A Private Sorcery

by Lisa Gornick

  IT TAKES NEARLY an hour to wind down the mountain to Panajachel. Through the window, I catch glimpses of a royal blue lake with three volcanoes overhead. I keep my forehead pressed to the glass, transfixed for the first time in my sixty-eight years by Nature’s glory.

  Inside the town, the spell is broken by the primitive tourism. Indians stroll in native dress, their wares spread out on the sides of the dusty streets. Against the background of the shanty bars and the sixties-style shops with names like Yellow Submarine, they appear to be actors in a historical reconstruction rather than the actual residents.

  I settle on a hotel with a view of the lake. It’s twice the cost of the room at La Posada de las Madres, but with Rena’s insistence on paying for everything, I haven’t spent more than a few quetzals. I put bathing trunks on under my shorts, stuff one of the towels into my camera bag and head to the hotel dining room, knowing full well that I’m making a poor choice. It’s depressing: all German families and businessmen. I watch a woman in her fifties with her poorly preserved septuagenarian husband. Fingers heavy with rings. Unnaturally thin. Unnaturally tanned. A tall, sultry youth brings her an iced drink with a straw and wedges of fruit perched on the rim of the glass. She examines him head to toe. Her husband appears to be dozing. Am I imagining this, twisted as I am after twenty-seven years (twenty-seven years, I hear you echoing, your eyes round with amazement) with only my fantasies—Maria’s bottom, her swinging braid—or does she press a folded piece of paper into the waiter’s palm?

  I order a hamburger, spelled handburger on the menu. It comes dry atop a tortilla. Afterwards, I walk down to the lake. Up close, it’s navy and vast, the far shore beyond sight. The beach is pebbled and half shaded at this hour. Two German girls, towheaded with bouncy breasts, squeal as they wade into the water. For the first time in my married life, it occurs to me that I could take a lover: real flesh and blood rather than the phantom Maria. Could, like my Uncle Jack with my housebound Aunt Mindyl, count infidelity as the cost of loyalty to an invalid wife.

  Quickly, I enter the lake. The shock of the cold halts my breath. I swim out twenty yards. The village disappears and the surrounding bowl of mountains appears.

  ON THE WAY BACK to the hotel, I pass a fonda with a flagstone terrace strung with colored lights and a menu of local fish. Returning a few hours later, I sit at an outdoor table. Most of the other customers are gringos, but with a distinctly hipper and more knowing air than the hotel’s luncheon diners.

  While I’m having coffee, a man and a woman come out from inside. They take the table next to mine. The man pushes back a chair and stretches out his blue-jeaned legs. Under the colored lights, his beard is almost orange and his boots, intricately tooled in some kind of exotic leather, shine with more luster than the animal whose hide they once were. The woman is tiny with black hair and a short, clingy dress. She pulls out a pack of Gauloises and lights up.

  I nod in their direction. They smile back in the way of travelers who, having exhausted each other’s company, are eager for distraction. He orders a shot of tequila. She drinks cognac. He points at my beer: “Uno más para el señor aquí.”

  “Gracias,” I say.

  “De dónde eres?” he asks.

  “De los Estados Unidos.”

  “Australia. Rodney. And this is Maracel. My little froggy.”

  “Cut it out,” she says in accented English, affectionate on the surface but tired, it’s clear, of the joke.

  “Pull up a chair. Maracel, here, loves Americans. Especially if they’re on the telly.”

  Over the next hour and through two more rounds of drinks, they tell me their story: how, intending to spend a year traveling around the world, he sold his bicycle shop in Melbourne and is now, seven years later, still at it. Indonesia, Thailand, India, Tibet, the Middle East. Six months in Cairo, down the east coast of Africa to the Cape, then back up through Gabon. The usual places in Europe, where three years ago he and Maracel met. She’d left her studies in Aix to follow him north to the fjords. A couple of months in Stockholm while he recovered from malaria caught somewhere along the way. “Not a dime out of my pocket, either, for the treatment. Two weeks in a sanitorium that was more like a spa than a clinic. Maracel tried to fake a malady to get herself in, right, Froggy?”

