Quiché Lessons.
Rent from DeepDyveOn Saturday, S'is visited Maximon and gave him a cigar, a pint of liquor—Quetzalteco—and a tart of blackberries. The cigar and Quetzalteco were Maximon's usual gifts, but berry tart was not. The tart was his wife's idea. On the way to the shrine, S'is had carried the tart on his lap, the filling jiggling like the bottom of a woman. The bus was crowded, and he had to stand, clutching the tin with two hands while the old vehicle lurched and shifted and grew so full of passengers, so hot, that the purple filling began to melt and run down the sides of the tin, onto his fingers. More passengers ascended. "Pase adelante," yelled the driver, "but careful of the little man's pudding." There was laughter in the bus, from the ladinos but also from [End Page 135] peasants like S'is, the women holding chickens on their laps and the men on their way up the mountain, carrying machetes instead of tart. It embarassed S'is because it drew attention to him, carrying this "pudding" like some woman, and he silently cursed his wife, K'ek, for her greed and superstition.
K'ek had gotten it into her head that she wanted a camera. At first he'd tried to argue with her. It was expensive, he said. And impossible. He would have to go all the way into the old city to buy one, and even then he could never get all the money it took. It would be all of their pay for six months.
"But you never know when children will get sick," K'ek said, "or have an accident. B'ek had the boy who died when the chicken bus went off the road. That was only a year ago, and now B'ek doesn't remember what he looked like. The same goes for Qu'atzuuk and Naniiq, whose sons got diarrhea. Then Riij had the five-year-old in front of her while she rode horseback. Remember? A bird came from behind a tree and frightened the horse. Up in the blue sky went Riij, with her son out in front of her, and . . ." Here K'ek had lurched forward dramatically, clasping her hands together in the air and gasping.
"Enough!" said S'is. "It's not the same for us. We have no sons."
She folded her skinny brown arms and scowled at him.
"Anyway," he said, "our daughters won't die."
But how did he know? Only three children, and the doctor told K'ek there would be no more. In his own family there had been twelve, and three had died.
"You can get penicillin now," he told her, "from the clinic."
"And all over there are horses to throw you off and cars to hit you and motorcycles . . ." S'is' brother had died last year in a motorcycle accident in Guatemala City. All that S'is had left of him was a photograph, taken of the two of them in Nahuala. He kept it covered, in an urn, to keep it from the children's fingerprints. It was true, he thought, that he had nothing of his brother but this picture. For the others, a sister gone for twelve years now, a brother gone for ten, and for his parents, too, he had nothing. He could not remember their faces.
S'is looked at K'ek and at his daughters and felt a deep ache. He wanted his older brother to return; he wanted his girls to live. And he, too, wanted a camera.
But he did not know how to get one. He knew only that his brother had owned one. His brother's widow, Mariana, was a ladina.
"I will ask Mariana," he told K'ek. "She could come to take a picture of them."
"Just one picture." K'ek frowned. "It is not enough." [End Page 136]
Now in their village...
