The Path of the Jaguar

by Stephen Henighan

  He bowed his head. He couldn’t disprove feelings. She thanked him with lavish formality for his interest in her. She left El Tesoro. She had not set foot in the store again.

  That Sunday afternoon as she and Eusebio circled the park, she told him of her decision. She saw him absorbing the news. She had to wait only a few moments for him to ask her the question he had asked her once before, when they had been novios for only a few months. “Amparo, will you marry me?”

  “Ri nuwuchejil!” she exclaimed. My husband! Observing his bewildered reaction, she remembered that he did not understand her language.

  FIVE

  SHE WALKED UP THE STEPS of El Tesoro for the first time in four years. Ten days ago she had phoned and asked to speak to Don Julio. When she introduced herself, there was a long silence. In a subdued voice, he asked her whether she had many children. Only one so far, she told him, and a second one on the way. “I think two will be enough.” She felt a twist of discomfort. She told him that the handicrafts she sold in the village market no longer made ends meet. Don Julio made a commiserating comment about how expensive the country had become. He could not offer her work at El Tesoro, but if he heard of something he would let her know. Having accepted this polite refusal as a rebuff, she was surprised when the phone rang the next morning and she heard his voice telling her that the nuns at Escuela San Fernando were looking for an educated woman of strong Catholic faith to teach kindergarten and the first year of primary school.

  As she entered the bookstore, the shelves of face-out covers encircled her. She hadn’t read a book since Sandra was born.

  “May I help you, señora?”

  “Yes, is Don Julio in, please? My name is Amparo Ajuix.”

  The young woman, who was sliding out from behind the counter, paused. Amparo traced the fall of her long dark hair to the unexpected challenge of her lucid eyes. This was the girl who had been working in her place the day she told Don Julio that she was leaving the university. Four years had lent her waistline a relaxed fullness. She examined Amparo’s body, her merciless scrutiny making Amparo feel like a pregnant teenager.

  Leaning around a corner, the girl called down the narrow passage between the bookstore and the souvenir shop: “Julio, there’s a lady here who wants to speak with you.”

  The girl addressed Don Julio as “tú.”

  “Amparo!” Don Julio emerged from the passage. “What a pleasure to see you!” Shaking her hand, he addressed her with the formal pronoun. She heard his restraint as a reprimand to the girl’s boldness. “You’ve met my wife?”

  Amparo extended her hand. “Mucho gusto, señora.”

  The girl’s loose smile exposed the large Mayan teeth behind her rouged ladino lips. “Mucho gusto.”

  “Sonia came to work for me after you left. And she stayed!” Don Julio’s laughter shook his frame into that of a stranger. His hair was white, his thinness no longer looked trim or compact. Living with this girl had coarsened him. Could Sonia be his equal in anything? Anything except the one thing made obvious by her taut designer bluejeans and the high breasts tightening the lines of her sweater? Don Julio had fallen prey to the miserable obsession that all men shared. A conflicted pride in Eusebio’s moral behaviour surged up through her irritation.

  “Thank you so much for helping me find work, Don Julio . . . ”

  “I only hope you can continue working there once your child is born.”

  He thought she would quit again. She was doomed to disappoint him, once more making him look bad for having supported her. “I will speak to Sister Consuelo about continuing to work after the child is born.” She stepped forward, emboldened by an awareness that Sonia’s coldness contained a shiver of insecurity: she did not have a child. Married to an older man, she might never have children. Amparo felt her position strengthen. “This child — ”

  But Don Julio had already begun to speak. “Yes, you should talk to Sister Consuelo. Perhaps she will find a solution.”

  She sought out his eyes behind his glasses, convinced that he was talking about more than holding onto her job. For an instant he held her gaze, igniting their old complicity. He, too, she saw, felt the return of their secret understanding, more powerful because neither of them had crossed these social barriers with anyone else. She had been the first Mayan woman he had got to know; he was her only friend among the burguesía.

