The First Ruination

 

Sara Jane Speaks

Upon the Rio Dulce where we once hunted Wahoos and Dorados, we became prey.

We sailed upon the night sea, silent as the million stars above us. Javier sat at the front of the canoe, Katina at the back, one paddling to the left while the other paddled right. Between them, seventeen-year-old Andy and I sat, each in our own row, I facing Andy’s bare back and staring at his hair tied up lithely at the top of his head. His head moved from side to side as he watched the brown pelicans necklacing the shore. To Me his profile was an enigma, his nose thick but hewn to a point at the tip, his face flat but his cheekbones sharp, so that he went from ugly to stunning then back again depending on how he angled his face. He was pure Q’eqchi.’ He was a survivor of the genocide the Guatemalan government had brought down on the Mayans. My parents had taken him in the year prior.

My father Javier’s face was painted black with shoe polish, an attempt to blend with the blackness all around us. Yet, the whites of his eyes were so radically white they glowed like embers when I first approached the canoe at midnight, my buckled brown satchel strapped over my shoulder, ready for the journey to the United States which would begin with a three-hour sail to Puerto Barrios.

The Sará Jane could have gotten us there in forty minutes, a ferry in ninety. When it was decided that the Sará Jane would have to stay on the docks of Livingston, I actually cried, lamenting that the powerboat which had been purchased on my sixth birthday and which I gave that name when my parents gave me the honor of naming it would be left an orphan at the shore. Taking a ferry in the morning would have proved too great a risk also. Too many people. Too great a chance of being apprehended in the current.

An old danger was brewing anew. The History Keeper Bagamu Beni—a husband and great grandfather, ninety-five years old, skin as black as oil paint—had vanished. Out of thin air, vanished. No doubt, his disappearance was a warning. After months of withdrawing their surveillance, the military government were again covertly monitoring Javier, taking special interest in the radical growth of his extra-governmental education program. He was suspected to be a member of the Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajadores, the communist party. For a government ever suspicious of its uneducated and impoverished population, Javier was becoming a threat in the ranks of Che Guevara, as much a menace as the herd of those European Communists the United States had executed years prior. 

Guatemala, if not the whole world, had been feeding on panic since the end of the Second World War. Forget that Jacobo Árbenz had been democratically elected president of Guatemala in 1951; he was decidedly a communist. His plan to redistribute agrarian land to Mayan agricultural laborers living on hope and sweat proved as much. Thus, it was decided by non-indigenous Guatemala and the U.S. and God Himself (as the Evangelical missionaries were apt to imply in those days) that a dictatorship was the safest alternative to Communism. The coup took place in 1954—out with Jacobo Árbenz, in with former military officer Carlos Castillo Armas, the best leader to fight the Red insurgency. All this three years before I was born, two years before Javier made Livingston his calling.

I had put a great deal of the history together as I once listened to two Garifuna men who sat at the bar of my parents’ restaurant, one in his twenties, the other The History Keeper. The Young One was wondering aloud about how Cesar Mendez would do as president and concluding that it would be more of the same—more greedy, Fat Men getting fatter; Árbenz had been the last messiah. The History Keeper said there was no messiah but Jesús Cristo. The Young One agreed but still wondered how it could be more of us than them and yet we are the ones to suffer, we are the ones to die. The History Keeper ended the conversation with the only thing he knew: they have more evil than we have people.

Andy was still watching the pelicans as I remembered the conversation. Surely, he was wondering if pelicans ever slept. Or had we woken the them?

The military men had awoken Andy a year-and-a-half ago, clamoring into the hut where he and his parents slept.  His mother had commanded him to look away but he did watch them hang his father from the ceiling, did see them pour the yellow liquid on him, and place the lighter flame on his toe. Andy did watch the fire flash up his father’s body like a startled lizard. Before his body crusted to black, the military men were gone and so was Andy’s mother.  He did see it all, though at the time, he couldn’t have named it for what it was to be: the first rumblings of a Mayan genocide

Andy had spoken to Javier about the scene, for by then, he was no longer hiding that he could understand English and Spanish. What he could not explain in English, he drew pictures of. Javier interpreted it as best he could: that the earth assumed Andy’s mother the same day Andy’s father was burned alive, that Andy followed where the Spirit led him, to the town of the Negroes. He’d ditched his wet clothes on the fifth day of a six-day journey across land and sea, so that I found him naked and bedraggled in the restaurant kitchen, searching for food to keep from fainting.

A girl had to love a boy like that. So easy about his thievery. So easy about everything. Even as we floated toward shore, he appeared half-asleep. An agreeable apathy was somewhere in his genes. His father was a warrior, Andy had let on, but he was the same warrior who said that if certain men were so insistent on seizing land, let them have it, for one day, the man who owned the land would go up in the same flames that the earth itself was destined for.

I looked ahead. We were not far from shore. The darkness around us was so soft, nursing us, spoiling us with the heightened scent of clean water and with soft wind and with owl songs.

My mother paddled, cutting through the reflections of trees in the water, my eyes frozen to the shoreline. My mother’s whole life had been upset. She was smart, she was beautiful, she was as rich as any Garifuna had the potential to be in Livingston, and yet she received the lot of every woman since Eve, whose desire too had been for her husband. Katina was leaving everything she knew because when you found a man that set your mind and heart ablaze, you didn’t let him go. Punto. And Javier was a rare breed. A Criollo indifferent to his birthrights. With a man like that, you ignored your ire and you cultivated faith. This was a woman’s lot.

“Mamá,” I called to her as we pulled so close to the shore that I could see dents in the sand.

Andy opened his eyes and looked back at my mother. Her gaze remained rigid.

“Mommy.”

This time, Javier turned around, putting his finger to his lips to hush me. A patch of black paint on his forehead had been smeared off where he rubbed sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. In recent months, my adoration for Javier had blossomed to intrigue, an intrigue that had yet to annoy him.

Daddy, how did your father die?

He didn’t die. He had to go away for a long time when I was your age. He was sent to a prison camp.”

What was his name?

His name was Luis Rafael. That’s what we called him. But I didn’t know him.

 Did your mother leave you too?

No. But I didn’t know her either.

“Mother,” I tried again.

Katina answered in Garifuna, “Quiet, child. We’re almost there.”

I spent the five minutes to shore thinking of the collection of books and records I had chosen to fit into the one satchel I was allowed. Some of my favorites: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Little Women, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Clouds. A collection of Jorge Luis Borges short stories. A Sinatra record, the first my father had bought in the U.S. I had no recordings of punta or parranda. That was the kind of music that lived in your pulse anyway. Andy could help me remember if I ever forgot.

We were then a stone’s throw from shore when I picked up my bag and placed it on my shoulder. When we landed, Javier stood and cut his paddle into the wet sand, as if planting a flag. His face suddenly transfigured, a light shining on it so bright that it made sheer the black paint. Javier squinted and held up his forearm to protect his eyes. The cylinder of light proceeded from a cluster of palm trees, the holder of the light hidden in the midst of them. The light began to bounce up and down from his face to his chest, a tactic meant to tease and confuse so that he could not run before the first crack of a bullet. At the sound of the blast, the pelicans took flight.

The bullet entered where the light stopped and lingered, bursting Javier’s heart straight out of his chest, bits and pieces of his organ stippling my forehead. Javier slid down the paddle he still held, his head landing in the sand.