The Path of the Jaguar

by Stephen Henighan

  “I’m sure he’s got a good reason for coming here,” Esperanza said.

  Amparo stared at the green-painted back of the seat. She had never felt so angry with Raquel.

  The ayudante opened the back door as the bus stopped up the street from the village square. Amparo, Esperanza and the children jumped out. Amparo felt the the bus’ warm black exhaust, darker than the falling dusk, soil her forearm. Women waited for the ayudante to unload their bags from the roof. Young men loped away, their white running shoes luminous as nighttime massed against the walls of the valley. Esperanza pulled her children against her side. “Let’s wait a moment.”

  They backed away from the crowd. The tall gringo stepped out. Shrugging his small day backpack into the space between his shoulder blades, he set off down the street towards the village square. Esperanza gathered her children against her. The gringo reached the end of the block, stopped at the house on the corner of the square and knocked on the multi-coloured door. The door opened and he slipped inside.

  Amparo felt breathless. It couldn’t be true! She gripped her sister’s hand. “What’s going to happen to her, Esperanza?” she whispered.

  “He’ll take her away to his country, as Yolanda’s husband did.”

  “But her medicine, her studies . . . She needs to be here.”

  “Maybe the gringos like Mayan medicine. She’ll starve if she stays here. After this, nobody will call her.”

  “She’ll be driven out. Oh, my friend. Mi pobre amiga de toda la vida . . . ”

  Esperanza walked in silence. She never complained about her husband, a dull man who loaded trucks in the Antigua market and got drunk every Sunday. Reading a reproach in her sister’s stolid stride, Amparo bowed her head.

  Her mind staggered to grasp what was happening in the house on the corner.

  It was almost dark when they unlocked the metal gate of the compound. She said a quick goodbye to her sister and her nieces. In the house, Eusebio and Pablito sat on the couch playing with the remote, switching between the news and a comedy show. Inés was late making supper. A plate on the counter contained white and dark slices of nude chicken meat nestled side by side. Amparo felt choked with anger. “Why isn’t supper ready?”

  “I didn’t think there was any hurry.”

  “Well, there is a hurry. Life is hard and we all have to work. If you can’t work here, you can work elsewhere. You can’t just be a burden. I visited two hotels in Antigua today that are looking for girls to clean rooms. Tomorrow you and I will go to Antigua and get you a job. Sandra can do the cooking. It’s time she learned to cook properly.”

  Sandra, who was stirring the frijoles on the stove, met Amparo’s eyes with a hurt look.

  Inés was crying. “No, señora. I’ve always worked — ”

  “You don’t work enough.”

  She brushed past the girl to drop her bag in the bedroom. Eusebio got to his feet. “Amparo . . . ”

  She set down her Cakchiquel-Spanish dictionary. She was too angry to speak. If he uttered one more syllable, she would shout at him.

  He regarded her with a long, half-suppressed sigh, then withdrew. Sometimes she forgot how well he knew her. The returning ebb of feeling deepened her bitterness towards Raquel. Amparo had endured trials in her marriage without losing her husband or debasing herself with other men; if Raquel was so intelligent, she should be able to do the same. Amparo sat down at the table, ignoring the stifled sobs with which Inés served the chicken, frijoles, avocado, and tortillas. As soon as the food was in front of them, the girl retreated to her room behind the alcove. They ate in silence. After supper, Sandra, springing to her feet, said: “Come on, Pablito, help me wash the dishes.”

  They put the children to bed early. Pablito fell asleep; Amparo told Sandra she could read with the light on. “Mama, will Inés have to leave?”

  “Nobody’s leaving. We all have to work harder.”

  She kissed her daughter goodnight and went to the bedroom. The room was in darkness. She could sense her husband’s bulk in the bed. As she undressed she thought of flesh so white it would remain visible in the deepest night. A corkscrew of heat started in her stomach and twirled up into her face and down into her thighs. She rolled into bed and clasped her husband’s body against hers. She kissed him on the mouth and slid her hand down the front of his naked body.

