The Path of the Jaguar

by Stephen Henighan

  “Phoenix, Arizona. Our brother — ”

  “Yes, of course, your brother. I could arrange for your husband to travel to Phoenix. But it’s better if I don’t get involved. I have to rely on this terrible government of Portillo for business. Find yourself a reliable coyote. Yoli and I will pay. But, you listen to me,” he said, gesturing with his right hand as his face shook into a jagged smile, “as soon as your husband gets to Phoenix, he pays us back. I expect regular payments!”

  “¡Sí, Don David! No se preocupe. You’ll be proud of us, I promise!” She leaned forward to kiss his hand, her knee grazing the floor. His dark whorls tickled her lips. “Thank you so much! God will bless you!”

  “Get me a blessing from a Mayan god,” he said, with a laugh.

  David drank a rum and Coke to celebrate the loan. Amparo tried in vain to meet her sister’s eyes. Yoli wouldn’t speak to her. She had woven David, Yoli’s banner of escape, into the family tapestry. Wary of an argument that might jeopardize the loan, she thanked David and Yoli, and promised to call them once Eusebio had confirmed his arrangements with the coyote. As she walked along the edge of the tarmac road back to Antigua, smoke stung her eyes.

  Her misery clung to her all through supper. She and Eusebio had arranged to send the children to see her parents before the coyote could arrive. After supper, Sandra led Pablito out the door by the hand. Amparo ordered Inés to go to her room. “You have to get up early tomorrow.”

  The girl hesitated, then retreated in silence.

  She and Eusebio pulled back chairs from the table. She looked at him, unable to imagine the house without him. Finally she said: “I went to see Yoli and David today. David said he would lend us the money.”

  “You’re joking, Amparo! You did that? He said yes?”

  “He said yes.” She was relieved that his reaction was as stifled as hers. Any sign of delight would wound her. Yet beneath his self-control, she detected a sheen of fear. She suspected that, like her, he had been secretly hoping that they would not find the money.

  He went to the phone and called the coyote. “He says he’ll come by at nine o’clock to discuss arrangements,” he said, as he hung up.

  They sat at the table, looking at each other, examining each other’s faces and saying little, until Eusebio said: “It’s nine o’clock.”

  They went outside. The pale wash of light from her family’s houses around the compound darkened the dust of the courtyard. She listened to the silence.

  A knock on the gate. Amparo opened it. A small man entered, hunched in spite of his youth. She did not know what she had expected a coyote to look like but this man appeared too ordinary to conjure people across borders. She led him towards the house. He followed. His right foot hung behind his left with a limping, heel-dragging step. She watched the side of his shoe rasp the dirt. She felt sick to her stomach. Afraid she might faint, she sat down on a low stucco wall. Eusebio and the coyote looked at her. “Go ahead,” she whispered. “Go inside. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  The coyote looked at Eusebio. “What’s wrong with her?”

  Eusebio shrugged his shoulders. “Women . . . ”

  She watched the two men walk towards the house.

  SEVENTEEN

  EVERY NIGHT SHE EDGED HER leg across the mattress to the space that belonged to his knee. She fanned her calf over the sheet, summoning his presence as she did the presence of God or Ixmucane. But Eusebio was a man, and once a man was gone he could not be recalled. Having conceived of her marriage as a bond bestowed by God, a pact the two of them had made with their Church, she remembered their years together as his snores, the smell of his chest, the weight of his hand on her stomach and her thighs, his shy nibbling of her nipples, the sweat that plastered them together. His voice on the phone, during the ten minutes’ conversation they allowed themselves every Sunday night, belonged to another man, a husband in name and obligation but not in body. Their marriage had turned into a balloon that floated high above her, while her daily life went its own way down on earth.

  The night he left, the coyote had come at 3:00 AM. She had put Sandra and Pablito to bed, then returned to the couch, where he was watching a telenovela at low volume. She took the remote control from his hand. “Are you going to say goodbye to Sandra and Pablito?”

  He shook his head with the little-boy shyness that never failed to strike a pang into her heart. “I can’t say goodbye to my children, Amparo.”

