This is what I remember about Guatemala
- PDF / 65,350 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 535.748 x 697.323 pts Page_size
- 10 Downloads / 224 Views
This is what I remember about Guatemala
´ c to r To b a r He Latino Studies (2013) 11, 253–257. doi:10.1057/lst.2013.7
This is what I carry with me when I write. First, one of my earliest childhood memories. I am four or five years old, a native Angeleno visiting his father’s hometown, Guala´n, on the Motagua River. I have spent a day splashing in the shallow water, in a river that’s a protagonist in family sagas as yet unknown to me. I’ve waded among river stones and boulders, and I have taken ill. Night falls and I am lain out by my father on a concrete slab. Pungent ointments are applied to my skin by a medicine woman. A large group of relatives stands around me, whispering words in Spanish, while a bulb hovers over me with an electric glow. I am feverish, sweating, in a kind of waking dream, far from home, far from Los Angeles and the bungalow courtyard I call home – and I am closer than I can ever be to the place where my story begins. And then I return to Los Angeles, to the solitude of my life as an only-child of the only Guatemalan family I know, in a city of abundance in which there are no chatty uncles or grandparents or untamed rivers. Later, I am 11 or 12, visiting the home of my maternal grandfather, in Guatemala City’s Zona 7, in the Colonia 6 de octubre. The Spanish that’s been on my tongue from the time I could speak, first learned in Hollywood apartments from my parents, has begun to die. I am a North American proto-adolescent in a Guatemalan body. In Guatemala City, amid the concrete cubes, the narrow streets, the unpaved avenues, I feel bigger. I do things that make me look odd and eccentric to the people around me. For example, I plant myself alone in my grandfather’s tiny r 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies Vol. 11, 2, 253–257 www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
Tobar
front yard and fire bottle rockets into barren barranco below his home. It’s Christmas time and fireworks are abundant in Guatemala. Like a solitary US Army artillery officer, I bombard imaginary targets in the brush, playing alone, just like I do in Los Angeles. Half an hour later smoke rises from the ravine. An actual volunteer fire unit is summoned, the men climbing down into the scrub land, extinguishing the blaze ignited by Don Marcelo’s oversized gringo nieto. I hide inside the spare, concrete walls of my grandfather’s home, awaiting punishment, though none ever comes. No one is angry with me, there are no recriminations, there is no embarrassment; my pyromania is a minor event in that crowded corner of the city, where, in the years to come, blood will be shed, stupidly and often, by men who carry guns. A few days later Christmas comes. In Los Angeles, this is a holiday marked by an ample tree and the bounty of gifts underneath, wrapped packages from Toys R Us that contain American technological marvels in miniature: toy rockets, toy V8 sedans, toy jet fighters. In Guatemala, there is a single pine branch over a nativity scene, and thin packages for the California grandson: when opened, they are reveale
Data Loading...
