The Path of the Jaguar Read online

  “But,” Raquel said, “we must help women who aren’t as free as we are. If we make too many rules people will be justified in asking whether it is really democracy we seek.”

  Raquel’s words made the skin at the back of Amparo’s neck go cold. The older women looked frightened. They remembered better than anyone how, during the war, the slandering of Catholic community organizations as outposts of Communism by the military and their Evangelical allies had been the prelude to disappearances and massacres.

  “ . . . We must be here for all women,” Raquel was saying. “Especially the women who need us most. Christian humility, Christian charity, require us to make exceptions. Some women’s husbands don’t understand why it’s important for children to go to school . . . ” She looked around as others nodded in agreement. “ . . . Some women’s husbands are jealous or suspicious . . . ”

  Amparo felt the brush of Raquel’s glance. “Enough!” The sharpness of her response startled them. “We all know the rules. If we admit women who do not send their children to school, the government audit office will withdraw our funding. We must follow the rules! Democracy is freedom, but first it is everybody obeying the rules.”

  She realized that in responding to Raquel she had spoken in Spanish. She bowed her head. “Where’s the envelope?”

  Esperanza handed it to her. Amparo displayed the envelope. “Here — we have each deposited our six quetzales. And here,” she said, lifting up the larger, business-sized envelope at her knees, “is the envelope containing our savings to date. Now we will count the money.”

  Counting the money was an exacting, but essential, process. The women were anxious to see that the quetzales they had deposited in past months were still there, that the matching funds provided by the government had made their savings multiply. They wanted evidence that their neighbours had also put in their money, and that corruption had not siphoned off their investment. Each month, the señora gringa withdrew the envelope containing the money from the safety deposit box in the bank in Antigua; on Sunday she brought it to the village. This Friday Amparo had taken out the envelope and hidden it in the back of her refrigerator, wrapped in three plastic bags, until the meeting. She felt the cool damp manilla paper beneath her fingertips as she slid the larger envelope into position next to the smaller one.

  She opened the smaller envelope and counted the money. “Jun quetzal, ka’i’ quetzal, oxi’ quetzal . . . ” Counting in Cakchiquel forced her to concentrate. The base-twenty Mayan arithmetical system, which she’d heard Mama and Papa using at home, had never come as naturally to her as the base-ten system she had learned in school. She still hesitated when she reached the tenth woman’s six-quetzal deposit and had to announce sixty as “three-twenty”: “Oxi’ winäq.” But she was determined to persist, if only to exclude Raquel, who had made her lose her temper.

  “Kajiwinäq junlajuj!” she announced. Fifteen women, who had each deposited six quetzales, made ninety quetzales. She turned to the large envelope. At the end of each meeting those women who were literate wrote down the amount contained in this envelope.

  “What is the amount in the large envelope?” Amparo asked.

  “One thousand nine hundred twenty-three quetzales,” the women repeated. Their faces displayed pride, happiness, even amazement that they had collected so much money. In the unimaginable United States of America, the señora gringa had said at the last meeting, this was almost three hundred dollars. Such power, she warned, brought the responsibility to adhere to democratic decision-making. Soon they would have to make choices about which institutions or business proposals they would support with micro-credit. They would have to manage disagreements, reconcile different points of view. The señora gringa had scanned the room with a meaningful look, as though only she suspected what lay in store for them. In fact, Amparo believed, it was the señora who was unsuspecting. It was clear to Amparo that the gringa did not recognize the seriousness of the rift between Catholics and Evangelicals. At the insistence of the government and the NGO, the Cakchiquel Women’s Savings Club had absorbed Evangelicals who had been trained to hate the idea of community. Her clashes with Raquel during meetings were a whisper compared to the battles that would rage once they began to hand out money. She was determined to ensure that the organization not lose its way during this difficult stage. No one, not even her new baby, would pry her out of the leader’s seat.