  She let these words hang in the air for a very long time. She put the remote control on the coffee table and took his hand in hers. “It’s better this way,” he said.

  His tranquillity frightened her, as though he were already in another country. Once a man went north, he stayed there unless he returned in handcuffs. The good men continued to send money to the Western Union office in Antigua, but many had other wives, other families, up there. At least that would not happen to them. Eusebio would be staying with her brother. He was leaving the country, but not the family. Nor was he going away forever; of that she felt certain. Yet his calm provoked her until, acting as she had rarely acted in all the years they had been married, she said: “If you’re not saying goodbye to the children, you can come and say goodbye to me.”

  In the bedroom, she left a lamp on, wanting him to see the light glimmering on her breasts as they made love, wanting him to remember her with all his senses to cancel out the possibility of another woman making an impression there. She felt brazen and shameless. Later, when the digital clock flipped to 1:00 AM as her husband dozed on his back, she took him in her mouth as a señora decente did not do, and teased out his pleasure with an avidness that no number of Hail Marys would exonerate until he woke with a moan, raging to make love with her one more time.

  At 3:00 AM, she held his hand as they walked to the gate of the compound. Her husband gave her a kiss and left. She locked the gate, walked back into the house, went to her bedroom and turned out the light. Each morning now, she woke to the stunned awareness of his absence. The pain clung to her, as persistent as the ache in Mama’s back.

  For two days she heard nothing. On the third night, after the children were in bed, her brother Rafael called from Phoenix. “Sister, I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”

  “Llegué al lugar indicado,” Eusebio said. A chill passed through her at the sound of this phrase. More than the tinny murmur of Rafael’s gringoized Spanish, the phrase llegar al lugar indicado, to arrive at the appropriate place — because the coyotes forbade their clients from uttering the names of their destinations — told her that her husband was in the USA. As though it were the most natural thing in the world for Eusebio to travel, she asked him about his trip. “Really smooth,” he said. He had driven north with the coyote and two other men. By morning they had reached Huehuetenango. Somewhere north of this northwestern city the four-by-four had turned onto a pitted sideroad, then another. Eusebio and another man were told to get out and walk over the hill in front of them. Two hours later, as they stumbled through the rocks and dust of this land too arid for agriculture, and came down the far side of the incline, they saw the four-by-four waiting for them in a ravine. “Welcome to Mexico,” the coyote said when they got to the door. He handed them Mexican ID cards that bore their photographs. They drove to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas, and booked into a hotel. “The rooms had showers,” Eusebio said. “In the morning we went downstairs and there were gringos eating breakfast in the dining room!” After breakfast, Eusebio and the other man were driven to the airport —

  “You took a plane?”

  “Two!” They had flown from Tuxtla to Mexico City, then from Mexico City to Monterrey. She peppered him with questions. What had it felt like to fly? “No, Amparo, there isn’t time,” he said, leaving her with a chastened resentment of the authority conferred on him by his new knowledge. In Monterrey they took away his Mexican ID card and gave him an American passport with his photograph and another man’s name. He was put in the back seat o
f a car full of Mexican-Americans from San Antonio, Texas returning from a shopping trip in Mexico. They spent the night in a motel on the outskirts of San Antonio. In the morning they took away his passport and gave him a bus ticket to Phoenix. Rafael and Megan picked him up at the station.

  “When do you start working? Eusebio, I need money to send Pablito to school in Antigua!”

  “Give me a moment, Amparo!”

  In the morning, after Inés had left, Sandra and Pablito played with their food. “Where’s Papa?” Sandra asked.

  “He’s with Uncle Rafael and Aunt Megan,” Amparo said. She watched the children considering this information.

  “Is he happy there?” Sandra said.

  “He’s happy because he will be able to work and send us money.”

  They nodded their heads in understanding. Other children’s fathers were doing this. They did not ask about him again.

