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  I’M DOWNSTAIRS.

  It was eight o’clock in the morning. The phone had awakened me and I had to get out of bed and stumble over to the desk to answer it. It was Tamara. She told me that she was downstairs. That she knew me—laughing, teasing, alluding to the past—so she knew she’d have to come and get me. That she wanted to spend the day with me, take me to see a few sights. My brother was still in bed, in a deep sleep. I thought momentarily of the lunch and the prayer service we had scheduled with my sister and her fiancé and all of their friends and ultra-Orthodox rabbis from the yeshiva. I shuddered. Be right down, I said, and hung up.

  As I got off the elevator, I saw Tamara sitting in an armchair in the lobby, her legs crossed and long and bare. I motioned to her to give me a minute and walked over to reception. She walked slowly up to meet me, and stood waiting in silence beside me as I greeted the same old man (I’d begun to view him not as receptionist but as owner, one of those cantankerous owners who don’t trust anybody but themselves, or who are too stingy to pay anybody but themselves) and asked him for a yellow memo pad so I could leave a note for my parents, excusing myself. The old man looked worse than ever. His face more greenish and shriveled. His eyes red. His clothes wrinkled. His hands seemed to tremble. He was staring at Tamara beside me, still serious, still grumpy, and murmured something in Hebrew that sounded disdainful. Tamara ignored him, or perhaps she didn’t hear him, or perhaps his comment wasn’t that disdainful after all. She was wearing a pair of very short, old, torn khaki shorts, leather sandals, a flowing, almost see-through white linen blouse that showed the top of her freckled shoulders, and a bra that might have been red. And that was it. No makeup. Her copper hair was wild and matted, as if she’d just awakened. Her eyes were bluer than I remembered. When I finished and handed the old receptionist the note, Tamara immediately gave me a hug, an urgent hug, and this time there was no Lufthansa uniform and it wasn’t awkward at all. And though part of that hug might have been retaliation for the old man’s disdainful comment, I liked that she held me so tightly and so absolutely. I liked seeing her few strands of gray. I like your gray, I said, and she smiled at me with her big Mediterranean eyes. Then she took a step back and held my hands in hers, our fingers entwined, and I noted with satisfaction that she wasn’t wearing a ring. But for a second, I thought I could make out a very faint circle of pale skin on her left ring finger. Perhaps I had imagined the wedding ring, in the confusion and heat of the airport. Perhaps she had taken it off that morning. Perhaps she had left it at home, hidden in some drawer or case or jewelry box. I looked up. Best not to know.

  Come on, she said, tugging me outside.

  Bamboo

  I was drinking café de olla from a rusty blue pewter cup. Doña Tomasa had put down a matching blue pewter kettle beside me, on the sandy ground of the shack. There were no tables or chairs. The palm-frond roof was already black and full of holes. What little breeze there was stank of rotten fish. But the café de olla was strong and sweet and helped to perk me up a bit, to loosen my legs from the two-hour drive to the port of Iztapa, on the Guatemalan Pacific coast. My back felt damp, my forehead sweaty and sticky. As the heat increased, it seemed, so too did the fetidness of the air. A scrawny dog was sniffing at the ground, in search of scraps or crumbs that might have fallen onto the sand. Two barefoot and shirtless children were trying to catch a gecko that chirped above, hidden amid the palm fronds. It was not yet eight in the morning.

  Here you go, said Doña Tomasa, and she handed me a tortilla with cracklings and spicy chiltepe, wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. She leaned on one of the supports of the shack, rubbing her plump hands on her apron, burying and unburying her feet in the warm volcanic sand. She had salt-and-pepper hair, a leathery complexion, a slightly cross-eyed gaze. She asked where I was from. I finished chewing a mouthful, my tongue stunned by the chiltepe, and said I was Guatemalan, just like her. She smiled politely, perhaps suspiciously, perhaps thinking the same thing I was thinking, and turned her eyes up toward the cloudless sky. I don’t know why I always find it hard to convince people, to convince myself even, that I’m Guatemalan. I suppose they expect to see someone darker and squatter, someone who looks more like them, to hear someone whose Spanish sounds more tropical. And I never pass up any opportunity to distance myself from the country either, literally as well as literarily. I grew up abroad. I spend long stretches of time abroad. I write about it and describe it from abroad. As though I were a perpetual migrant. I blow smoke over my Guatemalan origins until they become dimmer and hazier. I feel no nostalgia, no loyalty, no patriotism—despite the fact that, as my Polish grandfather liked to say, the first song I learned to sing, age two, was the national anthem.

