Chapter 13: Cactus and Cowboys

Chapter 13: Cactus and Cowboys

“Can you help me?” she asked in refined Spanish.

“Me?” I asked looking around. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her properly. How could I be of help?

“I’ve run out of gas and wonder if you would buy some of these Christmas gifts for cash?” she said. She gestured to a male companion who was holding out two boxes of perfume. I heard the SUV door unlock as he stepped out.

Just then Lorena rounded the corner of the SUV, her hands full of Doritos bags.

“Vayase (get lost)” she snarled, shoeing the SUV and its occupants away like a bothersome fly. She slid back into the car and passed me a bag of chips.

“They were trying to rob you,” she said. “Always keep your windows rolled up when the car isn’t moving.”

I’d been left alone for five minutes and already found trouble.

We were eating dinner when Danielito, Thelma’s youngest child, died. We had been back in Toronto for two weeks when the phone rang in the late evening. Javier’s brother described what happened and we gripped the phone, the receiver jammed between us so we could both hear.

It had been an average evening in Guatemala City, Thelma baking cakes in her bakery, Daniel working on his books and the girls off at school and work. When dinnertime came and went with so word from Danielito, Thelma had called his cell phone to see how late he was going to be. A stranger had answered and said “The person who owns this cell phone is dead.” Danielito’s body had been found slumped over the steering wheel of his car in Zona 10 of Guatemala City by a passerby who answered the phone which had kept ringing and ringing with Thelma’s calls.

The police arrived at the scene and determined that Danielito had been executed, with a single shot to the head. He was 18 years old.

Javier flew back to Guatemala and I stayed behind to look after Javier’s business affairs, my hands pressed to my mouth in shock. I still pictured Danielito as the chattering little “Fosforito” with freckles and tousled red hair who had greeted us on our first visit to Guatemala. Even though he’d grown taller and his shoulders were wide like a young man, I still thought of him as a pre-teen. A recent photo over his bed showed him standing at the edge of Pacaya volcano, with his arms outstretched, his head uplifted and laughing, literally at the top of the world. Now he was dead. He’d never have a chance to climb that volcano again.

Violence touched our family. A week earlier, Javier’s younger brother Beto had been held hostage at gunpoint -- a gun held to his head by two thugs who pushed their way into the back seat of his truck, forced him to complete his route delivering eggs while they gathered the monies he collected after each delivery. His wife, at home with our nephews, three boys under the age of six, had been notified of the robbery by the owner of the first grocery store. It wasn’t until the end of the day that she heard Beto was safe. Calling the police would have only resulted in retribution from the perpetrators. It was the third time he’d been robbed at gunpoint that year and seemed a barometer of the times. Even Javier was grim.

“People are desperate for money before Christmas so there’s a good chance of getting robbed on this trip.”

Despite the signing of the peace accord in 1996, which put an end to Guatemala's 36-year civil war, crime in Guatemala continued to be rampant and has one of the world’s highest homicide rates. In a country of 11.5 million, there are more than 5,000 killings a year. The Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development estimated the global rate of 7.6 intentional homicides per 100,000 people in 2004. By 2009, Guatemala had a rate of 52 per 100,000 people. Canada, by comparison, is at 1.8.

Lawlessness is a four-way battle between gangs, vigilante groups, drug cartels and security forces. Maras (youth street gangs) extort bus drivers for protection money to allow their vehicles to move through gang-controlled zones throughout Guatemala City. In 2009, 135 bus drivers and 41 of their assistants, along with 53 taxi drivers, were slain.

Mass protests demanding government protection backfired when gangs retaliated by launching a campaign of terror, throwing grenades and shooting bus drivers – even those paying protection money – while they were driving their buses. Terrorized passengers found themselves on buses careening out of control.

“I’ll wait for you,” said Lorena, taking a seat nearby.

“I’m OK,” I protested, confident I could manage by myself. The bathroom didn’t seem any more rustic than others I’d encountered in my travels. I’d mastered the squat toilets of Asia and in Honduras, even seen a toilet poised over a lake where you could look inside the toilet bowl and see fish circling waiting for what might drop.

