Tales of a Female Nomad (7 page)

“How long are you in Antigua for?” he asks.

“I’ve just rented an apartment for six months, maybe a year.” Then, with a little laugh, I ask, “Does that qualify me to join your table? I’d love to meet some of the locals.”

“Sure,” he says. And I’m in.

Most of the ex-pats in this group are Americans. One woman owns a successful art gallery on the main square, with fine paintings, assorted crafts, and books. Her taste is exquisite and the shop is thriving. The fellow with the beard collects, preserves, and sells butterflies to museums and anyone else who wants a framed, glassed-in butterfly collection.

I am invited to visit the greenhouse of a retired doctor and his wife. The glass house is hot, the smell is earthy, and dozens of exquisite orchids fill the tables and hang from beams. Their daughter, an adult, is also living in town; she is coming off of a broken marriage and has been living in Antigua for nearly a year with her son. She and I become friends.

They are all living well. Some of them have cooks, cleaners, drivers, and women who do laundry. The staff-people are “servants,” which is one of those words one doesn’t use in the U.S. any more. Here in Guatemala, I am told, the servants are happy to have the jobs, even though the salaries are small. The ex-pats are living in luxury on next to nothing.

Over the next months, I have an occasional dinner in an ex-pat home; and at least twice a week, I join the flexible group in Doña Luisa’s for breakfast.

The ex-pat lives are very much in order. They pay someone to go to immigration in the city to renew their visas, they take a monthly deworming pill, not even bothering to check to see if they need it, and they entertain elegantly, their servants cooking and cleaning up after the party.

Many ex-pats have their own cars, their own clubs, their own pools. And most of them are aggressively anticommunist. I avoid conversations about Nicaragua and the Sandinistas.

One Saturday I meet an ex-pat from Guatemala City when he buys a handwoven fabric from María, a young indigenous woman who sells weavings on the street. María is gorgeous and one of the best sellers in town. The long shiny braid, the flirty dark eyes, the hint of a great body under her boxy
huipil
blouse, and her fearlessness in the face of foreigners are the keys to her success. Every day I stop by her spot near Doña Luisa’s and we talk.

That Saturday morning when I come to say hello, she is holding out a beautiful red, yellow, and black weaving to an American man. He is looking for a tablecloth. I help her by taking one end.

“It’s good quality,” I tell him. “María comes from a family of weavers. Five sisters and their mother. Their work is the best.”

I hold María’s baby, Diana, while she negotiates a price. When they are finished, buyer and seller are both smiling.

María invites me to Diana’s first birthday party. Her family lives in San Antonio Aguas Calientes, a village in the hills about fifteen kilometers out of town. I have been there three times to share celebrations. I am honored by their invitations.

“Can I come early and help?”

“Sure,” says María. And she quickly disappears into a hard sell with a couple who are walking toward her.

“A cup of coffee?” the man says to me as he slips the tablecloth into his backpack. Why not?

Eric is in his early forties, a Warren Beatty look-alike with a southern drawl. He lives in Guatemala City, but he’s spending the weekend at one of the better hotels in Antigua. We have coffee in his hotel. After coffee, he invites me to join him on a trip to Chichicastenango the next day.

At eight the next morning Eric arrives in a light blue Mercedes. I don’t like riding in expensive cars, especially when I am going to be driving through places where people can’t afford bicycles. But I have no choice.

We drive along a twisty, dusty, mostly dirt road. The day is windy and dust is flying around us like a plague of locusts. I keep hoping that dust will cover the car, nick its sleek exterior, and hide its identity; but that Mercedes symbol proudly precedes us wherever we go. The dust seems to slide off the car as if the finish has been done in ScotchGuard.

Above the road on both sides of us are terraced fields of beans and corn. The women working in the fields look like paintings, each wearing nearly identical splashes of color. Like the women from many indigenous villages in Guatemala, the Chichi women wear matching
huipiles,
blouses made from rectangular weavings with openings for the head and the arms. You can know a woman’s village by the
huipil
she wears. The Chichi
huipiles
are decorated with brilliantly colored flowers.

Chichicastenango sits in a valley; its buildings are whitewashed adobe; its streets, cobblestone; its roofs, red tile. The steps of Santo Tomás church, which is the focus of the plaza, are filled with women selling flowers and lighting incense. Eric buys me a lily, paying nearly as much for one as the seller was asking for the whole bunch. The village smells of sweet wood, burning in the cooking stalls, of incense from the religious ceremony that is taking place on the church steps. The streets and alleys are a huge palette of oranges, bananas, melons, papayas, and flowers in every imaginable color.

Eric and I wander in and out of the fruits and vegetables, along a passageway of weavings, down alleys of leather and woodcrafts. I buy some candles and a wrought iron candle holder. Eric buys a wool blanket for himself and a floppy hat for me. Then we wander over to the Mayan Inn for a lunch of grilled meats, cheese, black beans,
salsa
, and fried plantains. Eric is easy to be with, relaxed, bright, comfortable with himself. It’s a great day; I like this man.

In the car going home we talk about ourselves. He tells me that he plans to live the rest of his life in Guatemala. He lives in a big house in the outskirts of Guatemala City, surrounded by a tall fence. He has a pool, a maid, and a Mercedes. He says he’s discovered paradise.

He has been here for three years without ever going back to the United States. “And I never will,” he says.

“How can you be so sure?” I ask, surprised at the conviction in his voice.

He looks at me with a smile on his lips but not in his eyes, “I am wanted for bank robbery in Texas.”

