The
PATH
of the
JAGUAR
ALSO BY STEPHEN HENIGHAN
NOVELS
Other Americas
The Places Where Names Vanish
The Streets of Winter
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Nights in the Yungas
North of Tourism
A Grave in the Air
NON-FICTION
Assuming the Light: The Parisian Literary Apprenticeship of Miguel Ángel Asturias
When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing
Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family
A Report on the Afterlife of Culture
A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change
Sandino’s Nation: Ernesto Cardenal and Sergio Ramírez Writing Nicaragua, 1940-2012
The
PATH
of the
JAGUAR
STEPHEN HENIGHAN
©Stephen Henighan, 2016
All rights reserved
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Thistledown Press Ltd.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Henighan, Stephen, 1960 –, author
The path of the jaguar / Stephen Henighan.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77187-123-5 (paperback).– ISBN 978-1-77187-125-9 (html).– ISBN 978-1-77187-124-2 (pdf)
I. Title.
PS8565.E5818P38 2016 C813'.54 C2016-905260-5
C2016-905261-3
Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie
Printed and bound in Canada
Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada for its publishing program.
CONTENTS
PART ONE
1997
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
PART TWO
2003
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
PART THREE
2005
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The
PATH
of the
JAGUAR
PART ONE
1997
ONE
“AND YOUR CHILD?” MAMA SAID from the doorway. Thinking of the child in her belly, not the girl playing in front of the television, Amparo avoided her mother’s eyes. She looked at her leather shoes and straightened her white blouse over the hips of her black dress slacks. When a woman’s husband makes false accusations, she can share her pain with no one. The sickness of the silence between her and Eusebio, as acrid as morning sickness except that it was continuing into her fifth month, filled her throat. Stepping out of the doorway into the shadow of the room’s zinc roof, her mother said: “Do you want me to look after Sandra while you go to town?”
“Inés can look after her. She can close the stall for a few hours.”
“Let her keep working. I’ll look after your daughter.” Her mother bent forward and hugged Sandra to the yellow stitching that crossed her light blue huipil: the same blouse that Amparo wore when she sold handicrafts in the market, but which she exchanged for Western clothes when she left the village. “Don’t you want to help your nana husk black beans?”
As Sandra squealed, Amparo yearned to be able to fall into her mother’s arms. “Speak to her in Cakchiquel, Mama. Teach her our language better than you taught it to us.”
Amparo’s mother hugged her granddaughter to her chest. “When I was young we were dirty Indians until we spoke Spanish, and then maybe we could be people.”
“I’m going, Mama.” She pulled her jacket around her shoulders, zipping it up so that her belly would not shock the nuns. As they crossed the tiles to the front door, Amparo caught herself saying goodbye to Sandra in Spanish. She was like her mother: she wanted her daughter to speak Spanish. She told herself that if her mother had passed on her entire culture, she would have been spared this embarrassment.
She opened the gate of the compound and stepped onto the dirt street where bougainvillea spilled over the tops of the white stucco walls. The steep slopes of the valley climbed towards the sunlight. The brightness hurt her eyes; when she and Eusebio were first married, they used to meet in Antigua at the end of the day and ride the bus home together up the mountainside
She turned left towards the village’s small concrete park. It had no trees or fountain like the park in Antigua. Averting her eyes from the house on the corner with the purple door, she entered the market. A new stucco building, put up next to the town hall by a Swedish aid project as the Peace Accords were being signed, it was dim and spacious, lined by the women’s ceiling-high stalls draped with weaving. Most of the wall-hangings, bags and vests were woven at home by women and girls on backstrap looms or smaller telas de cincha; some of the work was mass-produced, with synthetics blended into the wool. The mayor had raised the licence fee for stalls again, and the women were taking home fewer quetzales. Coming from a family that had enough food to support a servant, Amparo could send Inés to look after her stall while she cared for Sandra or worked in Antigua. On weekends, when tour buses arrived, she tended the stall herself. She got to know the drivers and guides from the agencies in Antigua, acquaintanceships that led to special commissions or private sales.
Amparo entered the market, greeting the women in Cakchiquel mixed with Spanish. A thin hand caught her arm. The girl held a baby at her breast. As a child, she had been the terror of the market. In school her learning was so quick that she took over the class on days when the teacher was drunk. There was talk of a scholarship that would allow her to go to secondary school with the nuns in Antigua. But in early adolescence, those dangerous months for a young girl, when she had finished the six years of primary schooling and was waiting to find out whether she could study with the nuns, she had fallen in love. By her fourteenth birthday she was pregnant; now married, she would never leave the market. Watching the baby’s curled hands pat the girl’s cheek, Amparo wished Mama were stricter with Yolanda. On the day Sandra was born, as soon as the midwife told her she had a girl, Amparo promised herself that her daughter would not take a walk with a boy until she had finished secondary school.
