by Bruce Wydick
“Sure, although I can’t guarantee at this point that we will not see it again after I drink it.” Alex sincerely did not want to throw up in front of the sweet girl with the angelic face.
“Let me see how bad your temperature is.” She bent down and put her hand on his forehead and left it there a few seconds. Her hands were soft. “You’re very hot. Let me also get a cool washcloth for your head.” She turned to her sister. “Ema, buscame un paño por favor.” Alex lacked the energy to protest.
Ema brought the washcloth and Lourdes left, returning a few minutes later with some tea in a worn china cup and the washcloth. She put the washcloth on Alex’s head but left her hand there for a few minutes, closed her eyes, and began to whisper some words under her breath in Mam, her Mayan language. Ema stood nearby, her eyes shut tight. The words sounded mysterious to Alex.
“Are you casting a spell on me?” mumbled Alex, his eyes closed, feeling like the last battle of Armageddon was waging inside his intestines.
“No, I just said a prayer for you. My pastor teaches us that when someone is sick, we should put our hand on them and pray for them to get well.”
“What if I don’t believe in God?” asked Alex. “Does it work still?”
She paused and seemed to consider the question. “I suppose that’s up to him,” she said.
Alex studied her face one last time and then began to drift off to sleep.
Rich arrived back from town to Fernando and Juana’s house about the time darkness had set in. The home was now illuminated by a single naked lightbulb dangling from frayed, improvised wiring from a beam in the center of the house. Alex was still lying on the bed, his clothes drenched with sweat, weak and green. Lourdes was sitting on a stool next to the bed, trying to feed him some soup with a spoon. Ema was by her side, wide-eyed and silent, helping to care for the interesting new foreigner who had somehow landed in their house.
“You look like something the dog’s been playin’ with under the porch,” Rich pronounced as he looked at Alex. “But seems like you’re getting the best health care available. Probably don’t even need the cipro.”
Alex was not completely convinced Rich was joking. He responded in Spanish for the benefit of the family around him, “Rich, give me drugs. I am very, very lousy.”
Rich handed him a couple of ciprofloxacin tablets and Alex washed them down with some of Lourdes’s tea.
Lourdes looked at Rich. “Thank you. You are very kind.”
“Oh, I know. Always getting confused with Mother Teresa.”
Rich said to Alex, “You’re not going to be able to walk back to the hotel in this condition, we can’t get a jeep up here, and I don’t feel like strapping you to the top of a mule, so Fernando and Juana have offered to have you stay here tonight. Agreed?”
Alex looked at Fernando and Juana. Fernando said quickly, “Alex, there is no problem. We will take care of you. If you get worse, we’ll summon a team of men to carry you by stretcher down to the doctor.”
“I am sincerely hoping this will not happen,” Alex replied.
Fernando, Juana, and Lourdes took turns making Alex feel as comfortable as possible, and as Alex rested, he watched the family drink cups of coffee around the fire lit between the three rocks on the floor of their house. The family was speaking mostly in Mam, but he could understand the gist of their conversation from the interlaced Spanish: stories about the day, the sick foreigner, the usual complaints about the price of coffee, the latest news about others in the village. Alex had never grown up with a family like this. Giggles from Lourdes, little Ema, and their mother hung like sparkly ornaments on the banter. Alex liked the sound of Lourdes laughing. In low tones the family continued their conversation around the orange glow of the fire as Alex fell asleep.
Alex awoke the next morning, far from perfect, but significantly better. Fernando was already working in the field and Juana had gone into town to buy some things for the house. Lourdes was already cooking him breakfast over the fire pit.
“Buenos dias,” she said cheerfully as Alex opened his eyes. “Do you want some breakfast?”
“Actually, that is sounding great,” admitted Alex. “I think the battle is over and the good guys mostly have won.”
Lourdes laughed. “I knew my prayer would make you better.”
“Either that or maybe the cipro,” said Alex.
