The Taste of Many Mountains

by Bruce Wydick

  Soon the concave slope of the small mountain began to level off, and they reached the summit. They stopped for a rest. Sofia was breathing hard after the climb. She unzipped her backpack and took out her inhaler from the side pocket, pumping in several quick bursts. “This better be good,” she said as she flipped it back into her pack.

  They found themselves on a forested plateau. Angela heard a faint, enigmatic chanting sound through the trees, but could see nothing. They reloaded their backpacks and resumed their hike along the trail. The chanting continued. It grew louder. Now through a grove of trees, Angela could see smoke coming from a small campfire. A half dozen people were gathered around the fire, all indigenous Mayans in traditional dress. They were led, it appeared, by a man who to Angela seemed like he must be some kind of priest. The fire burned next to a primitive stone shrine that was covered with lit candles and the wax of decades, if not centuries, of candles before these. The forest was filled with the redolent aroma of incense mingled with the smoke from the ground fire. The stone face of a god with protruding nose and lips, looking like a small version of an Easter Island statue, stared stoically ahead at the front of the shrine.

  “It’s the shrine of Pascual Abaj,” Jen whispered to them. They kept at a distance behind the ceremony, crouching behind a fallen log in the grove of trees.

  “Pascual who?” whispered Angela back as Sofia leaned in.

  “Pascual Abaj. It means ‘sacrifice stone.’ This is a shrine to the Mayan earth god Huyup Tak’ah. That’s his face on the shrine.”

  Through the branches of the forest they watched the priest take two eggs and hold them up in the air as he closed his eyes. After a two-minute incantation to Huyup Tak’ah, he took the eggs and smashed them together over the fire, allowing the yokes to dribble into the flames. The stench of burning eggs filled the air. He then picked up a bottle of rum sitting on a nearby rock and poured splashes of rum over the burning eggs. Colored flames shot up above the fire pit as the alcohol ignited. There were more prayers. Another woman handed the priest some flowers. The priest tossed the flowers one by one into the fire. More rum was decanted over the orange flame, which again flared momentarily into blue-green. At that moment Angela noticed a nervous-looking chicken cramped in a very small cage near one of the women.

  “What’s that chicken doing there?” Angela asked Jen.

  Jen was curious as well. “I don’t know, but based on what happened to the eggs and flowers, I don’t think it looks good for the chicken,” she whispered. They waited. More chanting.

  After several minutes the woman reached down and handed the caged chicken to the priest. He drew the chicken from the cage and held it in the air.

  “Uh-oh,” whispered Sofia. “Time to close your eyes.”

  “Oh my G—” said Angela, looking at Sofia, who responded in kind with a squeamish look on her face. The priest reached for a long butcher’s knife sitting on one of the rocks. Holding the chicken upside down with one hand, he carefully drew up the knife and, in one horizontal motion, slashed off its head. The head fell into the fire. The priest held the headless chicken upside down by its legs over the fire, chanting a Mayan incantation. Its wings continued to flap slowly for a few moments as the headless chicken bled out into the flames.

  “Ick,” Angela remarked to the others.

  “Told you that you wouldn’t be disappointed,” whispered Jen.

  “How’d you know he’d be up here?” asked Angela.

  “He’s up here all the time, kind of like a priest working his confession booth. People come up to him here with their petitions and he seems to know the appropriate sacrifice for everybody’s problem.”

  “That chicken must have stood in for a big issue,” guessed Angela. “Well, at least it wasn’t a goat, or a cow . . .”

  “Or a virgin,” added Sofia. They all laughed under their breath. Angela wondered for the first time if her ancestors ever sacrificed any virgins. “You know, in Latin America we’ve made some notable progress over the last five centuries.”

  As Angela joined in the quiet laughter behind the log, out of the corner of her eye she perceived the subtlest of movements on the ground next to her. A paralyzing electric current surged through her limbs as she witnessed the long body of a venomous barba amarilla emerge from under the log and slowly slither between Jen’s boots. Crouching on the other side of her, Sofia immediately saw it after sensing Angela’s recoil, while Jen’s happy expression remained unchanged as she continued to focus unawares on the activity at the ritual site.

