(before I could waffle), I studied vocabulary until exactly one A.M., then set the alarm and konked out to the sound of the rain, splashing down on the sorrowful, noseless saints around the patio pool.
SEVEN
I woke at dawn to a splatter of gunfire. That’s what I thought, until I remembered (how could I have forgotten?) that birthdays often began with firecrackers, always at break of day, and followed, as they were now, with the frantic barking of half-a-dozen dogs and the crowing of roosters, near and distant. That agitated the parrot, who called “Hola! Hola!”
I pulled on clothes and shoes and headed for the central plaza, running in half-light on the cobblestones, fog swirling around my feet and up over the red-tiled roofs. Ancient architecture floated beside me, an amazing lot of it in partial ruins, intricate heaps of rubble toppled in the long series of earthquakes. The plaza was already astir, but quiet, enough to hear the splash of the fountain in the park—water streaming from the breasts of maiden statues—and the swish of somebody’s broom outside a store.
The shell of the old cathedral occupied one side of the square. At right angles to that, yellow light warmed the windows of the police station, housed under two-story colonial arches. Three uniformed men stood in the doorway smoking, assault rifles slung over their shoulders. A little spurt of adrenaline. No threat to me, or I to them, but a rifle is a rifle.
At one side of the park a group of Mayan women were already tying their backstrap looms to the trees and spreading their weavings on the grass, a twenty-foot long carpet of color. Several of them carried babies on their backs, secured within a wide strip of fabric. Not far away two long-haired teenagers curled asleep on benches, their packs under their heads, fair-skinned gringos, I noted, as were the half-dozen other runners who approached me out of the mist, like Caucasian ghosts. They panted on by me without a greeting, as if on the last lap of some super-marathon from Stockholm or Chicago. I was panting too, at close to 4,000 feet above sea level.
I stopped to breathe and stare for a moment into the Moorish courtyard of San Carlos University. The name echoed distantly in my head and then up front, with a little ping. My father had worked at San Carlos, at the campus in Guatemala City. I asked him once what he did there. “Talk to the ‘stugents,’” he’d said, teasing me with one of my own pronunciations. Another odd memory. Apparently there was more than one kind of forgetting. There were the details that hoped to be found, like a child playing hide and seek, popping out from behind a chair, and there were the ones that hid themselves in earnest.
The run finished, I did a set of push-ups in my room, took a shower and went to breakfast. Alone in the dining room, I ate freshly made tortillas, brought and served by a black-eyed Mayan girl—really a girl, no more than twelve, I thought. A large white apron covered her woven skirt, her long hair tucked under a silly looking maid’s cap. I greeted her, “Buenos días,” but she refused to answer or meet my eyes. Her hand shook as she poured my coffee. Scared witless of the gringo. Her clothes smelled strongly of woodsmoke, and of something else, burnt vegetation. A quick vision presented itself, smouldering cornstalks, carried about the house to get rid of lice and lizards. That triggered another smell, things just in from the rain, wet clothes and hair, wet chickens, wet dogs, all gathered around an open fire in the middle of a room.
Doña Rosa, entering the kitchen in a flowered housecoat, gave the maid instructions in Spanish, her arm around her, patiently repeating, then apologized to me in a whisper, wringing her hands. “No me comprenda.”
“What’s her name?” I asked.
She shrugged. “No name. Call Maria.”
“Where does she live?”
A wide sweep of the arm. I understood that more than Doña Rosa knew. The child walked here from a distance, bringing tortillas made before dawn.
At school Catherine and I worked through the morning hours at a table in the courtyard, where the temperature warmed quickly to a sweet seventy degrees, and would, I soon learned, day after day. At noon I joined the Ávila family around the dining room table, Juanita in her green school uniform and Marco (no longer in school for whatever reason) and his father, both in dark business suits, on break from the family tienda, one of the downtown stores. While they chattered in Spanish, I struggled to catch a phrase here and there, with my dictionary and glasses beside me on the table.
Back to school then, for an exhausting afternoon of forced dialogue with Catherine, the relentless one. I ended the day at a bar, sipping a lukewarm Gallo while I watched television with the regulars and listened to their sharp consonants and remarkable rolls of the tongue. A soccer game was in progress between the Rojos and the Cremas and the room was full of cheers and curses. I was not a soccer fan, but I strained to catch the substance within the curses: Puta! Que imbécil fuiste! Ay, Dios!
On the way home I bought an English language newspaper, the International Edition of the Miami Herald, a couple of days old on the stands. Mostly I was after the baseball scores, with the late season gloom of a Red Sox fan. The Sox, at the end of another losing season, were fourteen and a half games behind the Yankees, fifth place in the AL East. I barely glanced at other news. The front pages were filled with the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North pictured repeatedly with his hand raised, swearing in, swearing in.
I studied all evening in my room, wired to my tapes, John Coltrane and Oscar Peterson. Later Doña Rosa rustled up the stairs in her slippers with a cup of warm milk and a sugar cookie as big as a saucer. To fatten me up, she said. I was too flaco. Besides, she scolded, I would make myself sick if I worked so late. I needed to sleep. “Is why you pipple always sick in Guate, Señor Peterson. No slip! Put out light and go slip, like good niño.” She laughed at herself, allowing me to laugh, too.
In all that, I managed to find a predictable framework for those three weeks. But the mountains were not through with me yet, and they were full of surprises.
EIGHT
Meanwhile, Rebecca seldom left my thoughts entirely. In dreams I often found myself a passenger in her car, my knees pressed against the dashboard, seat stuck in the forward position, as it was in actuality. In these dreams, she was always driving me to Logan Airport, where she was dropping me off, as she did—in actuality—because she was going “right by,” on her way to a conference.
I finally called her, only to get my own voice on our answering machine at home. She had not yet changed it. “Please leave us a message,” I heard myself say. So I did. “Ted, tell Rebecca everything is fine here. Ask her how she is. How is his Mom?” I left the number and said goodbye to myself. She called back when I was out. Juanita wrote down her message. “All fine here, too. No news. Your mother the same, holding her own.” Juanita thought she’d missed a word, whatever it was my mother was holding. It was all right, I told her, nobody knew.
On Saturday, at the end of the first week, I took my run later in the morning while my clothes washed at the local lavendería. Doña Rosa had been urging me to visit the chapel next to the partially restored Church of San Francisco where a 17th century healer, Hermano Pedro de Betencourt, lay in state. I lingered there maybe five minutes, staring at the mesmerizing display of the wizened corpse in a wall niche surrounded by candles, dead flowers, crutches, and scores of photos of those who claimed to be healed. A woman standing nearby muttered a chatty prayer and crossed herself repeatedly. After leaving the dim recesses my eyes took a while to adjust to the sunlight, and maybe that was part of the problem, because when I got back to the central plaza I saw her.
The plaza was alive with traffic—motor bikes, street hawkers, tourists. She was twenty feet ahead of me, looking in the window of a shop with a sign that read High Class Tipica. It was Rebecca for sure. I