“And don’t forget my soup . . . ,” countered Lourdes as she cocked her head with a smile.
“Certainly that was it,” agreed Alex. He paused. He studied her face now that he was feeling better, there was more light, and he could see more clearly. It was indeed a sweet face, but now he saw the depth of it. It was the face of someone who had experienced more than life’s share of hardship, but had responded by developing a greater sympathy for the sufferings of others.
“Lourdes, do you really believe that prayers work?”
“I know they do. We could have never made it through el crises a few years ago without prayer.”
“What crisis?” asked Alex.
“El crises de café. About five years ago my father nearly lost everything when the price of coffee went so low. We only had money to eat two meals a day, and many people in our village were almost starving. That is rare in Guatemala. Here we are poor, but we are usually not starving. That was a very bad time, and we prayed to God to help us.” She was silent for a moment, and a little pensive. “Is it really true that you don’t believe in God?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure. But whether there is a God or not, I’d rather put my energy into making things work better down here.”
“What things?” Lourdes was curious.
“All the things wrong with this crummy world. Lourdes, there is way too much economic injustice. Look at your family, half starving because the world price of coffee happens to get cut in half one year. Do you know what caused this, Lourdes? Do you know what caused your family to almost starve five years ago?”
Lourdes shook her head; she did not know.
“It was because some imbeciles at the World Bank decided to finance a bunch of new coffee production in Vietnam, that’s why. Ten million new bags of cheap coffee on the world market caused the price to go way, way down, making your lives miserable. Did your father have any say about this? No, and neither did any of the other small coffee growers in the world who suffered because of those idiots.” He used the words imbécil and idiota, not realizing the extraordinarily abrasive connotations of these words in Spanish.
“But with God’s help and the help of everyone in the village, we made it through okay,” insisted Lourdes.
“Yes, but with a more just world, you would not have to ask God to bail you out so often.”
“Alex, no matter what, there will always be troubles. Even look at you, your sickness could have been much worse. There are so many things that we try to control, but we will never be able to. We can do the best we can, but in the end it is all in God’s hands.”
As Alex lay in bed, they talked easily through most of the morning about growing up in Guatemala and the Netherlands. Alex’s Spanish was becoming more comfortable, and Lourdes spoke slowly and helpfully, correcting his mistakes gently. She also asked Alex to teach her a few words in Dutch.
After some time Lourdes stood up and her expression turned somber. “Alex, I need to leave now to Huehuetenango for a doctor’s appointment.” Then she told him, “I’m going to have a baby.”
Alex paused. “You . . . will have a baby?”
“Yes, in about six months. The doctor says the twentieth of November.”
Alex was a little stunned. “You are married?” he asked.
“No, Alex. I must tell you it is difficult for me to talk about this. A few months ago I was walking up the path from a meeting at our church; it was night. I was . . . attacked. Me violó, Alex.”
“Oh no, Lourdes . . .” Alex could feel the anger welling inside him. How could anyone hurt this person?
“Yes, a man from
another village. He is now in prison in Sololá.”
“Your father must have wanted to kill him.”
“He was very angry, Alex. Yes. As I was, of course. And I also felt ashamed. I should not have been walking alone . . .”
“There is nothing for you to be ashamed about,” said Alex, but she didn’t seem to hear him.
“I even had a sponsor from the United States, a husband and wife who supported me all through my school. Now it will be hard for me to continue in school. How would they feel if they knew I had taken such a foolish risk after all the opportunity they have given me?”
“Lourdes, you must not think this way at all,” pleaded Alex.
“Anyway, I must go.” She collected a few things from around her parents’ house. “I hope you feel much better, Alex.”
“Thank you, Lourdes. I do feel better.” He said it not just to be appreciative; he really did feel better.
“A-dios, Alex.” She pronounced it slowly and deliberately to emphasize the literal meaning: go with God.
