The Path of the Jaguar Read online

  “Two hundred thousand people died to make this possible. We have to respect their sacrifice.”

  Mama continued to card. At last she looked up. “Amparo, you think too much about big problems. Go cook supper for your husband!”

  SEVEN

  “MAMA!” SANDRA FLUNG HER ARMS around Amparo’s knees, hobbling her. “Nana was teaching me to weave!”

  “What a good girl!” She wondered how much of her infancy Sandra would remember when she grew up. The corrugated zinc roof felt too low overhead.

  “Come watch television, Sandra.” Eusebio clicked the remote until a program for children appeared. “Mama and Papa have to talk. Then Mama’ll make supper.”

  Amparo glanced at him. She had grown accustomed to evenings when they did not talk. “Where’s Inés?” she asked.

  “In the market, closing your stall.” He laid his hand on the bedroom door.

  She followed him into the room. Eusebio closed the door and stood in front of it. “You were at Ezequial’s house.”

  She twisted on her toes.

  “Seeing your ex-fiancé . . . ” He looked at her with a stoic, wounded expression. “I asked your mother where you were and Doña María tells me you’re at Ezequial’s house!”

  “Doña María!”

  “Yes, I had to hear it from her.”

  Now any reply she made would sound false. “Ezequial wasn’t there, Eusebio. I wouldn’t have gone in if he had been. I was talking to Raquel.”

  “Oh Raquel. She’s the perfect pretext, isn’t she? Pious Raquel. She was the excuse you used when you started seeing Ezequial, wasn’t she?”

  “I only did that once, Eusebio. I was eighteen years old and even then I realized I’d made a mistake. I went and told my mother the truth.”

  “The truth.” Eusebio sighed. Yielding his grip on the door, he paced a circle through the gloom. She watched him pass their wedding photograph and the tortoise shell they’d found on the beach at Monterrico during their honeymoon weekend. A photograph of his late mother dressed for church showed her ladino finery offset by features that were as Mayan as those of anyone in Amparo’s family. His large upper body weighed him down like a sack of corn. “It would be good to hear more of the truth in this house.”

  “You know the truth, Eusebio.”

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  “Eusebio!” For an instant she could have shaken him by the ears. “How can you say such things to the woman who is carrying your child?” She looked him in the eyes. “Your child, Eusebio.”

  Eusebio kept pacing. She longed to tell him of Don Julio’s young wife: they used to share such delicious news. The worst part was knowing she was lucky. Wives in Santa María, where the women loved to marry soldiers, had been killed by their husbands on less evidence than this. She felt gratitude, then resentment: why should she be grateful to him for not acting like a militar?

  She realized that Mama must have been present when Doña María had told him his wife was at her ex-fiancé’s house.

  Eusebio sat down on the bed. “Amparo, what have you done to me? For you I moved to this village, I became part of your family — ”

  Part of a Mayan family, he meant. For her he had gone to live with a bunch of Indians. Perhaps he should remember that his family, proud ladinos though they might be, had eaten rice and beans for breakfast, rice and beans for lunch and rice and beans for supper. By settling in an Indian village he had moved into a decent house built by her father and shared meals of vegetables, avocado, and chicken provided by her family’s hard work.

  “I have to cook Sandra’s supper.” She struggled to contain the shudder in her voice. “Soon we will have two children . . . ”

  “No!” The cry punctuated his sobbing with a breathy silence. “Amparo — ”

  She stifled the impulse to throw herself into his arms, throttled the desire to slap him across the face. She stood with her feet apart on the tiles. The windowless bedroom felt too small; her marriage was too small. This compound, where she must lie to her mother about her marriage, penned her in. She had worked in many different jobs, yet none of them had released the energy that swelled inside her with more force than this child. So many possibilities untapped, and now this hateful guilt that tracked her everywhere.

  Eusebio hunched on the bed with his face in his hands, the label of his T-shirt poking up like a miniature flag of surrender. How glossy with sweat the hair on the back of his neck had felt beneath her hands when they had made the child!

