In the Courts of the Sun (4 page)

[2]

I
got what they now think was dengue fever. It was more dangerous than it is these days, and on top of that I was hemorrhaging in my lungs and sneezing up blood because of what turned out to be a factor-8 deficiency, that is, hæmophilia B. I spent three months lying rolled up behind the hearth, counting the bright red stitches in my cotton blanket and listening to the dogs. My mother mouth-fed me corn gruel and Incaparina milk substitute and told stories in our quiet singsong style, sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in Ch’olan. Everyone else, even my youngest sister, was working down in the fincas, in the lowlands. One evening I was lying on my side, trying not to vomit, and I noticed a tree snail crawling up a wet patch on the cinder-block wall. It was a blue-green balled cone, like a plumb bob, striped with orange and black, a
Liguus fasciaticus bourboni,
as I learned much later. My mother told me the snail was my second
chanul,
a
“chanul de brujo,”
that is, a warlock’s familiar.
All traditional Maya have a chanul—or, to use the Classic Mayan word, a uay. It’s generally outside your body, but it’s also one of your souls. If you’re hungry, it gets hungry, and if someone kills it, you die. Some people are closer to their uays than others, and a few can morph their own body into the body of their uay and prowl around as an animal. It’s a bit like the animal familiars in the
His Dark Materials
books, except it’s more part of you. I already had a normal uay—a
sa’ bin-’och,
which is sort of like a hedgehog—but according to my mother the snail was going to be just as important. It’s an unusual uay to have and seemingly not very powerful. But a lot of
brujos’
uays are small and secretive.
Around this same time my mother started playing a counting game with me. At first, I guess, it was just to teach me numbers. Pretty soon we played it every afternoon. She used to roll the rush mat aside from next to where I was lying. Underneath she’d spooned twenty-five little holes out of the clay floor, in a cross shape. The idea is to visualize the cross as though it were in the sky and you were lying supine on the ground, with your head at the sun’s current azimuth in the southeast:

She used to spread a thin white cloth over the square and push it down a bit into each of the depressions, and chew up a bit of tobacco and smear some of the juice on the inside of her left thigh. When I learned to do it, she had me rub it on my right thigh. Peeling open one of her prized Tupperware containers, she’d take out her
grandeza
—which is a pouch of amulets and stones and things—and pour out a mound of red
tz’ite
beans, which are really these hard seeds from a coral tree—and set out her quartz pebbles, which I would hold up to my eye and look for bouncing lights inside. I never understood why she did this next bit—she’d smear a line of wet black across her face, starting from the crown of her left ear, running under her left eye, across her upper lip, and down her right cheek to the right mandibular angle. The routine was that we’d each take a random handful of seeds out of the mound and empty it out on the margins of the cloth, to the east and west of the depressions, while we each asked for help from the protector of the day. Then she’d tap the ground five times and say,
“Hatz-kab ik,
Ixpaayeen b’aje’laj . . .”
That is,
“Now may I borrow
The breath of the sun
Of today, now I borrow
The breath of tomorrow’s.
Now I am rooting
And now I am centering,
Scattering black seeds
And scattering yellow seeds,
Adding up white skulls
And adding up red skulls,
Counting the blue-green suns,
Counting the brown-gray suns.”
In Ch’olan the word for “skull” is also a word for “corn kernel.” Next we’d take turns counting out the seeds into the bins in groups of four and use the beans to mark today’s date on top of that. Then she would bring out a single thumbnail-size crystal of carnelian quartz. This was the runner.
Just like the pieces in Parcheesi, the runners move through the game board based on a randomizer. Instead of dice we use corn kernels that have a black dot on one side. You throw them up and count how many land with the black side up. Unlike Parcheesi, though, the number of kernels you throw varies on the basis of where you are in the Game. There were different counting protocols applied, like if your last group had three counters in it you’d sometimes break it up into two and one and count it as one even number and one odd one.
And the Game is complicated in other ways. There’s a whole set of question-and-answer jingles, starting with one for each of the two hundred and sixty day-name-and-number combinations in the ritual calendar. Each of those names intersected with another three hundred and sixty names for the solar days. Combinations had their own attached proverbs and their own shades of meaning, depending on other aspects of the position. So—a little like in the
I Ching
or in Yoruban Ifa—the Game generates little phrases, which you could read as sentences. And because there are so many possible combinations, it can seem like it’s conversing with you in a pretty unpredictable way. Usually my mother said it was Santa Teresa, who was something like the goddess of the Game, interpreting for us. When something bad came up, though, she said it was Saint Simón who was talking. He was a bearded man who sat at the crossroads, at the center of the Game, and whom some people still called Maximón.
