DAY 15.....HIERONYMUS, NERUDA AND THE CIA

DAY 15

The days seem to be getting away from me. I have spent way too much time trying to figure out how to do this blog thing and my Spanish teacher, Javier, is keeping me very busy in and out of my 4 hours with him daily. My god, but what a great time we are having. We spent more than a day analyzing two Hieronymus Bosch paintings and now we are in the middle of a Pablo Neruda poem about a strange deserted city. Fantastic! And this guy cooks this stuff up in order to force complicated practice with the language. So, we do things like using the Neruda poem (La ciudad destruida) to deal with ‘what would it have been like in this destroyed city if things had gone differently.’ It really feels great to be doing this and we are having a great time working like this. I think tomorrow we are going to deal with Nietzsche. Yikes.

Ok, here’s the skinny on all of this: Instruction starts for me at 8:00 am which means waking up when I smell smoke from a neighboring house wafting in my window. It must be some family’s morning tortillas being cooked. It’s always there, the smell of wood smoke, just before 6:00. I find it comforting to wake up like that and imagine a simple kitchen with a certain family waking up, too. The abuela in the kitchen patting out the little fat Guatemalan tortillas and tossing them on a hot surface. A single bulb hanging from the ceiling for light and a single mother is getting the kids ready for school. Tortillas, platanos fritos, and frijoles negros served from the wood fire on white plastic plates. At any rate it is my wake up call and I venture down the caracol steel stairway that connects me to the ground and make my way to the outdoor kitchen. No coffee machine or filters, so this is what I do: step one: put a lot of ground coffee into a pan with water, add milk and simply boil it; step two: lug the whole thing upstairs with a water glass since there don’t seem to be any cups around; step three: wait for a couple of minutes for the grounds to settle. And there you have it, coffee, and it’s not half bad. Then watch a little Guatemalan news, jump in the shower that has a shower head with electric wires hanging out which are heating the water, don’t be afraid of electrocution, pack my backpack with my computer, jacket, notebooks, umbrella (very important), take the coffee stuff down to the kitchen and wash it so no one complains, grab my stuff and take off along the path through the coffee plantings, the corn fields with horses neighing when they see me, hoping I am bringing them food and tromp along the lake to the school. Mornings are usually sunny and I love this walk along the lake with bright vistas to the mountains across from us. More hot coffee will be waiting at the school and breakfast! I usually get a great omelet with black beans on the side and the Guatemalan tortillas which are more like gorditas than tortillas as we know them in México lindo y bello. By then there is just enough time to hook up my computer and check email or go over some homework and correct really stupid last minute mistakes. Then Javier arrives and invariably says: “Take your time, don’t rush!”

And all of this is costing $150 dollars a week and that includes 20 hours of private instruction; 4 hours of conversation practice, the apartment and breakfast 5 days a week. Pretty amazing, really. Lunch I have at the apartment. Usually tostados and black beans or tostados and tomato paste topped off with tostados and nutella. Don’t barf. It’s really kind of good and cheap and easy and I refuse to try to cook anything. And then evenings it’s dinner out after the conversation class. The best places are ‘Buddha’, believe it or not, very hippy and delicious or “Ventanta Azul” which has wonderful traditional Guatemalan food, is tiny, candle lit with lots of flowers. It’s hard to spend more than 8 or 9 dollars for dinner including drinks and tip. So, that’s good, too.

Am not doing too well with some of the fellow of students, well, specifically a group of covert 20 something year old missionaries. I say covert because they say they are working for a non profit. But I pressed for a little more information because I thought that was really cool and they said the organization was called ‘Mana’. Oh, just wait a minute, I think. Can’t fool me. I grew up as a Southern Baptist minister’s son and any idiot knows that mana is the food from heaven that was given to the Israelites on their trek through the wilderness. And I guess these kids are supposed to be bringing food from heaven to the Guatemaltecos?? And just what might that food be??? I bet it ain’t tostados. What arrogance. I talk to Javier about this and his eyes get sad and he talks about this as a deep offence over which he has no control, but he does say that the village they are going to has control over how they will receive them. And that suprises will be in store.

And then I finally ask him the long awaited question: ‘Javier, what part did the United States play in the civil war?’ He very calmly tells me about two progressive presidents who were making good changes for the people of Guatemala but who were assassinated by the CIA. He tells me about violent right wing military dictators being backed by the USA because they stood by international companies and their concerns instead of the common people of Guatemala. There is amazingly no rancor in his voice. Just facts. I feel a little sick at my stomach and more than sick, just plain old embarrassed. How horrible to hear this. I feel like going around like some idiot apologizing to these people and I do apologize to Javier that this happened to his country and that the big bastion of liberty and democracy supported what amounted to genocide. I feel really ashamed about this and think that today I will just hang out alone at the apartment.

What do you do with information like this? Get really depressed? Try to forget it? Shoot yourself? Try to ask some higher power for forgiveness on behalf of bastards who have defrauded us of the meaning of liberty and deceived all too innocent kids who thought we were all about truth and goodness and leading the world with a flaming torch…you know as in, the “bring me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” cast iron lady in the big harbor? This is like seeing someone who has had their arms and legs cut off. There is nothing you can say. There is just nothing you do about it to make it right. It’s no more and no less than horrible. I am thinking there might be forgiveness in the fact that the earth permits green things to continue growing, covering the past in tangles of vines, offering yet another new chance for better things.