  The baby’s strangeness shook her like a chasm opening in the earth. She could only glimpse how this person she had never met would perceive his world. Again she felt excluded, isolated in her own home. The love she felt for the baby inside her filled her with guilt and worry. Her place in this household returned in hard specifics that blossomed in her mind: Re’n pa nu wochó, re’n q’o ri nu akual, nip’a ri nu ch’i’p, ri nu akual rojo yi’wa . . . She was in her home, she had a child and a youngest of the family on the way and her child wanted to eat. These were the facts. Nothing could change them.

  She opened the door and stepped into the living room. Sandra darted up from the television. “Were you bad, Mama?”

  “Of course I wasn’t bad. Adults can’t be bad.” She stroked Sandra’s hair.

  “Papa tells me to go to my room when I’m bad.”

  She regarded her daughter’s narrow shoulders and long straight hair. “Papa didn’t tell me to go to my room. We had something to talk about. A grown-up conversation.”

  “Is Papa feeling bad? He wasn’t feeling bad before. Did you make Papa feel bad?”

  “Sandra, por el amor de Dios!” She filled a pot with water and hunted for matches to light the stove. She motioned for Sandra to help her. Aware of the television babbling in Spanish, she asked in Cakchiquel: “Did Nana speak to you in our language today?”

  “Ja!” Sandra confirmed.

  “Enchi’ q’o ri ixtën? Where’s the servant girl?”

  “Raja xipa . . . ” Sandra’s Cakchiquel sputtered out. “She came in while you and Papa were talking.”

  Amparo knocked on the girl’s door and told her to start working. Inés stared at her for a moment, her large eyes afraid, then entered the kitchen and heated the rice. She pared the meat from two legs of a chicken and fried it in a corner of the pan across which the paste of frijoles was spreading. Watching her work, Amparo sectioned an avocado with strokes made sluggish by her puffy wrists.

  They ate in silence. Sandra stared around the table. Amparo felt furious with her whole family. The child in her womb tugged at her heart, commanding gentleness towards it alone.

  When she had finished eating she left the table and closed the bedroom door behind her, wishing she had asked Don Julio to recommend a book. On her shelf, next to the crowded photograph of her siblings, she had a Monteforte Toledo novel published under the liberal government of the early 1950s. The novel was about an idealistic ladino who was sent as a doctor to a Mayan village and fell in love with a Mayan woman. She had started the novel once before. Discovering that she remembered the first few chapters, she flipped to the middle, to a painful scene where the doctor’s family came from the capital to visit him in the village. It had been so long since she had read anything longer than articles in the Prensa Libre that she wrestled for a few minutes with the act of concentration, with closing out the grumble of voices and the clang of pots from the next room, resigning herself to the fact that the book was in Spanish and the author’s obsession was the hypocrisy of ladinos who knew little about their country. As she read, her mood changed. She had forgotten the magical self-enlargement of reading. Laying the book aside at the end of the chapter, she thought about how, during the worst years of the civil war in the highlands, Maya caught with books — any book, even the Bible — were executed. She chided herself for not taking advantage of the privilege of having books, now that peace had come, when many Mayan brothers and sisters had paid with their lives for this right.


  Eusebio entered the bedroom. “Amparo, I’m not going to take this any more. My daughter just asked me if I was bad. Me! When I’ve done nothing but look like a fool — ”

  “Is that what you told her? That you looked like a fool? You told our daughter — ”

  “I didn’t tell her anything. I told her to get ready for bed. I told her she was being bold.” His voice dropped. “Just like her mother.”

  Once he had used this phrase to tease her. The shadow of the novel cushioned her with the fictional family’s torments. She saw their foolishness, lighted up against the backdrop of that of the family in the novel. They might quarrel all night, but in the end they wouldn’t understand each other better, be any different, or any less married, than they were right now. The realization made her bolder. “Don’t you ever say anything like that to Sandra again,” she replied, knowing that her casual tone would heighten his fury.

  “I’ll speak to her the way I want to! ¡Carajo! I’m the head of this family. I’m not going to take this any more!”

  She sidled to within a few centimetres of his face. “What aren’t you going to take any more, Eusebio?”

  “You deceiving me in front of the whole village. You’ve made me look like a fool.”