So anyway, the Game is like a combination of a map, an abacus, and a perpetual calendar. Movements of the quartz pebble, the “runner” piece, give you variables depending on how far ahead you want to read and how much you want to rely on intuition. Sometimes out of two reasonable moves one just looks better. There’s also a special way to press intuition into service. My mother taught me to sit still and wait for
tzam lic
, that is, “blood lightning.” It’s a kind of a twitch or fluttering feeling under the skin, maybe some kind of a miniature muscle spasm. I guess you could call it a frisson. When it came, its intensity and its location and direction on your body told you things about the move in question. For instance, if it were on the inner edge of your left thigh, where the tobacco stain was, it might mean a male relative was coming to see you from the northeast, and if it were the same feeling but on the outside of the thigh, it might suggest that the visitor was a woman. Usually my mother would try to find out—I don’t want to say “predict”—just basic things, most often about the crops, like whether the squash beetles were getting ready for another attack. Nearly as often it was about the weather, with the red runner representing the sun and the others standing in for clouds or marking mountains. Sometimes she’d use the runner to represent relatives or neighbors, to try to help them with big events in their lives like marriages or, if they were sick, to find out when they’d get better. One time I remember I’d asked her to play for my maternal cousin’s paternal grandmother, who had a bad stomach worm, and my mother stopped the Game in the middle. Much later on I got wise to the fact that it was because she’d seen that the old woman wasn’t going to recover.
As my mother said, the Game didn’t work so well for little things. There were times when I said I wanted to guess when my father was coming home that day. She’d resist it at first because it was too trivial, but finally she’d let me move the quartz pebble around as a stand-in for Tata, and she’d kind of play against him. So my counter had to stay ahead of my mother’s seeds as they came after me. If at the end she finally trapped my counter in, say, the northwest bin, that would mean he was coming home to us very late, by way of the town northwest of us. If he fell in the south bin, that meant he was still at the school. If he ended up in the center bin, that meant he was just about to come home. And he always did. Within a few minutes he’d crouch through the door.
None of this seemed at all like fortune telling or astrology or any of that
disparate
. It was more like the Game—or just for continuity, let’s call it, prematurely, the Sacrifice Game, although I realize I haven’t properly introduced this idea yet—it was like the Sacrifice Game was helping you realize things consciously that your mind had already noticed. One time one of my uncles said that in the old days the original people had owls’ eyes and could see up through the shell of the sky and through mountains into the caves of the dead and the unborn. If someone was sick you could look through his skin and into his organs to find the problem. You could see your birth behind you and your death in front of you. But since then our eyes had become clouded and we could only see a tiny fraction of the world, just what was on the surface. I practiced a lot. On the first day of my twelfth
tz’olk’in
—that is, when I was about eight and a half years old—my mother initiated me into life as a
h’men
.
The word’s been translated as “daykeeper,” “timekeeper,” “sun keeper,” and even “time accountant.” Most literally, in Ch’olan it would be “sun totaler” or “sun adder-upper,” or let’s say “sun adder.” A sun adder is basically the village shaman, a pagan alternative to the Catholic priest. We figure out whether a client is sick because some dead relative is hassling her, and if so what little offerings she should make to him to shut him up and which herbs to hang around her house for a faster recovery. When should you burn off your
milpa,
that is, your family cornfield? Is this a good day to take a bus trip to the capital? What would be a lucky day to have the christening? It’s all blended up with Catholicism, so we also use bits of liturgy. If you wanted to be a bastard about it, you could say we’re the local witch doctors. The reason we’re called sun adders is that our main job is to keep track of the traditional ritual calendar. All the little ritual offerings that we do, even all the Sacrifice Game stuff—which, if you wanted to be a bitch about it, you could call fortune telling—is pretty secondary.
For the Ch’olan, things come in pairs, especially bad things. Two years after I got my adder bundle, that’s how it happened with us.
One thing about places like Guatemala is that the Conquest is still going on. In Guatemala—just for the barest smidge of history—things had settled down for most of us indigenes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the early fifties, things weren’t all that bad. But in the summer of 1954 the CIA, at the behest of the United Fruit Company—the Chiquita banana folks—engineered a coup against the elected president and set up Carlos Castillo Armas as a puppet dictator. Besides doing everything the Pulpo—that is, the Octopus, as we called the UFC—wanted, he immediately began an unofficial ethnic cleansing policy against the Maya. UN estimates list about two hundred thousand Maya massacred or disappeared from 1958 to 1985, which gives Guatemala the lowest human rights rating in the Western Hemisphere. For us it was the worst period since the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century.