  She worked in the market in the afternoons, weaving in front of her stall. She finished the red bag with the sauntering white jaguar on the front. She wasn’t happy with it: the crook of the jaguar’s foreleg was wrong. To convey a sense of perspective, she had woven a white mountain into the background near the top of the bag. Examining the finished product, she saw that the mountain was too far away from the jaguar: rather than investing him with a sense of movement, the hump made him look as though he had strayed far from home. She stored the bag in the back of the stall, reluctant to display it.

  The Canadian students’ month of intensive language courses had ended, and with them her morning sessions with Ricardo. Don Teófilo’s next contract was with the State Department of the United States. Amparo was one of the maestras he retained for this assignment. She had taught State Department officials before: they were humourless, competent men who learned Spanish vocabulary efficiently but seemed to feel that it was impertinent of her to suggest that they alter their Yanqui accents when speaking Spanish. This time she had been assigned to teach a man from a special unit of the US Marines. Ricardo had paid Don Teófilo to continue his Cakchiquel classes twice a week; he had agreed to schedule the classes in the afternoon now that her mornings were full. She had just enough time for a quick lunch of tortilla and avocado between the two students. She returned to her desk in the front room of Escuela Tecún Umán as he came in the door.

  “Sakar, Ricardo.”

  “Sakar, Amparo. La utz a’wech?”

  In Spanish he asked her about her new morning student. As she heard herself venting her disgust, she realized how much she had come to trust Ricardo. “He boasts he can go into the jungle . . . into the jungle naked.” She faltered. “He says he can feed and clothe himself from roots and branches. He knows how to kill men with his bare hands. Oh, he’s ugly . . . Tattoos everywhere, and he has three girlfriends in Guatemala City. He expects me to listen to such filth! He can speak quite a lot of Spanish, but such language! Usually the gringos from the State Department are very correct, but this man’s a kaibil.”

  She trusted that he had spent enough time in Guatemala to know that kaibiles were special forces units that had committed massacres during the civil war. He nodded. “How long are you going to be teaching him?”

  “Until his next assignment starts.” She leaned forward. “Ricardo, when he leaves I may not be able to continue teaching you. I don’t mind coming to Antigua if I have four hours with the kaibil. Then the extra two hours make sense. But to come to Antigua just for two hours’ work . . . ” Eager to avoid any hint of a rebuff, she said: “You must come and visit our market. I’m sorry I had to cancel before, but there were problems in my family.”

  “I’d be delighted to visit your market,” he said.

  On the afternoons when she wasn’t teaching Ricardo, she returned from her morning classes with the kaibil disheartened. The empty house desolated her. With the children at school and Inés in Antigua, she felt abandoned. She would turn on the television and imagine that Eusebio was sitting beside her on the couch, fantasies that led to feverish imaginings which she stifled in sobs. She had never thought of herself as weak, but now she feared that she had grown too used to being married. Her longing for Eusebio backed up into resentment of him for having spoiled her with his constant weight in bed. She went out into the yard of the compound, where Papa, if he wasn’t away on a delivery, would sit smoking a cigarette. Mama winnowed black beans in a woven basket. She sat with them. In their solemn way Mama and Papa allotted her more time than before, encouraging her in the gentlest of tones to go to the market, where she might make a sale. The sight of them sitting side by side, made her dizzy at the thought of the thousands of kilometres of mountain and desert separating her from Eusebio. Her marriage had filled with unstaunchable space. More and more, her thoughts concentrated on how to bring her family together again.

  Mayan New Year approached. Mama burned incense on the day, but ignored the customs she had learned in childhood for fear of angering the priest. Amparo felt restless. She conserved her marriage in every atom of her daily life, yet, to her guilty dismay, the fading of Eusebio’s presence gave her moments of elated freedom. She could be as Maya as she wished without offending her ladino husband. She could raise the children according to her will alone.

  “Sandra,” she said, “on Mayan New Year, you will wear traje to school.”

  “Regular traje? Or is there a special traje for the New Year?”

  Exasperated, Amparo blurted: “I don’t know . . . I’ll find out.”

  Sandra stood up, twisting her thickening hips in the elastic little-girl slacks that were too small for her. “How are you going to find out?”

