chapter three

feeding elephants

One Sunday in May, Guillermo and Juancho decide to go to the Aurora Zoo, the scene of so many happy childhood outings. There’s a palpable tension between the boys, as if something remarkable has happened to change their relationship. In reality, nothing has, but Juancho feels scared of his friend now that Guillermo has become so combustible. He doesn’t want to end up feuding. Juancho is pleased to be driving, so that he need not look his friend directly in the eye.

They park close to the zoo’s entrance. The walkway is sprinkled with visitors—grandparents, parents, and children on bicycles or scooters, Indian families, worker families, all kinds of families, except those of the very rich. The jacarandas are in bloom, with their inverted cones of scarlet flowers, and the shrubs are pockmarked with white and red berries. The clouds in the sky are thick and tuberlike: it might rain later that afternoon, but now the sun is shining, not too harshly.

The aroma of cotton candy, sugared nuts, tamales, and mixtas—hot dogs with avocado wrapped in warm tortillas—hangs listlessly in the air.

“I’m hungry,” Guillermo says suddenly, putting out a cigarette. He picked up smoking in Europe as a way to calm his nerves and to feel more self-assured, but never smokes in front of his parents. He doesn’t want them to remind him of how he complained about Carlos’s smoking.

“I could eat something,” Juancho replies hesitantly. He’s thin as bamboo.

They go over to a food cart and wait their turn in line. Guillermo shakes his head when he sees the menu on the side of the cart saying that the mixtas cost thirty-five cents each, and a small Coke twenty. This is all chump change, yet he feels obliged to complain. “We used to pay a nickel for them at Frankfurts near the Cine Capitol. Do you remember?”

Juancho nods. “And the Cokes used to cost six cents.”

“Life—and inflation—in the damn tropics,” Guillermo says.

He orders two mixtas for himself, one for Juancho. He would prefer to drink an atol de elote, but he knows he’d have to leave the zoo. The cart man prepares the mixtas deftly, as if he were a machine, putting the hot dog on a griddle-warmed tortilla and then slathering it with guacamol. He pulls two cans of Coke from his Styrofoam ice chest behind the cart.

Guillermo gives the man two quetzales, and refuses the change.“Keep it—you should invest in a new cart.”

The man nods and is already taking a new order. He has a look on his face as if to say the world is filled with sergeants and few soldiers.

“What do you think?” Guillermo asks his friend. They are sitting on wobbly stools on an elevated table piled high with napkins and soiled wax paper.

“They taste the same to me.”

Guillermo shakes his head, watching half of his second hot dog fall to the sidewalk as the tortilla breaks in half. “The ones at Frankfurts were grilled, not boiled, and the avocado was dolloped on a thick corn tortilla from a big plastic container that sat cold in the icebox. These tortillas are made of wheat flour.”

“Nothing’s what it was,” says Juancho resignedly.

“You are so right,” agrees Guillermo, with more than a hint of disgust in his tone. “Let’s pay a visit to our old friend La Mocosita.”

The elephants are around the corner from the mixta cart. La Mocosita, the erstwhile baby now fully grown, seems unusually agitated. She keeps walking back and forth in her pen, dousing her back with water and trumpeting. Guillermo looks at her and swears there are tears in her eyes. When the two friends try to feed her bananas, she turns her back on them. That’s when they see the broken arrow sticking out of her haunches. Someone has shot her, and a thread of blood issues from a small hole near her tail, trickling down her left leg.

Thousands of gnats can kill an elephant, Günter Rosensweig used to say, so his son would understand that the smallest creatures can accomplish a lot if they decide to work together.

“Can you believe this?” says Juancho, horrified.

“My stupid father . . .” Guillermo whispers. He pulls a Pall Mall from his shirt pocket and lights up.

“I don’t understand what your father has to do with anything. We need to find a zookeeper.”

“. . . always talking about the importance of people working together when he should have been telling me it only takes one asshole to wreck a beautiful thing. What kind of person would shoot an arrow into an elephant’s backside, in a zoo no less?”

They look frantically for a guard around the neighboring lion and tiger cages. They go to the exhibit where three Galapagos turtles sleep like prehistoric rocks on a grassless stretch near a standing pond with storks and ibises. They finally find a zookeeper sitting on a bench with the Prensa Libre covering his face. He is snoring loudly.

