After a couple of kilometers on a dirt road, I finally found the sign Doña Tomasa had told me about. The land belonged to an indigenous family. The house was made of sheet metal, bricks, broken tiles, cinder blocks with exposed rusty rebar. There was a plot of maize and beans, a few palm trees looking grim and sad. There were chickens running free. A white goat was chewing the bark of a guava tree that it was tied to with a length of iron wire. Under a canopy, sprawled out on the ground, three young women were husking corn as they listened to an evangelist preaching on a small portable radio.
An old man approached, tanned and taciturn and still muscular despite his age. Don Tulio? I asked. At your service, he replied without looking at me. I explained that Doña Tomasa, the lady from the shack, had sent me. Right, he said, scratching his neck. A boy age five or six appeared and hid behind the old man’s legs. Your son? I asked, and Don Tulio whispered yes, the youngest. When I held out my hand, the boy lowered his gaze and blushed at such a grown-up gesture. I opened the trunk of the car and started to take out my things, and at that moment, as though rising up from an abyss, as though muffled by something, perhaps the dryness or the humidity or the already inclement sun, I heard a series of guttural cries. I fell silent. I heard more cries. Far away, behind the house, I caught sight of an older woman, whom I took to be Don Tulio’s wife or mother, helping a fat and half-naked young man as he lurched forward and fell on the floor like a drunk, kept crying out like a drunk, and headed straight toward us. He was struggling to walk toward us. He wanted something from us. The lady, using all her strength, was determined to stop him. I looked away, out of respect, or pity, or cowardice. Nobody else seemed very concerned.
Don Tulio said it was twenty quetzales, for the whole day. I took a bill out of my wallet and paid him, still hearing the young man wail. Don Tulio asked if I knew the way to the beach on foot, or if I wanted his son to accompany me. I was going to say that I didn’t know, thank you, when suddenly the young man shouted something that I couldn’t understand but that sounded coarse and painful, and Don Tulio immediately rushed off. The young man, now spread-eagle on the ground, was having spasms, as though epileptic. Finally, the old man and woman managed to drag him off and haul him around behind the house, out of sight.
Though they were quieter and more distant now, I could still hear the howls. I asked the boy what was happening, who the young man was, if he was ill or drunk or something worse. Kneeling down, playing with an earthworm, he ignored me. I put my things down on the ground and slowly, cautiously, headed toward the back of the house.
The young man was in a bamboo cage, lying in a puddle of mud and water or possibly urine. I could hear all the flies buzzing around him. This one turned out bad, whispered Don Tulio when he saw me standing next to him, but I didn’t know whether it was a moral or a physical judgment, whether he was referring to some perverse behavior or alcohol habit, to a nervous condition or a mental deficiency. I didn’t want to ask. I watched the young man in silence through the thick bamboo bars. His pants were wet and half-open. His chin was white with saliva, his chest covered in small fistulas and sores, his bare feet muddy and filthy, his eyes red, tearful, almost closed. I thought that a poor indigenous family had no choice but to keep him away from the world, to remove him from the world, building him a bamboo cage. I thought that while I could take a day off and drive two hours from the capital to a beach on the Pacific for no other reason than to go for a swim, this young man was a prisoner to something, to some kind of evil, or alcohol, or dementia, or poverty, or something much bigger and more profound. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and eyes. Maybe because of the crystalline coastal light, the cage suddenly looked sublime to me. Its craftsmanship. Its shape and resilience. I came a little closer and gripped two of the bamboo bars tightly. I wanted to feel the bamboo in my hands, feel the warmth of the bamboo in my hands, feel the reality of the bamboo in my hands, and perhaps not feel my own indifference, nor the indifference of an entire country. The young man writhed briefly in the puddle, stirring up the swarm of flies. His moans were now docile, resigned, like those of an animal that has been mortally wounded. I let go of the two bamboo bars, turned around, and walked to the sea.
The Birds Are Back
I arrived at the Martínez house well into the afternoon, at just that moment when the sky recedes, and the street dogs bark on their corners, and at the house next door an evangelical preacher, aided by a broken microphone and a loudspeaker, starts up his frenzied shouting and chanting.
The door was opened by a short, dark, elderly woman with a friendly face and a blue apron she’d probably been wearing all day. You’re Señor Halfon, she said. Please come in. I’m Ernestina, Iliana’s mother, she said, holding out her hand. Iliana and her father won’t be long, she told me. They just went to check on his coffee plants, not far at all.
Doña Ernestina closed the door behind me and we stood there in a dark narrow hallway. To one side was a leatherette sofa. To the other, directly across from the sofa, the wall was covered with small family photos, now faded and matte; also on the wall were four large high-school diplomas, all in a row, all proud in their wood and imitation gold-leaf frames. Doña Ernestina talked me through each photo, pointing as she explained — over the evangelical shouting and chanting — which of her four children was in each one, and at what age, and where they were, and what they were doing, and whose piñata it was. You see, my husband, Juan, used to love taking pictures, she said nostalgically. Before, she said, her voice suddenly a bit hoarse, and she said no more. But that last word seemed to hang there, framed among all of the photos and diplomas, like a gateway to something, perhaps to another time, another memory, another corridor, one even darker and narrower, one with no way out.
The Martínez home — humble and immaculate — was on a fairly steep hill in La Libertad, a hard-to-reach town with a temperate climate in the Guatemalan highlands, in the department of Huehuetenango, just a few kilometers from the Mexican border. A notoriously dangerous and violent part of the country: in the past few years, because of narcotrafficking; during the armed conflict of the seventies and eighties, because of military abuses and massacres; at the turn of the twentieth century, because of the revolutionary wars fought against president and despot Manuel Estrada Cabrera (years later, Miguel Angel Asturias would use him as the model dictator for his novel, El Señor Presidente). In 1915, the very town of La Libertad, then called Florida, was the setting for the last revolutionary battle against Estrada Cabrera’s army. The revolutionaries didn’t win that last battle, but they succeeded in establishing peace and freedom in the region, and in 1922, in their honor, once Estrada Cabrera was out of power — before dying, he’d been declared insane by Congress and forced to resign — the name of the town was officially changed to La Libertad.
The evangelist’s sermon suddenly ratcheted up. The front door opened. Iliana walked in smiling, wiping her just-washed hands on the legs of her canvas trousers. She apologized for being late and I said that there was no need, that her mother had kept me entertained. Isn’t that right, Doña Ernestina? And Doña Ernestina blushed slightly. Did you find Pensión Peñablanca? Iliana asked, and I said that I had, that I appreciated it, that I’d left the sapphire-colored Saab there along with my belongings. It’s the only pensión in town, she said, but it’s not bad. And besides, she said, the co-op is close by, right on one side of the main plaza, and so is Doña Tuti’s café. You can have breakfast at her café, no worries. It’s a safe bet. Just ask someone where Doña Tuti’s is, she said. Because there’s no sign.