In the Midst of Winter

  After Miriam, Evelyn’s mother, left to head north, that indomitable grandmother had looked after her and her two older brothers. Evelyn was still a newborn when her father emigrated in search of work. They had no news about him for several years, until they heard rumors he had settled in California and had another family, although nobody could confirm it. Evelyn was six when her mother also disappeared without saying goodbye. Miriam fled the village very early one morning, afraid her determination would not survive a last embrace with her children. That was what their grandmother explained to them whenever they asked, and she added that thanks to their mother’s sacrifice they could eat every day, go to school, and receive parcels from Chicago, containing toys, Nike sneakers, and sweets.

  The day Miriam left was marked on the faded Coca-Cola calendar for 1998 still nailed to the wall of Concepcion’s hut. Her elder two children, Gregorio, age ten, and Andres, who was eight, grew tired of waiting for Miriam to return and made do with her postcards and with hearing her choked-up voice on the post office telephone at Christmas or on their birthdays as she apologized yet again for not keeping her promise of coming back to see them. Evelyn continued believing that one day her mother would return with enough money to build her grandma a decent house. All three children had idolized their mother, but none as much as Evelyn, who could not clearly recall either her appearance or her voice, but constantly imagined them. Miriam sent photographs, but she had changed a lot over the years, put on weight, dyed her hair with yellow streaks, shaved off her eyebrows and painted new ones higher on her forehead, which made her look constantly surprised or scared.

  The Ortegas were not the only ones without a father or mother: two-thirds of the children in their school were in the same situation. In the past it had been only the men who emigrated in search of work, but in recent years the women had been leaving as well. According to Father Benito, the emigrants sent back billions of dollars each year to maintain their families, and in so doing ended up contributing to the stability of the government and the indifference of the rich. Few of the village children finished school: the boys left to look for work or ended up in gangs or on drugs, while the girls got pregnant, moved away for work, or were recruited as prostitutes. The school had very few resources and were it not for the evangelical missionaries who competed unfairly with Father Benito thanks to funds from abroad, it would not even have had workbooks or pencils.

  Father Benito was in the habit of installing himself in the village’s only bar with a beer that lasted all night and talking to the locals about the ruthless repression launched against the indigenous peoples, which had lasted for thirty years and sowed the seeds of disaster. “Everyone has to be bribed, from the topmost politicians to the lowest policeman, not to mention all the delinquency and crime,” complained the priest, who was prone to exaggerate. There was always somebody there to suggest that if he did not like Guatemala he should go back to his own country. “What are you saying, you wretch, haven’t I told you a thousand times that this is my country?”

  AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN, Gregorio Ortega, Evelyn’s eldest brother, quit school for good. Left to his own devices, he wandered the streets with other boys, his eyes glassy and his brain befuddled from sniffing glue, gasoline, paint stripper, or anything else he could get hold of. He spent his time stealing, fighting, and pestering girls. When he grew bored he stood by the roadside and asked a truck driver for a lift. They took him to other towns where no one knew him, and when he returned he brought ill-gotten money. If she caught him, Concepcion Montoya gave him a good hiding, which her grandson accepted because he still depended on her to feed him. From time to time the police picked him up in a roundup of young drug users, gave him an even worse thrashing, and put him in a cell on bread and water, until he was rescued by Father Benito when he happened to pass by on his rounds. The priest was an incurable optimist who against all evidence to the contrary kept his faith in the capacity of human beings to reform. The police would give the boy one last kick in the backside and hand him over, scared, covered in bruises, and riddled with lice. The Basque threw him into his pickup with a volley of insults and took him to the only taco stall in the village to fill his stomach, all the while prophesying in his doom-laden Jesuit manner that the boy would have a terrible life and an early death if he continued with his aberrant behavior.

  Neither his grandmother’s beatings, his time in jail, nor the priest’s dire warnings served as a lesson to Gregorio. He went on drifting. The neighbors who had known him all his life avoided him. If he had no quetzales in his pocket, he would turn up at his grandmother’s looking sheepish, feigning humility, and eat the same beans, chilies, and corn that were on offer every day in her home. Concepcion had more common sense than Father Benito and soon gave up trying to preach about impossible virtues to her grandson. He had no head for learning and no wish to take up a trade; there was no honest work anywhere for boys like him. She had to confess to Miriam that her son had abandoned his studies but avoided wounding her with the whole truth, since there was very little his mother could do from afar. Every night Concepcion prayed on her knees with her two other grandchildren, Andres and Evelyn, that Gregorio would survive until he was eighteen, when he would be called up for compulsory military service. Although she had a deep loathing of the armed forces, she thought that perhaps conscription could set him back on the right path.

