Authors: Kelly Kerney
Within an hour, the bags up front filled up and trash filtered down to their position in the line. Maya leapt on the silver shimmer of a food wrapper, then a Coke can. Her enthusiasm dwindled quickly and Jean made up for it
with her own efforts. She collected what she could, wondering if a name was enough information to find someone in Guatemala. Had Cruzita really given up Maya because of poverty? Possibly Jean could find her and simply ask.
The rocks underfoot crunched smaller and smaller, into cinders. It became difficult to walk, like hiking uphill on sand. The woman just ahead fell back, out of breath, and began talking to Jean. “He”âshe pointed to the man in the white polo shirtâ“is with the Truth Commission.”
“Is that the same as the Historical Clarification Commission?”
“No. They're different.”
“How so?”
The woman shrugged, gave the short answer because of her lack of breath. “Historical Clarification published their findings already, the Truth Commission hasn't.”
“And what are they finding? Anything new?”
“Nothing new. Just counting the dead.”
“A shoe!” Maya held up a tire sandal triumphantly. “This is the sixth shoe I've found. How are these people making it up the volcano without shoes?”
The woman and Jean looked at each other.
“I don't know, sweetie. Why don't you leave the shoes? People,” she managed to say, “might come back for them.”
What were the chances this Cruzita was still alive? The bloodiest year of the civil war was 1983. Mostly likely she was dead. Most likely Maya was a true orphan, no matter what Telema's irate article implied.
“I think,” the woman ventured, “the Truth Commission is more personal, helps people find loved ones. They'll be here forever. The Historical Clarification Commission worked on the bigger picture, identifying perpetrators, influence, and money flow. They published their report in February.”
“And who are you with?”
She pointed to her shirt. “I'm with the Accuracy League. I interview survivors.”
“And what do they tell you in these interviews?”
“My interviews are more about the dead. Past injuries they had, dental details, what they were last seen wearing. Stuff like that, helping people find loved ones in the mass graves. Sometimes we identify and return remains to families.”
Jean shuddered. “Is that important to the Maya, new burials?” A dumb question.
“Oh yes. Honoring ancestors is always their main concern, even above their own safety. Improper burial is excruciating psychic anguish for them. As is any implication that a dead relative ever did anything wrong. It's hard to get accurate information a lot of the time, because they won't allow themselves to say anything bad of the dead. So, say a father was forced into the army. They won't say so. They'll just report him missing, but if they told us he was in the army, we'd have a much better idea of where to search.”
“So how do all these organizations fit together? I mean, the Truth Commission finds the bodies, then you help identify them?”
The woman made a face. “The Truth Commission's full of pompous assholes. Fortunately, we have our own forensic anthropologists.”
The bags, heavy and full, could not be carried to the top. Everyone left them on the trail, to pick up on the way down. As they approached the summit, the trail abandoned its switchback pattern and led them on a direct assault of the crater. The sun threatened to break over the ridge without them, but the more they hurried, the longer it took. One step forward could cause Jean to slide three steps back. Maya doubled over, employing her hands to work with her legs. Everyone sweated, so that the fine dust settled on their skin and turned to a thin black mud. The litter near the top was the worst on the trail. Now it seemed they should have hiked up, then collected trash on the way down.
Jean's body locked into a rhythm as she considered the mystery before her. Cruzita. But really, what could she find out? Jean knew the story already. A poor Mayan woman, surrounded by death, unable to preserve her own life, let alone one of a child. To find out more was to open herself only to bad news. Because there could be nothing but bad news for a Mayan woman in the mountains in 1983.
Maya reached the rim of the crater half a minute before the rest of them. She paused, not moving, her arms slightly raised at her sides. The spectacle of her wonder compelled the others to hurry, and when they reached the end of the path, none of them could believe what they saw.
