The Path of the Jaguar

by Stephen Henighan

  “They’re not dialects,” Ricardo protested, with a directness that made her stand straight-backed and upright, even as it terrified her. “The Mayan languages are languages, just as Spanish is a language. Some of those languages have local variants, which are dialects . . . but a language is not a dialect just because it’s spoken by indigenous people!”

  Luisa, her head held high, accompanied the Canadian profesora up the curving staircase to the second floor. Amparo slipped into the main classroom, where each maestra sat across a small desk from her student. She opened her books in front of her before Ricardo could realize that she had overheard the conversation.

  “Sakar, Amparo,” he said as he sat down. “La utz a’wech?”

  “Utz matiox, Ricardo. Y ret?”

  “Utz matiox.”

  “Matiox rï.”

  They smiled. The creases around his eyes and mouth made her realize that his whiteness had led her to underestimate his age. Her respect for him increased. This was a man who had been coming to Guatemala for many years; he would know important people here, people to whom she would never gain access.

  His homework had been to write sentences using the vocabulary they had learned yesterday. He lifted a hard-backed notebook and read the sentences in a voice that was more nervous than she had expected. “Re’n q’o jun ya’l q’iak. Q’o jun b’alam pa ri nuya’l. I have a red bag. There is a jaguar on my bag.”

  She corrected his pronunciation of b’alam, stressing the b’ again. He repeated the sound. She folded her hands together on the table beneath the ruffled white cuffs of her blouse. In muted Spanish — they lowered their voices when they spoke Spanish — she said: “You don’t really have a bag with a jaguar on it?”

  “I had one. I gave it to a friend.”

  Una amiga. He had told her he was married. Rushing on to avoid revealing her disappointment or being roped into his moral lapses, if those were what he was on the verge of confessing to her, she whispered: “Is it a woven bag? The background is red and the jaguar is white?”

  “Yes.” He stared at her. She had caught his attention, driving away thoughts of his amiga.

  “And the jaguar is walking?”

  “Yes . . . ”

  “You bought this bag in my village? At our market?”

  “No. In Mexico. Two years ago, when I was in Chiapas.” The sounds of students repeating Spanish phrases echoed off the wooden classroom floor. She sensed his attention beginning to wander.

  “I make those bags,” she said. “I weave them, I sell them in the market in our village. I’m the only person who makes bags like that. The bag you bought in Chiapas was made by me.”

  She saw him struggling to absorb her words. “How can you be sure?”

  “A few years ago I was invited to go to Chiapas and Oaxaca to sell my weaving and work with the Mayan women there, but I couldn’t afford the bribes you have to pay to get a passport, and the Mexicans wouldn’t have given me a visa anyway, so a gentleman here in Antigua, a very kind gentleman who has since passed on, arranged for my weaving to be sent to Chiapas.” His washed-out blue eyes followed her. She had his attention again. “Later, when he paid me for the bags that he said had been sold there, I almost refused the money because I thought it was charity. I was left with strange feelings towards him. But now, with what you’ve told me, I see he was telling the truth. It makes me remember him with great tenderness.”

  She had noticed Don Julio’s cough the last time she had seen him, but had thought nothing of it. Later she heard that he had died and that his family had hired a lawyer to prevent his young wife from inheriting El Tesoro. The man who ran the restaurant now, who had bought it from Don Julio’s cousin, had reduced the size of the bookstore. Sonia, the widow, had left Antigua.

  His voice low, Ricardo asked: “Would you like to travel to other countries to sell your weaving?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not possible. My brother, who’s married to a gringa, tried to arrange for me to go to Arizona for two weeks, but, even if I could afford the passport, the American Embassy doesn’t give visas to people like me . . . For us, even going to Mexico is a dream.”

  “But there are lots of Guatemalans in the United States, no?”

  “Ladinos from rich families that can pay bribes for passports . . . Or they’re illegal. Or they went as refugees during the war — but many of those are also illegal. I have a friend from my village who went to California.” She lowered her voice. “¡Él es ilegal!”