  The smell of his sweat filled her nostrils, her pores. Dios, this is Eusebio, my Eusebio and he really believes . . . he’s really incensed. In her disregard she had drifted into a fast-flowing mountain current, and now she was being swept down the mountainside. She prayed to the heart of the sky and the heart of the earth and the wisdom of their eternal union.

  Eusebio was shouting at her so loudly and quickly that she could not absorb his rage. He seized her wrist until it burned. She could throw him off, she could flee out the door and across the compound to her father’s house, but the moment she did that, time would stop. As soon as a woman fled, her marriage was over. She lived alone for the rest of her life; her children were taunted, other women accused her of tempting their husbands. Then she grew old and became a burden. If she ran, her life was lost. Eusebio, unconstrained by a village or a Mayan community, could return to Antigua and find another woman. The unfairness made her veins throb harder. She struggled against him and threw him off. Sweating, they stared at each other. They were almost as they had been when they made the child. “I haven’t ruined your life, Eusebio,” she said in a low rush, determined that Sandra would not overhear her. “But you’re about to ruin it. There’s nothing wrong here except your machista stupidity.”

  Part of her wanted to be hit. She, who advised the young women in the Cakchiquel Women’s Savings Club, should know better than to feel in the thud of a husband’s fist evidence of his devotion. Many times she had told young girls that this was not a respectful foundation for a marriage. Yet too often beating was passion turned on its head, promising the rebirth of intimacy: she struggled to snuff out the lure of this falsehood. She tried to count the weeks since they had last come together as man and wife; her body craved the weight of his hands.

  Her neediness gutted her anger. She lay on the bed, desperate that Sandra not hear her tears.

  Eusebio was silent. His hands lifted and fell next to the brass studs of the pockets of his bluejeans. She remembered giggling with Raquel about how, seeing farther than other girls, they had chosen fiancés who would allow them to arrange their weddings at an appropriate time rather than having them dictated by the frenzied ticking of a nine-month clock. But they had failed like other women. Raquel, still childless beneath the eyes of the village, waited for quiet Jorge to return from ever-longer days at work. And she —

  “First you betray me,” Eusebio said, “then you insult me.” He paused, as though an idea had just occurred to him. When he looked up, she saw a tired ghost of his old boyish glinting, “I’m going to sleep on the couch tonight. I can’t stay here. I can’t take any more of this.”

  Her lips felt dry. “Will you put Sandra to bed, or should I?”

  EIGHT

  SHE WOKE IN THE MORNING to the heat of the child in her stomach. Her next thought was for Sandra.

  She got out of bed, dressed, and opened the bedroom door. Eusebio, curled in front of the television, glanced at her. He rolled over, shrugging his shoulders in his white T-shirt as he set aside the blanket, embroidered with rabbit-god motifs by Amparo’s grandmother. He looked more unshaven than usual. “Come back into the bedroom before Sandra sees you,” she whispered.

  “Was Papa bad?”

  Amparo turned around, swept her daughter off her feet and covered her face with kisses. She carried her back to her bed. “Papa was feeling ill last night,” she said. “He didn’t want to keep Mama awake . . . We don’t have to talk about it to anyone.”

  “You mean to Nana?”

  Amparo’s grip faltered. Would this be Sandra’s earliest memory: her mother coaching her to hide her parents’ arguments from her grandmother? She used to make lists of the lessons she would teach her children. Honesty had been near the top . . . But then she had also planned to speak to them in Cakchiquel. “Anchi jat jech’ël?” she said in exasperation. “What makes you so twisted?”

  Sandra burst into tears. Amparo hugged her, lifting her off the bed. “Mijita, mi pobre niña . . . ” She caressed Sandra’s back, continuing to murmur in Spanish. “It’s all right, I promise.”

  Sandra’s crying stopped. In a clear voice, she said: “If I don’t tell Nana that Papa slept on the couch, will you bring me something from Antigua?”

  “No, I will not bring you anything from Antigua and you will not tell Nana. You will be a good girl and do as Mama tells you.”

  Sandra burst into tears. “Papa! I want Papa . . . !”

  Amparo got up and left the bedroom. “You deal with her.”

