The question of where my family would go in the summer of '07 was
answered by an invitation from a fellow high school debate coach to her August
wedding in Guatemala. Post Gonzales-Gate terror alerts notwithstanding, we made
the travel arrangements.
Part of the preparation for me was
formation of focus questions, as we say in the teacher biz. Since the trip
included a bus tour- with the wedding party- of the country’s Mayan past, my
question became: “What can I learn from contemplating a vanished civilization?”
and its companion, “Can I glean clues from my travels as to the likelihood that
my ‘civilization’ may be vanishing?” I collected literature on the Mayan past
and learned from my readings that the Maya were a highly clever people who were
able to develop a surplus out of the meager Mesoamerican soil. The surplus led
to a stratified society, with a leisure class. As in all leisure classes, high
priests evolved who codified and formalized a system of belief around a core
myth. For the Mayans, the core myth was that the gods created the world and
people by committing suicide, for people consume the gods in the form of maize.
This debt to the gods must be repaid with varying levels of sacrifice. When the
debt is deemed in severe arrears, a human sacrifice might be in order.
Candidates for sacrifice were culled from the nobility ( a practice we have
clearly abandoned). In cases of more quotidian debt, the high priest could make
lesser offerings, for instance he might stand on the summit of the ziggurat and
cut his penis, letting blood drip onto a piece of bark. The blood was then
cooked over a wood fire, generating an energizing smoke for the languishing
gods.
Lest anyone jump ahead and conjecture that
Mayan “civilization” vanished because it was abhorrent or oppressive, keep in
mind that at the time of its pre-Columbian demise, around 900 AD, it had run
many hundreds of years longer than any of the present western “civilizations.”
A note: I have put the words “civilized”
and “civilization” in quotes throughout this essay. Although a working
definition of “civilized” is easy enough to come by (my own is: “A civilized
society is one in which people are kept from killing each other to the extent
that a leisure class can be sustained”), the word has a positive connotation
that has never, to my knowledge, been adequately explained.
So the departure day arrived, and I made
my first mistake. I had been on cold-turkey withdrawal from the newspaper
horoscope section-almost two weeks!- my fortitude maintained by a deep
embarrassment that I could be manipulated by so obvious a scam, when as we were
heading out the door I saw the paper open to the horoscopes (Susan does the
crossword puzzle cunningly tucked into the same section), and I weakened and
took a peek: “Not a good day for an outward journey. Take an inner trip
instead.” I slapped my head, “Doh!”, Homer Simpson style. Rationalizing
quickly, I reminded myself that the Mayans were obsessed with time, as measured
by their complex, double-wheeled calendar. Each day had its own gods and
purposes, which the priests could interpret for the people. Surely this was a
grand precedent for our watered down divinations.
As it happened, the horoscope did not seem
far off. Our American Airlines flight to Dallas, for a connecting flight to
Guatemala City, was delayed for three and a half hours. We missed the
connecting flight and spent a night in the Dallas Ramada Inn, where, at 5:00am,
I encountered a hung-over young man in the internet room resting his forehead
against a wall. The point of the airline experience is that, just as there is
speculation that the Mayan priestly class could not fend off hypothetical ills
of Mayan life, so the longevity of our “civilization” might be forecast by
gauging slips in what we call “service.” Specifically, in this case, service to
the middle class. It doesn’t matter which airline we used; stories from other
travelers illustrated a problem across all carriers: If your flight has no
trouble, the service is excellent; if there is a problem, you might as well not
exist. I refer not to the flight’s being late (that was caused by weather) but
to the void in communication and assistance that ensued. The fault lies not
with people in the field. The exhausted airline employee who faced us and about
80 other passengers, none of whom had any idea what to do or where to go, was
knowledgeable and hard working. The problem lay with her bosses in the priestly
class, the CEO’s, who left her, and us, hanging over a pit of uncertainty for
many hours until we could sort things out for ourselves. Of course, given the
big picture of global misery, one doesn’t want to whine too much because one’s
trip to Guatemala is delayed, but trends are important, and decline in service
to the middle class is not a good trend.
