What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “We have to get to Chichi early,” he said. “It’s market day.”

  “I need coffee first,” I said.

  “Did you sleep at all?”

  “Yes, I slept. I just need coffee.”

  “Don’t tell me you can’t wait for just a while. If you can’t, you’re addicted.”

  “Yes, well, you grow the stuff. You should know.”

  “It’s meant to be enjoyed in moderation, my dear.” He was holding his pipe away from his mouth to say this.

  “Why don’t you just smoke that thing? I’m certainly going to smoke if you don’t mind.”

  “I see we did not sleep well. Never mind. You’ll get coffee in Chichi. It’s about two hours from here.”

  “So, not far then,” I said, blowing smoke out the window.

  “No. Considering the terrain we will cover, it isn’t far at all.”

  He looked over at me but I looked straight ahead.

  “All right, then, I’ll get you some coffee,” and after a few kilometers, he pulled into a fast-food breakfast place on the edge of Guatemala City and returned with a cup of instant.

  “Okay now?”

  I would have said no to instant under any other circumstances, but instead held the hot paper cup against my cheek and felt soothed.

  “Yes, okay.”

  It was still early when we reached Chichicastenango, but the cobbled streets were crowded with people, mostly Mayans, their wares spread before them on blankets: baskets of ground herbs and tied bundles of dried herbs, clayware, burlap sacks of beans, mottled, pink and black, woven tote bags, kitchen utensils, sandals with soles made from tire treads, pyramids of mango and papaya, weavings both hanging and folded, painted masks and woven belts, bananas and pots of food stewing on grates, corn turned above coals and rubbed with limes, painted ceramics, and over the whole of it hung a gray haze of smoke from copal burning in braziers on the stone steps of the Iglesia de Santo Tomás, bright white in the sun and built, according to Leonel, on the foundation of a pre-Columbian temple. We climbed its eighteen steps, one for each month of the Mayan calendar, toward what once was a Mayan temple and was now a Roman Catholic church, as it had been since 1545, but don’t kid yourself, he’d said, without elaborating as to what this kidding of myself might mean.

  We climbed and he pushed open one of the two great wooden doors and we were inside, standing in the coolness before several pallets covered with rose petals and burning tapers affixed to the pallets by their own melted wax. The people were removing burned stubs and lighting new ones, sprinkling the petals with a liquid and strewing more petals from a basket, all the while whispering in their language.

  “This is not something Catholic,” Leonel said quietly. “This is the costumbre. There are Catholic elements, but on a deeper level, this is much older.”

  The people who were tending the candles and roses seemed not to mind our presence, but there was no sense that we would be welcomed to light candles ourselves. In and out they went, stopping for visits to the pallets, where, according to Leonel, they placed their problems and sorrows.

  From the high steps, the market stalls were a flotilla roofed by market tents like sails, white and hard to the wind, luffing at the edges, bright and taut, and beneath them people moved like schools of fish in the swells of commerce.

  He took me to a place called Cofradía de Pascual Abaj, where ceremonies were performed by a K’ichi’ Mayan cofradía, which he translated as “brother in a religious sense,” who builds a fire to a Mayan deity, growing the blaze by spewing aguardiente on the fire from his mouth.

  “Alcohol,” Leonel whispered, “very strong. It is said that writings carved here record the actions of the god Tohil, who presided at the time of the Spanish conquest, and whose name might be translated as ‘obsidian’ or ‘rain’ or ‘tribute’ but is also understood as ‘fate.’ He was among the first of the gods the Spaniards attempted to eradicate, but, as you can see,” Leonel said, “without success. But the god of fate, Papu, can you imagine! They wanted to eradicate even the god of what the Mayans were destined to become.”

  We walked back into the market, where he seemed to know some of the vendors, who showed us many different weavings, some brought from behind the counters, where they were kept because of their finer quality. There were woven bags, huipiles, and other pieces. The textiles are texts, he whispered, where stories are written concerning wildcats, horses, and birds, both colorfully plumed and plain, and also dogs, flowering trees, and corn plants, snakes, antlered deer, and geometric designs that might refer to lightning or maps, tilled fields or stars. Every figure speaks, if one knows how to read the weave.

  The shops and all fabrics within them smelled faintly of woodsmoke. Leonel asked if I would like something, and when I said no, thank you, he chose a black-and-white woven bag for me, such as the one he carried that first day in San Diego, but this one had a jaguar standing on its hind legs.

  “This is for you. No, I insist. This is your bag, because it has the jaguar. Someday I will tell you why. Mine, if you remember, also has the jaguar.”

  He took me deeper into the market, past the street of tomatoes, to an alley of flat iron griddles where women were patting tortillas between their palms.

  We ate there, in the fog of griddle smoke, and in the next alley, bright and open to the air, he bought pink clouds of cotton candy. I didn’t want mine, so he ate both, followed by roasted corncobs with salt and lime and then he said it was time to go because we had to meet with someone.

  We drove again on dirt roads up into the hills, under a moon like the light at the bottom of a well, the dark air laced with woodsmoke.

