Cobán. 7 August 1991. The last night of the feria. Young students from the military school who have mohawk hair-cuts, the sides of whose heads are old gold, dance on a platform under a tent broadly striped like a golf umbrella as a deaf and dumb man in indigo raingear wanders around with a simpleton’s smile among the Indian women who are seated with their babies on fold-up chairs slashed with violet Pepsi Cola signs, staring at the dancers who demonstrate the latest dances to Madonna numbers. The nearby carousel – griffins, basilisks, ducks – carries old Indian women with near-black, knitted and serious faces as the dancers follow mandates: ‘Stick out your butt and shake what you got.’
Not too far away is a marquee, guarded by chary teenage soldiers, with an exhibition of military photographs – the military organizing a beauty competition for Indians in the Alta Verapaz Highlands. The winner of this competition, stooping, wears a white veil over her terracotta dress. A military video shows the beauty of Guatemala – white nun orchids, macaws of orange and glitter blue, frail monkeys with whisked frizzes of hair and bereaved, human-flesh faces.
Glenn, one of my travelling companions, the sides of whose face are incandesced in a young medieval saint’s beard, starts talking to Whitney who works with the fair. He ran away from San José eight years ago when he was twelve and he claims his face, as that of a missing person, is on milk cartons in the United States. A child goes by with a piñata, one of those huge Guatemalan papier-mâché dolls, many colours in them, this one predominantly poppy and electric blue.
Next day Whitney stands among the gathered bits of wood from a rail track which look like shavings. The slashes all over his jeans are wigs, an albino’s hair. He loves Guatemala, loves the life of the fair, but even he has seen el panel de la muerte – the van in which death squads took victims who were very often later found with their throats slashed to the point of decapitation or in some cases skinned. El panel de la muerte has frequently passed through this country since the mid 1960s, where clouds fall asunder and dig into the tops of volcanoes, where movement often seems like a trespass so still are the reflections of a slate-blue volcano on a lake, so myriad and silent and personably voluptuous are the blues of the hills.
About two hundred thousand people have been killed, under the hotchpotch rule of generals, colonels, brigadiers, since the early 1960s. Forty thousand people have disappeared since the early 1980s. When civilian rule came in 1985, especially towards the end of the term of office of President Vinicio Cerezo, hundreds continued to die. Now with the accession of President Jorge Serrano there are signs calling for peace and reconciliation everywhere, little doves on the fringes of them.
On the night before I arrived, 31 July, the body of a seven-or eight-year-old street child was found in a rubbish dump beside an electric pylon in Zona 3 of Guatemala City, his eyes gouged out. On 1 August, the day I arrived, a street child who’d pinched sunglasses in the central market was taken and tortured with cigarette butts on the testicles by the police. On 8 August Jose Miguel Merida Escobar, head of the homicide section of the Department of Investigations, was gunned down in Guatemala City. He’d been investigating the murder last year of an anthropologist who worked with Indians. The couple I stayed with in Cobán had exchanged love letters during the Highland campaign of the early 1980s. The husband had been a doctor with the army. Nothing in El Salvador, he said, could have been as bad as what he saw.
A head of Christ and some severed plaster hands of saints were affixed to a wall hanging.
When the army wiped out an Indian village during the Highland campaign they usually stuck one face on a tree as the expression of mastery.
General Mejía Victores, who came to power in 1983, destroyed four hundred and forty villages, killing one hundred thousand people.
In the couple’s home, beside the wall hanging, was a picture of Lassie, a crucifix with oregano, sage and thyme thrust through it, a photograph of a baptism, a picture of a muscular-faced Apollo 7 astronaut.
In Guatemala, where there is no public health programme, chopping off hands and feet is still a way of dealing with gangrene. The government of Jacobo Arbenz, who came to power in 1950, tried to bring health care to all. But President Eisenhower and the CIA and the United Fruit Company put an end to his government in 1954 with a coup that was followed by hundreds of killings.
A young man in a smouldering pink and apple-green tie had driven a Kaiser Manhattan 1954, of cream and royal blue, through the fair, a collection of girls in the car with 1950s hair-dos and wearing peplum dresses, the dresses with boleros that stick out at the waist.
In 1963 President Kennedy was responsible for bringing down another vaguely egalitarian government.
‘The rivers have been running with blood since the early seventies,’ my hostess in Cobán told me.
During the late 1970s, under the rule of General Lucas García, having a small group of people in your house was an invitation to el panel de la muerte.
