a day, maybe two. A full week at most.”
Don Francisco hushed him. “No hay problema, señor,” he assured me. He went into a little speech that Marco translated, switching instantly to his father’s earnest manner, deepening his voice. “La guerrilla has now been defeated, thank God. True, they are still causing trouble in the mountains. Are you planning to travel about the country?” His hands drove a car.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Ahh. Pues, ten cuidado,” said Don Francisco. Be careful. I looked at Marco. He sliced his throat. “Delincuentes,” he whispered.
“You see, Mr. Peterson,” Don Francisco continued, suddenly in English, “many Indian given gun, by los guerrilleros, you see, and they use, you know, to rob and kill.” He stood to go, then paused behind his chair. “You must not think bad our country. We are democracy now. Our president elected civilian, first civilian fifteen years. Pero, your own country, Mr. Peterson, that is also famous for big crime, verdad?”
“Bingo,” I said.
He looked perplexed but carried on. “Crime, okay, but war, finished, thanks to General Ríos Montt. You know General Ríos Montt former president? He fix things in big hurry, that man. Five years ago. Bring law and order.”
It was the most he had ever said to me directly and there was no stopping him now, standing there behind his chair, with me as his only attentive audience. Marco yawned. Juanita asked to be excused, granted by her mother, who picked up our plates and retreated to the kitchen herself. Don Francisco sent Marco to get something. It turned out to be a poster, a big blue hand on a white background, two fingers and the thumb held up in a pledge. I don’t steal, I don’t lie, I don’t abuse, the lettering said, as I translated it. These posters, Don Francisco said, had been distributed all over the country during General Ríos Montt’s regime, every store, every business.
He wound up finally with another name, Elizondo, the “next president of the country.”
The man’s name was faintly familiar and it took a few seconds to realize why. I had heard him speak the previous Sunday. Marco had awakened me early that morning, sent up by his mother with an invitation to join them at mass at the cathedral. I declined groggily, pulling the pillow over my head.
“Okay,” said Marco. “But what shall I tell her royal highness?”
“Tell her I’m an unreconstructed post-modern skeptic,” I muttered. He said he hadn’t heard of a church like that around here.
When he left, I got up anyway, disgruntled and thoroughly awake, and dialed the radio in search of a little music. I got a woman vocalist with a wonderful hot momma style, singing what sounded like a Latinized Negro spiritual. She was followed instantly by this guy Elizondo, who was introduced just as Zondo. I understood little of what he said, and wasn’t interested. He was followed by another speaker, a man who seemed to be offering a corrective to the first guy. What got my attention was the one part of his name I caught, López. Coincidentally, my best friend as a kid back in the village was named Luis López, a Mayan boy, nine years old when I saw him last. López was a common name, and I couldn’t translate what he was saying, anyway. He had a strong accent. I preferred the torchy singer, but she didn’t return.
I put all that down in journal notes and the next afternoon started to convey it to Catherine. She stopped me as soon as she heard the word guerra, as I thought she would. “You know we can’t talk about the war.”
“The war. So there is one.”
“Change the topic. Ahora, ya.”
I obliged, with the subject next on my canary pad, the “coincidencia” of bumping into the man named Elizondo twice within a few hours.
“Zondo, huh? Pues.” She looked amused. “That was hardly a coincidence. The man is ubicuo.”
Ubiquitous? I hadn’t noticed. She said we couldn’t talk about him either, because that was politics, too.
Fine with me, I said. I’d much rather talk about the difference between Corona and Gallo.
At one point early in the third week, as I was blundering along with a reading, I became aware of a silence across the table. I looked up at Catherine from my notebook, thinking for an instant that she had fallen asleep. She was awake all right, but had drifted off to some other location. “Teacher, teacher,” I said, thrusting my hand in the air. She snapped back and apologized, but it happened again, several times. I finally asked her if something was wrong. It was the first hint I had gotten yet, or the first I took, that something could be wrong.
She was just tired, she said. She had spent all weekend trying to do an errand in the capital, but had been blocked by detours for a city-wide festival. “A wretched saint’s day,” she said. “The assumption of our lady into heaven.” She winced.
“Big deal,” I said. “Today happens to be the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death.”
I’m happy to say that changed her mood. She laughed, that fascinating sound from somewhere inside. Then I told her he died on a toilet. It was my turn to wince. She laughed again. In fact, this time she guffawed, then covered her mouth. “Oh, poor Elvis,” she whispered.
We went right back to work, but part of my brain was focused on this new piece of her. Maybe, I fancied, like the two Antiguas, there were two Catherines. But how would I know? You’d think you couldn’t help get to know someone you spent six hours a day with, five days a week. But I didn’t know her, and she didn’t know me.
I had enough to occupy my attention. With only a week to go before classes ended, I was facing a jumble of substantives and cognates, and every kind of verb, regular and irregular, present indicative, subjunctive, pretérito, imperfecto. Then there was that whole matter of “you” that I couldn’t keep straight, when to use usted, “you” with a formal distance, and vos and tú, “you” with shades of familiarity. To use any of them inappropriately could be received as an insult, Catherine insisted. The default position in Guatemala or any Spanish speaking country, was usted. Women were careful to use it with men. I’d noticed that Catherine always used usted in talking to me. Tú was the sticky one, in its various forms, tú, te, ti. But actually, vos could be even more informal and chummy than “tú.” Children used it with each other (yes, I remembered), and guys on athletic teams. To make matters worse, it was also a throwaway word, like “you know,” or “yeah, man.”
“Just stay clear of tú,” said Catherine. “Too familiar. Easily misread.”
That was a microcosm of a larger subtext, the use of a language that made you a member. It was not a technique you could learn in three weeks, I knew now, or one you could return to quickly after more than thirty years of neglect, in spite of Catherine’s assurances. With time and room for error, I could piece together almost anything I wanted to say, and patient speakers could usually make themselves clear to me, but it was all still mechanical and clumsy.
In the parts of the Popul Vuh I’d been reading—the sacred stories of the K’iché culture—the gods, the great crafters, sought repeatedly to create beings who could hear and speak, who would talk to the gods and understand who they were. The gods had experimented first with creatures made from clay and then from wood, a gross mistake in each case, for though the carvings managed to reproduce themselves in some way that strained credulity, their hearts were empty. Next the gods tried monkeys. That was disappointing, as well, and at long last they created humans from corn. That worked. Corn connected. But I was not corn.
