Guatemala Stories: Bird of Life, Bird of Death.

PREFACE:

I was composing a series  of radio documentaries called War,Peace and Poetry, a commission for Australian Broadcasting. I wanted to travel to the places writers and poets wrote about. It was the late eighties and the worst of the violence was in  Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua so that’s where I went. I chose poets because of the distilled quality in their words. Journalists look for facts and poets look for truth.  Poets saw it, tasted it, smelt it, shed tears, felt the fear of it, the gut-wrenching, cold-sweating stinking fear of it.

My traveling companion was Victoria Vega Schultz. We first met at almost legendary WBAI 99.5 FM New York City.   She reported the Nicaraguan revolution from Managua for Scandinavian Radio and WBAI and was writing a book about the Sandinistas. 

                                                 _____

The Hotel Pan American 

Guatemala City, 1988

We walked down the flight of musty stairs at the Hotel Pan American in Guatemala City. The stairs creaked and the carpet was threadbare.  In the hotel lobby, the sun streamed through the frosted glass windows and filled the foyer but it was cool inside. The floor laid in diamond shapes with yellow and brown tiles shone. The walls were varnished and had a warm dark patina. The switch board buzzed and a typewriter snapped behind the desk below a ticking black and silver clock. A glass cabinet on the reception desk held five small dolls in Mayan ethnic costumes. And behind the desk a magazine rack displayed the latest headlines: Time Magazine: Central America: Deeper into Danger. 

At the entrance to the Hotel Pan American, a dark-skinned man stood with a tasseled wooden billy club and a pistol on his belt. His name was Garcia and he watched the traffic passing.

At ten o’clock at night, the heavy wooden doors are bolted shut. The streets quiet and empty.  Inside the Hotel Pan American, the ticking black and silver clock beside the glass cabinet with the five dolls locked inside and the magazine rack exclaiming: Central America: Deeper into Danger, and a drab-green army jeep easing past the stucco walls and bolted doors through the cobbled streets and soldiers leaning back, their legs hanging down, cradle their M16’s.

Nearby is a yellow-lit bar and pizza joint and it serves simple food; tortillas and avocado, rice and beans and beer and Coca Cola. The waitress is moving slowly because her shift is almost finished. Soon she will head home through the darkened city. She will walk quickly, head down, watching the pavement, her heart bumping in her chest until she locks the door behind her.

 

Leaning in the doorway is a broad shouldered man. His face Indian and his hair is thick and black and shorn high above his ears. He’s probably a soldier. He wears a satin bomber jacket and sips beer from a bottle. He’s  frozen in the frame of the doorway and his sunshine soaked neck is thick and strong and seems to push with crushing force into his shoulders and his arms hang loose. Outside I can hear the sound of rock n’roll. Elvis Presley echoes through the street. 

_____

Nebaj, Guatemalan Highlands. 1988.

We are In Nebaj in Guatemala’s western highlands in this small funky hotel called Tres Hermanos. It’s an adobe shack with a tin roof and no running water or electricity. There are two thick candles in brass holders on the bedside table. Promotional prints of the Quetzal bird hang on the wall. 

Legend has it that in 1524 when Pedro de Alvarado conquered Guatemala for Spain, he murdered the Mayan chief Tecun Uman plunging his lance deep into his chest.  As he did, the legendary and sacred Quetzal bird, the totem and spiritual protector of the Mayans, plummeted to earth and covered the dying leader with its long, soft green plumes. 

The Quetzal bird kept a deathwatch through the night and as dawn rose was transformed, no longer the pure green of jade but now soaked in blood from the dead warrior king. The bird rose red with Mayan blood. And what began with a trickle soon became a torrent roaring through the centuries into an endless silent sea of suffering and death for the Indians of Meso-America.

Guatemala’s Nobel Prize winning writer, Miguel Angel Asturias described the 

Quetzal’s resurrection as embracing humankind and nature. Asturias was born in Guatemala in 1899. He studied in Paris at the Sorbonne exploring myths and religion of the Maya and he described the quetzal bird’s resurrection this way:

“Don’t you see

breast red as blood

arms green as the blood of plants,

blood of the trees

blood of the animals.

He is a bird

and he is a tree.

Don’t you see the long plume of his tail.

Bird of green blood

Tree of red blood.

Quetzal bird.

The Guatemalan army removed the forest in a concerted campaign to reduce cover and dissuade guerrilla fighters from attacking the outposts that dot this landscape. Of course they made a lot of money selling the lumber too. They destroyed the Quetzal’s habitat and now it’s an endangered species. Like the Maya.