Through perseverance, then, we arrived at
Guatemala City Airport in late afternoon of our second day, to the sight of
hundreds of grim faced young men decked out in battle fatigues with automatic
weapons at the ready. They were stationed everywhere around the airport, but an
especially grim detachment greeted us at customs. Clearly anyone who screamed,
“I’m a terrorist and I’ve got a bomb” would be shot on the spot. We remained
dutifully silent, covertly doing what we could against the indigenous sport of
cutting in line, proffering our papers and flirting with friendly custom agents
where possible, and soon we found ourselves in the chaotic baggage claim area.
A quick negotiation got us a cab for the
40 kilometer trip to Antigua, the site of our friend’s wedding. The cab trip
brought us immediate exposure to Guatemala’s upcoming national elections.
Everywhere in the noisy urban sprawl of Guatemala City, and even in the
beautiful mountain pass leading to Antigua, were campaign posters. All the
exhibited candidates were male, ranging from twenty-something to middle aged,
and all were smiling as with some delightful secret. The messages were not
revealing of intention. The image of a man named Colom grinned over the
caption,“Viva Guatemala!” Victor Hugo’s proclaimed, “Puede!" while former
General Molina held out a stern "mano
dura" which
promised order of some sort. We picked a poster at random and asked the driver
if he liked the guy; he laughed and said, “No.”
The final winner in the runoff three
months later, by the way, was Colom, popular in rural areas. He beat Molina,
popular in the crime weary cities, which wanted his "hard hand."
People in the provinces feared the hard hand would be a return to military rule.
Colom in turn had to fight charges that a study he made of Mayan religious
rites showed he was an agent of the devil. That had apparently played well in
the cities. By the end of the election process, there had been 50 election
related killings. The devil vs. the devil?
Western children learn that the Greek’s
invented democracy. But is this what they invented, a flash of handsome face
and a sound bite, a moment of choice, then life goes on? It was hard to see any
outward differences between the Guatemalan democracy and ours, other than the
death count. In either case, it’s a match of pretty faces shouting, “Puede!”
Were there any clues to our future health in this system? Maybe we can go on
indefinitely with “democracy.” We can only hope.
The first sight of Antigua, the old
Spanish capitol, made the hours of aggravation worthwhile. Guatemala has 30
volcanoes, and three very large and looming ones tightly surround Antigua. At
intervals they smoke like chimneys, and every few hundred years they provoke intense
earthquakes and lava flows, wiping out the contemporary incarnation of Antigua.
The pastels of the low buildings, the majestic and crumbling cathedrals, the
scarlet sunset behind the volcanic cones: if this is “civilization,” play on!
We were brought sharply out of our
reveries by a sudden halt to the bumpy drive over cobbled streets. At every
turn that could have led us to the front entrance of the Hotel Santo Domingo,
the ritziest hotel in the country and site of the wedding, we were blocked by armed
soldiers, seeming extensions of those in the airport. Our driver haggled with
them to no avail, and finally we were told to take our luggage and walk a block
up a narrow ally to a side entrance. As we trudged past the soldiers, we
encountered no smiles; they assiduously did not look at us. I noticed their
fingers rested on their triggers. Ethnically they appeared Mayan, but I was
told later the army is mostly mestizo. At the hotel entrance, men in black
suits talked incessantly into headsets, looking nervously everywhere except
into our eyes. At all times during our three day stay at the hotel, the
soldiers and men in black were there. The initial explanation offered by the
concierge was that there was an international agricultural conference at the hotel.
It was not until the day of our departure that we learned that one of the
guests was the vice president of Colombia, although nowhere in the country did
we see signs of a seething hatred for this man, or even knowledge that he
existed. Several shops near the hotel featured photos of Bill Clinton sampling
their wares during a trip in the 90’s, no doubt protected, if that's the word,
by the same sort of force.