  Angela was impressed that Sofia did not faint immediately. Indeed, as her own mouth seemed incapable of forming words in any language, Sofia spoke to Jen in a tense but calm voice.

  “Jen, I believe it is very important that you keep looking ahead and hold very still,” whispered Sofia. The snake continued its slow and inauspicious exit from under the log through the blue-jeaned arch of Jen’s crouched legs. “Perhaps it’s better if we don’t talk now.” They all continued to crouch, still and silent, Jen’s eyebrows now raised and teeth clenched after a torturous glance between her knees revealed the source of the anxiety. Angela watched as the tail of the barba amarilla unhurriedly made its way past her boots, behind them, and into the woods. They closed their eyes in relief and slowly stood up as the snake slithered across some leaves and down the hill.

  They moved as quickly as they could away from the fallen log and back on the path. “Gracias, Sofia,” said Jen. “That was one for the ages, ladies.”

  “How did you not lose it?” Angela asked Sofia.

  Sofia took a deep breath and shrugged. “I’m not quite sure. Well, lunch, anyone?”

  The three women left the shrine and headed down the mountain.

  After lunch they walked back toward the central square and Jen asked, “Would you like to visit a few microfinance clients?”

  “How do we get there?” asked Sofia.

  “Well, you could take a taxi, or we could ride together on this.” She pounded the seat of a rather large motorcycle they had just approached that was parked on the street.

  “This is yours?” Sofia asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Three of us?” Sofia asked incredulously.

  “Sure. Person on the back gets the helmet!”

  They aligned themselves on the seat with Jen pushed so far forward that she was sitting on the gas tank. It was fortunate that she and Angela were both fairly small. They laughed at being jammed together in such a tiny sitting space.

  “Hang on!” Jen revved the accelerator and the bike rocketed down a cobblestone street. The feet of Sofia and Angela fought for a spot on the lone rear footrest.

  A cool breeze blew through Angela’s hair as they rumbled out of town toward the mountains. Jen adeptly churned her way through the gearbox with her left foot as they passed small rural houses, grazing cows, and countless fields of coffee. Angela was in the back. Sofia’s long, dark mane was flapping in Angela’s face, making both of them laugh. Angela remedied the situation by flipping down the visor on the helmet.

  Jen moved her head to the side and yelled back to them over the noise of the motorcycle, “It’s interesting that you are working with coffee growers, because so am I. At least half of the borrowers taking microfinance loans in my study grow coffee.”

  “Do they take the loans for coffee production?” yelled Angela.

  “The loans are supposed to be for investment in rural microenterprises, but I suppose some of it could get diverted into their coffee,” she yelled back. “Money is fungible, after all. Purpose of the program I’m evaluating is to finance alternatives to agricultural production in general, and alternatives to coffee in particular. There’s no money in coffee these days.”

  After a fifteen-minute ride, Angela felt the motorcycle engine begin to coast, and they pulled into the front yard of an adobe house surrounded by fields of maize and coffee. The three women, one at a time, somehow managed to untangle all of their limbs from the bike
, laughing at their predicament. Regaining their composure, they approached the front of the house.

  “Señor Bixcul? . . . Señor Bixcul?” called Jen, hands clasped around her mouth for projection.

  A voice emerged from a small adobe workshop next to the house, and the voice was soon matched by a person. Señor Bixcul strolled out to greet Jen. He shook hands with her and her two friends as they all were introduced. His hands were dry and rough, but the handshake was warm and firm. Angela figured that he was probably about sixty years old, but the age was perhaps dwarfed by the mileage. Despite it all, Señor Bixcul had an amiable smile that, even with a few missing teeth, shone through his dark, wrinkled skin. He invited them into his workshop.

