The Path of the Jaguar

by Stephen Henighan

  “You will also find,” Don Julio pointed to the shelves that stood against the wall, “that it is the foreigners, not our own ignorant burguesía, who are interested in Guatemalan literature.”

  She had read books by Miguel Ángel Asturias and Luis Cardoza y Aragón in secondary school, but most of the titles meant nothing to her. “I do not know these books, Don Julio.”

  “You will train yourself while you are working,” Don Julio said. “Part of your job is to read the books you are selling.”

  Don Julio’s strange notions teased her with the suspicion that he was making fun of her. Was he just another ladino who found Indians ridiculous? Yet his gentleness, his distance and detachment, which seemed in a contradictory way to bring him closer to her than the haughty self-assertion of other men, won her over. Their conversations assumed an unnerving intimacy; when offering advice, he slipped from the formal “Usted” into the “tú.” She was taken aback. She finally decided that, although he was too much of a gentleman to be impervious to the fact that she was an attractive young woman, he was not trying to ruin her honour. He seemed curious about her, a reaction she had rarely encountered in anyone; the thrill of connection across barriers reminded her of how she had felt when she had met Ezequial.

  The best customers were gringo professors who bought fat books on Guatemalan history that cost a month’s wages each. They spoke to her in sometimes comical and self-important but surprisingly erudite Spanish about their investigaciones. Their interest in her culture reinforced her desire to learn their language: the language of people who were more open-minded than the käk winaq, as she called the ladinos. Sitting next to Eusebio on the bus back to the village at the end of the day, she bubbled with rage. The ladinos claimed that, being modern, they had the right to despise the Maya; but these gringos, who were more modern than Guatemalan ladinos, valued Mayan culture. She hurled herself into organizing the women from her church, and from the market — there was no market building then, just a collection of stalls in the dust next to the town hall. They worked for better schools, an enclosed market, Mayan-language instruction for children, a real clinic. Eusebio pleaded with her not to draw too much attention to herself. The war wasn’t over; elsewhere in the country, Catholic activists were still being killed. In the eyes of the Army, Catholicism and Communism were related versions of collectivism; only individualistic Protestant Evangelicals were above suspicion.

  She shared her insights about the customers with Don Julio. “It’s true the gringos you’re talking to are more open than the Guatemalan burgués,” he said. “These are the good gringos. But the bad gringos, such as those who overthrew our government in 1954, are usually in power.”

  “Yes, Don Julio,” she said, remembering his exile.

  He gave her books to read, at first modern Guatemalan novels by Monteforte Toledo and Rey Rosa because these were the literary books she was most likely to sell. Then she read Rigoberta Menchú’s memoirs, which seemed to have little to do with Menchú the public personality who journalists raged against in the newspapers — she had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, to the ladinos’ horror — but was simply the story of all Mayan people during the worst days of the war. Yes, she thought, when she finished the book, this is what happens to us, even if the worst of it did not happen in this region.

  Next Don Julio gave her the Popol Vuh, which had been translated into Spanish during the liberal government of the early 1950s. Amparo already knew these stories of the origins of life, having been told them in Cakchiquel by her grandmother. The pallid inadequacy of the Spanish translations of sacred language was complicated by the fact that, as Don Julio explained, the stories had been written down in Quiché. Yet after thinking about this, she decided that it was good to be reminded of the culture that all Mayan people shared. During the war, the Army did not ask whether people were Quiché or Mam or Q’eqchi or Cakchiquel before they killed them.

  When Don Julio lent her a bilingual book of poems by a poet from Momostenango named Humberto Ak’abal, she was both exhilarated by the presence of the Quiché versions, which she could almost read, on the lefthand pages and vexed that all these famous promoters of Mayan culture spoke Quiché.

  “Are there no Cakchiquels who write?” she asked. “No Mam or Tzutujil?”

  “Maybe in the future. These could become languages that people will write in and speak on the radio and in government, or they could die out. It will depend on how organized Mayan people are after the war ends.”