Is it because the place is beautiful that
it draws such rage? I wondered if there were lessons for all civilization in
the grim state of today's world leaders' personal security. Constant
encirclement by armed troops seems more a captivity for leaders than
protection, almost making them appear candidates for sacrifice. Modern
“elections” may be a ritualized sacrifice, in which we decide, not so much who
the new leaders will be, but whom we get rid of. If the U.S. polity is smart,
the next presidential election will feature a Republican candidate closely
associated with Bush, so that the electorate can experience his sacrifice. The
victorious Democrat, a smiling face shouting “Puede!” will represent, simply,
the new future sacrifice. [Post script, 3/12/14: Obama turned out to be the
victor after Romney was sacrificed. Now, for all his sins, we'll have to
sacrifice Obama to the new "Puede!"
Anyway, to be fair, there’s another aspect
to Guatemala’s generous use of its army. The country is still recovering from
its 36 year civil war, which ended only in 1996. These threatening soldiers
with their automatic weapons may or may not face real enemies now, but they
face real psychological stresses. The memory of bloodshed lingers with or
without an enemy. The ubiquitous troops, found as well in jewelry shops and
pharmacies, may be this society’s way of absorbing post traumatic stress
syndrome.
Meanwhile, we quickly discovered that the
Hotel Santo Domingo is one of the great hotels of the world. It is built among
the ruins of a 17th Century monastery. Baroque chamber music plays softly in
the long halls and in the ruins. The reconstructed church conducts mass on
Sunday. There are niches by the door of each guest room where stand 16th and
17th century Spanish carvings.
The wedding ceremony was held in the
chapel, much of whose walls are from the original four hundred year old
structure. The new walls are beautifully integrated with the old. It’s hard not
to believe that a wonderful hotel like this would not prolong the life of the
“civilization” that produced it.
Every culture needs to produce something
beautiful, or at least impressive, to look at, if only a hundred foot statue of
its leader. Guatemala might subsist indefinitely on its beauty alone.
The several hotel museums are wonderfully
arranged, with compelling exhibits, though sometimes the English captions
seemed to either lose, or gain in the translation. My favorite was the caption
below a mural of ancient Mayans toiling to build a temple: “The Mayan gods were
benevolent if offered human sacrifices.” Doh!
The wedding ceremony was conducted by an
attorney friend of the bride’s family. She created an amalgam of Jewish,
Catholic and New Age sentiment for the occasion. At the end of the ceremony,
she explained that the groom, a Guatemalan, would perform the Jewish ritual of
stepping on the wine glass (the bride was Jewish), after which, she said, we
could choose to shout “Mazaltov!” “Felicidad!” or “Congratulations!” My
colleague Cheryl, back home, had an epiphany after reading Strindberg’s “A
Dream Play,” the message of which was that the most productive type of
spirituality is “hybridity,” where the seeker “wishes to pick and choose idols
of worship and beliefs to espouse without the stale, enduring, bland template
decreed by an official institution.” It sounds like an evolutionary, flexible
approach. Yet which lasts longer, rigid theocracies with armed guards, or
intellectual, hybridistic societies? (Of course this question begs another: Is
the best society that which lasts longest?).
Antigua is a wonderful place to walk,
though you have to walk carefully (the sidewalks are as uneven as the cobbled
streets). On one stroll through the central plaza I came upon a bookstore with
outrageously priced paperbacks in English (average price: $60-$70). The books
were encased in cellophane so I couldn’t browse them for free, but the book
jackets were intriguing enough. Most were about the U.S., specifically CIA
complicity in the horrors endured by Guatemala. There was much about United
Fruit and the coffee business. The picture was of an indigenous people brutally
enslaved by American business interests, with puppet governments ensconced or
removed by the CIA. Not for the first time I searched my inner self for guilt
or lack thereof. None of my ancestors owned slaves, or shares of United Fruit,
yet I live, and eat fruit, where Native Americans were wiped out; I benefit
from an economy held afloat by military expenditures. Where is this guilt
supposed to lead? If people are to be subjected to guilt, then there’s no end
to the fallout, because guilt envelops everyone, the ostensibly downtrodden
too. Can a society collapse from guilt, like Hamlet’s stepfather? Did guilt
weaken the rulers of the classic Maya?
