So we set off for the capital. My father loved me very much and I was very fond of him, so it always fell to me to travel with him and share his suffering with him. We arrived in the capital. In those days it made me really angry that I couldn’t understand what my father and the man he wanted to sell the mimbre to were saying to each other. The man was telling him he had no money and wouldn’t buy the mimbre. He was a carpenter, an old man. In Guatemala they still use mimbre for furniture and it’s usually the carpenters, especially carpenters in Antigua,* who buy the mimbre to make their special kind of open wickerwork. So we went there and I could see the gestures the men were making to my father but I didn’t know what they were saying. Afterwards my father was very worried because they wouldn’t buy the mimbre. We went looking for other buyers but for us the capital is like another world: one we don’t know, because we live in the mountains. In the end, my father had to leave the mimbre with the first man who only paid him half what he asked. And we went back home with only 25 quetzals. After so much work! We returned home and it was awful because we found my mother had been really counting on our work and thought we were coming back with a lot of money. And we had hardly any. My poor mother nearly died of anger and rage at the fact that after all our suffering we hadn’t any money. She felt sorry for all us children because she knew the hunger and cold we’d gone through collecting the mimbre. In the end, we were forced to go back to the finca to get a bit of money together.
Sometimes we took mountain mushrooms and herbs from the fields to town as well. We sold them and came back with a few centavos in our hands. But for us children, our work was mainly collecting mimbre.
My first visit to the capital was a big step in my life. I was my father’s favourite; I went with him everywhere. It was the first time that I’d been in a truck with windows. We were used to travelling in closed lorries, as if we were in an oven with all the people and animals. It was the first time I’d ever sat on a seat in a truck–and one with windows. I didn’t want to get in at first, because it wasn’t like the trucks I knew. So my father said: ‘I’ll hold you tight, don’t worry. We’ll get there all right.’ He gave me a sweet so I’d get into the truck. And so we set off. I remember the truck starting up…I hardly slept at all looking at the countryside we passed through from Uspantán to the capital. It impressed me very much, it was wonderful to see everything along the way–towns, mountains, houses very different from our own. It made me very happy, but also a bit frightened because I thought, as the truck pulled away, that we would go over into the ravine. When we reached the capital, I saw cars for the first time. I thought they were animals just going along. It didn’t occur to me they were cars. I asked my father: ‘What are they?’ ‘They’re the same as the big lorries, only smaller,’ he said, ‘and they’re for people who only want to carry small loads.’ ‘What we go to the finca in, what the workers ride in, is a lorry for our people,’ my father said, ‘and what we’re travelling in now is what people go to the capital in, just to travel, not to work. And those little ones, they belong to rich people to use just for themselves. They don’t have things to carry.’ When I first saw them, I thought that the cars would all bump into each other, but they hardly did at all. When one stopped, they all had to stop. It was all so amazing for me. I remember when I got home telling my brothers and sisters what the cars were like, how they were driven, and that they didn’t crash into one another or kill anyone, and a whole load of other things as well. I had a long tale to tell at home.
My father told me: ‘When you’re old enough, you must travel, you must go around the country. You know that you must do what I do.’ That’s what he used to say. After we sold the mimbre and got so little money for it, my father went to the office of the INTA.* My father went to the Agrarian Transformation offices, as they call it, for twenty-two years. When people have problems with land, when they’re sold land, or when the government wants to settle peasants in other areas, they go through the Agrarian Transformation Institute. They give you a certain day on which you have to turn up and anyone who doesn’t keep his appointment is punished, or fined. My father explained to me that there was a prison for the poor people and if you didn’t go to that office, that’s where they put you. I didn’t even know what a prison was. My father said the people there didn’t let you in unless you showed them respect. ‘When you go in, keep still, don’t speak,’ he said. We went in and I saw my father take off his hat and give a sort of bow to the man sitting at a big table writing something on a typewriter. That’s something else I used to dream about–that typewriter. How was it possible for paper to come out with things written on it? I didn’t know what to think of all those people but I thought they were important people because my father took off his hat and spoke to them in a very humble way. Then we went home, but after that, every time my father went to the capital I wanted to go with him, but he didn’t have the money to take me. There were so many interesting things, but also things that I didn’t want to see, that frightened me. I thought, ‘If I were alone, I’d die here.’ The city for me was a monster, something alien, different. ‘Those houses, those people,’ I thought, ‘this is the world of the ladinos.’ For me it was the world of the ladinos. We were different. Afterwards I went to the capital a lot, and it became more familiar. But my first impression stayed with me. I remember that my father and I were very hungry. We didn’t have anything to eat. My father said: ‘We’re not going to eat because we’ve got to go here and go there.’ We went all over the city. But I was very hungry and asked my father: ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but we’ve still got so many things to do.’ And instead of food, he bought me a sweet to suck. That impression stayed with me as well–that every time my father went to the capital I thought of him going hungry. I’d never had an ice cream, a nieve as they call it, so my father once bought me one for five centavos. I ate it and it tasted very good.
We spent three days in the capital. My father had a friend there who was from our region, he used to be a neighbour of ours. But he’d started buying and selling things and moved to the capital. He had a house on the outskirts of the city, a tiny shack made of cardboard. We stayed with him. I was very sad to see the man’s children, because before they moved away we used to play together in the countryside and go to the river. I cried when I saw them because they asked me: ‘How are the animals, the rivers; how are the plants?’ They wanted to go back and I was very sad for them. They hardly had any food to eat in the house. They couldn’t give us anything to eat because they had hardly any food. Anyway, that’s where we stayed.
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