Tree Girl (5 page)

Her father’s angry reply had been simply, “Because you’re a woman!”

Such new ideas weren’t welcome in Guatemala, but Papí never treated his daughters with less respect than his sons, and always he taught us that being Indio was something to be proud of. He didn’t scold me for questioning our religion and our customs.

Today, as he did each season after corn was planted, Papí took all of us up to the caves. Each of us carried a
basket filled with foods to eat. Papí carried a bundle on his back that held all that he needed for his Mayan ceremonies of thanks.

Today, our hike took nearly two hours because Mamí walked so slowly. When we arrived at the caves, the younger children explored the shallow caverns while the rest of us relaxed, ate, played, and visited. Papí unfolded the bundled shawl from his back and prepared for the giving of thanks. In front of the largest cave, he lit a large bundle of colored candles bound together so that they would burn as one on the ground. Then he lit small balls of the pine resin, trementina, in a bucket and added incense.

He swung the smoking bucket in front of the flaming candles and voiced his thanks for hours. I sat quietly beneath a nearby tree and listened to every hypnotic word he spoke in our Indio language of Quiché. Softly, he chanted.

I mouthed some of Papí’s Quiché words in silence. The words weren’t prayers offered to someone who existed only in his mind or on some cloud in a faraway heaven. His prayers were to the God and the spirits that were around him in everything he touched and did, at every moment of each day.

When his prayers of thanks were finished, Papí swung his incense bucket for a long time in silence,
and then he prayed and asked God for things that perhaps no god could grant.

Papí stood, tears bleeding from his eyes. He held his hands upward with his palms lifted to the sky, and with short halting breaths, he prayed.

Small rivers of tears flowed down Papí’s cheeks, as I, too, wept that day, wiping away large tears with my huipil.

It was dark when we arrived back at the cantón, but even in the dark, I could see Mamí sweating from fever. “Do you want me to stay home from school tomorrow?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “Go and change the world, Gabi.”

The weeks following our visit to the caves were difficult. The cantón remained busy because our hunger and our need to survive would not wait for war. Still we needed the rain and the sun. Still we needed to plant
our crops, collect firewood, grind corn for tortillas, and care for the animals. Each day I attended school, and each afternoon Manuel and I walked farther into the countryside seeking information about Jorge. Papí also searched, but each passing day seemed to hammer another nail into the coffin we denied existed. We began to fear the worst.

I tried to ignore the coming and going of the soldiers and guerrillas, and the sounds of distant gunfire that drifted with the wind, but each week the soldiers’ harassment worsened.

On a day in December when dark skies brought heavy rain, a column of nearly twenty soldiers marched into our cantón. They caught everyone by surprise, spreading through the cantón, pushing open doors with their rifles. The one who pushed open our door shouted, “Show us the titles that prove you own this land.”

Papí pleaded with the young soldier. “We don’t have the paper titles that you ask for,” he said. “We’re visitors like our ancestors, visitors using this land for one short lifetime. This land belongs to no one. It
came to us from our ancestors without any title and it must be passed on to our children without this paper title you ask for.”

“You’re violating the law. You have thirty days to move from this property or you’ll be forced off,” the soldier threatened.

“Don’t you see?” Papí pleaded. “Already the Latinos have driven our ancestors from the fertile valleys to these mountainsides. We have no place else to go.”

“That’s your problem,” said the Latino soldier. “Thirty days, no more.”

After the soldiers left, everybody in the cantón gathered in turmoil and disagreement. “We must leave,” some insisted.

“To go where?” asked Señora Alvarez. “If we move to the middle of the forests, soon the Latinos will come there and say we must move again.”

“I agree,” said Papí. “Because the Latinos suddenly decide we need some piece of paper, that doesn’t make the land theirs. They cannot force us to move.”

Like a family, everyone in the cantón decided to
remain. We didn’t have guns, but everyone kept their machetes close to their sides. We had someone standing watch at all times on a hill above the cantón. If the soldiers came again, we would be ready to fight. What other choice did we have? This country was our home long before the Latinos came from a different land to claim what wasn’t theirs to claim.

When the soldiers returned several weeks later, our lookout warned us before they arrived. We gathered and stood as a group, preparing to fight, knowing that our machetes were useless against guns. But instead of demanding that we leave, the soldiers came smiling. “We’ve decided to let you stay as long as you tell us when you’ve seen the enemy,” they said. “Remember, if you don’t tell us when the guerrillas appear, you’ll lose this land.”

I think the soldiers knew that pushing us from our land would only unite us. “What have you done with my son Jorge?” Papí pleaded with them.

“We didn’t take your son,” the soldiers insisted. “It was the guerrillas. They are animals capable of anything.”

This denial only hardened our resolve. We would not cooperate. The military knew we feared them, and for the next couple of weeks they pretended to be concerned about us. They tried to play with the children of the cantón, and they said nice things to the elders, hoping to gather information on the guerrillas. “How are you doing, Don Rafael?” they asked one elder they recognized. “How is your sore knee? Maybe we can find you medicine if you help us to find the guerrillas.”

Each child was handed marbles and candy and then asked, “Have you seen any bad guerrillas come here this week?”

We all shook our head no to these questions, even the children. A whipped dog has a long memory. We knew the soldiers only wanted information, and nothing would change our feelings about them until they returned Jorge.

