The Path of the Jaguar
Page 6
They entered the small bare room with the crucifix on the wall. Sister Consuelo shut the door, closing out the smells and voices and hot sunlight. Amparo concentrated on the presence of God. She had rarely felt such a cool, pure Catholicism; Ixmucane and Xpiyacoc receded. She wondered whether Sister Consuelo’s cell resembled this office. Facing the nun across the bare wooden table, she said: “My husband does not believe that our child — the child who will soon be born — is his.”
“Have you given him reason to believe this?”
“No! Of course not!” Tears ripped through her.
Sister Consuelo’s face was unforgiving. “Are you certain, Amparo, that none of your actions has been open to misinterpretation?”
She had expected more sympathy. She tried to examine her conscience, to earn God’s compassion. “My husband is a good man.” Sister Consuelo was a nun, but she was a European; she must not think that Eusebio was drunken or unfaithful. “He asks only to be a good father. He works helping street children, he brings home the little money he makes, he cares for our daughter, he does not drink — ”
As she gulped for breath, trying to hold back her tears, Sister Consuelo said: “You have not answered my question.”
“ — but he has fallen prey to a terrible deception.”
“Why did this happen, Amparo?”
Amparo stared at the crucifix over the door.
“Before I met my husband,” she said, “I had another fiancé. When I was eighteen years old, my brother would go to see his friend Ezequial. They would walk around the village together. Ezequial has a sister, Raquel. Even though their family is Evangelical and we are Catholics, Raquel became my best friend. We talked about all the things that girls talk about. When my brother and I left our compound, we would tell our mother that we were going to visit Ezequial and Raquel, and she would let us go. Then one day, as we were walking along the path that leads up the hill behind our village, my brother and I exchanged positions. He walked with Raquel and I walked with Ezequial. At first I felt sorry for Ezequial because he had a bad leg. I could see he was a good person and I admired him because he never complained about his limp. That was the beginning of my feelings for him . . . of his becoming my fiancé. My mother never suspected because I would say I was going to visit Raquel . . . ”
Sister Consuelo shook her head. “How people ruin themselves for the illusion of earthly love!”
“I was only eighteen,” Amparo said, “but I knew this was wrong. After two weeks, I went to my mother and told her the truth. I said that Ezequial was my fiancé, that we went for walks and held hands and talked about the future. My mother said that if I married him I would have to convert to Evangelicalism, and that I should think about this very carefully.”
“You put an end to this folly?”
“Not immediately. I was studying, I was working. Ezequial asked me a lot about my beliefs. I felt like forbidden fruit. He had been brought up to believe that Catholics were evil.”
“Meeting you showed him the falsehood of his ways.”
“It showed him that Catholics could be good people. I didn’t change his mind. He insisted that if we married I must convert. After a year I realized I couldn’t become an Evangelical. I found it . . . undignified. And so I told Ezequial I couldn’t marry him.”
“You did this without compromising yourself?” Sister Consuelo’s gaze was relentless.
“Without compromising myself,” Amparo replied. “It was just sympathy on my part and curiosity on his. We were young and mistook these feelings for love.” Seeing Sister Consuelo flinch at the word “love,” Amparo pressed forward: “After this, I decided to devote my sympathy to my own community, to promote my culture and help the women in my village.”
“Have you told your husband about Ezequial?”
“Yes.” A stirring of confusion made her realize how calm she had grown. Her gratitude towards the nun backed up into impatience. “When I met Eusebio in Antigua and he became my fiancé, I used to stay here after work on Friday evenings and Eusebio and I would go to dances in the Pensativo football stadium. We danced all night, but we respected each other. We never went off into the dark together like some couples. There were no buses back to the village when the dances ended, but there were boys who had cars. Eusebio would walk me to a car. You wouldn’t believe it — seven or eight young people would squeeze into a two-door car and we would groan and scream all the way up the mountain!”
“That was more immoral than anything you did with your fiancé.”