  “Amparo,” he sighed with his shy laugh, “I thought you were angry with me.”

  After they had made love, his lovemaking meeting her expectations with the exactitude of a man who had been a husband for many years, he cradled her head in the crook of his shoulder. “Amparo, I can’t spend my life in front of the television. A man has to be more than that.”

  “You won’t find a job if you don’t leave the house, Eusebio.”

  “What can I find? A maquila in the capital? I’ll have to travel all night to get to work. You’ll never see me. I might as well not be here.”

  She twisted free of his embrace and stared at him, wishing she could see the expression on his face.

  “Amparo, I want to go north. I’ve found a coyote. I could stay with your brother in Phoenix . . . ”

  She hugged him. “¡Mi amor! It’s too dangerous. They pack you into the back of a truck and you suffocate. That’s what Papa says. He knows the drivers . . . ”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that. Do you think a mara gang boss is packed into a truck? You can travel safely. You just have to pay for a different class of travel.”

  “How much do they want?”

  “Forty thousand quetzales.”

  “Forty thousand quetzales! Eusebio, we can’t — ”

  “I can pay it back. It’s only five thousand dollars. Amparo, in the United States, any job you do, they pay you two thousand dollars a month. Two thousand dollars in a month! Here I couldn’t make that in a year. Amparo, you know how many men from this village support their families by sending back money.”

  “And when will I see you again? Once you leave you can’t come back unless you’re trapped by the migra and come back in handcuffs, and in that case we’ll have the maras at the door threatening our children unless we pay your debt.”

  “Amparo, Amparo. It’s not going to be like that.” When he hugged her with his whole soft body she could almost convince herself that he knew exactly how it was going to work out. “Our responsibility is to our children. If Pablito stays in that school he’ll be lucky to finish the six years of primary school. We have to send him to a colegio in Antigua. We can’t afford it unless I work.”

  “Inés is going out to work tomorrow.”

  “And how much will she bring home once she’s paid her bus fare to Antigua and eaten lunch? It’s not enough, Amparo.”

  “You’re my husband, Eusebio. A husband and a wife should live together.”

  “Our children come before our own happiness. The coyote’s coming to talk to me tomorrow night . . . ”

  The sob ambushed her. She felt her chest collapsing as though a support-post had snapped. She gasped against the shock as she realized that she had moaned aloud. Eusebio tightened his arms around her. The children, he whispered. The children . . . She had been thinking about her children since before they were born. She had rarely thought about marriage other than as the time when she would have children. Even when she had been counting down the days to her wedding night, her imagination had refused to linger on the possible delights of lovemaking, carrying her forward to the pain she would feel when her first child was born. Only now did her denial surge up to shake her like volumes of icy water, a foretaste of death that sloshed her mind around like a piece of fabric escaping from the grasp of a woman washing clothes in a river. She had disdained the happiest time of her life and now it was ending. Promising to confess her sin next Sunday, she dwelt on the pleasures she and her husband had explored in their bed. The pleasures felt insufficiently enjoyed. Though she knew she should seek a union of the spirit, her mind hummed with thoughts of two bodies wrapped
together.

  “Can’t you find work in Antigua?”

  He caressed her shoulder. She drifted into sleep.

  Next morning she got on the bus with the servant girl. Doña María was sitting in front of three teenage boys in baseball caps. Her bag of potatoes tilted into the aisle. The ayudante hung out the door of the bus, calling, “Antigua! Antigua!” The driver went down the fitted-stone street towards the main square. As they passed the house on the corner, Doña María said: “Shameless!”

  The boys in the back giggled. “The whore’s shameless . . . ”

  “So she is,” Doña María said.

  Her poor friend. Amparo looked straight ahead.

  “Shameless whore!” Doña María repeated with additional venom.

  “She’s a better curandera than your sister Eduviges,” one boy muttered.

  “She’s a lot prettier,” another boy said.

  “Your sister’s too ugly to cast spells on gringos!”