  She opened the large envelope, took out the dirty quetzal notes, contained by rubber bands, unbound the first wad and started to count. The wad was made up of five-quetzal notes. Her head bowed, she laid down the notes one by one: “Wo’o, lajuj,wolajuj, juk’al . . . Five, ten, fifteen, twenty . . . ”

  The other women stopped talking. This, too, was part of the ritual. Somewhere down the corridor, a door clacked shut, but otherwise the room was silent. Amparo continued counting.

  “Junwinäq junlajuj, Junwinäq junlajuj wo’o . . . Thirty, thirty-five . . . ”

  Concentrating to avoid a mistake, she heard a flurry of quick steps, felt the sag of the floor beneath the cushions. Realizing someone had come into the room, she looked up.

  A hand grabbed her hair, twisted her head up and pushed grinding hardness against her temple. Pain flashed down her back as she was wrenched upwards until the weight of her belly was tearing at her spine. Unwashed man-smell and the aftertaste of alcohol mingled with ground-in sweat and dirt. He pushed the barrel of the gun against her nerve-ends until the pain was unbearable. The women were whimpering. A hasty brush of movement. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Esperanza frozen halfway to her feet as a second man levelled his gun at her.

  “Take the money, señor!” Amparo said. “Please. Just take the money!”

  He cranked her head up and around. He had brown skin, soft black hair, high cheekbones, large white teeth, and dark eyes set slightly aslant. They could have been cousins. She felt the force of his desperation, his willingness to kill, like the thumping of blood in her own neck.

  “We’ll shoot you all and then take the money,” the man who was holding Esperanza at gun-point said. The handkerchief tied around his face barely muffled his voice.

  “Señor,” Amparo whispered, appealing to the man holding her head. “We are all mothers. We have children to raise! In the name of God, señor — ”

  The man huffed as he tightened his grip. She felt lathered in sweat, ashamed of the mingling of his scent with hers.

  “Maybe it’s better if you don’t raise your next child.”

  The masked man made a heel-dragging sideways step. He gestured with his gun at the two envelopes and the money piled on the floor. “Put the money in the big envelope,” he told Esperanza. She stumbled forward. A wad broke open; wayward bills seesawed to the floor.

  “Hurry up!” the man screamed. He repeated his jigging sideways step. Esperanza burst into tears. She clawed at the bills and pushed them into the envelope.

  “Give it to me,” the masked man said.

  Her face lowered, Esperanza lifted the envelope. The man grabbed it.

  The other man twisted the barrel of his gun against Amparo’s temple like a gimlet. Her lungs beat in search of air like wind-whipped laundry on a line.

  “Nobody leaves this room for thirty minutes,” he said. “If you leave, we will come back and kill your children. You all have children and we know who you are — ”

  “Just take the money, señor.” Amparo’s tongue was thick in her mouth.

  The man wearing the handkerchief limped out of the room with the money.

  “Thirty minutes, or we kill your children,” the other man said. He tightened his hold on Amparo, then threw her to the floor. The thud of the tiles froze her sweating cheek. She felt her child turn a somersault in her belly and she began to shiver.

