by Bruce Wydick
She and Sofia soon gave up their seats to a pregnant woman and her mother, and they stood in the aisle, pressed fully against the other passengers, holding their backpacks against their chests.
The bus pulled onto the two-lane Pan-American Highway, traveling slowly at first when climbing to elevation, but then at magnificent speed when it reached a downgrade. Every so often the bus stopped along the Pan-American to gather a few more passengers on its way to Huehue. They approached a roadside stop, where half a dozen preteen boys waited for the bus. There was no longer room for more passengers, even standing in the aisle, but somehow four of the boys managed to jam their way in. The other two ran to the back of the bus and climbed onto the ladder that led up to the large steel rack on top.
“Are those kids actually going to ride on that thing down the highway?” Angela asked.
“Unfortunately, I think so,” responded Sofia.
The bus picked up to forty, fifty, and then sixty miles per hour, the boys still hanging on the ladder smiling and waving through the window to the graduate students standing in the aisle, now pushed toward the back of the bus by the crush of incoming passengers. The bus headed toward a sharp mountain corner and one of the boys dangled by one arm and one leg off to the side of the ladder, letting the bus whip him through the breeze around the turn. Fortunately, no car met them coming the other direction. The second boy giggled and then began to fight for the same spot on the ladder so he could try it on the next turn.
“Wow,” was all Angela could manage to say.
“Angela, are you feeling ill at ease in your native homeland?” inquired Alex.
“Hey, Alex, why don’t you hop outside and play on the rack with the chicos,” she retorted.
With a grind of the transmission, the driver commanded the moaning diesel engine of the bus into high gear. The raucous engine noise forced him to turn up his already blaring salsa music to full volume so that it could be heard more clearly. It seemed to Angela that the bus driver was in a much greater hurry along this road than he should be, or that a road this twisty should allow. Traveling at an intrepid velocity around blind corners, the bus caught up to a minivan from behind. After several minutes of perilous tailgating, the bus pulled into the oncoming traffic lane on the Pan-American to pass on a downgrade. The tension mounted inside Angela as the aged Blue Bird could muster only enough horsepower to slowly inch ahead of the minivan.
Glancing between some of the passengers standing in the aisle, Angela could make out a gray car approaching in the distance from the opposite direction. She looked down through the window aside the bus to see the minivan driver glance up at the bus driver. The look on his face made it clear that being passed by a full bus was presenting an open challenge to his masculinity. His lower jaw seemed to protrude slightly as he determinedly redirected his focus toward the road. To Angela it seemed like instead of allowing the bus to pass, he might actually be speeding up. As the bus inched ahead of the minivan, its diesel engine screamed in protest as the bus driver continued to ask for more on the accelerator pedal. Angela glanced over at Alex. Even Alex’s face now began to reveal genuine concern.
Eager to see if the driver was going to pull off the pass, the boys hanging on the back ladder swung out to the side to catch a view down the highway, returning quickly to the relative security of the ladder when they saw the ever-less-distant oncoming vehicle. Angela’s left hand clung to the seat next to her, and her right hand clutched her backpack around her chest. Her hands began to sweat and her fingernails drilled holes into the green vinyl of the old bus seat. With the oncoming car less than a hundred yards away, the minivan driver finally acquiesced. This allowed the bus to slip ahead of him in the right lane by about two feet, just as the oncoming car blew by them a split second later, clearing the front of the bus by no more than fifteen feet. Angela looked and saw that the expression on the old man’s face had remained a straight-ahead stare, completely unchanged and stoic, an unfazed veteran of Guatemalan bus travel. The boys on the rear ladder laughed with delight, mockingly waving adios as they pulled away from the minivan driver behind them.
“Schijten, that was a close one,” said Alex. Sofia glanced at Alex’s pallid face. “You okay, Alex?” she laughed. She then looked down on the bus seat at the small holes in the vinyl from Angela’s fingernails that were surrounded by a liquid handprint of sweat. Then she looked above the driver’s window, where someone had painted in bold script: Jesus Conduce Este Bus, or “Jesus Guides This Bus.”
Sofia pointed to the sign. “See, guys, there was nothing to worry about after all.”
CHAPTER 3
Alex
AFTER THREE AND A HALF HOURS, THE BUS PULLED INTO Cuatro Caminos, a transfer point outside where the Pan-American turns sharply to the north, intersecting with the north-south highway in the west that runs from Quetzaltenango north to Huehuetenango and then toward the Mexican border. The bus stopped, and the passengers got out to switch buses, buy something to eat, or use the toilets. These were the only options, for there was nothing else people did at Cuatro Caminos. The students hopped off the bus with their packs, hoping to find something for lunch.
Cuatro Caminos was not the cleanest place one might search for a bite to eat. Stationed on the intersection of the two highways were countless fruit and vegetable vendors and outdoor butchers selling mysterious cuts of meat hanging from hooks over countertops. One woman was selling chicken feet that were packed more than two feet high in an unrefrigerated glass case. An Exodus-like plague of greenish flies frenzily feasted on the garbage tossed aside by vendors and passengers and on many of the food items for sale. The morass of vendors and constant departure of smoke-belching buses gave Cuatro Caminos a constant reek of garbage and diesel.
