Last night I slept with don pancho
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| “Will you be eating lunch?” asked Lorena, as she peeked her head inside the doorway of the cinder block bedroom where I was resting on the bed. She caught me staring at the ceiling wondering how hot it was outside the door.
No nearer to a decision after our visit to the shaman, I needed to do some heavy thinking after Javier’s announcement. If he planned to spend more time in San Vicente I had some decisions to make. More importantly, how would Papa’s stroke transform my life with Javier? Would I become like Amalia, spending my life alone in Canada while he lived in Guatemala? Could I live in Guatemala full-time eventually? One daughter was away at school and the other was in high school so I supposed it was possible some day, but did I want to? The longer I lay in the cinderblock bedroom, the faster the questions swirled in my mind. “Lunch?” asked Lorena adjusting the fan so it blew more vigorously in my direction and interrupted my musings. “Mama needs to know how many chickens to kill.” Avoiding chicken was my talisman against getting sick. There weren’t enough fingers on my hands to count the times I’d gotten sick from eating chicken. The worst time was in Guadalajara Mexico where I thought I’d fallen in love with a mariachi player but discovered my swooning was the beginning of a bout of food poisoning. I spent three days lying on the tiled bathroom floor of my budget hotel, vomiting, in and out of consciousness. I lost 10 pounds in three days. Now, chicken was on my list of foods to avoid if I didn’t want to be airlifted home. I especially didn’t want to get sick in San Vicente. There was zero privacy given that the toilet was right beside the terrace, a gathering spot for family and friends. ” You’ll never get sick from eating chicken in San Vicente,” said Lorena, as though she could read my mind. “I kill them myself,” she added, making a twisting motion with her hands, simulating wringing the neck of a chicken. “Then it’s straight to the pot and the table.”
In Canada, I was a big supporter of locavore eating and often wrote articles promoting the environmental benefits of following a 100-mile diet, eating foods grown, produced and sold near your home. In San Vicente it was the 1-mile diet. Everything came from within walking distance. Want milk? Milk the cow. Eggs? Grab a few. Chicken? Wring a neck or two. Fresh fruit arrived by the bushel load. You didn’t just eat one papaya – you ate an entire platter. The proximity to food sources was a world apart from my Canadian childhood where we drank powdered skim milk Mom stored in a box the size of Tide detergent, in the pantry. If we were lucky, she’d mix the powder with water the night before so in the morning the thin watery liquid would be nicely chilled. If not, she’d stir two scoops of powder into a plastic pitcher with a wooden spoon at breakfast and the milk would be room temperature, the lumps of undissolved milk powder floating like dry croutons in the bluish liquid. In San Vicente, milk was so fresh it was warm. There were so few packaged items, Mama Tallo’s household didn’t even have a garbage can. Instead, whichever animal was the fastest – Radar the dog, an observant chicken or the pig - ate the leftovers. Any wrapping paper was used to start cooking fires. Much as my political and culinary philosophies aligned with life in San Vicente, when I came face to face with my prospective dinner, my sentiments changed. Give me a nice anonymous Filet-of-Fish from McDonalds. I already felt bad about the lumbering pig who had often accompanied on my daily walks, snuffling along the side of the lane to the foothills of the cerro. I’d begun to think of him as my pet or at least my walking companion. Two days ago he’d disappeared with only a patch of dirt, stained dark red, where he used to lie in the sun. A black pot of pork tamales appeared later that day. Today my stomach was growling and the only alternative was those leftover pork tamales. Truth was, I hadn’t befriended the chickens outside my door and they were hardly distinguishable from each other. It was as close to eating anonymously as I’d get. “Yes,” I nodded to Lorena. . “We need four chickens,” she hollered to Thelma who was already headed into the chicken coop. Never one to miss an opportunity for interaction with potential sources of food, she pushed open the gate and made her selection among the squawking, clucking, scrambling hens. Lorena grabbed the nearest one and handed it off to Alba who headed off with a hen held firmly by the legs. Thelma, not convinced the first chicken was the plumpest, grabbed a hen, probed its chest for plumpness and then hefted it shoulder height to assess its weight. Just then, a ruffled red-feathered hen that bore a striking resemblance to the Henny Penny of my childhood storybooks, waddled past and caught Thelma’s eye. Plump but fleet of foot, it was determined to avoid Thelma’s clutches. It