Authors: Kelly Kerney
“And their candidate, Gilberto Ahumada Lobos, will win. There's no doubt.” He shook his head. “I have a theory. The other political logos, I swear, they're painted by his party, too, to make people afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Afraid to vote. I have friends working the political end, trying to register Mayan voters. They're too terrified, they won't sign up. All the options, or semblance of so many options, scares them. They're scared they won't pick the
right
candidate. The right candidate being whoever wins. All they want to do is vote for who will win, so the winner won't kill them for voting for someone else. They don't believe that their votes could actually
determine
the winner. It's so fucked up.”
“Does all this make you angry? Like the work you're doing is for nothing?”
He shrugged. “You better drink faster,” he told her. “If it's not ice-cold, it tastes like ass. They've already been out of the fridge for fifteen minutes.”
Jean sipped, already tasting the faint notes of ass. To overcome it, they chugged together, Jean drinking half her bottle in one pull.
“That girl with you . . .” her companion began, but faltered. Instead of finishing the sentence, he finished his beer.
Jean took her time to reply, “She's my daughter.”
“Oh.” He smiled the empty smile of someone changing course. “Your real daughter?”
“Yes, she's my real daughter.”
“And where's her father, if I may ask?”
Jean glared at him. “Possibly Nueva Aldea de la Vida.”
“Your daughter . . .” he tried again. “Does she usually make scenes like that?”
“Only recently.” The scene in the lunch shack had made quite an impression. Telema's phrase “little bombs” came to mind. “But she's getting better.”
“She doesn't look like you, not at all.” He laughed uneasily. “She looks like her father, I suppose. Her father's Mayan?”
“I'm not sure,” Jean snapped. “I was drunk, it was dark. I couldn't see his face.” It was incredible, the personal questions that always came up when strangers saw Maya.
The NGO put his hands up like a referee. “Whoa, whoa! Calm down. I don't really care, you know, I didn't mean it like that. I just want to make sure . . . How do I phrase this?” He opened a new beer. “Yes, people are jumpy. Half the population should be in jail and the other half is too terrified to think straight. There are tens of thousands of armed soldiers without an army now, forming their own gangs. I just want to make sure you don't take that little firecracker to the wrong place.”
“What's the wrong place?”
“Ten miles or more outside Xela,” he said without blinking.
“How about Nueva Aldea de la Vida?”
“Good God, definitely don't go there.”
“Why not? What's there?”
“A new garment factory, an old model village, and a lot of terrified, superstitious Maya who endured the brunt of the war. My organization pulled out of there a couple of months ago, after interviewers received death threats.” He tapped on the table to command her attention. “Listen, if you're looking for the father, if you have to engage Nueva Aldea de la Vida at all, don't go there. I'll get a contact for you. There's one woman left there, I think. Last I heard, she was still there. I'll get her in touch right away.”
Several beers later, Jean slipped back into her room. At the sound of the door, Maya shot up from sleep. “Where did you go?”
“Only to the bathroom, Maya. Do you need to go? I think maybe you should try.”
Half asleep, Maya admitted with a whimper, “I'm afraid.”
“You're afraid to go to the bathroom at night? Is that the problem? What are you afraid of?”
“Snakes.”
“Well, I was just in there and there are no snakes, I promise.” Jean walked her down the hall, holding her hand. Maya peed with the door open.
~~~~~
Jean's first task upon arriving home from Iowa was to search for Telema. They had not spoken since their night on the deck, since the UN report
had been released. And now, after Jean had had some time to absorb the report, its implication of her, she needed to confess. Things with Telema simply could not progress without a discussion about Maya. After going to Telema's house and her usual bar, Jean finally found her that night in her office.
“How long have you been here? I've been to Iowa and back!” Jean said Iowa and back like she meant hell and back. “I've called youâ”
“Imogene, Imogene. Why do you write books and papers about things you cannot even begin to understand?” Telema said as a greeting.
“I guess . . .” Jean tried, unsure of her footing among the piles of books. Something crunched underfoot, glass. How long would she have to pretend to be writing a book about Guatemala? “I guess I hope that the writing will help me to understand.”
“You cannot understand from afar, at your computer, any more than you can understand it up close, Imogene. The perpetrators and the victims don't even understand. They become indistinguishable. That is violence for you. Real violence. Everyone becomes a victim and a perpetrator simultaneously. Do you know why?”
“No.”
A streetlamp outside the window illuminated everything just enough that Jean could sense the things all around that she could not see.
“Because the masters of the violence don't have to do a thing. It perpetuates itself. It hits you so hard you become incapable of understanding anything but your own survival. The soldiers become as terrified as their victims. Blunt-force trauma. Would you like a drink?”
Jean recognized the shape of a bourbon bottle on the desk. Telema switched on a weak desk lamp, to search though its green glass glow.
“I broke the other glass,” Telema said, “but you can have mine.” She pushed a jelly glass over, then looked over the clutter on her desk. Choosing a black plastic pencil cup, she emptied it, blew inside, then filled it with four glugs.
“I got a call from the dean this evening. I've been reprimanded for teaching politics again with the UN report. I crossed the magical twenty-year threshold that separates fact from opinion. And several students have complained that I'm un-American.”
“Un-American?”
“What is this, 1954? I'm sure there'll be more complaints after they all come back from their beachy, third world, Spring Break paradises. But fuck
them. I have real work to do.” She took up a small index card from her desk and waved it at Jean.
“What's that?”
“Evie Crowder's phone number.”
Headlights passed outside, turning the shadows upside down and throwing the bookshelves into tumult.
“She's alive?” Jean asked. “She has a phone number?”
“Yes, but she's not very good at the phone. She's over a hundred years old. She can't hear a thing, actually. I tried. But I'm going to see her next week.”