  “He’s a coffee grower, but also makes corte, the Guatemalan cloth that women use for skirts,” Jen informed them. The skirts were famous for their multicolored stripes and intricate designs, subtle Mayan patterns and pictures of people and different kinds of animals. He explained to them the process he used to dye and mark the designs on his thread. There were hundreds of yards of thread of different colors drying in the sun on racks outside his shop. Each distinctive marking on the thread, he explained, would produce different types of designs on the cloth. Señor Bixcul had applied for a $400 loan to help him purchase a new telar so that his son could work with him, and a large bag of colored thread.

  “How much extra income per month does the microloan earn for you?” asked Angela in Spanish, wanting to understand whether it was having any kind of positive effect.

  “Quizas tres-cientos quetzales al mes,” Señor Bixcul replied. It was about $40 more per month.

  “Not bad,” said Angela.

  “No, it’s not bad at all,” agreed Sofia. “But it’s not surprising, either. Capital is usually more productive in the hands of someone who has very little of it than in the hands of someone who already has a lot. The credit market without interventions like microfinance is not only biased against the poor—it’s inefficient.”

  “How are things in the business otherwise, Señor Bixcul?” asked Jen.

  “Bien.”

  Angela could not resist. “Señor Bixcul, how do you really use your loan money?”

  “Pues, there is something I must confess to you,” said the old man.

  “Completamente confidencial,” replied Jen. She turned to the other women and spoke in English. “He understands that we are not his loan officers—just researchers, so he’ll be more open with us.”

  “I do not use all of my loan for the weaving business.”

  A violation of his lending contract, Jen explained, but interesting. “What do you use it for?” asked Angela.

  “My son does not work on the loom all day. In the afternoon he goes to school. I use much of the loan to pay his colegiatura.” He used it partly for the school fees.

  They thanked him for his sincerity and spent a little more time talking with Señor Bixcul, then said good-bye. Their last image was of him shaking his head from side to side, watching the three women trying to fit on the motorcycle. His wide grin showed off all of his missing teeth. Before Angela had time to feel self-conscious, Jen’s wrist yanked back on the accelerator and the overburdened motorcycle lumbered down the road.

  They stayed at Jen’s house that night. It was a small cottage she leased during her fieldwork, not too far outside of Chichicastenango. As Jen cooked at the stove, she fielded questions from Angela about microfinance.

  “What effect do you think this microfinance has on the coffee growers?” asked Angela.

  “Well, a lot of coffee growers here operate a small business on the side that helps them to diversify some of the risks associated with the volatility in their yields as well as the volatility in coffee prices. This gives them some income in times other than the harvest season, and if coffee prices are down, it provides something for them to fall back on,” said Jen. “A few borrowers reach high enough levels of enterprise capitalization that they leave coffee production altogether.”

  “Interesting,” said Sofia, reflecting on the day, “that after his weaving business, Señor Bixcul views his son’s education as a better investment than coffee production. Notice when he cheated, he cheated toward education, not coffee.” She continued reflectively. “Aside from economic diversification, perhaps microfinance may have another important role to play in the welfare of the world’s coffee growers.”

  “What’s that?” asked Jen.

  “To wean them off growing coffee.”

  The two other women looked at Sofia.

  “What I mean is, we just interviewed a fair trade marketing executive in the capital, who literally clings to his rosary beads as he begs for negative worldwide supply shocks. He said that the best thing that could happen to all coffee growers would be for there to be fewer of them and less coffee.”

  Sofia paused and then continued. “You say that giving coffee growers microfinance loans leads some of them to abandon coffee growing in favor of doing something else. Today we talked with a man who secretly uses his loans to finance more education for his kid. Well, given the sensitivity of coffee prices to supply, even this fair trade marketing executive admits that a significant reduction in the worldwide production of coffee would probably do more for more coffee growers than fair trade ever could. Higher world coffee prices would benefit every coffee grower, not just the growers who are privy to the special fair trade marketing channels. Perhaps the best development programs for coffee growers might not involve coffee at all.”