  Ignoring him, she blows smoke over her right shoulder. I watch the cloud enter his beard, the way he recoils without knowing why. She’s older than I’d thought at first. Early thirties rather than twenties. I listen to the rest of their journey. The States east to west and then across to Hawaii. From there, a hitch on a freighter six thousand miles south to Argentina. A year coming back north. Chile, Bolivia, Peru.

  A lot of travel, I think, on the proceeds of a bike shop.

  Here, in Guatemala, they’ve been everywhere: to the ruins in Tikal, all through the Highlands. “There are places in these mountains as remote as anywhere in the Andes,” Rodney says. “You’ve just got to get away from Disneyland here. Ten minutes out on the mailboat and you’re in a different world. We’re stuck for two days because there’s a German kid here who works on VWs. He’s doing a patch job on the cooling system of our van so we can use it to get back to San Diego. Then it’s arrivederci to that rattletrap.”

  They tell me where to get the mailboat, and Maracel writes the name of the village I should visit on the back of her matches. I tell the waiter to put their drinks on my bill.

  “Thanks, mate,” Rodney says.

  Maracel reapplies her lipstick. “Remember, Santiago Atitlán.”

  They leave before the waiter returns with the check. When it comes, I see that the bottle of Chilean wine they consumed before they came out to the terrace has also found its way onto my tab.

  IN THE MORNING, I catch the mailboat. I get off at Santiago Atitlán and tour the village, which consists of a white church, a small store and a handful of houses tucked behind low stone walls with flowers growing in beds along the top. Here, the native costume loses its theatrical quality, the women wrapped waist to toe in spirit fabric with elaborately embroidered huipiles above, the designs indicating not only region and town, but, in the pattern, family too, the men in red striped pants and wide, colorful sashes. I buy a loaf of bread and a bottle of water and walk out to the beach on the lake. No longer surprised by the cold, I enter the water slowly but steadily. I swim for a long time, my limbs regaining their youth in the water’s buoyancy. Always, I’d wanted to take you boys somewhere magical like this for the summer. We could rent a house in the South of France, I’d urged your mother. Always, I’d let inertia and cowardice overtake me: cowardice about setting out on an adventure, about crossing your mother’s wishes.

  I dry on a flat warm rock, my skin clean and soft from the mountain water. Three women with baskets balanced on their heads cross the beach to a cove where a stream enters the lake. Singing, they lower the baskets from one another’s heads, remove the articles of clothing and, kneeling on rocks that jut over the water, scrub with smaller stones the colorful cloth.

  My lids grow heavy. This could be Carmelita by the river where every Tuesday she and her sisters did the family wash, where, one Friday, her baby was found floating facedown. A drowning, the coroner announced, refusing to take sides as to whether Carmelita had killed her own baby or the nefarious deed had been done by some other hand, human or not. After Carmelita’s death, her sisters had given sworn testimony that Carmelita would never have taken her own life. That she would have wanted to go to heaven to see her baby. That everyone knows suicide es el camino al infierno.

  I doze. On awaking, I feel as though the sun and sleep have cleared all circuits. Like electroshock therapy, we were told, in my residency. Prone on my hospitable rock, I stare into the cloudless periwinkle sky.

  Perhaps Carmelita, shaded by a hospitable tree, did this during the hot afternoon hours when everywhere, except at the mine, work ceased and people returned home for the large meal of the day and the siesta.

  I sit up on my rock. A canoe g
lides halfway between the shore and horizon where a volcano, still snow-peaked, looms. How, I wonder, could Carmelita have been murdered without anyone in the jail hearing her screams?

  I open the small notebook I keep in my camera bag. “1955,” I write. “Carmelita deemed a prison suicide.” I skip down a line. “1955: Maria attempts suicide in the hospital bathroom.”

  Blood rushes to my face as I look at the two names together. I put down the notebook and grip my thighs, afraid my body will betray my shock to my neighbors, laughing now as they lay the laundry out to dry.

  I stare at the page, horrified that I could have worked for twelve years on the Carmelita story without seeing her kinship with Maria.

  Kinship, baloney, I hear Merckin sneering. What about twinship, my dear Dr. Dubinsky?

