We’d stopped seeing birds, Señor Halfon. We’d stopped seeing animals. This hillside was all bare, completely stripped, not a tree left. You see, people had to chop down all the trees on their land in order to plant maize. Plus, he said, they needed the wood from those trees for their comales, to heat their homes, to cook. Don Juan stood. He pushed back his worn straw hat. Just look at this hill now, he said. It’s full of cypress and pine again, full of shade trees for the coffee, like cushín, which is that one there, and the one over there, which is what they call inga. He lowered his arm, taking his time, and went on. Now that the co-op is up and running, coffee brings us enough money to buy our maize, so we don’t have to plant it. Now our own coffee plants and our shade trees, when we prune them, give us enough wood for the comal, so we don’t need to cut down any other trees. Now we plant trees, said Don Juan. And there’s nothing better, Señor Halfon, than giving life. Giving life not just to coffee plants and trees, but to the mountain itself.
The three of us kept walking, single file, down a dry narrow trail lined with very green coffee plants decked with very red fruit. Iliana was pointing out which plants were arabica and which were bourbon and which were caturra. Those are the best varieties, she said. That’s all I have here, on San Andrés Farm, said Don Juan, and smiled. We try to get members not to plant cataui or catimor anymore, Eduardo, since those varieties don’t produce such good coffee. Don Juan stopped, crouched before a plant, and pulled off a short branch at the bottom. You have to pull out the offshoots, explained Iliana, watching her father, to thin the plant so that it produces better beans, better coffee. At first, she said, it was very difficult to make the older members understand that. Don Juan seemed to stroke the plant’s trunk with affection after pulling out its offshoot. People around here were used to a plant producing a lot of coffee, said Iliana, and of course, when you remove the offshoots, that plant produces fewer beans, but those beans are much higher-quality. The plant invests all of its energy, you could say, into producing less fruit, but that fruit comes out better. As I listened to Iliana speak, as I observed her and her father, a forbidden question suddenly popped into my head, an almost biblical question, a question that must never be asked, a question that could only occur to someone with no offspring. And I swallowed bitterly. It’s like pledging quality over quantity, you see? Iliana went on, and that pledge marks a change not only in the way members grow coffee, but also in the way they conceive of themselves.
Don Juan stood and we continued walking in silence among the coffee plants, traversing the slippery, uneven terrain. We heard the distant cry of a falcon, then the sweet metallic trill of a motmot, then the joyous cackling of a flock of parakeets.
We came upon some dilapidated, rotting wood huts. What’s this, Don Juan? I asked, but Don Juan made no reply. Perhaps he didn’t hear me. He stood before a lone coffee plant, tall and dense and bursting with red fruit. All of that, said Iliana, jerking her jaw toward the row of huts, was my brother’s chicken coop. No one has kept it up for the past three years. Ever since he was murdered.
Don Juan turned his back to us and seemed to step into the enormous, lone coffee plant. As though hiding among its green leaves, searching for something among its green leaves. As though wishing the old plant would protect him. His back still to us, he was plucking beans off the old plant, slowly, tenderly, his campesino hands letting the red fruit fall soundlessly onto the dry ground. He bent a little and picked the lower beans. He stretched to the upper branches, pulled them toward him, and his expert hands stripped them clean. The ground around his feet was turning red. His straw hat crackled in the branches. He now looked more hunched, smaller. He kept on plucking beans and dropping them onto the ground. He kept entering the foliage of the old plant, the greenery of the leaves and branches, until the whole of him disappeared entirely.
White Sand, Black Stone
The young officer was reading the pages of my passport diligently, scrupulously, as though they were the pages of a gossip magazine or a cheap novel. He held them up. He looked at them against the light. He scratched them hard with the nail of his index finger. It occurred to me that he might fold over the corner of one of the pages at any moment, bookmarking it, as though planning to return to his reading later. You travel a lot, he said suddenly, as he looked over all the stamps. I didn’t know whether this was a question or an observation and so I remained silent, watching him sitting there in front of me, on the other side of a black metal desk. He couldn’t have been twenty. His face was beardless, dark brown, gleaming. His green khaki uniform fit him too tightly. He seemed unbothered by the beads of sweat that ran slowly down his forehead and neck. So you like traveling, he mused without looking at me, in the contemptuous tone of a new soldier. I considered telling him that all our journeys are really one single journey, with multiple stops and layovers. That every journey, any journey, is not linear, and is not circular, and it never ends. That every journey is meaningless. But I didn’t say anything. Through the open door I could make out the noise of motorcycles, trucks, vans, a ranchera being sung on a transistor radio, thunder in the distance, swarms of flies and mosquitoes and men shouting offers to buy and sell Belizean dollars. Revolving in the corner, an old floor fan simply circulated the humid afternoon jungle heat.
It was my first time there, in Melchor de Mencos, the last Guatemalan town before crossing into Belize. I had left the capital early in the morning, and driven to the border stopping only once, at the halfway point, at Lake Izabal, to put in some gasoline and have some lunch — a seafood broth, a handful of dark tortillas with queso fresco and loroco flowers, and plenty of coffee.
Señor, your place of residence? the officer asked me all of a sudden, still looking through the pages of my passport and jotting down my details in a huge accounting ledger. Guatemala City, I lied, although it wasn’t altogether a lie. And the reason for your trip to Belize? I’m going to visit some friends, in Belmopán, I lied, although that wasn’t altogether a lie either: I had been invited to give a reading at the University of Belize, in Belmopán; traveling by land had been my idea, to get to see the road, to get to know Belize’s beautiful white-sand beaches, Belize’s idyllic turquoise blue sea — an idea that now, having seen the distance and the terrible state of the highways, I was starting to question. And your profession, señor? Engineer, I lied, as I always lie, as I always write on immigration forms. It’s much more advisable and prudent, especially at a border of any kind, to be an engineer than a writer.
The officer said nothing, and slowly, with all the lethargy of the tropics, he continued to note down my details.
Outside, it was cloudy and thick and the sky looked ready to burst. After wiping my forehead with my hand, I started looking at a huge map of Guatemala that was stuck on the wall just behind the officer, and I remembered how, as a boy, in the seventies, I had won a prize at school for having drawn the best map of the country. My drawing, of course, still included the then province of Belize, the largest one, located in the far north. It wasn’t until 1981 that Belize gained its independence — and until 1992 that it was recognized by Guatemala — thereby ceasing to be the upper part of the map that I’d learned to draw as a boy. I was never very good at drawing. But that one time, I remember, I really made an effort. And my prize, which I took with some astonishment from the hand of my teacher, was a small green mango. I still can’t see a map of the country without thinking of a green mango. I still can’t see a map of the country without thinking that Guatemala, in a more than figurative sense, had been decapitated.