*
Despite a rain delay in Dallas, we made it to Guatemala City in one piece Sunday night. Anibal, as promised, held an orange sign with my name on it in the waiting area just outside the airport. Fortunately, it was no trouble (in fact, it was almost too easy) getting thru immigration and acquiring our luggage. I bought Kristin black beans and bread at a food stand while our luggage was being loaded onto a van, then we packed ourselves in. The kids fell asleep almost immediately.
The drive to Antigua was strangely familiar. Much of it we remembered from a year and half ago—the thin twisting climb into the mountains, the pickup trucks with kids and young couples standing in their dusty beds, green road signs with names distant and strange to us. Antigua lay around a last bend in the road, just as I remembered. It was dark, so we couldn’t see the mountains or volcanoes I had promised Mallory.
Mario, the Director of Tecun Uman, the school we will spend two weeks studying Spanish at, met us out front of his school. He drove us to an apartment several blocks south of the central square, down Avenida 5, into a newer development. I was disappointed to be so far from the square, but the place seemed nice enough. As we got out of the van, we heard a piercing screech not far from where we stood, in the shadows. It sounded like someone had squeezed a large monkey. Mario explained it was the whistle of a security guard, blown periodically to scare off potential robbers. It wasn’t clear to me if the whistle was blown when a “potential” robber was seen, or just for good measure. Later that night, and the two nights since, I have heard the whistle several times, and so have put my hopes in the latter.
Our apartment is in a two story house and conjoined to seven other flats by a small, roofless central garden. The rooms are small, rustic, and dank. We have two bedrooms, a living area, bathroom, and smallish kitchen. The floor is red ceramic, the walls stucco and painted lightly orange and blue, with red brick archways over the kitchen entrance and a strange, square opening off the kitchen—again roofless—extending to the ground floor and to the open air above. A long sheet of plastic keeps the rain out, but not the noise from the tenants below. They have two kids, like us, and their noise is not unlike our own. Anyway, the kids like it. My favorite place is the roof which has a great view of Agua, one of three volcanoes looming over the city directly to the south, and green mountains in every other direction.
(the view from the roof of our apartment)
*
It’s Tuesday night, our third night here, and we have settled into a kind of rhythm. Notwithstanding the language barrier, which I am particularly frustrated by, the biggest challenge has been the family logistics of living twenty-five minutes by foot from our school, and in a much smaller place than our house in Cincinnati.
We began our classes today at Tecum Uman. I will be studying with maestro Victor on the roof of the school. Victor is a short, serious looking middle-aged man, and from what I can tell, an experienced teacher. He has a high-pitched laugh which he breaks into occassionally at the strangest times. I like him very much.
There is a tangerine and a papaya tree heavy with fruit growing up through the building. Like the great tight rope walker Philip Petit, when I see fruit, I want to juggle. I couldn’t get my mind off it all morning during our lesson. I mistook the unripe tangerines for limes, since they are nearly identical in appearance, until Victor corrected me. In any case, I mean to steal a few for tossing before the week’s up.
Notwithstanding Victor’s apparent prowess as a teacher, not to mention my eager mind, four hours with the maestro dispelled my hopes of picking up the language quickly.
(Victor and I)
(Mallory with one of her teachers)
(Kristin with Rosa, her maestra)
*
It’s no problem getting online in Antigua. I’ve been told there are roughly 40-something Internet cafes in the city, five or six of which I have visited already. We pass about 8 on our way to school. I spent the afternoon today in one of the more interesting cafés called the Funky Monkey, which I think is run by a young American, but I’m not sure. The sign in front dubs it the “coolest” Internet café in Antigua. “Cool,” in this case, refers to loud American music, smoking paraphernalia, and ashtrays. Still, I was shocked at how good it felt to hear “Sweet Child of Mine” playing on the hi-fi, and to be among smokers—surely the most congenial and generous folk on earth—was a comfort. You can get connected here for about fifty cents, or four quetzales, an hour, which isn’t too bad considering the connection is high-speed, and the people are generally friendly, though I haven’t found a shopkeeper yet that I can understand.
(the central square, Antigua)
*
Even in good shoes, the walk to the school is a bear (Tecun Uman is located about 3 blocks west of the central square). I need to remind myself that most folks who work in this city live in pueblos a good 45 minute walk from the city. I am far too used to the convenience of my car. There are more bicycles here than cars, by the way, and more “chicken buses” (public transportation) than bicycles, though walking is the norm. As a rule, all the cars are stolen.
