The Center of the World (5 page)

CHAPTER 9

K
ate had been in her second year of graduate school at UC Davis when she learned that her adviser had been awarded a grant to study water usage in Central America. “Water,” he said. “In the future, everything is going to be about water. The population growth of the Earth is unrestrained and every one of us needs water. We can live without shoes from Italy, cashmere sweaters, even toothbrushes. We cannot live without water.”

He was a British transplant to California. He looked old to Kate, an ungracious fifty-something with freckles splattered on skin that should never have been in the midday sun. In what seemed to be out of character for an academic, he wore Italian shoes and, occasionally, a sweater that her grad school buddies swore was cashmere.

“Everyone studying water is doing research in California or the southwest,” he said one day in class. Professor David Clemson was an excitable man, seemingly intent on dashing the stereotype of British propriety, and pounded the podium as he spoke to the class. “Don't follow the herd on this one and wander around the Colorado River. I've got a grant to study water usage in third world countries. We're going to need the most low-tech way to conserve water. Take one semester and see how it goes. What the hell else are you doing? Sitting in the classroom taking notes from old farts like me?”

The next time the class met, he introduced a guest speaker, VJ Kirkland, foreign correspondent to South and Central America. “Let's leave our small view of the world and listen to what she's been up to,” he said.

VJ Kirkland had not overdressed for the event; she wore khaki pants that looked a bit too big for her and a long-sleeved T-shirt. She wrote for the
San Francisco Chronicle
. Her life was spent on buses in Colombia, living for weeks in small hotels in Chile, and now Guatemala, covering the economics of emerging countries. “We have been deeply involved in controlling the economies of countries in Central America for decades,” she said, “and we are only now seeing the full damage of our interference.”

Kate couldn't have been less interested in politics. But she was interested in the door that Kirkland had opened, the possibility of stepping past the national border into other countries as if they were Florida or Oklahoma.

Kate scheduled a meeting with Dr. Clemson. When she entered his office, he continued on with his monologue about water as if class was still in session.

“Look around, Miss Malloy. This campus is on the outer edge of the Sacramento Valley, which should be a desert. But we've pumped the bloody daylights out of the Sacramento River to create rice fields and expansive lawns for our campus with sprinklers that turn on once a day whether it's raining or not.” He paused, as if forgetting why Kate was sitting in his office.

“I wanted to talk to you about your grant to study water.” She was ready to step out into the world. She had grown up next to the Connecticut River in Massachusetts, watching great blue herons soar just inches above the water. Her mother had taught her how to handle a canoe by the time she was in second grade. She had never traveled out of the country, never taken a breath in any direction that deviated from being a student. The world beckoned her and she felt the breath of her mother blowing her forward. “That's it, Katie, keep going,” she could hear her mother say.

“I want to talk with you about studying the impact of water on rural village life, you know, health and economics. I think there's a lot we can learn on the macro level from the microcosm of isolated villages and how they use water,” Kate said. She hoped that she was hitting all the right tag words. He had to sign off on her research design, but first she had to convince him that she was smart enough, tough enough to do this. “I'd like this to be my dissertation. I could help you with your research.”

“Where are you thinking about? What country?” he asked, leaning back in his chair. His was an interior office with no window. Kate would sooner be unemployed and living on the streets than teaching at a university where her office was a cinderblock bunker with refrigerated air blowing out of the ceiling vent.

“Guatemala. The Highlands area around Lake Atitlán has a lot of isolated villages. They're hard to get to and some of them don't have passable roads at all, only footpaths. Water usage patterns should be clear and distinct,” said Kate. “The common link for all the villages is Lake Atitlán.”

He raised his eyebrows and spread his palms open. “Political instability?”

She was prepared for this. “The unrest is confined to the more urban areas and the northern highlands that border Mexico. The villages around Lake Atitlán are relatively calm.”

He drummed his fingers together. Kate imagined that he wished he were going on a research trip right now instead of sitting in his terrible office. She knew he would say yes, but that he was required to fuss first.

