Happy Ant-Heap (20 page)

The old capital, Antigua, always regarded as the most relaxed place in the country, was only an hour away by taxi, so I decided to go there and spend a few days in surroundings renowned for their tranquillity. The hotel recommended was of unusual interest for it had been built at immense cost on the ruins of the Convent of Santo Domingo, destroyed in one of the earthquakes for which Antigua has earned a melancholy reputation. It was dark by the time I arrived, with the hotel full of shadows and the lighting in the cavernous reception area so faint that I found it difficult to read the paper I was given to sign. Rooms were reached at the end of long passages in which dark saints, salvaged from the ruins, waited as if in ambush in their niches. Overpowered by the atmosphere, the guests talked in lowered voices. The Santo Domingo, I learned, was about a half a mile from the town’s centre but, enquiring of the direction to take, I was dissuaded from going in search of bright lights by a warning that it was better to be off the streets by eight, and it was now coming up to nine.

Next morning the doubts and misgivings of the previous night were dispelled by the brilliance of the day. More churches, monasteries and convents had been crammed into a relatively small area here than anywhere else in the Spanish colonial possessions, and, although many had been thrown down by the terrific earthquakes of 1717, 1751 and 1753, the shining façades of such buildings that had survived floated above the city. Antigua held a refulgence of a special kind, softened by shadows from balconies and eaves, and above all the vast misted shape of the volcano that formed a background to so much of the city.

It was a Sunday and I walked down to the Plaza where, as was to be expected on this day in any Latin American town of standing, most of the innocent pleasures of life were on display. The Indians had flocked in to sell their weaving, to watch the clowns, to allow conjurors to take plastic balls from nostrils and ears, to listen to the evangelist talking about hell, and to squat in family circles in the gardens, keeping their innumerable children amused. Above all this place resounded with music of an exciting, even violent kind. For the first time I realised that the insistent, shrilling pipe-music of the mountain tops, everywhere in South America, also exists in Guatemala. A group of youngsters who might have been coming here from among the llamas of the altiplano of Bolivia were in frenzied action with panpipes and flutes, over the hugely amplified percussion of a marimba through speakers fixed up on the wall of the neighbouring police station.

The quietest attraction of this day, and out of hearing of these excitements, was a solemn pilgrimage just around the corner to the shrine of Hermano Pedro in the Franciscan church where stickers, in gratitude for his most recent miracles of the hundred or so performed annually, are stuck all over the walls. Among new additions were thanks to the saint for saving the driver of a car from death after a wheel had fallen off, and for a widow’s vision of her husband in paradise, noting in her little tribute that some rejuvenation in his appearance had taken place after death.

I amused myself in and around the Plaza until about 6.30 p.m. when, with the day darkening, the music came to an end. Now the clowns wiped the paint from their faces and packed up their gear. In half an hour it would be dark. The streets were beginning to empty and Indian family groups had already curled up in neat ancestral fashion under the arcades where the foreign backpackers sprawled among them. I wondered how many Indians were enjoying the experience. A friend who spoke fluent Maya-Quiché and had employed an Indian couple to look after him had heard them refer to their employers as the male, or female, ghosts. I learned from him that some Indians sincerely believed whites to be malevolent spirits, in whose power Indians found themselves temporarily entrapped.

Accustomed to the scene in the social centre of other Latin American towns, where the joys and sorrows of life are prolonged almost indefinitely after dark, I was a little disquieted by this abrupt ending to the day, and it was with reluctance that I took one of the last taxis back to the Santo Domingo.

The next day I was told that the best hope of more cheerful lodging was to be found in the Calle de la Concepción. This was almost a foreign colony in a single street, with European-style restaurants that stayed open until ten, including an Italian one run by a Neapolitan who offered to sing to his customers on Saturday evenings. There were as well several promising guest- houses, but all were taken over by Americans who had come down for the winter. The American proprietress of one rang a friend and found me a room. It was hardly any distance further from the centre than the Calle de la Concepción, she assured me. Why should this be of importance? I asked, and she told me that Concepción might be a little better in the matter of security. Two or three armed robberies happened daily in Antigua, according to the newspaper, she said, and a Spanish student had been stabbed only a few days before. ‘This is really a little town within a town,’ she said, ‘and we aim to keep it that way.’