  She had not thought about it in this way. His comment spurred her to feel that she must go beyond her frustrations with Mama — her narrow views, her shame in her language, her clothes, her very being — and see her life’s broader horizons. She thirsted to drink down Don Julio’s knowledge. Next morning, when he entered the bookstore, she was aware of his wiriness, of the gleam of his grey hair and the smack of his aftershave lotion. He walked towards her with a purposefulness which showed that he, too, was aware of a conversation left unfinished.

  “I have something to ask you, Amparo.”

  She held her breath in fear. He had misinterpreted her need; he was about to make a proposal that would shame her. She struggled to remember whether she had told him about Eusebio.

  “Have you heard of Francisco Marroquín University?” he said, tapping his fingers on the counter. “It’s a private university in the capital. As a public service, this university has decided to create scholarships for Mayan students who are potential future community leaders. I would like to recommend you for one of these scholarships.”

  And so began the strangest episode of her life. Her parents did not understand why she, who had learned all that schools offered, could need to start studying again. The only university they had heard of was San Carlos, the public university, which was almost a war zone, where students were beaten and shot by soldiers, and even the professors used to disappear, their mutilated corpses turning up days later in ditches or garbage dumps. “No, Mama, it’s not that kind of university. This is a peaceful place. It’s where the rich people’s children study.”

  “Then why do they want you?” Mama asked.

  The question had crossed Amparo’s mind as well. To receive the scholarship, she had to take a bus into the capital to an interview in a restaurant in Zone Ten. She had never set foot in this exclusive district of Guatemala City. Don Julio told her not to go to the interview in Western clothes. She must wear her village’s traditional huipil, the uq, or Mayan skirt, and have her hair pulled back in a bun and held in place with a woven headband. She burst out laughing as he itemized the details. “This isn’t a joke, Amparo,” he said. “These people are searching for Mayan community leaders. You must look like a Mayan community leader.”

  The thought of entering Zone Ten in clothes she would not normally wear outside her village almost made her reject the offer. And, when she finally agreed and made the trip, in the crowded schoolbus into the capital she could feel people, many of them even poorer than she, sneering at her clothes. When she transferred in the chaos of Zone One to the muncipal bus that took her across the city, the disdain grew more potent. She hurried along the broad sidewalk of the divided Paseo de la Reforma, the grand boulevard whose name celebrated the decree that had given the ladinos the legal right to steal the Mayas’ land, and reached the door of the restaurant. A tall doorman wearing a jacket with tails blocked her path and told her she could not enter.

  She bowed her head. This was an elaborate joke; no one could really be inviting her to study at Francisco Marroquín University. Mama was right about the world and she was wrong. She hunched inside her huipil, wishing she could shed it. The sun’s glare exposed her as she retreated down the sidewalk. The thought that she would have to ask directions to the bus back to Zone One mortified her. She was searching for someone who looked humble enough to reply to her query when a pudgy man in a suit ran towards her, his thin black tie flipped over his left shoulder by a gust of wind. “¡Con permiso! Ar
e you Amparo Ajuix? I’m Licenciado López. We’re waiting for you in the restaurant.”

  He touched her arm as he guided her back down Paseo de la Reforma. She wasn’t sure whether to take the gesture as courtly, or as a sign that he saw her as a clueless peasant. With his well-nourished mustache and florid cheeks, the man looked like a minor military official. His expression hardened as he paraded her past the hostile doorman and into the restaurant’s hushed, carpeted interior. He seated her at a round table and introduced her to three men and a woman who were licenciados and an older man who was a doctor. She paid attention as she was introduced to these people; this did not prevent her from noticing the stares of the businessmen and the fine ladies, whose jewellery gleamed more brightly than their stricken white faces.

  Into a sudden silence, Licenciado López said: “Sakar. La utz a’wech?”