My hostess knew a vendor of nick-nacks who went into the mountains in Alta Verapaz in the early 1980s and was shot by the army because he hadn’t got his papers. In 1982 Ríos Montt of the Inglesia del Verbo was in control. He ardently preached evangelism during his one year of dictatorship and now in every Indian village there are up to half a dozen evangelist huts and it is not uncommon to see Indian women or poor ladino women stretched out, beating the ground at night, possessed by the Holy Spirit while a man plays the accordion and croons lullaby-hymns. Inglesia Assamblea Dios Bethsaida, Inglesia Evangelica Cuadrangular, Inglesia Evangelica Bautista Gethsemani, Templo Evangelico Emmanuel, Inglesia de Dios Pentecostes, Templo Assamblea de Dios Salem, Inglesia El Redentor are reverberations of General Ríos Montt, usually poor, dusty places, often with drums and keyboards. General Ríos Montt, a man still praised because he had delinquents shot, a man whose boring sermons preached on television every Sunday night are still voodoo. ‘I don’t steal. I don’t lie. I don’t abuse,’ was his pabulum for the country.
‘No mas secestros’, ‘No more kidnappings’, a slogan said on a wall in the red-light district of Zona I in Guatemala City.
It was raining and all that could be seen of female prostitutes were their legs sticking out from under long sheets of plastic. A male prostitute in a glitter suit played with a lighted yo-yo by the kerb.
The first breath-in of this country, under skies which could have been the cloud skies of Knock, had been the giant, cupola churches of Guatemala City which seemed to flinch – the memory of murder or earthquake? – and the Spanish colonial churches the colour of pig pigment. Inside these churches saints held up infants wrapped in chiffon as if they were about to throw them. Indian women clung to the brown garb of a saint and the Virgin was lined up like women in a beauty competition – Our Lady of San Juan, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Mercedes, Our Lady of Desamperados, the Immaculate Conception, Our Lady standing on a half-moon, Our Lady standing on a lamb. They had the look of 1950s Italian stars, black or hennaed hair, vaguely febrile faces.
The most popular was Our Lady of Desamperados, Our Lady of the Abandoned. Two street children prayed in front of her, one with a turtle-brown face, his white teeth gleaming as he prayed. They followed me outside afterwards. There were ancient black and white photographs stuck behind Our Lady of Desamperados, a youth, one leg astride on stone steps. Christ often lay like a caged animal in a glass cage, sometimes silvered ocelot skin on him. If he was standing the favourite colour of his garb seemed to be bluebell blue with a confetti of thorns on his head.
Men with rose-madder and cobalt typewriters had typed passport applications on the streets in Guatemala City. Jesuit magazines ranged alongside those showing near-nude and masked wrestlers or by booklets about the splendours of sex. Towels from El Salvador were exhibition pieces in shops; they showed tableaux of peace – women washing by brooks, ox-drawn ploughs in the fields, a turtle on its journey. There were painted flowers made of corn husks on the wall of a restaurant with all the signs of the zodiac on the floor. The faces in record-shop windows were mainly of Franco de Vita and Tres Voces de El Salvador.
The journey through Guatemala had been on protruding-nosed buses painted in carousel colours, past towns where Indian women vendors sprinkled yogurt with cinnamon, where candles burned at evening on sky-blue weighing scales on market stalls under runny volcanos, where Maria Montes stood in the nude in barberíe alongside Virgin Marys with stamens of gold on their head.
There were Chinese restaurants in every town and village, long-necked birds, swans, dragons trussed together outside them. ‘Why are there so many Chinese people?’ I asked my hostess in Cobán. ‘Because Milton Cerezo, the brother of President Vinicio Cerezo, offered Chinese people citizenship for eight thousand dollars.’ But then again she told me that the government in El Salvador pays the guerrillas so that American aid keeps coming every day. She also told me that when aid came after the 1976 earthquake the streets of Guatemala City were chock-a-block with Mercedes. That I had no trouble believing.
By Lake Atitlán there were miles of tourist stalls, huge hangings haunted by the faces of little merchants who stood in front of them. But the casualties mix with the tourists. In 1988 an epileptic boy who went looking for firewood outside San Lucas Tolimán near Lake Atitlán disappeared as did two of his relatives who went in search of him. The army was in the area at the time. Last December, in Sololá, overlooking the lake, fifteen people, including three children, were mowed down by the army when they appeared at an army base to protest against army pillaging.
In the fields on my journey had been the red blooms of coral trees, trees with huge white bells on them – the cartucho tree. There were young soldiers with M16s all over the roads as there had been security men with M16s outside every second store in Guatemala City. A bridge on the way to Cobán had just been blown up so we had to go another way. The power in Guatemala City was cut off for three days just after we’d left it, a power station blown up, and cholera was confirmed at the same time.