The house she thought I would like was on a street of fine old buildings, with little passing traffic and a minimum of street lights. It turned out to be rather grand. Servants came and went softly, branches loaded with exotic blooms drooped over the pavement of a vast courtyard, and there was an inspiring view of the tip of the volcano over a wall. It turned out that apart from the staff I was the only occupant. The police station was only a stone’s throw away in the direction of the Plaza, but there was no comfort in its proximity, for the English-language newspaper, the
Guatemala Weekly,
reported that an armed robbery had taken place
outside
it only a few days before.

The high spot of previous stays in Guatemala had always been the ritual excursion to Lake Atitlán, for a day or two to be spent in one or other of the twelve villages on its shores, where the cones of so many volcanoes, skirted with black forests, seemed almost to duplicate the enchantments of South-East Asia. Writing of it back in the Thirties, Aldous Huxley had described himself as almost surfeited by its beauty, and coming down from the highlands when the shining contours of water under the volcanoes first came in sight, the hope was that this beauty had survived. It was not to be fulfilled. Huxley, in those days, might have watched a palisade of white cranes up to a mile in length wading in the lake’s margin, while others, awaiting their turn to descend on the fish, made languid patterns of movement in the sky. Since then Atitlán had suffered from the vandalism of war and of tourist development, and now the great birds, and most other forms of wildlife, stayed away.

So I took the ferry to Santiago where, under misted volcanoes, the beauty of Atitlán returned. Santiago had managed in some way to resist the influences that had despoiled other lakeside villages. Perhaps there was something in the character of its people, who were Tzutuhils and notable for their pugnacity and independence, that made this possible. Whereas the Cakchiquels had shown little resistance to the Spanish invaders, the Tzutuhils put up a fight.

Above all, these people resist change and are defenders of the status quo, and bearing this in mind, it surprised me to discover that two Protestant evangelist missions had opened up, entering not only into vigorous competition with each other for souls but with the easy-going and somewhat Indianised Catholicism of the Church of Guatemala. It was at the end of the Second World War that the first of the evangelists arrived, and one of these launched a campaign to outlaw garments which, as he believed, were woven with pagan designs. He caused frustration among collectors, particularly foreign visitors, by paying above market prices for items with suspect weaving, which—although sometimes valuable antiques—went straight onto the bonfire. In the end the Council decided he was damaging the tourist business, and he was sent on his way. Nowadays, I learned, the evangelists no longer ordered members of their flock to dress like ‘normal’ Guatemalans, but at most suggested that they might suffer from a loss of status by the use of ‘old-fashioned’ modes of dress and, if employed, could expect to be paid lower wages.

By good luck an Indian wedding was being celebrated at the smaller mission at the time of my arrival. It was a highly Westernised affair. An old car with a sticker on the windscreen saying,
CRISTO TE AMO
was parked at the front entrance, and I snatched a glance through the window at the tiny brown triangle of the bride’s face through her veil. Revivalist music burst out of the door we had reached at the back, and I had a view of tight-jacketed Indians, some in black, at the moment when the hymn ended and the pastor signalled for clapping.

The music, played on a variety of unfamiliar instruments, now changed to an Indianised version of
The Wedding March
and the small bride and her groom were about to enter the building by the further door. It may have been that in clambering down from the car, her Western-style wedding dress had become disarranged, for in the instant before she passed out of sight there was a glimpse of skirt beneath, and the dramatic purple and white of the Indian style of Santiago. I was relieved. There had been a change, but at least the Indians here were still far from a transformation from proud Tzutuhils into poor whites.

In Atitlán I was mercifully out of touch with newspapers for a few days, but arrived back in Antigua to coincide with a spate of journalistic gloom. At the end of the years of military dictatorship the time was at an end when eight leading journalists could be murdered for revealing to their readers too much of what went on behind the scenes. Now at last the press was free and the awful secrets tumbled from a Pandora’s box in which, at the end, only hope remained.