Guillermo pulls the paper off his face.

“What’s going on?” says the keeper, shielding his eyes from the sun, his legs kicking in the air.

“Someone shot an arrow into La Mocosita.”

“Huh.” The zookeeper raises his shoulders. “I’m in charge of the reptiles. You need to find Armando, the keeper of the large mammals.”

He makes no effort to get up. They see why: there’s an empty pint of rum next to him. Furthermore, he packs more pounds than a grown sea cow. He would fall on his face if he tried to stand.

“You drunken piece of shit.”

The keeper flays both his arms in the air as if trying to punch them, but he can’t get himself up. He looks like a fat cartoon character with elephantiasis.

Guillermo and Juancho run over to the monkey house. A zookeeper, wearing green rubber pants and boots, is hosing down the cement floor of the cage while some gibbons hang from rings and growl from above. They tell him what they’ve witnessed.

“Hijos d’puta, huevones. Maricones. Sinvergüenzas. Last week someone cut off the ear of the pygmy rhino. A month ago a red panda was stolen. What’s going on in this country? Do the guerrillas think that torturing animals will overthrow the government?”

Juancho laughs nervously. He understands that Guatemala is going down the tubes, but not for these reasons. Armed conflicts don’t necessarily spark mischief.

“What’s so funny?” the zookeeper asks, closing the faucet. “Don’t you believe me, you skinny piece of shit?”

“Everything is the guerrillas’ fault. The postal worker strike, the pollution from the buses, the eruption of the Pacaya volcano,” Juancho says facetiously.

Guillermo has never seen a guerrilla, but he has bought the line that those trying to overthrow the government are Marxists on the Cuban payroll. He has seen college students with beards and mustaches drinking beer and cursing the military government at Gambrino’s Lunch or at Café Europa behind the Lux. They are skinny boys with ink stains on their shirt pockets and black pants with cuffs rising up to the ends of their white tube socks. They wear Che Guevara glasses, with thick tortoiseshell frames, even if they have twenty-twenty vision. Their shoes are black and badly scuffed. They are not exemplary members of the human race, but they certainly don’t arouse fear. Most of the time they occupy tables near the Paraninfo where they sell copies of Alero—a literary magazine—or try to get their fellow students to sign petitions protesting the latest government assault in Quiché. Guillermo knows that they are not wholly innocent but it’s hard to imagine these scholarly types living in the mountains and jungles, surviving on plant roots and handouts from sympathizers, and planning raids against fully armed military garrisons. The radical core do their recruiting away from the public eye.

They follow the zookeeper to La Mocosita’s cage. His wet boots squeak as he walks.

A dozen people are trying to attract the elephant’s attention, to get her to come nearer. Not in the mood, she lounges in the back of her enclosure, resting on her right leg. The long tears coming out of her eyes flow like strings down her gravelly face.

The zookeeper picks up a towel from the guardhouse and goes into the elephant cage through a back gate. La Mocosita doesn’t even stir. He moves over to her and gently washes the crust off her face with the towel as if she were a child. She lifts her head in pleasure and lets him rub her jowls. He then looks at the arrow, shaking his head. In one gesture, he breaks it against the surface of her left haunch. She groans forcefully four or five times, shaking her head back and forth. He shoves a clean towel flush against the wound and holds it there, stanching the bleeding until the elephant calms down.

“Let’s get out of here,” Guillermo says.

* * *

They decide to go to Pecos Bill, a hamburger joint on Sixth Avenue in Zone 4 about two blocks from the Hotel Conquistador. As kids they used to go there with their parents on Sundays, spending the whole afternoon swimming in the Motor America Hotel pool nearby and then eating the best hamburgers in the city. The restaurant has a little courtyard in back where the families often sat while the kids played on the seesaws and jungle gyms.

The restaurant is mostly empty. Juancho and Guillermo need a beer—they are driven by thirst, not hunger. They take a table near the entrance, where they can gaze out at the Esso gas station across the street and, a bit beyond it, the 235-foot Torre del Reformador, which is a mini Eiffel Tower given to Guatemala by the French in 1935.

To the right is a table occupied by two girls in their early twenties and an older woman—perhaps their grandmother—dressed in a long black Mennonite-style dress and wearing too much rouge and mascara. Her hair is dyed dirty blond. Guillermo glances under the table and sees that the older woman is wearing high pumps. The three look like they have just come from church, maybe Mass at the nearby Union Church.