“Doña Amparo,” the girl said. “My mother and I want to join your savings club.”
“Ask your mother to talk to me.”
“She’s gone to get the bus to Antigua.”
“I’ll see her on the bus then. I’m going to Antigua myself.” She made her way to her stall in the back corner of the market. Weavings made by Inés, by Amparo’s mother, by her sisters and sisters-in-law and by Amparo herself, stretched down from racks and hangers in the dim light. She reached down, slipping her hand into a pile of stacked blankets, and pulled out the dark red bag. B’alam. Onc
e a year, sometimes more often, she wove a red bag with an ambling white jaguar on the side. When she was tending the stall she hung the bag above her head. Don Julio had tried to arrange for her to go to Mexico — to Chiapas and Oaxaca — to meet indigenous women, exchange weaving techniques and sell her bags. She had dreamed that this could come true, as though she were a rich käk winaq with a passport, as though Mexico would give her a visa. In the end, Don Julio had shipped the bags to Mexico; Amparo stayed at home.
“How’s it going?” Inés looked startled at Amparo’s question. The vertical pleats of her grey-blue Quiché skirt lent her hips a fragile air. Her eyes met Amparo’s, then skidded away, still afraid of her after all these years. During the civil war the girl’s village in the highlands was occupied by the army: the soldiers raped every Mayan girl as soon as she reached puberty. Amparo’s father made deliveries in the region and sometimes spent the night in the home of Inés’ parents. When the child turned eight, her father asked Papa to take her away. “But you haven’t met my wife,” Papa said. “You don’t know what sort of woman your daughter will be working for.” He feared that Inés would simply add to his family’s burdens. That night, he told Amparo, he drove his truck back to Guatemala City, keeping himself awake by swigging his favourite cocktail of black coffee and Coca-Cola from his thermos. Inés slept on the seat beside him, her sandals grazing the top of the woven bag on the floor that held her clothes. He delivered his load of wood hewn from a highland forest to a furniture factory on the edge of the capital, then brought the girl back to the village. The next time Amparo’s father drove north, the army had razed the girl’s village. The place no longer existed; to ask what had happened to the people who lived there was to invite death. When he told the girl, she lowered her head. She stopped asking when she would go home. After Amparo and Eusebio married, her father gave them Inés as a wedding present.
“I sold a bag to a gringo couple,” Inés said. Her meek smile reminded Amparo that she was twenty. She should have married by now; her humble manner suggested that she would not marry, that she would always be a burden.
Inés showed her the money paid by the gringos. Amparo counted it and slid it into the pocket of her dress slacks. “I’m going to Antigua,” Amparo said. “You close the stall when you finish.”
“Sí, señora,” Inés said. They spoke in Spanish, even though Cakchiquel and the girl’s Quiché shared many words.
Amparo left the market and walked across the whitewashed park and up the street of interlocking stone to where the bus to Antigua waited.
Ten passengers sat on the yellow-and-black schoolbus, its front window plastered with decals announcing the driver’s personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The pilotos of public buses were converts to Evangelical Protestantism. Papa was a piloto, even if he drove trucks rather than buses, and he remained an observant Catholic. She felt more secure when her driver was a God-fearing Catholic rather than an upstart Evangelical so arrogant as to mistake God’s son for his personal friend.
“Amparo, come here, mi hija,” Doña María called.
In her slurred Spanish, Doña María asked about Amparo’s mother’s health. They might have understood each other better in Cakchiquel, but Doña María was embarrassed to use the language in public. She had been unable to go to the market in Antigua this morning because her youngest was ill. She was making the trip down the mountainside with a bag of potatoes, even though it was late in the day and the chances of selling enough to cover the bus fare were slender.
“I would like to save my money.”
“I saw your daughter in the market,” Amparo said. “How pretty her baby looks.”
“You must be looking forward to your next baby, mi hija. Is your husband hoping for a son?”
Amparo felt the fullness of her stomach as though the child were heating her. Her temples throbbed. Papa claimed that Doña María had the powers of a curandera, like her sister Eduviges. The driver kicked the bus into gear and made a tour of the block, the ayudante hanging out the open door by his arm and yelling, “Antigua! Antigua!” as he scanned the streets for passengers. She braced her hand against the back of the seat in front of her above where the mysterious word “Bluebird” was pressed into the dark green metal. The bus began to climb out of the valley.
Doña María, rocking alongside her, said: “Your child will not go hungry. The women in your savings club are rich.”
“We’re not rich, Doña María. We are humble people who are saving our money.”
“The government and the gringos gave you money and you’re keeping it for yourselves.” Doña María’s face underwent a hideous transformation. “Why won’t you let me join?”
“Our club,” Amparo said, “was set up by a Non-Governmental Organization. Every woman must deposit six quetzales a month. At the end of the year, if we’ve followed the law, the bank pays us our interest and the government matches a portion of our savings with a donation — ”
“The government gives you money and doesn’t give any to the rest of us! That’s your payoff for telling the women in the market to vote for President Arzú.”