  The sensation passed. Don Julio, shrugging his shoulders with a motion that carried him into the doorway where the girls serving at the tables passed back and forth behind him, said: “And your husband?”

  “He’s a social worker for an NGO. They run a drop-in centre for people living on the street. He would like to do something else, but he lacks a high school diploma.”

  “He’s lucky to have an educated wife.”

  Amparo struggled to smile. She struggled not to cry.

  “Julio,” Sonia said. “We have to pay the suppliers.”

  “Thank you very much for your help, Don Julio.” Amparo shook his hand. She spotted an enormous gringo leafing through a book with a photograph of a Mayan village on the cover and wished she could ask him if he needed help. She stumbled into the street.

  SIX

  SHE WALKED WITHOUT A DESTINATION, blinking against the sunlight. As her composure returned, she passed the San Pedro Church. On the street in front of the steps, a young priest was blessing a ladino family’s new car. The priest finished his oration and began to sprinkle water on the car’s hood. A group of pale, bulky tourists with cameras came around the corner. The priest, growing nervous, rushed the blessing. He cast the water about in haste, looking terrified that he might become an attraction to be photographed. The sight steadied Amparo. Those who accused her of backwardness were themselves seen as backward by others. Which meant that the idea of backwardness had no meaning. Pausing in front of the church, she crossed herself.

  She walked to the market and took the bus back up the mountainside to the village. She got out two blocks north of the park. At the house on the corner, the purple door opened and a modest figure in a long skirt emerged. Amparo started to turn away. But it was too late: Raquel called her name.

  Amparo crossed the street. Raquel gave her a hug and invited her in. “Why don’t I see you anymore?”

  “I’m so busy.” She stared across the lintel and took a quick look over her shoulder at the passengers dispersing from the idling schoolbus.

  “And expecting another child. Come in and tell me about it.”

  Amparo glimpsed Doña María’s daughter emerging from the market, carrying her baby. Hoping the girl had not spotted her, she slipped into the house and closed the door behind her.

  “I don’t have to start cooking yet,” Raquel said. “Jorge won’t come back until late.”

  Amparo remained standing on the tiles.

  “Come in!” Raquel said, tugging at her sleeve. “Why can’t we talk like we used to?”

  “I have to go home. My mother’s been looking after Sandra all day. I’m teaching little girls at Escuela San Fernando. As I’m expecting, I tire quickly.”

  Raquel, thin and dark, spurned adornment. She wore long skirts in Western style, and did not speak Cakchiquel even with her mother; her preacher had told her Indian dialects were shameful. She stared at Amparo with the sympathy that made her company so enticing. “Amparo, you always had time for everyone: your husband, your work, the Savings Club, your church. And you had time to talk as well.” She straightened up. “You’re not yourself.”

  “Eusebio — doesn’t — want — me — to — talk — to — you.”

  A horrible sense of everything being wrong swamped her like nightfall. It was wrong to betray her husband by criticizing him, wrong to bare her unhappiness to Raquel rather than to Sister Consuelo. Accustomed to howling about her discomforts in church before unordained upstart preachers, surrounded by co-worshippers who moaned out loud about the sins they had committed before being saved, Raquel could only trivialize Amparo’s pain. T
he secrets they had shared in the past had been discarded like corn husks.

  “Why doesn’t he want you to talk to me? Because of my religion? Amparo, we’ve never let this come between us.” She shook her head, her large eyes looking sad yet inquisitive. No doubt she had found new confidantes to whom anything Amparo revealed would be passed along.

  She must not say a word.

  “Let me get you a handkerchief.”

  Raquel disappeared through the kitchen into the back room. Amparo felt marooned in the small, silent house, trying to contain sobs that were too big for her body. A poster over the sink, emblazoned with English words in yellow lettering, showed a crowd of thousands stretching away before a preacher staring heavenwards against the backdrop of a tilted cross. Raquel, bringing her a cloth handkerchief, said: “It’s pretty, no? It’s a gift from missionaries who visited our church. It shows a great crusade for souls that took place in the United States.” Watching Amparo rub her eyes, Raquel said: “Your Pope never gets crowds like that!”