  To her surprise, Ricardo shook his head. “No. People are not illegal.” He seemed almost angry. “They can be indocumentados . . . There are people who have documents and people who don’t have documents. But no human being is illegal.”

  She had never thought about it like this. Were there other people in those countries who thought as Ricardo did? That you could be just as worthy and dignified living in another country without the proper papers as at home, in the village where everyone knew you?

  Troubled by these thoughts, she shook her head. “I could never do that. I obey the law. Even if that was the only way to travel, I could never turn myself into a criminal.”

  Don Teófilo passed through the room, ringing the bell that signalled it was time for a break. Ricardo got up and joined the students in the doorway to buy a tortilla spread with avocado. Avoiding Luisa Méndez, Amparo spoke with Nancy Robelo, telling her about Don Ricardo’s bag. Nancy told her about all the countries where her soldier had worked as a peacekeeper. They were boasting about the men they were teaching as teenaged girls might champion the boys in their class on whom they had crushes.

  After the break, Amparo taught Ricardo the verb ibinik, to walk. “Re’n ibi’n, ret abi’n, raja nibi’n . . . .” They practised this verb, recounting the places that different people walked to, then returned to the previous day’s vocabulary. He still couldn’t pronounce the b’, but he was starting to distinguish a’ from ä. Now she could tell when he was saying a’q, pig, and when he was speaking about äk, chicken.

  During the second half of the class she felt restless. As the final minutes approached, she folded her hands across her Cakchiquel-Spanish dictionary. “You really bought one of my bags in Mexico? Oh, I wish I could see it just to know it’s true!”

  “If I hadn’t given it to my friend, I’d be happy to show it to you. Of course I can’t be sure it was your bag . . . ”

  “Ricardo! Come to my village. I’ll show you our market and the compound where I live.”

  “With great pleasure,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. She had the impression that working so far away from his wife had made him withdrawn. A man needed a wife, even a foreign man whose emotions were less strong than those of a Latin American. “I haven’t been to your village since I went to talk to Doña María . . . I’m sure it’s changed a lot.” Punctual as always, he closed his notebook.

  “Yes,” she said, gripped by an unexpected nervousness. “You can bring a couple of the students with you.”

  “Of course,” he said, observing her.

  She met his eyes. Worried that the invitation to visit her village had been an excessive intimacy, she allowed her gaze to wander to a flurry of movement near the front door. The little Chinese professor who taught the Canadian girls politics and economics was coming in the door, a huge smile on her face. She was escorting a tall man whose black polo neck shirt stretched over a body subsiding into a middle-aged spread. He had light brown skin, yet the ghost of high Mayan cheekbones lent his face a dashing, dramatic appearance accentuated by the clipped grooming of his moustache. His eyes, set behind spectacles with the finest of gold frames, were large, dark, impervious to others’ scrutiny.

  The world had changed the day she had seen this man on television.

  She seized Ricardo’s arm. Her voice crushed into a whisper, she said: “That’s Comandante Vladimir! He was with the guerrillas!”

  Ricardo turned around in his seat. Vladimir stopped and acknowledged him with a
brief handshake. Comandante Vladimir knew her student! “He’s going to be teaching a course for us on the politics of the civil war,” Ricardo said, getting to his feet. “Don’t leave, Amparo. I’ll introduce you to him.”

  FIFTEEN

  PABLITO, WRAPPED IN THE RABBIT GOD blanket, sat in front of the television. Without stopping to put down her books, Amparo kissed him on the forehead.

  “Utz,” Mama said. “He’s fine. Just quiet. Mem ri a akua’l. Your child is mute.”

  “He’s pretending to be tired because he doesn’t want to go to school tomorrow.” Sandra stood in the middle of the room, a skipping rope dangling from her hand, her pointy pre-breasts darting the front of her pink child’s blouse.

