As does the landscape I see when I hike the five miles from the hotel to the village-that-no-longer-is.
My steps on the footpath are undergirded by her purring. After slumbering through the transit and first unsuccessful stabs at harvesting memory, she comes fully awake here.
Is it because you’re home? I ask her.
That, she answers. And because it reminds me of home.
What?
I feel the rumbling I’ve come to know means she is laughing.
You know, I’ve never heard any tales of jaguars laughing. I don’t shield her from my irritation.
No? Well, there are jaguars of sweet laughter, and harsh. Jaguars of the moon. And sun. And stars. Jaguars of kings and of sacrifices, too, she says.
The footpath brings me to an old, tremendously wide but squat tree. It is different than I’ve imagined it all these years, but I’m certain it’s the one.
The one that ran with the blood of the children killed in the village that day.
I stare at it for a long time, but I don’t cross the threshold it marks.
* * *
I have dinner at the hotel dining room, then move to the common area that replaces an official bar in establishments this small. All the guests seem to be in the room – friendly and noisy, and drinking. Which is good, because I don’t want to have to think about my cowardice on the mountainside. Instead I chime in on conversations about ikat and jaspe and gender-specific weaves, pretending I know more than I do about the warp and weft of my heritage.
I also drink too much, and as the common room crowd starts to thin out, I face an unsteady walk down the corridor to my room. There is a moment after I open the door, when I’m struck by how empty it is. How I am in a strange place, on a strange errand and in a strange mood, without husband or son or friend to mark with me how the light from the full moon flows through the open windows. Or to feel with me the night air like a brush of a moth’s wing against the cheek.
But then I remember I’m not alone. Ever.
Ready? she asks.
Not exactly, I answer. But it’s time anyway, isn’t it?
Though the path is narrow and broken up, I have no problem finding my way. In the silver of the night, the tree is a ghostly sentinel, but when I put my hand to its craggy bark, it is reassuringly solid.
Which way? I ask her.
Around the village, then up to the top of the mountain. To your mother’s family compound.
The central plaza, the church and other village structures don’t conform exactly to the version my mind had created when my father first told me the story of my baptism. Still, it feels like memory when I walk through the empty streets.
I feel more than hear when something comes up behind me.
Don’t turn around, she tells me just as I’m about to do so. Not yet. Not until it’s clear why you are here.
I pick my way to a steeply inclined footpath. It’s a half-mile of hard work on uneven ground. The hair that lays over my neck and midway down my back floats up on the current of whatever is following me.
Something flits at my face, darting away an instant before I flinch.
A cloud races to cover the moon and it is as if someone has turned out the light. The trail turns harder then, sharded with pieces of volcanic glass that cut through the thin-soled flats I’m wearing. She jumps, and then I sense her body, a twin, beside mine in the dark.
Hurry, she says.
I feel her bound away. The susurrus behind me grows louder when she does.
I have to drop to all fours to make my way in the dark. The scree on the path cuts my palms and my knees. I break through to a clearing just about when the moon decides to show its face again, then straighten up and brush away the grains of stone that have embedded themselves in my hands and legs. My dress, floaty and the color of rich cream – the nicest of the garments I’ve brought with me to Guatemala – is flecked with blood.
The little houses in the compound look desolate and beaten down by time. She leads me on a circuit of them. From each dark and open doorway I see eyeshine.
We stop at a house I don’t need to be told was my mother’s. The colors on the walls are weathered, but they were once the same shades I’ve painted my little house in Del’s woods.
Sit, she tells me. On the threshold.
Then she opens her mouth and what comes out is language, but formed by sounds that have nothing human in them.
Your storyteller is here, she says, and I understand the translation is for my benefit.
As I sit, I see the compound bristle with shapes that flicker between ghostly and solid. All the hundreds of stories I know and have told during my lifetime flee at the sight. She turns her face to me as the panic I’m feeling reaches her.
Her eyes are not something I’ve looked into at any length. Just that once she jumped, at my request, and showed herself in a way her kind almost never does. Now, the amber eyes shine in the dark and I see bits of my life, moments flashing familiar, in their depths.