  “The Pope gets bigger crowds than any of your preachers. Didn’t you see the pictures on television when he was in Mexico?” Trying to calm her anger, she reminded herself of the affinities that used to weld her to Raquel: active women who had exercised careful judgement to spare themselves the misery of unfaithful or drunken husbands, they had selected men who were calmer and more modest than they. They used to giggle about their quiet husbands over Raquel’s kitchen table.

  “Your Pope,” Raquel said, “distracts people from direct communication with Jesus Christ.”

  This was a conversation Amparo preferred to avoid. She felt little warmth towards Pope John Paul II, who disdained the poor and offered solace to their oppressors. But he was still the successor to St. Peter. When the Pope had visited Guatemala, thugs from Raquel’s church had run around Antigua defacing the posters that announced his visit by drawing black horns above John Paul II’s ears and scrawling “The Anti-Christ” across his forehead. “Your church doesn’t even have priests,” she retorted. “It’s the blind leading the blind.”

  They never used to talk about religion. It had been the subject furthest from their long, intimate afternoons.

  Raquel gave her arm a glancing touch. “Are you sure you won’t sit down? I’ve got a pie that Ezequial brought from Comalapa.”

  Amparo handed her the handkerchief. “I have to go home.”

  “Now what’s wrong?” Raquel said, leaving the handkerchief dangling in front of her. “Aren’t I allowed to mention my brother’s name?”

  “A married woman does not want to hear about her ex-fiancé.” Amparo pushed the crumpled handkerchief into Raquel’s hands. She heard Raquel’s breath trembling. “I have to go.”

  “Come back. Bring Sandra with you. We can talk.”

  You can talk, Amparo thought. That was what she feared. News spread through the village in a second, in spite of the barriers between Catholics and Evangelicals.

  She submitted to Raquel’s embrace and stepped out of the house into the dusty park. Through the broad doorway of the market, she saw that most of the stalls had closed. The bougainvillea’s luxuriance made no impact on her as she walked home. She followed the long curve of the dirt street towards the gate of the compound.

  “Amparo!” Doña María’s sliding gait made her look almost crippled. The leather strap of her right sandal was clinging by a thread. “Amparo. I’ve come from talking to your mother. You know that she and I were neighbours when I was a girl.”

  “Yes, Doña María,” Amparo said, realizing that in Cakchiquel she accepted as ritualized greetings phrases that in Spanish sounded like repetitions. Her head bowed, she said a formal: “La utz ab’anon? How is your health?”

  “Matiox, matiox.” Doña María scrutinized Amparo. “Ret b’ison. You look sad.” When Amparo refused to rise to this, the old woman said: “I hoped to find you at home. I wanted to talk to you about the proposals for schools in Cakchiquel.”

  “Yes, with the Peace Accords teaching in our school will be in Cakchiquel in the early years.” She took a step forward. “The members of our church have written to the government to request that the language of instruction be changed by next year.”

  Doña María’s expression folded in on itself in leathery distaste. The rose-coloured blossoms over her shoulder brightened the dusty street. “Your church . . . ” Of the two Cakchiquel words for church, she chose the half-Spanish one that sounded disparaging: ChichoDios, God’s car. “Amparo, we don’t want our children to be backward — ”

  “Our children will approach Spanish with more confidence if they can write in their own language and know their history.” She enunciated the final term with particular force — ojer tz’ij, “ancient words” — to refute the way that this conversation about public matters was obliging them to stud their Cakchiquel with Spanish expressions. In Spanish history was an historia, a story like any other you might tell, full of fibs and exaggerations; in Cakchiquel it was words transmitted from ancient times.

