by W. E. Gutman
“Come, it’s time to praise the Lord.” A travel-worn gray beard, crumpled trousers, a cotton-kneed, jet-lagged gait and eyes red with fatigue had given me away. Or was it the camera casually slung over one shoulder?
“Why are you assuming I speak English,” I replied in fluent Hebrew. You could have tried Japanese, you know. After all, this is a Minolta,” I added, feinting annoyance and perilously mixing interrogative and declarative.
Rachel overlooked -- or failed to appreciate -- the diversity of my rhetorical skills and proceeded to cross-examine me, this time with the seriousness of a prophet in search of disciples.
“So, you’re from New York, aren’t you?”
“Well, I’m from Paris but I live in New York.”
“What brings you to Israel?”
“I’m researching an article on the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
“You don’t say. Anyway, listen, when you get back to New York you must go to Brooklyn and see the Rebbe and seek his blessings.”
“The Rebbe?”
Rachel mentioned a name. “Who else,” she snapped with a sidelong glance of consternation and suspicion. “Surely you’ve heard of him, haven’t you? You must go to him, he’ll….”
Ah, yes, I mused, the holy man who distributes crisp dollar bills to an adoring army of shnorrers [spongers], the would-be Messiah who recites sententious maxims disguised as unintelligible grunts.
“He’ll energize you,” Rachel exhorted. “He’s a pious and saintly Jew. He performs miracles.”
“If he is so saintly and pious a Jew, shouldn’t he be performing miracles in Israel instead of Williamsburg,” I ventured, risking and ultimately earning the bile of this tenacious missionary.
“You wouldn’t be a Satmar by any chance?” Rachel squinted with mistrust, probing my eyes for telltale Transylvanian treachery. Finding none, she focused on the small square and compasses pin adorning my lapel.
“What’s that,” she asked with unmasked ferocity.
“I’m a Freemason,” I said curtly, in no mood for syntactic variety.
“A Freemason! Oy gevalt!” Rachel’s eyes rolled with anger and disbelief. Her mouth arched with disgust. “Blasphemer! Irreligious libertine!” She yanked the glass of sacramental wine from my hand and threw me out of the store.
One of the symptoms of stupidity is an overabundance of preconceived notions.
*
No sooner ejected from Rachel’s emporium than I was accosted by Menachem, a Philadelphia Greek Jew and self-avowed born-again Christian sent to Israel to convert Jews to a newfangled brand of Christianity that postulates the worship of Jesus through Judaism (sic). My father, who coined many a colorful simile in his time, might have likened this swindle to having one’s hand down the cookie jar and one’s soul up in heaven. But being a gynecologist, and with an earthiness characteristic of his peasant origins, he would have given the comparison a somewhat coarser texture.
I looked at Menachem, feeling compassion more than annoyance. Only faith in the infallibility of his own convictions, I told myself, prevented him from grasping the enormity of such ministry. But who was I to question, let alone contradict him? I’d long given up reasoning with the unreasonable, ceased debating the unarguable, vowed never to get sucked in religious diatribe. It was not easy. Gullibility and benevolence ensnare the perplexed and kindhearted alike. Often disguised as curiosity, or mistaken for self-quest, their tender traps yield fresh victims at every turn. Hadn’t I once been held captive in my own home by a squad of smooth-tongued but unimaginative Jehovah’s Witnesses? Didn’t the Hare Krishna button-hole me and thrust unsolicited literature in my hands? Hadn’t the Moonies tried to recruit me? Wasn’t I badgered into buying a volume of the Zohar by a commando team of Kabbalah proselytes operating in the main concourse at New York’s Grand Central Station?