Alex felt the need for a restroom and began to search. After a surprising length of time, he found a “pay baño” behind one of the food vendors. He handed a few coins to the teenage girl managing the baño, and she reciprocated with a roll of toilet paper. He walked into a kind of outhouse, which featured a fantastically soiled commode surrounded by rotting plywood walls nailed crudely together. In a short time, he returned to the bus with the ashen countenance of a man who had visited Hades and needed to work through it. “You’ll never believe the disgusting place I just went,” he announced to the women in a shaky voice, yet one that was nevertheless eager to relate the experience.
“Oh yes, I think we would,” replied Angela. “Spare us the details.”
“No, seriously. I’m not kidding you guys. The corporation that runs this bus system invests none of its profits in sanitation. Do you want to know how very bad that toilet was I just visited?”
“Actually, not at all,” said Angela. “We genuinely do not want to know what you saw in the baño. We don’t want to know how it smelled, what you did, or the hurdles you overcame in doing what you had to do . . . not anything about it, really. But whatever it was like, I’m sure it enhanced your solidarity with the oppressed.”
Sofia laughed and excused herself as she searched for bananas, which she had told them were reasonably safe.
Alex scowled, forced to reflect in solitude about the human degradation he had endured in the baño.
A few moments later, he headed toward one of the vendors. “Angela, I am having chicken feet. You should try some.”
“I’m not going to eat any of this stuff,” said Angela.
“Suit yourself,” he replied. “But don’t you think that we should make better attempts to blend with the local people, to sample native foods?”
“Oh, you’re already blending in great, Alex. I can hardly tell you apart from anyone here.” It was Angela’s turn to scowl, and she quickly left to join Sofia.
Alex purchased the chicken feet and hopped back on the bus. He tried one of them, nibbling a little of the meat right below the talons. A little chewy, but the taste of the salty meat was pleasing. He kept the rest in their plastic bag and put it in his backpack, perhaps for later.
But he could compete on other grounds. He remembered what one of his rhetoric professors in the Netherlands had told the class—debates are frequently won in the more fertile ground of the heart rather than in the head. To Angela’s expected presentation of the standard economic model, he planned a counterattack that harnessed not his nascent grasp of economic theory, but several gut-wrenching anecdotes of overseas sweatshop abuses by multinational corporations. He was proud of his sequence of examples, for each was more horrific than the next: pictures of abused local workers in multinational corporations with photos of facial injuries, dismembered limbs, and locked doors that kept underpaid workers from leaving a factory. He was particularly proud of a slide showing body burns on a factory worker in Indonesia who had been working with hot plastics to make baby dolls for American children. A picture was indeed worth more than a thousand words—wasn’t that the English idiom? And certainly more than a half hour of long-winded theories and statistics. It provided proof of the negative impact of globalization on the overseas poor. Solid proof.
He thought about how he had made some in the class cry for the plight of the workers and laugh with scorn at the multinational corporations, each within a few minutes of each other. And fortunately for him, the debate was scored by the class. Alex had swayed many and achieved a mighty victory. He learned later through one of her friends that it was the first B+ that Angela had earned since high school. He reflected back on it, pleased with his strategy and performance.
CHAPTER 4
Angela
NEW PASSENGERS BOARDED THE BUS TO HUEHUE, AND THE diesel engine grumbled back to life. Giving a final cry of “Huehue!” the conductor slapped the side of the bus twice with his palm, and with a magnificent blast of its earsplitting horn, it rolled away.
As it turned northward from Cuatro Caminos, the bus steadily gained elevation, rising from 7,500 feet to over 9,500 feet. They were driving in the clouds, and the air of the western highlands became chilly and moist, even in the afternoon. It started to rain. The bus was less crowded now, and they were able to sit. Alex slept in the seat in front, and Angela sat in silence next to Sofia. Angela was leaning her forehead against the bus window as Sofia rested her chin on her backpack that she held on her lap. They gazed through the droplets on the window at the bittersweet contrasts of Guatemala: the lush countryside dense with adobe houses and endless acres of lush, green coffee plants; rows of corn, or milpa, sown alongside black beans; the ornate, multicolored, handwoven clothing adorning the women performing backbreaking tasks that should have been carried out by machines, or at least animals; the lack of clean water amidst the abundance of rainfall; malnourished children playing in the mud in front of their homes with a wealthier child’s broken toys.
Angela looked thoughtfully at the rural landscape of her native country. Her thoughts turned to the civil war, which had ended little more than a decade before, and whose theater had been concentrated in the very area in which they were traveling. At UCLA she had written a term paper on the conflict in her Latin American studies class. The results of her research had been grim: up to 200,000 dead or disappeared, most notoriously in Huehuetenango and the adjacent Quiché province.