“I think this could work. But I'm not so keen on a young woman working alone in Guatemala. Well, times are different, aren't they? I want you to get a bit more information from that journalist. Kirkland.”

One week later, she located the correspondent from the
San Francisco Chronicle
. The reporter was rarely in the office by all accounts. They spoke by phone and then agreed to meet at Judy's Place, a restaurant in Oakland, not far from where Kirkland lived. Kate spotted Kirkland at one of the red padded booths along the side.

Kirkland was tanned and beautiful in a dusty way, wearing sandals and jeans, her backpack fitted with cameras and airport stickers. Her rich auburn hair was pulled back and held with an elastic cinch. She was bone thin, and Kate noticed that a ring on her right hand hung two sizes too large. Kirkland caught her gaze.

She spun the ring around her finger. “Two months of amoebic dysentery this time. I lost eighteen pounds. Every time I return to the States I go on a diet of milkshakes and chocolate bars to beef up for the next round.”

Kirkland's raw beauty and warrior determination clinched the decision for Kate. If she could choose to be like someone else, it would be Kirkland, flying off on dangerous missions, writing important stories, living on the edge. She wondered if Kirkland's mother had died also, if that was why she flitted around the world, attached by the thinnest filament, picking only the hardest places.

“So, you want to go to Guatemala to study low-tech ways of water management. You'd pretty much have the market cornered on that one. I've never heard of anyone studying water there. Bats, yes. Monkeys, yes. Guatemalan fabric, yes. Water, no.”

“Dr. Clemson wants to find out if we're missing something with our technology, if there's something so simple that third world countries might know that we can't even see. The research could go the other way too. We might offer them water technology that benefits them. He's got a grant and he's willing to fund a trip for me for at least one semester,” said Kate.

Kirkland sipped her beer. “Have you done much traveling in other countries?”

“None.”

Kirkland raised a finger to get the bartender's attention. “Can I get a burger here?”

She turned back to Kate. “That's the other thing that I eat when I come home. Meat. There's nothing like starvation to cure my old vegetarian habits.”

Kirkland doused her burger with ketchup. She was not a dainty eater. Kate pointed to her chin. “You've got food right there.”

“Thanks. I don't clean up very well these days.”

Kirkland ordered another beer. The woman ate and drank like it was her last day of life.

“So, you want to know what it's like in Guatemala. There are many Guatemalan stories. Which do you want?” She pushed her plate away.

Kate felt like she was being tested. But for what?

“Is it dangerous? I mean, is it too dangerous?”

“Here is one reality—you might never see any evidence of civil unrest. You will see the most beautiful countryside imaginable. There are parts of the country that are untouched. Besides, you are a gringo and no one is fighting with you.” Kirkland flicked her glance toward the door.

“But another reality is that they have been in the midst of a civil war for the past thirty years. The military have waged a war against their own people. It's the same playbook that despots have used since the beginning of time. Big companies like United Fruit wanted more land and they bought off the military so that they could run indigenous people off their land and get it for free. Sound familiar?”

Kate shook her head. “I study water. I don't even follow politics in my hometown, never mind Guatemala.”

Kirkland threw her mangled napkin on the table. “Nobody is stopping them and they are careful to make nice when tourists are around. Not that many tourists go to Guatemala. Mostly it's the pot-smoking still-hippie types who aren't taken all that seriously by the local governments. But it's their own military killing their own people. If you're a reporter, you are regarded with suspicion. By all means, make sure everyone knows that you are not a reporter.”

If Kate were brash and courageous like Kirkland, would she still feel the tremor of being a motherless girl? Even now, the hollow place left by her mother's last days grew larger. Had she told her mother that she loved her? On those last days, when her mother looked so much like her old self, Kate begged to go to school, anywhere except her mother's bedside.

“For the most part, if you're white, you can go about your business, especially if you stay out of their politics. Stay out of Guatemala City and don't go to the far northern mountains near the Mexican border and you'll be okay. Amazing, isn't it?”