There, above the sunken, smoking crater, a young blond woman presided in a gold bikini, leggy and gigantic. Below her, in the distance, Xela lay in a misty stupor. The hikers had no time to navigate an alternate route, but stood amazed at this goddess blocking their path, ignoring them. And then a miracle happened. The sun mounted the horizon and appeared between her legsâa reverse birthâand began a slow crawl up her thighs.
“Lift your chin,” a voice called, to their left. “Open your legs a little more.”
The girl obeyed, which caused a flurry of activity off to the side, where a camera crew adjusted to the new angle.
The girl, with light spreading up her body, turned to the camera and held her mouth out, as if for a kiss. “Gilberto Ahumada Lobos,” she purred.
“It's a political ad,” the UN worker said. “They're filming a presidential ad.”
“No, no,” the director yelled. “Roll your
r
. Like this. Gilberrrrto.”
The girl tested the word on her tongue.
“We've got two minutes to get this right, or we're back up here tomorrow night.”
The girl no longer looked immortal, but panicked and cold in her bikini as the sunlight moved up her legs, not warming her.
“Gilberrrrto,” she said, over and over.
“It doesn't matter. We're doing a native voice-over for that.”
“But it must look real,” the director yelled. “Her mouth must look like it's saying that word. No Spanish speaker will believe her lips are saying those words! Baby,” he pleaded, “move your mouth like you're making love.”
She pouted, crossed her arms over her chest. “Why am I in fucking Guatemala pretending to be able to speak Spanish? We could have shot this back in California. It's a fucking mountain. We have mountains in California! We have the sun! We have people who speak Spanish!”
They eventually made their way around the crew, to a ledge where soldiers with AK-47s sat guarding the view. Behind them, the blue hand gave a ten-foot-tall salute.
“Ahumada Lobos is FRG,” one of the Truth Commission people said, staring at the hand. The woman from the Accuracy League disappeared off the trail for a moment and returned with her polo shirt turned inside out.
It was unclear whether the shoot had been a success. The girl, wearing a coat now, huddled on a rock and smoked a cigarette. Maya approached, asking her something Jean could not hear.
“No, I'm not running for President,” she replied, crushing her cigarette onto the rock. “But I bet I'd be better at it than anyone running the show now. I can't even get a decent cigarette in this country.” She moved her tongue around inside her mouth elaborately. “Tastes like ashes. Like it's already been smoked and resold.”
Jean turned her attention to the view, which was clearing and intricate. Daylight seeped into the valley, the sun a bright yellow yolk broken over everything. The mists, dissipating, clung in small depressions scattered through the valley. The woman with the inside-out shirt pointed at them,
taking notes. In the outskirts, wheat fields flamed red in the angled sun. No one spoke. From this high, Jean thought, it could be any era they were looking out on. It could be 1902 just as well as 1999.
“This is the most beautiful place I've ever been,” Maya panted, with her hands on her hips. “I could just
die
, I could just
die
right here!” She approached the large blue hand and pressed her own hand to the image, like a greeting. “It's wet,” she said, surprised at her blue palm. She stamped a naked part of the rock with her own imitation, a miniature close-fingered salute, then wiped her hand down the side to get rid of the paint.
~~~~~
“It's a big day for Guatemala,” Telema announced the morning after their date, from her classroom podium. Jean could barely remain in her chair for her excitement, her happiness. She had woken up that morning on her deck, with Telema already gone. And an hour later, here she was, probably sharing the same hangover. Jean stared up at the stage and told herself, This brilliant beautiful woman is my girlfriend. Telema Espejo de la Hoz, she decided, was the most passionate, interesting person she'd ever met. She'd held that gun as if she'd taken hostages before.
All around, undergraduates slumped in their theater chairs, some with their eyes closed.
Telema hoisted a stack of papers and passed them off for distribution. Jean saw the black purse tossed carelessly on the lectern, wondered if the gun was still inside. The first secret between them, the gun in a crowded theater. Jean took two copies and passed the stack across three chairs, to Telema's best student, who was wearing a paisley tie. Jean had never noticed him in this class until now. He took his copy and removed his horn-rimmed glasses to look it over seriously as Telema began her lecture.