  “I’ll ask someone,” Amparo said. She laid her hand on Pablito’s shoulder. The boy sat at the table drawing a picture. Figures in long gowns stood on a steep-pitched mountain landscape. The burning orb overhead looked like the sun, but when she asked him, trying to divert Sandra’s questions, he said it was the moon. “Ri ik’,” he said shyly, startling her by remembering the Cakchiquel word for moon. The longing in his nervous eyes made her shiver.

  “Yes, the moon,” she said, in Spanish.

  Sandra sidled up to her, looping her arm around Amparo’s hip and gazing at Pablito’s drawing. “I bet,” she said, “that you’ll have to ask Raquel. Raquel knows more about traje than you do . . . ” Amparo ignored her. Pablito reached for his red crayon. Sandra continued: “Did you and Raquel have a fight, Mama? Aren’t you best friends any more . . . ?”

  “Of course we’re best friends! It’s not like you and the girls at school, changing your minds every week about who you’re friends with. Women support each other, indigenous women in the same community . . . ”

  “Then why don’t you ask her?”

  “All right, we’ll go see Raquel right now! Pablito, come on, we’re — ”

  “I want to finish my drawing!” Pablito wailed.

  She took Pablito to Esperanza’s house and left him to draw. She tried to persuade Sandra, too, to stay with Esperanza. “No,” Sandra said with a dark stare. “I want to hear what Raquel says.”

  Amparo spied Esperanza biting down on a smile. She hustled Sandra out the door. They closed the gate of the compound behind them and walked to the house on the corner of the square.

  The brightly coloured door opened and Raquel looked out with a vexed expression. They had barely spoken since Pablito’s illness. As she stepped inside, Amparo was aware of Sandra watching her with furious scrutiny. She felt a nervous twist as the narrow walls enclosed her in the first smudge of evening. Below the poster of the Mayan ceremonial calendar, a postcard glowed in the day’s last light. Amparo saw a photograph of a skyscraper-studded skyline and the words Kansas City.

  Raquel gave her a look of disregard that sheered into glancing defiance. Amparo became so angry that, until her daughter nudged her hip, she forgot why they had come. “My daughter,” she said in Cakchiquel, “wants to dress in traje for New Year’s day — ”

  “You want me to wear traje,” Sandra said i
n Spanish.

  “ — and we do not know if she needs a special traje, or if ordinary traje is enough.”

  She stopped, conscious of the shuddering in her voice. Raquel stared at her. “Your traje tells the history of your village. Do you need more than that?”

  “I don’t know what I need,” Amparo said in exasperation. “I came here because I thought you were my friend.”

  “Are you still my friend, Amparo? Now that you’re alone, do you understand that women have to act on their fantasies?” “I understand where my duty lies.” She tightened her grip on Sandra’s wrist.

  Raquel smiled. “You will always be a Catholic.”

  Amparo was aware that she had not invited them to sit down. Raquel seemed impatient; although alone, she felt occupied. “How is your son?” she asked.

  “He’s better. Thank you.”

  “If he wants to train as a Mayan priest, I’m willing to help him.”

  “Oh, Pablito just wants to be a käk winaq like his father. I’ll be happy if my daughter learns our traditions to pass them on to her daughter.” Fearing that she had sounded offhand, she looked down at Sandra, who stared back at her with an expression that was too contradictory to fathom. Amparo let herself out of the house.

  In the cool silence of the empty square in front of the closed-up market, they felt alone. Sandra said: “Mama, Raquel looks like a witch.”

  “She’s a curandera, a medicine woman.”

  “No, Mama, a witch! Like those three sisters on television who are witches.”

  Amparo, remembering the program Sandra was referring to, balked. Could her daughter understand what a curandera did only by comparing Raquel to a gringo TV series? Her children’s world was too complicated. It would clear Sandra’s mind to wear traje to school.

  As she opened the gate of the compound, she prepared to tell Eusebio about the visit and realized for the five hundredth time that he had disappeared. The man who spoke to her on the telephone for ten minutes on Sunday night, with his know-it-all brusqueness and evasions, was not the gentle Eusebio to whom she used to spill out the events of her day.