World, the World

by Norman Lewis

‘Curfew’s over by six and I check in with the police at six-thirty. There’s a change of route. It’s up the Pan-American by bus again, but this time we have to go to San Rafael, and pick up horses there to ride over to the finca.’

  ‘Can we do it in the time?’

  ‘Twelve hours is OK unless the bus breaks down. That’s something I don’t even want to think about.’

  The local rule was that, by associating with anyone under surveillance, you automatically came under surveillance, too. You were also not allowed to spend the night under the same roof as someone subject to curfew, a frequent hazard and taken very seriously in Guatemala. I stayed at the local hotel, and was up with the whole country at dawn. Lazlo called for me five minutes after he’d reported to the police, just across the square. At six forty-five, with extreme punctuality, the bus going north to Ixtahuacan set out up the excellent Pan-American Highway, and once again I tried to decide just what the subtle and elusive ingredients in this landscape were that made Guatemala, so drenched in blood and sorrow, the most beautiful country in the world.

  Our fellow passengers were either Ladinos or Indians, the Ladinos carrying their worldly possessions in single bundles. Despite the clandestine affinities of blood, these people held themselves wholly apart and while occupying the tight narrow benches in such a vehicle, spared no effort in both cases to avoid the slightest physical contact with racial half-brothers and sisters.

  There was a wait for the horses at San Rafael. I had visited the town before, and I found it was now both richer and poorer. Capitalism had spread up through the high valleys of the Altiplano. Chiqui’s bar, which supplied the horses, had once been a matter of adobe and whitewash; now there was a front by the road painted with huge 7-Up bottles and the claim Apaga La Sed Al Punto (vanquishes thirst instantly) in letters two feet high. The Indian girls in the street market wore tartan kilts, and a photographer put local boys into Lone Ranger outfits to take their pictures.

  When the horses were ready we set out for Santa Maria, and it became immediately clear from the landscape that there was money in circulation. They had steamrollered broken-up rock into the road surface and the peppery red dust of old was no more: corrugated iron threw back its headaching reflections where palm thatches had been stripped away. The owners of the small coffee fincas now built their houses with mahogany planks, and the electrified fences round their property carried, for the benefit of illiterates, cartoons of a fence-sealer in the instant of electrocution. The position of the finca of old was only to be located by recognition of the low hills surrounding it. Even here there was a difference, for the hill-tops as we remembered them were always blackened by slash and burn cultivation. Now they were verdant with fresh growth. Where the small slum-like Indian village of Santa Maria de la Sagrada Concepción had once been, there stood a large featureless building which reminded me of a pavilion in a major trade fair. This was part of a complex enclosed in a higher fence than we had seen before. Although it was too far away for the details to be picked out, a placard was fastened to the fence, and I had little doubt that this one too illustrated the fate of those who attempted to enter or leave the complex other than by the main gate.

  A man appeared from nowhere to take over the horses, leaving us to ring the doorbell under the banner which said Centra De Voluntaria Colaboración, and almost immediately the door opened, and a small man stood there, hand outstretched.

  ‘Señor Rodriguez? Mr Anderson?’ It was quite clear that he was expecting other visitors, and we explained who we were and what we were doing there, which in no way affected the geniality of his manner. ‘I’m Richards, Plantagenet Richards of Operation Rescue,’ he said. ‘Two other gentlemen were coming to see me, but I guess something’s holding them up. Why don’t you just step inside? Maybe you’d like me to show you round.’

  ‘That would be very kind of you,’ Lazlo said. ‘We’d certainly appreciate that. I used to own the old finca here. Lost it at the time of the Armas trouble. We happened to be in Huehuetenango and someone told us we ought to take a look at what you’re doing here, and, well, I guess my curiosity got the better of me.’

  Richards listened, nodding. ‘Understandably,’ he said. He turned his head to smile at each of us in turn. ‘I never had the opportunity of seeing the original finca myself, but I was shown photographs of it, and you’ll find that a certain amount of change has taken place.’ He gave a soft laugh.

