January 15, 2005
Quetzaltenango, Guatemala
Over the past few years I’ve written many times about the people I’ve come to know here in Guatemala, especially my adopted family–the five kids and their parents from the village of San Antonio Palopó, who now live in the city of Quetzaltenango. But also their aunts (on their mother’s side), a few others of their extended family, as well as unrelated friends and acquaintances. I spent the first few weeks of this trip catching up on the year past with most of them.
For the most part, everyone is doing fine. My kids are fine, and doing pretty well in school. No one I knew died (yet), but there was a birth—and one born a year and a half ago has been admitted to.
A Secret Revealed
Last year I heard the rumor (thanks to my kids) that Alva, one of the aunts and a student in her last year of law school, had had a baby boy. But my little informants didn’t know for sure. I visited Alva at her apartment in Quetzaltenango, where she was going to university, and saw a stroller over in one corner of her small place; there was a partially empty bottle of Gerber baby food and a baby blanket on the clothesline. It looked suspicious, but Alva gave me no indication that she had a baby, and I didn’t bring it up.
This year the baby is out of the closet, so to speak. And Alva graduated and is now a licensed lawyer. Those two things are probably related.
As I’ve written before, she is the first person in her village to graduate from university, and one of the few to even attend. For years, when she was away at school, her family led people in the village to believe that she was in Guatemala City working as a maid for some rich family. As long as there was a chance that Alva might not succeed it was safer not to let on that she was trying to break out of the traditional life of the village. Failure would have brought ridicule. I suspect the secret got out in recent years; I have a hard time lying when asked a direct question.
But Alva’s baby was kept secret until she graduated. It wasn’t that she wasn’t married; under normal circumstances having a baby before marriage would have merited little, if any, comment. In the village, weddings, which cost money, are somewhat of a luxury. But having a baby while attempting to get a university education would, to the villagers, have signaled imminent defeat. Now that Alva graduated, both her education and her baby don’t need to be kept secret.
But this year there was another birth…
Another Birth, Another Mystery
Birth is always a miracle, but some are more miraculous than others. One of Alva’s sisters, Lydia, about 30 years old, is handicapped; her legs are malformed and one hand and arm is dysfunctional. But she copes fairly well. I’ve been amazed at what she can do, including tie knots in thread with her tongue which enables her to participate in the family weaving business. She is as bright as anyone I know, and is surprisingly well informed considering she has been virtually sequestered her entire life. She rarely even came out to the front room of her family’s house where she could be seen by people passing by in the street. I never saw her leave the house.
Even more surprising than being well informed—and more amazing than tying knots with her tongue—Lydia got pregnant. It is enough to make one believe in immaculate conception. As far as I know her social life was non-existent. But nonetheless, she got pregnant and he baby was born three months ago.
She left the village and moved in with my adopted family in the city of Quetzaltenango. I would like to know whether the father had to leave the village too.
When I saw Lydia and the baby a couple weeks ago she joked that miraculously he had neither mother nor father. I didn’t press her as to the identity of the latter, but I suspect it may remain a mystery, at least to me. I asked my kids, who will usually share with me any gossip they are privy to, but they don’t know.
On the other end of the spectrum one old friend, Don Pedro, may be near death. He is not that old, in his 40s I think, but he was one of the first people I knew in the village. I first met his daughters when I was a language student in Antigua. They would come down from San Antonio to sell stuff to tourists. Sometimes Pedro would come along.
For the past couple of months he has been mostly confined to bed, and recently in the hospital. A doctor told him that he has an internal infection. That could mean just about any internal disorder, but probably not an infection. Pedro said he suspected his illness may have something to do with his past drinking habits. I wouldn’t be surprised. Most of the time he didn’t drink at all, but when he got started he had a hard time stopping.
When I first came to the village, about ten years ago, I rented a tiny room from Pedro, connected to a little store the family operated. Around Christmastime he went on a binge and stayed drunk for most of a week. I don’t think he went home the whole time. Instead he slept in a hammock that was hung right in front of my door. Day and night for several days I had to step across him whenever I wanted to enter or leave my room. He was mild mannered and quiet when he was sober, and fortunately he was about the same when he was drunk. He mumbled and sang, but other than that he wasn’t any trouble.
Sometimes at night Pedro’s elderly mother would come over to remonstrate with him. She spoke only Cakchiquel, the Mayan dialect of the village, so I don’t know what she was saying—but I have a pretty good idea.
When Pedro finally sobered up, his daughters told him that he had borrowed a fairly large amount of money from me to buy booze. He came to me, haggard from his ordeal, and contritely promised he would pay me back as soon as possible. He was so sincere, and so sorry that neither his daughters nor I could keep from laughing. The look of relief on his face when he realized he didn’t really owe me money was priceless.
But now, maybe the drinking is catching up with him. He was in San Antonio when I visited the village; the doctor had let him come home for the holidays. We talked for a while, and I left wondering whether I would see him alive again.
The Road Ahead
The next part of my trip is going to be something completely different. As Guatemala gets tamer and better known it is becoming harder to find places off the beaten path. Whole busloads of tourists turn up in surprising places. Next week I plan to head up into the Cuchamatanes Mountains, an area I’ve never been to before. My principle destinations will be two towns that are pretty well known; there are fairly good roads to both of them, but few foreigners travel a shorter, but mountainous road that connects them. That route is only a hundred miles or so long, but it is a two or three-day journey over rough, but spectacular terrain (from what I hear). If I run into a busload of tourists I’ll be really annoyed.