Guatemala with Muriel & Don

Bucher and I left Belize City in Cessna Zero-Four-Uniform on a business-pleasure trip the afternoon of Friday the Thirteenth, to the despair of superstitions employees who begged almost tearfully that we wait a day. We went with our very close friends, Muriel and Don Stauffer, half-owners of the plane. Don is the manager of Hercules B.H., Bucher’s biggest customer.

The weather was gorgeous and clear. As we left Punta Gorda, where we cleared B.H. Customs and Immigration, we could see a Guatemalan mountain peak some eighty miles away. Not a cloud the length of the valley leading to the city, so we could see the mountains on either side, cultivated milpas scarring the sides at what appeared to be 60-degree angles, the river, highway, and railway underneath, and at the far end, beyond Guatemala City, the two volcanoes, Agua and Fuego, the latter smoking slightly.

 

Saturday morning the men left to do their business at Texaco and Muriel and I headed for the market…of course. We finished there an hour before we were to meet our husbands for lunch but, I promise you, it took the entire hour to negotiate the dozen blocks between market and hotel.

Muriel is an inveterate disappearer-into-doorways and I kept losing her in shop after shop…particularly in shops with Christmas decorations, the most gorgeous selections I’ve ever seen anywhere. She wanted to pick up a few little items…two atomizers of a type she uses to spray her pieces when she’s doing enamel-on-copper ceramics, an omelet pan, a pocket flashlight, and a particular type of executive’s pocket notebook.

Muriel’s Spanish extends to “thanks you,” “why not” (como no, which is a common Latin phrase), and “another scotch and soda, please.” Obviously, I was to be her interpreter. Well, my Spanish is getting fairly adequate for most situations…but atomizers and omelet pans were a bit difficult. We visited store after store, where we saw everything in stock by the time we worked past the language barrier and made our desires known. By the time we made it to our lunch date, we were exhausted.

 

We scheduled our trip for that particular weekend because Pete Crawford of Texaco, who had been in Belize about three weeks earlier, insisted we attend a late Thanksgiving dinner on the Saturday evening. By the time we arrived, his little dinner party had grown to 125 guests with two bands. His home is large, with tiled floors, several terraces, and a fireplace that felt rather good this time of year. Some of the guests spoke English and we managed quite nicely. There was dancing, of course, and Bucher and Don went completely to pieces over the perfectly gorgeous, beautifully groomed women. It really was a wonderful party.

 

On Sunday, Pete picked us up at noon and drove us to Antigua for lunch. (We insisted on a late hour, and it was a good thing, since he said he swept the last guest out at five that morning).

I had been to Antigua during my trip with Mama years ago, but we had not visited the Posada Belén. It is a Spanish Colonial convent that was destroyed partially by the earthquake. It has been restored as an hotel, keeping as much as possible of the early building. You can wander through a great maze of courtyards, patios, and gardens, some roofed, most open with vines overgrowing the ancient brickworks. It is charming.

We climbed an outside stairway to the second floor, examined a room, and lost Don. He had discovered a tiny, steep circular staircase and had disappeared up it. I do not believe the steps could have been more than a foot wide and I wasn’t sure I could navigate it without getting stuck. We came out on the roof, climbed over it and on up broken brickwork to what must have been a bell tower. The view over the city, the surrounding mountains, and volcanoes was glorious. The roof was drifted inches deep with volcanic ash from Fuego’s recent eruption. Seeing it, we could imagine the horror of the ash-fall that Costa Rica has had lately.

We had a lovely lunch at the hotel, watching the brick patio with two free-flying macaws, Indians working at their looms, and dozens of excited little Guatemalan children there for Sunday dinner with their families.

 

After lunch, Pete drove us through the city a little. He got permission to take us into the home of a prominent artist. It is a restored Colonial home, with one wall adjoining, and in common with, a roofless, wrecked old church. You enter directly into a patio, a view of the volcano in the background. We went into a large stone-walled formal drawing room, furnished completely in Spanish Colonial furniture…historic but most uncomfortable looking.

The whole point was to see the open court beyond the drawing room. There, with one wall of the old church, a niche above a stone staircase holding a beautiful old statue, and vines growing down the walls and around a tree inside the court, we saw a lovely carved black mahogany “chest” whose louvers opened to reveal a modern wash basin, mirror, shaving rack, etc. To one side was a tiled circular trough that was obviously a shower. And dead center of the courtyard, open to the sky, and overlooked by the balcony outside the master bedroom, was the third fitting common to bathrooms.

 

Pete then drove us to the park in the center of the city. The fountain there, erected by the Spanish in 1614 is something of a talking-piece. Four almost life-sized women carved around the center of the fountain provide jets of water, two per female, from what we considered a highly unaesthetic source. Interesting, though.

 

Pete decided he would take us on to Palín, where the massive ceiba tree in the center of town spreads its branches so far that it extends beyond the sides of the large market square beneath it. Leaving Antigua, he got a little confused, asked directions of a bystander, turned a corner, and realized too late that he was blocked by a procession down the next street. At first we thought it was a funeral but as it continued, we could tell it was something else. We all got out of the car and walked to the corner to see what it was.

On one side of the street came a single file of barefoot Indian men, each wearing a medallion of St. Francis on ribbons over each shoulder and a strange rectangular picture on his back. On the opposite of the brick-paved street marched a single file of brilliantly dressed Indian women, some carrying babies slung in lengths of native-loomed cloth across their backs, all barefoot, all with head coverings of thin white cloth. Both men and women were murmuring a low chant. Occasionally down the street between the lines would come one or two brown-robed, sandaled friars.

Then a group of twenty-four Indian men came down between the two endless lines of marchers and stopped in two lines of 12 each just in front of us, facing each other. Behind them, marching between the lines and on down the street came thee Indian women dressed in brown, monkish robes, singing “Ave Maria.” They sang the verse and the entire line of Indians, hundreds far down and far up the street, joined in the chorus each time.

Suddenly, far up the street (and I use the expression advisedly, since it was on a hill) lurching slowly down toward us came some sort of float. It obviously was an enormous carved mahogany platform with a life-sized statue of the Virgin (we learned later, as Our Lady of Guadalupe). The statue was done in somber colors and was quite surprisingly good; in contrast, the angels crouching at each corner of the float were pink-and-white blobs of saccharine and very poor.

The float was quite close to us before I realized with an emotional jolt I will never forget, that it was being carried on the shoulders of twenty-four staggering, barefoot Indians. The group just in front of us relieved the bearers with a smooth, practiced alternate insertion of one shoulder for another in the leather-padded arches grooved into the lower edge of the massive float. The wide-eyed awe on those impassive Indian faces is something I will never forget either, as one group of bearers replaced the other. The procession was an impressive thing for us to have happened on accidentally.

 

We drove on to Palín, saw the tree, which is quite spectacularly large, and then went on back into the city.

 

On Monday, Don was sick with Mal de Turista and couldn’t possibly leave. Bucher and I flew back alone. The weather changed on us and clouds closed in down the valley so that we were flying quite low to stay in view of the river. Cutting across one of the low ridges toward Punta Gorda was out of the question, so we followed the river all the way to the coast, far out of our way. As we got there, it was closed in solid toward the north and we thought we might have to turn south to Puerto Cortez, Honduras, where I envisioned a happy night in a Honduranean jail after landing without papers. However, we went out over the water; the clouds cleared; and as we gained altitude and turned north, we could see the B.H. coastline all the way to the Belize peninsula. We went on home easily.

Tuesday morning, Muriel and Don chartered a plane to fly them to Punta Gorda. I flew down in Zero-Four-Uniform to meet them and the three of us flew back to Belize City together.