  Apparently, he had only just taken over. We were shown into an office which he said he proposed to move around a bit. The fine jaguar skin on the floor had been left by his predecessor, and he disapproved of the slaughter of protected animals. Nor did he much care for the collection of scowling or simpering Indian masks with which the outgoing co-ordinator had sought to decorate the walls. The replacements, stacked in readiness, were large photographs of the attack on the original finca by the fleet of bulldozers that had helped to transform it into the Centre of Voluntary Collaboration.

  The telephone rang and Richards picked it up. ‘Yes, yes, I understand,’ he said. ‘It’s quite the normal thing. We’ll be seeing you shortly, then. My visitors,’ he explained. ‘Tyre trouble at Huehuetenango. Well, that certainly gives me a little more time to show you what we’re doing here. Afraid I’d have to persuade you to spend a day with us to be able to show you the whole operation. Do the best we can in what little time we have.’

  Access to what Richards called ‘our little enterprise’ was through a steel door at the back of the office which slid open on the pressing of a button. We walked through and found ourselves at the top of a gentle slope, and below us was laid out a miniature town. It was stark white and as regular as a military cemetery. From where we stood we looked straight down a street lined with white box-like cabins, each with a door and a single window, and, so far as we could make out, surrounded by a low, spiked fence.

  ‘We amuse ourselves by calling this Fifth Avenue,’ Richards said, ‘and naturally that little plaza at the bottom had to be Times Square. Rather childish of us, but quite a bit of US aid went into the scheme so you have to forgive the self-advertisement.’

  A group of Indians carrying metal sprayers fed from tanks strapped on their backs hurried past. They were dressed in grey denim pyjamas and were a little hunched, as if walking through a low tunnel. Richards grinned happily.

  ‘That’s the squad from the KP roster. They go round disinfecting the chalets every day.’

  We made approving noises and Richards said, ‘You must have had problems in your time, Mr Papas, the way the old buildings were and the well-known Indian indifference to dirt.’

  ‘The main problem was money,’ Lazlo said. ‘Indian likes and dislikes came into it too. I tried to put in concrete floors but they wouldn’t have them. It had to be earth floors so that if a kid was sick in the night or anyone couldn’t bother to get up and go to the yard where they kept the pigs they could just make a hole, and there you were.’

  ‘And you could do nothing about that?’ Richards said.

  ‘I had no back-up,’ Lazlo told him. ‘I didn’t want to push it too far. The only people they are afraid of are the police.’

  ‘I ought to tell you we feel we have a mission to accomplish here,’ Richards said. ‘Those who have studied these Indians say that they cease to mature after the age of twelve. There is an intellectual gap between puberty and old age. What you have is a child in a body that grows older.’

  ‘In some ways, I imagine, not a bad thing,’ I said. It was a remark that Richards did not appear to have heard.

  We moved on to look over the vast communal kitchen hall, with no sign of life beyond several denim-clad figures that slipped in and out of doors. We saw the dispensary, the clinic, the hospital, the undenominational church which also smelt, slightly, of disinfectant, and a children’s playground with swings.

  Richards said, ‘It’s a disappointment that you’re seeing the town when it’s kind of half-empty. Because it’s mid-morning the work-force are down
in the plantation, and they have to keep the dormitories locked up.’

  A key was found for a family chalet: doll’s-house tables, two chairs, blankets folded army-style, mosquito-net hanging from a peg and a mirror on the wall. For the first time Richards showed something other than satisfaction, in this case with an Indian version of graffiti on the mirror’s surface. ‘Pagan symbols,’ he explained. ‘I’ll have someone clean that off.’

  ‘Where are all the children?’ I asked.

  ‘Down on the plantation,’ Richards said. ‘The women go there to be with their husbands. It’s something we don’t care for but we can’t stop them. The children won’t leave their mothers.’

  ‘So they don’t use the playground?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Actually it’s not in use. Indian children don’t play like ours do. The fathers never grow up, but the kids are adults as soon as they can stand on their two feet. Kind of strange isn’t it? They have no sense of play. The guy who put in the playground certainly boobed.’

