Jaque

V I V E N C I A S : R e p o r t s f r o m t h e F i e l d

T h i s i s w h a t I r e m e m b e r a b o u t G u a t e m a l a

H é c t o r To b a r

Latino Studies (2013) 11, 253–257. doi:10.1057/lst.2013.7

This is what I carry with me when I write. First, one of my earliest childhood memories. I am four or five years old, a

native Angeleno visiting his father’s hometown, Gualán, on the Motagua River. I have spent a day splashing in the shallow water, in a river that’s a protagonist in family sagas as yet unknown to me. I’ve waded among river stones and boulders, and I have taken ill.

Night falls and I am lain out by my father on a concrete slab. Pungent ointments are applied to my skin by a medicine woman. A large group of relatives stands around me, whispering words in Spanish, while a bulb hovers over me with an electric glow. I am feverish, sweating, in a kind of waking dream, far from home, far from Los Angeles and the bungalow courtyard I call home – and I am closer than I can ever be to the place where my story begins.

And then I return to Los Angeles, to the solitude of my life as an only-child of the only Guatemalan family I know, in a city of abundance in which there are no chatty uncles or grandparents or untamed rivers.

Later, I am 11 or 12, visiting the home of my maternal grandfather, in Guatemala City’s Zona 7, in the Colonia 6 de octubre. The Spanish that’s been on my tongue from the time I could speak, first learned in Hollywood apartments from my parents, has begun to die.

I am a North American proto-adolescent in a Guatemalan body. In Guatemala City, amid the concrete cubes, the narrow streets, the unpaved avenues, I feel bigger. I do things that make me look odd and eccentric to the people around me. For example, I plant myself alone in my grandfather’s tiny

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front yard and fire bottle rockets into barren barranco below his home. It’s Christmas time and fireworks are abundant in Guatemala. Like a solitary US Army artillery officer, I bombard imaginary targets in the brush, playing alone, just like I do in Los Angeles. Half an hour later smoke rises from the ravine. An actual volunteer fire unit is summoned, the men climbing down into the scrub land, extinguishing the blaze ignited by Don Marcelo’s oversized gringo nieto. I hide inside the spare, concrete walls of my grandfather’s home, awaiting punishment, though none ever comes. No one is angry with me, there are no recriminations, there is no embarrassment; my pyromania is a minor event in that crowded corner of the city, where, in the years to come, blood will be shed, stupidly and often, by men who carry guns. A few days later Christmas comes. In Los Angeles, this is a holiday marked by an ample tree and the bounty of gifts underneath, wrapped packages from Toys R Us that contain American technological marvels in miniature: toy rockets, toy V8 sedans, toy jet fighters. In Guatemala, there is a single pine branch over a nativity scene, and thin packages for the California grandson: when opened, they are revealed to contain socks and underwear.

My newly divorced mother and I travel up into the hills above the city, to the home of one of her middle-class cousins. They are children and teenagers and we play ball games together in their expansive backyard lawn. I organize a game of kickball, an exotic export from my Los Angeles playgrounds, and for an hour I am in Guatemala and in my element. I am made to understand, with envious glances and looks of admiration from my second cousins, that I gleam with the healthy constitution of a well-fed US boy, a child who can be anything he wants and who knows it. And I know it’s my family’s departure from the “Land of Eternal Spring” that’s made my transfiguration possible.

It’s something to think about on the plane trip home to Los Angeles, with Pan American Airlines wings attached to my sweater by a stewardess in sky-blue wool.

Back in California, I ponder the meaning of Guatemala, in my only-child existence amid jade plants and brick incinerators, with my single mother in a Hollywood apartment decorated with a crumbling mosaic of Venice. Guatemala is there in the extended silences of my severed existence. I walk and play in the dry California air, squint in the desert light, and I think of the empire of metal, plastic and electronics around me. I know I belong here, in this modern, self- confident and brazenly ambitious place; but that I also belong in that less- modern other country that’s on the other end of a plane ride, a country that’s hopeful in a much different way and filled with most of the people whose bloodlines are tied to mine.

Much later I will attend a California university and first hear the word “empire” used in an argument, a noun applied to the world of the living and not to dead Romans or vanquished Aztecs. I will hear and read another, very powerful word derived from that one – imperialism. And other nouns orbiting

Tobar

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around that abstract notion – exile, displacement, diaspora. And I will think that all these words apply to me. They are the words that explain something essential about my existence.

These feelings will grow when I return to Guatemala as a college-educated young man, now with fluent Spanish on my tongue that’s been placed there by professors from Mexico, Puerto Rico and Nueva York.