(Avendia 5, Antigua)
*
Our seventh day in Antigua. All week I’ve smelled burning leaves and branches from unrecognizable trees—all being cleared for further development and burned. The laborers, the older ones anyway, look like photos from outdated Spanish textbooks dressed in their gray slacks, white camisas, and yellow straw hats with machetes strapped to their belts. Happily, the new homes going up in South Antigua look two hundred years old. From the roof of our place you can see enough of their inner gardens and exploding flower work to covet their wealthy lives within.
Were I to grow old here, I think my life expectancy would double if only for the day’s long yawning. There are no demands for rushing here. Like the poet Nicanor Parra’s Santiago, Chile, “the days are interminably long: several eternities in a day.”
(Kris and Mallory in front of Augua)
*
The guards are blowing their monkey whistles more fervently tonight. Either there are burglars about, or, more likely, they are tired of the crickets. Or maybe they’re just bored.
Today I watched a man fifty feet up a tree hack down limbs with a machete. I could not make out anything binding him to the tree for safety. He was risking his life, as far as I could tell, for an afternoon’s wages—which I would guess are roughly equal to a package of hot dogs.
*
Our last day in Antigua. In the rain season the days can’t decide how they want to come off. Any hour could bring rain. Temperatures move from cool to warm back to cool with no pattern whatsoever, which might explain in part why nobody wears shorts here. But the mornings are all the same. The sun rises early, the houses are quiet and colorful, the air lithe and lighter than any other time of day. The sky is generally blue with wisps of low clouds which prefer the volcano peaks, often hiding them from view.
Having found a casa in the capital city, we are attempting to move in today. We didn’t expect to find a place so spacious in Zona 10. It lies at the end of a cul de sac and just five minutes by foot to Hanna’s Hope where Kristin will be working. Through contact with a missionary here, we discovered Darvy, a local lifejacket. I pay Darvy $20 a day to take us around, translate, help me at the bank, etc.
I’ve discovered that most gringos down here—missionaries in particular—have a “guy.” Without a “guy,” you can’t hope to accomplish much. Darvy serves as a conduit to something resembling efficiency, a word more akin to fantasy here than in the States. Our livelihood rests on and with Darvy.
We leave Antigua without regret, needing a more permanent residence to call home. Antigua is so beautiful, but suffers from typifying too perfectly the Spanish colonial baroque a gringo is more apt to want to photograph than call home. Besides, there are more Europeans on the streets than locals, it seems, so that if it were not for the architecture (most of which appears on the verge of collapsing), and the now familiar shape of hills and volcanoes, one might easily forget where he is.
I made the mistake in our first week here of referring to Antigua as a city that perpetually yawns. Perhaps Time is drowsy in this altitude, and nods its great head from time to time at the impossible inefficiency of the place, but no, I have learned that Antigua is a city that walks—walks at all hours, walks to language schools (which may outnumber the Internet cafes), walks to work and back again, walks door to door with tortillas in wicker baskets, walks to the market and to the bus, walks home.
*
We left Antigua Saturday as we had found it two weeks before. Our new rented house in Guatemala City lies in Oakland at the end of 15th Avenida Finale down a little side street no larger than a driveway which, if it were any longer, would fall off into a barranco. There are few houses in the city, I’ve been told, this secluded. I’ve also been told seclusion makes us more suseptible to robbery. We’ll see. We do have a 12’ wall with coiled electrical barbed wire surrounding the house, so it has the feel of a compound. It is also conjoined to a sister house by a common wall, same architecture, and a man named Tony living there with his maid. Tony was born in France but spent most of his life in Guate. His first words to us, just over the wall and out of site, were: “Hey gringos,” in what sounded like a heavy New York accent.
The rooms of the house are huge, the ceiling close to 15’ in the upstairs master bedroom, and a shared kitchen, dining, and living room make up the downstairs, with double glass doors opening to a thin backyard garden. The place is almost embarrasing, I must say, especially since many people are referring to us as “missionaries” here and back home. We are here, in part, to love and serve the fatherless, or better, the family-less, which is another way of saying the homeless. And so I hope we can make of this place a home for more than just ourselves.