Though she didn’t think of herself as much of a revolutionary, she was beginning to understand how people living in this kind of destitution could be driven to violence. But there had been no reconciliation, no admission of guilt, no government apologies for the massacre. There was little official acknowledgment, let alone sympathy, in this country toward the rural villagers who found themselves caught between the guerrillas and the Guatemalan army with its civil patrols, threatened by both with death if they failed to align with the proper side. Yet every so often a new mass grave was discovered, full of the skeletons of indigenous peasants, frequently women and children, who had given in to the pressure of the wrong group, or were merely accused of doing so. How many of these skeletons pulled out of the ground had been her relatives or their friends, neighbors, the people they saw every day, bought food from, or who taught their children in school?
Angela continued to stare out of the bus window, now noticing a small adobe hovel not more than twenty-five yards from where they were stopped to pick up some passengers. Chickens and pigs sifted through the garbage in the front. Children in ragged clothes were playing soccer with a half-deflated plastic ball. Another nearby child caught her attention, a little girl who appeared to be mentally disabled. “Sofia, look.”
But Sofia was already watching.
The little girl was wearing a raggedy top and no pants, and she had mud streaked down her legs. Trying to play with the others, she began to tire, and would sit down to rest. Some of the other children laughed because when she tried to sit down in the grass, a couple of the chickens would come up and peck at her. Scared, the little girl began to cry, but seemed to lack the energy to get up. The other children laughed again as an aggressive chicken pecked at her thigh. The little girl screamed and weakly tried to swat at the chicken, which was too fast for her. She must have spilled some food on herself when she was eating, Angela thought, and the chicken was pecking at it. The process repeated once again. Sofia and Angela glanced at each other, not knowing what to say. The scene was beginning to make Angela sick. The bus slowly pulled away, rounding a corner, and Angela strained to look, but everything was lost from view.
The disquieting image lingered in her mind as the bus rumbled on through the highlands. Angela continued to stare out the bus window covered with rain droplets. Images of poverty passed minute by minute over the reflection of her own face in the window: shoeless children playing in the mud, peasants tending rainy coffee fields, mothers carrying firewood and children at the same time, protecting themselves and the wood from the rain by wearing trash bags with holes cut for their arms.
Her mind was shifting back and forth from her growing subjective emotion and feelings to the objective and the academic, and then back again. Each piece of passing village scenery provided another window into a parallel life, a life that by some stroke of fortune she was chosen not to lead. This is my life, she thought. I am a young mother walking in the rain, carrying firewood and my baby back to my little adobe house with the dirt floor. My husband toils futilely in the maize field, and my children are malnourished and play barefoot in the mud.
Then back to the academic: How is this possible, for such abject poverty to exist in a land so rich in soil and natural wealth? Both economic and political freedom seem to exist here now as much as in most other places. What keeps the system from working for these people? What keeps it working for me? Angela pondered these questions alone in silence for some time.
And then she decided to break the silence. “Sofia, why are these people so poor?” she asked, turning from the window to the Argentinean economist with the long brown hair seated beside her. It was an academic question that, as of this very moment in Angela’s life, had become intensely personal.
She turned to Angela. “You mean why are rich countries rich and poor countries poor?” Sofia had probably pondered questions like this for several years now. “Yes . . . the puzzle behind all of the puzzles. I wish I had an easy answer to that question, but I don’t.”
“Do you have a complicated one?” said Angela, almost happy to hear that she hadn’t missed some pat answer while dozing off in class at UCLA.
“I suppose I do,” Sofia replied as she gazed out of the window at the same village scenes passing by, “but it probably won’t totally satisfy you.
At least it doesn’t satisfy me.”
CHAPTER 5
The young woman slowly sat up from her place in the straw. She tucked her hair back underneath her beautifully embroidered cinta, which had been dislodged as she had hidden herself, and peered again outside through the crack in the barn wall. Several more women were being rounded up in the group about fifty meters away, as Mildred and two other women attempted to negotiate with the officer who had approached them. The officer did not want to listen, and he appeared to intentionally turn his head in the other direction. Another soldier pushed one of the women back so hard that she tripped over her sandals, falling to the ground backwards; she was helped up by one of the other women. The soldiers were adding more women from the village to their group. Some held their babies, and many of the women were crying, pleading with the members of the Patrulla Civil, the local civil patrol, who led them to the group. One of her neighbors was being forcibly dragged across the ground by the arm.
The young woman’s thoughts turned to her husband. He had been working a field about a half mile from the village. Would he be safe? Would he try to come for them? She hoped he would not.
She must not be discovered, for if she were found hiding, she knew what the soldiers would think. Why would she have been hiding if she were innocent of cooperating with the guerrillas? Only a guilty person would be hiding from the soldiers.
But, of course, the guerrillas had come into the village.
At least seven or eight had been shot and had bullet wounds. They needed help. They told the villagers their story. Many of their platoon had died in a firefight with the army, and they needed food and medicine. Like everybody in the village, she was afraid when the guerrillas came. The army had poisoned the water supply of one village just for providing cups of water to the guerrillas. She had even heard that they had cut out the tongues of some accused of speaking to the guerillas, as an example to prevent future collaboration.