“You're the most productive person I've ever known,” Jean concluded sadly. Her shame about Maya was temporarily alleviated by this new pang of remorse. In this relationship, Jean knew, it would never end. Her guilt would constantly change shape faster than she could reconcile it.
“How's your work going, Imogene? Have you figured out your thesis yet? Have you figured out the point of it all?”
“I told you the other night I hadn't. If the coup wasn't orchestrated for the money, then what?”
“Something much worse. How about this: There was no point. The theater of the absurd. A performance for performance's sake.”
“So not even United Fruit. The coup had nothing to do with Fruit at all?”
“That's not what I said. How about this: No one believed that the Guatemalans had risen up to oust Jacobo Arbenz themselves. The CIA, Eisenhower, and his crew could control a mass delusion in a tiny country of petrified, uneducated people. They could control the American press, but once the story leaks out into the larger world, it is beyond their control. The UN cried foul and so, to thwart suspicions that they overthrew a democratically elected president for the sake of United Fruit, they told the State Department to immediately bring the company down.”
“I never thought anything could make money look like a noble cause. They were bad leaders and bad friends?”
“Self-preservation is the strongest instinct. The money was important enough to spark thirty-six years of civil war, to destroy the lives of five million people. It was important enough to kill a few hundred thousand Guatemalans, but it wasn't worth tarnishing ten American reputations, so they abandoned it.”
Jean held her bourbon.
“Did you read the Truth report, Imogene?”
“Most of it, yes. On the plane. It's a little dry, though.” It was a good sign,
she decided, that Telema used her real name, her pet name. She began to practice her defense, counting off all the horrors she'd saved Maya from, though Telema began her own accounting.
“Indeed.” Telema held up the report to read by the light of the desk lamp. “
The Foundation's principal objective will be to facilitate the implementation of the recommendation made by the CEH, regarding five principal areas of activity ordered by the mandate: a) Direct implementation of specific recommendations; b) Backing and assistance in the implementation of the recommendations; c) Monitoring the adequate implementation of the recommendations; d) Promotion of and support for historical research; e) Assistance in seeking funds to finance projects for the implementation of the recommendations.
” She took a sip. “They are very careful with their prepositions, very precise. Reconciliation by grammar.”
“Telema, I don't understand why you're so upset. I mean, I understand, it's horrible, but this isn't anything you didn't expect. What do you want?”
“I want Reagan prosecuted for war crimes. I want Eisenhower and Dulles exposed in the history books. I want the D.C. airports renamed. As of now, we can completely gut a country for nothing and know that in fifty years, some paper like this will come out and outline how to make it all better.” She took up the report again.
“Measures to preserve the memory of the victims: a) Designation of a day of commemoration of the victims (National Day of Dignity for the Victims of the Violence). b) The construction of monuments and public parks in memory of the victims at national, regional and municipal levels. c) The assigning of names of victims to educational centers, buildings and public highways.”
A car passed, turning the room upside down in shadows.
“There are not enough roads in Guatemala,” she concluded, then tipped her pencil cup back to drain it. “I want there to be only one National Day of Dignity for Americans. Right now, every day is a day of dignity here, but I think there should be only one, like everywhere else.”
Jean could only agree. Her shame so overwhelmed her in that moment that she wanted nothing less than punishment. To be disgraced and chided by this merciless woman seemed the only answer. She no longer wanted to save the relationship; she merely wanted to save her sanity at this point. Only after Jean was held accountable could she and Maya move on.
“Telema, you know, this report is sort of personal for me, too. My daughter's Guatemalan.” Telema watched Jean's mouth as she spoke, as if she were reading subtitles. “Mayan, actually. I knew you'd disapprove of me adopting
her. She was a year old. She arrived at LAX malnourished and reeking of shit. A war baby.”
“No, no, I think it's swell. Just swell.”
Jean stiffened. The professor refilled their drinks. “It's very selfless of you, very humanitarian. Why bring your own child into the world when there are so many who need good homes, right, Imogene?”
Jean nodded tentatively. She felt her name was being used as a weapon now.
“No!” Telema slammed her cup down, spraying bourbon all over the report, all over her arm. Jean felt it splash on her face. “If you fucking want some legacy, if you want to mold some helpless child in your pathetic image, then have your own fucking children! Raise them to be fucking conscientious Americans! Don't steal the children of an endangered minority, then raise them with your bullshit self-righteous version of cultural appreciation!”
Jean felt a tremendous release as her embarrassment dissolved into anger. Telema's tirade sounded as abstract, heartless, and meaningless as the report. Not a single question about her little girl, her baby who'd been attacked with a knife, who still had the scar, who wasn't a human being to this monstrous woman but a
member of an endangered minority.
“This . . .” Jean growled, rising from her seat, “this is bullshit. You're telling me it would be better for Maya to have grown up in an orphanage, without an education, in a war-torn nation, to die from childbirth at the age of fifteen, rather than be here with me.”
“Yes.”
“Then you're no different than the people who kill for ideals.” Jean stepped back, toward the door, through the broken glass. “You're no different than the people you want to see strung up.”
“It's just trading one kind of poverty for another, Imogene. What makes you think yours is better?”
“What the hell are you talking about? If you think Guatemala's so great, why are you here?”
“Maybe there's a road somewhere, in Guatemala, named after your daughter. That would make it all right, yes? Just fill the country with memorials, with concrete penises pointing to the sky, so we can all feel better about your selfishness.”
“You have no idea where Maya came from. You know less than I do.”
Jean could not walk out carefully on the glass without looking unsure of herself. So instead she stomped recklessly, sending shards skittering across
the floor. Telema leaned back in her office chair, studying her calmly, but underneath, Jean knew, she was a mural of smoke and teeth and jungle. Antlers cocked and pointed in her direction.