  Amparo stared at her hands. How could the boys laugh off what Raquel had done? She gripped Inés’ wrist. Her bad mood clung to her all the way down the mountain. In the market, she reminded the servant girl of the names of the hotels where she was told they were looking for women to clean rooms. “Come to the school at noon. I expect you to have a job.”

  As soon as she and Ricardo had exchanged greetings, she warned him that she couldn’t invite him to the village this week. He nodded. Behind his nod she saw an emotion she could not recognize: not impatience, but an acceptance of the change in plan that felt at the same time like a form of depreciation, as though he expected her to be unreliable. She made him repeat b’alam until he was tripping over his tongue. In Arizona Eusebio would have to learn to talk to gringos, to stand up to them; her fear for him increased.

  “B’ey,” she said. “Road. You have to pronounce it correctly, Ricardo. B’ey.”

  “Bay,” he said. “Bej. Be-ej . . . ”

  During the break she told Nancy Robelo that the visit to the village had been postponed. Nancy cast a sighing look in the direction of her soldier, who was talking again to the skinny hindú girl. Then the skinny girl veered away, and the soldier was left alone. Nancy’s face lighted up.

  “Don’t fall in love with him, Nancy,” Amparo whispered.

  “I haven’t. Well . . . only a little bit. It’s not dangerous.”

  “Not for him. For you it’s very dangerous.”

  Nancy tossed her highlighted hair. Amparo felt a heaviness wrapping around her like a damp woven blanket. It was her role today to disappoint, frustrate, and hurt; but she couldn’t back down.

  When she left Escuela Tecún Umán at noon, the servant girl was standing between two parked cars on the opposite side of the street. She looked away as Amparo approached. “I couldn’t — ”

  “You couldn’t what?”

  “I couldn’t go to the hotels. I felt ashamed.”

  “You didn’t ask? You didn’t even try to get a job? Anchi jat jech’ël?” she said, not caring that the girl didn’t speak Cakchiquel. Across the street, the students were bantering in English as they filtered out of the school; at her feet, the boy who looked after parked cars hiccuped. “You’ve been hanging around the streets for four hours? You think that’s more respectable than looking for a job?”

  The girl bowed her head.

  Amparo caught her by the shoulder of her blouse. She marched the girl past the tumbled pillars of the ruined church. At the end of the block, she let her hand drop. She felt a twinge in her heart as they passed the austere façade of Escuela San Fernando. If only Sister Consuelo had not returned to Analusia! She must rely on her own resources, and must teach this girl to do the same.

  “Hurry up!” she said. The sign of Hostal Imperio Maya, the first hotel she had visited, protruded into the street. She led the girl inside. “Señora, with permission — you said you needed girls to clean the rooms. I’d like to recommend this girl to you. She has been working in my house for many years, cooking and washing and changing sheets. She is reliable and doesn’t steal. We can’t afford a servant any more and this girl needs work. Please, señora — ”

  The woman asked the girl her name, where she lived, and how long she had been working for Amparo. To Amparo’s relief, the girl straightened up and answered the questions in a respectful tone. “You start at six o’clock tomorrow morning,” the woman said.

  “What is her wage?” Amparo asked.

  The woman looked impatient. “The usual,” she said and gave a figure. Amparo could hardly suppress her dismay. Inés’s pay would barely cover her return bus fare to Antigua.

  Where would she find the money to pay forty thousand quetzales?

  She accompanied the girl as far as the Calzada. “Go home,” she said, “then go to the market and open the stall. Tell Eusebio I’ll be back later in the afternoon.”

  She walked towards the edge of town. As the cobblestones turned to tarmac, smoke from fires in the bush stung her eyes; passing trucks soiled her hair with exhaust. She hadn’t phoned Yolanda, taking for granted that she would be at home. Her mind turned to Doña Manuela’s divination. If Doña Manuela was correct, finding a way for Eusebio to work in the north might be the most important job of her life.

  The guard slouching in the new security hut at the edge of the development waved her past. As she knocked on the door of her sister’s house, the Santa María dialect with which Doña Manuela spoke Cakchiquel ran through her mind. Her brother-in-law answered. “Yes?”

