Domingo, 23 marzo.[1] I had made camp on a hilltop overlooking the valley through which the Pan-American Highway snaked, eighty kilometers into Guatemala. I was excited to be there, under the brilliantly green long-needled pines of the Guatemalan Highlands, an extension of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas. My first impression of the people was positive: They were friendly but self-possessed, paying only as much attention to me as was necessary. From a respectful distance I was falling in love with the Maya women, with the shy smiles on their broad faces, with the long thick braids of their black hair.

That day had started with a late-morning hike out of San Cristóbal de las Casas and then a ride from two California dudes headed for Panajachel on Lago de Atitlán. I crossed the border with them, paying two quetzales for my visa stamp and twenty for an “inspección.”[2] But the more time I spent with those guys, the more troubled I was by their bogus carelessness, their jive disdain for the land they were passing through, their mean-spirited jokes about “those little Indians in their silly costumes.” Even though I was considering Panajachel as a stop-off, I had them let me out five kilometers past Huehuetenango, the first city we happened upon.

As I prepared my dinner, I thought through an itinerary: I had a week until Palm Sunday, the beginning of Semana Santa, enough time to stay a few days somewhere on Lago de Atitlán before arriving in Antigua for its famous Holy Week celebrations and ceremonies. By then, the package of submissions for the literary magazine I was co-editing should have made its way from Iowa City to Guatemala City.

The next morning I hiked into Huehue to exchange a travelers check for quetzales and check out the market. As I wandered around, a gray-haired man approached me, asking if I wanted to buy a camisa he pulled out of his satchel: an old, tattered cotton shirt, white with blue stripes and a wide collar embroidered in a design of red and blue. I was so taken by the serendipity of the moment, and by his claim that this was his shirt, that I promptly bought it, thinking I’d try to mend it. I later learned this was a traditional shirt worn by the men of Todos Santos Cuchumatan, a Mam-speaking Maya community forty kilometers northwest of Huehue, deep in the Highlands. 

By Tuesday afternoon I was in San Pedro La Laguna, sitting on a rock at the edge of the water at the edge of the day. Fishermen oared out onto the lake in their flat-bottomed boats. A boy told me that in the language spoken by the Maya people of San Pedro, the word for pescado is ch’. Heavy clouds hid the volcanic peaks surrounding the lake, but that didn’t stop me from imagining them.

The previous day I’d caught a bus out of Huehuetenango to Chimaltenango, 200 kilometers southeast toward Antigua. I got a room at the first pensión I happened upon and grabbed dinner in the market. Early the next morning I took a bus from the main plaza to Antigua and proceeded to look for lodgings for Semana Santa. Once the capital of Guatemala but abandoned in 1773 after being destroyed for the second time by earthquakes, Antigua was eventually rebuilt, preserving enough of its Spanish Baroque architecture to earn a designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

All the hotels and pensiones in the city were fully booked; tourists coming for the popular Semana Santa festivities had beaten me to the punch. But I chatted with a young gringo on his way out of town who recommended a home where he’d rented a room. His sketchy directions didn’t lead me to that home but instead to the home of Doña Marina, who had a room to let with a private bath. I made a down payment on eight days’ rent and caught that same bus returning to Chimaltenango, where I met a young Swiss traveler on his way to San Pedro La Laguna. I tagged along with him, catching another bus to Panajachel, where a lancha that ferried passengers across the lake to San Pedro departed on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. We had just enough time to sit down at a little lakeside restaurant and enjoy a bowl of fruit and granola swimming in yogurt, first hint of the gringo influence there.

If Panajachel was teeming with gringos on vacation, San Pedro was jam-packed with hippies who’d slipped out of the mainstream. The greeting party that came down to the landing when the boat arrived was a colorful mixture of Tzʼutujil Mayas and flamboyantly garbed hippies. It took a minute to distinguish the two groups; many of the latter had established semi-permanent residence in San Pedro and were striving to assimilate into the culture. My Swiss friend and I found a place to stay at Casa Felipe – fifty centavos a night for a petate suspended by ropes from a wooden frame. [3]