 

Before we left Guatemala City we dropped by the Australian consulate and obtained a letter acknowledging our credentials. These days there are less bodies found in the early morning, hands bound and indications of bludgeoning, slashings from machetes, decapitations. Half the country is Mayan Indian and things haven’t changed much since the Europeans arrived five hundred years ago. 

There’s talk about the Mayans how perhaps 200,000 have been killed in the past thirty years of civil war. Out here it was wise to inform officials that we were journalists and even better, get written acknowledgment. We were not looking for trouble but we wanted to see a controlled village, get a feel for the landscape writers and poets wrote about.

“Come in from the sun”, a smartly dressed young officer says, his perfect white teeth and his uniform starched and pressed and his boots shining black despite the dust.  We wait in a whitewashed room, sitting on a plain wooden bench until the young soldier invites us in to meet the colonel.  

The colonel was obviously ladino, mixed Spanish and Indian, and his uniform was crisp and fitted tightly over his well-muscled arms. He didn’t smile. He asked for passports, and  examined them with close attention. I passed him the letter from the Australian consulate.

He looked up and gave us the up-down-up  and then said he would not guarantee our safety since there had been reports of guerrillas in the area and "couldn't  predict", what they’d do if they found a couple of gringos so far from home. He reached for a stamp and brought it down with an authoritative thud. 

“My family is in San Francisco” he offered. “They want me to join them in the States but I prefer it here, to work for my country,” and he brushed his mustache with his index finger. “My brother and I, we are both army men and we’ve both been to the States”, he says with some pride, “I am very patriotic.” 

The colonel dismissed us and we walked into the sunlight and that’s when we first met our ripple-soled driver. He was waiting for us outside the colonel’s office, lounging back in this beaten up Toyota, smoking a cigarette. We hadn’t ordered a cab. But here he was. Our watcher. He's sitting resting underneath a tree over there by the fence,  just sitting taking in the scenery. He drives us back to Tres Hermanos.

The chickens wake me before dawn. They wander freely in the quadrangle picking up scraps in the dust. I can see them through the open door as the sun rises. I hear the muffled sounds of women and I can smell fire and something cooking, tortillas heating on a flat piece of metal over the flames. And steaming sweet coffee.

Now the sun is rising above the surrounding hills and its yellow light cuts through the hazy smoke rising from the cooking fires. People are already on the move. It’s not yet six am. An ox-driven cart creaks past the open door of the quadrangle and school children are running past. The woman who owns our accommodations is in the open-air kitchen and she smiles at me through the window, which is framed with some kind of green climbing vine and she beckons me to take coffee. It was about now that our guide rolled in and parked his Toyota Land Cruiser truck nearby.

He materializes, glides in and out of the picture on his ripple-soled-rubber shoes and you can barely hear him. He  watches and listens and speaks Ixil, the clicking, popping sound spoken by the Mayans in Nebaj, here in the Guatemalan highlands. For fifteen Quetzals or about one U.S. dollar the driver agrees to drive us to Saquil Grande, a controlled village beyond Nebaj deeper in the mountains. He says we’ll be back before sundown. He’s probably a spy.

We drive north. The mountains are muscular, flexed, tough and steep and their slopes are almost barren of trees. Gray smoke creeps across the drab olive green and the sky is a mighty blue. I can taste the dust on my teeth. My haunches are jammed against the unforgiving steel in the back of the Toyota truck and my legs are draped over two cases of over-ripe tomatoes and a box of bananas.  Two old Ixl men wearing well-worn sombreros pulled down over their brows and the truck climbs higher and higher. Their eyes seem Asiatic, eyes that Gauguin might fall in love with but have seen unspeakable things; the Jaguar’s smile and the silent sweep of vulture’s wings flying on the wind following armed patrols that devastate their villages leaving smoke and carrion for the birds. 

Their skin is smooth like well-worn wood with sparse whiskers. Their eyes seem closed and yet they are open slits and today dulled from liquor and when they laugh they giggle like young girls and it looks strange coming from their mouths. With gnarled fingers they grasp the railing that runs behind the back window of the truck as it swerves and bumps deeper into the controlled territories and we see more and more soldiers on the roadside. 

When we arrive at the first village we find a road block bunker near a small general store. They lounge nursing their Uzi machine guns. We see Mayan men holding wooden guns, patrolling the roadside. The people are sullen and avert their eyes and only the children’s inquisitiveness encourages their parents to observe us.

A policy called the Program of Assistance to Conflict Areas was developed jointly by Israel with South Africa and Taiwan and the U.S. to create controlled model villages and civil patrols similar to strategic hamlets in the Vietnam war; and Israeli separation and apartheid policies in Palestine. 

