Guatemala with Carli

Carli and I flew (commercially) to Guatemala together to have our eyes checked and new lenses made for our glasses. Arrived at noon on a Wednesday, checked into the hotel, had lunch, saw the eye doctor, ordered lenses, and by mid-afternoon we were through.

Bucher’s parting words had been…not “have a good time” or “take care of yourselves,” but “neither of you needs to go near the pastry shop.” Guatemala has absolutely superb pastelerías; a great square, fragile box of delicacies is one of our favorite take-home treats. As it happens, the best pastry shop in the city is around the corner from our hotel. As it also happened on that trip, because of prior commitments, Carli and I were not able to disobey Bucher until almost four o’clock the afternoon of our first day.

 

That evening Carli and I had dinner with some close friends, Chris and Joan Hempstead. Bucher and I had met them before they were married, when we first lived in Belize and Chris had a boat built here. They have a lovely home, three enchanting tiny daughters, and are delightful long-standing friends, so we had a lot to catch up on, back and forth.

The following day, Carli and I had planned to accept an invitation from Chris’s mother to visit her in Cobán, a town in the mountains to the north of Guatemala City. However, an elderly relative (ninety-ish) died that morning, so we cancelled our trip and changed plane reservations to return to Belize a day earlier.

 

With our trip to Cobán cancelled, we spent the morning in the market, naturally. That afternoon, despite a light rain, we took a taxi out to the very interesting archaeological museum. As a matter of fact, the nucleus of the museum had been given to the country by Chris’s uncle some years ago. It is beautifully housed in a large building around a central patio and nicely displayed…Mayan artifacts plus interesting exhibits, past and present, of the various Indian groups who live throughout the country.

The zoo is near the museum and Carli was determined to see if they had an ocelot. The rain did not stop but slackened, so through the mist ran two slightly demented Gringas, giggling and enjoying each cage to the amazed entertainment of the few Guatemalans huddling here and there for shelter. Carli was incensed not to find a Felis pardalis, and even two massive lionesses who emerged from their cage as the rain stopped couldn’t sooth her.

 

I felt sure we could get a bus from the zoo to the hotel, so asked the guard at the gate which number to take. He told me and added where to wait for it. It was in a direction opposite from a bus-stop sign. Carli was intent on going back to the sign and I insisted that I wouldn’t hurt the man’s feelings by disobeying his instructions after our nice little chat in Spanish.

Carli wondered how I’d make the bus stop, assuming, she added loftily, one actually came along. I replied that it was simple; I’d jump up and down, wave, and shout. Carli didn’t have time for more than a horror-struck glance in reply, for the bus rounded the corner and I started waving. Carli got ready to leap into the underbrush if I showed signs of jumping up and down, but was relieved to find the bus stopping before the need to abandon me forever presented itself.

Guatemala has a fine bus system. The vehicles are small and old, but fairly comfortable. The routes are winding, and you get a chance to see things you miss by car. Carli was fascinated.

 

That evening I took Carli to “La Tablita,” one of our favorite restaurants, for dinner. They serve divine charcoal-broiled steaks and have the best garlic bread and garlicky salad anywhere. I suspect that lone females don’t go out for the evening in Guatemala, but I decided that we were tourists so it didn’t matter. Also, we went rather early by Guatemalan standards. The taxi driver insisted on waiting for us, so it all was very simple.

 

Next morning we got our glasses and were packing to leave when Joan Hempstead called to say that Mrs. Hempstead Senior was crushed at our cancelling our visit, couldn’t we come anyway and delay our return to Belize. There was a wild confusion of could-we-or-couldn’t-we get reservations and, after finding that we couldn’t, having a nice lunch with Bucher’s Texaco man Pete Crawford, and then finding out from Pete that of course we could get back to Belize the day the airline said no one flew.

In thirty minutes we finished packing, called Aviateca to hold their Cobán flight for us, let Joan know we were going after all, cancelled our return to Belize and made new reservations, checked out of the hotel, and drove about ten miles to the airport. Let me tell you, it was wild but we made it.

There was even time for Joan to meet us at the airport to say that she had spoken to Mrs. Hempstead on their radio, who was delighted that it worked out. Joan promised to double-check our return reservations and send a third cable to Bucher informing him of another change in plans.

