Harvard (the university)Arbar
La SIMLa TIM
El bestsellerEl beseller
La fronteraLa fontera
El traductorEl tradutor
El baseballEl veivol
El basketballEl vackevol
El españolEl pañol
El blue jeanEl bruyean (I have actually seen it spelled like that!)
El Weekend (weekend)El wiken
Los tennis NikeLos tenes niki
Los tennis PumaLos tenes epuma
La espuma (foam)La epuma
El gourmetEl goumé
La Coca-ColaLa hoca-cola or even hoha-hola
Un ron rumUn guon
El desayuno (breakfast)El desatjuno
Los frijoles (beans)Los frisoles
Los camarones (shrimp)Los caramones
La cerveza (beer)La chebesa
El langostinoEl lagotino
La lasagnaLa lagagna
La hamácaLa maca
Las alcaparrasLas caparras
El jugoEl fugo
El s?No el f! (sounds exactly the same!)
El hotelEl chotel
El cepillo (comb)El cepollo
El papel higienicoEl pepel ifienico
Lake Atitlán
It was also during my stay in Antígua, and alongside with my Spanish studies, that I brought my historical novel on the fall of Constantinople to its conclusion. As mentioned, I had previously visited the Ionian island Corfu to get the local colour and atmosphere right for the final scene of the book. It features ex-state secretary George Sphrantzes as he, having taken the monastic vow on the same island in the 1470s, thinks back on his life and wonders if that which actually did happen had been predestined by God and therefore was unavoidable. This is the so-called epilogue of the book; an imaginary account, rife with poetry and feeling, of what might have transpired through the old man’s mind as he readied himself to rejoin his beloved emperor and see his maker.
Once finished, I was for a while reluctant to busy myself with another script, and over New Year’s I even made a short visit to Texas at the behest of the same woman who the previous summer had so graciously helped me to a whole bottle of gin at the sumptuous colonial hotel El Convento in San Juan. This trip was notable, not only because it allowed me to experience an authentic, albeit a bit shocking, side of contemporary life in redneck country at a ranch where wild animals had been brought in and kept corralled, waiting for tourist hunters to come along for a weekend of organised slaughter around the feeding grounds, inevitably luring the animals to their demise. There were literally piles of dead boars rotting in the sun, and as far as the coyotes were concerned their killers would suspend their corpses from the fences running for miles through this dry country, proudly advertising that another one of this loathed scavengers had been eliminated. The deer on the other hand had been disposed of in a different manner since their hunters were proud to put their taxidermied heads above a mantelpiece and boast of how excellent their aim had been: ‘One clean shot, and he came down as though he’d fallen straight out of the sky’...
I myself fell out of the sky, back into the street grid of Antígua, in early January and was henceforth intent to wrap things up there. I had been in town since late October, and although I had initially entertained hopes that it would be able to captivate my interest for several months to come, I now felt this not to be the case and decided to move on according to my initial plan. By this time, I knew pretty well what the various streets and their establishments had to offer. Initially I had been quite impressed by the variety of cuisines on offer in such a comparatively small place, but even the existence of a really nice French restaurant no longer exerted an irresistible attraction on me. On the other hand, there was a place called JP’s Rum Bar on the premises of yet another Spanish school. It used to attract a slightly more eccentric clientele than the usual tourist crowds. To go there for a couple of drinks and some pseudo-philosophical chit-chat was one of my preferred diversions, but as usual, wherever conversation is decent in public, the girls shine with their absence, and JP’s own blond girlfriend behind the bar was not only off-limits but, if I remember correctly, pretty flaky too. Last time I was in town JP and his female companion had evidently packed up and left town, perhaps for good, since the rum bar was gone and the edifice formerly housing it sombre and silent.