  “Your brother was ill. You should thank God that he has recovered.” Setting down her dictionary and notebook on the kitchen table, Amparo walked towards the alcove, where Inés, her hair in tight, shiny braids, was paring chicken for supper. She longed to tell someone that she had shaken hands with Comandante Vladimir. Her student, Don Ricardo, knew him! But references to the civil war gave Mama the shivers. Amparo told Sandra to help Inés. In a low voice, she asked Mama: “Why isn’t Inés in the market?”

  “I couldn’t look after Pablito and cook supper at the same time. When Sandra came home I sent her to get the girl.”

  “And why isn’t Sandra cooking? She’s going to be a woman. She must learn to cook. We buy her good clothes, we pay for her to go to school in Antigua — ”

  The door opened. “Papa!” Sandra shouted, running across the tiles. Pablito wriggled in his nana’s arms.

  Eusebio gave Sandra a distracted hug. He looked shackled, as though his weight had slid down into his ankles and feet. Amparo stepped forward. “Leave Papa in peace, Sandra. He worked hard today.”

  Sandra retreated with a dramatic scowl. Amparo looked her husband in the eyes. “We have to talk,” he murmured.

  “Where are you going?” Sandra asked. “I want to watch the telenovela with Papa!” Amparo thought of all that her daughter would never understand because she had not walked into a schoolroom barefoot. If Amparo had given birth to a baby every year, as Mama had done, Sandra would be a responsible girl who looked after her younger siblings. When she had closed the door, she threw her arms around her husband, nuzzling his chest.

  “I met Comandante Vladimir today!” she said, when she broke out of his embrace, “He looked very handsome, like a film actor, but hard, even though he’s heavier now. It made me realize how hard those men in the guerrilla were. Don Ricardo had a meeting with him! He’s hiring him to teach a course to the students.”

  Eusebio looked at her. “Amparo, my job is over.”

  In the stifling silence, he went on: “The office in Washington did not renew Señor Robinson’s money.”

  “But they can’t — the young people need shelter. They can’t close the drop-in centre.”

  “From now on, young gringos will work in the drop-in centre for free. They don’t need the money; they can do it to have a different experience. They call it volunteering.” He shrugged his shoulders. She saw that he was repeating words spoken by Señor Robinson: words that made little sense to him. The uncertainty in his eyes filled her with pain.

  “They can’t take away your job!” She flung herself against his chest. “They can’t!”

  “But if the gringos work for free . . . ”

  She tugged on his neck. “How much longer — ?”

  “Till the end of the week.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Amparo, there’s no money . . . ”

  “But can’t Señor Robinson — ?”

  He shook his head. His helplessness made her impatient and angry. She couldn’t let her impatience show for fear of crushing him. Once again, her marriage was going to depend on her quashing her feelings. She fell against him and tightened her arms around his ribs until he gasped.

  The children knew better than to ask questions during supper. She had instilled at least this much respect in them. In the morning, as Inés left for the market, she wondered how long they would be able to afford her. Each time she allowed this thought to enter her head, she cancelled it out by assuring herself that Eusebio would find another job. But which job? He could go into a Korean maquila, work twelve-hour days in a pounding din and spend most of his meagre wage on bus fares to come home for eight hours out of twenty-four. There was no work in the village, and, with the decline in tourism, very little in Antigua. She, too, might soon be unemployed. A handful of the Canadian students would sign on for extra hours once their month of intensive language training had ended, and Don Teófilo had a few contracts with gringo organizations and religious universities that would carry Escuela Tecún Umán through the months of February and March, but they could easily be laid off at the end of March. She wilted at the thought of months without an income. In the sleepless nights, when she and Eusebio exchanged inconclusive murmurs, her mind returned to Doña Manuela’s divination: Beyond this time in which you have work, the weather is full of storms. Your life will be marred by dangers, the path forward is not clear and may not be lengthy. You will endure these trials and find the path which is yours only with help from your family.

