by Norman Lewis
She had the face of a celebrant or a goddess on an Attic vase that some might have considered too strong to be beautiful. Ribas said, ‘She had fourteen suitors before she married, which is the limit they allow. After that she would have been put out of the village.’ For all that, the marriage had turned out badly and the husband had disappeared, or as they said in San Carlos, leaving you to form your own conclusions, he had ‘gone to Algeria’.
Cala San Vicente had to be approached at low tide along a strip of shingle, slithering over seaweed and splashing through rock-pools. According to Ribas, this village had been chosen as possibly the most isolated in Europe, and so Raoul Villain had been spirited here after his assassination of the French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès who opposed France’s entry into the 1914 war. In San Vicente he had built himself an ugly house like a vast slab of concrete with fleurs de lis painted all over the grim facade. The oldest villager was half led and half carried into our presence, and supposing that all foreigners were French, produced a few words in that language for my benefit. By the time he had arrived to commence his exile, the old man said, Villain had come to believe that he was a reincarnation of Joan of Arc and had been sufficiently persuasive to convince many of the villagers that this was the case. The fishermen, therefore, including himself, brought their catches to Villain to be blessed, and he accepted with great dignity the small fish set aside as his reward. It was in this guise that he confronted the anarchists who landed here in the first days of the Spanish war, and was shot down on the beach.
We climbed a mile or so up the steep hillside to reach the cave-shrine through a narrow opening in the rock. It had undoubtedly been chosen as residence of the Goddess Tanit because by great good fortune the entrance offered a view of the great sea-girt rock of Tagomago, where the Carthaginians had also left indications of their presence. The German had hacked away a section of a wall and removed the treasure concealed behind, but a few square yards remained intact, suggesting that the robber had been disturbed at his work. Detritus left by him was strewn all over the floor. It is said that children were sacrificed here to Tanit. Raking through the primordial rubbish I found a tiny black sliver of bone that the museum of Ibiza thought might have been part of a child’s finger, although this was never confirmed.
In Farol it was not permissible for a fisherman to carry a priest on his boat, and there was a strict veto on carrying or wearing any article of leather, in particular shoes, as opposed to rope-soled alpargatas. Prohibitions in the port of Santa Eulalia were more comprehensive and I quickly noted that a fisherman seemed embarrassed when an outsider touched his nets. Despite an otherwise cordial relationship with my neighbours, an uneasiness remained.
It was a disappointing situation relieved in some measure a month or two later by the arrival on the scene of Juan Ripoll a native of San Carlos. Juan was a smallholder, like a substantial proportion of the males of San Carlos, but also an incorrigible gambler and eventually lost not only his house and his land, but his wife. No pressure had been put on him to leave the village, but such was his loss of face that he did so, establishing himself in a vacant shack a mile down the shore, and scraping some sort of a living by doing odd jobs for local farmers. In his late thirties, Juan was good-looking in a piratical sort of way and of cheerful disposition. We were soon on friendly terms and he got on well with Ribas who turned up at Ses Estaques almost every second day to take advantage of the sudden high barometric pressure which kept him busy at his painting.
Ribas was of peasant origin and therefore had a predisposition to be fascinated with the sea, and to know very little about it. At times when pressure was high in Ibiza town and low on the eastern shore, he told me it was his custom to spend the day walking up and down the sea front, encouraged by the sight or sound of the waves and ready for inspiration to strike. Ripoll managed to come by a small boat and occasionally the three of us went for short and dangerous trips. None of us knew how to sail, and the fishermen drying their nets in the garden would shake their heads when we set out and cheer us like successful bullfighters when we returned.
One of the many splendid things about this island was its resistance to change. People and events stayed in the same happy groove. Spontaneous activity quietly settled to routine. Life adapted itself to peaceful and reassuring objects and procedures, and nerves quickened to the pleasures of familiar things: the surge almost of hysteria that greeted the arrival and departure of the ship, the solemn blastings on the conch shells that signalled the fishing boats’ return, the honk of the taxis’ horns supplicating for fares, and at midday when the villages were suddenly full of the odour of frying in crude oil, the clatter of the big-wheeled carts over the cobbles, and the millennial Arabian cries of hih! hih! with which the mules were urged up the steep streets.
For a whole season Ribas chased after his atmospheric pressure, managing to spend half his time admiring the sea and painting the heedless fishermen at Estaques. Whenever we had time on our hands, Ripoll carried us on risky expeditions on his boat. In the end one of our neighbours who had injured himself and could no longer work on the nets took pity on us and agreed to come on a trip round the island. One minor snag arose. The fishermen here were members of a patriarchal society, and the permission of the senior male of several families had to be sought. This was obtained and a date settled upon when a letter from Lazlo Papas in Guatemala arrived that brought about a change in my plans.