  I RETURN TO PANAJACHEL in time for lunch at the Karma Kafe, opened, it says in the statement of purpose included with each menu, in 1969 by two women, Alice and Deb, from Santa Cruz who sought a simpler life where the chi could flow. I’m partway through my veggie pocket, served with a bowl of yogurt, when Rodney and Maracel walk in. Maracel plunks down next to me. Rodney shrugs his shoulders and settles into the other empty chair. “Did you go to Santiago Atitlán?” Maracel asks.

  “This morning. Every bit as unspoiled as you said. There were women washing their clothing by the lake.”

  “They wash without soap so as not to toxify the lake.”

  “Pollute,” Rodney corrects. “You should know. Your countrymen specialize in that. The Rhône. The Hérault. An abomination. Children swimming in agricultural runoff.”

  With this second meeting, I can see how wearing their teasing of each other would soon become to anyone in their company, the hostility only thinly disguised. Your mother did that sort of thing the first years of our marriage: little jabs about Leonard, the academic doctor whose inheritance will go to posterity rather than his two sons. Translation: see how he has failed to give me what a doctor’s wife should expect—a swimming pool, a Cadillac, a diamond tennis bracelet.

  “Our last decent meal until San Diego,” Rodney announces. “Eat up, Froggy.” Maracel scowls. “She’s allergic to health food. Prefers the French breakfast of a demitasse of mud, a couple of cigarettes and a slab of those airy white baguettes, overrated, if you ask me, and no more nutritious than your American, what do you call it, Miracle Bread?”

  “Wonder Bread.”

  “That’s it, Wonder Bread. They sold it in Melbourne at three times the price of our local bread. My mum, telly addict she was, God bless her soul, thought it was this laboratory invention that would guarantee her children would grow to be the size of American football players.” Rodney points to his short, stocky legs. “You can see how well it worked. Probably stunted my growth.”

  I finish my veggie pocket and begin the bowl of sour yogurt. Without asking, Maracel spoons some mango and overripe melon from her plate into my bowl.

  “Froggies,” Rodney says. “You’d think that since it was one of them who discovered microbes, they’d be a bit more mindful. But no, they act as though bacteria doesn’t apply to them.” Ignoring Rodney, Maracel uses her spoon to stir her fruit into my yogurt. “We’re out of here in an hour. Now that the van is fixed, we’ll jam straight through to San Diego. Should take us about forty hours.”

  “You won’t stop to sleep?”

  “Nah. We switch off. Don’t even have to stop driving. One of us slides over, the other slides out. Maracel here does the nights. She smokes the whole way and stops every few hours for coffee. But you’re not going to spend any more time here, are you, mate? This is, no offense, rip-off ville for the tourists. A Mayan theme park.”

  Rodney looks at his watch. “Listen, if I was you, I’d catch a ride with us as far as Huehuetenango. Today’s market day and there’ll be a late bus going up to Todos Santos. That’s the sticks, but not so far out you’ll get the willies. Maybe three hours from Huehue. There’s a pensión on the square. Two quetzals a night and then extra for each blanket. Take three. At night, it’s fucking freezing. No running water, just a pump in the courtyard and a dunny out back filled with fleas. Me, I prefer to go native and use the fields. For food, there’s a woman who cooks for travelers out of a stall in the market. It’s not bad. Just skip the beef, because the way she does it, you risk getting a disease. And bring a couple of bottles of water and a roll of dunny paper.”

  MERCKIN WOULD HAVE interpreted my letting Rodney make the decision of where and when I’ll voyage, the green van idling in front of my hotel where I quickly pack up, as the breakthrough of a buried homosexual wish to submit. Would interpret what transpires three hours later as we near Huehuetenango with Rodney muttering about the red light on the dash and how it has begun to blink on and off as letting myself get screwed.

  Rodney pulls into a gas station on the outskirts of town. Maracel stares out the window, apparently indifferent to the plight of the vehicle. A Ladino man wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt looks under the hood. Rodney follows him inside the garage. After a while, he beckons to Maracel. She gives him her wallet and he begins counting out bills. I climb down from the van and head toward them.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The water coolant system. Needs two new hoses and a new pan. Asshole kid in Panajachel. The patch job he did is falling apart already. I should go back and wring his scrawny neck, but this guy here says we wouldn’t even make it that far. He can do it, but it’s a cash situation only.” Rodney looks again at his watch. “And too late for the bank. So listen, mate, what we’ll do is get someone here to give you a lift into town so you can catch that bus. Otherwise you’ll be stuck here with us overnight.”