  GREGORIO ORTEGA DID NOT MANAGE to benefit from his grandmother’s prayers or from the candles lit in the church in his name. Only a few months before he was due to be called for military service, he succeeded in being accepted into the MS-13, better known as the Mara Salvatrucha, the most vicious of Guatemala’s gangs. He had to take the blood oath: loyalty to his comrades above everything else—family, women, drugs, and money. He went through the tough initiation ceremony: a tremendous beating meted out by members of the gang to test his spirit, which left him more dead than alive. Several of his teeth were broken and he passed blood for two weeks, but once he had recovered he won the right to his first MS-13 gang tattoo. Over time, as he accumulated crimes and won respect, he hoped to end up like the most fanatical gang members, his entire body and face covered in tattoos. He had heard that in Pelican Bay prison in California there was a Salvadorean who was blind because he had had the whites of his eyes tattooed.

  In its twenty-something years of existence, the MS-13, which had started out in Los Angeles, had spread its tentacles to the rest of the United States, Mexico, and Central America. The Mara Salvatrucha had more than sixty thousand members, all of them dedicated to killing, extortion, kidnapping, and the trafficking of arms, drugs, and human beings. They had such a brutal reputation that other gangs tended to use them to do their dirty work. In Central America, where they enjoyed greater impunity than in the United States or Mexico, the gang members marked their territory by leaving a trail of mangled dead bodies. Neither the police nor the army dared confront them. In the village, Concepcion Montoya’s neighbors knew that her eldest grandson had joined the MS-13, but only spoke of it in whispers behind closed doors, for fear of reprisals. At first they wanted nothing to do with the unfortunate grandmother and her other grandchildren. Nobody wanted any trouble. Ever since the years of repression they had grown accustomed to living in fear and found it hard to imagine things could be any different. The MS-13 was another plague, another punishment for the sin of existing, another reason to tread carefully. Concepcion faced their rejection with head held high, pretending not to notice the silence surrounding her in the street or at the market, where she went on Saturdays to sell her tamales and the secondhand clothes Miriam sent from Chicago. Gregorio soon left the region; for some time he was no longer to be seen, and so the fear he aroused in the village gradually subsided. They had more pressing problems. Concepcion forbade her grandchildren to mention their elder brother. Don’t go looking for trouble, she warned.

  When a year later Gregorio returned for the first time, he had two gold teeth, a shaved h
ead, and tattoos of barbed wire on his neck and numbers, letters, and skulls on his knuckles. He seemed to have grown several inches, and where before he’d had the build and skin of a youngster, now he sported a gang member’s muscles and scars. In the Salvatrucha he had found a family and an identity. He did not have to go around begging; he could have whatever he wanted—money, drugs, alcohol, guns, and women, all within easy reach. He could scarcely recall the days of his humiliation. Striding into his grandmother’s hut shouting that he was back, he found her shucking corn with Evelyn, while Andres, who had not grown much and looked young for his age, was doing his homework at the far end of the only table in the hut.

  Andres leapt up, gawping with fear and admiration at his elder brother. Gregorio greeted him with an affectionate push, then shadowboxed him into a corner, showing off the tattoos on his fists. He approached Evelyn to give her a hug but stopped short. The gang had taught him to mistrust and be scornful of women in general, but his sister was an exception. Unlike the rest of them, she was good and pure, a girl who had not yet matured. When he thought of the dangers lying in wait for her simply because she had been born female, he was glad he would be able to protect her. No one would dare do her any harm, because they would have to face the gang and him.

  His grandmother managed to find her voice and asked why he had reappeared. Gregorio studied her contemptuously, and after an overlong pause replied that he had come to ask for her blessing. “May God bless you,” she stammered, the words she said every night to her grandchildren before sleep, adding in a whisper: “and may God forgive you.” The boy took a bundle of quetzales out of the pocket of his loose jeans precariously slung around his hips and proudly handed it to his grandmother, his first contribution to the family income. Concepcion Montoya not only refused to accept the banknotes but asked him not to come again, as he set a bad example for his brother and sister. “You ungrateful old piece of shit!” cried Gregorio, flinging the money to the floor. He left muttering curses, and several months went by before he saw his family again. On the rare occasions when he was passing through the village he waited for his brother and sister hidden on a street corner to avoid being recognized, a victim of the same insecurity that had been the cross he’d had to bear in childhood. He had learned to hide this weakness; in the gang it was all boasting and machismo. He would intercept Andres and Evelyn in the throng of kids leaving school, grab them by the arm, and drag them into a dark alleyway to give them money and find out if they had heard anything from their mother. The rule in the gang was that they should reject affection, chop off all sentimentality: the family was a tie, something weighing them down. There should be no memories or nostalgia, for they were to become men, and men don’t cry, don’t complain; they don’t love, relying only on themselves. The only thing that counted was courage; honor was defended with blood, and respect was earned by blood. Yet despite himself, Gregorio was still linked to his brother and sister by the memory of the years they had spent together. He promised Evelyn a fifteenth-birthday party with no expense spared and gave Andres a bike. For several weeks, Andres hid it from his grandmother, until she heard about it and forced him to confess the truth. Concepcion boxed his ears for accepting money from someone who was a gang member, even if he was his brother, and sold the bike in the market the next day.