  TEN

  MIST CONDENSED AROUND HER HEAD. She felt the child’s twisting far down in her entrails as though it were marooned in a place beyond her reach. The Maker, the Modeller, Sovereign Plumed Serpen
t, wrought the world out of mist. Her mind strayed through the spaces beyond that haze when the mountains rose out of the water and the first people were fashioned out of corn and took the name B’alam. Her child was slipping away from her. Before she could reach through that space to pull the child back into the light which, inhabited by the first mother and the first father, would yield life, her strength abandoned her. As she floated on the waves that must recede before people of corn could take to the earth, a sharp smell penetrated her nostrils. Pom. Someone was burning incense. She heard voices: Eusebio’s words derogatory, Mama’s tones implacable in resistance. Amparo tried to reach out to them. She slipped away into the silence of the mist. She saw the people of mud who had preceded those of corn, deity’s failed experiment in human life. The mud people’s noses and eyebrows crumbled. People of wood, the heart of the sky’s second failed experiment, who could not speak or worship their makers, stared without seeing her. As the people of wood drowned in the great flood, she slid farther down into darkness. The tendrils of incense prickling her nostrils were the lone thread leading back to the world. She saw four roads of different colours crossing. Cold fear that she was already a corpse and this was Xibalbá, and the four crossing roads were the gate to the underworld. A chanting tapped through the walled-up silence. Nothing moved. She was blind, the cold rivetting her to the meeting point of the four coloured roads. The first four men, Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night, Jaguar Not Right Now, and Dark Jaguar, fathers of all subsequent lineages, hung before her eyes, then faded away. The tapping mingled with the tang of incense. The two sensations blended until they were a single interwoven fabric like the rope of terror that runs up a woman’s spine when she fears for her child — yes, she had a child, and another one inside her — and in that instant her body swathed her in its aching weight and she was back in her room listening to the sound of the curandera chanting. The child turned in her belly, moving her body with its body, two bodies moving as one, as she and her husband had moved as one to make the child. The curandera must be Doña María’s sister Eduviges, a woman simpler yet wiser than her sibling.

  “Raja q’o’,” she said. “She’s here.”

  Eduviges stepped back from the side of the bed. Mama began to sing the song she sang when they were ill as children. She had sung these words over the beds of the children who had died in infancy, and over those who had returned from illness. Her voice was harsh but strong:

  Kapae’ wakami

  Katz’uye wakami

  Kapae roma utz qaw’a

  Katz’uye wakami

  (Stop here today

  Sit down today

  Stop here for our food is good

  Sit down today)

  Amparo, feeling the bulk of her hair beneath her on the pillow, whispered: “It’s all right. I’m here.”

  “You’ve been away for two days.”

  At Mama’s words, she remembered the man with the gun, the other thief’s dragging gait. She lifted her hand, felt the bruise on her temple and began to cry.

  “Stop crying,” Mama said. “No one was hurt.”

  She passed from sleep to waking without lapsing into the mist. Every time she woke she felt sad. Eusebio entered the room and held her hand. Esperanza visited her and said: “In the next meeting we’ll start saving again. I’ve spoken to the señora gringa and she says we cannot allow misfortunes to discourage us. The only solution is to start again.”

  The señora gringa had spoken to Esperanza, not to her. Her powers were ebbing. She had lost everyone’s respect. Her child would be the offspring of rumour.

  The day after emerging from the mist she sobbed until dusk. Esperanza came in for an hour but had to leave to look after her children. Eusebio and Mama poked their heads in the door. Mama told her that Sandra was staying with her.

  That evening her contractions began. Eduviges returned, not as healer but as midwife.

  Her son was born at the stroke of midnight, his body lodged across the line between one day and the next so that they were never certain which date to count as his birthday. From the moment she held him in her arms she could feel his timidity. He was afraid of life. Spirits had infected him with poisons in the womb. Her first thought was that his sickliness would make people think he was Ezequial’s son. His nose and brows looked about to crumble like those of the people of mud. She held him against her breast, blinded by her need to protect him. When Mama and Eduviges told her that Eusebio wanted to see the child, she whispered, “No . . . ” But they had already left the bedroom. Eusebio came in the door. He was unshaven. She wondered if he was sleeping on the couch. He lifted the infant off her breasts, which had been untouched by his hands in months. She gasped. Eusebio raised the boy to head height and stared into his face. She could hear the child breathing in throaty gasps.

  Eusebio started to cry.

  “Don’t hurt him!” she said. “Give him back to me!”

  Eusebio was sobbing more loudly than a child. “He looks just like my grandfather!”

  “He doesn’t look like anyone yet,” she said, finding the strength to sit up. She tried to pull the child away. “He looks like the people of mud. By tomorrow,” she said, feeling herself growing calmer, “he will look like the people of wood. Later he will look like a human being made from corn. Then we can have him christened.”