You’re not here to tell stories, she says, but to listen to them.
She settles herself on her haunches beside me just as the first nahual comes to stand before me. It wears the shape of an ocelot, and the tale it tells belongs to my mother.
When the creature’s last word stops ringing in the quiet night, it steps away and is replaced by another. My grandparents’ animal twins, my aunts’ and uncles’ and cousins’ all tell me their stories, and after them others with no blood connection to me. Coatimundis, muskrats, bats, goats, monkeys, turkeys, snakes – any and every kind of nahual – presents itself with the story of its human counterpart long fled to the afterlife.
Then I jerk backward, scrabbling to put space between me and the creature of pitted face and dappled hair that comes to the front. It doesn’t have to throw one of its stone hands for my body to remember what it feels like to be caught in its fury.
The kaibiles also have stories to tell, my jaguar says.
The tale that comes out of the dwarf’s mouth is harsh. The evil to which it is bound hurts. The words – sharp as obsidian – prove their edges on the kaibil and me both.
It is not the only kaibil whose story I hear this night, and as much as I’d like to set those tales aside, I cannot. Every story holds some small fragment of what is true, a trace of the spirit that gives us life.
Hours later I look up and the compound is empty. What was held here is gone. The first tendrils of rosy dawn break through the penumbra.
I turn to the jaguar. Are we done?
Her eyes scour the fringe of scrub around the compound. There is one yet. It has had to travel, for its twin’s blood was not spilled here. And yet here is where it has come, year after year, looking to tell its tale.
It is almost fully morning before I sense its approach. Perhaps it is a little bigger than it was, but it is still a button buck. It picks its way on tiny hooves, straight to me.
And rubs the moist velvet of its face on mine.
Acknowledgements
I’m convinced there is a special heaven for beta-readers, and for those who, without even knowing they are doing so, provide the encouragement, inspiration, friendship (and coffee) that keeps writers writing. Needless to say, they should not be held accountable for what their coffee and friendship wrought: Angela Arrington, Bo Balder, Raquel Barrios, Hugh Beyer, Michelle Francl-Donnay, Stephen Gerringer, April Grey, Blanca Herrera, Chuck Hinckley, Kay Holt, Lindy Kilby, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bart Leib, Hna. María Lorena, Anna McCarthy, Ellen O'Brien, Bryan Saunders, Morgan Vourvoulias-Saunders, Mons. Hugh Shields, Krys Sipple, Anna Vega, Alberto Vourvoulias and Bill Vourvoulias. You are all my homeland.
And thank you, too, to the Al Día news team: Gabriela Barrantes, David Cruz, Ana Gamboa, Alex Graziano, Hernán Guaracao, Luis López, Arturo Varela and Yesid Vargas, for working to tell our stories, week-in and week-out.
Author Biography
Sabrina Vourvoulias is a Latina newspaper editor, blogger and writer.
An American citizen from birth, she grew up in Guatemala and first moved to the United States when she was 15. She studied writing and filmmaking at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.
In addition to numerous articles and editorial columns in several newspapers in Pennsylvania and New York state, her work has been published in Dappled Things, Graham House Review, La Bloga's Floricanto, Poets Responding to SB 1070, Scheherezade's Bequest at Cabinet des Fees, We'Moon, Crossed Genres #24, the anthologies Fat Girl in a Strange Land and Crossed Genres Year Two, and is slated to appear in upcoming issues of Bull Spec and GUD magazines.
Her blog Following the Lede (http://followingthelede.blogspot.com) was nominated for a 2011 Latinos in Social Media (LATISM) award. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and daughter. Follow her antics on Twitter @followthelede.
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue
Part One
Finn: Lead, lede, led
Mari: Once upon a time
Del: Words written on wind
Abbie: If u cn rd ths
Part Two
Mari: Intercession
Finn: Burying the lede
Abbie: OMGWTF
Del: Sgraffitto
Part Three
Finn: Redaction
Abbie: Mile marker 324
Del: Cold press
Mari: Fairy tales
Acknowledgements
Author Biography
Ink Page 31