  “I have an adviser here. You might think of him as a teacher. I’ve been with him for a while. We first met some years ago after an earthquake, when I came here to help set up a camp for refugees. He’s quite old now. He doesn’t speak much Spanish—a little, but not much. I had to learn some K’ichi’ in order to talk to him, so I will translate for you.”

  “I’m going to meet him?”

  “He’s been expecting you in a certain way, so yes. But we might have to wait for him to wake up. He’s often asleep when I arrive. I almost think he does that on purpose, but never mind.”

  Leonel held a small flashlight, spraying a wedge of light on the ground leading to the house. A woman held the door open, but didn’t smile. We crossed through the candlelit dark and when my eyes adjusted, I saw that the house consisted of one large room, with weavings folded and stacked almost to the ceiling along one wall. At the far end, there was a fire pit with a grate, a basin, and metal pans hanging from nails. An old man was seated against the wall near a hammock that rocked by itself, as if someone had just left it.

  “That’s his daughter,” Leonel said in English, nodding toward the woman, who now stood grimly with her arms crossed over her chest. She waved us toward a wooden chair and a stool that had been positioned near the old man. Leonel was too large to sit on the stool so I took it. The old man hadn’t yet said anything. His hair was straight and white, he had no teeth, and his skin was dry and grooved, but deep in their sockets his eyes shone as if he carried a lamp in his skull. He leaned toward Leonel and whispered.

  “He welcomes you,” Leonel said. I nodded, but no one was smiling here, so I didn’t smile.

  There was silence. The daughter stood her ground, arms folded, jaw set. Leonel spoke in halting K’ichi’. The old man leaned forward. Still nothing. More K’ichi’.

  “He’s seeing who you are,” Leonel said. “That’s what he does.”

  “Is his daughter angry we’re here?”

  “No. If she was, she wouldn’t have let us in, believe me. But don’t expect her to make jokes with you. Now stop speaking English. They can’t understand and we don’t want to show disrespect.”

  The old man seemed surprised at something Leonel said then and
even I could tell he was asking for clarification.

  “It’s about your horse,” Leonel said in Spanish.

  “¿Mi caballo? Qué caballo?”

  “El caballo rojo,” he said with exasperation, and the old man nodded firmly. Red horse, I thought. I had no idea what they were talking about.

  “It seems he hadn’t realized that I would think the horse was real,” Leonel said in Spanish. “Your horse, Papu, is a statue. I think he’s amused at this mistake.”

  “I’m lost,” I said, forgetting not to use English, and failing at the time to connect this conversation to the red papier-mâché calliope horse in the corner of my living room at home.

  “He says you are even younger than he thought you would be.”

  “No entiendo.”

  The old man understood this and nodded.

  “No,” Leonel said, “it’s just that he was expecting someone older, and I think he wasn’t expecting a woman, although he doesn’t say this.”

  Leonel repeated what he said in K’ichi’ and the old man nodded and said something back.

  “Yes. He thought you would be a young man, but he knew that the horse was a statue, and he thought that I had understood this.” Leonel laughed for some reason. I decided not to try to make sense of this conversation, but instead would sit here in the intense quiet, as the room seemed to amplify the man’s labored breathing into a gourd-rattle sound.

  The woman brought us two cups of a sweet drink and withdrew again. In K’ichi’ mixed with Spanish, they spoke for a little while more. The old man then turned to me and said something like Oo-mi-al.

  “He’s calling you ‘daughter,’” Leonel said gently. “Su hija.”

  “Thank him, Leonel.”

  “You don’t thank him for that. Just accept it. He wants to give you something.”

  The man had left his chair and gone to a trunk on the floor beside the weavings. He returned with what looked like a sash or belt, of tannish-pink cloth with darker pink designs. It appeared to be old.

  “He wants you to give this to your grandfather as a gift from him.”

  “My grandfather? Both of my grandfathers are dead.”

  “No, he means Grandfather Goodmorning.”

  “How does he know about him?”

  “Well, in this case it’s nothing strange. I told him. And now I’m going to tell him that you accept his gift on behalf of your grandfather.”

  The man waited, looked at me again, and said, “Quilib la nan,” then louder, “Quilib la nan.”

  “It’s time to go now,” Leonel said.

  “What is Quilib la nan?”

  “He is telling you to be careful.”

  “Xpe ri jab.”

  “It will soon rain. Or something like that,” Leonel added. “I’m not sure what it means.”

  * * *

  During the next days, we drove through the western highlands, climbing the slopes into the clouds from Chichi to Santa Cruz del Quiché, then north near Nebaj, where we spent a cold night in an adobe house offered by another man Leonel knew, who also gave us ears of roasted corn and tortillas wrapped in cloth, which we ate by candlelight. When the flame died out, he told me to get some sleep. I lay down on a pile of rugs with his field jacket over me and heard him cross the floor and then the door close behind him. He was not going to the hammock slung on the other side of the darkness. He was leaving me alone.

  It was as I imagined the grave would be, with the coffin closed and the earth shoveled onto its lid, an absolute dark with no escapes, shovel after shovel until there is no sound, the ear cupped so as to hear nothing, the lid inches from the face, a darkness like boiling tar or an unfinished tunnel.

