No one else seemed troubled. They chattered sociably, in what sounded to me like an indigenous soup of languages. The men all wore long-sleeved shirts and sports caps. The women wore pastel cardigans over bright hand-woven blouses. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what those blouses were called. “Wee-PEEL,” prompted a voice in my head, a child’s clear, piping voice, rebuking me for the lapse. That was it, how I had once pronounced the word, but not how it was spelled. I had probably never known how to spell it, and I certainly didn’t now.
I tried not to stare, remembering a taboo, a hex caused by blue eyes. Did anyone still believe that? There was a word for it, but this time no little voice reminded me. Anyway, I was the object of glances myself. A toddler to my left on an old man’s lap, a tiny, black-eyed girl with dusty bare feet, reached out her hand to me. I returned the gesture without touching her. It came back to me, sensually, what it was like when people insisted on touching me as a boy, my skin or my hair, fingers needing to know how a light coloring felt.
Someone tapped me lightly on the arm. It was the drunk. He had moved over to make a place for me on the aisle seat. “Oh. Gracias,” I said. The offer, I suspected, was one of courtesy to a guest, a habit unblurred even by a night of drinking. I took the space, my shoulder pack and suitcase in my lap and my knees jutting into the aisle.
Very soon I began to get an undeniable olfactory signal. The fruity friend beside me was in trouble. I understood, and wished I knew how to tell him that, but he was staring out the window and seemed unaware of the problem. In a minute the stench became overpowering. An undercurrent of snickers moved up and down the aisle. I heard muttered scatology—caca, cagadas—and recalled with a jolt of pleasure that those were words I knew, ones I had been ordered by my mother never to use and like a good boy never did.
The muted hilarity lasted only a minute. The kid in charge up front signaled the driver to pull over, then ordered the people in the aisle to stand as he bumped and squeezed a path to the back. His eyes were on me. I realized that I, the vulnerable gringo, could be considered the source—the curse of Montezuma, the galloping shitskies. “Levantese!” the boy barked, his hands in translation. He wanted me to stand. I refused, pretending ignorance. He said something else, something apologetic, and now I got it. “Oh, no,” I said. “No, don’t!”
He ignored me, reaching across to grab the drunk by the shirt and lift him out of the seat, the man hardly bigger than the boy. I considered intervening—I was bigger than both of them, after all. But I retracted that instantly, picturing a melee, shit flying, maybe literally. I got up and squeezed across the aisle, luggage in my arms, while the kid opened the emergency door with a rasping squeal and shoved the drunk into the street. No one said a word. No cheers, no objections, the driver not so much as turning his head. “Seat, señor,” the boy said to me, with an elaborate sweep of the hand. I stood where I was, filled with regret, as the bus pulled away.
In another ten minutes we entered a long drop, turned onto a cobblestone street and jiggled to a parking lot. I was the last passenger to dismount and was hardly off the steps when I felt the difference. Not just the relief of breathable air, but the cast of light, the pitch of sound. In fact, I was in an enchanting geographic bowl, all but surrounded by green mountains, still half hidden in morning mist.
I felt received, as if I’d made it successfully through twenty-four hours of some kind of a hazing. Early initiation completed, said the mountains. Admit tall skinny bozo in ill-fitting hat.
FOUR
I had planned to take a taxi to an inn and present myself at the Escuela Méndez early the next day, a sensible Monday morning. But “sensible” had lost a good deal of its meaning, and I needed to walk. I crossed an open-air market, through the smoke of grilling food and shouting hawkers, and entered a business district, where a courteous man gave me directions. That put me on a residential street. Adobe houses in pastels fronted directly on the sidewalk. Heavy flowering vines draped over the walls from inner courtyards. It was suddenly quiet. I smelled coffee.
The school address was a hacienda of sorts, a large stucco house surrounded by a flower garden and enclosed by an iron fence. A brass bell hung on a rope, but before I could ring it, a security guard in a brown uniform appeared from under the shadow of a tree. “School?” I asked. “Méndez?”
He eyed me carefully through the gate, without speaking. It occurred to me that there might be another inspection, my paraphernalia spread on the grass, books and all. And if I were to frisk him in turn, would that bulge in his side pocket be a pistol? Like an answer he went for it. I tightened. But it was only a rolled up notebook. He wet his finger. “Llama?” he asked. “Nennen? Nom?”
I could match that. “Jag heter Peterson,” I said, with my Scandinavian (third generation) throat. He found me somewhere in the depths of the notebook, then led me through the carved front door into a large treed courtyard set up with tables. Rooms opened off on all four sides, with wall-sized blackboards. In the office the guard gestured me to a seat, mumbled something into an intercom and handed me a phone.
“Professor Peterson!” said a hearty voice. “Carlos Méndez here. Welcome to Guatemala. So glad you made it safe and sound.” English. British schoolboy accent.
I apologized for barging in on a Sunday, and he to me for the country’s communication services. “There have been a few strikes, you see, work stoppages, mail and telephone off-kilter.” I was enrolled, no question. Everything was “hunky-dory,” he said. He had a tutor waiting for me, a very fine tutor, and a place for me to tuck myself in, “a nice middle-class home with a nice Ladino family.” He would be around in just a moment to wrap things up and take me to my residence.
He came “around” through a side door into the office. A small trim man, Hispanic in appearance despite the British accent, pulling a large napkin from his neck and running his tongue over his teeth. I had interrupted his breakfast. This estate was apparently his home. He pulled out my file, checked my ID, passport and immunization shots. I paid for three weeks, with a fourth reserved as an option.
Then he bustled me into his car, a clean black late-model Lincoln, which he drove with great care through the narrow streets, his eyes just reaching over the steering wheel.
“Are you a family man, Professor Peterson?” he asked.
I answered with only a split-second delay. “One daughter, in college now. My wife’s daughter, that is.” Still my wife, at the moment, on paper.
“Good,” said Méndez. “Because there are two teenagers in this home. They will also be your instructors, if you let them.”
We stopped in front of a house similar to those I had just passed, where we were greeted effusively in Spanish by Don Francisco Ávila Espinoza, his wife, Doña Rosa, and Marco and Juanita, their kids, all four on the plump side. The smell of roasting meat filled the house. I hadn’t smelled a Sunday roast since I lived with my mother in Rhode Island. It made me vaguely uneasy.
“You are in good hands, Professor Peterson,” Méndez said, patting me on the arm, and left.
The Ávila parents turned me over to the kids, who gave me a tour of the first floor: a parlor (“La sala, señor”) with overstuffed furniture and a television set considerably larger than my own, a formal dining room (“El comedor”), the table covered with a flowered plastic cloth, and a tiny inner courtyard (“El patio”) grated overhead but otherwise open to the sky. Cement statues of saints, all with eroded noses, circled a tiled pool. A parrot perched on the head of one of them. “Mandatory parrot,” said Marco, without a trace of accent. “What’s his name?” I asked. “Polly,” he said.
My room was on the second floor. The kids insisted on carrying my bags up the narrow staircase, and I gave in for fear of offending them. They led the way, Marco with the suitcase and Juanita with my pack over her shoulder. Halfway up, out of earshot of their parents, Marco stopped and set the suitcase on a tread. “Caramba!” he gasped, wiping his brow with his sleeve. “Excuse my French, señor.”