of early morning patrons. A woman in native dress was patting out fresh tortillas with a sound as old to me as my name. “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy,” I once thought the sound said. A sleeping baby was tied to her back by a wide swath of fabric. The waiter who pulled out my chair was decked in black knee breeches and an embroidered jacket, a bright scarf with long tassels on his head. I ordered cornflakes, ignoring the breakfast menu.
I ate slowly, reconsidering my next pre-planned move, to the city of Antigua, 20 miles or so to the west. I knew one thing about Antigua. It was home to more than a dozen language schools, and one of these, the Escuela Méndez, just might be expecting me to make an appearance. I had chosen that school because it was small and taught only on a one-to-one basis. For some reason, I had never received final confirmation of enrollment. I could have phoned right now—that might be sensible—but I decided to just go there instead. Because, where else?
I finished my coffee and stopped at the desk to pay the bill. The clerk assured me that there were indeed buses to Antigua, even on a Sunday morning. Would I rather arrange a car rental? No, I predicted no need for that. He called me a taxi.
The terminal turned out to be the parking lot of a Shell station, filled with recycled buses, gaily painted in three or four colors. I spotted one with “Antigua” printed on a card in the windshield, and under that in black crayon, Starship La Empresa. As a one-time trekker, I was hooked. I paid the fare to the attendant at the door—a kid, really, maybe fourteen—and climbed aboard with my luggage. It had been a schoolbus, a U.S. discard probably, with child-sized seats, rows of three on each side. All were occupied, whole families jammed in, babies hammocked to their mothers. The windows were shut and several people were smoking.
I turned to retreat. Too late. A line of passengers was boarding behind me, shoving me along, women with baskets of produce on their heads, one with a squawking chicken in a wicker cage. I edged all the way to the back, resigned to standing, my hat brushing the ceiling, backpack behind me against the emergency door. There was no place to store luggage. I stuffed my suitcase on the floor between my feet. Beside me, a very drunk gentleman occupied what amounted to three places, but I decided not to contest it, and no one else did either. The aisle filled quickly, some passengers standing, some squatting on the floor. I stood head and shoulders above everyone in front of me, like an over-grown kid at the back of the bus. Even the men tended to be short. This was not something I recalled. But why would I? All the village adults I had known as a child had been far taller than me.
The horn trumpeted, the boy in charge called out something, and with a lift-off explosion we were on our way. The driver, who wore a head-set, peered through a collection of things hanging from the rear-view mirror, rosaries and small stuffed animals. As I watched, he jumped a red light, pulled into the oncoming lane, then swerved back, just missing a truck. I checked the emergency door behind me, wondering if it would open.
No one else seemed troubled. They chattered sociably, in what sounded to me like an indigenous soup of languages. The men all wore long-sleeved shirts and sports caps. The women wore pastel cardigans over bright hand-woven blouses. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what those blouses were called. “Wee-PEEL,” prompted a voice in my head, a child’s clear, piping voice, rebuking me for the lapse. That was it, how I had once pronounced the word, but not how it was spelled. I had probably never known how to spell it, and I certainly didn’t now.
I tried not to stare, remembering a taboo, a hex caused by blue eyes. Did anyone still believe that? There was a word for it, but this time no little voice reminded me. Anyway, I was the object of glances myself. A toddler to my left on an old man’s lap, a tiny, black-eyed girl with dusty bare feet, reached out her hand to me. I returned the gesture without touching her. It came back to me, sensually, what it was like when people insisted on touching me as a boy, my skin or my hair, fingers needing to know how a light coloring felt.
Someone tapped me lightly on the arm. It was the drunk. He had moved over to make a place for me on the aisle seat. “Oh. Gracias,” I said. The offer, I suspected, was one of courtesy to a guest, a habit unblurred even by a night of drinking. I took the space, my shoulder pack and suitcase in my lap and my knees jutting into the aisle.
Very soon I began to get an undeniable olfactory signal. The fruity friend beside me was in trouble. I understood, and wished I knew how to tell him that, but he was staring out the window and seemed unaware of the problem. In a minute the stench became overpowering. An undercurrent of snickers moved up and down the aisle. I heard muttered scatology—caca, cagadas—and recalled with a jolt of pleasure that those were words I knew, ones I had been ordered by my mother never to use and like a good boy never did.
The muted hilarity lasted only a minute. The kid in charge up front signaled the driver to pull over, then ordered the people in the aisle to stand as he bumped and squeezed a path to the back. His eyes were on me. I realized that I, the vulnerable gringo, could be considered the source—the curse of Montezuma, the galloping shitskies. “Levantese!” the boy barked, his hands in translation. He wanted me to stand. I refused, pretending ignorance. He said something else, something apologetic, and now I got it. “Oh, no,” I said. “No, don’t!”
He ignored me, reaching across to grab the drunk by the shirt and lift him out of the seat, the man hardly bigger than the boy. I considered intervening—I was bigger than both of them, after all. But I retracted that instantly, picturing a melee, shit flying, maybe literally. I got up and squeezed across the aisle, luggage in my arms, while the kid opened the emergency door with a rasping squeal and shoved the drunk into the street. No one said a word. No cheers, no objections, the driver not so much as turning his head. “Seat, señor,” the boy said to me, with an elaborate sweep of the hand. I stood where I was, filled with regret, as the bus pulled away.
In another ten minutes we entered a long drop, turned onto a cobblestone street and jiggled to a parking lot. I was the last passenger to dismount and was hardly off the steps when I felt the difference. Not just the relief of breathable air, but the cast of light, the pitch of sound. In fact, I was in an enchanting geographic bowl, all but surrounded by green mountains, still half hidden in morning mist.
I felt received, as if I’d made it successfully through twenty-four hours of some kind of a hazing. Early initiation completed, said the mountains. Admit tall skinny bozo in ill-fitting hat.
FOUR
I had planned to take a taxi to an inn and present myself at the Escuela Méndez early the next day, a sensible Monday morning. But “sensible” had lost a good deal of its meaning, and I needed to walk. I crossed an open-air market, through the smoke of grilling food and shouting hawkers, and entered a business district, where a courteous man gave me directions. That put me on a residential street. Adobe houses in pastels fronted directly on the sidewalk. Heavy flowering vines draped over the walls from inner courtyards. It was suddenly quiet. I smelled coffee.
The school address was a hacienda of sorts, a large stucco house surrounded by a flower garden and enclosed by an iron fence. A brass bell hung on a rope, but before I could ring it, a security guard in a brown uniform appeared from under the shadow of a tree. “School?” I asked. “Méndez?”
He eyed me carefully through the gate, without speaking. It occurred to me that there might be another inspection, my paraphernalia spread on the grass, books and all. And if I were to frisk him in turn, would that bulge in his side pocket be a pistol? Like an answer he went for it. I tightened. But it was only a rolled up notebook. He wet his finger. “Llama?” he asked. “Nennen? Nom?”
I could match that. “Jag heter Peterson,” I said, with my Scandinavian (third generation) throat. He found me somewhere in the depths of the notebook, then led me through the carved front door into a large treed courtyard set up with tables. Rooms opened off on all four sides, with wall-sized blackboards. In the office the guard gestured
