The Path of the Jaguar

by Stephen Henighan

  She recited the introduction she had prepared, explaining to him that she did not speak Cakchiquel perfectly, and that this was one of the problems the language faced. “Our parents were ashamed of this language and didn’t teach it to us very well. I can teach you the Cakchiquel of my village, but in other villages they speak differently. And in my village most of the young people speak to each other in Spanish; only about thirty percent of us speak Cakchiquel perfectly.” She hesitated. “It’s very difficult to learn Cakchiquel, and you can’t talk to very many people in it. You must know this before you begin.”

  “These are exactly the problems that interest me.”

  Condemned to work harder than her colleagues, she bent her head. But her feeling of resignation was pricked by an upsurge of emotion. She was talking to somebody who, like Don Julio, could feed her need to understand. During the first two hours of the class, she made him write the letter corresponding to each of the thirty-two sounds of the Cakchiquel alphabet. She showed him how the x had a shushing sound that didn’t exist in Spanish. Anticipating the mistakes that foreigners made, she illustrated the difference between qäk, “red,” and käk, “foreign,” explaining that he must pronounce the q far back in the throat. She told him to listen to how a tiny pause could turn a sound into a separate letter, making k utterly different from k’. At ten o’clock the break came. The Canadian professor, a small Asian woman who was being taught by Luisa Méndez, came downstairs from the private room where she had her class, and she and Don Ricardo went out onto the street to talk. Vendors crowded around the door, offering the students tortillas spread with avocado paste. Amparo walked to the bottom of the staircase, where the maestras exchanged impressions of their students. “How’s the professor?” she asked Luisa.

  “Simpática,” Luisa said, “but these Canadians aren’t normal gringos. The professor is a chinita. Imagine!”

  “Yes,” a younger woman echoed, “and my student is hindú.” She shrugged her shoulders with a hapless expression. “My gringa is darker than me!”

  “Mine is a real gringo,” Nancy Robelo said with a toss of her head that made her highlights ripple. “He even has blue eyes. He was in the army!”

  “¡Un militar!” the first young woman said with a down-turned mouth.

  “He’s not bruto like a Guatemalan soldier,” Nancy said. “He worked for peace . . . to keep peace . . . in . . . ex-Yu-go-e-slav-iaa.” She smiled as she extracted the word from her mouth like a length of corded rope.

  “Maybe you’ll marry him,” Amparo said.

  “Amparo! I’m not from Santa María!”

  As the younger maestras giggled, Luisa, her eyes narrowing, said: “Amparo, why did Don Teófilo give you the manager to teach?”

  “How do I know? He phoned me and asked if I’d do it.”

  Luisa observed her in silence. Uncomfortable with her scrutiny, Amparo turned away.

  After the break they reviewed pronunciation. She felt relieved at how perfectly she possessed these sounds. She spoke Cakchiquel better than she had given herself credit for; being with Ricardo made her feel more Mayan. She obliged him to repeat and repeat. He was better at vowels, having difficulty with consonants like b’.

  “B’ey,” she said. “Road.”

  “Bay,” he repeated.

  “B’aq,” she said. “Bone.”

  “Back,” he repeated.

  “B’alam,” she said. “Jaguar.”

  “Ballam,” he said. He looked up. “Let’s keep working on that one. I’d like to be able to say ‘jaguar.’”

  “B’alam.” She made him repeat the word fifteen times. His face turned almost blue as he strangled his breath to produce the required hiatus. He asked her questions she didn’t understand: was this b aspire-something or glotta-something? The students at the nearby tables paused in their lessons as he repeated, “Ballam, ballaam, baallaam . . . ” She was struck by this manager’s lack of fear of appearing ridiculous in front of young people half his age who were under his authority. It was impossible to imagine Don Teófilo allowing himself to be corrected in front of his maestras.

  “Let’s try something else,” she said, when his repetitions had petered out.

  “What’s the word for one of those little woven bags you buy in the markets?” he asked.

  “Ya’l,” she said.

  With a sheepish smile, he risked a short sentence: “Q’o jun ya’l. There is a bag.”

