Woe is me: I’ve been stood up by a tuc-tuc man. As a result I was half an hour late for school (long walk), which is just as well since my brain can’t operate at full-blast all that long.
My teacher, Silvia, continues to indulge my lack of interest in textbook conversations. Initially she tries to engage me (in Spanish) with such sparkling ice-breakers as, Which do you prefer to wear: skirts or trousers? But soon we leave my wardrobe behind and are talking about her grandmother’s memory of an encounter with La Llorona (my second-favorite legend in the world, about which I produced a piece for NPR years ago, which you can find on this blog if you do a search) and her explorations on eBay.
She has an amazing talent: she makes me feel like I’m not a moron. But the minute I emerge from under her wing and hit the town on my own, I’m dumb again. The young girl at the crepa counter where I ordered lunch today wouldn’t prepare my order till she’d made me say it right.
This afternoon I asked Silvia if she’d be willing to visit the city cemetery with me. Since it’s the other spot where robbers consistently lurk, it’s the other place the police will accompany tourists. Yet for some reason no other tourists wanted to go. Go figure. So Silvia, the police guy and I had a wonderful little outing, just the three of us. They told me there’s a Jesus whose eyes follow you wherever you go, but he must have been hiding.
Attached to the side of the church is the city’s only morgue con autopsy facility, housed in a worn, garage-sized structure. The door was open and, had I looked, I would’ve seen a body on the stainless steel gurney. The body’s grieving family sat just outside. The police guy said there’d been some kind of accident.
Throughout every day and night there are intermittent blasts from fireworks. The ones in the morning often mark a birthday. Today at noon there was an unusual flurry which I found out was in celebration of the festival of El Cristo de Esquipulas: the Black Christ. I read that he’s a teeny little thing made of dark balsam, and is so revered that he draws pilgrims from all over Guatemala, often on their knees.
It’s been quiet the last couple nights at my boarding house — just me and the owner — but tonight the place is hopping: an American couple, an Austrian couple and two Guatemalan men from Nebaj. They’re all sitting around drinking rum and talking and laughing, but I have to go study my irregular verbs now.
Postscript: How could I study within spitball’s distance and not join the conversation? Well, I didn’t join too much because my Spanish sucks, but I listened. The Austrian couple used to be acompaí±entes during the war, foreigners who lived in remote Maya villages to help protect the natives from massacre. The Guatemalan, who works with displaced indigenous families in the north, was talking about the difficulties in translating between Spanish and Maya language. Branch in Spanish is “arm of the tree” in Ixil. Door is “mouth of the house.”
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