  “To solve the dilemma of the prisoners,” said Angela.

  “Exactly,” said Sofia.

  The women continued the conversation into the night until they fell asleep on mats laid out next to the low-burning fire in the fireplace. The next morning Angela and Sofia boarded a bus heading back to Huehuetenango.

  In another week it would be time for Angela and Alex to return home.

  CHAPTER 20

  Alex

  ALEX HAD NEVER BEEN ONE FOR GOOD-BYES. IT WAS A FEELING he had developed from his childhood. After his parents’ divorce he split time between them, staying at his mother’s house during the weekdays and his father’s apartment on the weekends. Twice a week, there was the inevitable good-bye to one of his parents, which he quickly came to dread, and then despise. And as the years wore on, the routine of the biweekly good-bye failed to anesthetize the pain of it. It had made him cynical about traditional institutions, including family, and maybe especially family. In all of these traditional arrangements someone was always getting ripped off, getting hurt, feeling pain. There were always motives of which to be suspicious.

  Now it was time to say good-bye to Lourdes and her family, one of the few families he had met where there was love and warmth between family members, despite their modest means. And just as he was still trying to understand all of this, time had run out. They hiked up the long road from the Hotel Chinita to their house. Juana was expecting them for lunch.

  When they were still fifty yards from the house, she greeted them from the kitchen window where she was working, as always. “Buenos tardes muchachos de California!” she broadcasted from her spot at the window to the entire neighborhood, waving enthusiastically. Ema ran out to greet them and extended her hand for Angela’s and pulled it to her cheek. They walked together with the others toward the house.

  “Donde está Don Fernando?” they inquired.

  “Oh, I cannot tell you how sorry he was not to be here to say good-bye. A neighbor’s son had to be taken to the hospital in the capital, apendicitis I think it was. He had much he had left to say.” She turned to Angela. “Especially to you, mi hija.”

  Once again she had prepared them the traditional almuerzo tipico: tortillas and beans, some fresh avocado, a square of goat cheese, plantains, and one of the chickens that had been rummaging around the yard yesterday morning.

  Over lunch they talked about plans for the coffee crop that year, about Angela’s and Alex’s work back in San Francisco,
and about plans for the baby. After lunch Juana brought out coffee for everyone, and they chatted a little more until the conversation naturally died down and came to a satisfying rest.

  Alex talked in front of the house with Lourdes, the conversation heavy with the weight of a looming good-bye. But the survey of the coffee growers was complete. Rich would be returning south to his tropical fruit project. Sofia would remain a few more weeks to work on her own branch of the coffee research before heading back to Berkeley.

  “Who will help you with the baby?” Alex asked Lourdes, concerned.

  “My mother will help me, and also my father, and of course the Lord. He will help me too,” she replied. He remained concerned. “Alex, don’t you know that he even turns mistakes and sins into good things later? It is a promise in la Biblia. I have read it.”

  “If you say this is so, Lourdes, I do not doubt you.” She smiled and his arms reached out to hers above her elbows, and he held her and looked into her eyes. And now as Alex looked into her eyes closely, she looked less certain of herself. Ever so slowly their faces drew closer together, but as he went to kiss her on the lips, she turned her head just slightly so that the kiss landed softly on her right cheek as she shut her eyes, resulting in what could be interpreted as the most traditional and culturally appropriate of gestures. Was it because she thought someone was watching, or of her own accord? Of this Alex would wonder.

  After some time the others joined them in the front, where everyone shook hands and embraced with much quicker besos to the right cheek. The students slowly walked away from the house, waving as they turned left on the dirt road. Alex turned back one last time. Lourdes smiled, and quickly brushed away a tear with the palm of her left hand as she waved good-bye with her right.

  The next morning Sofia and Rich walked Alex and Angela to the bus and bade them a warm good-bye. And as quickly as they had come, they were gone.

  CHAPTER 21