  “That’s fine for you, who live in a compound,” Doña María said. “My husband sows corn. We can’t teach our children to read and write Spanish because we barely write it ourselves. Where will our children learn, if not in school?”

  “But Doña María, you don’t send your boys to school!”

  “My daughter was the best student in her year. Imagine where she would be if she had studied in some dialect!”

  “Maybe she would have understood her position in this country well enough not to have a baby at fourteen,” Amparo said.

  “And you think you are such a fine married woman!”

  In spite of herself, Amparo took a step forward. The volume of her body hindered her. “What do you mean, Doña María?”

  They glared at each other. Doña María’s disdain filled her with fear. Had she glimpsed Doña María’s nahual: the secret animal each person carried inside them, who came to their rescue in moments of distress on the condition that the animal’s identity not be revealed? Doña María was a poisonous snake. “Understand her position in this country!” Doña María grumbled. “The Army was right. Priests and Communists are the same. Los curas son comunistas y los comunistas son curas.”

  “Is that what your gringo missionaries say when they come and take your money?”

  “Who are you to criticize us for contributing to our church? You, with your fancy altars and your incense! My friend Jesus Christ drove the moneychangers from the temple, but you meet in the church to count your money.”

  “You may join us,” Amparo said, “as soon as you send your boys to school.”

  “I’m not going to send them to school in some backward dialect so that you can keep your compound while my family sows corn!” Doña María spoke in Cakchiquel. The only Spanish words in the sentence were “backward dialect.”

  “Doña María — ”

  The older woman turned away and shuffled down the street, favouring her disintegrating right sandal. She stopped and turned around. “Who are you to criticize my daughter, when your sister Yolanda sits on park benches in Antigua with gringo men?”

  Amparo turned towards the metal gate. Her big body wearied her. She felt a treacherous dash of shame at the child that was pushing its way into her life. As she reached the gate, her mother came to the door and let her into the yard, preceding her across the hard dirt with her seized-up stride. Mama had never complained about all the children she had borne. Amparo read a reproach in her mother’s kind, enduring features, the grey hair that hung in straight hanks to her broad, pitched-back shoulders, her huipil with its motifs declaring her citizenship of this village and her heavy uq scattered with squiggles of the wool she was carding at a bench in the yard.

  “How’s Sandra?” Amparo asked, alerted to her own maternal duties.

  “She’s in the house. Eusebio came and got her. He asked where you were.”

  “I’m here.” She avoided Mama’s questioning gaze. “I ran into Doña María.
‘Your mother and I were neighbours when I was a girl,’” she said, imitating Doña María’s voice.

  “That was before she married that man. La ma’ la’ nurayij nükum ya’,” Mama said, repeating a phrase Amparo had heard women speak too many times before: The man likes to drink liquor. Eusebio remained the rare husband to whom this phrase did not apply. For a moment she longed to rush into the house, certain that Eusebio would hug and kiss her, and everything would be the way it was before. “ . . . No wonder his sons have to work in the milpa instead of going to school . . . He was always a difficult man, even before xepolpotijkï!”

  Whenever a family in the village was converted to Evangelical Protestantism, Mama referred to them as having been flipped upside down. Since Doña María, her husband and their children had been flipped by a pudgy man from Alabama who wore a purple T-shirt with a white cross on the back, and encouraged his followers to daub their houses with purple paint, Mama had barely spoken to them.

  “Did she talk to you about the school?”

  “Yes,” Mama said. “In the past I thought like her. But now you tell me that you can write in Cakchiquel. Well, if we can write in this language, maybe I should have taught it to you better.”

  Engulfed by her mother’s shame, Amparo took a step towards her. Mama returned to her bench and resumed carding the wool. Once her hands had slipped into an easy rhythm, she said: “I told Doña María I didn’t understand the idea of a school in Cakchiquel, but that if it was what my children wanted for their children I wasn’t going to argue.”