Now it was safe for the mass graves of the resistance to be opened. While I was away, one had been found in a children’s playground, out of bounds for years, from which it was estimated that 200 corpses would be recovered. In nearby Uspantan the remains of ninety persons who had fallen under suspicion had been disinterred in a single week.
La Prensa Libre
listed seven villages where the bones of a thousand dissidents might still be hidden away.

With a decline in the statistics of current murders, the police corruption capturing the headlines was of an order never experienced before.
Guatemala Weekly
reported instances of police officers robbing pedestrians in Guatemala City, and gave details of a system of daily quotas paid by patrolmen to their superiors as a portion of their income from corruption. Criminals sent to jail, the report alleged, could buy their way out and be back in action in a few days. It was a situation in which vigilante justice was everywhere on the increase. In Patzún, householders took habitual robbers from police custody and beat them to death. The residents argued that in the past such men had always been able to pay for their freedom.

Some newspapers still seemed a little nervous at drawing attention to the misdemeanours of persons in high places. Others, such as
Siglo XXI,
trod resolutely on thin ice. It published, for example, full details of the strange case of Colonel Cruz Mendez, Commander of the Aurora International Airport in Guatemala City and a gang of car thieves. These had driven off in a brand-new and highly desirable Mitsubishi belonging to an influential foreigner, who carried enough weight for the three squad cars to be dispatched in chase. Their headlong pursuit led to Colonel Mendez’s house, where the thieves took refuge. The police were refused entry, and the Colonel’s lawyer, appearing on the scene, told them they must leave unless they could produce a judicial order. This could not be obtained. Although Colonel Mendez received the powerful support of the Minister of Defence, his explanation that what had happened was ‘the result of a simple confusion’ was hard to accept and he was suspended from duty.

There was a glut of sensational news items that week. Indian peasants who had clearly not yet learned their lesson had invaded eighteen estates. What were described as ‘official’ bands of criminals were under investigation by the military, and kidnappers had abducted a party of girls from a school bus. Yet among all this drama and violence a single incident, which in earlier times would have been considered a minor offence, resisted all efforts to dismiss it from the front page. This was the case of the President and the milkman.

On the first Sunday of the month of February, the newly elected President Alvaro Arzú was riding with his wife and a party of army officer friends in a country lane on the outskirts of Antigua when a Suzuki pickup driven by twenty-four-year-old Sas Rompich came charging out of a side road and ran over a rider and horse before charging at the President. According to the Ministry of the Interior’s report, the attack was foiled by an escort car racing forward to place itself between the President and his assailant, and blocking the assailant’s escape. With this, a Captain Lima, throwing himself from his horse, wrenched open the door of Rompich’s car, caught him by the throat and shot him three times. It can be taken for granted that, apart from accepting the news of Rompich’s death, nobody in Guatemala believed this account.

However, whereas according to experience the story should have been dropped by the press after a couple of days, for once this did not happen. Few eyebrows of old would have been raised over an obvious fiction, but in the new era of openness things were different and disbelief had slipped in through the back door.

For the fact was that Rompich turned out to be no obvious assassin, but a milkman out on his rounds with a car laden with milk bottles, until it was his huge misfortune to encounter the President’s cortège. Newspapermen were told by the family that he might have had a drop too much to drink at the time, and once in a while was drunk for two days or so. At worst, then, this might have been a case of dangerous driving. No horse or rider had been run over or damaged in any way. The newspapermen now referred ironically to ‘a pseudo-
attentat’,
or ‘the supposed attack’, and whatever hope there might have been in some quarters that public interest might now subside vanished with the publication of the Attorney General’s charge that material evidence had disappeared. This included sabre scabbards found near Rompich’s car, provoking sinister rumours of sword-play as well as proven gunfire. A further report from the Attorney General’s office was that Rompich’s shirt, with possible evidence of wounds other than those produced by Captain Lima’s bullets, had been spirited away. Next the public was to learn that the victim’s family had received mysterious warnings to keep their mouths shut ‘or else…’. It seemed to some Guatemalans that the bad old days had returned.