  “If you had the cash, they could fix it for you now?”

  “A couple of hours, the guy says. But we only have seventy Guate malan. And to do it as a rush job, he’s going to charge two hundred fifty.”

  “I can lend you the cash. You can send me the money when you get to the States.”

  “That’s bloody decent of you. You sure that won’t leave you short?”

  I shake my head no. My intestines are doing funny things. I pull open the Velcro on the inside pocket of my vest and take out two hundred quetzals—about two hundred twentyfive dollars. Rodney writes down my address and then goes to talk to the mechanic, who points at a kid sitting on a crate under a tree. The kid gets up and walks toward a beat-up Chevy Nova parked on a patch of grass. Maracel gives me little pecks on both cheeks. Under her perfume, she smells rangy—in need of a bath. Rodney puts my duffel bag in the front seat of the Nova and clumps me on the back a couple of times. He closes the car door for me.

  “I’ll send that money order to you first thing when we get to San Diego. Should be waiting for you by the time you get home.”

  Not until I’m on the bus to Todos Santos, seated again behind the driver on a seat that is barely bolted to the floor, the only person other than the driver who has shoes and who is not carrying either animals or large burlap sacks, do I let myself wonder if I’d fallen for a scam with Rodney and Maracel. Ten quetzals passed to the mechanic to go along with the ruse. Did they spot me last night at the restaurant and take me then as their mark? Or did they innocently, if such a word can apply to such weathered souls, befriend me and were then unable to resist acquiring a few quetzals from it all, perhaps not even clear themselves if they intend to return the cash? It’s not the money that concerns me, but the question of whether I can still read character or whether I, too, have grown so withered that trust has become charity.

  We bump along, first slow turns as we climb into the mountains, and then, as the terrain grows steeper, sharper and sharper switchbacks. They’re low mountains, verdant with vines covering the trees and the lushness of something on the edge of being overripe. In the distance is thunder. Hearing the creak of the brakes with each turn and seeing the clench of the driver’s jaw as it begins to rain, I recall reading about a bus that tipped over one of these cliffs. I think of Rena awaiting m
y return and of you who now has only me to love you and of your mother doomed without me to spend the rest of her life with Mrs. Smiley’s rules. For a quarter-hour, I gloomily ruminate. Then we round a curve, and suddenly, like the glow in a Renaissance painting that surrounds the spot where the cherubs stand, the sun breaks out, a gold light pouring down the trees so that the rain, still softly falling, looks now like tinsel and the mist like steam rising from the road. Another bend and we are in a clearing, the mountain peaks bathed with rose and the clouds white pillows jostling one another. The trees are a green I’ve never seen before, bright and shiny, and, for a moment, with the sparkling haze and the pink sky and the twittering of birds as the rain stops and the Indians around me open the windows, I think we’ve driven right through heaven’s gates.

  IT’S DUSK BY THE TIME we arrive in Todos Santos. With the color drained from the landscape, the village looks grim and unwelcoming: no lights to lure tourists; in fact, as far as I can see, no tourists at all. I take my duffel and walk toward the sign marked PENSIóN. The air has turned cool and damp, the dampness of things never fully dry. The Queche proprieter speaks less Spanish than I do, but she points to a pile of army blankets under a sign that says two quetzals. I take two and then, remembering Rodney’s warning, a third. She leads me up a wooden staircase to a room with straw on the floor and a metal cot. Next to the cot, there’s a table with a candle melted onto a dish. She points to the candle and pantomimes lighting a match, which she then hands me, a single wooden stick, as she leaves. I open the shutters and look out at the outlines of the mountains, a dark beast asleep on its side.

  I eat a plate of rice and beans in the marketplace, drink a cup of boiled coffee that I then pay for by spending most of the night tossing and turning, too afraid of fire to light the candle but too cold to get out of bed and search through my duffel for a flashlight so I can read. I hear the church bells toll one, then two, then three. At three, a baby begins to wail—long, high-pitched cries of pain—and I wonder if there is a doctor in this town or if I am it.