“No, that’s not how it works. We are audited by the government, we are overseen by a gringa development worker. If we are not moral, if we are not meticulous — ”
“Eleq’om ri ixoq! The woman’s a thief!” Doña María switched into Cakchiquel. “Everybody knows that you and your friends meet in the basement of your church to count your money!”
“It’s not very much money,” Amparo said, wishing she could avoid this part of the conversation. She spoke in Cakchiquel, hoping that the lounging teenage boys in baseball caps at the back of the bus would ignore them. “In the future we will be able to take out the money as micro-crédito, to start a business or make an investment, but the señora gringa must approve the project, strict records are kept . . . ”
“Why can’t I join your club?”
“All indigenous women in the village are eligible.” The language of bureaucracy edged the conversation back into Spanish.
“Bueno,” Doña María said, as though the matter were resolved. “I’m joining. So is my daughter.”
The bus clattered around a corner and stopped. Two women and five children climbed on and stood in the aisle. The ayudante swung back through the crowd to collect their fares.
“To be a member,” Amparo said, “you must send your children to school.”
“My daughter was the best student in her year.”
“But your sons — ”
“My husband needs our sons to work in the milpa. It’s easy for you: your family has a compound. We must grow corn!”
“You know the conditions, Doña María.” Amparo couldn’t help admiring the fact that Doña María sent her daughters to school. In many families the girls never saw a classroom; it was the boys who went to school until they grew big enough to help their fathers in the cornfields.
The bus stopped at the bend in the road and a group of children on their way home from school spilled out the door. A seat near the front became free. Dragging her sack of potatoes, Doña María changed seats.
Amparo slid over to the window. Below her lay Antigua. She could see the turmoil of the market beneath the volcanoes, the firm bar of the divided Calzada, packed with trucks and buses, ruling off the market from the town. The spires of the enormous ruined white churches stretched up from the geometrical rectangle of cobblestoned streets that lay like an elongated grate reaching from the Calzada to the park, green with trees, bright with the sprinkle of its invisible fountain and penned in by the heavy buildings that had been built by Spanish Conquistadors. On the north side of the park stood the Cathedral, where God’s grace called out to her. North of the park the ruined churches alternated with green interior gardens hidden from the street by white stucco walls and high wooden gates. The enclosed mansions converted into gringo hotels, heavily guarded shops selling jade jewellery, paintings or handicrafts, extended in straight cobblestoned lines
to the top of the town. In the moment before the schoolbus dived down the slope, whisking the perfect view from sight, Amparo thought: I don’t need to do anything in my life. I don’t need to make money or work, or even be happy with my husband because God has made so much beauty for me. Look at all that my God has made for me! I could devote my whole life to thanking God for sending his son Jesus Christ to earth, to thanking Ixmucane for making it possible for women to have children.
As the bus swayed down the potholed dirt streets on the edge of Antigua, the whining of Laura Pausini, singing laments in Spanish about men leaving women, sliced by the sibilant “s”s of her Italian accent, yielded to the voice of a newsreader. They rumbled into the market, rolling over the ruts alongside schoolbuses arriving from other villages. The perfect cone of the Agua Volcano stretched towards the sky. “ . . . the body of the Mayan priest Jorge Puuc has been discovered in a well. Edmundo Rodríguez, known as Comandante Vladimir, spokesman for the guerrillas during the peace negotiations, denounced Puuc’s death as evidence that human rights abuses are continuing in spite of the signing of the Peace Accords . . . ” The bus stopped and people filed off into the back quarter of the market, where the furniture makers had their stalls.
Amparo ducked beneath the speaker and eased herself down into the din of the market. Comandante Vladimir was the first guerrilla she had seen on television. For years they had been told that the guerrillas were Soviet ogres, and suddenly there was this handsome man with his gallant moustache and diction more refined than that of any general, representing the guerrillas at the negotiating table. Her friend Raquel, who hated the guerrillas, claimed that Vladimir was as corrupt as the generals.
At her feet, tethered brown chickens clucked their availability for slaughter, pyramids of sapodilla fruit, mandarins, guavas, and mangoes rose from tarpaulins like miniature volcanic cones. She skirted the indoor portion of the market, where food was sold, making her way in the direction of the Calzada. Men stood behind public weigh scales and tables holding telephones. Every vendor barked out the worth of his merchandise: T-shirts, vinyl bags adorned with comic-strip characters, plastic sandals, running shoes. Amparo negotiated the space between the stalls and the streaming people with dazed hesitation. Her balance felt wrong. Her foot slipped on a rut. She caught herself. She must care for her child. Ri aköla, she corrected. Not child: children. The second one was already part of her life.
The Path of the Jaguar Page 1