The Path of the Jaguar Page 12

  “But this understanding is false!”

  “You took a long time to change your view. Others may take longer.”

  Inés brought Amparo a plate wrapped in a plastic bag. She could feel the warmth of the tortillas against her palm. Next to the tortillas were frijoles, a splash of avocado and two slender strips of white breast meat. Raquel excused herself as Amparo began to eat.

  “A bus!” Inés said. Her thin hands clasped.

  Amparo’s first thought was not for the tourists but for Inés. She was aware of the forced solicitousness with which she had been talking to the girl since last night. The hardship that was about to descend on the family would affect Inés first. Her contribution was minimal, her position ambiguous; if she wished to remain during hard times, she would have to earn her keep. The girl gave a slight bow, as though stressing the usefulness of the information she had just provided. Amparo finished her last tortilla. The girl slid the plate and cutlery into the plastic bag, knotted it, and put it away at the back of the stall.

  Amparo resumed weaving. Her energy flowed back, filling her with the urge to create. She knew, also, that the sight of a woman in traditional Mayan dress weaving was an excellent way to attract tourists. She bent her head as she spotted a gangly middle-aged gringo with broad shoulders.

  The gringo approached with a lilting stride. He was huge, even allowing for the fact that she was sitting on the floor; his crisp bluejeans went on forever. He said nothing, observing her weaving. His receding hair had turned a pasty colour between blond and white. She broke her rhythm to nod towards the stall. “Pase adelante, señor. Please go ahead, sir.”

  He did not move. His plain face and simple eyes unnerved her, as gringos’ faces often did: she expected people with money to be craftier.

  “Go ahead, señor. The girl will show you the weaving.”

  “Utz a ruk’u’x ri ken,” the big gringo said. “Inkux x’on . . . ?”

  Amparo didn’t hear the rest of his sentence. She felt flooded with shame. The voice continued to flow as though it were coming from the gringo’s mouth, which was impossible because this voice was spinning out Cakchiquel expressions that even Mama would struggle to formulate. Amparo didn’t know what ruk’u’x ri ken meant until the gringo’s broad, pale hand signalled the central rod of her backstrap loom. Díos mío, que vergüenza: he knew the Cakchiquel technical terms for every part of the loom! With a few exceptions, such as charq’oy, Amparo used the Spanish words.

  His effortless Cakchiquel poured over her bowed head. He dropped down into a crouch, observing her over his bent knees. “Disculpe, señora. ¿Usted habla Cakchiquel? Do you speak Cakchiquel?”

  He became a tourist again. His Spanish, far more than his Cakchiquel, had a strong gringo accent. “Where did you learn all those words?” she asked him in Spanish, aware of the sob in her voice. Conscious of the crowd that had gathered around them, she kept her eyes focused on her loom.

  In his loud gringo Spanish, the man said: “My name’s Willard J. Franklin. I belong to the Kansas City Kakchiquel Club. We’re a bunch of ordinary folks who get together twice a week to practise Cakchiquel. We come down here once a year to tune up. We call ourselves the KCKC. We spell Cakchiquel with a K because it makes our name go down smoother.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Amparo said. Feeling that if she was really a person who believed in promoting her culture she must risk exposing her Cakchiquel in public, she beat down her shame long enough to ask him: “Where did you learn all those words in our language?”

  “We learn a different vocabulary every year,” he said, his native pronunciation of choltz’ib’, “vocabulary,” erasing his identity as a tourist. “This year we learned weaving vocabulary.”

  Amparo stared at the concrete. In the crowd’s silence, she heard Inés shuffle her feet. She had forgotten that this man was a potential customer: shame abolished all other emotions.

  Polished black shoes stepped forward beneath a black Mayan skirt. A self-confident voice addressed Willard J. Franklin in Cakchiquel that was more assertive for having been relearned in adulthood. “My friend is very humble. She does not tell you that she weaves beautiful bags. Her bags have a jaguar that walks. No one else in our village weaves bags like these.”

  “Q’o jun ya’l,” Amparo said, looking up at Raquel. “There’s one bag.”

