The Most Beautiful Place in the World

by Ann Cameron

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  “Grandma,” I said, “is it?”

  “Is it what?” she said.

  “Is San Pablo the most beautiful place in the world?”

  My grandmother made a little face.

  “The most beautiful place in the world,” she said, “is anyplace.”

  “Anyplace?” I repeated.

  “Anyplace you can hold your head up. Anyplace you can be proud of who you are.”

  OTHER YEARLING BOOK

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  JULIAN, DREAM DOCTOR

  JULIAN, SECRET AGENT

  GLORIA RISING

  Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York

  Text copyright © 1988 by Ann Cameron

  Illustrations copyright © 1988 by Thomas B. Allen

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-80013-8

  Reprinted by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers

  v3.1

  FOR PABLO ZAVALA,

  who introduced me to Guatemala

  —A.C.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  First Page

  My name is Juan. I live in Guatemala, in the mountains. My town, San Pablo, has three huge volcanoes near it, and high cliffs all around it, and steep, bright green fields of corn and garlic and onions growing in the hills, and red coffee berries growing in the shade of big trees in the valleys. It has lots of flowers and birds—eagles and orioles and owls, hummingbirds, and flocks of wild parrots that zoom down out of the trees to steal our corn and don’t talk any language but their own.

  San Pablo is on a big lake with seven other towns around it. People get from one town to another mostly by ferryboat or canoe. There’s a road, but it’s not a good one.

  I’ve never been in any of the other towns, only San Pablo. Still, at night I like to go down by the lake and look at the lights of the fishing canoes on the black water, and the lights of the other towns glowing at us across the lake, and the thousands of stars in the sky. It seems like every light is saying, “You’re not alone. We’re here too.”

  Right in town, San Pablo has stray dogs and dust in the street, and a few cars, and a few buses from the big cities, and a few mules carrying firewood from the mountains, and lots of people carrying still more stuff—jugs of water or big baskets of bread or vegetables on their heads, babies on their backs, or sometimes huge wooden beams balanced over their shoulders—whatever they need to take home. Since there aren’t many cars, if you want something, you carry it yourself, no matter how heavy it is.

  The only time people aren’t carrying things is at night, when they go out just to stroll around town and have fun and tell stories and talk to their friends. Everybody walks in the street, more or less straight down the middle, and if a car comes while somebody’s having a good conversation or telling a good story, the car has to wait till the story finishes before people will move out of the way. Stories are important here, and cars aren’t.

  Down by the beach there’s an especially beautiful place—a big, low house with lots of windows, and flowers and palm trees all around, and green grass and peacocks in the yard, and an iron gate that opens for walking right down to the water.

  That’s where I was born. Well, really I was born in a little house behind the big house. My dad was the caretaker for the big house, and he and my mother had the little house in back to live in, for free. But after I was born, my dad wanted to go out with his friends at night the way he did when he was single, and my mother said there wasn’t enough money for that, so they fought, and one day my dad just left. I heard he took the bus to the capital, which is not that far away; but he never came back to see my mom or me. The truth is, I remember the peacocks on the lawn where we lived better than I remember my dad.

  After my dad left, the rich people who owned the big house had to hire a new caretaker, and naturally they wanted him to live in our little house, so my mother had to move out. She was only seventeen, and she didn’t have any money or any way to take care of me, so she took me and moved back home to my grandmother’s house. My grandfather died a long time ago, but lucky for us, my grandmother isn’t poor. She has a house made out of cement blocks, with windows without any glass in them—they have little wooden shutters that my grandmother closes at night or when it rains. The house has four rooms, and all the walls inside are covered with the paintings my uncle Miguel has made, which are really pretty, and which he says he’s going to sell someday.

  Outside, my grandmother keeps lots of flowers, so the house looks nice. But best of all, my grandmother owns her house and the land it’s on. She keeps the papers that prove it in an iron box under her bed, and she’s sure of what they say because somebody she trusts read them to her, and nobody, praise God, can take my grandmother’s house and land away from her.

  My grandmother’s house is big, but it’s pretty crowded, because my three unmarried uncles, and sometimes some of my five married aunts and their kids, live with us too. Sometimes even my grandmother’s cousins’ kids have lived with us for a while. In fact, if anybody in the family loses a job, or gets sick, or can’t get along with a husband, or has some kind of trouble, they come to live with my grandmother. She takes care of everybody, until they can take care of themselves again. Sometimes, though, you can tell she wishes they would get around to taking care of themselves sooner than they do.