There is also Café Teatro run by a Swiss called Alan. He was always friendly towards me and the food was very good, but for some reason — I was never badly treated or so — I never felt quite comfortable sitting at the bar (probably because at the time I could not participate in discussions in Spanish as much as I would have wanted) and eventually stopped frequenting it. Further down the 5 Calle Poniente there is a restaurant in typical Guatemalan style but with a gringo couple as owners. I have forgotten what the name of the place is, but you can’t really miss it since there is always a guy out in the street trying to shove a menu down your throat. But fear not! The restaurant is pleasant. Apart from attentive service it has good steaks, brochettes and, rather surprisingly, the best chocolate mousse I have ever tasted — having lived in France for many years I do have some experience of this national dessert. I don’t know how they make it, but it’s simply delicious and you can even eat the receptacle because the bowl containing the mousse is in itself made from chocolate.
The town in itself is famous for its chocolate shops and pastry chefs, and I’m sure it must be one of the latter who is responsible for the mousse. If I were the Michelin Guide for Gourmets off the Beaten Track I’d put the restaurant up for ‘well worth a detour’ alone on account of the restaurant’s chocolate mousse. Another thing that adds to the ambiance here is that the owner has a past as a studio percussionist in Memphis, Tennessee, and every other night joins in on the congas together with native Paco and his orchestra of Pan flutes for some Andean entertainment, traditionally peaking with the local theme song always on demand: ‘Volcán de Agua’. Nonetheless, the arguably best restaurant I had the privilege to dine in while living in Antígua is the Panza Verde, conveniently located just a few blocks north of my abode on 5th Avenue. Its interior is both elegant and rustic at the same time. Prices are slightly at the high end, if I remember correctly, but the French inspired cuisine, run by an excellent Swiss chef, is consistently top-notch, so there is never a deception to be feared. And the service is impeccable.
Apart from the steady stream of tourists — everything from backpackers in striped pyjama pants and hay coloured Rastafari curls on a shoestring budget to wealthy Americans in khaki shorts and Hawaiian shirts frequenting ancient monasteries converted to luxury spas — and apart from the many foreigners running hotels and restaurants here, the population of Antígua remains predominantly indigenous and the town has a large stationary artisan market. I bought a very beautiful handmade bedspread there and only regret that I subsequently gave it away.
The presence of many Indians in turn means that people of my height (roughly 6’2") and nothing whatsoever to boast of in Holland, not to speak of in the NBA, where I would have been the token pygmy) come across as veritable Gullivers among the Lilliputians. There might be some pretty Guatemalan girls throughout this native population but in all honesty, I’d have to walk on my knees to meet them face to face. And they really are too traditionally raised and dressed to normally come into question as prospective mistresses, or even wives, to the visiting Westerner. Notwithstanding, I have met at least one tall gringo married to a guatemalteca. I also remember a hotel and restaurant owner from former East Germany who had knocked up and married another one in Flores in the Petén region. And then there is of course the sympathetic Swiss owner of Sun Dog Bar and Restaurant up in Rio Dulce — he too is hooked up with a local girl. But none of these girls, on the occasions I met with them, were traditionally dressed.
The real Indians on the other hand keep to themselves and seem content that way. Their general standard of living is rudimentary enough to most of us, used to at least have floors and window frames in the places where we live. Antígua, on account of its influx of tourists and the money invested in its maintenance, is quite an exception to this rule of deliberate primitivism. But wherever the indigenous element predominates (such as is the case not only in Guatemala, but in many parts of Ecuador, Peru and Mexico as well), the more houses seem as though they had been completely abandoned, in milder cases midway into construction but mostly right after the rebars have been put in place and the casting plate defining the first floor has hardened. But that is a deceiving appearance. To most Indians a slab of rough concrete is a very good roof keeping almost everyone beneath it dry, and they soon move in under it, unconcerned about such trivialities as doors and windows, since anyways the house will never, ever, become what we palefaces, applying even the most lax standards to the concept, would call finished.