  Noon was approaching; she was worried about Pablito’s cold. She taught Ricardo to say “’Till tomorrow!” — Chuwak inchik! — gathered her books and stood up. As Ricardo got to his feet, Don Teófilo came over to shake his hand. Luisa Méndez, descending the stairs in conversation with her little Chinese woman, conceded Amparo a circumspect nod.

  Amparo walked to the market and rode the bus back up the mountain to the village. When she reached the house Mama was in the kitchen. “Pablito came home,” she said. “The bad spirits have got into him.”

  “He just doesn’t like school.”

  “He’s vomited twice.” Mama followed her towards the bedroom. “His vomit was smooth and yellow. That means the spirits got in through his eyes.”

  Setting down her Cakchiquel-Spanish dictionary, Amparo regarded her son’s form huddled under the covers. Pablito’s face was hot, his skin dry; there was a yellowish fleck in the corner of his mouth. “How are you, mijito?”

  “Mama.” He struggled to sit up. Coughing seized him. He coughed until his tongue stuck out of his mouth. He began to gurgle. Mama came to her side with a bowl.

  Pablito vomited into the bowl. The vomit was yellower than corn, as though the matter out of which the boy was formed had been extracted in a bright gruel. Amparo could not believe that the substance that filled the bowl was coming from Pablito’s tiny stomach. The boy collapsed back into the sheets and began to cough, driving the fetid backwash of his vomiting into their faces. Amparo ran for a damp cloth to clean his mouth. Mama carried the bowl to the bathroom. “That’s the third bowl he’s filled in two hours,” she whispered. “That’s what happens when the spirits get in through their eyes.”

  “We have to get him to Antigua. The hospital — ”

  “The hospital can do nothing about this.”

  Amparo hesitated, torn between respect for her mother and fear for her son’s health. “Should I get Doña Eduviges?”

  “Doña Eduviges is old. Now the best curandera is your friend Raquel.”

  “All right.” Amparo walked out of the house, crossed the yard and clanged the iron door of the compound behind her. She hurried down the street, as though set upon by the blank stucco walls. The boy in the bed filled her mind. She felt the nearness of her own death, the fragility of life in a world that had been created and destroyed many times, the need to bequeath descendants to the cycle of life and death in order to live on as an ancestor. The dearness of Pablito’s soft flesh made her stumble. As she turned into the square, her mind filled with a vision of the four coloured roads that crossed before the gate of Xibalbá. The four colours — black, white, green, and red — covered the door of Raquel’s house in horizontal bars; the purple that had been painted over was barely discernible beneath their fresh brightness.

  Raquel answered the door wearing her huipil. Her hair slid on her shoulders in two tightly woven braids. “Sakar, Amparo,” she said. “La utz a’wech?”

  “Matiox, matiox. But Pablito’s ill. You’ve got to come. Mama says spirits have entered him.”

  Raquel stepped back to usher her in. A poster over the sink displayed the symbols and names of the twenty days of the week in the ceremonial calendar. Tangy, pungent incense permeated the house. Raquel went into a back room and emerged carrying a lumpy woven bag.

  After Jorge had come home for the last time and beaten her, Raquel’s thin, beautiful, haunted features had swollen up until they muffled the shape of her bones. She had gone to her preacher, to the gringo missionaries; then, dissatisfied with their answers, she stopped tal
king to these people. When she disappeared from the village, everyone assumed her aunt had paid a coyote to take her to Arizona. On her return, months later, she revealed that she had been studying with a Mayan priest in Santa Cruz del Quiché. She went to villages in the hills around Antigua and spent weeks speaking with the women there, praying and performing ceremonies, until she recovered her Cakchiquel and her traditional knowledge. Amparo felt a reproach in Raquel’s convert’s grip on the Mayanness that she herself slid in and out of from hour to hour. It pained her that Ezequial no longer returned from Comalapa, his religious disagreements with his sister having become irreconcilable.

  They crossed the compound, ignoring Esperanza’s youngest daughter, who was playing in the dust. Amparo led Raquel inside. Raquel greeted Mama respectfully, addressing her as “ixoq.” Before approaching Pablito, she lighted incense on his bedside table and prayed to the heart of the sky and the heart of the earth. Raquel picked up the incense and waved it in Pablito’s face until smoke wafted into his nostrils, making him cough.