  She caught her breath, intimidated by his height, by the flat stomach and vigorous shoulders that looked as though they had been transplanted from the body of a younger man. His spray of greying curls belied the crooked, handsome severity of his face. “I’m Amparo. Yolanda’s oldest sister.”

  “Of course. Yolanda . . . your sister . . . ”

  “Amparo!” She heard the sound of Yoli’s feet on the tiles. The hug she longed for enfolded her in Yoli’s youth and warmth and energy. And gratitude, Amparo felt: she was still the only member of the family who visited Yoli.

  They led her into the living room and sat her on the couch. David turned off the television and pointed towards the window. “You see that security hut? I told them to build it. I told them their security is mierda. I’m going to keep telling them until they make this development into a place where I can leave my wife in safety.”

  Amparo nodded. She took a covert glance at the candlestick on the shelf, its curves deflecting the afternoon sunlight. A Mayan woman she didn’t recognize brought in a can of Coca-Cola and a glass on a tray. “Where’s Doña Manuela?” Amparo asked.

  “Who?” David said, stretching his long legs.

  Yoli looked stricken. “We had to let her go.”

  “The servant?” David said. “She was a disaster. I came home and there were seeds on the floor and my menorah had been desecrated. She performed some kind of savage ritual in my living room,” he said, waving his arm to encompass the space he owned.

  Yolanda left the room.

  “So, Amparo,” David said, settling into an armchair. He had wiry wrinkles in the corners of his mouth. “What can we do for you? How are things going in the family?”

  She had to tell him, even if it meant being demolished by his scorn. She felt her hand tremble as she drank from the glass of Coca-Cola.

  “My mother is well, my father still enjoys driving trucks . . . ” She saw his impatience as he picked at the whorls of black hair that covered the backs of his hands up to the knuckles. Forcing herself to think of her children, she said: “Eusebio has lost his job.”

  Yoli returned to the room and sat down next to her husband. Hurrying on, afraid that they would blame Eusebio, Amparo explained that the funding for Señor Robinson’s NGO had been cut, that the Americans were sending all their money to the Arabs now.

  “You have to understand, Amparo,” David said, his hands parting. “This war the Americans are going to fight in Iraq is a war that must be fought. N
o one knows that better than people of my race.”

  She hurried on, speaking of the importance of her children’s education, of the impossibility of her husband’s finding another job in Antigua or Guatemala City. Finally she told them of Eusebio’s decision, of how much the coyote was going to cost. “We don’t have the money. That’s why,” she said, hearing her voice going hoarse, “I’ve come to ask — ”

  “Amparo! We can’t give you forty thousand quetzales!” Yoli was on her feet. “How’s David supposed to feel if my relatives ask him for money? Do you want him to think we’re all beggars?”

  Amparo stared at the coffee table. Not even Yoli had escaped their mother’s legacy of shame.

  “A coyote doesn’t have to cost forty thousand quetzales. You can get one cheaper than that.”

  “Eusebio doesn’t want to risk his life.”

  “You don’t have to pay the money up front. Everyone knows the maras will give you a loan.”

  “A loan from the maras is too dangerous. If Eusebio is sent back, they’ll make my daughter into a prostitute to pay off the loan.”

  “Amparo!” Yoli reached for Amparo’s glass of Coca-Cola, picked it up and drained it. “I thought I’d got away from these problems!” She sat down in the chair, her hair falling over her face. “I’m sorry, David. I apologize for my family!” She and David started to make incomprehensible sounds. The sight of her little sister, who had been so neglectful of her studies, holding a conversation in English made Amparo feel small and backward. Every time she tried to improve her life, shame lay in wait for her like a malevolent spirit.

  David leaned forward, clasping his hands between his knees. “I’ve been telling my wife that we’re responsible for our family. That doesn’t mean we hand out money to every relative who asks, but in the case of you and your husband, who have a plan to improve your situation . . . ” He shrugged his shoulders. “If you’re going to have a debt, it’s better that it be with us than with the maras.” He concentrated on her face. “Where does your husband want to go?”