  I finished the tortilla and the café de olla. Doña Tomasa, having taken my payment for breakfast, gave me directions to a patch of land where I could leave my car. There’s a sign, she said. Ask for Don Tulio, she added and walked off without saying good-bye, dragging her bare feet as though they were weighing her down and muttering something bitter, perhaps a little tune.

  I lit a cigarette and decided to walk awhile along the Iztapa highway before returning to the car, a classic Saab, sapphire-colored, which a friend often loaned me for traveling around the country. I walked past a stall selling cashews and mangoes, an abandoned gas station, a group of dark-skinned men who stopped talking and just looked at me askance, as though resentful or perhaps bashful. The earth wasn’t earth but little bits of paper and wrappers and dry leaves and plastic bags and a few discarded green almonds, crushed and rotting. In the distance, a pig wouldn’t stop squealing. I kept walking, slowly, unconcerned, noticing a mulatta woman on the other side of the road who was too fat for her black-and-white-striped bikini, too chubby for her high heels. All of a sudden, I felt my foot touch something wet. Maybe because I was looking at the mulatta, I had stepped in a red puddle. I stopped. I looked left into a dark and narrow warehouse and saw that the floor was covered in sharks. Small sharks. Medium sharks. Blue sharks. Gray sharks. Brown sharks. Even a couple of hammerhead sharks. All of them seemed to be floating in a mire of brine and guts and blood and more sharks. The stench was almost unbearable. There was a girl on her knees. Her face shone with water or perhaps sweat. She had her hands deep inside a big gash in the white belly of a shark and was pulling out organs and entrails. In the back, another girl was rinsing down the floor with the weak stream of a hose. It was the fishermen’s cooperative, according to a badly painted placard on the wall. Every morning, I presumed, the fishermen of Iztapa brought their catch there and the two girls cleaned it and cut it up and sold it. I noticed that most of the sharks no longer had fins. I remembered having read somewhere about the international black market. They called it finning. I’ll have to be careful later, I thought, in the sea. It seemed to be a day for sharks.

  I TOSSED THE CIGARETTE BUTT nowhere in particular and returned to the car, hurrying, almost running away from something. As I drove, I noticed that I had already started to lose the image of the sharks. It occurred to me that an image, any image, will inevitably start losing its clarity and its strength, even its coherence. I felt compelled to stop the car right there in the middle of the town and try to find a notebook and pencil and write it down, capture it, share it through words. But words are not sharks. Or maybe they are. Cicero said that if a man could go up to heaven and from there contemplate the whole universe, the wonder that such great beauty caused him would diminish if he had no one to share it with, no one to tell it to.

  After a couple of kilometers on a dirt road, I finally found the sign Doña Tomasa had told me about. The land belonged to an indigenous family. The house was made of sheet metal, bricks, broken tiles, cinder blocks with exposed rusty rebar. There was a plot of maize and beans, a few palm trees looking grim and sad. There were chickens running free. A white goat was chewing the bark of a guava tree that it was tied to with a length of iron wire. Under a canopy, sprawled out on the ground, three young women were husking corn as
they listened to an evangelist preaching on a small portable radio.