“So are you telling me that it's safe or not?” said Kate. She licked the last of the beer off her lips.

“If you're just going to float around in a little boat testing water for a few months, you'll be okay. If you stick your nose into the conflicts between the Maya and the army, be prepared to get in trouble.”

 

Kate had followed up their meeting with several more phone calls about what clothes to bring, what kind of shoes, would there be electricity. Should she bring iodine tablets to purify the water? She had not wanted to sound afraid, but she could hear it in her voice.

Kirkland had softened somewhere along the third phone call. Laughing, she said, “Tell me where you live in Davis. I'm here for another week. I'll bring you some of my old stuff, maps and books. And remember, I told you to be careful, not petrified.”

Kate had followed Kirkland's advice, until now.

CHAPTER 10

T
he church, built by Franciscans in the 1600s, was the most imposing building in Santiago. Kate crossed the large square, walked up the thirteen broad stone steps, and pulled open the thick doors to the church, making her way down the right side. Her sandals clapped on stone until she came to the doorway that led to the meeting room. Manuela was her only student again. Like all Mayan mothers, she had her children with her. Kate was surprised at how easily Manuela could manage the two toddlers and study English at the same time.

She had met Manuela at the marketplace where the young woman sold her handwoven fabric and belts several times per week. Often, Manuela set up her back-strap loom, attaching the threads to a post on one end, with the other end tied around her waist. She sat on the ground with her legs tucked beneath her and passed a wooden shuttle back and forth, creating a twelve-inch-wide length of fabric with designs particular to her village. Her motif was a deep red background with thin blue stripes running through it.

On other days she brought avocados to sell from her cloth bag. The fruits were dark green orbs brimming with soft abundance and comfort that Kate bought ten for a dollar. She chose not to bargain with Manuela even though she knew this was the gringo price. When Kate's marginal Spanish grew, the two women had easily started up a twice-weekly conversation at the
mercado
.

“You are the one who studies the water?” Manuela had asked in Spanish, which was not her first language either. Manuela spoke Kaqchikel, one of the twenty-two dialects of Mayan languages. Her hair was pulled back into a long gleaming braid and wrapped around the crown of her head. Her lips were soft and her light brown face was unlined.

“Yes,” said Kate. She had accepted that all her actions were noted by the local people, including her daily excursions to different parts of the lake, wading through the weeds, collecting samples, testing as much as she could.

“I want to learn everything about the lake,” said Kate, disappointed again that her language deficit kept her from expressing her deepest thoughts. Living among the Maya had produced the odd sensation of feeling both much older and much younger. She had at first felt as if she possessed a massive warehouse of knowledge that the indigenous people did not.

In the first few weeks, she imagined all kinds of benefits that she could orchestrate for them with her vast knowledge and access to medicine, science, and water management. Kate felt the lure of superiority and fought it at every turn. Even her height made her feel like an adult in a world of children, or very small adults. Some of the men were as tall as she was but the women rarely topped five feet.

But after several months, she felt more and more like the clumsy one who had to be taught the most basic skills: how to make tortilla dough, which avocados were the best, how to negotiate the wild world of bargaining, and most intriguingly, how to tie the long handwoven fabric across her chest so that she could carry parcels.

“The lake is the center of everything. We call it the belly button of the world,” said Manuela. Kate thought she recognized frustration on Manuela's face; the woman wanted to say more but her facility with Spanish was not that much greater than Kate's.

Manuela's dark eyebrows rose at the center. “Are you here to take our water?”

Kate lurched at the sudden turn in the conversation, the divide between them, centuries of different pathways, and the ever present cloak of wealth that every North American was assumed to have. Kate would never be anything but the colonial outsider here, despite her discomfort with the idea.

“No. I want to learn how to keep water from going away. We all need water.” Kate was sure she sounded like a pure idiot. Of course the Maya would wonder if she was here as a scout, just one more invader who wanted to pillage their resources.