Lorena headed off leaving me by myself. I tried the bathroom door on the left. It was stuck. I tried sliding the latch back and forth to see if that would loosen it. Then I knocked on the door.

“Ocupado,” said a female voice from inside.

“Lo siento – sorry” I said, sliding the lock back to what I thought was its former position. I waited a few minutes but when the occupant didn’t emerge, decided to try the spare bathroom near the chicken coop.

More like an outhouse, it was so rustic the walls didn’t meet the corrugated metal roof and were so low I could see into the patio where the family was congregating. I thought to my parents toilet in Winnipeg, with its library of bathroom books, New Yorker crossword puzzles, bottles of Just a Drop deodorizer and fastidious attention to absolute privacy. Here, even cows in the corral could peer inside.

Beside the toilet on the floor was a bucket filled with water.

“Pour the water into the toilet when you’re done and then refill it with water from the pila outside,” hollered Lorena across the wall.

As I scooped the bucket into the pila to refill it with water, a pale silver fish with determined look in its eyes swam up and snapped at my fingers. I drew my hand back with a start. Lorena laughed.

“He eats the insects,” she explained. Health officials had advised the local women to empty their pilas and scrub the interior surfaces with disinfectant regularly to get rid of disease-bearing mosquitos. But it was so much work to drain, scrub and dry the pila it was a chore that often got missed. An insect-eating fish served the same purpose and required no maintenance. Based on this fish’s size, which was more bodybuilder’s bicep than flounder, it was finding plenty to eat.

Once back with the family I lost track of time as we ate. Lunch was doblados de loroco, a tender tortilla stuffed with cheese and loroco, an edible flower that grows in the lowlands of El Salvador and Guatemala. The tiny pale purple pods had been plucked from a vine growing behind Mama Tayo’s kitchen, where dainty tendrils curled up a pole of exposed rebar. It looked more like a weed than a perennial valued for its nutritional qualities. But known to contain vitamins A, B and C plus calcium and iron, it’s a valuable source of fibre.

“Fragrant with a pungent kick reminiscent of Mediterranean capers…” I was in the midst of examining the loroco inside my tortilla in more detail when Javier came over with news.

“Um, you locked Julie in the bathroom. She’s been pounding on the door for an hour. Don’t worry, I heard her shouting and let her out.”

Oh, no I thought. That was our 22 year old niece’s voice I’d heard say “ocupado” in the bathroom. I must have slid the outside latch into a closed position and locked her inside. Julie came around the corner of the kitchen -- her face red from the exertion of hollering.

“Lo siento – very sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she laughed.
Javier took me on a tour of our sleeping quarters. Much like other homes in San Vicente, the ranch was a mash-up of buildings built in various stages as funds were available. Some buildings were connected by doorways while others, such as the kitchen and older bedrooms, were free-standing structures. We walked along a dirt pathway to a large back bedroom. A pair of chickens scurried past us on their way out.

Javier pushed open a wooden door and stepped inside the room

“This is where my uncle Javier was murdered,” he said, waving his arms into the dim cavern. “It’s also the same room I was born in and slept in until I moved away.”

Hearing the nostalgia in Javier’s voice should have been warmed me with affection but I was horrified. I wasn’t expecting the Four Seasons San Vicente but the bedroom looked like a prison. There were 10 beds and the walls were dark with musty mould. Or bloodstains. Javier continued his reminiscences, undeterred by my body which was shrinking away from the doorway as if of its own volition.

“I used to wake up with my pillow gone flat because mice had eaten the cotton out of it while I slept.”

Mice and mould were one thing but it was the murders that made me most jittery. Javier’s uncles had been a part of the populist movement of Guatemalan people who were dissatisfied with Jorge Ubico’s dictatorship and United States interference in Guatemalan affairs. Students, the middle class, young military officers and farmers rose up in 1944 in the Guatemalan Revolution prompting the election of Arbenz. A CIA-orchestrated coup put an end to the nationalist revolt and overthrew the elected government in a 1954 air strike. A military dictatorship took over and prompted decades of military rule. Javier’s uncles had been assassinated for supporting democratic rule. Papa Challo, the youngest brother, was the only surviving son.