There are more soldiers in town. Two men in a bunker, lounging back. A jeep pulls up outside the store and more soldiers hoist themselves out and saunter into the deep shade of the entrance. Fine swirls of white dust settle on my skin and I can taste it around the rim of the Pepsi bottle.

Another military bunker on the other side of the square beside the church; a young soldier leans across the sandbags and stones, his Uzi machine gun slung over his shoulder. He slumps in the shade of the corrugated iron roof which has bricks on top to keep the tin secure. Two boys standing beside the ice cream cart; it’s unsteady and the small bells tinkle ding when it moves and the wheels are worn and ice cream cones nest one inside the other. Girls, with their heads lowered walk quickly past, crimson cortes, woven skirts traditional and omnipresent.

The Mayan Goddess Ixchel invented weaving and weavers make a sacrifice to her before beginning a new piece. The tools of weaving show the design of the blackstrap loom goes back four thousand years.  The weavers are more interested in the beauty of the garment than the fit. They weave stories and messages into the cloth.  It takes about ninety days to complete. Cochineal is a red dye made from the dried bodies of female insects called el Cochineal. They are found on several species of cactus.

_____

Perhaps he was eleven. His voice was clear and pure like a bell and his eye lashes fluttered like a butterfly when he looked into my face and asks if he can clean my shoes today. The blackened stained wooden box,  the small worn wooden stool. He sat and his knees were bent and his head leaned down and his hands flashed back and forth and a soft brush whisked and he squirted fluid from plastic bottles and used a toothbrush in the cracks and crevices. He digs his fingers in a tin of shoe polish and  massages the leather.

 

He earned forty-five centauros for ten minutes work and my grubby boots shine in this hot and dusty square. The young boys reached out to touch them. Their shoes had never shone before. Their shoes were worn and broken apart along the sides. One of the boys ran his fingernail through the sheen of dust already settling on the shining leather. Bare feet slap against the hot paving stones as they play. And now they watch the gringos and chat amongst themselves in Ixil that clicking, sucking sound that slapped around inside their mouths. Some had no shoes at all. Then the boys ran off, like a rill, then a runnel sparkling across the dry town square. Then down the rapids down the steps, across the road until swallowed by the shadows on the other side.

Few speak about what happened here in the thirty year war; 200,000 or more murdered, tens of thousand disappeared, a reality woven into Guatemala's blanket of silence. Guatemala is sometimes called a land of widows and orphans. 

Traveling through the raw green hills and its eternal spring, one sees few young men except those in military camouflage. When you ask the women they avert their eyes and ask if you would like to buy a souvenir. In Guatemala they talk about el silencio, a silence that wraps itself around the pain.

Mayan women passing.

Women wearing huipils

woven from the dead.

Weaving with their daughters,

unique patterns

woven and embroidered

threads of lives unraveling

the tree of life in red 

white lilies

and many sodden graves

and memories unsaid.

Mayan women passing

between the living and the dead.

Mayan women passing

along the selvedged edge

Into an endless, silent sea.

Fernando Gonzales Davison met us at the Hotel in Guatemala City. He suggested we find a private place to speak so we invited him to our room. We sat on beds opposite one another and he spoke in a quite voice. He had the gentle appearance of a family doctor but an air of tragedy. And I detected  suppressed rage when he spoke of the horror’s he’d seen and written about. He was a writer and poet and taught at Guatemala’s San Carlos University. He also did research for the Swiss Embassy, a relatively safe vocation in a violent city where it’s said one phrase outside the law can cost your life. He hands us this poem.

Rafaga (Gust of wind/burst of machine gun/burst of fire}

Translated by Victoria Vega Schultz

Prelude:

When a smile no longer smiles

When pleasure is a bruised colored rose and purple

Then don’t inquire further. 

When an organ plays only as a stem snaps

Then you too kneel down.

When nobody wants to listen or to speak

Don’t hide your voice.

Prologue:

Onto what land can I build a home

When it is sulphur my feet step upon

And a pavement abyss is all I can see

And omens become puffs of smoke in the wind

On to what land can I build a house

When the dust burns my anguished fingers 

And the wineskin contains a buzzard’s trap.

Onto what land can I build a home

When women burn up in early widowhood

And their smiles only echo the past. 

CODA

The flight to New York would leave later that morning. Our bags were packed. Three green canvas bags filled with Guatemalan weavings and soiled clothes; scraps of paper, receipts hand written in a curvaceous, flowing script on soft, porous paper they stamp with a thud talking care not to smudge the fresh ink.

It was not yet dawn. I was standing naked in the frame of the door waiting for the new morning to begin, silent and preparing my mind for the jolt back to the United States and New York. The air felt good, gentle and cool and I reached for Victoria and held her close for a moment and then turned and went inside to dress.