11 de Junio

Que pasa: Notice that the titles of these entries are the day that I write them, not the day that I post them. So there's a little lag in what I'm actually thinking/doing because of my internet access, or lack thereof.

Thanks to those of my family who gave encouragement after my last entry. Know that I am a long way from despairing. All that's up is that I'm having to take little measures (coffee, peanut butter, a novel in English) to keep my bearings, something I've never really had to do before. It seems weird to me because I'm not like a prisoner or anything, so I hesitate to embrace a “you can make it” mentality. I have chosen to do this myself in order to see if I like ethnographic fieldwork, a 24/7 thing that swings with your mood. Overall, it is stretching me and humbling me, two things that must be ultimately good.

I have spent much of the last two days sitting in a chair at the entrance of Luis's gallery, reading. I have finished For Whom the Bell Tolls, and it was an excellent read. I'm going to get another book tomorrow in Panajachel. If you know me, you know that I'm a slow reader (getting faster), so that tells you how much time I have spent reading.

I love Hemingway's style because it really gets into the characters' heads. He follows their trains of thought and saves his most descriptive language for their memories and impressions. All 470 pages take place in the span of 3 days, so you can imagine how much detail there is. A great sentence: “His face looked as though it were modeled from the waste material you find under the claws of a very old lion.”

The old paperback book broke in half because I used it to swat flies, which means I can't sell it back to the bookstore for half the price of 40 Quetzales. I killed many flies though.

Something else about the book: the main character is Robert Jordan, an American ex-pat fighting in the Spanish Civil War, so the dialog is transliterated from Spanish. Towards the beginning of the book, one guy says to him, “So much talking makes me very thirsty, Comrade Hordan. You have a funny name in Spanish, Comrade Hordown.” Funny because the day before I read this I had had a conversation with Luis about saying Jordan. It's very hard for Spanish-speakers to say the j sound; the closest equivalent is ch. I have been helping Luis practice his English. “Whesch pintin do you like?” “Whesch pants do you like?” “Orichinal work” “Tree-handred dollars.” He wants to learn to say sure, but I think it would be best to leave that one alone because it doesn't come out any better than “chird.”

But sitting at the same spot along the main road of Sta. Catarina for two days straight has also been good for giving me a feel for the rhythm of this town. Luis and I chat some, and he has his own greetings for each passerby. In this town of 3000, he has sat at this same spot every day for I don't know how many years, so he knows about everybody. He taught me some Kaqchikel greetings today, which are many and vary with the time of day and the age and sex of whom you are greeting.

Also what's neat about this town are the noises. It's small enough that you could hear faintly someone scream from one side to the other, although the noise of the town would obscure it. Someone is always blasting music in the morning or the dogs are always barking at night, and then there are the sounds of the day in between. Every kind of service vehicle has its own distinct noise to announce his presence. The man with the ice-cream cart has jingle-bells that he shakes. The bread man has one of those old-school brass horns with the rubber squeeze-ball (and he comes along our stretch of town every day around 2:20 with fresh banana bread, cinnamon bread, sweet bread, and other kinds, all 1 Quetzal (about 14 cents) a piece. They are baked individually in rolls, not loaves, and I buy one every day). The pickups have their quick police siren noises. The buses have their barge-horns. The promo-trucks for Coca-Cola or Gallo or the cell-phone companies blast music and muffled announcements of deals out of the loudspeakers on their cars. That leaves the car alarm for the garbage truck (you know, that 8-phase car alarm).

It's amazing how my attitude towards the food here has developed: I have loved it and hated it, I have praised Catarina for it sometimes and I have eaten in silent disgust other times. Granted, some dishes are better than others, but some things (tortillas) never change. I haven't mentioned this yet, but my amoebas are gone, so the ol' digestive system is back on track. I'll say now that my sickness affected my appetite way more than I realized at the time, and now my attitude towards the food has come about full circle.

Today (and yesterday) for lunch we sat in the back of Luis' gallery and ate hot tortillas and processed packaged ham and lukewarm coffee. Not much of a meal, but I have grown to look forward to even that, as long as the tortillas are hot. I have run the whole spectrum of getting sick of things to having things grow on me. There is no telling which way it will go next, or when it will level out. I wonder how much of my appetite has to do with the novelty of the food and how much to my natural disposition to it.

On its erratic and uncontrollable track, my attitude towards food here develops just as much as (and probably affects) my attitude towards the people and towards this place in general.

Funny: as I am writing this Catarina knocks on my door with a hearty “buenas noches” and brings me something she bought below: a tortilla with black beans cooked inside, called ta' un. She made these a few nights ago herself; I picked one up and was fascinated. They're really tasty. I have asked if I could learn how to do this. She says it is difficult but she will teach me.

I've been making tortillas with Catarina before dinner. I'm getting better. I found out that when we eat them she can actually tell which side was made by her right hand and which by her left. Her making them really is something to watch, given that she's done this one to three times a day since she was ten years old. I've asked her and no, they don't have contests for tortilla-making. I think that if this were the U.S. or Japan there would be a contest somewhere.

Right now I'm sitting on my bed writing this. It's 6 pm and there's low and steady thunder coming from across the lake, where mounting storm clouds are hiding the volcanoes' peaks. My door is wide open, and the dense breeze brings with it the smell of the sweet firewood they burn here and a constant noise of kids running around. Fish for dinner tonight, and then we're going to the campo to play basketball with a ball that needs air.

One more thing. Luis Miguel turns 8 next week. All this time I thought he was 8 and Wilson was 10, but it's actually 7 and 11. That better explains the maturity difference. Today, for example, Wilson missed school to take a pickup into Panajachel where he sells hand-made embroidered postcards to tourists. He ate lunch there and with some of the money he made bought himself and Luis Miguel each a toy car. Luis Miguel is a long way from this. He cries easily when he and Wilson fight or play a little rough, although I guess that's about “normal” for a 7-year-old. I continue to treat Wilson as an equal though. I ask his advice about who in town to stay away from, and I even like his sense of humor most of the time.

All of these are in Santa Catarina

Lightning over the lake