View of the World

by Norman Lewis

  As the tumult showed no signs of abating I walked down to the plaza, which had filled up with blank-faced Indians moving slowly round in an anti-clockwise direction as if stirred up by some gigantic invisible spoon. There were frequent scuffles and outcries as young men singled out girls from the promenading groups and broke coloured eggs on their heads, rubbing the contents well into the thick black hair. The eggs were being sold by the basketful all over the plaza, and they turned out to have been emptied, refilled with some brittle, wafer-like substance, repaired and then painted. When a girl sometimes returned the compliment, the gallant thus favoured stopped to bow, and said: ‘Muchas gracias.’

  Calmo, whom I soon ran into, his jacket pockets bulging with eggs, said it looked as if there were going to be a fiesta after all. He couldn’t think why. There was really no excuse for it. The fashionable town-Indians, most of them shopkeepers, had turned out in all their finery, headed by the ‘Queen of Huehuetenango’ herself – a splendidly beflounced creature with ribbon-entwined pigtails down to her thighs, who was said to draw her revenues from a maison de rendezvous possessing radioactive baths. There was a sedate sprinkling of whites, hatted and begloved for the occasion.

  Merchants had put up their stalls and were offering sugar skulls, holy pictures, plastic space-guns, and a remedy for heart-sickness which is a speciality of Huehuetenango and tastes like inferior port. We found the lean horseman launching his rockets in military fashion from a wooden rack-like contraption. They were aimed so as to hiss as alarmingly low as possible over the heads of the crowds, showering them with sparks, and sometimes they cleared the building opposite and sometimes they did not. Other enthusiasts were discharging mortaretes, miniature flying bombs, which leaped two or three hundred feet straight up into the air before exploding with an ear-stunning crack. The motorcycle policeman on his scarlet Harley-Davidson with wide-open exhaust, and eight front and six rear lights, came weaving and bellowing round the plaza at intervals of about a minute, and a travelling movie-show was using part of the cathedral’s baroque façade as the screen for a venerable Mexican film called Ay mi Jalisco featuring a great deal of gunplay.

  A curious hollow structure looking like a cupola sliced in half had been built on the top of the town hall, and about this time powerful lights came on in its interior and nine sad-faced men in dark suits entered it by an invisible door, carrying what looked like several grand pianos. A moment later these pieces of furniture had been placed end to end to form an enormous marimba, under an illuminated sign that said ‘Musica Civica’. A cosmic voice coughed electrically and then announced that in response to the esteemed public’s many requests the municipal orchestra would have pleasure in rendering a selection of notable composers’ works. Eighteen hammers then came down on the keys with a responding opening flourish, and the giant marimba raced into an athletic version of ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’.

  Calmo and I took refuge from the torrent of sound in a tavern called The Little Chain of Gold. It was a place of great charm containing a shrine and a newly installed jukebox in addition to the usual accessories, and was decorated with beautiful calendars given away by Guatemalan bus companies, and a couple of propaganda pictures of mutilated corpses put out by the new government after the last revolution. The Little Chain advertised the excellence of its ‘hotsdoogs’. Most of its customers were preparados, Indians who had done military service and had rejected their tribal costumes in favour of brightly coloured imitations of American army uniforms. Some of them added a slightly sinister touch to their gay ensembles of reds and blues by covering the lower part of their faces with black cloths, a harmless freak of fashion which I was told had originated in a desire to breathe in as little dust as possible when foot-slogging along the country roads.

  Calmo said that the main difference between a preparado and a tribal Indian was that the preparado, who had acquired a civilised taste for whisky, couldn’t afford to get drunk so often as an uncivilised drinker of aguardiente.

  We drank the aguardiente. It smelt of ether and had a fierce laboratory flavour. Every time the door opened the marimba music pressed on our eardrums. Calmo made an attempt to detain one of the serving girls. ‘Don’t go away, little treasure, and I’ll bring you some flowers from the gardens in the plaza, whatever they fine me.’ He received so baleful a stare for his pains that he dropped the girl’s hand as if she had bitten him. At last the hour of civic music ran out. From where we sat we saw that the Mexican outlaws had ceased to gallop across the cathedral wall. The crowds had thinned into groups of stubborn drunkards. Calmo was becoming uneasy. ‘In my opinion it is better to go. These people are very peace-loving, but when they become drunk they sometimes assassinate each other in places like this. Not for malicious reasons, understand me, but as the result of wagers or to demonstrate the accuracy of their aim with the various fire-arms they possess.’