*
Back in New York, unpacked and listless, I collapsed on the sofa and closed my eyes. I’d alighted from what seemed like a dizzying trek through a storm-buffeted kaleidoscope. Jumbled scenes from that journey danced in my head like the shredded vestiges of a dream -- Jerusalem basking in a timeless golden radiance, the stone house where I’d lived forty years earlier, the eucalyptus tree I’d climbed, now dwarfed it seemed, the eerie absence of the boys and girls I’d befriended, the long, winding road to Jericho, the shimmering Dead Sea, the ghostly ruins of the Essene settlement of Qumran, the inscrutable stillness of the mountains of Moab in the distance. I remembered the pious Jew on the plane, replayed Rachel’s invincible exuberance and Menachem’s wacky ministry, envied David’s imperturbable godlessness. I found myself wondering, in the interrogative, naturally, what it had all been about. A distant voice whispered: “The truth is nothing but the loudest and most persuasive of two opposing arguments.” It’s around that time that I began to toy with the notion that any assumption, scheme or system that is anchored in the certitude of its own infallibility and which, through skewed logic, considers all other assertions, schemes or systems to be flawed, must be invalid. But, I reasoned, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed are king.
Lost in the fog of my post-travel blues, I was suddenly reminded of the compactness of time. I’d expanded resources I could ill-afford to squander. I surveyed the copious notes I’d brought back from my trip. Meanwhile, I was still out of work and running out of options.
A PERILOUS INCOMPATIBILITY
Colette Avital, my childhood friend and once very brief object of desire, now Consul General of Israel in New York, had heard of my situation and offered me a post in her press office. A month-long investigation by the intelligence unit probed into my past, anatomized my family, dissected my work history and scrutinized my political proclivities. Declared “kosher,” filled with eagerness and anticipation I went to work as a press officer. Thus began for me a dizzying descent into obscurity, an obstacle course to nowhere, a road jealously patrolled and sabotaged by petty bureaucrats sporting large egos and armed with an ambition eclipsed only by mediocrity and ineptitude. Before long, I was suffocating -- no, drowning -- in a fishbowl infested with piranhas. Abandoned as I was to a rat pack of power-hungry mandarins, all busy feeding their vanity, I surrendered and retreated to the numbing routines to which I’d been consigned. I’d been hired to work as a press secretary, publicist and media point man. Instead, I became everybody’s translator, proofreader, scribe and linguistic troubleshooter. Every upstart paper-pusher who couldn’t put a fucking comma in its proper place, much less write a coherent sentence, came to me for help and expected to get it at once. I complied because, in good conscience, I could not allow the tripe that was being placed before me to appear on Consulate stationery. In short, I’d been alternately unused, misused, abused and exploited. In the process, I discovered that diplomacy (politics/propaganda) and journalism are perilously incompatible -- if not mutually exclusive. I was a journalist, not a politician, less yet a diplomat. I’d acquired a fresh inventory of newspeak and, in the process, developed an increased intolerance for the genre.
Eighteen months later, I quit. Addressed to Colette and never acknowledged, my letter of resignation, here heavily redacted in the interest of discretion, read:
I should have written sooner, when the idealism and exuberance I’d brought to the job of press officer began to erode. Both have since been replaced by feelings oscillating between exasperation and insensibility. The climate in your Communications department swings precariously between lunacy and inertia, confusion, and gloom. Everything is ad-libbed and executed badly on instructions by taskmasters who are out of their element and who delegate work they themselves are utterly incapable of conceptualizing. The strictures inherent in my present circumstance have made it painfully evident that I could not ply my trade from within your bureaucracy. Most disheartening is the realization that I was unwittingly used to help promote other’s people’s diplomatic careers. Under the circumstances, disillusioned but confident that at the age of 56 I can still attain some measure of professional c
ontentment, I hereby tender my resignation. I gratefully acknowledge your initial support at a difficult juncture in my life.
*
Considered an oddity by some, a loose cannon by others, I never learned how to play “the game.” Incorrigible, bored by routine, undisciplined, easily disillusioned by people, I’d skirmished and burned bridges before. I would do so again, in personal relationships, when friendships turned flighty, when compelled to wonder to what extent kindness of heart makes stupidity bearable, or in employment, when shackled by inhibiting rules and strictures. The penalties for such deviance include defeat and alienation. Dreamers never win. Victory would render us superfluous. The dividends, however, often hidden from view in a moment of crisis, include an array of fresh challenges and opportunities that I would be quick to seize, often oblivious to or in defiance of the perils they entailed.