  My grandmother earns her living selling arroz con leche—rice with milk—in the big market where everyone goes to buy food every day. Arroz con leche is like rice pudding, except you don’t eat it with a spoon, you drink it hot in a glass. It’s sweet, and it has lots of cinnamon in it, and my grandmother makes it better than anybody in town. She gets up at five in the morning every day to start making it. That’s what she’s done, almost every day of her life, since she was thirteen years old.

  After my mom and I moved back to my grandmother’s, I’d wake up in the morning in bed with my mother and hear the sounds of everybody getting up—Uncle Miguel muttering, “Where’s my shoe, my shoe, my shoe?” and my aunt Maria whispering to her son Carlitos, “You didn’t wet the bed again, did you?” and Angelica, my aunt Tina’s fat little daughter, crying because she doesn’t want to take
a shower; and I’d smell the wood of the cooking fire, and the arroz con leche steaming in a big, smoke-blackened pot, and the breakfast tortillas toasting; and then my mother and I would take our towel and get our turn in the shower. My grandmother has running water in her house, which most people don’t. She says she needs it for the arroz con leche business. But she doesn’t have electricity, or hot water in the shower. She says electricity and hot water and things like that are expensive, and not very important.

  So my mom and I lived in my grandmother’s house, and my mom earned some money cleaning houses and washing people’s clothes in the big washtub in back of the house; and at night she’d take me out to walk around town, and we’d meet all her friends and talk to them, and it was fun.

  One night when we were out like that, a man came up to my mother with a big smile on his face. He said, “What a good-looking boy you have! He certainly resembles you!” And then he bought me a piece of candy, and talked to my mother some more.

  Pretty soon every night that we went out, we’d see him, and he’d walk with us. Then one night he invited my mom to a dance. After the night of the dance, she started leaving me home when she went out. I guess she wanted to see him alone.

  All of a sudden one day, she told me she was going to get married again to that man we met on the street. She was going to go live with him. But I couldn’t go with her. He didn’t want me. He wanted to start his own family. He wanted his own children. He didn’t have the money for me.

  And that same day, my mother moved out of my grandmother’s house and moved in with my stepfather. He had a house, but just one room. And he didn’t have a bed, so he and my mom came up to my grandmother’s house, and he and my mother carried out the bed she and I had been sleeping in and took it down to his house. My grandmother wasn’t home when they came for the bed, or maybe she wouldn’t have let them take it.

  When they were carrying the bed, I followed them out to the road, but my mother said, “You stay here, Juan,” so I went back to the house.

  Once they were gone, I didn’t know what to do, so I just hung around all day until my grandmother came home, and went up to her and pulled her into the room where our bed used to be.

  My grandmother frowned. “So now you have no bed!” she said. I started to cry. It’s bad enough not having a father and a mother, but when you don’t even have a place to sleep, it’s worse.

  When I stopped crying, I asked my grandmother if I could sleep with her at night, but she said no.

  “I have to work too hard,” she said. “I need my rest. I have had enough sleeping with children. Children kick,” she said.

  “I won’t kick,” I said.

  “You say you won’t, but in your sleep you would,” my grandmother said.

  She could see I was going to cry again.

  “But just a minute,” she said. “We’ll fix up something for you.”

  And she looked around and found a bunch of empty rice bags, and put them on the floor by her bed, and gave me a blanket off her bed. She got everything all ready for me before dinner, about five in the afternoon. I guess she knew I was worried that I didn’t have a place where I belonged anymore, and if I at least had a place to sleep, I wouldn’t be so scared.

  Then she told me, “Well, Grandson, you can stay here, but you know the rule about the gate. You have to obey the rule about the gate, you know.”

  I nodded and said, “Yes, Grandma.”

  My grandmother’s house has a high fence around it, and a wooden gate with a lock on it that my grandmother locks every night. The only ones besides her who have keys are my uncles. Everyone else has to be in by eight thirty. After that, my grandmother won’t get up to let them in. No matter how hard anyone knocks, she just shuts her ears. And she won’t let anyone else go open the gate either.

  I told my grandmother I understood about the gate, but since I was still little, maybe I didn’t exactly understand.

  Once my mother was gone, I started going walking alone after dinner. I didn’t really belong to anyone, so I did whatever I wanted.

  One night a few days after my mother left, I went for a really long walk, all the way to the lake. By the time I got back to my grandmother’s house, it had been dark a long time, and the gate was locked.

  I didn’t know what to do. And I was cold, besides. I just had shorts and a T-shirt on, and even though San Pablo is hot during the day, it gets cold at night because we’re so high up in the mountains.