  Her head bent, she lifted and pulled, lifted and pulled, extending the red fabric. The long bluejeaned legs and the slender black skirt went past her shoulder. The clacking of the loom competed with the sound of the gringo’s murmured negotiations with Raquel. The sound of the large gringo speaking Cakchiquel held the crowd mesmerized. She saw Doña María pressing forward, her slender daughter and six-year-old granddaughter at her side. She hoped Doña María felt remorse: she, who had helped to sabotage the adoption of her language by the village primary school, should take this gringo’s mastery as a sign of how wrong she had been.

  Defiance brought Amparo to her feet. She brushed down her skirt as she stood up. Turning around, she found Willard J. Franklin testing the weft of her red bag between his thick pale fingers. “Utz,” he said, pronouncing his judgment. He asked a technical question in his supernatural weaving vocabulary.

  Raquel’s thin face flushed with a heightened sensitivity. “I do little weaving myself,” she said.

  Aware of the crowd at her back, Amparo provided a lengthy response in vigorous Cakchiquel. She related how weaving techniques had been passed down through the generations by the women in her family. He seemed pleased by her response and gave her a good price for the bag: not the foolish overpayment of an ignorant tourist, but the calculated compliment of a gentleman. She opened her mouth to thank him. Before she could invite him to look at her other weaving, he had turned to Raquel. “You say you do little weaving. What is your work?”

  “I’m a curandera,” Raquel said.

  A huff of derision from the crowd. Amparo knew without looking who was responsible.

  “I’m very interested in Mayan medicine,” the gringo said. “Last year the KCKC studied Cakchiquel medical vocabulary.”

  Raquel slipped out from between the high walls of the stall with a nimble movement that drew the gringo along in her wake. They skirted the crowd and walked down the back passage of the market in avid conversation, the gringo’s resounding voice showcasing his knowledge of the vocabulary of traditional medicine. Amparo approached the remaining tourists and invited them to visit her stall. She offered to show her loom to a middle-aged woman in a straw hat. The prospect of Amparo cornering all the sales sent the other women back to their stalls.

  The woman in the straw hat, also a member of the KCKC, if less fluent than Willard J. Franklin, bought a wallhanging that Mama had woven. It was Amparo’s last sale of the day. The tourists drifted around the market for another hour. Amparo was about to return to her loom when a car horn sounded. It sounded again, in a quick double burst, then a third time. Amparo followed Inés to the front of the market. The cream-coloured minibus with “TURISMO” on the side was full and idling. The impatient driver honked again. Large, crusted-looking gringo faces turned to stare as Willard J. Franklin crossed the square at a shuffling run. Amparo caught her breath. The gringo was coming from the house whose door was painted with the colours of the roads that crossed before Xibalbá.

  “Go back to the stall,” she said to Inés. Women began to murmur. She felt overwhelmed by pity for her friend. Raquel’s life was over. It might not even be possible for the two of them to speak again. As Willard J. Franklin vaulted into the van to applause from his fellow members of the KCKC, Amparo felt sick to her stomach. The driver revved the engine and the van drove away.

  “Shameless!” Doña María said, standing on the front steps. Women hissed. Amparo turned away. On the opposite corner of the square, the door of the house remained shut.

  No more tourists came. The silent alleys between the stalls reminded Amparo that Eusebio had lost his job. At four o’clock she se
nt Inés home to prepare supper. She bent over her loom and lifted and pulled, trying to winch the anger from her chest. Her pity for Eusebio and her rage with Raquel fused. By the time she got home, Mama would have heard that Raquel had been alone in her house with a gringo. As Raquel’s friend, Amparo would be held responsible for this outrage.

  The market emptied; her loneliness hardened. The sun grew lower in the sky. She carried the loom back to the stall, lowered the weavings and folded them in boxes. She closed up the stall and left the market. As she crossed the square, she avoided looking at Raquel’s door.

  She held her breath as she closed the door of the compound behind her and approached the house. Inside, Eusebio was curled on the sofa with his arm around Pablito. He was teaching his son to use the remote control. As if that was the lesson Pablito most needed to learn! Her husband was twice responsible for her son’s timidity: he had frightened the boy in the womb and now he was passing on his passivity. He’ll never get another job, she thought, watching the back of his head as he pressed the buttons. He’ll never work in Antigua again. She stopped on the tiles and drew a long breath, accepting that the rest of her life would be shaped by this fact.