  An old man approached, tanned and taciturn and still muscular despite his age. Don Tulio? I asked. At your service, he replied without looking at me. I explained that Doña Tomasa, the lady from the shack, had sent me. Right, he said, scratching his neck. A boy age five or six appeared and hid behind the old man’s legs. Your son? I asked, and Don Tulio whispered yes, the youngest. When I held out my hand, the boy lowered his gaze and blushed at such a grown-up gesture. I opened the trunk of the car and started to take out my things, and at that moment, as though rising up from an abyss, as though muffled by something, perhaps the dryness or the humidity or the already inclement sun, I heard a series of guttural cries. I fell silent. I heard more cries. Far away, behind the house, I caught sight of an older woman, whom I took to be Don Tulio’s wife or mother, helping a fat and half-naked young man as he lurched forward and fell on the floor like a drunk, kept crying out like a drunk, and headed straight toward us. He was struggling to walk toward us. He wanted something from us. The lady, using all her strength, was determined to stop him. I looked away, out of respect, or pity, or cowardice. Nobody else seemed very concerned.

  Don Tulio said it was twenty quetzales, for the whole day. I took a bill out of my wallet and paid him, still hearing the young man wail. Don Tulio asked if I knew the way to the beach on foot, or if I wanted his son to accompany me. I was going to say that I didn’t know, thank you, when suddenly the young man shouted something that I couldn’t understand but that sounded coarse and painful, and Don Tulio immediately rushed off. The young man, now spread-eagle on the ground, was having spasms, as though epileptic. Finally, the old man and woman managed to drag him off and haul him around behind the house, out of sight.

  Though they were quieter and more distant now, I could still hear the howls. I asked the boy what was happening, who the young man was, if he was ill or drunk or something worse. Kneeling down, playing with an earthworm, he ignored me. I put my things down on the ground and slowly, cautiously, headed toward the back of the house.

  The young man was in a bamboo cage, lying in a puddle of mud and water or possibly urine. I could hear all the flies buzzing around him. This one turned out bad, whispered Don Tulio when he saw me standing next to him, but I didn’t know whether it was a moral or a physical judgment, whether he was referring to some perverse behavior or alcohol habit, to a nervous condition or a mental deficiency. I didn’t want to ask. I watched the young man in silence through the thick bamboo bars. His pants were wet and half-open. His chin was white with saliva, his chest covered in small fistulas and sores, his bare feet muddy and filthy, his eyes red, tearful, almost closed. I thought that a poor indigenous family had no choice but to keep him away from the world, to remove him from the world, building him a bamboo cage. I thought that while I could take a day off and drive two hours from the capital to a beach on the Pacific for no other reason than to go for a swim, this young man was a prisoner to something, to some kind of evil, or alcohol, or dementia, or poverty, or something much bigger and more profound. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and eyes. Maybe because of the crystalline coastal light, the cage suddenly looked sublime to me. Its craftsmanship. Its shape and resilience. I came a little closer and gripped two of the bamboo bars tightly. I wanted to feel the bamboo in my hands, feel the warmth of the bamboo in my hands, feel the reality of the bamboo in my hands, and perhaps not feel my own indifference, nor the indifference of an entire country. The young man writhed briefly in the puddle, stirring up the swarm of flies. His moans were now docile, resigned, like those of an animal that has been mortally wounded. I let go of the two bamboo bars, turned around, and walked to the sea.

  The Birds Are Back

  I arrived at the Martínez house well into the afternoon, at just that moment when the sky recedes, and the street dogs bark on their corners, and at the house next door an evangelical preacher, aided by a broken microphone and a loudspeaker, starts up his frenzied shouting and chanting.

  The door was opened by a short, dark, elderly woman with a friendly face and a blue apron she’d probably been wearing all day. You’re Señor Halfon, she said. Please come in. I’m Ernestina, Iliana’s mother, she said, holding out her hand. Iliana and her father won’t be long, she told me. They just went to check on his coffee plants, not far at all.

  Doña Ernestina closed the door behind me and we stood there in a dark narrow hallway. To one side was a leatherette sofa. To the other, directly across from the sofa, the wall was covered with small family photos, now faded and matte; also on the wall were four large high-school diplomas, all in a row, all proud in their wood and imitation gold-leaf frames. Doña Ernestina talked me through each photo, pointing as she explained—over the evangelical shouting and chanting—which of her four children was in each one, and at what age, and where they were, and what they were doing, and whose piñata it was. You see, my husband, Juan, used to love taking pictures, she said nostalgically. Before, she said, her voice suddenly a bit hoarse, and she said no more. But that last word seemed to hang there, framed among all of the photos and diplomas, like a gateway to something, perhaps to another time, another memory, another corridor, one even darker and narrower, one with no way out.