By later in the day Alex had mostly recovered and made the hike back down to San Pedro Necta, reflecting on the girl he had met in the campo and what she had told him. He joined the others at the hotel.
That night after dinner the students sat down together in Rich’s room at Hotel Chinita to calculate Fernando’s profit from his harvest: Altogether, Fernando’s costs had amounted to $102 for 780 pounds of coffee cherries, what would become a one-hundred-pound sack of roasted beans. On the revenue side, each of Fernando’s 2.5 hectares had about 2,500 coffee plants, and the yield of each hectare was about 17.6 hundred-pound sacks of roasted coffee. With a price on one-third of his crop from the co-op at $129 (of which one-quarter was marketed as fair trade) and $120 on the two-thirds of his crop he sold to the coyotes, this gave him an average price of $123 per sack, and an income of $924 for his entire crop. Added to the income of Fernando’s family was $189 dollars he received during the last year from other odd jobs. That plus some remittances sent by his relatives who immigrated to Los Angeles allowed Fernando and Juana to stay out of debt and keep food on the table. Provided there were no emergencies, the family was just able to cover its bills.
CHAPTER 11
Angela
ANGELA WAS SWEATING AS THE STUDENTS COMPLETED THE mountain hike back up to Fernando’s house. They had carried out some other surveys in the area, but this session would focus on background information, the history of his family in coffee cultivation. Juana greeted them affectionately, “Buenos dias a los muchachos de California!” Lourdes was working next to her, rolling dough to make tortillas.
“Buenos dias, Doña Juana.” They exchanged the mutual kiss on right cheeks, laughing awkwardly as Lourdes and her mother tried not to touch the students with their doughy hands. “Thanks for taking care of this particular muchacho,” said Sofia, motioning toward Alex.
“The patient behaved excellently,” responded Lourdes a little shyly, looking at Alex.
“That’s amazing,” replied Angela, surprised. “What did you feed him?”
“Está Don Fernando?” asked Sofia, inquiring if Fernando was home. Fernando appeared shortly from the field. They sat again around the old table. Lourdes brought them each cups of atol.
Fernando sat down next to Angela. “And how are you finding Guatemala, mi hija?”
“Bien, gracias, Don Fernando,” Angela answered, smiling and accepting the affectionate reference. The real answer, of course, was considerably more complicated. Every moment she spent inside a Guatemalan house was like a magic mirror that revealed more of the unsettling contrast between who she was and who she would have been, between her life as it was and as it would have been. This was the conflict within her heart. The conflict within her head was searching for the reasons why the contrast had to be so severe. As Fernando studied her face momentarily, she felt that somehow he sensed some of these things. But how could he?
Right now, however, it was time to continue interviews for the case study. “Fernando,” began Sofia, “tell us a little about your family. How long has your family cultivated coffee?”
He began to laugh to himself and look up in the direction of the blackened underside of the corrugated iron that was both his ceiling and his roof. “A long time, pues. A very, very long time . . .” But the laugh that moistened his eyes began to fade, leaving behind just the moistened eyes. Angela studied his face. A deeper melancholy seemed to lie behind the answer to this question.
He looked down for a while and then returned his gaze directly at the students. “I wish all of you could have talked with my great-aunt Ester before she passed away. She was always telling my cousins and me stories about our ancestors. I think she told us some stories a thousand times. And when she got old, her memory of the old stories stayed, but she would forget how many times she had already told them to us. So she would enjoy telling them to us over and over, just like it was the first time all over again.”
“What kind of stories?” asked Angela. Fernando looked at her and smiled, and then began.
April 1864
Isidro Ixtamperic lived during these early years of the nineteenth-century coffee boom with his wife, five sons, and three daughters. He was five generations removed from Fernando, the great-grandfather of Fernando’s grandfather, and lived in a Mam-speaking village near the small indigenous town of San Felipe. The small town was in the Department of Retalhuleu, about sixty miles south of Huehuetenango, bordering the Pacific coast. Generations of his family had lived in the region, its balmy climate and fertile soil nearly ideal for subsistence agricultural plots of maize and beans. It was also land that was nearly ideal for coffee cultivation.