I have my first intelligent conversation with my maternal grandfather, a bricklayer and union man. He tells me stories of early 20th century Guatemala, an era before trains or automobiles, when travelling to the capital city invol- ved walking long distances between the towns of the country’s central mountain range, sleeping with other travelers in the plazas and courtyards of munici- pal buildings. With my uncle I have my first grown-up family drinking session over bottles of a rum called Venado, and he spins fabulous tales of Gualán that involve vultures and tall women riding on the back of his motorcycle. Another uncle tells me in a casually conspiratorial tone that there’s something in Guatemala City he wants to show me and on a quiet weekend morning we drive to the campus of the Universidad de San Carlos, the country’s national university. From a safe distance, across a lawn and parking lot, he points to a mural, two-stories tall, depicting a massive gorilla dressed in a general’s uniform: Los gorilas al zoológico, el pueblo al poder. I am 20 years old, conscious enough of the moment that Guatemala is living to know that the painting of this mural is a beautiful, defiant and supremely reckless act. Guatemala is a dictatorship, as evidenced by the proliferation of olive drab men in its cities, the rural roads where a campesino in a “self-defense patrol” armed with a machete orders me off a bus and then takes my passport and holds it upside down while trying to read it. On the television, the fictions and absurdity of the dictatorship are on display for my amusement: portly generals in camouflage lined up before a table, reciting prime-time proclamations to the sound of marimba music. Their armed minions sow terror on the streets and make my relatives fear the night. It’s the era of disappearances, of cadavers with hacked limbs, trash dumps that are a paradise for vultures that feed on human remains. I am made to understand by my cautious relatives, in guarded statements, that they mourn these happenings, feel a collective sorrow, even though they never speak of them. I am the visiting, educated son now, and they want me to know things, and yet they want to protect me. They want to shield me from the murderous and anarchic crimes of the empire. From the official violence, wielded in a brutish but yet somehow effective manner, imposing a silence upon on all but a brave few.

I am 20 and I feel protected – by the eagle of my US passport, and the L.A. smarts I carry inside me. So I set out to explore Guatemala alone. I take the train from Guatemala City to Puerto Barrios, on a pilgrimage to Gualán, to the station where I now know my paternal grandparents met. My grandmother tells me the story before I leave Guatemala City. She was an orphan teenager,

I remember Guatemala

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come to look for work and live with relatives. My grandfather sat at the station and waited for the daily train from the capital to arrive, and introduced himself at the platform to the prettiest single woman to step off that day. He romanced her and eventually gave her two sons without ever marrying her. Later, he abandons her, and she eventually kidnaps my father to rescue him from his abusive stepmother – she escapes with him via the train, waiting at that same station from the southbound train to Guatemala City.

I travel in an old British passenger car without windows, behind a steam locomotive puttering anachronistically in the late twentieth century. We move northward at a jogger’s pace, stopping in the middle of empty fields where campesinos wait with large baskets. Finally the train reaches the station where my family story begins: I see a shuttered clapboard building with a corrugated tin roof, an empty concrete platform, and on the ground around the tracks too much discarded trash. It’s small and sad and very unromantic, and before I can look for any more meaning, any hint of the family stories that took place there, I am rolling away. I am there two minutes and I let the train carry me away to Puerto Barrios, the Caribbean port at the end of the line.

I become a writer, and for the rest of my life the fleeting memory of that train platform, and my extended memories of Guatemala, will echo with me on my travels as a writer in the events I am appointed to witness and the chronicles I am paid to tell. I begin as a writer for my hometown newspaper, a Los Angeles corporate behemoth written in English. I am hired for my fluency in the language of villages and exile, because I come from a land of tiny Christmas presents and unregulated pyrotechnics, and because I am unafraid to speak the language of that place, now spoken by more than a million Angelenos. I know things from two worlds, and I honor my duality and revel in it.

I am a translator in a city hungry for understanding. I am the writer who knows the language of rivers and train stations, of milpas and barrios, of palacios municipales and universidades autónomas; and also the vocabulary of freeways and skyscrapers and planning commissions. I perform this daily interpretation on my feet, traveling about the metropolis, rendering observations in prose: character sketches, assorted axiomatic truths about Latin America unknown to the monolingual English speaker, and epic, cross-border biographies told in short newspaper paragraphs. I speak of how the practices of distant Mesoamerican places are being imprinted on the life of our city. I explain how the exiles, with their tales of loss and with their resilience, are leaving a mark on our US city, on our downtowns and our suburban tracts, our city halls. Some of my readers write to me and tell me they’ve looked up from the printed page and felt certain mysteries of the city have been explained to them for the first time. Others are angry because they feel I am celebrating the loss of a beloved home, their ownership of this place being wrested from them by outsiders.

The journey back and forth across the continent, in automobiles and airplanes, and also in my imagination: that’s what makes me a writer. It gives me

Tobar

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an eye for the absurd, the unfair, the poignant, the magnificent. It gives me an aesthetic, and a sense of literary purpose with altruistic overtones: I feel the need to speak for many. And in this need I find a craft. I write books, and the pursuit of this craft leads me to Garcı́a Márquez and Neruda, and then to Steinbeck and DeLillo, to Shakespeare and Twain, following an improbable, personal logic that is both Latin American and of the United States. It gives me a textured but very confident sense of self and identity, a momentum that propels my fingers on the keyboard, and that puts pen and ink onto paper.

My word-work gives me power, strangely, on both sides of the cultural divide. I am still in my twenties when, back in Guatemala, one of my uncles calls me “Don Hector,” and as self-centered as I am I know I am too callow to deserve such an honorific. In my hometown, in English, I am given the privilege of being published again and again, and the feeling that I’m also undeserving of that honor is something that I don’t quite shake, until I am in my forties and the writing and reading culture of my city is transformed again. I realize, eventually, that I am no longer translating, but describing the shared experience of a city and country. This happens when I look up from the books I’ve written, and have been asked to sign, and I see the faces of young readers. They are, for the most part, students and recent college grads in their twenties. Their faces and expressions are recognizable to me in ways that are difficult to express. I can sense that they, too, have cornfields, trains and rivers in their pasts, and that they want more books to read, words to call their own.

I remember Guatemala

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