The following Sunday is my forty-ninth birthday. It will be the first time in my life that I’ve been away from family on my birthday. There are no cards in the mail, no gifts, no one to give me a birthday hug or take me out to dinner. I feel empty and sad. I don’t want to be alone on my birthday.

I think about telling some of my ex-pat friends, but they’ve only known me a few months. Besides, I am spending less time with them and more with María and her family these days. It is not a surprise that I feel more comfortable with the indigenous community; the privileged life of the ex-pats feels lofty and too exclusive for me, though they are quite willing to include me in their world. When I am with them, I find myself recreating a persona that is reminiscent of the me I no longer want to be.

I decide that on my birthday, I will invite María and her large family to my apartment for hot dogs and beans; but I do not tell them that it is my birthday. Fifteen people show up, twelve kids and three moms. When they arrive, I see Doña Lina, my landlady, peering across the yard at us, disapprovingly.

I have bought a small gift for each guest. No one has a clue what the party is all about . . . but we eat and sing (not “Happy Birthday”). And they open presents. When they leave, María reminds me of her daughter’s birthday party on Wednesday.

As soon as the gang walks out the door, my landlady knocks. She is not happy with my having filled her house with indigenous people, but she doesn’t say so. Instead, she asks me how I know them and if I have ever been to their home. She offers a gratuitous warning, “Be careful. They think nothing of stealing.”

Then she invites me for lunch on Tuesday, two days from now. This is the first gesture of friendship she has proffered, and it is a significant one. She tells me she would like me to meet some of her friends. Until now, our relationship has consisted of polite greetings and the exchange of rent money. I’m hoping the luncheon will be the beginning of a new relationship. She will be the first friend I have in the Spanish (white) population of Antigua.

The invitation is for
doce
(twelve)
y media,
except I hear
dos
(two)
y
media
and I show up two hours late. By the time I get there, lunch is over and her friends have gone home. I apologize profusely, explaining my mistake. But the significance of the invitation, the embarrassment in front of her friends, and the rudeness I demonstrated in not showing up ruin any possible relationship. She no longer talks to me when she sees me in the yard or on the street. I am disappointed. I’d been hoping a relationship with her and her friends would give me an insight into the Spanish population; but it isn’t to be.

The next day is Diana’s party. María’s village is a short bus ride into the hills. I arrive with a birthday book for Diana (she is one) and a bottle of bubbles for the other kids. As I walk toward the small adobe structure, I can hear the clapping of
tortillas.
It’s the sound of villages in Central America, someone clapping a
tortilla
into its round, pancake shape before it goes on the grill. I’ve been hearing the sound for months. Now I’m about to do it.

María’s mom patiently demonstrates. We are sitting in the cookhouse, which has a dirt floor, open walls, and a tile roof. In one corner there is a wood fire heating a pot of beans with bits of meat, and throwing its flame and sparks whenever the wood is turned. A second wood fire is being fed and getting hot for the
comal,
a rectangular steel griddle that will cook the
tortillas.

We are sitting at a slab table pulling off blobs from a huge pile of
masa
dough and rounding them into balls between the palms of our hands.
Masa
is made from corn; it’s halfway between cornmeal and corn flour, finely ground and mixed with ground lime and water.

Mamá puts the ball of
masa
into the center of one palm. Then, using a rhythmic clapping motion, she turns her hands,
clap, clap, clap, clap, clap,
in opposite directions; then back,
clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.
The dough grows rounder and flatter until finally,
clap, clap,
you have a
tortilla
around ten inches across. Each new
tortilla
gets put onto a growing pile of
tortillas
waiting to be cooked. There are three of us slapping and twisting in the tiny, smoky hut filled with the sweet smells of burning wood and bubbling beans. And soon, the
tortillas
are flipped onto the
comal,
and the smell of toasting
tortillas
dominates the room.

As the younger kids and a couple of the men string streamers around the lower tree limbs and chase bubbles around the yard, and four women clap and cook in the hut, two of the sisters are attached to their backstrap weavings, working the threads into beautiful patterns. The loom is attached to a tree on one side and the other side is held in place by leather straps stretched around the backs of the weavers.

By the time the guests arrive, about twenty-five in all, there are three piles of cooked
tortillas,
each one about a foot and a half high. When the food is ready, Mamá hands each guest a
tortilla.
The
tortilla
is both a plate and a spoon as bits of it are torn off and used to pick up the beans that have been plopped in the center of the disc.

I am watching the guests line up for beans when I hear my name. Mamá is holding up a
tortilla
with raggedy edges and holes in the middle. She laughs.

“This one is Rita’s.”

Everyone, including me, joins her laughter. I collect my
tortilla
and she goes back to passing the others out until the next malformed
tortilla
appears.

“Rita!” she calls. “
Esta
es tuya.
” This is yours. More laughter.

By the time she finishes, I have six
tortillas
in front of me. But more important than the
tortillas
is the sense we all have that I am becoming a part of them.

I study weaving with Mamá (after five hours of classes, my tablecloth is six inches long and two feet wide). I help María and some of the teenagers improve their selling-English. I play with the kids (María’s daughter and her nieces and nephews).

I discover that the family, and many others in the village, have benefited from the Christian Children’s Foundation. One of María’s sisters is taking sewing lessons paid for by the foundation. She brings me a skirt she has made. A younger sister shows me letters from her sponsor. They are carefully pasted into an album with a
quetzal
bird on the cover, its long tailfeathers nearly hanging over the edge. Then she runs to show me some of the new clothes she’s been able to buy. CCF is real, more than just an ad in a magazine.