Isidro did not own coffee land, but worked the land of a ladino cultivator named Póncio Mendoza. The Mendoza land he worked was based on a habilitación from an advance given when Isidro needed money three and a half years ago. He needed money to buy medicine for one of his daughters suffering from tuberculosis. The child had died, but the debt remained to the Mendoza family, and well exceeded the supposed legal limit of fifteen pesos. Although in many ways Mendoza had been willing to provide for other needs of Isidro’s family, the more he provided, the more Isidro’s debt seemed to grow. After a while permanent debt and labor obligation simply became a way of life. As the patrón, Póncio Mendoza would provide, and the peon Isidro Ixtamperic would be obligated to him. It was a cycle that continued as predictably as one season followed the next.
With the demand for coffee surging in the rich countries of the world, Guatemalan ladinos and European immigrants flocked to the west to establish coffee plantations. Sensing the economic opportunity in the fertile land, coffee growers pressured the government to grant them access to indigenous ejido lands surrounding native towns. The government did this through a legal arrangement called the censo, by which commercial cultivators could legally lease the ejido land without violating previous statutes. In reality this practice had existed for decades, expanding under the production of cochineal, but it had been limited. The burgeoning coffee market had brought greater economic and political pressure on local indigenous communities to convert increasing amounts of their communal land to censo, but this pressure had been resisted by the local village council.
As a member of the council, Isidro Ixtamperic was summoned to a meeting one night to discuss the issue. Isidro arrived at the meeting and took his place on a knotted wooden bench. He glanced around the room at the concerned faces of the other members of the council. A low fire burned in the middle of the gathering, and a haze of smoke filled the meeting room. Santos Kayb’il, head of the council, nearly always wore a concerned look, but tonight his face was particularly forlorn. “Land-grabbing by the settlers under the censo increases,” he informed the council, although this fact was already known to most. “The council must do something.”
“Yes, but what?” responded Francisco, one of the older council members. “The national government supports anyone who wants to take eji
do land under the censo. They will back the settlers with the militia. There is nothing we can do.” The members of the council regarded Francisco’s statement with suspicion. He had a modest-sized coffee plot himself. Some thought that he might be looking to expand his operation.
“To do nothing is not an option.” Santos Kayb’il gazed sternly at Francisco. “Coffee has already taken our best hunting lands that have been with our people since before the Europeans. The settlers now defend this land like it is their own, and the government supports them. If it continues like this, we will leave our people with nothing.”
The members of the council debated the issue, with some arguing for a call to action. Another council member suggested a truce with the ladino cultivators.
“A truce?” asked Santos Kayb’il. “Another truce that is only to be broken when the Europeans demand more land?” A truce had been forged two years before when the ladinos had demanded censo land with government backing. But after the truce, they refused to pay taxes or rent to the local municipality. They had even bought and sold ejido land between themselves, using titles in the exchange. This so outraged the local indigenous community that the council brought a protest to the Ministry of Government, threatening to hack the coffee plants to pieces with their machetes. The Ministry had finally brokered a compromise between the two parties in which the ladino cultivators agreed to limit their landholdings and pay rent on these lands to the municipality. The council felt like the agreement had finally been able to achieve peace in their time. But shortly thereafter, a governor carrying out an investigation of further complaints found that the only grower in the surrounding areas who was actually paying rent on his coffee land was the local Catholic priest.
Isidro knew that Santos Kayb’il had no stomach for another truce. He couldn’t defend it to his people. Isidro sensed that the time had come for him to speak up at the meeting.
“We rise up,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, his head still bowed, then raised to look around the room. “We rise up and take what God has rightfully given us, what is rightfully ours. We take back all coffee land on which rent has not been paid since the truce.”