Less than a month later, determined to return to traditional journalism, I moved to San José, Costa Rica. Free-lance assignments involving the plight of Central American street children and persecuted indigenous minorities, opened new doors and served as a springboard for more lucrative employment as an independent reporter. This extraordinary odyssey, which would last twelve years, took me from the Mexican highlands to the jungles of Panama and yielded a bounty of articles and commentaries that graced the pages of various U.S. and Central American newspapers and infuriated some readers.
*
Fiscally motivated, Kathy Keeton’s suggestion that I travel to Central America instead of Brazil would, in retrospect, prove auspicious. Brazil had long been synonymous with festering hillside slums and chic downtown esplanades teeming with rising tides of homeless children. It also had the dubious distinction of turning a blind eye to self-styled enforcers bent on purging these omnipresent pariahs from Brazilian society. Whereas these well publicized pogroms are reactive and spontaneous in Brazil, a nation of nearly 200 million, they seem to have escaped serious scrutiny in parts of Central America, notably in Guatemala and Honduras, with a combined population of about 15 million, and where the systematic, pro-active, state-sponsored extermination of homeless minors had reached epidemic proportions.
Central America is a region rocked by political chaos, plagued by economic decay and convulsed by horrific violence. Entrenched military plutocracies have given way to civilian puppet regimes that continue to thwart efforts at democratization by intimidating the feeble and indecisive voices of reform. Gross inequalities in wealth and status (fewer than one-tenth of the people own and control over ninety percent of national resources), unfavorable currency exchange rates and mounting trade deficits have further weakened faltering economies by increasing unemployment, freezing wages and unleashing unforgiving rates of inflation. Conservative estimates place the combined regional unemployment rate at nearly forty percent. Better than seventy-five percent of all households earn poverty-level incomes. The level of poverty for children under five has topped at eighty-five percent. The poverty level among kids aged between six and fourteen now exceeds eighty-six percent.
A steady decline in family income had led to an increase in child labor. In addition, already skimpy state-sponsored social programs for children were being stripped to the bone by recurring and increasingly harsher austerity measures. As a result, more children were being abandoned or expelled by families that obeyed the Church’s mandate to multiply and populate the Earth. Regrettably, the Church, which is wont to voice concern for the unborn, does little or nothing on behalf of the living.
The 75,000 children roaming the streets of Central America are divided into two groups: runaways from households eroded by overpopulation, poverty, alcoholism and abuse; and children abandoned or cast out by families no longer able to provide for them. Viewed as “vermin,” “a blight,” “parasites,” and “criminals,” unwanted, unloved, the inheritors of dysfunctional societies, they are invariably labeled as “bad for tourism,” “bad for the neighborhood,” “bad for the country.” Endorsed by indifferent or openly hostile governments, this perception had inspired successive waves of bloodletting against these children. Intimidation, threats, illegal detentions, vicious beatings, torture, rape and extra-judicial executions at the hands of law-enforcement agents, once sporadic, were now widespread. Corrupt and inept judicial systems turned a blind eye to such impunity and rarely arrested or convicted the culprits. Mounting evidence suggested that the executioners were “embedded” in government. And the carnage continued.
*
What began as a probe into state-sponsored killings of street children set the stage for the study of other socio-economic ills in the Isthmus, mostly in Guatemala and Honduras, all traceable to the vestiges of colonialism, government corruption, political chicanery, apathy, sloth and other signs of decadence. It would be a bumpy ride on a road strewn with hazards.
Large obstacles put us on guard; small ones whet our appetite. It’s often the latter that makes us trip.
PART THREE
THE ESTUARY
Muddy waters
JOURNEY TO XIBALBA
From the mists of time, deep in the primeval Guatemalan jungles, comes a document known as the Popol Vuh, a fragmentary chronicle of the allegories, beliefs and attitudes of the ancient Maya. An epic poem of great lyric beauty and haunting melancholy, the Popol Vuh is also a record of the peregrinations of a people caught in life’s struggle for survival, identity and cultural self-affirmation.