Kate struggled to ask Manuela the kind of questions that had any depth. Three languages had stood between them: Kaqchikel, Spanish, and English. She had waited for a breakthrough, when Kate could ask her,
What is it like to have your husband gone so often, are you lonely, do you miss him or do you want to throttle him when he comes home?

Instead they had asked each other,
Do you have a sister, a brother, do you live in a house?
These were the short concise demographic questions that each of them could answer in a language that the other one would understand. Was Kate married? No. Manuela had frowned, her soft brown skin bunching between her eyebrows.
Estudiante
. Mayan kids went to school through sixth grade if they were extraordinarily fortunate. What did Manuela think of Kate, at twenty-four, still going to school?

Kate wanted to explain about water, how she grew up along the Connecticut River and how it was wide and beautiful, filled with wildlife along the sides and with more than a few great blue herons, just like the ones that flew low over Lake Atitlán each morning. How she studied water usage, how without it, none of them would be here. How the human body is mostly water, how much our brain loves water, how it soothes children when they swim in the lakes of New England. She'd wanted to tell Manuela all of this, but instead she braced for the question that she had known would follow. “Where is your mama?” asked Manuela in careful English.

There it was. It always seemed to hurt others when she started.

“My mother dies when I am fifteen. She has an illness, very bad. A cancer, a terrible cancer,” said Kate in present tense, pointing generally to her torso. Would Manuela know this was the worst, the fastest, most dreaded cancer? Did the Maya suffer from pancreatic cancer?

Manuela's eyes had brimmed over and she said something for which Kate needed no translation. Manuela was telling her that the death of a mother is horrible beyond all else, a child must have a mother and we are all children. Kate knew all about this; she had been motherless for nine years.

Two small children stood at the bottom of Manuela's skirt, each one gripping the tightly woven fabric.

“Are they your children?” It was an obvious question, but one that Kate could splice together from nouns and verbs.

Manuela nodded. Kate did not know much about children, how they learned, what they ate, why they stood and stared at you as if you were a giant rodent. But she registered that these kids were about the same age. She didn't know the Spanish word for twins or how to pantomime it. She had to work around it.

“How old are they?”

Manuela paused. Kate knew she was calculating from her world into Spanish.

“Two years, more or less,” said Manuela, shrugging her shoulders, moving her hands in front of her like moving water. Then she took a pencil and wrote two dots next to each other. This had to be the Mayan number for two.

“They are both the same?” This was the path that Kate was looking for.

“
Sí,
” said Manuela, smiling and patting her abdomen. “Two. Both the same, at the same time.”

Manuela apparently didn't know the Spanish word for twins either. Kate hadn't seen any evidence of twins anywhere in Guatemala.

“I'm teaching English classes at the church. Would you like to come? We can trade for your avocados.”

The deal had worked for the last four weeks. But today Manuela was upset and Kate saw it immediately. Kate's present tense Spanish would have to do. English would be impossible in this case.

“Why are the soldiers here today?” she asked.

Manuela's face was remarkably smooth, broad along her cheekbones. The muscles near the inner corners of her eyes squeezed slightly as if the question had hurt her.

“They are here to eat and take what they want from us,” she said.

Kate remembered that Manuela's husband, Jorge, should have been back from the terraced fields of the mountains by now. Manuela looked younger today, too young to be contemplating the recklessness of soldiers.

“Are you happy that Jorge is home?” asked Kate.

Manuela lived in Santa Teresa, a smaller village outside of Santiago. Kate had never met Jorge but Manuela had talked about him.

Manuela's eyes filled at the sound of his name. “He does not return from the mountains. He is gone three weeks and this is too long.” Manuela opened her hands for the unsaid, the speculation that Manuela did not have words for. “I worry that the military accuse him of things he has not done. They accuse us of things we have never done.”