Another book brought me out of my dour
meditations. It was by an American who claims to have discovered that the Mayan
accounting of time was based on the real thing, which he called “synchronistic
time,” while ours, based on the Gregorian calendar, is fake. Further, the
events of 9/11 created a rupture in our fake time, a sort of opening into Mayan
real time, and this is a moment of opportunity, which we must not miss (price
of book: $65). This, I felt, was not so much hybridization as wishful thinking.
That doesn’t make it wrong, just overpriced.
Moving on I found a box of old American
paperbacks, reasonably priced for the relics they were. I spent $2 for a 1970
science fiction anthology, edited by Robert Silverberg, called “World’s of
Maybe,” featuring stories about alternate universes. The first story, “Sidewise
in Time,” by Murray Leinster, first published in 1935, was about a “timequake”
that hits the earth. The quake causes various time periods to violate their
natural borders, so that a Roman phalanx finds itself marching down the street
in a 20th century American suburb, etc. This seemed the perfect reading
material for Guatemala, which is itself the product of merging realities, the
converging point of five tectonic plates, its volcanoes connecting heaven and
earth, all in a temporal stew where Mayan (synchronistic?) time merges with
colonial and current time.
The moral, though, for our purposes, is
that a society with cheaply priced goods is more likely to survive. The delight
I found in my $2 book erased all the guilt of my former reverie. When cell
phones and airline tickets are too expensive for the middle class, you can
start counting the days.
The day after the wedding we boarded a
chartered bus with the wedding party for a tour of Guatemala. We were 31 people
in what amounted to a group-honeymoon, a charming and, we felt, practical idea
(no room for fights between the newlyweds, no longing for the family). The
first stop was Quirigua, where a king from the north conquered the area, killed
the former king and his family and commissioned large stelae to proclaim his
greatness. Nearby was a ballcourt for the famous game of “fireball” in which a
solid ball of burning rubber had to be hurled through hoops, soccer-like
without use of arms, with the loser sacrificed to the gods. Mayan society was
certainly not utopian, in the sense of “good,” though it was arguably “good” in
the sense of “long lived” (almost 1,000 years). On the other hand, as the
apotheosis of macho culture, it would only be called "good" by those
well-treated. Be this as it may, a question appears: is classical Mayan culture
gone because of a deficit in its governance, or because it’s, well, gone, as
all "civilizations" are sooner or later gone? Will we be gone because
we’re making mistakes, or because everything is sooner or later gone? I
searched Quirigua vainly for answers (the gloom only partially lifted by our
calling out “Stellaaaa….!” Tennessee Williams style).
The next two nights were spent on the
River Dulce in steamy little jungle cabins, the first night especially steamy
because our air conditioning unit broke. Tropical downpours alleviated the heat
and humidity at intervals, but most of the night was spent in frantic
claustrophobia, particularly acute for our two boys in the next cabin, who were
forced to combine a sudden absence of transmitted communication of any kind
with being trapped in a jungle. My wife and I at least had a white gecko on the
ceiling to stare at. The saving grace was a dream I had in the early morning,
engendered, so I thought, by the heat. This dream seemed in the form of a
docudrama showing that Hitler had come to Hollywood in the 20’s, for unknown
reasons. I watched as he fell into a scuffle with local toughs around Highland
and Hollywood Blvds. It could be that a culture can be saved by its dreams (I
vehemently reject recent revisionist “research,” funded by pharmaceutical
companies in their quest to make psychology an affair of drugs, which claims to
show that dreams are meaningless trash, which the mind must dispose of. Trash,
maybe-meaningless, no.), but this dream got me nowhere.