  The help she received from her family would be meaningless unless she could provide them with security. If the path ahead of her was not lengthy, she must ensure her children’s security. The path she found, for as long as it might last, must be the right one. Nothing else mattered. They would breathe her into eternity as an ancestor. The thought of leaving Sandra and Pablito unprotected made her frantic. She had done all that a woman could do: she had educated herself beyond anyone’s expectations; she had worked for Don Julio, she had become a teacher; she had founded a savings cooperative; she had run her weaving stall. She had tried every means available to improve her life and those of her neighbours. She had ransacked the resources of Antigua, where money and opportunities were more plentiful than elsewhere in the country, and still she was sliding backwards. When she gazed out the window, riding the bus down the mountainside, she saw a landscape of desolation spread below her.

  She must do something extraordinary.

  On the Saturday morning after his last day of work, Eusebio refused to get out of bed. His lethargy filled her with energy. “You can’t spend the whole day there,” she said. “We have to make life better for our children!” She lifted her traje off the hook in the cupboard. Once she was dressed in her Mayan skirt, huipil, and headband, she grabbed her pillow and slugged him over the head with it. He lay as quiet as a chicken whose neck had been wrung.

  “You can’t spend the rest of your life in bed!” As she closed the bedroom door behind her, the sunlight reflecting off the tiles of the vacant living room enveloped her in air, space and possibility. She felt like the hero twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, emerging from Xibalbá, survivors of a ball game in the underworld. She felt as Blood Moon must have felt after giving birth to these two errant heroes. Her own children, already fed breakfast by Inés, were playing with their cousins in the yard of the compound. Rage and energy tore at her stomach in a memory of the tearing that had brought Sandra and Pablito into the world. She rummaged in the closet until she found her bundles of thread. She mst make something new. Outside, her brother Fernando and his Mam wife were hoeing the tiny garden they cultivated in the dust in front of their house. “I’m going to the market,” Amparo said to her children, making a point of speaking in Cakchiquel. “When your father wakes up, tell him he can find me there.”

  She reached the market to find Inés hoisting aloft woven bags and embroidered shirts on a long pole to set them in the spots where they hung on display. A thirst for work, pure work, raced through her. Even though it was Saturday, few tourists were likely to be bused up from Antigua. She crossed the market and bought a jar of atol de maíz. Pulling out her favourite workstool, she sat down, opened the bundles, and dipped the threads in the atol. A quick dip was all it took: corn, from which the first p
eople had been made, also nourished her fabrics. The threads clustered up like worms. She stretched them out, spacing them evenly on the smooth concrete. She lifted the rack-like loom out of the back of the stall and, shooing the servant girl aside, set it up in front.

  The morning rushed past to the rhythm of the dipping of her charq’oy pole and string. She lifted and pulled, lifted and pulled. Her mind became concentrated and free of worry. The thread on the sixteen-pole loom grew into a red ribbon, then a narrow band. Inés sat hunched in the stall, watching her in a way that made Amparo wonder whether the girl was remembering her mother weaving. Mama had taught her to weave; she had helped to teach her sisters, from Esperanza, who was a year younger, all the way down to Yolanda. She must give Sandra proper lessons soon, before she began to think of herself as too good for weaving. A woman who could weave might be poor, but she would never starve and never be unable to clothe her family. Amparo was aware that these words were less true than they had once been, yet such certitudes comforted her.

  As lunch approached, the red band on her loom broadened. She probed the weft with her fingers. A black skirt sheathing a pair of slender legs approached. “Look at this,” Raquel said, waving a copy of Prensa Libre containing a story about government corruption. If Raquel had a family, she wouldn’t waste her energy on problems nobody could solve.

  “Keep your voice down,” she said. Talking about politics had flipped their conversation into Spanish. The village’s mayor belonged to President Portillo’s political party, the FDR. Raquel continued in an angry whisper: Portillo was a drunken young lout, a puppet of the Evangelical General Ríos Montt, who had unleashed fifteen months of scorched earth warfare on the highlands in the 1980s. Amparo remained silent as Raquel denounced the general, remembering how, as an Evangelical, she used to defend him. She said in Cakchiquel: “Many of our people see Portillo and Ríos Montt as their lords who protect them.”