The U.S. Congress stopped official aid to the government in 1982, but the Reagan administration kept it going secretly, sending weapons and training Guate army officers in counterinsurgency techniques at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning. Maybe a few of them were sincere anti-Communists who actually thought the guerrillas were a threat, but 97 percent of everything is real estate and by ’83, when the genocide peaked at around fourteen aborigines per day, the war wasn’t anything but a real-estate grab. They’d roll in, say, “ You’re all guerrillas,” and that’d be it. A year later any producing fields would be occupied by Ladinos.
In the U.S. most people seem to think of the CIA as some kind of sleek, efficient secret society with good-looking employees and futuristic gadgets. Latin Americans know it as just another cartel, big, bumbling, but better financed than most, running errands for the big drug wholesalers and shaking down the small ones. In the seventies and eighties the military built thousands of little airstrips all over rural Guatemala, supposedly to help us disadvantaged types move products to nonlocal markets but actually so they could drop in anywhere, anytime they needed to goose a deadbeat. There were more than a couple around T’ozal. One of my father’s many uncles-in-law, a
parcelista
named Generoso Xul, marked out and burned off a few milpas on common land that turned out to be a bit too close to one of them. By late July Generoso was missing, and my father and a few others went out looking for him. On the second day they found his shoes tied up and hanging in a eucalyptus tree, which is a kind of sleeps-with-the-fishes warning sign.
My father talked to this person he knew from the local resistance, who was a Subcomandante Marcos-like figure called Teniente Xac, or as we called him, Uncle Xac. Tío Xac said he guessed that the Soreanos
“habian dado agua al Tío G,”
that is, that they’d killed him. After that my father got all these kids and parcelistas and their kids to watch for the airplanes and write down their registration codes on cigarette papers and bring them to him, and he compiled a pretty long list. A friend in CG checked them with the AeroTransport Data Bank—Guatemala was so much these people’s backyard that they hardly ever even bothered to change the numbers—and it turned out a bunch of them were operated out of Texas and Florida by Skyways Aircraft Leasing, which, it came out much later, was a shell corporation, and had flown out of John Hull’s estate in Costa Rica. Hull—and this could sound a little conspiracykookish if it weren’t well documented in, for instance, the 1988 Kerry Congressional Subcommittee paper “ ‘Private Assistance’ and the Contras: A Staff Report” of 10/14/86, easily available at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, 40 Presidential Drive, Simi Valley, California, under “White House Legal Task Force: Records, Box 92768”—was a U.S. citizen who laundered money and shipped uncut cocaine for Oliver North’s crew. Most of the money went to the contras in El Salvador, but the North cartel, the Bush cronies, and the Ríos Montt group—Montt was the puppet president of Guatemala at the time—all took home millions. My guess is that Uncle Xac was hoping to go wide with the list at some point, either just to focus some attention on the Soreanos, who were a big local family whom everybody hated, or to try to discredit the generals in the next election, which shows you how naïve he was.
On Christmas Day of 1982 I had another episode of pneumonia following blood loss and my parents took me to the Sisters of Charity Hospital at San Cristóbal. Supposedly I was ranting and raving. There was one of the younger nuns, Sor Elena, who kind of looked after me and kept asking how I was doing, and I thought she was really great. I’m sure I’ve thought about her every day since then, maybe even every hour, at least when I’m not in one of my fugue states.
Todo por mi culpa,
all my fault. Four days after I got there, on
la fiesta de la Sagrada Familia
, December 29, 1982, Sor Elena told me that government troops had surrounded T’ozal and were interrogating the Cofradias, that is, “cargo bearers” or “charge holders,” who are a kind of rotating committee of village elders. Later I found out more. It had been a market day, when almost everybody had come into the village. A white-and-blue Iroquois helicopter with loudspeakers materialized and circled around and around like a big kingfisher, telling everyone to assemble in the plaza for a town meeting, where they were going to give out assignments for the next year’s civilian patrols. By this time the soldiers had already marched in on two barely used dirt roads. According to my friend José Xiloch—or, as we called him, No Way—who saw some of it from a distance, hardly anybody tried to run or hide. Most of the soldiers were half-Maya recruits from Suchitepéquez, but there were two tall men with sandy hair and USMC-issue boots along with them, and the squad was commanded, unusually, by a major, Antonio García Torres.
Only two people got shot to death in the plaza that day. My parents and six of their friends got loaded into a truck and taken to the army base at Co-ban. That evening the troops burned down the community center with eleven of the more resistant citizens alive inside it, which at that time was the terror tactic of choice. It was also the last time anyone I know of saw either of my brothers, although it’s not clear what happened to them. Much later I found out that my sister had eventually made it to a refugee settlement in Mexico. The troops spent two days forcing the citizens to level the village and then loaded them onto trucks for relocation.