In between the two nights on the River
Dulce we took a boat to Livingston, on the Caribbean. On the way we stopped at
an island riddled with caves. A local man led us about 40 feet into one narrow
passage that opened up into a small cavern. He flashed his light and we could
see other passages leading off into darkness. He mentioned the Maya coming
here, and I could feel the sweat dripping down my body, and I thought I might
feel the closeness of forces watching, waiting, very patient. Were these forces
human? Was my sense wishful thinking, the most disheartening of all
possibilities? Actually, I felt no force, just the suggestion of how likely a
place this would be to find a force. Still, places with perceived “forces” are
necessary for a culture, are they not? What would we do in the San Fernando
Valley, a place devoid of obvious “forces” (unless you count the 5,000 year old
Chumash well, commemorated with an iron grate in the Encino Pick ‘n
Save parking lot) without the nearby Santa Monica Mountains, beautiful beyond
words where extant.
Livingston, accessible only by boat, is
home to descendants of black slaves shipwrecked off the coast, many of whom
intermarried with Amerindians. They speak a language called Garifuna, a mixture
of African and Amerindian languages. The groups of black teenagers we saw were
very attractive, but not outwardly friendly. In a few cases we heard muted
conversation as we passed and then raucous laughter from behind. We spent a hot
afternoon there amongst lovely pastel colored plaster houses and quiet streams,
covered everywhere with junk and debris. Our boys left us to swim at the beach.
We strolled about and I noticed that for the first time on our trip there was
an election poster for a female candidate: the indigenous activist Rigoberta
Menchu. We surmised that Livingston was a restive place. While wandering, I
opened the Triple A book and read that Livingston is full of dangers: thieves
everywhere, with armed robbery common on the beach, and the sea contaminated
with “jungle runoff” and unsafe for swimming. It was then I realized that in
spite of the heat and the incredibly beautiful beach, we had not seen a single
person, other than our boys, in the water, or even on the sand, and we had
passed families of pigs wandering untended down the residential streets, over
gutters that no doubt fed into the sea. I rushed back to find the boys about
100 feet out in the shallow sea, very happy and reluctant to come ashore. When
they finally rambled out I gave them the sober news, which they found
unimpressive. “What a cool beach,” they agreed. For several weeks I watched for
signs of cholera, malaria, salmonella, anything, in the boys, but nothing
appeared. Surely it’s a sign of a culture’s probable decline when its most
valuable assets cannot be used. And yet, the people in Livingston seemed happy,
and we heard no reports of people leaving.
On then, the next morning, to the big
prize, Tikal. But just as Dorothy and her friends had to pay a heavy price to
enter the Palace of the Wizard, visitors to Tikal are referred to a nasty
little town called Flores, full of natural beauty it does its best to
annihilate. A small island in Lake Peten Itza, with a short bridge attaching it
to land, Flores receives its manna from visitors to Tikal. Shopkeepers look at
you with a sharp eye and sly smile and say “Tikal?” as if to say, “You idiot.”
With the exception of the wonderful Luna Café, which has soulful food and plays
beautiful Latin music, the restaurants are indifferent to the finer points of
cooking, and of hygiene (bathrooms offer a common hand towel for customers).
There is a general worship of noise for its own sake: at 5:00a.m. a boy riding
sidesaddle on a motor scooter behind his mother repeatedly screams that he has
the new La Prensa; cars speed about through the day blasting election
propaganda; even the gas company truck sports speakers that blare some sort of
gas related news. Still, there were many kind and charming people in Flores, and
the invasive natural world often brings relief. Case in point, we had our first
lunch on a floating platform (reached from the restaurant over a trackless
construction zone) that bobbed gently on the lake. We spotted a storm to the
south, and within minutes a mighty gale with horizontal rain was blasting
through the unprotected platform, washing our tables clean and drenching us, as
the smiling waiters wrapped up what food they could. It was pure magic, and on
its own came close to redeeming Flores.