  His coughing turned into a hoarse dredging sound. At the point where his lungs seemed to have been scraped raw, he leaned forward. Mama returned with her bowl. Mealy yellow vomit poured out of Pablito until the bowl was half full. Amparo feared for his ability to draw breath, but as the final dribbles fell from his lips, he collapsed onto the pillow with a loud, rank-smelling wheeze that reassured her that he was still alive. She ran for a fresh damp cloth to clean his face. Mama, gesturing with the slurping bowl, said to Raquel: “That’s the fourth time today.”

  “It can’t continue,” Amparo said. “His stomach’s empty.”

  “It will continue.” Raquel looked taller in her thinness. “It will continue until we expel the spirits. We need a pixcoy bird.”

  Before Amparo could object, Mama said: “Doña Eduviges will sell me one.” Amparo wanted to take her son to the clinic. Yet she was wary of defying the other women’s certainty. She went for her purse and handed Mama two folded ten-quetzal notes. She piled coins on the bedside table in indication of her ability to pay Raquel’s fee. Mama left the house. Raquel sat down to await her return as the room filled with incense and her son shuddered in his sleep.

  Amparo pulled her chair closer and laid her hand on Pablito’s head. She felt the heat turning his thick hair as dry as tinder. Raquel looked her in the eyes. “Yellow vomit is a women’s illness. It affects young girls near the time of their moon, particularly those who have just become women. It’s caused by not eating enough garlic. Or by eating eggs when they shouldn’t. That’s what allows the spirits to get in through their eyes.”

  “You’re telling me Pablito has a girl’s illness?”

  “This is a sign.” She leaned forward. “Amparo, your son may be a mother-father, jun chuchqajaw. If he is, you must let me train him.”

  Amparo shook her head. “That’s not for him.”

  She had spoken in Spanish. Raquel replied in the same language: “And what is your world, Amparo?”

  “My world is my family.” She glanced at her sleeping son. “Things are good between Eusebio and me now.”

  “Even though you are sitting across from a gringo four hours a day? You know what they say about those schools: the maestras fall in love with their students.”

  “They may fall in love with them, but the sensible ones don’t do anything about it. The gringo goes back to his country, but the maestra must stay here.”

  “Your sister Yolanda is married to a foreigner.”

  “Yes, and look how that hurt my parents.” Her anger at Raquel for having lured her into this conversation ebbed. Against her will, she responded with a smile to Raquel’s sympathy. “You’re right. It’s hard not to fall a little bit in love with them when you’re talking to them for four hours a day. I’m teaching a manager; the manager for the Canadian semesters in Guatemala. He speaks Spanish, but he wants to learn Cakchiquel. He’s not a very warm person, but he’s courteous and he’s interested in our culture.” Something in this sentence made her uncomfortable. “Personally, I think it’s very useful to teach in a school. If a woman knows herself, it can stabilize her marriage. You can develop friendships with other men in a formal situation where you know nothing will happen. You can have your fantasies, but you are a maestra doing a job. The important thing is to have your fantasies and not to act on them.”

  “I think,” Raquel said, “that you will always be a Catholic.” After a moment, she added: “It’s fine for the woman to have her fantasies then come home to her husband, but men aren’t like that. Their fantasies become real only when they act on them. That’s what I learned with Jorge.”

  “I’m sorry you’re alone, Raquel.”

  “I’m happier being alone. I used to cry so much when he didn’t come home! But now he’s living in the capital, probably with another woman, and I’m unable to remarry because I’m still legally married.”

  Amparo looked at the boy in the bed. “I’m sorry if I said anything hurtful.”

  “I’m starting to think,” Raquel said, “that women must not be afraid to act on their fantasies.”

  “Don’t say that! What a lack of respect.”

  “A lack of respect to whom? To Jorge, who betrayed me? To Doña María and the villlage gossips? These people deserve respect and I don’t? Even our ancestors, ri qati’t qamama’ Kaqchiquel, allowed women to get divorced in certain circumstances.”

  As cowed by Raquel’s cultural mastery as by her anger, Amparo bowed her head. “A married woman must be careful.”

  Raquel lifted Amparo’s hand from Pablito’s head and took her palm in hers. “You’ve learned that lesson well, haven’t you?”

  They sat holding hands, listening to Pablito’s wheezing sleep, until Mama returned. She carried a hemp bag that wriggled and squeaked.