“Yes, they were sinful car rides!” Sister Consuelo’s fixed expression curtailed Amparo’s laughter. Taken aback, Amparo thought: now that she thinks men like me, that I’m like her beautiful sister, she’s going to find it harder to forgive me.
“Girls sitting on the laps of total strangers!”
“Bueno, people we knew from the village.” Amparo searched for a way to change the subject. “I told my mother about my evenings with Eusebio. I said she could have complete confidence in me. The only time she was nervous was when our church group made a trip to El Salvador. I went as Eusebio’s fiancé. I sat next to him on the bus. The nuns who accompanied us frowned on this. One of them told my mother that I was the only girl who had sat next to a boy. It was true, but the boys and the girls spent the night in different parts of San Salvador. Once we left the bus, we barely saw each other!”
“If you had shown more respect for the nuns,” Sister Consuelo said, “your fiancé would have respected you more, also. He would trust you more today, as your husband.”
“That doesn’t mean I deserve the way he’s treating me.” She listed some of the insults he had hurled at her, her anger holding her voice under control. “Eusebio knows this child is his! I’d never, ever — ”
“I must ask you a very serious question. Amparo, did you ever, during your courtship with the man who became your husband, do anything that showed disrespect for him or yourself?”
“No, Sister Consuelo! A thousand times no! When we danced we were always out in the open where everyone could see us. We were fiancés for more than five years and we always behaved perfectly. He asked me to marry him when I was twenty and I didn’t say yes until I was almost twenty-five because there were so many things I wanted to do in life before I had children. I preferred to wait. We barely kissed until we were married.”
Sister Consuelo’s cheeks turned red. “Remember that you are a teacher of innocent girls!”
“I’m trying to make things clear! I want you to see there’s no reason — ”
“When you married, why did your husband move to your village? Wouldn’t it have made more sense for you to move to Antigua?”
Amparo hesitated, trapped by the cleverness of Sister Consuelo’s eyes. “Yes . . . It’s not common for a ladino to move to a Mayan village.”
“Or for a man to move into his wife’s house. A man provides for his family. If he is deprived of that pleasure, his self-respect suffers.”
“No no no!” Amparo raked her half-closed hands across the top of the desk. “All that happened was that I remained friends with Raquel after I accepted Eusebio as my fiancé. After Sandra was born, Raquel took a great interest in her. She doesn’t have children. Her husband . . . I don’t know why she doesn’t have children. But I used to go over there . . . Word of this spread in the village. Ezequial lives with his sister and her husband when he comes home. But he’s hardly ever there. He works in Comalapa, in a house the Evangelicals run there.”
“Did you see Ezequial at Raquel’s house?”
“Only once! One time I dropped in and he was there. I came in the door with Sandra, and I could see how thin and hurt he looked seeing me with my daughter. He hasn’t married. His bad leg makes him shy. I apologized to Raquel and left. I felt that every second I remained there was a knife-blow to his heart. But he wouldn’t be happy if I’d married him. He thinks he would be, but it’s not true.”
“So you saw your ex-fiancé. And you are
surprised that your husband is upset?”
“Only once! For two minutes! And Raquel and Sandra were there the whole time. But the village — you must know what they’re like: people who have nothing better to do but spread untruths about others. They made it sound as though Ezequial was there every time. They even said Raquel wasn’t there and I was alone with Ezequial!” She shook as she fought against tears. “I feel so alone. My husband doesn’t trust me, I have to hide our arguments from my mother, my daughter is turning against me — ”
“The mother is the centre of the family. As all others depend on her, she feels alone.” Sister Consuelo paused. “Any path we choose involves loneliness. If you make your husband feel secure, he will have the strength to overcome what he knows in his heart to be falsehoods. Give him the opportunity to make that respect into a sign of his own strength. Yet, at the same time, be firm; by showing him respect, you will encourage him to respect you when you assure him of your loyalty.”
Amparo sucked away her sobs, astonished at the same time by the nun’s wisdom and her innocence. “Thank you, Sister Consuelo.”