  We paid our bill and had just got up when the door was flung open and three of the toughest-looking desperadoes I had ever seen reeled in. These were no shrinking Indians, but hard-muscled ladinos, half-breeds who carried in their faces all the Indian’s capacity for resentment but none of his fear. They wore machetes as big as naval cutlasses in their belts. For a moment they blocked the doorway eyeing the company with suspicion and distaste, then one of them spotted the jukebox, which was still a rarity in this part of the world. His expression softened and he made for our table putting each foot down carefully as if afraid of blundering into quicksands. He bowed. ‘Forgive me for addressing you, sir, but are you familiar with the method of manipulating the machine over there?’

  I said I was.

  ‘Perhaps then you could inform me whether the selection of discs includes a marimba?’

  I went over to the jukebox. These ladinos, I thought, would still be living the frontier life of the last century; a breed of tough, illiterate outcasts, picking up a livelihood as best they could, smugglers and gunmen if pushed to it, ready, as it seemed from the frequent newspaper reports, to hack each other – or the lonely traveller – to pieces for a few dollars, and yet with it a tremendous, almost deadly punctiliousness in ordinary matters of social intercourse. I studied the typewritten list in Spanish. There were several marimbas. The ladino looked relieved. He conferred in an undertone with the other two fugitives from justice, came back, bowed again, and handed me a Guatemalan ten-cent piece. ‘If you could induce the machine to play “Mortal Sin” for us, we should be much indebted.’

  I returned the ladino five cents change, found a US nickel – which is fairly common currency in Guatemala – and put it in the slot, while the three ladinos edged forward, studiously casual but eager to watch the reptilian mechanical gropings by which their choice was singled out and manoeuvred into the playing position. ‘Pecado Mortal’ turned out to be a rollicking son – a kind of paso doble – executed with the desperate energy of which the sad music-makers of Central America are so prodigal. Calmo and I were halfway through the door when I felt a tap on the shoulder. The principal bandit was insisting that we join him for a drink. ‘Otherwise, my friends and I would feel hurt, gentlemen.’ He laid bare his teeth in a thin, bitter smile. We went back and sat down again. While he was getting the drinks Calmo said, ‘In the education of our people the most important thing taught after religion is urbanidad – good manners. Even those who have no schooling are taught this. I do not think that we should risk offending these men by showing a desire to leave before they do.’

  A moment later our bandit was back with double aguardientes and a palmful of salt for us to lick in the proper manner, between gulps. The music stopped, and his face clouded with disappointment. Behind him a lieutenant loomed, swaying slightly, eyes narrowed like a Mongolian sage peering into the depths of a crystal, mouth tightened by the way life had gone. He was holding a coin. ‘Might I trouble you to perform the same service for me, sir?’ he asked politely.

  It turned out that the second mestizo wanted to hear ‘Mortal Sin’ agai
n. ‘It is remarkable,’ he said, ‘and most inspiring. I do not think it can be bettered.’ The three tough hombres moved away uncertainly towards the jukebox again, simple wonderment struggling beneath the native caution of their expressions. The needle crackled in the ruined grooves, and we heard the over-familiar overture of ear-splitting chords. Someone found the volume control and turned it up fully. Every object in the room was united in a tingling vibration. The second bandit drew his machete with the smooth, practised flourish of a Japanese swordsman, and scooped the cork out of a fresh bottle of aguardiente with a twist of its point. Two more members of the band stood waiting, coins in hand.

