“You can punish me,” I say.
He stares at me, and then in the moonlight he smiles. “I think your heart has stopped beating. That is enough punishment,” he says. Then he asks me, “Do you want to learn to sail this cayuco?”
My ears cannot believe what they hear. “Yes,” I say. “More than anything else I know.”
“Okay,” he says. “If we finish gathering the maíz by Sunday, I will teach you how to sail. Now it is too dark to pick my nose.”
I laugh, but I am still afraid. “How much do you use this cayuco?” I ask.
As we walk Uncle Ramos talks. “I do not use the cayuco very much except to take maíz down the Río Dulce to Puerto Barrios. But this boat is a good boat and can sail the ocean if that is what I need. It is made from a big guanacaste tree that I cut from the forest myself. The guanacaste tree is the best tree a person can use. It is strong and straight and does not rot easily in water.”
“How far can you sail with this sailing cayuco?” I ask.
“To any place where there is wind and water,” he says. “To Honduras, Belize, the Yucatán, Cuba, or even the United States of America.”
“The United States of America,” I say, shaking my head. “I do not know how far that is, but it must be a very long sail.”
Uncle Ramos walks fast toward home as he speaks. “Yes, it is a very long sail and a very dangerous sail.”
“My father will be mad if he knows I have come here tonight without permission,” I say.
“Then maybe that is something we should not tell him,” Uncle Ramos answers.
“Thank you,” I say quietly.
When we reach the home of Uncle Ramos, I try to be quiet when I carry my woven petate inside to sleep. I think my father hears me, but he does not say anything.
All of that week I work harder than I have ever worked in my life. The nights do not let me sleep well because I am thinking about learning to sail the cayuco.
When Sunday finally comes, I cannot remember my own name because I am so excited. Very early in the morning, we gather fruit and make tortillas to eat during our sail. I think my father is excited, too, but he does not show it.
That day, when Uncle Ramos takes us out to sail, he teaches me how to raise and lower the sail and how to change direction. He teaches me to empty water, to understand the wind, and to sail with bad weather. He even teaches me how to sail against the wind. This is something that my mind does not understand.
“How do you sail to the United States of America?” I ask.
Uncle Ramos pulls a small map from his pocket, then squints across the lake and points. “First you sail to that island over there. I call it the Island of the Birds because so many of them nest there. From there you go under a big bridge by the city of Fronteras. That takes you to another lake called El Golfete. When you reach the other end of El Golfete, you enter a river called the Río Dulce. This turns and bends through deep gorges until you pass a big Spanish fort on your left. There you enter the Gulf of Honduras and the Caribbean Sea.”
“Then do you reach the United States of America?” I ask.
Uncle Ramos laughs hard. “No, you still have not left Guatemala. Now you sail north.” He unfolds the map to show me. “During the day you must keep the morning sun on your right and the evening sun on your left. At night you follow the North Star. Tonight I will show you that star and how you can always find it.”
Pointing along the shore going north on the map, Uncle Ramos explains, “There is a strong current called the Gulf Current that helps you to sail north. The trip is very dangerous because there are storms and pirates. There are sharks longer than the cayuco, and the sun is so hot it can cook an egg.”
“But then you reach the United States of America?” I ask.
Uncle Ramos shakes his head. “After you sail north for maybe a week, you are not able to follow land anymore. When the land disappears to the west, you are at the top of the Yucatán. Now begins the most dangerous part of the trip. The current will push you hard to the east, but you must always keep sailing north.”
Uncle Ramos points at the map again. “If you keep sailing across the Gulf of Mexico, you will reach land somewhere along here.” He points to a coast of the United States. “The United States of America has many small regions called states. Where you will land is called Florida.”
“How do you know all this?” I ask.
Uncle Ramos does not answer this question.
“How long does it take to sail to Florida?” I ask.
Uncle Ramos looks at the map and thinks. “Maybe twenty days.”