The nun got to her feet. “Let me get you a glass of water.”
Amparo stood up to follow her to the kitchen. The sound of their steps echoed in the high-ceilinged vastness. What would she say to Eusebio when she got home?
NINE
THE EVENING OF HER MEETING with Sister Consuelo, Amparo returned home to find Eusebio alone. Inés had gone to her room. Mama had invited Sandra to eat dinner with her and Papa. This unspoken recognition that her marriage was in need of her parents’ intervention made her furious. Sister Consuelo’s counsel was swept away by rage. “And now you want to know why I am late? I suppose you think I was talking to Ezequial, who doesn’t even live here? I suppose you are that stupid and suspicious?” The shock of each sentence thrilled and terrified her. It felt like the night when, buoyant from hours of dancing in the Pensativo stadium, she had accepted a sip from a bottle that a boy was passing around, half believing that the recipient contained water, and had swallowed the only shot of hard liquor of her life. “I’ll tell you where I was! You won’t be an hombre, you won’t be bien macho, until I tell you, will you? You’ll be happy to know that I was talking to a nun.” She stepped towards Eusebio to confront his mute hostility. “I had to tell someone that my husband has accused me falsely and there’s no one else I can talk to.” Her voice broke and she began to sob harder than she had ever sobbed before. She felt her body stagger. Eusebio stepped forward and touched her shoulder. She pushed him away. Her power flooded back. “I’m not going to indulge you any more,” she said. “You can think what you want, but you’re not upsetting my daughter by sleeping on the couch. We will sleep in the bedroom. We don’t have to talk, we don’t even have to touch, but we will be responsible parents.”
She crossed the room to the toilet and closed the door behind her. As she looked at her face in the scuffed mirror, her first thought was that this was not the scene Sister Consuelo had envisaged. Her second thought was that Inés had overheard every word. Her third thought was that, without meaning to, Sister Consuelo had given her the courage to lose her temper.
Since that night they had been polite in front of others and silent when they were alone. Eusebio continued to regard her with a hard, wounded look. She had arranged with the Escuela San Fernando to continue teaching until the first week of her eighth month.
On the Sunday night prior to her last week of teaching, in the back room of the church, she opened the meeting of the Cakchiquel Women’s Saving Club. Doña Soledad, the red plastic band of her wristwatch glistening beneath the cuff of her huipil, arrived late, excusing herself by saying her husband had brought her corn to peel.
“Our husbands must understand,” Amparo said.
“Ja!” The women agreed, directing half-mocking frowns at Doña Soledad.
“Konojel niqatij ixim!” Amparo looked around the meeting room that the priest lent them. The women sat on cushions on the floor. Amparo, who occupied the largest cushion, faced the bare, whitewashed walls. The notebooks in which the accounts were written, and the envelopes containing the cash, lay in front of her. “We all like to eat corn! But we also like to come to our meeting.” She went on: “The señora gringa cannot attend this month because she is working in El Quiché. We will start by passing the envelope and talking about our lives.”
“Why don’t you start?” Doña Soledad suggested. “How is your new baby?”
“I went to Doctor Asensio in Antigua last week, and he says my baby will be fine.”
Doña Rosa, one of the village mothers, shook her head. “A faithful wife does not go to doctors. The only man who will see my body is my husband.”
“The doctor is just doing his job, Doña Rosa,” Amparo said. “When you pick up a chicken, you are not violating the rights of the rooster.”
“I own the rooster!” Doña Rosa laughed. She displayed her six quetzales, placed them in the envelope and passed it to her neighbour, who showed her six quetzales, deposited them, and passed on the envelope.