“I know we haven't yet studied the years after the CIA coup in Guatemala, but this was just released yesterday.” She held up the paper, which went limp in her hands. “The Commission for Historical Clarification has published their report on the thirty-six-year civil war that followed the coup.”
Jean felt her heart constrict. This had been released yesterday and Telema hadn't mentioned it to her? She was forced to hear it, like the others, as a lecture.
Telema held the unwieldy report with two hands. She read from the middle:
“During the armed confrontation, the State's idea of the âinternal enemy,'
intrinsic to the National Security Doctrine, became increasingly inclusive. At the same time, this doctrine became the
raison d'être of Army and State policies for several decades. Through its investigation, the CEH discovered one of the most devastating effects of this policy: state forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for ninety-three percent of the violations documented by the CEH, including ninety-two percent of the arbitrary executions and ninety-one percent of forced disappearances.”
The students were writing on their tabletsâ91 percent, 92 percent, 93 percentâafraid the numbers might show up on a test. Jean knew it had been the majority, but such a vast majority surprised her. It may, also, have taken Telema aback. It would have explained her mood the night before, waving a gun around and ordering Jean not to look anywhere but at her.
“
Three percent of the human rights violations were attributed to the guerrillas fighting the government. Four percent remains undetermined
.” No one bothered to write these figures; they knew Telema enough to know the first ones were the ones that mattered.
“Victims included men, women and children of all social strata: workers, professionals, church members, politicians, peasants, students and academics; in ethnic terms, the vast majority were Mayans.”
A door slammed open in the back, changing the light, as a handful of students walked in, late.
“Through its investigation, the CEH also concludes the undeniable existence of racism expressed repeatedly by the State as a doctrine of superiority, as a basic explanatory factor for the indiscriminate nature and particular brutality with which military operations were carried out against hundreds of Mayan communities in the west and northwest of the country, especially between 1981 and 1983 when more than half the six hundred twenty-six massacres and scorched earth operations occurred.
“Acts such as the killing of defenceless children, often by beating them against walls or throwing them alive into pits where the corpses of adults were later thrown; the amputation of limbs; the impaling of victims; the killing of persons by covering them in petrol and burning them alive; the extraction, in the presence of others, of the viscera of victims who were still alive; the confinement of people who had been mortally tortured, in agony for days; the opening of the wombs of pregnant women, and other similarly atrocious acts.”
She was reading and flipping so quickly. The students, not able to keep up with their note-taking, looked around, bewildered and unsure of what
they were hearing. The door opened again, with a burst of sunlight, as more students wandered in late, adding to the confusion.
“The CEH accounts among the most damaging effects of the confrontation those that resulted from forcing large sectors of the population to be accomplices in the violence, especially through their participation in the Civil Patrols, the paramilitary structures created by the Army in 1981 in most of the Republic. The CEH is aware of hundreds of cases in which civilians were forced by the Army, at gunpoint, to rape women, torture, mutilate corpses and kill. This extreme cruelty was used by the State to cause social disintegration. A large proportion of the male population over the age of fifteen, especially in the Mayan communities, was forced to participate in the Civil Patrols . . . The coexistence of victims and perpetrators in the same villages reproduces the climate of fear and silence.”
The theater seats moaned as new arrivals sat down.
“Estimates of the number of displaced persons vary from five hundred thousand to a million and a half people in the most intense period from 1981 to 1983 . . . Through its investigation, the CEH has confirmed that those who fled were forced to move constantly, mainly to evade military operations directed against them despite their being defenceless, and partly to search for food, water and shelter . . . From 1983 onwards, Army strategy toward the displaced populations was designed to bring it under military control: amnesties were offered and those who accepted were resettled in highly militarized communities, marked by activities that included psychological operations to re-educate the people and the construction of model villages in the most conflictive regions.”