The indigenous people who lived on a subsistence level of agriculture were suspected of endangering the entire militaristic government. Kirkland had hammered away at that point one night after she had delivered a few books and maps to Kate's apartment in Davis. Kate had never seen the Maya armed with more than a machete or a hoe. She tried to picture a political uprising with people armed completely with farming implements.

Kate knew that most of what she could offer Manuela would sound hollow.
Don't worry. Things will be all right. I'm sure Jorge will be back soon.

“Will you teach me to wear the cloth that you tie around you to carry the children? The rebozo?” asked Kate. Distraction was all she had to offer. One of the hospice nurses had told her father that distraction was highly underrated. “Let your daughter do something normal,” the hospice nurse had urged him.

Manuela tilted her head and smiled. Manuela looked to be a few years younger than Kate, perhaps twenty years old. But Kate could be incredibly off with ages.

“In Spanish or English?” asked Manuela.

“Both. We'll use all the words that we have today.”

Manuela's lips spread wide into a smile. She reached for the fat knot in the red fabric, near her right collarbone, and began to untie it. As she did, she swung one child around to the front.

“Here is Sofia,” she said. “She likes you. Let her sit on you while I show you how to tie the cloth. Then you will tie her to your back like a good woman.”

Kate pulled the small girl to her lap and then put both hands to her face and pantomimed terrible fear. She had learned to improvise, using hand gestures, grimaces, enough exaggerated facial gestures to win a role in an Italian opera, making her eyes wide in surprise, tracing lines of tears to downturned lips if she was sad. Little Sofia reached up and patted Kate's face, offering the sweet benediction of a toddler. Manuela laughed at Kate's antics.

“You will learn today,” said Manuela.

They spent the rest of the lesson time tying and untying the long handwoven fabric, putting one child and then the other into the snug place at the back where they were safe. Sofia wore a miniature
huipil,
tied around her waist with a cloth belt. The little boy, Mateo, found a stick in the corner of the room and had to be persuaded to continue with Kate's on-the-job training. Only one child at a time would fit there, with a small dark head peeking over Kate's shoulder.

Mateo's hair stuck up with a stubborn cowlick that Manuela tried to pat into obedience from time to time. He ducked his head after several tries.

Kate could remember only one song from childhood. “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.” Why not give it a go with Manuela's kids? She was sure that kids liked hand motions. Her college roommate one year was an early childhood ed major and she spent an inordinate amount of time cataloguing singsong tunes.

“Can I teach the children a song?” asked Kate. Manuela understood
teach
and
children,
but
song
was an English word that she didn't know. She gave the universal shrug for
I don't know
.

Kate sat down on the floor with the two kids. “The itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the water spout.” Kate turned her fingers into spider legs climbing up.

“Down came the rain and washed the spider out.” Her voice wavered in self-consciousness. Her fingers flitted through the air like rain, or leaves, or something falling. She made an exaggerated sad face to cue the brother and sister where this song was headed.

“Out came the sun and dried up all the rain.” Kate opened her arms and tilted her head up to the sky. Both children looked up. What do kids think this is about? They spoke Kaqchikel with a smattering of Spanish.

“And the itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the spout again.” Kate clapped to signify the end of the song.

The girl and her twin brother looked expectantly at Kate. “Manuela,
como se dice
spider in Kaqchikel?” Kate cupped her hand and ran her fingers, hopefully like a spider.

Manuela tipped her head to one side and suddenly she understood what the song was about. “Ahm,” said Manuela, laughing, repeating it to the kids. Manuela stood up and said she was done for the day.

“I wait for my husband now,” she said. She slung the girl onto her back and tied the fabric in a fraction of the time that Kate had taken. Kate watched the young mother walk out, one child on her back and one on her hip.

Kate placed her hand to her face and sniffed in the scent of the children. They smelled of smoke, lake water, and earth. She gathered her backpack and closed up the small side room of the church. The lake and all its mysteries called to her.

She hired a water taxi for the rest of the day and explored the opposite side of the massive lake, stopping in the small villages of Santa Cruz, San Marcos, and Santa Catarina.