“What happens if you do not keep sailing north when you cross the Gulf?” I ask.
“If the current takes you east between Cuba and Florida, you will drift into the Atlantic Ocean. If that happens you will die. The ocean is not like your parents,” he says. I see Uncle Ramos wink at my father. “The ocean does not forgive you when you disobey or make mistakes.”
It is after this visit to Uncle Ramos that the bad stories first come to Dos Vías. The stories are sent from other villages higher in the mountains and tell of much fighting between the guerrillas and the military soldiers. The stories tell of villages burned, people tortured, and thousands killed or left without a home. I do not think these stories can be true. How can you kill a thousand people? But my father tells me the soldiers can do these things.
Soon the guerrillas come to our village. At first it is only to ask questions and to ask for food. It is hard for me to know if they are friends or enemies. The guerrillas say they fight for the rights of the indígenos and the poor campesinos like us. But I can see fear in the eyes of my mother and father when they bow their heads and give food to the guerrillas.
When the military soldiers come into Dos Vías, I see that my parents are even more afraid. The soldiers ask many questions, and they wave their rifles and shout, “Anybody who helps the guerrillas will be shot!”
Now this is a problem. Maybe if we help the soldiers, we will die. Maybe if we help the guerrillas, we will die. Always we are afraid of death. We do not want to die. We want only to live and to grow our maíz. This is all that we want. We do not think the bullets from a guerrilla’s gun hurt any less than the bullets from a soldier’s gun. A bullet is a bullet.
There is another problem. In every village in the world, I think there are neighbors who do not like each other. After the soldiers and the guerrillas come, some people say their neighbor is helping the other side. Soon everybody thinks somebody else is a spy.
In Dos Vías my mother and father are liked very much. Mother tells everyone that we must help each other. I hear my father say, “If enough people hope and dream and fight for what we know is right, Guatemala can change, even for us, the poor campesinos indígenos.”
Me, I do not know if what they say can be true, but I think it is true that people need hope. I know the indígenos in my village had some hope. They believed in their hearts that someday they, too, could be free and live without fear.
But the night when the soldiers burned Dos Vías, that night, hope died along with all of my people. When the blood dried on the ground, the hearts of the indígenos died with their bodies. I will always remember that night as the night of evil, and I will always think of that night as the night that God turned his back on the indígenos. Yes, he turned his back on us.
4
COCONUTS IN LOS SANTOS
THE NIGHT THEY KILLED MY FAMILY, after Uncle Ramos tells me to run, I keep running into the night. Angelina is scared and tired, so again I carry her until I come to the field where my family grows maíz for the tortillas we eat. Now I must stop.
Ahead in the dark a horse stands with a broken rope hanging from its neck. His head is up and his eyes stare at me with fear. He does not know what is walking toward him in the night. I move forward very slow with my hand out. I click my tongue and pretend I have maíz to feed him. The horse lets me take the rope and tie a loop around his nose like a halter. Angelina do
es not let go of my leg.
There is little time, but I kneel beside Angelina. I look into her scared face and make myself smile. “Do you want to go for a ride on a horse?” I ask.
She blinks her big eyes and nods.
“Do you want to go as fast as the wind?”
I think I see her smile in the dark.
“Good,” I say. “But you must hold on. Can you hold on very tight?”
Again Angelina nods.
“Okay, we are ready.” There is no saddle, so I jump onto the horse’s back and pull Angelina up behind me. I turn the horse down the mountain, click my tongue, and slap the halter rope. The horse leaps ahead into a gallop.
Angelina holds on tightly. “Go slower!” she screams.
“We must go as fast as the wind!” I call back.
At night it is easy to fall, and riding this fast is foolish. But tonight I have no choice. Even now maybe the soldiers follow us. I let the horse decide where to go. It is safer this way.
Our horse is not a fat horse, and the bone from his back is like a board bouncing under us. “Ouch!” screams Angelina. “Ouch!” She begins to cry.