  Someone called to him. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  ‘The feeling I have is the operation isn’t working out quite as hoped,’ I said.

  ‘I get that impression too,’ Lazlo replied.

  Five minutes or so passed and Richards was with us again, but something had changed. I caught an unmistakable whiff of whisky I could not remember ever encountering in Guatemala. Suddenly I suspected that Richards, as often happens, was a depressive with a smile, but now the persistent smile was no more.

  ‘Talking of what we have to offer,’ he said, ‘we just don’t seem to be reaching them with incentives.’ The corners of his mouth were turned down. ‘Trouble is, if they have a blanket to sleep on and a couple of handfuls of maize a day, why should they care?’

  ‘Ever tried them with a fiesta?’ Lazlo asked.

  ‘They’re not interested if they can’t drink, and that’s something we can’t permit. To give you some idea of our problem, I’m going to ask you to take a glance at the articles on display in the store. We have entered into a legal contract by which our voluntary collaborators are paid in scrip. This way quantity buying enables us to supply all requirements at the equivalent of half the cash price they’d be charged elsewhere. You’d suppose these guys would be fighting to get through the doors to take advantage of the arrangement, but you’d be wrong.’

  We followed him on a tour of inspection of the piled-up shelves, of the three hundred-plus items including sateen neckties, zipper wallets, plastic flowers, tin trays painted with snow-scenes, imitation watches, imitation rattlesnakes and Guatemalan flags.

  ‘They don’t want to buy them,’ Richards said. ‘They don’t even look at them. Now I’ll show you what they really go for.’

  We found ourselves in a room containing nothing but hundreds of mirrors. There were large mirrors, medium-sized mirrors, and mirrors the size of large postage stamps. All the mirrors were in atrociously coloured plastic frames. ‘We do our best to put across the idea of quality,’ Richards said. ‘One of those small introductory mirrors you see there has a scrip-value of only ten cents, and we explain to them that the coating starts to flake off after a few days and that they have to go up to scrip-value of maybe a dollar to acquire a lasting possession. We offered to take old mirrors back for a trade-in and some of them fell for the idea. We told the store-clerk to keep the best lines in the background and try to put over the scarcity-value angle, and I guess that seems to work too. There are a few cases of families with five or six mirrors, but there it stops. It’s all they want. Ninety per cent of the stock we bought in is left on our hands. The people who pay my wage-check’, Richards said unsmilingly, ‘are looking for customers with a houseful of furniture who sit down to tenderised steak on Sundays. Maybe not right now, but in the long run.’

  ‘Which is never likely to happen with your collaborators,’ I suggested.

  ‘Don’t quote me, but not in my opinion. No. They’ll go on working their asses off, with nothing at the end of it.’

  It was a U-turn that took my breath away, then suddenly I noticed the stagger. Egged on by the whisky, it was as if something inside him had broken loose.

  I risked a question. ‘How do they come here in the first place?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ he asked. ‘You must know. Everyone knows. They’ve no choice. They’re sent here with a gun at their heads. Tell you something else. Stupid as they are, in a way I like them. We squirt vitamins into their maize posole and they put on weight. But remember, this is their last chance. In this country, life is cheap. You won’t find anywhere it’s cheaper. While they’re in this place they stay alive.’

  ‘What am I to understand by that?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know what’s going on in the villages?’

  We did not, and nor in all probability did anyone else from the outside world—including Richards himself—except in the vaguest of ways. It was only years afterwards, having studied the testimony of the 23-year-old Rigoberta Menchu (later to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize), that I understood the martyrdom of the Indians of Guatemala. A vast tragedy spread through these mountains but only Rigoberta saw what happened and survived to tell the story. In Chajul, twenty miles from where we stood at that moment, the army had ‘punished’ villagers believed to have supported the call for the return of their ancestral lands. Indians in all the neighbouring villages had been rounded up and brought in to witness the fate of the ‘malcontents’. Attendance was compulsory and the Indians were warned that those who stayed away would receive the same treatment.