  Releasing Amparo’s hand, Raquel bent over the bed with hands clasped, calling upon the heart of the sky and the heart of the earth, the two who unify into one while remaining two and hence incarnate the world, which is both unity and distinctness. Her words enhanced her presence in a way that seemed to draw her thin body upright. Pablito coughed in his sleep. “I’ve seen this before. When the vomit is yellow” — Raquel even used the Cakchiquel word for yellow, k’aän, when nearly everybody used Spanish words for colours — “like the yolk of an egg it will continue for at least three days after the stomach is empty. We must ask the spirits to leave.”

  She pored over Pablito’s face as though it were a sacred text. She cajoled the spirits, assuring them of her respect but insisting that it was time for them to move on. Her words, buoyed up by the thick whitish incense, rode around the room like tiny boats. “The blockage is at the level of his chest,” she said. “You won’t get food into his body until this is gone.”

  Amparo felt hemmed in by the other two women. Mama passed the hemp bag across the front of their bodies. Raquel reached into the bag and extracted the still, trembling bird, trussed rigid by the expert lock of her long fingers. “You must open his mouth.”

  Amparo lifted her hands towards the bird’s tight-clasped beak.

  “Not the bird’s mouth! Your son’s mouth!”

  To her horror, Mama was laughing. “The bird will eat the spirits,” she said. She reached forward and gave Pablito’s shoulder a rough shake.

  Pablito’s eyes opened. He coughed and coughed, tried to sit up and fell on his side. “Mama! Nana!” he said. “What’s she doing with that bird?”

  “She’s going to make you better, mi amor. Open your mouth.” She tried to cover her lack of conviction with urgency. Yolanda’s maid’s divination had felt as irrefutable as the June rains, yet she couldn’t believe that this bird would cure her son’s vomiting. Was she Maya, or wasn’t she? Raquel, whom she still wasn’t used to seeing in a huipil, claimed that any middle ground was betrayal, yet she couldn’t help how she felt. She couldn’t help wincing as Mama held Pablito’s jaw open, hauling his coughs into frightened whimpers, and Raquel, chanting, m
oved the bird in a slow arc towards his lips. As the bird’s head plunged between Pablito’s bared teeth, Raquel loosened her grasp. The bird’s beak cranked open, its upper and lower mandibles wedging against the upper and lower rows of Pablito’s tiny baby teeth. Boy and bird were fixed together, two faces becoming one. In its panic, the pixcoy bird opened its beak wider, lodging itself more irrevocably in the boy’s mouth as Pablito bit down in fear. Amparo saw their throats branch into one another like spliced lengths of pipe. Pablito’s coughs stuttered to a halt. His body arched in the bed, his craning head thrusting the bird’s tailfeathers into the air like a warrior’s trophy. She turned her eyes away, unable to avoid thinking of the movements of Eusebio’s body during love.

  Pablito’s neck stretched, his head flung back in silence. The pixcoy bird was gulping.

  “The bird is swallowing the spirits,” Mama said.

  Raquel leaned forward, murmuring under her breath. The rising sequence of gulps that filled the pixcoy bird’s stomach drowned out her words.

  Raquel’s hands swooped, unlatching the pixcoy bird from the boy’s mouth. She clamped the bird’s beak shut, swayed it through the smoke three times, then left the house. She returned with her hands free.

  Pablito slept. Amparo pulled the sheets up to his shoulders.

  “Your son is cured,” Raquel announced, her thin face gleaming. “Cured because a woman wasn’t afraid to act on her fantasies.”

  FOURTEEN

  NEXT MORNING, WHEN SHE WALKED into the broad front hall, Amparo heard Luisa Méndez, addressing Ricardo as “Mr. Manager,” ask him about his Spanish course. Devious Luisa, always checking up on other teachers so that she could pass on gossip to Don Teófilo.

  “But I’m not studying Spanish,” Ricardo said in his loud, too-clear voice, “I’m learning Cakchiquel.”

  “Amparo can teach Cakchiquel?” Luisa mulled this over. “Amparo es indígena . . . I didn’t know that Amparo was an Indian.” Lifting her chin, she said: “These are dialects. My parents spoke a dialect, but I was fortunate to learn the Spanish language so I am not an india as they were.”