wasn’t able to resist the enticement of a handful of seeds and Henny Penny was soon headed to the kitchen to join its predecessor Lorena looked at me. It was time for me to find something to do. Javier had given strict instructions. “Whatever you do, don’t let Michele see you kill anything.” I needed to find somewhere to go and fast so decided to wander over to Tia Maria’s house. It was a happening place as her front porch also functioned as an informal cantina. She had converted her living room into a tienda, a mini-store that sold small snack items as well as one litre bottles of Gallo beer. The middle among Papa Challo’s seven sisters, Tia Maria was in her late seventies but had a mischievous twinkle to her eye that made her seem much younger. Her cheerful appearance was misleading. She was a gossip and had no reservations of speaking her mind. “That’s the wrong woman for you,” she’d said to Yemo just before he walked down the wedding aisle. Like Papa, her lack of tact had alienated her from many in Javier’s maternal side of the family. I enjoyed her outspoken attitude and always brought her a small gift, making a point of including her in my rounds of neighbourly visitations. Her house was a ramshackle collection of buildings. One adobe and straw building was topped with a red poinsettia so twisted it looked as though it had been growing towards Papa’s house and then changed its mind and reversed course. The whole building leaned to one side like a deck of cards. Tia Maria stepped out to greet me, her grey hair in a bun and a ruffled apron reminded me of the Mama cat in the Three Little Kittens nursery rhyme. “A reminder of the earthquake,” she said, making the sign of the cross. I was happy to share a bottle of Gallo with whoever happened to be at Tia Maria’s. . Even my basic Spanish was understood. In the countryside long silences and simple conversations were the norm. If I bought one litre bottle of Gallo, I was guaranteed a rapt audience. Dating back to 1886, Gallo is the most famous and oldest continually produced beer in Guatemala. Its stylized rooster crest logo and dark brown bottles are a source of national pride. Although it has garnered dozens of international gold medals for quality and is the only beer in Latin America to ever be awarded Belgium’s highest honour for quality the Monde Selection “Prestige Award”, it gets mixed reviews from beer drinkers outside Guatemala who scorn its weak colour and fizzy taste but I love its bubbly carbonation. There was big news at Tia Maria’s. “La Pelona is in the neighbourhood,” said Tia Maria, cracking open a beer and putting her bare feet up on a chair. “She took three people in San Vicente this week.” According to Guatemalan folk wisdom, the grim reaper was a woman called la pelona (bald woman on account of her skeletal head). Given the recent deaths, the air was abuzz with discussions of ailments being suffered by the various neighbours. Ailments were blamed on sustos or sudden frights that triggered serious illness. One woman Dona Lidia had eight enfermedades, each medical complaint the result of bad luck or shocking news her family had experienced. Each susto provoked the onset of a new suffering. I sipped my beer and nodded in sympathy, my interest wandering as Tia recounted the ailments of various neighbours. In a string of words I heard the words that got my attention. “la prometida” of Javier. That meant fianceé. And she wasn’t talking about me. I almost fell off my hammock in shock. Tia nodded knowingly. “You were at her house yesterday,” she said with an innocent inflection to her voice. My mind ran through a slideshow of the houses Lorena and I had stopped at during the previous day’s caminito and then paused as I remembered one visit that had been different than the others. I usually got a lot of attention but this one house just past the church had been different. The woman of the house had pulled out a chair for me to sit on, poured me a coke and interrogated me so vigorously I was soon nudging Lorena in the shins to try to make an early exit. Dozens of people had paraded in to gawk at me including a very large woman with curly hair who came running in, still wiping her hands on her apron, as though we were giving away free blenders. She stood and stared at me without saying a word. I didn’t get a friendly feeling. “The mother of la prometida de Javier,” said Tia Maria, settling back in her hammock, happy I was no longer in the dark. I vowed to learn more about this fiancée. And I wouldn’t be hurrying back to Canada until I did. Recipe: Rellenitos de platanos (stuffed plantain)Its tradition to offer guests a little snack when they show up at your house, even if they don’t plan to stay. These nourishing cinnamon-scented little desserts are perfect with tea or coffee and can be stored in the refrigerator for several days which makes them ideal for serving to impromptu visitors. Chapter 17: It’s a Dog’s Life
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