  ‘Mortal Sin’ had been played five times, and we were still chained by the polite usage of Central America to our chairs, still gulping down aguardiente and licking the salt off our palms, when it suddenly occurred to me that it was unreasonable that an electric train should be rumbling through a subway immediately beneath us in Huehuetenango. I got up, grinning politely at our hosts, and, balancing the liquid in my glass, went to the door. The lamps in the plaza jogged about like spots in front of my eyes, and then, coming through the muffled din from The Little Chain of Gold, I heard a noise like very heavy furniture being moved about in uncarpeted rooms somewhere in space. The world shifted slightly, softened, rippled, and there was an aerial tinkling of shattered glass. I felt a brief unreasoning stab of the kind of panic that comes when in a nightmare one suddenly begins a fall into endless darkness. Aguardiente from my glass splashed on my hand, and at that moment all the lights went out and the music stopped with a defeated growl. The door of The Little Chain opened and Calmo and one of the ladinos burst through it into the sudden crisp stillness and the moonlight. Calmo had taken the ladino by the forearm and the shoulder – ‘And so my friend we go now to buy candles. Patience – we shall soon return.’

  ‘But in the absence of electricity,’ the ladino grumbled sadly, ‘the machine no longer functions.’

  ‘Perhaps they will restore the light quickly,’ Calmo said.

  ‘In that case we shall play the machine again. We will spend the whole night drinking and playing the machine.’ The ladino waved in salutation and fell back through the doorway of The Little Chain.

  We moved off quickly under the petrified foliage of the plaza. Nothing stirred. The world was solid under our feet again. A coyote barked several times sounding as if it were in the next street, and a distant clock chimed sweetly an incorrect hour.

  ‘A quiet evening,’ I remarked. ‘With just one small earthquake thrown in.’

  ‘A tremor, not an earthquake,’ Calmo said. ‘An earthquake must last at least half a minute. This was a shaking of secondary importance.’

  There was a pause while he translated his next sentence into English. He then said: ‘Sometimes earthquakes may endure for a minute, or even two minutes. In that case it is funny … No, not funny, I mean very serious.’

  2

  A Letter from Belize

  SOMEONE IN MERIDA said that a good way to go to Belize was from Chetumal in south-east Mexico by a plane known in those parts as ‘El Insecto’, that did the twice-weekly run. My informant pointed out that this route was cheaper and more direct than going via Guatemala, as well as giving anyone the chance to get away from the insipidities of air travel with the big international lines. I agreed with him, and went down to Chetumal on a veteran DC3 that was the last surviving plane of a small tattered fleet once possessed by this particular company. Chetumal turned out to be a nicely painted-up little town with a wonderful prison, like a Swedish sanatorium. There were seven people at the airport seeing other people off for every one that was travelling, and going through the customs and emigration was a purely family affair. I found ‘EI Insecto’, which was a four-seated Cessna, in a field full of yellow daisies, and helped the pilot to pull it out on to the runway. When it took off he leaned across me to make sure that the door was properly shut. There were a few cosy rattles in the cabin, of the kind that most cars develop after some years of honourable service. These added to the pleasantly casual feeling of the trip. Duplicate controls wavered a foot or two from the tip of my nose, and the pilot cautioned me against taking hold of them to steady myself in an air pocket. ‘These small planes take more flying than an airliner,’ he said. But apart from fiddling with the throttle lever, probably out of pure habit, and an occasional dab at the joystick, he did nothing to influence our course as we wobbled on through the air currents.

  Beneath, the not very exuberant forest of the Orange Walk district of British Honduras unrolled itself. As the Cessna flew at about 2000 feet, the details were clear enough. Even birds were visible. A pair of flamingos parted company like a torn flag, and a collection of white maggots, that were egrets, were eating into the margins of a pool. We were following the coastline, a mile or two inland, with the horizons wrapped up in turbans of cumulus cloud, and a few white thorns of fishing-boats’ sails sticking up through the sea’s surface. Approaching Belize, swamps began to lap through the dull, dusty green of the jungle. They were gaudy with stagnation; sulphurous yellows, vitriolic greens and inky blues stirred together like badly mixed dyes in a vat. The pilot pointed out some insignificant humps and thickenings in the forest’s texture. These were Mayan remains; root-shattered pyramids and temples. Around them would lie the undisturbed tombs, the skeletons in their jade ornaments. The pilot estimated that only ten per cent of these sites had ever been interfered with.