  Eusebio gave the child back to her. He kissed her cheeks and her lips and her neck and her breasts. “I’m sorry, Amparo. Will you forgive me? I’m so sorry. I’m worthless, I don’t deserve you. I promise I’ll never treat you badly again. Amparo, please forgive me, can you ever forgive me?”

  The words poured out of him as though they would never stop. She let him go on long after she had decided to accept his apology. His conversion was a miracle, and she knew that miracles must be savoured. At last, she lifted her hand to his cheek.

  That night they slept together in the bed with the child between them. She woke in the morning to a loud knocking on the front door. When she reached the main room, the child slung across her shoulder, Esperanza was coming in the door. Though exhausted from hours of feeding the child at short intervals, Amparo felt a great calmness ease through her at the boy’s weight on her shoulder and the memory of her husband’s sleeping body.

  “Amparo,” Esperanza said, “I’m going to have to bring Sandra back here — ”

  “Already? Can’t you . . . ?”

  “It’s Yoli. She’s run away with a gringo — ”

  “Run away? To Antigua?”

  “She’s going to be travelling with him as his girlfriend! Amparo, nothing like this has ever happened . . . I’ve never seen Papa and Mama so ashamed. Mama says she can never go to the market again. She’s too humiliated to go to Mass.”

  “She has to go to Mass,” Amparo said, struggling to absorb the news. “Maybe we can get her back before anything happens. We can go to Antigua — ”

  “You don’t understand, Amparo. She’s in the capital, at the airport. She’s going back to his country with him.”

  “She’s leaving Guatemala?” Amparo wrestled with her inert brain. “Leaving Guatemala?” They were speaking Spanish, but she said the word “Guatemala” in Cakchiquel: Ixim Ulew, Land of Corn. The idea of a girl travelling with a man she was not married to was horrible — but to leave Guatemala was beyond imagination. “What will it be like for her, Esperanza?”

  Esperanza shook her head. Amparo felt the baby on her shoulder begin to cry. Trembling, she asked herself again what the world was like.

  PART TWO

  2003

  ELEVEN

  AFTER NEW YEAR THE FUEGO Volcano erupted every night. The village lost its electricity. “I’m afraid, Mama!” Pablito said as darkness fell. Sandra, assuming a lofty air, as though she spied womanhood winking at her from a nearby ridge, pretended not to hear him. When she came home from school she changed out of her uniform and into her favourite pink slacks. She moved around the house like a rich dama in a telenovela, brushing her hair, slidin
g a pink plastic hairband onto her head, staring in the bathroom mirror and asking if the two shades of pink matched. Amparo grew impatient with Sandra’s apparent soundless dialogue with someone who wasn’t there. In the dusk Mama closed the door of the compound behind her, and brought Amparo a portion of the black beans she had spent the afternoon cleaning. She set down the pail of beans in the doorway and looked at her granddaughter. “When your mother was your age she had been carrying Aunt Esperanza on her back for three years.” As Sandra waltzed on, Mama said: “What a lucky girl you are to have nice clothes and not to have to work in the evenings.”

  “That’s why we only have two children.” Eusebio sat on the couch with his arm around his son. “We can give them things we couldn’t afford if we had seven or eight.”

  “Why did you have so many children, Nana?”

  Sandra’s question took Amparo by surprise. At least her daughter was thinking about the choices a woman must make. The pink flush of the slacks accentuated the plushness of the girl’s thighs. Next year she would start to menstruate. Mama had forbidden Amparo and Esperanza to eat eggs when they were menstruating, a practice she had continued with their younger sisters; in addition, she had watched their every move. Amparo planned to do the same with Sandra. Her daughter would not cause a repetition of the shame that Yolanda had brought on the family.

  “When I got married, “ Mama said, “it was the custom to have a child every year. A woman knew that her life was about suffering.”

  Sandra mulled this over. “I’m sorry, Nana.” She stepped forward, hugged her grandmother, then uttered a formal excuse: “Takuyu’ numak.”