More rifle shots echo behind me in the night, but I do not look back. We ride hard until there is nothing behind us but a dark quiet sky. Finally I slow. Soon we will come to the village of Los Santos. I know people there, and maybe it will be a safe place. If I can stay with friends of my father, I will not have to go to Lake Izabal. Lake Izabal is very far away, and I am tired. Also I am very scared.
Angelina’s arms grow tired and she almost falls off. I reach back and pull her around in front of me. With one arm I hold her. She stops crying.
When we reach the hill above Los Santos, I am very tired and weak. My muscles ache and the skin on the inside of my legs burns. I have the hair on the horse’s neck wrapped tight around my fingers. It is good to see the small fires from the village below.
“Can we stop now?” Angelina asks, her voice scared. “Where are we?”
“Yes, we can stop riding now,” I say. “That is Los Santos.” I jump off the horse and lift Angelina to the ground.
“Did we go as fast as the wind?” she asks.
I smile. “Angelina, we went faster than the wind.”
As I walk into the village of Los Santos, I lead the horse and hold Angelina’s hand. Something is very wrong. I know this when I find cane stalks and boards burning on the ground. This is all that is left of Los Santos. All the homes are burned down the same as in Dos Vías, and a very bad smell fills the air.
In the dark there is something else that is wrong. There are no people, and on the ground between the burned homes there are coconuts. I pick up a burning piece of wood and hold it in front of me. Now I can see better. I reach down and pick up a coconut. Suddenly the air stops in my chest. I drop the coconut and grab Angelina’s hand again. I know now why the air has a bad smell.
“Where are the people?” Angelina asks quietly.
“They are gone. All gone,” I whisper. I do not tell Angelina that the coconuts we see are the skulls of people who are burned. “We must go,” I say. “We must ride the horse again.”
I hold the burning wood over my head. Now I can see dead bodies near the trees that are not burned. There are men and women and old people and children. All of them shot. I am almost to the edge of the village when a body in the tall grass makes me trip. I fall onto the body. Angelina falls with me and screams. When I stand, I am shaking. It is Carlos.
Carlos is a boy who has come with his family to our village. He is my age, and many times we have kicked a football to each other. Carlos kicked a football very hard. Tonight his legs are cut off and they lie beside him in the grass. I shake my head hard from side to side to make this bad dream go away, but the body of Carlos does not go away. I put my hand over Angelina’s eyes, but already she has seen too much. Her body is shaking.
I stand and stare at the legs beside Carlos. Those are the same legs that kicked a ball to me many times. What did those legs do wrong? Those legs did not belong to a guerrilla or to a soldier. They belonged to only a young boy. I know the soldiers have done this, because already this night I have seen how they kill.
I do not understand the soldiers. When they ask our people, “Are you communist?” we do not understand them. The indígenos want to live without fear. They want to grow their maíz and teach their children respect for the ways of the ancients, los ancianos.
My parents always told me that we must help others and be good to the world around us. If a soldier is hurt, we must help him. If a guerrilla is hurt, we must also help him. I think this is why the soldiers call us communists. But I think that helping people just makes us good people, not communists.
If I am something, I am indígeno, and I have in me the spirit and the blood of the ancient Maya. That is what I am. When I die my body does not die less from the bullet of a soldier’s gun or the bullet of a guerrilla’s gun. Death is death.
But I am alive, and I do not understand. All the people of my village have died with only machetes and sticks in their hands. How can the soldiers be afraid of this? The priest tells me I am a child of God. But if this is true, where is God tonight when all of his children are killed? I do not think that God would watch so many of his children be tortured and raped and killed. He did not see my mother and father and my brothers and my sister die. Tonight everyone has died except for Angelina. And my friend, Carlos, he is dead, too. His legs are cut off. God did not see this. I am the only one who has seen this, I think.