  The airport at Belize was negatively satisfying. There were no machines selling anything, playing anything, or changing money. Nor were there any curios, soft drinks or best-sellers in sight. Under a notice imparting uninteresting information about the colony’s industries, a nurse waited, ready to pop a thermometer into the mouth of each incoming passenger. The atmosphere was one of somnolent rectitude. A customs officer, as severely aloof as a voodoo priest, ignored my luggage, which was taken over by a laconic taxi-driver, who opened the door of his car with a spanner and nodded to me to get in. We drove off at a startling pace down a palmetto-fringed road, by a river that was full of slowly moving, very green water. Presently the road crossed the river over an iron bridge, and the driver stopped the car. Winding down the window he put out his head and peered down with silent concentration at the water. Although he made no comment, I subsequently learned that he was probably admiring a thirty-foot-long sawfish, which lived on the river bed at this spot, and was claimed locally to be the largest of its species recorded anywhere in the world.

  From a view of its outskirts Belize promised to live up to the romantic picture I had formed of it in my imagination. There were the wraiths of old English thatched cottages (a class of structure pleasantly known in Belize as ‘trash’), complete with rose gardens with half the palings missing from the fences. Some of their negro occupants were to be seen shambling about aimlessly, and others had fallen asleep in the attitudes of victims of murder plots. Pigeons and vultures huddled amicably about the roofs. Notices on gates which hung askew from single rusty hinges warned the world at large to beware of non-existent dogs.

  Disillusionment came a few minutes later when we pulled up at the hotel. Here it was that I realised that what information I had succeeded in collecting about Belize before leaving England was out of date. According to an account published in the most recent book dealing with this part of the world, the single hotel had possessed all the seedy glamour one might have looked for in such a remote and reputedly neglected colonial possession. But I had arrived eighteen months too late. Newcomers are now conducted, without option, to a resplendent construction of the kind for which basic responsibility must rest with Frank Lloyd Wright – a svelte confection of pinkish ferroconcrete, artfully simple, and doubtlessly earthquake-resistant. As the Fort George turned out to serve good strong English tea, as the waiter didn’t expect to be tipped after each meal, and as you could leave your shoes outside the bedroom door to be cleaned without their being stolen, there were – even from the first – n
o possible grounds for complaint. But it soon became clear that besides these considerable virtues the Fort George had many secondary attractions which peeped out shyly as the days went by. Little by little the rich, homely, slightly dotty savour of British Honduras seeped through its protective walls to reach me. I began to take a collector’s pride in such small frustrations as the impossibility of getting a double whisky served in one glass. Two single whiskies always came. Also, the architectural pretensions were much relieved by such pleasing touches as the show-cases in the vestibule which displayed, along with a fine Mayan incense-burner in the form of a grotesque head, a few pink antlers of coral, odd-shaped roots, horns carved into absurd birds and a detachable pocket made of pink shells, recommended as ‘a chic addition to the cocktail frock’.

  Part of the Fort George’s charm arose from the fact that the staff, who spoke among themselves a kind of creole dialect, sometimes had difficulty in understanding a guest’s requirements. This went with a certain weakness in internal liaisons, and from the operation of these two factors arose many delightfully surrealistic incidents. At any hour of the night, for example, one might be awakened by a maid bearing a raw potato on a silver tray, or be presented with four small whiskies, a bottle of aspirins and a picture postcard of the main façade of the Belize fish market, dated 1904. The Fort George, incidentally, must be one of the very few hotels in the world where the manager is prepared to supply to order, and without supplementing the all-in charge, such local delicacies as roast armadillo, tapir or paca – the last-mentioned being a large edible rodent, in appearance something between a rabbit and a pig, whose flesh costs more per pound than any other variety offered for sale in the market. Of these exotic specialities I was only able to try the paca, and can report that, as usual in the case of such rare and sought-after meats, the flavour was delicate to the point of non-existence. The fascination of life at the Fort George grew steadily. It was a place where any beginner could have gone to get his basic training in watching the world go by, and many an hour I spent there, over a cold beer and the free plateful of lobster that always came with it, listening to the slap of the pelicans as they hit the water, while doves the size of sparrows fidgeted through the flowering bushes all round; and the rich Syrian – part of the human furniture of such places – drove his yellow Cadillac endlessly up and down the deserted hundred yards of the Marine Parade.