In Guatemala, dead spirits are viewed as natural phenomenon as universal as rain or wind. Family members moved freely between two worlds and encounters were not uncommon. Signs of their presence were spontaneous. Horses returned from pasture, their manes mysteriously braided.

“Work of the spirits,” said Javier.

There was no way I could sleep in a roomful of spirits especially if in bed alone. Javier would be sleeping on the patio in a hammock alongside the rest of the men in the family. Pistols in their boots and machetes leaned up against the chicken coop, they wanted to be ready for any action that might arise. Danger vibrated in the air. Earlier in the day, someone had chopped down a section of fence and several cows had escaped causing considerable damage by trampling the neighbour’s tobacco crop. Papa Challo was the prime suspect. He’d been muttering about the property line for decades.

That afternoon a trio of ranchers had shown up demanding restitution from Victor, Alba’s quaking husband. The ranchers would be back.

“You can’t sleep in there,” said Lorena, showing up at the doorway “Follow me.” She led me out past the kitchen and across the lane to a free-standing building next to Amalia’s house. Although considered a basic structure by the Habitat for Humanity crew who had constructed it six months earlier, it was like the Garden of Eden. Shaded by a lemon tree, it boasted real glass windows (one with a screen), a steel door with a peephole and a double bed, TV and a floor fan. It was absolutely empty and all mine for the duration of my stay.

As I unpacked my suitcase, I felt faintly guilty because I doubted the volunteers who built it ever imagined (or would have been pleased to find out), it would be used by a woman from Canada. But, the room had been vacant since constructed. It was too segregated from the main house for anyone else to feel comfortable in. The seclusion suited me just fine.

As it turned out, I wouldn’t be alone. The room came with a canine companion. Radar, who looked like a scruffy version of Benji the lovable Hollywood star, slept outside the door and barked at the slightest threat.

There was a lot to bark at. Between lemons hitting the tin roof like missiles, the sudden explosion of evangelical TV programs from neighbouring homes, clucking chickens and a bird that sounded like a mewling kitten, it was far from tranquil in my corner of San Vicente. But it was my new home and in my opinion, the nicest spot in the Sanchez family real estate portfolio.

The unspoken truth was that Chepe had hooked up with another woman in Boston and had three more children. The woman was never referred to by name – just La Mexicana – and all I knew was she weighed 400 pounds and came from near Texas.

“Chepe was always popular with the ladies,” shrugged Javier whenever I’d ask for an update the “Chepe situation.”

Amalia’s life was in limbo. Twenty-five years old when Chepe left, she’d spent the prime years of her life alone. Still a pretty woman, with dark hair, soft eyes and nice figure, she could have found someone else, a loving partner. But she couldn’t remarry or even date. San Vicente had no eligible bachelors and the community was devoutly Catholic so a secret fling would have caused a scandal.

She spent her days washing laundry in the pila, tending her tidy garden and preparing meals for the children, who were now young adults. At night she sat alone, wrapped in a blanket on the sofa, watching telenovellas (soap operas) on TV in the darkened living room. Now she had me in her spare room.

I was outraged on her behalf and couldn’t understand why nobody else felt the way I did. Even Thelma who I considered the most modern of the family members, just shook her head when I broached the subject. The whole situation seemed grossly unfair. Javier didn’t understand my outrage.

“Chepe sends money,” he responded with indignation. “Look at the nice house she lives in.”

“It’s not about the money,” I argued. “She has no life, no future. She’s been in limbo her whole life waiting for him to come back.”

“Asi es - That’s the way life is,” said Javier.

I lay on my bed in the Habitat for Humanity house alone and wondered about the future. After Papa Challo’s stroke, rumours flew that Chepe would come back to San Vicente. What would happen when he returned, I wondered. Would Chepe stay in the marital home? What would Amalia do?