No, if there is a God, then tonight I think he is like the soldiers and does not care about us. He does not care about the poor campesinos from the mountains who do not have money to wear fancy clothes or to shine their shoes. Things have happened this night that even the sky and the wind should never see. I understand now why Uncle Ramos has told me to run so far away. It is because here in Guatemala, there is not a God to protect us. That is why Uncle Ramos has told me to tell what I see. This is something the living can still do.
And so I kneel once again beside Angelina. “Look into my eyes,” I tell her. She tries to look away but I hold her head. “Look into my eyes,” I tell her again.
And now she looks.
“Do you want to go far away from here and ride on a boat with a sail?”
Angelina nods.
“We will be sailors,” I say.
“What is a sailor?” Angelina asks.
I do not know what to tell her, because I know we are not sailors. We are only two foolish and scared children.
5
PIGS IN THE MAÍZ
WHEN WE RIDE the horse away from Los Santos, my mind is numb. I tell myself I must be careful. I must be awake when I ride. Even at night there are guerrillas and soldiers on these paths. So I make the horse walk. My ears listen to every sound the night makes.
From here it will take one hour of riding to reach the town of Chollo. That is where I must leave the horse and find a truck that goes to Lake Izabal.
I feel sorry for Angelina. Her young mind does not yet understand what has happened. I know I will need to explain this night to her sometime, but tonight I am not sure I understand myself what has happened.
We ride on narrow paths across many fields, through valleys, and across steep ridges. Angelina taps my shoulder. “I want to go home,” she says.
I think carefully before I tell her, “We are going home.” This is true, because when you have no home, any place new can be home.
When I think we cannot ride the bony horse another step, I hear the sound of dance music. Ahead is Chollo, a busy town with electricity, cars, much noise, and garbage in the streets. Even in the middle of the night, there is the noise of trucks and music. Before I see the lights, I smell the smoke of motors.
It is too far to ride a horse from here to Lake Izabal, so before I reach Chollo, I get off and help Angelina to the ground. I wrap the halter rope around the horse’s neck so it will not tangle, then I slap the horse hard
and he gallops into the dark. He will make some lucky person a good horse.
After the horse disappears, I hope I have done what is right. It is too dark to look at the compass in my pocket, but I look up at the sky and find the North Star. That is the star that Uncle Ramos has told me will lead a sailor to the United States of America. Tonight the star must stay behind me if I want to go south and find Lake Izabal.
We do not have any money to ride a bus, and it is very dangerous to travel alone in the middle of the night with a little sister. All that I can do is wait near the restaurante on the edge of Chollo. Here the trucks stop for food. I must find a truck to hide in.
I watch as a truck stops that has wood stacked high. The next truck has many chickens in cages. I let myself think that maybe Angelina and I can ride with the chickens, but then I think, no, Angelina will cry. Two buses go past. And then a truck stops that is carrying dried cobs of maíz. A canvas tarp covers the truck’s big box.
“Do you want to go ride with some maíz?” I ask Angelina.
“I want to go home,” she says stubbornly. Her bottom lip sticks out when she speaks like this.
“I think if you ride with me in the maíz, we will find home,” I tell her.
Slowly Angelina lets me lead her through the shadows of the buildings until we are close to the truck. I kneel beside Angelina. “Listen very carefully,” I tell her. “I need to go make room in the maíz. You wait here until I am ready. When I wave to you, run to me. Okay?”
She nods.
“Stay right here until you see me wave,” I say again more strongly.
Again she nods, and I let go of her hand. There is nobody in the street, so I run fast across the dim road until the shadow of the truck hides me. I look back, and Angelina waits patiently. Quickly I crawl up on the truck and pull the tarp to one side. The back is almost filled with dried cobs of maíz but there is room to ride. I turn and wave for Angelina to come.
She sees me and starts to walk toward the truck. When she is halfway across the street, a man walks around the corner of the building. I whisper very loud to Angelina, “Hurry!” but she stops and stares at the person. “Come!” I whisper, as loud as I dare.