DAY 17...THE LAKE & FEAST DAY OF SANTIAGO

DAY 17

Where ever I go around little San Pedro, the lake is a constant companion. Down one street you run into the wide blue reaches of it stretching the equivalent of a 40 minute boat ride to the other side; at a turn in a path the lake opens up mysteriously glinting through marshes of rushes hiding a fisherman gliding silently in his boat; at the end of a melancholy garden opening to the lake, flooded palapas wait questioning the boundaries of water and land. The lake is always with you here. It isn’t an accessory to the place. It’s more like the deep liquid heart of this place. In the rain there is no horizon across the lake, everything disappears into lowing lying clouds and endless space. At night if the clouds lift for a while the lake reflects the very distant lights of mysterious little villages perched at varying heights along the caldera. The lake watches you silently, always present but always separate like a wise mother.

I was thinking the other day riding on one of the boats that plow the waters from one village to another that it actually reminded me of Lake Como. It’s deep like that. It has a kind of eternal feeling about it. It’s not capricious. And this lake like Como seems to hold its own unhurried and uncensored melancholy. I wish I believed that it absorbed our melancholy and cleaned us of so many feelings.

I am on my way to Panajechel by boat and today there are about 8 people onboard with me. Well, actually, the number keeps changing with people getting on and off at the little docks at the villages. After Panajachel I plan to make it back to Santiago Atitlán to the Festival of the Patron Saint of the place, Santiago Apostel.

I am stunned by the beauty of this little trip around the lake. The step hillsides that come down from the mountains are covered in a myriad of trees that weave countless textures of green. The trees seem to grow out of huge rock formations. The water is blue, crystal blue. It all looks like some kind of perfectly kept Japanese garden. And I am stunned by the beautiful houses, villas along the shore. These places are built where I cannot imagine that they would have access by any road. The people at these fascinating places must get in by boat. And they are surrounded with gardens that are beautiful in a kind of forgotten way.

A Mayan family gets on board just before we reach Panajachel. It’s becoming very chilly. The mother in this group is young. She wears one of the traditional head dresses which is a piece of dark burgundy velvet wound and twisted into her coal black hair and they tied in front so that it rises about her face. I think there should be a law that all female human beings have to wear this! And then she has on one of the dark green, blue, purple huipiles that are typical of Santa Catarina here on the lake.

Panajachel is more or less the tourist hub of the lake. Well, I am sure it is more, but it’s a little hard on one trip to get around the huge amount of tourist commerce going on. However, I will say that you can buy Guatamalteco textiles here from everywhere and that there are some good buys and that’s really interesting, and, of course really overwhelming.

A couple of blocks from the tourist hub-bub, I happen accidently onto the actual market of Panajachel. Ah, here is a different world. And I wonder how many people actually stray up this way. I am aching to take more fotos of people in these clothes. I would say here at this market half the men are also in the tradition dress and all the women. Sometimes I feel like I am surreptitiously chasing someone around the market trying to find a moment to get a shot without being gross, well obviously gross. And then it hits me: stand still and let them come to you and it works. You just hang out some place and wait.

I have also found another really interesting way to get price negotiations started favorably. And I wasn’t the one who dreamed this up. Ok, here is how it goes: You hesitate and act like you can’t make a decision. Well, that’s normal for me. However, at that point one of the people selling something said to me: ‘Oh, you need to get your wife’s opinion on this, don’t you.’ Well, I almost jumped into explaining to the poor innocent woman why that wasn’t really a problem, but instead said: ‘Oh, yes I really should, because I am horrible at this and she has much better taste than I do.’ And then I tried to leave. At that point the seller thought she had a stupid guy that shouldn’t be making decisions on his own and off we went negotiating the price like mad. It works! I confess to having broken down and buying a really beautiful ‘corte’, the wrap-around skirt that is old, in perfect condition, woven in fine, fine wool and in patterns and colors so complex that it defies description. And because of my wife who was doing something else at the moment, I get it for a super prize. It is going to be used as a runner on the table for a Guatemalan feast when I get back.