  SIXTEEN

  “SAKAR, RICARDO.”

  “Sakar, Amparo. La utz a’wech?”

  “Utz matiox.” Unable to contain her curiosity, she whispered: “How was your meeting with Comandante Vladimir?”

  “He agreed to teach our students.” He paused, then began to read out his homework sentences. “Ri nutata’ nutik taq ixim. My father sows corn . . . ”

  When he had finished, she said: “You must practise the difficult words. B’alam.”

  “Baaalam.”

  “Ricardo,” she said in Spanish, lowering her voice, “I wish I could see the bag you bought in Chiapas. It’s such a shame you gave it to your wife.”

  “Not to my wife. To a friend.”

  His curtness took her aback. Recovering, she said: “I’m weaving a new bag. It’s on the loom in the market. Would you like to visit? Later this week . . . ?”

  He nodded. They returned to the lesson. The rhythm of her repetitions quelled the tension that had been prickling beneath her skin. “Ch’op,” she said. “Pineapple.”

  “Chop,” he repeated.

  “No, it’s ch’op. Remember the pause after the b in b’alam. If you can’t master this, you won’t be able to say ‘jaguar.’ Now — ch’oy. Mouse.”

  “Ch’ooy,” he said, almost managing it.

  On the fifth repetition he succeeded. By way of contrast, she said: “Choj. Straight. Now try to show the difference — ch’oy, choj.”

  “Ch’ooy. Choj.”

  As he followed her instructions, she was thinking of how Eusebio was too shy to come down to Antigua to ask for work. Señor Robinson had recruited him for the drop-in centre on the recommendation of their priest. She remembered thinking: this will make my sweet, shy boy more sure of himself. But taking orders from Señor Robinson had not given him the confidence to approach other gringos. By contrast, the tables of Escuela Tecún Umán, where she had bent her head close to those of many foreigners, had built her self-confidence. Possibly she had always been more self-confident than Eusebio, but at these little tables, which creaked when you set a textbook on them, she had learned to speak on equal terms with outgoing gringa students, Evangelical missionaries who learned Spanish to flip people upside down, successful musicians with long blond hair who were planning to buy houses around Lake Atitlán, earnest skinny development workers, restrained US government employees or, now, a Canadian manager of semesters abroad. Where Eusebio saw an impregnable white wall, she perceived different types of people who needed to be addressed in different ways.

  At the break, she joined the other maestras in the entrance hall. Luisa Méndez fixed her with a small-eyed glare. “So . . . Amparo is an indígena.”

  The younger maestras grew still.

  “That’s the only reason you’re teaching the manager. Don Teófilo wouldn’t let you teach Spanish to an important client — ”

  “I’ve taught Spanish to many im — ”

  “Just because this gringo wants to learn a dialect!” She shook her head, walked past the students and disappeared onto the cobblestones.

  Amparo opened her mouth, then stopped: the maestras, being ladinas, would defend Luisa’s prejudices. She must absorb the insult and endure, as Mayan people had been doing for five centuries. She turned to Nancy Robelo, who was wearing a pair of tight bluejeans that showed off her trim frame. “Nancy, my gringo wants to come to the village later this week. Do you want to bring yours as well?”

  Nancy’s eyes gleamed. “You want me to invite him?” She was such a pretty girl. Amparo couldn’t understand how she had reached the age of twenty-three without marrying. In the doorway, the Canadian soldier was talking to a younger boy and a skinny hindú girl with glasses. “I’ll invite him.” Her smile widened in a way that made Amparo uneasy. “And I’m sure he’ll say yes!”

  After the break, she taught Ricardo how the first-person prefix for possession, nu, changed to wu when the noun started with a vowel. “Ri nuch’op. My pineapple. But . . . Ri wuixin rna’j. My mandarin orange . . . ”

  At noon she walked to the market and bought a piece of hot chicken in a tortilla from a stall. She was reluctant to go home. There was no hurry because Eusebio would be there when the children returned from school.

  From now on, he would always be at home.