  The combination of fear and admiration that Andres and Evelyn felt toward Gregorio would turn into paralyzing shyness in his presence. The chains with crosses dangling around his neck, his green aviator’s glasses, his American boots, the tattoos spreading like a plague across his skin, his reputation as a killer, his wild life and lack of regard for pain and death, his secrets and crimes—all of this kept them in awe of him. They talked of their terrifying brother in forbidden whispers as far as possible out of their grandmother’s earshot.

  Concepcion was worried that Andres would follow his brother’s example, but he did not have the temperament to join a gang: he was too clever, too careful and timid; his dream was to head north and prosper. He planned to earn money in the United States and live like a pauper so as to save and send dollars to Evelyn and his grandmother. Later he would give them a good life in the north, where they would live with their mother in a proper cement house with running water and electricity. To get them there he would find them a responsible smuggler who would secure passports with visas and the vaccination certificates for hepatitis and typhus that the gringos sometimes asked for. Then they would leave Guatemala safely, otherwise the journey through Mexico on foot or on a freight train roof was an acid test: they would have to face attackers armed with machetes and police with dogs, or if they fell off the railcar they could lose their legs or their lives. After that, anyone crossing the US border could die of thirst in the desert or be shot by ranchers, who went out to hunt migrants as if they were hares. These were the tales told by the youngsters who had made the journey and been deported on the Bus of Tears. They returned ravenous and exhausted, their clothes in rags, but they were not defeated: within a few days, they recovered and set off once more. Andres knew one who had tried eight times and was preparing to go again, but he himself did not have the courage to do so. He was willing to wait, because his mother had promised she would find him a guide as soon as he finished school, before he was called up for the army.

  The grandmother was tired of hearing Andres’s plan, but Evelyn delighted in every last detail, even though she didn’t want a life elsewhere. Her village and her grandmother’s shack were the only world she knew. She had no clear memory of her mother and no longer lived in expectation of her postcards or the occasional telephone call. She had no time to dream. She got up at dawn to help her grandmother, going to the well for water, sprinkling the beaten-earth floor to keep down the dust, fetching firewood for the kitchen, heating black beans if there were any left from the previous day, making corn tortillas, frying slices of the plantains that grew in their yard, then straining the sweetened coffee for Concepcion and Andres. She also had to feed the chickens and pig and hang out the clothes left soaking overnight. Andres did none of this: it was women’s work. He went to school before his sister to play soccer with the other boys.

  Evelyn and her grandmother understood each other without the need for words, in a shared routine of repeated gestures and methodical domestic chores. On Fridays the two of them began work at three in the morning, preparing the filling for tamales. The next day they wrapped the mixture in plantain leaves, cooked them, and took them to the market to sell. Along with all the other small businesses, Concepcion paid protection money to the gang members and crooks who operated with impunity in the region; she also occasionally had to bribe the local police. Since she earned so little this was a tiny sum, but it was always demanded with threats, and if she did not pay, the delinquents would throw her tamales into the gutter and slap her around. Between this and the cost of the ingredients, she barely made enough to feed her grandchildren. If it had not been for the money Miriam sent, they would have been destitute. On Sundays and holy days, if they were lucky enough to count on Father Benito’s presence, the grandmother and her granddaughter went to sweep the church and arrange the flowers for the mass. The devout village women gave Evelyn sweets: “My, oh my, how pretty our Evelyn is becoming. You’ll have to hide her, Dona Concepcion, so that no heartless man can ruin her,” they would say.

  AT FIRST LIGHT ON THE SECOND FRIDAY IN FEBRUARY, the body of Gregorio Ortega was found swinging from the bridge over the river, covered in dried blood and excrement. Around his neck was a piece of cardboard with the fearsome initials “MS” that everyone knew. Blue flies had already begun their disgusting banquet before the arrival of the first onlookers and three uniformed police officers. Over the next few hours the body began to stink, and by midday everyone was leaving, driven away by heat, putrefaction, and fear. The only ones left near the bridge were the police awaiting orders; a bored photographer sent from a nearby town to cover “the bloodshed,” as he called it (even though t
his was hardly news); and Concepcion Montoya with her two grandchildren, who stood there silent and unmoving.

  “Take the kids away from here,” ordered the officer who seemed to be in charge of the others. “This isn’t something for them to see.”

  But Concepcion remained rooted to her spot like an old tree in the earth. She had witnessed this kind of brutality before: her father and two brothers had been burned alive during the civil war in the eighties. After that she had thought no human cruelty could surprise her, but when a neighbor came running to tell her what was on the bridge, she dropped a pan, spilling all the tamale ingredients on the ground. For a long while now she had been expecting to hear that her eldest grandson had ended up in prison or died in a fight, but she had never anticipated such a gruesome ending for him.