Am anxious to get to Santiago. And apparently everyone else around the lake is anxious to get there, too. The boats are packed. The usual schedules have been abandoned and boats are leaving as soon as they are full and they are very full. I stand in the space at the prow and meet by accident the young couple who are also living in this complex where I live. I call them (to myself) the blond beautifuls. She is German and he is Dutch. They are both more than 6 feet tall. Very slender, muscled with blond hair and tan skin. Totally fluent in God knows how many languages. Their English is without accent. She is Elke, always dressed rather provocatively and he is Martin, usually hanging out without a shirt or less. They are on their way to Santiago, too.

Passing the usual stands selling Mayan/Guatemalan things that lead up from the lake in Santiago, I turn a corner at the top of the street and here is where the Feast Day of Santiago is happening. The streets have been converted to a market place. One can hardly move. At times one can’t move. There is virtually no one not dressed in traditional clothes, an amazing sight.

I am just having a hard time getting used to tiny Mayan women pushing me aside as they barge their way to who knows where. Everything is being sold here. There are huipiles of every imaginable design, the men’s pants with their embroidered legs and woven sashes, cortes and hand-woven cloth for making cortes, fruit, street food (yummy little chubby Guatemalan tacos), shoes, plastic ware. And as I push my way through crowd, there is no other way to come out alive, I see the church of Santiago. My god, the stairs are the same as the stairs leading up to the church in Chichicastenango. This was an organized Mayan covert movement, I think, in which they built stairs to churches and did it with Mayan symbolism. Maybe with these stairs they were telling their people that the way you will understand this big edifice above you called an iglesia is to climb the Mayan stairs?

Suddenly, religious images appear from the top of the steps and I realize that I have happened onto the procession part of this celebration. These people in the procession are the cofrades, the keepers of traditions and ritual, who are preceding the images. First the women come. Not many, maybe about 15 of them. They are holding huge banana leaves wrapped around lit candles. They wear the remarkable headpiece of Santiago which looks like a red disc and over this they drape the traditional shawls (they don’t call them rebozos) folded and piled up so that the shape of their head looks as if it were rectangular and all of this juts out in front and shades the face. Then the men come down the Mayan stairway, their heads wrapped in red hand-woven pieces, wearing over the traditional dress very old looking black/brown cape like things. And there is a brass band. It is a sight truly from a different world and then they disappear around the corner.

I thank my lucky stars that I have been able to see this moment and proceed up to the church from which there is a great view of the 4, yes 4, Ferris wheels in the courtyard of the church.

And there he is standing more or less at the entrance to the church, the young gringo who is the more or less leader of the covert missionary group. And I notice that he is carrying his bible with him, exhibiting before like a preacher. Is he going to ‘witness’ to these people right now? Or later? I can only head the other way and get lost into the crowd.

Down the street and around the corner, I bump into the procession again. I thought they would have long disappeared. But no, now they have been joined by a troupe of extravagantly dressed Spanish noblemen in reds and yellows and spangles and gold and masks with pink, pink faces, little skinny lips and delicate beards wearing tennies. Everyone moves down the street to the tune of the brass band. And lo and behold, the guys carrying the images begin doing a unison, well, more or less unison, dance step to the music as they carry the images. Sometimes the men move all together and the whole apparatus sways back and forth as if it were on a ship in a storm and sometimes they get off and one side almost falls trying to force the other side to adopt their version of the rhythm. And the faces of the cofrades remain very stern.

On the way back to San Pedro, as I sit on the boat in very hot sun for a change, I decide that today will be my swimming day in the lago. I look for a place along the lake and here I find very busty Mayan women topless in their cortes bathing, and there a whole family washing and bathing, but finally I find my little rocks, strip off to my underwear and into the cool, cool, blue water with the floating rocks.

That’s right: floating rocks.