  Forty minutes later, as she led a scrubbed, contrite Sandra into the yard of the compound, she was aware of the reflection of her own drained features in her mother’s face. “Is Eusebio going to Antigua with you?”

  “No, Mama, his work starts later.”

  Her mother spared her a quick look, then turned her attention to her granddaughter. Like she herself, Mama felt that she had to make life better for Sandra.

  Through an open window, Amparo could hear Esperanza’s husband talking to their children over breakfast. Her brother and his wife, who lived in the house in the corner of the compound, were opening their shutters. Papa was away on an overnight container pick-up to the Atlantic Coast. As Amparo started towards the steel gate, Yolanda appeared from her parents’ house, looking too buoyant for the early hour. Her hair was thick, her face gleamed. Seventeen, Amparo thought. Yolanda wore a blue dress that fell to just above her knees. The dress was too short. Where had Yoli got the money for a dress like that?

  They went out the gate together and down the street towards the square.

  “We’ll all be proud when you graduate,” Amparo said, remembering the spontaneity that used to tingle between them when Yolanda was a little girl bursting with questions for her big sister. She drew a quick breath to keep up with the girl’s brisk stride. As the idling Bluebird schoolbus came into sight, Amparo glimpsed the ayudante waving Yolanda’s friends on board. “Yoli, you don’t have a gringo boyfriend?”

  “A gringo?” Yolanda looked puzzled. “I don’t know many gringos. Lots of gringos come into the café, but most of them hardly speak Spanish.”

  Her stride accelerated again. When had Yolanda become taller than her? “You know you have to be careful, Yoli.”

  “Amparo, how old do you think I am? Just because I’m not like you . . . ”

  Yolanda hurried away to join her friends. Amparo got on the bus and sat by herself next to a window.

  At the Escuela San Fernando, the girls ran across the schoolyard, their black braids and tartan skirts bouncing. Amparo wondered how many of them had parents who argued. Their bright faces, as gleeful as those of piglets, cried out in playfulness as though crying out in pain.

  At the end of the day she sat down on a bench in
the sunlight, breathing in the aroma of bougainvillea and dust. She thought of the centuries of nuns who had taught children here and prayed in peace in the cells that overlooked the courtyard, the cobblestoned streets, and the volcanoes, then turned her gaze towards Sister Consuelo, who came out of the building and sat down next to her. The sunlight exposed pleats in the corners of the nun’s eyes that suggested that this young woman, who Amparo had taken to be in her late twenties, was in fact a decade older. She risked a confession of weakness. “I’m tired. The child is tiring me.”

  “That’s what my sister says. Her children tire her most before they are born.”

  “They can tire you a lot after they’re born, too.” Amparo’s surprise took a moment to register. “You have a sister who has children, Sister Consuelo?”

  “Yes, in Jaen, in Andalusia.” The nun paused; Amparo sensed that she was inhaling the volcanic odour of the dust. How different her Andalusia must smell! “My sister did not have a vocation. She is a very beautiful woman. When we were girls, the boys . . . ”

  A vision formed in Amparo’s mind of a past in which Sister Consuelo had been not a nun, but a plain girl who watched in envy as her beautiful sister received visits from boys. Confiding in a nun would be no betrayal of her husband because a nun was the bride of Christ.

  “Her path was that of holy matrimony and children. Mine was that which you see.”

  “Sister Consuelo, I have many problems in my family.”

  “You must pray to God . . . ” As though perceiving the precipice over which Amparo felt herself hanging, Sister Consuelo changed course. “Do you wish to talk about these problems?”

  “Yes, yes.” She felt hot with fear, but it was too late to retreat. She glanced around the empty courtyard. Two nuns stood on the shadowed back steps; in the far corner the old groundskeeper was raking the dirt with his reed broom.

  Sister Consuelo got to her feet. When they passed out of the sunlight into the shadow of the convent, Amparo lifted her head and found her eyes brimming with tears. She stumbled on the steps. Sister Consuelo slid an arm around her waist. She drew a long breath, then the arm was gone and Amparo felt the light reproof of the nun’s austerity, yet a reproof that reassured her because it meant that God would absolve her for the words she was going to utter about her husband.