One of the girls attracts Guillermo’s attention, a strawberry-blonde with lots of freckles. Later he learns that Rosa Esther Castañeda’s mother was born in Ireland, but had come to Guatemala to study Spanish in the early sixties. She eventually married a local businessman who owned the Chrysler franchise in Guatemala. Rosa Esther took after her mother, while her sister resembled the father—a short, plump man with dark, vivid eyes.

The waitress comes over as soon as they sit down. Guillermo orders his Gallo and Juancho another Coke. When their bottles come, Guillermo thanks her as he squirms in his seat to make eye contact with Rosa Esther. Their eyes meet for a split second before hers shift away.

Guillermo is handsome, with dark wavy hair. Rosa Esther notices his full lips and dark, probing gaze. Guillermo is beginning to realize that his good looks can make some girls tremble. Juancho, on the other hand, is a string bean of a person. He seems brittle next to Guillermo, like a porcelain statue about to shatter, the kind of man a girl on a mission of mercy might find attractive.

Juancho orders a cheeseburger from the waitress when she brings them the beer and Coke. As she saunters away, the grandmother has a coughing fit and looks as if she might upend the table.

Guillermo gets up at once, and brings Juancho’s untouched soda over to her. “Please, drink this.”

The woman blanches, and waves him off with two bony white hands. She is gasping for air, and is clearly embarrassed.

“Please, I haven’t touched it. Have a drink,” he says.

Rosa Esther’s sister stands up and takes the bottle, jams the straw in the old lady’s mouth, and urges her to drink. The woman takes a few sips, then pushes the bottle away.

“Something got caught in my throat, I couldn’t breathe. I’m so sorry. We were just leaving. Let me buy you another Coke—”

“Don’t worry about it. ”

“That was so sweet of you,” Rosa Esther says, standing up and rubbing soft circles into her grandmother’s bony back.

“Are you okay now?”

“Yes, thank you, young man. May the Lord bless you . . . I don’t even know your name.”

“Guillermo Rosensweig. And my friend over there is Juancho Sánchez. If we can be of any further help—”

“You’ve done more than enough,” the old woman says. “Girls, don’t just sit there. Introduce yourselves and thank the young man.”

“Ay, abuelita, give us a chance.”

The two girls introduce themselves as Rosa Esther and Beatriz Marisol Castañeda. Juancho stands up and waves shyly, and then everyone sits back down. There’s a sense in the empty restaurant that there’s been a bit too much commotion for a Sunday afternoon.

Guillermo is smitten with Rosa Esther’s milky-white skin, the ethereal air around her, her blue eyes like shallow pools. She seems to almost float lightly above her seat as she sits between her grandmother and sister. Her hands are thin and delicate, blue-veined like her grandmother, barely visible under her long-sleeve white blouse.

About five minutes later, the three women get up to leave. Guillermo, who has been stealing glances as he talks to Juancho, feels a sharp pang in his chest as Rosa Esther turns around, waves to him, and mouths a thank you. She is the last one to walk through the screen door to the parking lot, and Guillermo notices how white and shapely her calves are. He quickly jumps up and goes bounding after her.

“Rosa Esther, wait.”

She turns around and manages to hold the door open for him. Her blue eyes sparkle like bits of cobalt.

“I don’t know how to say this—”

“You would like to see me again,” she slips in.

“How did you know?” He is surprised by her gumption.

She nods, raising her eyebrows. “It’s all over your face.”

“Can I have your phone number?”

She shakes her head. “I am not that easy.”

“So how can I see you again?”

“You can’t.”

He looks at her confused, in desperation, thumping one foot. “I want to see you again,” he says insistently, a bit uncomfortable that she is forcing him to be so declarative.

She nods a knowing smile. “I go to the Union Church every Sunday. Maybe one day you’ll stop by and share the Mass with me.”

It’s a strange request, totally unexpected, and his “Okay!” is equally odd, as if he doesn’t quite know how to respond.

He has never gone to church to pray or to seek any sort of solace. He really doesn’t believe in God or His son. It is all a bunch of idiocy. But it would be a greater folly not to go now that she has invited him so openly.

Sure, he can give religion a second chance.