the cards in a stretchy blue headband, then began packing up her bag. “You’re getting an A plus, in case you’re wondering. Hey, we’re done here. Finished.”
She stood and so did I. “You mean this is it?” I said.
She said sí, then “done” again in several Spanish versions, clearly amused. It was turning out to be much too abrupt. I was caught off-guard by a sense of incompleteness, that we still owed each other something. Not sex, nothing so recognizable. “Well, then, can I buy you a drink?” I asked, not very smoothly. “A parting glass—like?”
She hesitated, then said “No, I shouldn’t,” and I remembered her husband. “You’re not going to the party?” she asked.
“Oh yeah. I forgot. I don’t want to.”
“I don’t either, but I must.”
“I promised Méndez. But just in case I don’t, well—.” I held out my hand. She took it in a quick firm shake, then shouldered her big tote bag and walked toward the office door.
“Listen,” I said, catching up to her. “Escuche! You’ve been a good teacher. I’m grateful. I hope you know that.”
“Well, you’ve been a rather unusual student,” she answered. “Which, of course, is what I predicted, isn’t it?”
“Must you always be such an insufferable know-it-all?”
“To the bitter end,” she said, and turned into the office with a wave.
The Buen Viaje was an upscale inn, sprawling across a couple of acres of land at the southwestern end of the city. I walked there in a watery blue twilight, aiming directly toward Volcán de Fuego, watching a final finger of the sun as it caught the bottom of a cloud circling the mountain. It had rained briefly and stopped, and the air was full of the sweet-sour smell of ripe vegetation. On a muddy side road a dozen kids played pick-up soccer with a half-deflated ball, shouting curses as it splatted into the puddles. I observed them with a little pang—barefoot, filthy, falling, every man for himself.
I was arriving late, a reluctant guest. The parking lot of the inn was full of cars and the lobby was crowded and thick with smoke. I found a door leading to the exterior, a large grassy courtyard and two illuminated swimming pools. A marimba band played near a lighted fountain.
I looked for familiar faces and spied them, students and tutors, standing near the sliding doors of a first-floor suite, along with a dozen others I didn’t know. Carlos Méndez came to meet me and introduced me to the co-hosts, his friends Angela and Norman Harris from Long Island, a couple perhaps in their fifties. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and she a long skirt in the same plaid. They were owners of an international import company, Méndez told me. “And Señor Peterson is one of our star pupils, an English professor from Massachusetts,” he added.
“Oh-oh. I’d better watch my language,” said Harris, laughing as if he’d coined the joke.
In the suite another two dozen people had gathered around a long table packed with party food. Little U.S. and Guatemalan flags had been stuck on all the platters. I poured myself a scotch and ambled back outdoors. I saw Catherine on the other side of the patio, in conversation with a couple. I recognized her first only by her height. Her Yankees cap was gone, her hair down, hanging in waves around her face, abundantly. How had she managed to get all that tucked into the cap? She was wearing an ankle-length skirt of blue woven cloth tied at her waist around a lacy blouse cut low on her shoulders. She had excellent shoulders, I noticed, now that she had tossed the white shirt. I saw no one near her who might be her husband. It was all gringos.
I slipped through the crowd, stopping at the edge of one cluster after another. Everyone was speaking English, and in nearly every case the topic of conversation was some aspect of tourist life in the country—the exchange rate, when to pay a bribe, the safety and danger of travel. I gravitated to a couple of guys standing apart. One was Hank Stenning, the pony-tailed student I saw every day. The other, stocky and hot-looking in a tightly buttoned shirt, introduced himself as somebody Tornquist. He was “with coffee,” he told me. Who was I with, he wanted to know.
“Myself, I guess,” I said. He seemed puzzled. He was more than a little oiled already. I switched attention to Stenning. He didn’t look like he was “with” anybody either. He picked up on the conversation I had interrupted, telling Tornquist about a water project in the western hills, where he was headed next. “We find ways to connect remote communities with the nearest water suppwy,” he explained.
“Suppwy?” echoed Tornquist. Then he caught on. “Well, who pays you for that?”
Stenning was amused. “No one.”
I backed away and eased myself around the guests, headed for Catherine, curious to observe the transformation up close. “Hola,” she said, when I reached her.
“Are you with someone?” I asked.
She laughed. “How about do I come here often?”
“How about what are you drinking?”
“Papaya juice.”
“Right.”
“It really is.”
We raised glasses to each other. “You look very nice,” I told her, hoping I didn’t sound surprised.
“Thank you. I thought I’d better clean up for the fufurufus.”
“The what?”
“The nouveau riche.”
We drifted to the edge of a group of about a dozen people dominated by the couple Catherine had been talking with earlier. “Who are they?” I asked. She shrugged. “Cindy and Bob. They’re from Ohio. He sells fertilizer here. Shall we be nice and listen in on the conversation?”
“You be nice. I’m always nice,” I said.
Bob and Cindy were telling the story of a couple who had been recently robbed as they were climbing Volcán de Pacaya. “By two masked gunmen muttering something about the gods of the volcano,” said Cindy.
“It was stupid to go climbing alone,” someone inserted. That raised the question of who was responsible for crime in the country, and everyone had an answer: guerrillas, local police, Indians, and jealous wives. Laughter.
“We’re okay as long as we stick close to the touristy places,” said Cindy. “That’s what the State Department says.”
“Well, if you want my theory,” said Bob, “statistically there’s no more danger of being robbed or killed here than in any city in the United States. But the Tourist Commission wants us, and they know one way to get us is to convey just the right sense of danger.”
Tornquist, who had moved to the group along with Stenning, had a theory too. Since he was “literally from Missouri,” in the ten years he had been coming to Guatemala he had made it a practice never to take at face value anything he heard. “So help me, I swear to God the country operates on rumor and hearsay. Take away rumor and everything comes to a halt. Rumor is the machinery that powers the whole country, okay? It brings international loans, cancels foreign debt, builds hospitals.” He paused, and took a sip of his drink. A wave of cognizance passed over his face, as if he’d just