  The Martínez home—humble and immaculate—was on a fairly steep hill in La Libertad, a hard-to-reach town with a temperate climate in the Guatemalan highlands, in the department of Huehuetenango, just a few kilometers from the Mexican border. A notoriously dangerous and violent part of the country: in the past few years, because of narcotrafficking; during the armed conflict of the seventies and eighties, because of military abuses and massacres; at the turn of the twentieth century, because of the revolutionary wars fought against president and despot Manuel Estrada Cabrera (years later, Miguel Angel Asturias would use him as the model dictator for his novel, El Señor Presidente). In 1915, the very town of La Libertad, then called Florida, was the setting for the last revolutionary battle against Estrada Cabrera’s army. The revolutionaries didn’t win that last battle, but they succeeded in establishing peace and freedom in the region, and in 1922, in their honor, once Estrada Cabrera was out of power—before dying, he’d been declared insane by Congress and forced to resign—the name of the town was officially changed to La Libertad.

  The evangelist’s sermon suddenly ratcheted up. The front door opened. Iliana walked in smiling, wiping her just-washed hands on the legs of her canvas trousers. She apologized for being late and I said that there was no need, that her mother had kept me entertained. Isn’t that right, Doña Ernestina? And Doña Ernestina blushed slightly. Did you find Pensión Peñablanca? Iliana asked, and I said that I had, that I appreciated it, that I’d left the sapphire-colored Saab there along with my belongings. It’s the only pensión in town, she said, but it’s not bad. And besides, she said, the co-op is close by, right on one side of the main plaza, and so is Doña Tuti’s café. You can have breakfast at her café, no worries. It’s a safe bet. Just ask someone where Doña Tuti’s is, she said. Because there’s no sign.

  She was a small friendly woman, Iliana, with skin even darker than her mother’s. She must have been thirty or thirty-five. I’d pictured her much older. Perhaps because of the seriousness of her e-mails. Or perhaps because of the enormous responsibility and quality of her work managing the local coffee growers’ cooperative: the first co-op in the region, set up in 1965 by a group of men—including her father, Juan Martínez—who owned small coffee plots. I asked Iliana where her father was, and she was about to say something, when Doña Ernestina raised her arm, as though requesting permission to speak, and whispered: That’s Osmundo. Her index finger pointed to the photo of a young couple in a garden, he seated in a plastic chair, she on his lap. There was a silence, both from us and in the neighbor’s evangelical cries. As though he too had heard Doña Ernestina whisper and was waiting for her to keep going. But Iliana was the one to break the silence. That’s Osmundo and his fiancée, she said. Osm
undo was my brother, she said. He was murdered.

  The evangelist began chanting about God and His mercy and Doña Ernestina said dinner was almost ready.

  HIS NAME WAS HITLER. He was splayed out on the kitchen floor tile, before the wood-fire stove that was flickering and crackling and heating the comal. I crouched down. I scratched his chin and heard him purr, and only then did I discover a short black mustache that looked penciled in below his little white snout.

  There were five sisters. One was making tortillas and greeted me from the comal, smiling timidly as she clapped out a tiny ball of masa. Two more were slicing lemons and avocados. Another darted in and out, chasing her three- or four-year-old daughter; she lived with her husband in the house across the way, she explained, on the other side of the street. Iliana told me to sit down, pointing to a small wooden bench painted red and pushed up against the wall. I thanked her, taking in the women’s serene choreography, and thinking about my sister, and my brother, and our own choreography, and thinking that that smell—coffee, smoke, pine, coal, ground maize—was the closest thing there was to the smell of family.

  Juan Martínez walked slowly into the kitchen. He was wearing an orange shirt—neon orange, fiery orange, even fierier against his toasted skin. Iliana introduced us and he held out his hand in silence. His hands were leathery campesino hands. His thin body gave the false impression of fragility. He had a sad withdrawn look, and it was a moment before I realized it was the same look Iliana had. He invited me to sit beside him on the small wooden bench.