Another tactic the soldiers tried once was dressing up as priests. Several men showed up at our church one Sunday in robes. At first we thought they were real priests holding a real mass, but soon even the children recognized that they were imposters. During baptism
they forgot to put water on the baby, and they forgot the words to the prayers they were supposed to recite. Little Alicia chided them, saying, “You didn’t put water on this baby, and you didn’t say that right.”

The fake priests grew very upset. “Shut up! It’s none of your business,” they whispered angrily.

Alicia turned to me and giggled.

After the priests’ visit, we kept more vigilant. We had heard rumors that the soldiers were abducting young men and forcing them to become recruits. Now guards from the cantón kept watch every hour of the day and night, and whenever soldiers were spotted, our young men fled to the forests. The soldiers asked during each visit, “Does anybody here speak Spanish?” I always shook my head in denial, but Alicia and the other children would turn and sneak looks at me. It was no longer safe for me to remain in the cantón, so when the soldiers came, I, too, ran with the young men to the forest.

Not all cantóns posted guards as we did, and in many villages the soldiers captured men and older boys working in nearby fields, and forced them to become soldiers to replace those killed in the fighting. I heard
they also took away those who were caught speaking Spanish, along with those who sympathized with the guerrillas. Those people were never seen again.

Rumors and distrust moved through the cantóns like a plague. A person could simply say that someone they disliked had helped the soldiers or the guerrillas, and often that someone would soon be taken away in the middle of the night. Before long, Papí’s prediction came true. Even villagers from our cantón who had lived all of their lives together now distrusted one another. Nobody knew whom they could trust.

All during this time, Mamí grew worse, vomiting and complaining of stomach cramps. Our cantón’s healer, the
curandero
, came many times, costing Papí much money, but the herbs did nothing to lessen Mamí’s pain and her sweating. I still attended school each day, keeping far from the open roads. Each night I slept near the door of our home so I could escape to the forest with the young men if the soldiers arrived. Always I worried that someone might tell the soldiers that I spoke Spanish. Living with this constant fear made my own stomach knot up and hurt at night.

For me, knowing Spanish became a dark and frightening secret, but the gift Manuel had given me was not a gift that I wished to abandon. Each night I lay awake on my sleeping mat, and in the darkness of the night I defiantly mouthed forbidden Spanish words.

By month’s end, the military had changed their tactics yet again. In some cantóns, villagers had begun fighting back with their machetes, mounting small-scale ambushes on soldiers when they walked along the mountain trails. To combat this, the military declared it illegal to own a machete, and they came to collect every machete they could find. “Anybody caught with a machete will be considered an enemy,” they announced.

Many men, like Papí, hid their machetes in plastic bags in the ground, but this left us defenseless, not only against the soldiers but also against snakes, wild dogs, and angry bulls. Even worse, now we had to work breaking corn stalks in the field with only our bare hands, a chore that left our skin cut and raw. Many nights the younger children cried themselves to sleep. Without machetes, we were like a bunch of sheep surrounded
by mad dogs.

We celebrated little at Christmas, but we all hoped that the New Year might bring relief from war and fear. We prayed that Mamí might recover, and we prayed for Jorge’s return.

But Jorge didn’t return, and Mamí failed to improve. At first we had hoped her illness was caused only by bad water, but soon it pained her to move and she grew so weak that even standing became a struggle. Coughing and diarrhea consumed her body and took away more than her strength. Soon Mamí became so thin that her cheeks, once round and soft to the touch, grew gaunt and pale. Her shiny black hair became dull and stringy. Each night she tossed restlessly on her sleeping mat, sweat beading on her forehead as if the sun had burned her.

The curandero kept trying new cures, but nothing helped, so on an overcast day in March, Papí called all of us together. “Your mother is dying,” he said quietly. “I want each of you to spend a short time with her alone.”

I gathered my younger brothers and sisters and we
stood outside our home, each waiting quietly for our turn. Lidia and Julia wept. I felt scared. When my turn came, I leaned close over Mamí and whispered, “Go someplace without soldiers or war, Mamí. Go someplace where the flowers bloom brightly and where the roosters crow quietly. Go and rest in peace, sweet Mamí. We’ll never forget you.”

Mamí opened her eyes and smiled with thin, cracked lips. I leaned over and kissed her cheek, then I fled before she saw my tears.

Mamí clung to life as each of us visited her side. Papí visited her last and stayed with her for a long time. When he came outside, his red eyes and face were wrought with anguish. “Your Mamí has died,” he whispered.

At that moment, all of us wept and the heavens cried with raindrops.

In the afternoon, neighbors brought our family small gifts, and I helped dress Mamí in her best corte and huipil. Papí built a small wooden coffin alone in the forest. I could only imagine the cruel silence that must have surrounded him as he worked. When all was
ready, we laid Mamí in the coffin and rested her on the table in our small home.

Manuel came from the school when he heard of Mamí’s death. He was there when all of the cantón filed past Mamí, placing flowers and beads and other items of remembrance on her thin chest. And then we burned Mamí’s body high above the ground. I helped to gather her ashes and carry them in a vase to a space outside our home. I also helped to dig her grave. The place we buried her ashes already held the afterbirth of each of our family members as well as the ashes of our grandparents. This sacred land held the fluids of life as well as the ashes of death.

“I’ll teach your students for you,” Manuel told me before he left that day. “Your family needs you now.”