‘I came to this hotel and went to a picture house where I met a dumb whore …’ Urine merged with the flooding from the showers in a hotel. On my door there were weavings of graffiti. ‘La muer que entre aqui acompañada es para yique?’
I’d come here with two American students. We’d met in a bar in Alabama in December and made a pact to come here as a woman in country-and-western gear sang a Patsy Kline number – ‘I cried all the way to the altar’ – to fat women in male dress perched on tables. Sandra, one of my companions, led anti-war protests of five people around an orange-buff clock tower called Denny Chimes in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in January.
Beside the billboards with peace signs were billboards with posters of nudes, a nude with Alka Seltzer scrawled across her stomach, a nude with a battery in her pubic parts; on buses people stared into a little magazine which showed preening nude women among an array of mutilated and preferably nude corpses – prostitutes found murdered in Guatemala City or San Salvador, street children murdered by the police in Guatemala City, the victims of death squads in El Salvador, guerrillas found murdered near the power station which was blown up.
In small towns lyceum boys paraded with the goose step, immaculate white bands crossed on their chests, necklaces of regalia around their necks, plumes in their caps. They paraded past graffiti of blue and red and pink. On one parade there were fire brigades, each with its madrina, its beauty queen.
The confessional boxes in churches looked as if they were for dolls. Beside the statues of Dominic Savio and St Beatrice de Silva in small churches were altars for recent martyrs, priests, catechists, agronomists killed in 1981, 1982, their photographs honoured with white ribbons.
All over Guatemala ‘Dos nacos en el planeta de las mujeres’ was playing, two simpletons in G-strings confronting a synod of Amazons. The second most popular film was Los Mercenarios Implacables with Miles O’Keefe.
The stacks of postcards all over Guatemala City had prepared me for this country, postcards showing young Indian men dressed as centurions, wearing saffron cloaks, postcards barred with fuchsine and indigo, the predominant colours of costume. But there was another, never to be erased stack of postcards, nuns in white bearing the coffin of an Indian woman who’d died in childbirth, street children throwing paper flowers and white crêpe over a murdered comrade, street children bearing the coffin of a murdered comrade, street children keeping vigil around the coffin of their comrade, street children with their ears cut off and their eyes either burnt or gouged out, bodies being recouped from the secret, mass graves of the early 1980s.
In El Quiché, during one such excavation, the firemen played football with the skulls.
Poverty is the man with a missing hand; shanty towns built on landfills; restaurants with no running water where smells are drowned out with pom, a sacrificial incense; a legless boy on a rollerboard holding up a gallows from which a row of pink candyfloss hangs. Hope is nearly always the Virgin Mary, the edges of her garments; a child, a child in white bobby socks and a coral party dress with fiery edges to the frills. The bus of gentian blue and flamingo pink, ‘flor de mi tierra’, didn’t stop for an Indian woman and her two small children but it stopped down the road for a ladino woman with pastel lipstick.
In banks in little villages there were usually four queues, traveller’s cheques, savings, cashing regular cheques, payments. The Indians were always queuing to pay.
Black people cling to the coast where the almendra, the almond tree, turns carmine by the sea in late August, where little black boys with amber and gold in their hair gesticulate their penises at the sea, where the vultures gather like black crêpe on shores flanked by tendril-like coconut palms. ‘Martin Luther King. Bob Marley. Nelson Mandela dueho,’ is carved on a tree.
Raddled tennis shoes are piled up with teddybears, Alka Seltzer, aspirins, soup-mixes and bikinis in stores on the sea front.
At night, to the sound of reggae, there’s a run on cornflakes which are lit up by kerosene lamps.
‘Guatemala tu nombre es immortal,’ says the carthartic sign on a beach. Miami Vice is the name of a brothel and a black boy on the brothel steps has picked up a card: ‘La Cadavera’.
‘Como se llama?’ I ask a little ladino boy in a blouse of lacquer red on the shore at night.
‘Anton.’
I start walking away and he runs after me.
In the night of chalcedony and smoke a little black boy pulls another little black boy along on a dried-milk tin.
I buy Anton pink nougat sweets from El Salvador which have candied fruit in them and my pretend parenthood is done. He hurries away.
Back at Houston Airport an American man is saying loudly into the telephone: ‘I don’t want to play games with you. I’ve seen enough games in Central America. I’ve no sentiment left for you and I don’t want to go home.’
I’ve no sentiment left for you, I thought, and I don’t want to go home, and like Whitney who ran away from San José I want to go on travelling to ferias where the stalls are sprinkled with the Tarot – La Rosa, La Sirena – where mariache bands in maroon suits and in black velvet dicky bows play ranchera music – three-chord progression music – where men in sombreros take aim in shooting galleries over the mass graves of pink mice.