No news from you for a long time. I wonder if you’ve been getting my letters. A friend is posting this from Miami, but make no mention of it when you reply. We’re swallowing a heavy dose of censorship right now. Did you get my letter telling you that against all good advice I took a chance on the finca? This turned out a disaster because within weeks of fixing up the paperwork there was a revolution and, just as you said, it turned out I backed the wrong horse. President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán and all his reforms went, a local gun-slinger called Armas took over, and a lot of people, mostly Indians, got shot. I was pulled in on a charge of being a crypto-communist and the finca went. I gave the kids who worked for me an extra fifteen centavos a day and I put up the bottom age to ten, and that put paid to it. So I’m not only broke but under police surveillance. At the moment I’m in Huehuetenango where even if they’re starving they go on playing the guitar.
If you’re still working on your book about this part of the world I believe you should drop everything and come over as fast as you can, because it’s what’s happening here now, and perhaps a little less history (sorry!) that should be in the book. I don’t have a fixed address but if you decide to come all you have to do is to ask the town watchman to find me. Oh yes, and I managed to track down that Moon Codex I told you about. It will be valuable for your book about Mayan culture. It’s unique and things being the way they are the Indians would let it go cheap. Getting it out of the country might be quite another matter.
I gave a good deal of thought to the argument Lazlo raised here. In the intervals between the Eastern travels of the early fifties and the months spent in describing them, a good deal of work had gone into the book about Guatemala. Now I was inclined to agree that perhaps too much had been devoted to a vanished past and too little to the tumultuous present. This was one of those occasions when the Land of Eternal Spring put aside its smiling mask. A fresh experience seemed essential to restore to my account the balance between past grandeur and present ruin among what was left in this mountain enclave of the great Mayan people.
Accordingly I took my decision and packed to go. I told Ribas and Juan Ripoll that our maritime excursion would have to be postponed, arranged an extension on my lease at Ses Estaques and, having promised my friends that I hoped to be back either in the autumn or the spring of the coming year, I set off.
Chapter Seven
GUATEMALA WAS GETTING OVER its thirteenth revolution of this century when I arrived. I spent the night at the old Palace Hotel where the Indian girls who waited at table still went barefoot because t
he tourists liked it, and wire-mesh dating from the last revolution but one still covered one of the windows. There was a breakdown in communications and it took two buses to reach Huehuetenango where I hoped Lazlo would still be living. They had an old-fashioned system in use in the town which I much liked, and which worked very well. Nobody had a fixed address but the municipality employed a man to go round with a drum and shout out the name of the person you happened to be looking for. This I engaged him to do, and a few minutes after he started his banging and shouting, Lazlo came into sight tagging at his heels. He was so changed I would hardly have recognised him. He was very thin and had become more Hungarian in appearance than before, like one of those sad fiddlers playing in a café on the Danube waterfront in Budapest.
There was a glum sort of cantina in the square, where our neighbours at the next table were a couple of dog-faced policemen with an Indian tied up with a rope.
‘Where’s Lena?’ I asked.
‘Down in the city,’ he said. ‘She couldn’t take it here any more.’
‘What happened to the finca?’
‘A long story. I’ll tell you about it in a moment. You had the right instinct about that place. Remember we were in two minds when you left, but in the end we decided to take the chance. I’ve told you all this in my letters.’
‘There have been long gaps in the correspondence. I suspect some of them didn’t arrive. So what happened?’
‘You remembered that what worried us about it was the child-labour thing. Our first idea was to cut it out altogether but then the parents began to turn up asking us to keep them on, so we put up the minimum age from eight to ten and reduced the working day to nine hours.’
‘Which made you unpopular with the finca owners.’
‘Yes, I was unpopular. I told you, I’m seen as a crypto-communist. Well, to cut a long story short, a police investigator came up from the city and the finca was intervened, as they put it, or in plain English, confiscated.’
There was an outburst of nearby laughter and I risked a glance at the next table from which came the evil odour of an illicit liquor called boj. This was available only to the police. A child beggar had chosen this moment to approach their table on his knees and was kicked away. The policemen drained their glasses and one tossed some dregs in their prisoner’s face as they made ready to go.
‘Hell, isn’t it?’ Lazlo said.
‘What makes you stay here?’ I asked.
‘Nothing I can do about it. I’m under local surveillance, and also subject to curfew; I have to be in the house by six.’
‘Given up all hope of the finca, then?’
‘And of this country,’ he said. ‘The Embassy is doing what it can. We have to raise the necessary to fix the investigation and buy ourselves exit visas.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Never can be quite sure someone doesn’t understand English in a place like this. I wanted to ask you about the book. The one about this country. How’s it going?’
I made a face. ‘It drags on,’ I said. ‘I took on more than I bargained for.’
‘There’s a lot of history in it, you told me.’
‘A lot of it, unpublished letters. Holographs. There’s still quite a backlog to get through. It’ll be nice when I can stop reading old Spanish.’
‘But you still think it worthwhile going as deep as all that?’
‘Perhaps a little less than I did. The trouble is I’ve put five years or so into it, off and on. I hate to think of the wasted effort.’
‘Ever thought of making two books of it—one history and the other about what’s happening now?’
‘I don’t think I could face it, and I don’t think it would work.’
‘This place makes me nervous,’ Lazlo said. ‘Let’s go and sit in the gardens.’