  She crossed the broad Calzada by stages and wandered through the streets, marvelling, as she always did, at how there were travel agencies on every block, little hotels, restaurants, internet cafés, all housed in freshly whitewashed stucco buildings. Only the tumbled pillars of the colonial churches lacked fresh paint. She stopped at the front desks of hotels built around colonial courtyards. When she inquired about work, they looked at her in confusion. “You, señora . . . ?”

  “Not for me,” she explained, reassured that her black dress slacks, ironed white blouse and correct diction had made clear that such work was not for her. “It’s for my husband.” But in the small hotels members of the family worked behind the desk. The large hotels liked receptionists to know a little English.

  It was time to go home. Children in uniforms were streaming out of the schools and spilling off the sidewalks and onto the cobblestones. At the back of the market, the Bluebird buses were idling on the dusty, potholed earth. Women were struggling up the steps with their unsold goods. Doña Rosa from the Cakchiquel Women’s Savings Club, tiny and bent, dropped her bag of potatoes. A girl reached forward to catch the old woman. A shout went up, indicating that the ayudante had opened the bus’ back door. Amparo sprinted around to the back and came face-to-face with Esperanza and her two older children. Making a cradle of her hands, she boosted Esperanza’s children inside, then scrambled up behind them. She tried to remember when climbing in the back door of a school bus had ceased to be effortless. She pushed her nephew and niece against the window. Her sister pressed against her, the four of them squeezing into a seat that had been designed for two gringo schoolchildren. When the chaos subsided and the crowded bus set off up the mountain, the titter of the young people’s conversation in Spanish was undercut by the soft murmur of the women’s Cakchiquel.

  “Did you see Doña Rosa fall?” Amparo asked.

  “Poor Doña Rosa,” Esperanza said. “Remember how she didn’t want the school to teach in Cakchiquel?”

  Amparo gripped her sister’s wrist. They had been chatting in Spanish, but now she switched to Cakchiquel. “Remember how different we thought everything would be when the war ended? We thought we could have a Cakchiquel school! And a new country! The dreams we had!”

  “Ja,” Esperanza said. In Spanish, she said: “For the first two years there was some Cakchiquel in the school. Then the books began to deteriorate and they didn’t replace them. The teacher spoke Cakchiquel like you or me, not like Mama or Doña Rosa. That was when I started sendi
ng my children to school in Antigua. As long as they were teaching in Cakchiquel a couple of hours a day I told myself they should study in the village so they could see their culture in a classroom, see books written in their language . . . But the world changed, Amparo. It became completely gringo. Our children won’t survive with the schooling you and I had.”

  “That’s why I send Sandra to the colegio — they use computers, they teach them a little English. I’m trying to save enough money to send Pablito there as well, but with Eusebio — ”

  Esperanza nodded. “It’s expensive. Even a cheap colegio costs sixty quetzales a month.”

  “Didn’t we decide to have fewer children so that we could give them more? Then I get so angry with Sandra because she doesn’t know what it’s like to grow up in a family of ten children! But even when I’m angry with her, I just want to give her more.” She switched to Cakchiquel. “Re’n ninjo jun chik tijob’äl pa qachab’al. I want a little of the schooling to be in our language. I don’t want her to think she’s a ladina. I want her to succeed as a Maya. On Mayan New Year I’m going make her go to school in traje.”

  The idea occurred to her as she uttered it.

  Esperanza was staring towards the front of the bus.

  “What’s the matter?” Amparo asked.

  Esperanza laid a restraining index finger on her shoulder. “Look — ”

  Amparo peeped over the heads of the people around her. A very pale gringo, with shoulders as broad as a loom, sat near the front of the bus. She caught her breath. “That’s the gringo that Raquel invited to her house!” she whispered in Esperanza’s ear. “He speaks perfect Cakchiquel!”

  “What’s he doing going to our village this late in the day? The market’s closing . . . ”

  “Oh, my poor friend!” The windows rattled in their frames. “She’s ruining herself . . . ”

  “Who’s ruining herself, Aunty Amparo?” Esperanza’s daughter asked.

  “You must always remember,” Amparo said, looking into her niece’s frank brown eyes, “that a girl must act as God orders. If you forget that, you will ruin your life!”