We assembled at 6:00am for the trip to
Tikal. The early start was necessary to avoid the worst heat. The delightful
Professor Merritt, of the Rhetoric Dept. (don’t ask) at UC Berkeley, long time
friend of the bride’s father, and his witty wife Karen, sat across the aisle
from us on the bus, and the professor told us the story of his sister’s
childhood. She had the habit, as a young, headstrong girl, of tearing out each
page of a book as she finished reading it, crumpling it up in one hand and
tossing it in the trash. Often she would sit at the front of her class and
offer the teacher an unrestricted view of this procedure. Not surprisingly, she
was kicked out of a number of schools. What struck me was the Zen nature of her
act. She was living entirely in the now. When a page was done, it was, well,
done. How much more enlightened can you get?
To keep from becoming gloomy at the
thought of how impractical enlightenment can be, I switched my attention to the
current National Geographic, which I had bought at LAX because, coincidentally,
its feature story was, “MAYA, How a Great Culture Rose and Fell,” with a photo
of Tikal’s Temple of the Great Jaguar, lit up at night, on the cover. Much of
the information was familiar: the temples were built during the classic period,
around 600 to 900AD, and were mysteriously abandoned, as were all the Mayan
cities in Mesoamerica, sometime after 900. The main focus of the article was
the current thinking about Fire is Born, the foreign king from Teotihuacan in
the Mexican highlands, who conquered Tikal and is thought to be responsible for
much of the classic splendor.
We stopped at the gate to the park and
learned that the admission price had tripled that day. After much grumbling and
counting of Quetzals, we entered and parked. I was excited, though I had a
nagging fear that I would once again suffer what I call the Sistine Chapel
effect, which I experienced in Rome four years earlier. After marching through
the labyrinthine Vatican museum and using up all my art appreciation neuroreceptors
(and tolerance for crowds) on the stunning 19th Century collection of Egyptian
artifacts, I made it to the Sistine Chapel, looked up, saw God and Adam
reaching out to one another, and felt…nothing. I had the same problem with the
Mona Lisa. Maybe this should be called "Lack of Affect at seeing in person
a Widely Celebrated Work of Art Syndrome." How awful, I thought, if the
Mayan temples of Tikal, subject of many a travel poster, did not move me. My
anxiety was for nothing, though. Even the continual stream of sweat down my
face did not impede my sense of amazement. These people created an overwhelming
work of art to live in, in a fearsome jungle, and now it’s gone, the remains
covered in dirt and returned jungle.
"You too will be gone some day,"
the place seems to murmur. The Pick ‘n Save in Encino will be a piece of rebar
sticking out of the ground. Someone will look around and wonder, “What
destroyed them?”
The Mayans had the same contempt for the
past that we have in Los Angeles. The temples are not solid rock, like the
Egyptian pyramids, but chambers filled with debris. The debris was produced by
grinding up whatever structures the last Mayans in the area had built. I was
upset when our city, Los Angeles, without a moment’s hesitation, allowed the
destruction of the Brown Derby restaurant, a landmark known throughout the
world. But we did not just destroy it, we sacrificed it, we ate it, and it was
subsumed along with the chaparral forests, and Chavez Ravine and the L.A. River
into the new us.
Speaking of sacrifice, I pondered it as I
stood atop the massive Temple IV, as it is academically known. Were beating
hearts really cut out of chests up here? No one really knows, not even Mel Gibson. Were the beliefs
associated with this “primitive” site so different from ours. There is
sacrifice all over the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Maya believed that
sacrifice was a repayment for the debt of existence. Were Adam's and Eve's
bites of forbidden fruit attempts to exist physically, with the
"knowing" that entails? Is existing physically a sin? Talk about the
punishment fitting the crime- they were punished, sacrificed as it were, as we
all have been, by the very granting of their wish. The pain of sacrifice, so
essential to Jesus' story, may be the pain of separation of the physical and
the "knowing." How fitting that "Nirvana" by extension
connotes a state of oblivion. The joke will be on us if it turns out, after all
our efforts, that there really isn't anything to know.
