Rio Dulce, Sunday 4 June
We are on a Sunday family outing. Eugenio, man of the house, drives. Grandad – that’s me – sits up front beside the driver. The little woman and the baby sit in back. Eugenio is taking us down river to Livingston in his outboard-powered speedboat. I’ve draped a nappy over my burns and wear Eugenio’s straw work hat at a rakish angle. I fancy myself.
Monica says that I resemble an old wreck.
Tall trees intermingle with mangrove along the lakefront. There is no road down the river, no route for kidnappers. Children are safe and the river is the playground of wealthy Guatemalans of Eugenio’s generation. The cost of transporting heavy building materials would be prohibitive; their holiday mansions are constructed of wood and thatched with palm fronds and blend into the vegetation. Thatched boathouses shade their motor yachts and speedboats and their kiddies’ jet-skis.
We slam across the wakes of shrimp boats chugging upstream and taxi launches and the occasional yacht. Our first destination is a school close to the entry to the gorge. The school recruits bright kids of both sexes from Maya villages and educates them to be leaders in their communities. The school is the brainchild of a US citizen.
Eugenio makes fast to the school jetty. The buildings are wood and thatch. I meet with a couple of Maya late teenagers in reception. These are bright kids. They communicate among themselves in quick glances. Their smiles are almost too welcoming. The founder is downriver at the restaurant the school runs in Livingston. I should meet with the founder and with the students accompanying him.
The gorge does something to me. Eugenio claims I suffer an epiphany. Perhaps it springs from my Spanish heritage. I identify emotionally with those first Spaniards sailing their small coracles up this gorge. The Spaniards were small men of little education and many superstitions. Their ships must have felt minute and fragile in the shadows of the great cliffs. They knew nothing of what or who lay ahead. At any moment they could be crushed by boulders hurled from on high. I imagine that they prayed silently. The gorge opened. They sailed into sunlight. Ahead lay kilometres of fresh, open water, fields of water lilies. Streams cut into the limestone. Hot springs bubbled. Islands were white with ibis. Away in the distance lay a ring of purple mountains. The beauty must have blown their minds. They must have imagined that they had discovered Paradise.
Today sunlight cuts a line of brilliance midway up the southern face of the gorge. Long streamers of frangipani twist between the undergrowth and lay swathes of cloying temple perfume across the river. The river is dark. The water has a strong earthy scent. An indigenous child fishes from a tiny canoe beneath the overhang of a vast tree. Eugenio slows to avoid swamping a dugout overloaded with two trussed pigs and a family of ten.
Livingston announces itself with reggae blaring from competitive boom boxes. The town has the feel of an island. The majority of the inhabitants are Afro-Caribbean. The school’s restaurant is on the riverfront. Tables are arranged on a big deck shaded by a tin roof. The school’s founder is in his forties, a tall fair-haired man, thin and quiet and confident. He has become acknowledged in the aid industry as an expert on indigenous development and travels widely to conferences concerned with aid to the developing world. The restaurant is a new venture and caters for passengers off cruise ships.
The founder seats me at a table with four final-year students. Ask a question and one of three answers at length. Their purpose is community development. Development is instigating programmes that will improve health and earn money for their home villages without disturbing the traditional culture. Each of them intends a career in eco-tourism.
The school graduates thirty students a year: ten years and that’s a lot of eco-tourism guides and a great many pristine Maya villages with pristine handicraft markets and, of course, a wise shaman preparing herbal medicines blessed by a few traditional Maya magic spells.
I ask whether the students have considered entering politics.
No, they have no interest in politics. They are too young.
Young? At eighteen and nineteen?
The fourth student is the dilemma. Each of the other three is fluent in the spiel (I am sufficiently old and experienced to recognise a spiel). This fourth student doesn’t bother. I keep catching his eye and he is ready each time with this eye-to-eye twinkle.
It is a real bad-ass twinkle that says as directly as any words: ‘Hey, old man, you don’t believe the spiel. I know you don’t believe the spiel. You know that I know that you don’t – so now what? You and I? Do we keep playing the game?’
He continues twinkling.
I keep playing the game. It has become more than a game, a challenge.
I ask what the students think of Chavez and his ideas.
They have never heard of Chavez.
What do they think of Morales?
They have never heard of Morales.
Graduates of a school for indigenous community leaders, and they are ignorant of the first indigenous president of Venezuela and of the first indigenous president of Bolivia.
The silent student twinkles as brightly as a Roman candle.
Monica and Eugenio return to collect me. The school’s founder joins us. I ask whether he boards the cruise ships. Of course he does – and he describes to the passengers the good that the school does for the Maya and collects subscriptions to finance the school and ships the passengers ashore to the school’s restaurant, where they eat lobster as an act of atonement for their wealth.
Meanwhile, the restaurants owned by native Afro-Caribbean Livingstonians have lost the cruise-ship custom.
I have taken a couple of painkillers and am slightly dizzy. Eugenio steadies me as I climb down the ladder to the speedboat. We pull away from the dock and turn upriver. I look back. The school’s founder waves. And I wish that I didn’t see flames and sharpened machetes.