Antígua, with its long straight boulevards lined with colourful (lots of red!) colonial buildings thus remains the beautiful and interesting city in the country. From the 16th century until mid 18th century this highland sanctuary for birds and flowers, blessed with an all year-round mild climate, was the regional capital. At that time the Province of Guatemala was a vast dominion of the Spanish crown comprising the better part of Central America, including the Mexican state of Chiapas, to this day largely unexplored. But then, as so often happens along the edge of the Pacific, there was a series of earthquakes, of which the one in 1773 prompted the authorities in Madrid to eventually issue an order to evacuate. Although the new capital was subsequently built, and also has remained the administrative centre of the independent republic, the evacuation of Antígua was only partial. Over time it was repopulated even though it never became so densely settled as during its heyday.
Culturally speaking it nevertheless is the Capital and a testimony to the religious zeal of its once Spanish masters; the town is literally crowded with ancient churches and monasteries. Most of the churches are in a ruined or semi-ruined state and no longer in service. This partly gives Antígua the character of a Hispanic pendant to the historical Maya sites. In some aspects it really is a ghost town where the pious whispers, tolling bells and shuffling feet inside the Christian temples have long since dissipated, the walls become overrun with ivy and the cracks invaded by grass, lizards and nesting birds. Centuries of heavy rainwater running along the once white-washed facades have created long dark patches working as inkblot tests to the receptive mind. In this sense the town is its own graveyard, with its own monumental tombstones, and has something eerily haunting about it. This is especially noticeable at night when the long avenues and side streets become almost interminable and the streetlights run into vanishing points, eventually ceding to darkness.
Since I lived at the very southern tip of 5 Avenida Sur, I would have the town’s iconic arch disappear at a distance as I headed home. I had of course been recommended to use the mototaxis — cheap and reliable as they are — to shake me home over the notoriously cobbled streets in the wee hours, but somehow I nearly always felt that I was a big enough boy to make it home on my own. However, the further south I descended my avenue, the more deserted it and the side streets became, making circumspection mandatory while crossing them. Nothing evil ever happened to me, but the last 150 metres before my solid gate didn’t have any street lights at all, and I had to rely on the ones quickly fading into insignificance behind my back, as well as on some dim driveway lights surrounding select properties. Just before reaching my haven I had to pass by a gated community with a vehicle barrier and an illumined station normally containing an armed guard. In between that and my house there was just the darkness outside the botanical garden to be negotiated and then I was home, pushing the wooden door inserted in the huge wooden gate inwards and again entering the peculiar scent of centuries past.
In the end I missed not having a balcony or terrace that could be reached straight from my bedroom. Only the apartment next to mine had one and it already had tenants. The reason I felt my own balcony to be indispensable was of the view it would have offered of the Volcán de Agua, taking up a huge portion of the horizon to the south. Once again I had to conclude that in the long run I don’t like too much to stay in places where I feel that the landscape dominates me. Antígua is located at the bottom of a flat valley surrounded by volcanoes and mountains. For me to enjoy such vistas I need to have an elevated point somewhere from which I can contemplate the grandeur of la naturaleza. It could be a balcony, or a roof terrace, but it generally needs to be something above ground or, if it’s on ground level, it needs to have a free view ahead, preferably ending with a slanting bluff. My apartment didn’t have that and even though I knew the iron bars, even on the windows facing the interior of this old complex, were there to protect me, I began to feel imprisoned. It was time to break free and make a leap for Lago de Atitlán. The essence of that experience in turn is perhaps best conveyed in a travel letter that I sent shortly afterwards to my spiritual brother and most poetic colleague Kenneth Geneser. By all means the impressions recorded below possess the non-negligible merit of having being formulated in connection with my first visit to this wonderland, and so have the freshness of a recent inspiration, as opposed to the memory archaeology invariably associated with the digging and evaluating of a more distant past. Without further ado I thus invite the reader to feel included in my envoy and its ensuing enthuses:
Dearest Brother,
This was most certainly meant to be a letter reminiscent of the good old days when epistles took their epic time to arrive at their destination. Temptation, however, was too great. Instead of waiting, like an Alexander von Humboldt, for the enduring Indian to stick the letter inside one of two leather bags straddling the mule, and then embark on the arduous trek up and down steep and narrow gorges, only to arrive in the capital a week later, where the letter would be reloaded on to the stagecoach and, after another three days, reach the Caribbean coast; instead of subsequently waiting for the wind to turn and allow the heavily loaded ketch to weigh anchor and set sails for Aruba, its first port of call on a journey that doesn’t end until in Cádiz two months later; instead of waiting for the next ship to take the letter over stormy Biscay to Rotterdam, and then for the schooner to carry it onwards, past the Friesian islands and the treacherous Borkum Reef, arriving in Copenhagen on an unusually cold day in late April; instead of waiting for the mail boat from Copenhagen to finally dock in Rønne after the ice has melted in its port, and for the postman to reassume his Wednesday run to Arnager in order to hand over the stained, but still sturdily sealed, document to the stunned artist in his atelier, I said: instead of all this, which would have been the only way to go about these things two hundred years ago, I hereby expedite this travel account by the speed of light, via Boolean algebra, electrons, positrons, neutrinos, corpuscles and other unimaginably small and fleeting things, in order that thou mayest, suddenly and unexpectedly, nay, virtually simultaneously, receive it in your own electronic magic box!
Imagine a Persian style paraideza as described by Isidore of Alexandria, as a Garden of Eden bereft of its divine children, in the centre of which a source has sprung up. Over time this source has turned into a lake. Its banks are lined with trees bearing all kinds of fruit; on one slope grows the Tree of Life itself. The climate is neither hot nor cold, but an eternal flowery spring. The lake feeds four rivers simultaneously indicating the four cardinal points. All is surrounded by ridges crowned by a Ring of Fire preventing illicit entry.
This, dear Brother, is what I, sitting on the balcony of my own hotel room, presently have before and around me. I can thus confirm the old hermetic rumour claiming there really is a Paradise on Earth — for artists and poets. Lago de Atitlán is its name and it so precisely fits Isidore’s description that it can no longer be any doubt about it. ‘The j
ourney to Atitlán’ — doesn’t the title alone sound like some kind of initiation? — and surely some will be tempted to associate to the illusive Carlos Castaneda and his encounters with the legendary Don Juan. But in fact there is not just Don Juan and Tirso de Molina here.
For the sake of illustration: imagine throwing the English romantic poets pêle-mêle into this magic cauldron — a Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, de Quincey, as well as the challenging German team with Kleist, Hölderlin and Novalis in the line of attack, backed up by pictorial symbolists such as Caspar David Friedrich, Eugen Bracht and Arnold Böcklin, in turn garnished with some French poets following in Chateaubriand’s footsteps. My bet is that they would never manage to crawl up and out of it. Not that it is physically impossible — even if the slopes are steep they are not insurmountable — but because they simply wouldn’t ever want to leave! In short: this is Xanadu! Toteninsel! Der Gestade der Vergessenheit! The Island of the Damned! The Island of the Lotus Eaters! L’isle des Bienhereux! You will find the fata morgana of them all at some time of the day, in the light playing around the vanishing point of a distant cape, in the shadow of three giant fire-breathing monsters towering high above the aquatic expanse: the volcanic cones of San Pedro, Tolimán and Atitlán.
In scientific terms this body of water is the consequence of a gigantic volcanic eruption that took place some 85,000 years ago — an hour on the geological time scale — spreading pumice and dust that are present in the fossil and stratigraphic records from Florida to Ecuador. In the process the massive crater imploded, creating a caldera that subsequently filled with water, transforming the scene of violent primeval creation into one of serenity. Because of this — and you don’t really need to accept theories of energy meridians, spiritual vortexes and other pyramidal miracles two believe it: here the moment of creation is ongoing. The Earth still vibrates, because underneath one’s feet hot lava is fermenting and the great Toliman himself had his last known eruption as late as in 1853, geologically not even a minute but a fraction of a second ago.
Incidents of Travel in Latin America Page 29