Walking back to the bus I tried to put it
all together, but couldn’t quite. My meditations were relieved by spry spider
monkeys lurching in the canopy above. At one point a remarkable creature, most
likely, from what I’ve been told, a coatimundi, walked down the trail towards
us and passed blithely on the left. Also adding to the ambiance was the cry of the howler monkeys,
which turns out to be a highly unpleasant and hostile sound, something between
an angry lion and a wheezing gorilla.
That night, our last in Flores, I returned
(when the frequently failing electrical power permitted) to the Silverberg
anthology. It was diverting to find a 1955 parallel universe story by Poul Anderson,
titled “Delenda Est,” (short for “Delenda est Carthago,” Latin for “Carthage
must be destroyed!”) with a Mayan element. In this universe Carthage defeats
Rome in the Punic Wars, and the result is a modern world in which the Germanic
tribes of Europe are minimized and the Celts become dominant. The New World is
"discovered" by Gauls in the 9th century, and this leads to the north
American state of Afallon. This state is not able to wipe out the indigenous
cultures, however, but only stimulates them to compete. The “Mayan empire”
thrives under the assault, and far from vanishing in the 10th Century,
establishes an alliance with the southern kingdom of “Huy Braseal” and enters
the modern age. Anderson’s point seems to be that a rival was the missing
element in the real Mayan empire's survival. Post World War II US history seems to corroborate this
view. What would we have done in the fifties without the USSR? There would have
been no space program, probably, but the more sober thought is that there may
have been no coherent U.S.A. Now we have terrorism as our unifying force. If
this is a lesson to be learned from the Maya, we ought to learn it fast.
The next morning our party left on the bus
for Coban, but we and the Merritts stayed in Flores, as we had to be in
Guatemala City the following morning for our flights home. On our shared van
ride to the Flores airport, I regaled Professor Merritt with my theories, and
he repaid me by sharing the book he was reading, “The Invention of Morel,” by
Adolfo Bioy Casares. I flipped open the book to the introduction by Jorge Luis
Borges and saw the phrase “stoic irony” and felt I would not have understood
what it meant before this trip. At our bravest, we face the universe with stoic
irony.
The twin-prop plane ride to the capitol
was fun. The pilot expertly weaved back and forth between thunderheads, and we
had a close- up view of the environs of Guatemala City. Of particular interest
was the construction of houses along the ridges of hills, sometimes abutting
sheer cliffs. Our Guatemalan host, the groom, had told us on the bus that these
communities are built illegally, making major swaths of the city illegal. He
told us that some such areas are the province of organized crime figures, so
that it is not uncommon to find Mercedes parked outside on the dirt roads, and
plasma TV’s in the corrugated tin roofed houses.
The trip concluded on a surreal note, as
we had reserved a room for our last night at the Guatemala City Marriott.
Walking into the shining, vast lobby was like falling into a mad dream of
opulence. Employees were carefully respectful, lest we be billionaires. In the
hotel restaurant, our waiter asked where we were from. He sounded very
Angelino, and it turned out he was from San Bernadino. He told us Guatemala
City, outside the environs of the hotel and airport, is a dangerous place, made
safe where the army sets foot, but a free-for-all where they do not. He said
the hotel sees a lot of adoption activity, legal and otherwise, and later we
noticed a number of Caucasian women with brown babies. Our waiter said that
$5,000 was the going rate for a Guatemalan baby.
Another bit of stoic irony, Mayan babies
streaming into the U.S. Maybe those ancient sacrifices are paying off.
Our flights to Dallas and LAX were on time
and flawless. My horoscope: “A good day to go home and think about the trip you
were not supposed to take.” I had reached no conclusions, but my questions were
clarified.