The gardens were on the far side of the square, a pleasant place full of the flowers that grew like weeds in the beneficial climate, and bright birds squawking in the trees. The child beggar from the cantina hobbled across. He was blind in one eye and I gave him a few cents. ‘Notice how few wear national costume these days,’ Lazlo said. ‘They don’t want to draw attention to themselves.’
‘It’s part of the ongoing process,’ I said. ‘Remember the missionary who used to buy up all the blouses with the copulating horses and burn them? He used to go to a Zutuhul village and pay twice what a blouse would fetch in the market and toss it into the fire. Remember the free handouts of Mickey Mouse ponchos and skirts?’
‘That is nothing,’ Lazlo said. ‘I don’t believe you’ve the slightest idea what’s happening.’
‘I can see for myself,’ I said.
‘Not all of it,’ Lazlo said. ‘I’m not talking about folklore. This is something that’s happening out of sight. Since the Arbenz business the Indians are seen as a problem. Arbenz gave away a few hectares of wasteland and that started the panic. The Americans got rid of Arbenz but they couldn’t get rid of the ideas and the thing’s become an obsession. They’ve suddenly noticed that fifty per cent of the population of the country are Indians. Three millions out of six. So they’ve decided to act.’
‘You mean as before. Sterilisation campaign. Take out the troublemakers.’
‘Not this time. This is the real thing. They’re going to cut the Indian population by half.’
‘They can’t,’ I said. ‘There’s absolutely no way they could get rid of a million and a half Indians.’
‘They wouldn’t dream of trying it. A great deal of thought has gone into this. They’ve had population control experts over from the States studying the problem, and now they’ve come up with the solution. The proposal is to stop half the Indian population from being Indians.’
‘And how will they do that?’
‘Give them the experience of living like a white. At least that’s the intention. Most of them live on the tops of the mountains. They’re half-starved and their children are half-starved or they’re sick much of the time. Trained psychologists are going to be sent up there to tell them what miserable lives they lead and how good it is to be down in the lowlands. The grown-ups get clothes and the kids are given cough mixture and sweets, and they’re persuaded to come down and see what it’s like in one of the new voluntary collaboration centres that are going up all over the place.’
‘And they collaborate? Almost certainly, yes,’ I said.
I looked up. Two small ragged Indian boys stood there watching and seemingly discussing us. ‘Aren’t they referring to us as ghosts?’ I asked.
‘They are. The long ghost, you, and the short ghost, me. How did you know?’
‘I remember from last time. Your servants always used to call you and Lena the ghosts.’
‘That’s right. It’s said in the nicest possible way. We are ghosts, just as dogs are dogs and cats are cats. Physically we’re less attractive than animals. They’re sorry for us, just as we are for them. We’re both of us underprivileged from the other’s point of view.’
The boys moved on.
‘So these collaboration centres are some sort of trap?’ I asked.
‘Inevitably. It’s part of a five-year plan referred to in the papers as Operation Rescue. Eventually local centres will be expanded into Ideal Villages.’
‘As in Vietnam?’
‘As in Vietnam. Inmates will dress as whites, work regular hours for wages, drop all their ridiculous customs, be allowed to ride horses if they want to, and sell their votes for a dollar a time in local elections.’
‘A dazzling prospect,’ I said. ‘But apart from the voting hasn’t it all been done before, starting with the Jesuits and their whippings with prayer?’
Lazlo had taken a paper from his pocket. ‘We still have friends,’ he said. ‘Somebody slipped me this on the quiet. It’s strictly confidential. When you’re at the bottom of the human rights league most government reports have to be. This is about “Operation Rescue”, which is sensitive. There’s some tedious stuff I won’t bother you with, but then it goes on to spe
ll out what it proposes to do about Indian classlessness. It is to be abolished.’ He read from the paper, ‘“The operation envisages settlement and civilisation by the immediate creation of five social classes.”’
‘Hold on a moment,’ I said. ‘You’re pulling my leg.’
He waved me aside. ‘“Of these three will elect to be employed in traditional husbandry, leaving two to be occupied in domestic economy, maintenance work, and guard duties. Democratic ideals are linked to basic religious instruction, with the speedy elimination of outmoded credences and shamanistic rituals.”’ He stopped. ‘Why are you laughing?’
‘I really don’t know. It’s far more sinister than funny.’
‘You’ll be relieved to know that regional art won’t be completely suppressed. It goes on to say that it is appreciated that there is a market among foreign visitors for souvenirs produced by tribal artisans, and that this is of economic significance. The National Tourist Board will therefore be sponsoring the sale of what they call articles of this kind, although approval will only be given for selected ethnic designs. No doubt they’ve got their eye on those blouses your missionary used to burn. You can be sure your copulating horses are out. All this comes under the heading, “A Way Forward for Primitive Peoples”.’
‘It used to be genocide. At least it’s only ethnocide now.’
‘And I wouldn’t even be sure of that,’ Lazlo said.
‘Are any of these voluntary collaboration centres already in business?’
‘Yes, a number. And now comes the great surprise I’ve had in store for you. The finca has been turned into one.’
‘My god,’ I said. ‘I thought you had something up your sleeve. Any chance of seeing it?’
‘We have to be a bit careful. I don’t see why we shouldn’t.’
‘What about your surveillance thing?’