Adíos, Guatemala!

Here are the last few entries from my Moleskine, and the closing of the Guatemala Notebook…


*

I put Kristin, the boy, and the dog on a plane the other day. The house is nearly empty. Almost completely quiet. The things I’m taking with me are spilling out of four suitcases. Mallory has been sick with a high fever all week. She’s lying in the only bed left in the house dreaming, I hope, of good things.

The neighborhood has been carrying on with its perpetual song of hammers and birds and dogs and cars by day, and by night, crickets and more dogs, more cars. I imagine it hasn’t changed since they first began putting up houses in San Cristobal. Bob Merrick, my boss here in Guatemala, told me he remembers flying in a helicopter up here not 15 years ago, and there was nothing in these hills but the high grass and a few farms. Houses are going up now in every neighborhood on every street. Over our wall across the street a beautiful new home is being built, is almost finished. An old man lives there now. He sleeps on a blanket in one of the front rooms on the dirt. Maybe he is watching over the worker’s tools. I see him sometimes sloshing something with a stick in a few barrels, see him sitting on a bucket. The day I walked through (out of curiosity) he was sitting in front of a little fire poking at it with a stretch of rebar. He wore a straw hat. He didn’t smile.

I stood on our terrace last night and began thinking of last things. I usually try avoiding it, but sometimes you can’t. It was the last time I would look out over the city from that spot. The same lights flickered back, and I was no less amazed by the view of the closer roofs fading out toward the city and the hills toward El Salvador beyond. I will miss it, that view, this place.


*

My friend Paul dropped Mal and I off at the airport. We kept it short because men shouldn’t cry in airports. I guess. We flew Taca Airlines which, to my surprise, served free drinks. They pushed a mini-bar up the aisle, and I ordered a rum and coke and drank it beside a Mayan woman that couldn’t figure out how to unfasten her lap belt. Sweet lady. She couldn’t understand my Spanish, bless her heart.

Arrived in Chicago at 2 a.m., shuffled through customs, baggage, bought an Edy’s ice cream scoop for Mal and I, and took a shuttle to the Marriot. I slept, in the words of my friend, like a dead cat.

I’ve been back a week, and the buzz of homecoming hasn’t quite worn off yet. I’ve been shocked all week at how easy it is to get things done here. It feels like I’ve taken off a great big heavy wet coat and laid it down (in some airport maybe), because simply living in my own skin these last several days feels so much easier. Thinking back, I guess we had grown used to the inefficiencies, and the constant stress of getting by on bad Spanish and very little money. I keep wanted to speak to everyone in Spanish, or find myself making small talk with store clerks or strangers at the park, amazed I can communicate with these people.


*

I can’t in good conscience say Guatemala was good to us. It was not. These have been a difficult two years. Sometimes I think Guatemala is just like America, only drunk and a little stupid. But talking with Kristin recently, we were both amazed at all we experienced there, the things we saw and lived, the people we met and knew. I suppose it’s less where you are that matters, but who you are when you’re there. But the who that you are when you’re there shapes, in return, where you are, the place itself. Flannery O’Connor said that "somewhere is better than anywhere." And I supposed someone, it would follow, is better than anyone. I will miss the people more than the place, but again, the place is so much what it is because of the people. I will miss them both.

I am not sure how Guatemala has or will continue to change us, or how (in some infinitesimal way) we may have changed Guatemala. But to be honest, I’m not much interested in all that. I have learned to say with Walt Whitman that to be with those I like is enough.