The Maya feared death more than any of life’s ordeals and only exceptional individuals, they claimed, could find their way to the heavenly gates. The unworthy were hastily dispatched to Xibalba, the Mayan hell, the “House of Gloom,” the “World of Ghosts,” the “Mansion of the Damned” -- an icy abyss teeming with monsters that inflicted unspeakable torments.
If the Maya took great pains to elude the dreaded chasm -- self-mutilation and orgiastic human sacrifices, they believed, could forestall the inevitable -- they had no illusion that life “on the surface” was apt to be as hideous as in Xibalba’s entrails. Ego, greed, cruelty, deception, vengeance, all prevailed, acted out with an incontinence bordering on lunacy. Blood-lettings, wars, decapitations, amputations, in short, senseless carnage, were as likely to envenom their mortal existence as the “lower regions” to which their souls would eventually be consigned.
Longing for redemption, their governors engaged in an endless consecration of grandiose ideals. Fearing night, awaiting the advent of dawn but not the passage of greater events, they yearned for a spiritual reawakening that would never be. They pandered to unfeeling gods and offered sacrifices to atone inexpiable sins while the masses were fated to a life of submission and servitude in the shadow of despotic and degenerate elites. Busy erecting flamboyant pantheons, obsessed with their own place in posterity, the nihilistic demigods the people idolized were no kinder than the bloodthirsty Lords of Xibalba. They knew that they were false of heart, promoters of evil and tormentors of men, and that their extravagance and folly would lead to civil strife, social disintegration, economic exhaustion and, in due course, apocalypse.
Eventually, the debauchery, the drug-induced stupor, the bombastic mystique of their masters’ esoteric pursuits began to wear thin in the eyes of the overburdened populace. “Of what practical value to us, illiterate peons,” they pondered, “are such abstractions as systems of reckoning dates, stargazing and arcane hieroglyphics, when this knowledge is the exclusive domain of our rulers?”
Too long had the people been forced into a state of servitude; too exacting was the endless labor to erect temples, sacrificial altars and ball courts. They were tired of tending the fields of the princely castes and paying exorbitant tributes to corrupt and insensitive monarchs. For centuries the multitudes had surrendered to the ruling aristocracy and soon the sting of despotism, the ignominy of persecution would lead to open revolt.
Along with a sharp increase in the dominance of the elite and the unfettered opulence and ostentation their lifestyle demanded, the number of underling
s required to cater to their whims grew to colossal proportions. This imposed additional burdens for food and other goods needed to sustain the hierarchy. It is likely that these burdens triggered ever-widening divisions and fed mounting hostilities between the lower classes and their masters.
There is evidence in the Late Classic era, the period foreshadowing the “fall,” of a population explosion that led to the growth in the number and size of urban clusters. All these pressures -- overpopulation, soaring demand for goods and services, diminishing resources and widening rifts between social strata -- had a profound and everlasting impact on the Maya: It left them teetering on the brink. Mortally wounded, nudged by an irresistible momentum, the once great, the magnificent Mayan civilization quivered, froze and dipped over the edge.
The exact dynamics that led to the Maya’s sudden and staggering collapse is not well understood. What is known is that famine -- brought on by deforestation, over-cultivation, climatic changes, droughts, floods, outbreaks of infectious diseases, rising infant mortality, declining life expectancy and widespread discontent with an increasingly remote and self-absorbed plutocracy -- led to chaos, fragmentation and dispersal.
Mel Gibson’s haunting 2006 film, Apocalypto, which focuses on a few days in the dizzying tug-of-war between life and death in early 16th century Mesoamerica, hints at the sudden collapse of a once-glorious empire. Savage, hypnotic, this troubling epic telegraphs a larger message: It warns that a system of governance rigged to benefit the few eventually invites anarchy.
For the surviving full-blooded Maya -- some four million live in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico -- only two paths of survival remain: serfdom and assimilation, or alternating states of neglect and violent repression by the interlopers who now occupy their domain. Like their tribal brothers and sisters in the region, they remain suspended between two contrasting and incongruous worlds: ancient (intimate and familiar) and modern (alien and menacing).