she was restless and unable to sleep. When she turned on the light at night, the photographs on the mantle stared back at her: her wedding, her late mother-in-law. The bag Ricardo had returned to her hung from a peg. She got up in the morning to make breakfast for her children and wove at her loom in the living room all day as rain fell in the compound outside. She made tourist waistcoats, bags woven in dayglo colours that said Souvenir of Guatemala. In the evening she supervised Sandra and Pablito’s homework. Her mother was right about Sandra: she was outgoing and competent. She was like her mother and delighted in arranging facts into categories. Poor Pablito was lost. He was eight years old and could barely read or write.
Something must change. She ransacked her mind, trying to think of all the ways in which she could improve her children’s lives.
Next morning, after the children left for school, she made a phone call. “Yoli,” she said, “how much money do I owe you?”
“Thirty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty quetzales. I know it’s not your fault that Eusebio doesn’t send remesas, Amparo, but it’s embarrassing — ”
“Would you lend me more money?”
“What? Amparo — ”
“I want to send the children north. Will you help me?”
“Amparo, we’ve already lent you forty thousand! . . . Why do you want to get rid of your children? What kind of mother are you?”
“They have no future here. They’ll have to go north when they grow up. It’s better to send them when they’re young. They’ll learn English and go to school — ”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this! You wouldn’t . . . if your husband were here . . . ”
“That’s another reason. If Eusebio has the children, he’ll remember that he’s their father and support them. He’ll work harder and you’ll get paid back sooner.”
“It’s monstrous! Don’t you love your children, Amparo?”
“Yes, that’s why I’m doing this. I could be selfish and hold onto my children twice as tightly because my husband has left. Love is thinking of what’s good for the other person.” She stopped, realizing she had been about to make the mistake of telling Yoli that she would understand if she had children.
“Have you talked to Eusebio about this?”
“Not yet.” Amparo felt her sister’s embarrassed silence. She drew a breath to steady herself. “I know what you think. You think he has another woman there. Well maybe he does, I don’t know. If Rafael knows anything, he doesn’t tell me. But Eusebio’s still my husband. He’ll see his responsibilities the first time his children smile at him.”
It was hopeless. She sat down at the table, but it wasn’t enough to prevent the sobs from weakening her grasp on the receiver.
“Yoli . . . ”
“Get a glass of water, Amparo, then come back to the phone. I’m thinking.”
She put down the receiver, wondering when this insouciant little girl had started to give her orders. She wiped her cheeks, sipped a glass of water, and sat down beneath the tattoo of rain on the corrugated roof.
As she sipped, she thought about her decision. She must be twisted. What kind of mother wanted to be separated from her children? She was the worst woman on earth. Yet she could not get the plan out of her head. Some deep urge was driving her to send the children away. She took another sip of water and picked up the receiver again.
“Amparo,” Yoli said. “I promise I’ll help. I don’t know exactly how or how much, but I’ll find money or get David to find some.”
“He won’t be angry?”
“Right now,” Yoli said, “David owes me a few favours.”
Amparo held the receiver in silence, wondering whether her sister wished to say more about this. “Thank you,” she said.
“I won’t be able to pay it all, Amparo. Everybody in the family will have to contribute. You need to find out how much this is going to cost. And are you sure they’ll be safe? How can you trust your children to a coyote?”
After their conversation ended, she sat in silence and listened to the rain on the roof. Finding out how much it was going to cost would make the act real. It would mean that her children were leaving.
She got to her feet and walked into the bedroom. Her attention settled on the jaguar prowling across the red weft. On a scrap of paper in a drawer she found the cellphone number of Eusebio’s coyote. Would the number still work? She walked into the living room and lifted the receiver.
“Aló,” a curt voice said, beset by static.
“My name is Amparo Ajuix. You helped my husband, Eusebio Hernández.” She waited to see whether this was the right number.
“And?”
“I want to send two children on a trip. How much would it cost?”
“What ages?”
“Eight and twelve. I want the trip to be very smooth. I don’t want them to suffer.”
“One hundred thousand.”
“So much?”
“If you want the best service. Children cost more.”
“
I’ll call you when I have the money.”
It was too much. The plan could wait till next year. But when the children came home, she was reminded that Sandra’s breasts had grown more defined. In a few months she would face the same danger of being raped as all women who travelled north.
You will endure these trials only if you have help from your family. That night, after putting the children to bed, she went to see Mama and Papa. They sat around their gas stove as though it were an open fireplace. Papa sucked on his cigarette while Mama, with two buckets at her feet, separated beans from chaff. “Ri nu akua’l,” Mama said when she came in the door. “My child.” She saw that her mother was alert to the seriousness of her manner. As Amparo faltered, Mama said: “If you wish to join your husband, we can look after your children.” “No,” she said. “I want you to help me send the children to live with my husband.”
“You’re a mother, my daughter,” her father said. “Your children — ”
He looked to his wife for support. Mama looked at the floor. After a long silence, she said: “My grandchildren will have better lives.” She paused. “My great-grandchildren will be gringos.”
“Mama, they’ll still — ”
“My great-grandchildren will be gringos.” She shook her head, then laid her hand on Amparo’s arm. “Ja. Utz. We’ll help.”
The next week Papa put up for sale the fringe of land that ran around the outside of the compound, where he had planned to grow potatoes in his retirement. As soon as he went to the town hall to register the sale, the mayor made an offer on the plot.
“Papa,” Amparo said. “Don’t sell to our enemy.”
“He’s the mayor. If I don’t sell to him, he won’t let me sell to anyone else.”
The Path of the Jaguar Page 17