  His accent suggested that these might be the only words of Cakchiquel that he knew. “Utz matiox,” Amparo said. In Spanish she added: “Thank you very much for the invitation.”

  A man in a tuxedo hurried out of the back of the restaurant. He leaned over the doctor’s shoulder. Harsh whispers passed between them. “ . . . Reputation of my establishment . . . decent people eat here . . . ” He pulled himself upright and announced to the restaurant at large: “You did not warn me, sir! There will be no more reservations for the university!”

  Applause pattered from the surrounding tables.

  “The university is happy to go elsewhere,” the doctor replied. “But for today we are here.”

  The licenciada, the only other woman at the table, met Amparo’s eyes. “This is the Guatemala that we hope to change.”

  “I hope to change it, too,” Amparo said. Their conversation took off. She did not finish the spicy pepián that the waiter brought her. A vision came to her of these ladinos as trapped inside their expensive clothes and their houses secured behind high walls. They were people imprisoned by privilege who were struggling to find a way out into the villages and the highlands, and all the wide expanse of the country that had been off-limits to them as long as the civil war had kept them barricaded in the capital. She grasped that her world was twice as large as theirs. Now that the war was ending and all of Guatemala would become one, they needed her. She began to speak with confidence about her community activities and how she had acquired her education. At the end of the meal they told her that they would like to award her the scholarship.

  She carried the mood of that triumphant meal, where she took pleasure in the discomfort of the wealthy diners, into the first days of her studies. She ignored the fact that most students of Francisco Marroquín University shared little of their professors’ idealism. She had imagined the university as a lofty, elevated place, yet it was sunken, as though in extreme discretion, into a walled-in bowl in the earth in the middle of the capital. Inside the guarded gates was a parking lot where students left the long, gleaming cars in which they drove to class. Immaculate parkland and two museums led to the steps of new buildings with broad corridors and large windows. Entering the cafeteria, she saw her first computers. A group of light-skinned young girls sat at a table holding enormous mugs of coffee in their hands. They chatted and typed, each on her own keyboard. The girls did not see her. Even later, when she sat next to them in Licenciado López’s Guatemalan History course, which was the class she liked best, neither the girls nor the young men who were taking the course, noticed she was there. When Licenciado López lectured on the history of indigenous people, the young people displayed no awareness of the presence of indigenous students.

  To get to class on time, Amparo woke up at 5:00 AM, rode the bus down the mountain to Antigua, made the hour-long trip from Antigua to the capital, then the almost equally long trip on the muncipal bus across Guatemala City from Zone One. She walked the last ten minutes to the university’s gates. By the time she arrived her dress slacks and formal blouses, which felt dowdy by comparison with the clothes the girls with computers bought on their weekend shopping trips to Miami, were creased. She preferred creases to emulating the other three young indigenous women who had scholarships, all of whom wore traje as she had done during her interview. They were all Quiché. They spoke to each other in Quiché during breaks between classes. Amparo, who sat with them, could make out much of what they said but the hemmed-in world the young women had forged for themselves troubled her. If solitude was the meaning of Mayanness, she felt less Mayan than they. Was she, in the end, some sort of in-between person, deposited on an unstable middle ground by Mama’s reluctance to teach her their ancestral culture? She was ashamed to admit to the indigenous women that there were subjects she could discuss more fluently in Spanish than in Cakchiquel, that she did not know how to measure time in katuns.

  Eusebio, who had been her novio for five years, encouraged her in a flat voice. “I’m proud of you,” he said, in a way that made his humility almost hurtful.

  “You’ll see more of me when I finish,” she assured him.

  “I want us to get married.” It was Sunday afternoon. They were circling the village square holding hands, in the way that was approved of for acknowledged fiancés of firm religious belief.

  “We’ll get married as soon as I finish . . . ”

  “You’ll be a different person then. You won’t want to be with me.”

  “Eusebio, I want to be with you. That’s not going to change.” Yet as they rounded the corner of the square, the purple door of the house on the corner stared her in the face, reminding her of how much life could change.