  The only thing I could think of to do was to look for my mother. I knew where my stepfather’s house was, so I decided to go there. When I got there, through the window I saw a candle burning. Nobody ever goes to sleep or goes outside leaving a candle burning, because it could burn up everything in the house. So I knew somebody was awake, and inside.

  I wasn’t tall enough to see who, so I put a rock below the window and stood on it to look in. I saw my mother, alone.

  I knocked once, so softly she didn’t hear me, and then once again, louder.

  My mother opened the door a crack, and saw me. All she said was “You!”

  Of course, my mother knew the rule about the gate, and how late it was, and how I must have got locked out.

  She stood for a minute in the doorway, and then she said, “Come on in.” She could see I was shivering. Sometimes when you shiver, it’s not just from the cold.

  Inside the house there was a table with the candle, two stools, two plates, two cups, and some bananas. There were a few clothes hanging on nails in the wall, and a little rug on the floor, and, of course, the bed. That was all. The room could have used a lot of other stuff. Mainly, the one thing I wished it had was a back door for me to go out if my stepfather came in the front door.

  “You can stay here,” my mother said, “but if your stepfather sees you when he comes home, he’ll get very angry and hit you. So you’ll have to hide, and sleep under the bed.”

  So I got down on the floor under the bed, back against the wall out of sight, and my mother shook out the little rug to make it cleaner and put it over me.

  But I couldn’t go to sleep, because I was afraid of what would happen when my stepfather came home.

  After quite a while there was a loud knock on the door, and my mother unbolted it. From where I was, I could just see my stepfather’s legs and feet coming into the house. Then I heard him kiss my mom.

  “The guy finally showed up and paid me the money he owed,” my stepfather said. “So tomorrow you can buy the things you need.”

  “Good!” my mother said, and then they talked a little about what they’d buy for the house.

  “The candle’s going out,” my stepfather said. “Time to turn in for the night.”

  I watched his feet coming closer and closer. The bed creaked as he sat down on it. He took his shoes off and put his bare feet on the floor.

  “Where’s the rug?” he asked.

  “I washed it,” my mother said. “It’s outside. It’s still wet.”

  “Well, we don’t need it,” my stepfather said, and they both went to bed, and I went to sleep.

  In the morning my mother woke me early, before my stepfather woke. I crawled out from under the bed without saying a word, trying to be perfectly quiet. My mother unbolted the door and I tiptoed out.

  “Remember,” my mother whispered, “you can’t come here again!”

  She closed the door, and I ran up the road all the way to my grandmother’s house.

  “Where were you?” my grandmother said.

  “At my mother’s house.”

  “And what happened?” my grandmother asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Only I can’t go there again.”

  I thought I never would. But the next night my grandmother took me by the hand and said, “Come with me,” and we walked to my mother’s house.

  My grandmother knocked on the door, slowly, three times.

  My mother opened the door. My stepfather was behind her, sitting on the bed, but he stood up whe
n he saw my grandmother.

  “How are you, Mother?” my mother said. She and my stepfather looked nervous, but my grandmother didn’t.

  “I’m fine, as always,” my grandmother said, “but your son needs a bed, and you must get him one.” She turned around and put her hand on my shoulder and we left.

  Sure enough, they did get me a bed, and they brought it up to my grandmother’s house the next week. It was a wooden bed, and all the legs were slightly different lengths, but my uncle Luis borrowed a saw and fixed it up for me.

  After that, I only saw my mother by accident, in the street. She always said, “How are you, Juan?” as if she cared, but I only said, “Fine, Mother,” and nothing else. One day when I saw her, I realized she was going to have a baby, and a few months later she had it. So I had a half brother, but he didn’t know who I was. When I saw him on the side of the street playing, I wanted to knock him down and punch him—for having a mother, when I didn’t. But I never hit him. He was just a little kid. I could see nothing was his fault.

  Anyway, my life wasn’t so bad. I played soccer in the street with my cousins and the kids in the neighborhood. My uncle Rodolfo taught me how to do somersaults and backflips, and my uncle Miguel let me use his paints sometimes. And a few times I went walking with my aunts at night, the way I used to walk with my mother.

  The other thing I did was help my grandmother in the market with the arroz con leche. I learned how to ladle it out, and how to make change and see that nobody took any when Grandma wasn’t looking. And after I did that for a while, my grandmother told me she thought I was ready to have a job alone, and she taught me how to shine shoes, and bought me a shoeshine kit and a stool for customers to sit on, and the two of us figured out where I should stand downtown to get the most business—by the Tourist Office and the giant photo of San Pablo that has writing underneath it.

  At the beginning my grandmother watched. The first two customers I did a good job for, and then, on the third pair of shoes, I skipped a little.