The next morning began with a bracing bath in Lago de Atitlán, as I scrubbed my skin with the volcanic pumice stone found along the shore. I savored a sixty-centavo breakfast: another big bowl of yogurt with healthy toppings, un café con leche y pan dulce. Fortified by this meal, I hiked toward Volcán San Pedro, walking past milpas and cafetales,[4] past men lugging bundles of cooking wood strapped to their backs. I met a man who explained to me the four Mayan languages spoken in the vicinity. That night, I had dinner at Michel’s, a restaurant featuring fine cuisine prepared by local Guatemaltecos who had been trained by French travelers. Thirty of us – almost all French or Quebecois – enjoyed our Bisteks Milanese at long outdoor tables under hanging lanterns. Later, back at Casa Felipe, I capped the evening with Felipe’s rich dark café, locally grown and roasted, un pan con chocolate, and a Payaso bummed from another traveler.[5]

After three days in San Pedro, I planned to catch the Friday lancha back to Panajachal, but as I got ready to board, I discovered my little money purse was missing. An hour earlier I had been sitting by the lake and getting a lesson in Tzʼutujil from a rambunctious bunch of boys. Here are a few of the fifty words I wrote down in my journal:

perro [dog] - pak’pik’pes

gato [cat] - mix

pájaro [bird] - tsik’in’chok

lago [lake] - ya’

volcán [volcano] - jayu

sol [sun] - kij

luna [moon] - ic

señor [mister] - achi

señora [missus] - ixoc

It turned out the boys had taken a fee for their language lesson by lifting my bolsita while I was busy transcribing the words in my journal. Honestly, it was well worth the price. Another traveler loaned me a quetzal so I could catch the late boat back to Panajachel.

I made it to Antigua by Saturday, in time to witness Palm Sunday events the next morning. After morning mass at the Iglesia de la Merced, a procession began that traveled through the city: children in purple robes and a girl on a donkey led by a young man, preceded by men playing traditional Maya music on wooden flute and drum, and followed by a lively brass band. At three o’clock a series of andas, or floats (although that seems the wrong word for something that eighty men had to shoulder to keep aloft), started out from La Merced. The largest one I named Jesus Carrying the Cross through Clouds with Angels Blowing Trumpets. Antigueños dressed in purple robes lined a route carpeted with pine needles, waiting to take their turns. A smaller anda followed – the Virgin Mary Standing over a Large Heart Stabbed with Knives – and even smaller ones for John the Beloved Apostle and Mary Magdalene. This procession went on for seven hours.

At one point, a young Maya girl let me hold her up so she could see over the crowd, the highlight of my day. I also ran into a mellow Aussie I’d hung out with at Isla de la Piedra six weeks earlier. Antigua was in a festive mood: a marimba band played near Parque Central. According to the cars parked in side alleys around town, people had come from all over Central America. 

On Wednesday morning, I took a bus to Guatemala City to see if the package of manuscripts had arrived at the post office. The city was tense; soldiers shouldering automatic weapons patrolled the streets. The repressive Guatemalan government was fearful of a growing insurgency movement led by university students and Maya campesinos. Just nine days earlier, Archbishop Óscar Romero, an outspoken critic of the Salvadoran army and right-wing paramilitary groups in that neighboring country’s civil conflict, had been assassinated while saying Mass. 

Although no package was waiting for me, the ride back to Antigua offered its own reward, as recorded in my journal: 

This bus steers the streets of Guatemala City

the same Blue Bird bus of my grade school days

but tricked out in the bright benedictions of patron saints

and the passengers miraculously transformed

We have filled the seats and overhead racks

with all the clamor and packages of the marketplace

but now the bus gathers speed as it heads for the highway

The travelers bow their heads

in anticipation of reaching their villages and

as if certain temporal weights could be released by sleep

they all begin to act from other impulses

swaying heavily with the curves

Maya-black heads nodding

arms and shoulders jerking crazily

as the bus turns off the highway

and jolts over dirt roads

All these strange somnolent gestures

to which I am the only witness

the humor and pathos of a people at home in their skin

leaning casually against one another

sombreros falling off the heads of old men

tomatoes and oranges leaping from the mothers’ baskets

and rolling across the floor of the bus

One young Kʼicheʼ girl rests her face on my arm and dreams

as the ticket-taker squeezes his way down the aisle

collecting the forty-five centavos for a journey

worth far more than that

Footnotes:

[1] Sunday, March 23.

[2] In 1980, the Guatemalan quetzal matched the value of the U.S. dollar, one indication of the undue influence of the U.S. government. Guatemala was the quintessential banana republic.

[3] A petate is a mat made of woven palm leaves.

[4] Cornfields and coffee plantations.

[5] Payasos (i.e., Clowns) are a popular non-filter Guatemaltecan cigarette.