Most of the women wore huipiles and traditional dress; the Evangelicals, such as Raquel, wore long skirts. Amparo, like the other younger Catholic women, usually attended the meeting in bluejeans and a blouse. Today, because of the late stage of her pregnancy, she was wearing a shapeless Evangelical-style dress. She had taken a long nap before the meeting and felt exhilarated by the reservoir of energy she had discovered on waking. “You do not notice that the chicken is naked, Doña Rosa,” she said, “and the doctor does not notice that you are naked. Think of Doña Inocencia, who refused to go to the doctor. If she had been less ashamed, she might be at this meeting with us.”
The speech put Amparo’s Cakchiquel to the test. She was making mistakes, but the women understood her. She tried to conduct the meetings in Cakchiquel, particularly when the señora gringa was not present. The older women were self-conscious about their halting Spanish.
It had been difficult to persuade most of these women to join. She and Esperanza had spent hours arguing with them that they were not betraying their families by depositing six quetzales a month in a savings program. They had argued with them to keep their children in school, to discuss their health problems; in some cases, they had encouraged them to talk about their husbands.
“What else has been happening this month, Doña Rosa?”
Looking mortified, Doña Rosa stared at the floor. The other women urged her to say something. Pulling herself upright, the tiny woman said: “Jeb’el ri job’ niqa pa ruwi’ ri juyu. Good rain is falling over the mountains.”
Doña Juana, another older woman who wore the village’s huipil, nodded in agreement. “Konojel taq che’ yekikot. All the trees are happy.” Her bare feet were crossed in front of her. “My husband says the corn will be high this year.”
“What else is happening?” Amparo asked.
Esperanza, seizing on the silence, said: “Thanks to the Peace Accords, the school will teach our children in Cakchiquel.”
Doña Rosa shook her head. “Nac . . . Re’n manäq ninjo jun tijob’äl pa qachab’al. I don’t want a school in our language. Why are the foreigners making fun of us like this? Why won’t they let us become people like they are?”
“Doña Rosa,” Esperanza said, before Amparo could open her mouth, “we are respecting our culture — ”
Listening to her sister rehearsing the arguments they had used with Mama, Amparo felt her mind revolving around the word Doña Rosa had used to describe ladinos: foreigners, käk winaq. In the company of these women she could almost wrap herself in a shawl of pure Mayanness, like the three young Quiché women at the university. Perhaps, if she had not married a non-Maya, her life would be simpler. Yet it was a simplicity she didn’t want: a Mayan man would be more possessive; she would have to fight to leave home to attend these meetings; she never could have stayed away for all the hours it had taken her to work with the señora gringa to found this club.
Esperanza, Doña Soledad and most of the other younger women shouted, “¡Sí!”, then rectified their affirmation to a loud Cakchiquel, “Ja!” They reached high above their heads to show their support. Doña Rosa and Doña Juana looked at each other, then lifted their hands. Only the Evangelical women did not raise their hands.
“We have a majority, but we do not have unanimity,” Amparo said. “We can announce that by majority vote our club supports Mayan-language teaching in our school.”
Raquel lifted her hand. She spoke in Spanish. “There are other women who wish to join our club. I wonder if we could discuss their cases . . . ”
“You just want more Evangelicals here!” Doña Soledad said.
“The club should speak for all the women of the village,” Raquel said, “not just for some.”
She’s been told to do this, Amparo thought. Not by Doña María, but by those gringo missionaries. She remembered the different ways in which Raquel had betrayed her over the years. Before she could open her mouth, Esperanza shouted in Spanish: “Some women are too brainwashed to speak for themselves!”
“Re’n ix’ajpub’!” Amparo said. “I’m the leader! I ask you to speak with respect. We must praise the heart of the sky and the heart of the earth to reach decisions that are wise.” She continued to speak in Cakchiquel, sounding, she thought, like her mother taking control of her children. By restoring the discussion to Cakchiquel, she brought in the older women, the mothers of their community; speaking in Cakchiquel reinforced her impartiality while it marginalized Raquel, who was uncomfortable in the language and would speak only in Spanish. “Our club is here for all, but to join you must meet two conditions. You must save six quetzales a month, and you must send your children to school. These conditions were established by the señora gringa and by the government. We cannot change them.”