  She raised the question of marriage with the three Quichés. But their engagements were with Mayan men. Locked into the tight grid of traditional communities, they could never be expelled no matter how superior they became to the men with whom they had grown up. Again Amparo felt that their strength grew from narrowness. She was embarrassed to find that by starting this conversation she had put herself in a position where she had to concede that her fiancé was a poor, working class ladino. The other women stared at her. They understood being loyal to a Mayan community, they could imagine leaving the Mayan world to marry a man with a better education and more prospects — but to leave the community for a man who was neither wealthy nor Maya?

  Next day, in the cafeteria, she sat by herself. Neither the ladinos nor the Quichés came to speak to her.

  On Friday morning, exhausted and longing for the end of the week, she walked downhill towards the university gate beneath the pollution-heavy highland cloud. A woman who worked in the cafeteria walked ahead of her, carrying a bag over her shoulder. When the woman was within ten paces of the gate, two young men rushed towards her. They wore baseball caps pulled down over their eyes. Amparo’s gaze locked on the long, silky dark hair hooked behind the ears of the man holding the pistol. The other man wielded a knife. They seized the woman, pushed the gun in her face, made a stab at the air with the knife, lifted her bag off her shoulder and, almost without breaking stride, plunged into the undergrowth on the other side of the street. The uniformed guards lounging around the booth behind the gate noticed what was happening only when it was too late.

  The woman stared in front of her, frozen in silence. A howl of agony filled the roadway. Amparo rushed to her side.

  “My money! My transistor radio! It took me months to save for that radio!”

  “Tranquila, señora. You’re safe, it’s all right.”

  “My radio! My radio! How will I hear the voice of Jesus Christ without my radio?”

  Two guards, Galil rifles levelled, pounced out into the roadway in combat posture and entered the bushes uttering threatening grunts. Amparo accompanied the woman past the museums and the young people chatting in the parking lot. She left her at the door of the cafeteria, giving her ten quetzales to buy herself lunch, even though the other employees were almost certain to offer her leftover food. During her classes, she felt trapped inside an invisible skin. In spite of her Quiché classmates’ invocation of traditional religion and somet
hing they called, in Spanish, la cosmovisión maya, the presence of Xpiyacoc and Ixmucane grew fainter. Licenciado López’s voice, as he gave his lecture, failed to pry her free from the speechless moment that had gripped the cafeteria employee during the seconds after she was robbed.

  By the end of the day she had decided not to return to the university. That afternoon, when the bus from the capital juddered into the market in Antigua, she stepped down onto the hard ruts. Her head lowered, she walked towards the park.

  Don Julio was in the bookstore chatting with a new employee, a young girl Amparo didn’t recognize. He grew animated at her arrival. Amparo interrupted him in a muted voice to tell her of her decision.

  He grew silent. “I can see you’re not going to change your mind. You haven’t come here to ask me to persuade you to give it one more week?” He chewed his lip. “This tension’s always going to be there. To make your culture advance you must give up part of it. If you live your life as the mother of many children, you’ll maintain your customs in a state of weakness. And in the future that’s not going to work. Your children will go to the maquilas or to the north and your culture will be lost. It’s only by compromising with the modern world that you’ll spare part of that richness.” He shook his head. “Believe me, I didn’t used to think this way. I believed in total resistance. But that’s not going to be possible anymore — ”

  She stared into his face until it blurred before her eyes and the books arranged cover-out on the wall behind him became a tapestry of indecipherable colours, a pattern on a huipil whose village of origin she could not identify. She remembered how she used to hunger for his conversation. Behind his words she felt his wounded disappointment; his inability to express this emotion directly, his need to turn it into an intellectual argument, deepened her disillusionment. Over his shoulder, she saw the slender girl staring at them. She said: “If I keep going there I’m going to lose my fiancé. I can’t imagine marrying anyone else. He treats me well. So few men are like that.”