  The Mayans don’t distinguish between past, present, and future, he’d said. They have one word to describe all instances of time, meaning something like “It comes to pass.” If you know the past, you know the cyclic forces that created the present, and by knowing the cyclic influences exerting themselves on the present, you can foresee the future, and this, he said, is why the present interests him so much. If you can learn to read the present, without preconceptions, you will better know which of all possible futures will come to pass. There is nothing magical about this. It is a skill that can be acquired by anyone with the inclination and discipline.

  In the morning, I found him loading several bundles of what appeared to be Mayan weavings into the remaining space at the back of the Hiace, because something was going to happen here soon, he said, and the women wanted for us to take these things to safety and bring them back someday when and if the time comes.

  “When what time comes? What is going to happen?”

  “I don’t know. They say they will be forced to leave and they won’t be able to carry anything with them, and it could be even worse than that.”

  “What do they think?”

  “I’m not sure. This place has been tense for a long time, but this is something new. I’m just reporting to you what they tell me. I don’t know what it means.”

  As we drove away from Nebaj, a group of women and girls watched us from the middle of the road, clustered together but not waving to us as they grew distant in the mirror.

  “What’s in the bundles?”

  “Head scarves, slings for tying children to their backs, belts such as you were given, and something that surprised me.” We had gone around a curve in the road and the women had disappeared. “Something that told me how serious the moment is. We may not be able to come back for a long time.”

  In Santa Cruz del Quiché, I asked him again: “What else is in the bundles?”

  “Their wedding huipiles. It takes months to weave one. A weaver might have a thousand patterns committed to memory, and each of these huipiles is one among a thousand. Those women want us to keep the huipiles safe, and you are going to do this, Papu, because soon nothing will be safe with me.”

  * * *

  That night we stayed in a small hotel near the shore of Lake Atitlán. My room had an adobe fireplace, like the fogón at Grandpa Goodmorning’s, where wood had been stacked for a fire. The bedstead was high from the clay floor, but there was a wooden stepstool provided for reaching the bed. I had never before slept in such a bed, in a room such as this, with its low, dark-beamed ceiling and windowsills wide enough for a basket of papayas. The hotel had once been a house, built before electricity, so the wiring was sent up the walls in tubes bolted to the clay. My lamp opened a small yellow hole in the dark, not enough to do more than light a glass of water at the bedside. The darkness panted like an animal beyond this light. I was drifting off when Leonel knocked and asked if I would like to take a walk, in the dark, to the lake.

  His flashlight fanned out across the ground ahead of us until we reached the water lapping against the stones and he flicked it off. For a moment, it seemed that I was upside down, that the black sky clouded with starlight was below me, but there was only the lake below, mirroring the stars above us. We were standing in a globe of stars, with bats singing in the air. There was no wind, and neither of us spoke. This was the all-at-once of sacred time, as Leonel’s mentor had told him, the same man who had also said that rain was coming. On the way back through the dark, I decided to ask him to explain about the red horse.

  * * *

  We had one more stop to make, in the town of Panajachel on the northeast side of the lake, where, he said, some Americans and hippies lived, and we were going to pay a visit to one of these hippies.

  “But why?”

  “Because before he was a hippie, this man was an engineer.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He’s an acquaintance of a friend of mine.”

  “Well, that narrows it down.”

  “Papu, this will take only an hour, and it’s important.”

  “Everything is important. Even the hippies, it seems.”<
br />
  “You’ll see. Bear with me.”

  The man who opened the door of a small pink house was no older than I was, with long blond hair and a deep tan, more surfer than hippie. He wore khaki shorts, a T-shirt, and no shoes, and had tied a red string of amulets around his neck, something that resembled an animal tooth and a pierced pebble.

  “Hey,” he said, moving aside to let us into the house. “I just made some chai. Would you like some?”

  I didn’t know what chai was, but said yes, and it turned out to be a spicy tea.

  The man’s name was Greg, and he spoke no Spanish at all, which I found odd for a person living in a Guatemalan town. Leonel set his tea on the table and said what he usually said: “I don’t have much time. But,” he continued, “I heard that you are interested in helping.”

  “That’d be great, yes,” Greg said. “I’ve always wanted to do something real, you know? I would go to Nicaragua but, well, I’ve heard it’s hard to make contacts there, so yeah, I’m glad I’m finally getting a chance to talk to you. I don’t know anything about guns, but I’m willing to learn.”

  “Guns? This isn’t about guns.”

  “Well, I mean there is going to be a revolution, right?”

  “I don’t know yet what’s going to happen,” Leonel said, “but I’m here to talk to you about a way that you, especially you, could help us.”

  “Me? Well, anything. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  “I want you to design a portable bridge that could bear the weight of a light truck. We don’t have trucks yet but if the bridge could support a truck, it could support anything and would be fine for our use. It needs to be somehow portable, so you would probably have to design something that folds up or comes in sections.”

  “A bridge? What does a bridge have to do with revolution? I don’t do bridges.”

  “But I was told that you are an engineer.”