  Rigoberta’s teenage brother and her mother were among the group sentenced to death. Her brother had been tortured for sixteen days, and finally blinded. Hardly recognisable as a human being, he was then burned alive with the rest of the Indian prisoners, while Rigoberta looked on. ‘After the fire went out,’ Rigoberta writes, ‘the bodies were twisting about … they kept twitching. Rigoberta’s mother’s torture went on for three days. ‘They cut off her ears, then they cut up her whole body bit by bit.’ She was still alive when they threw her under a tree to be eaten by the dogs.

  This was several years after our visit to Santa Maria, but as we were to discover, the atrocities were well under way. Richards, softened by whisky, repeated his lack of animosity towards Indians, adding that he did not understand them. ‘Something about these guys reminds me of bees—or is it ants? They stick together all the time. No way you’re ever going to turn them into individuals able to make a separate rational choice.’

  ‘And is that a bad thing?’

  ‘For them yes, because it gets them a bad reputation. They’re liable to fall for any crazy ism going around, and then they all go in together. It makes people kind of nervous about what could happen if you gave them half a goddam chance.’

  I spent a few days with Lazlo in Huehuetenango and the nearby area of the Cuchumatanes mountains, after which he was released from police supervision and we went down to Guatemala City together.

  ‘What are you doing about the Moon Codex?’ Lazlo asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘You’re very wise. They’re asking two thousand dollars and hardly any of it’s been interpreted.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be useful in any case. I’ve changed my mind about what I want to write.’

  ‘I’m glad about that,’ he said.

  It turned out that Lazlo and Lena were going to be stuck in the country for an unspecified time while they tried to obtain exit visas, and we said goodbye at the airport before I boarded a plane for Miami.

  Back in London I settled to rewrite most of the book about Guatemala I’d been dickering with for years. All the research went by the board, and the glossary of archaic Spanish so painfully put together ended in a ‘may come in useful’ corner of the cupboard where it would be quickly forgotten. In the end I wrote a novel about my stay among some Indians of the Altiplano who were to be ‘settled and civilised’ in
a place like the Centro at Santa Maria.

  Chapter Eight

  DURING THE EARLY MONTHS of 1956 I worked on the novel that became The Volcanoes Above Us, eventually delivering the manuscript to Jonathan Cape with a separate note. This said no more than, ‘Here’s the book you wanted about Nelson.’ Stunned by the belief that I’d taken him seriously, Jonathan opened the packet only to find himself confronted by an account of Indians and revolutions in Latin America. It turned out that, once he had taken a grip on himself, Jonathan was pleasantly surprised.

  I was invited to Bedford Square, and the customary lunch followed. All was as before: the waxworks emplacement of William Plomer, Daniel George, Jonathan and myself, the faint odour of carbonised meat as the housekeeper advanced with the stew, the cuckoo clock signalling the hour for lunch to begin. Jonathan congratulated me warmly on the book, which was only the second he had read about Latin America, and which he admitted presented it in a new light. A toast to its success was drunk in wine sent by a friend of Jonathan’s who had a vineyard in Provence. It tasted slightly of the camden tablets with which fermentation is suppressed.

  There was some reference to that year’s sojourn in Eastbourne, but it was perfunctory and half-hearted. Since my last lunch at Bedford Square Jonathan had been made a widower for the third time, and now recalling the details of what must have been a sentimental pilgrimage, he was suddenly convulsed with sobs.

  Part of the subsequent success of the novel was probably due to the fact that Jonathan twisted the arm of his friend Cyril Connolly, who normally only read non-fiction, but who in this instance chose it as the subject of his leading review in the Sunday Times. It was a bright moment for the firm at a time when sales had been a little disappointing, Jonathan said.

  Some useful time was spent with Michael Howard on minor reorganisations of the manuscript for which he took time off to attend to although engaged at that point in his major work on the history of the firm. A number of completed chapters he showed me offered a fascinating insight into the cut and thrust of the literary world plus an inside account of the manoeuvres, some of which were astonishing to me, of an adventurous and aggressive publisher.