So still slightly out of breath, Carli and I piled into an ancient DC-3 along with the other passengers, all Indians. Off we went through the clouds and over the mountains…which weren’t nearly far enough below us for my nerves.

Thirty minutes later, we came down in a long, high valley and settled bumpily onto the grass. We were the last ones out of the plane and as we alighted, a tiny Spanish priest dashed up to us delightedly saying that we must be the ones Doña Rosita was looking for. Let me tell you, it wasn’t too hard to pick us out of the crowd. I was glad to know we were being met.

Just then a small, brusque, tailored figure sorted herself out from the crowd and strode toward us, her wrinkled, alert eighty-year-old face warmly welcoming. She reached up to kiss Carli, shook hands with me, and explained that I certainly knew she was Mrs. Hempstead’s sister, didn’t I. Well, fortunately Callie Young had described Doña Rosita, so I was somewhat prepared.

Doña Rosita had a driver and a Jeep Camión (Jeep or Land Rover…heavy, enclosed, 5-passenger vehicle). She issued orders to the mob of little boys hoping to manage the baggage and, giving the impression that she had also given everyone in the area strict orders on what to do for the next 24 hours, marched us off to the car.

In the five miles into town we got a quick capsule history of the area. Most of the early European settlement and farming of the area had been done by Germans. They were run out and their lands confiscated during the First World War, but her family, the Duesseldorfs, had been allowed to stay…quite probably a matter of the museum and possibly more changing hands. As she pointed out their property, it was obvious that they had had vast holdings and half the buildings in the town were theirs, too.

Doña Rosita told us that the road we drove in on, which led straight for some miles, rising gently at the end into the town, used to be a lovely wide highway and they had their horse races along it. The government took over the road, let it go, and “look at the state of it now.” I gradually realized that, in all probability, the last horse race along that road was held about 1910.

 

We stopped in front of Mrs. Hempstead’s home…the old family home where both she and Doña Rosita were born…a long, unimpressive wall directly on the street, studded with shuttered and barred windows, but with fresh gray paint and white stripe and tiled roof. The wooden door was large and handsome, with brightly polished brass…and it opened into the most welcoming patio I’ve ever seen.

The patio is a large rectangle of grass with large flowering shrubs and, near the center, an enormous night-blooming cereus that arches higher than the roof and gives the feeling of privacy to the sitting areas on the surrounding walkway. The wide, covered, tile walk on all four sides of the patio has beautifully polished Spanish Colonial furniture, comfortable, casual wicker, etc. There must be at least three separate groupings so that a crowd can gather wherever the sun is…or isn’t…alongside the patio.

Opening off all four sides of the patio are the various rooms, of course…and I can’t imagine how many there are…at least ten large bedrooms, I would guess, remembering the names that went with them; Mrs. Hempstead keeps a room ready at all times for each of her children. Carli and I had separate rooms with an adjoining bath. Then there are dens and offices and living rooms and dining rooms. We weren’t there long enough to get really oriented.

 

Mrs. Hempstead is a lovely, frail, white-haired woman of 85, quite severely crippled, but active with her cane, alert, and interested in everything. Bucher and I met her eleven years ago when, shortly after she emerged from the hospital with a newly mended broken hip, she got into Chris’s Cessna and flew with him to Belize. She went along on a picnic at sea on the large boat Siesta that Bucher and Ford Young had then, and we were completely enchanted with her. We have been corresponding ever since and she has begged us repeatedly to visit her. This was the first time it has been possible. She could not have been more gracious and made Carli and me both very welcome and very glad that we had gone despite all the setbacks.

She showed us to our rooms. Carli’s, one that her granddaughters use, had canopied bed and dainty white furniture. Mrs. Hempstead had a little gift, beautifully wrapped, waiting for Carli and had put out a new book thinking that it would interest Carli…Etiquette for Teens or some such thing, by Amy Vanderbilt, I think. My room was through the adjoining bath, and quietly gracious in heavy damasks and satins, rich shades of deep rose.

 

And then we started eating. My after-view of Cobán is a montage of meals alternating with jolting rides over gravel roads.

Carli and I had had a lovely but generous lunch with Pete Crawford just before we started our frantic flight to Cobán. We hadn’t relaxed enough to digest that before we were faced with tea. Happily we did not have to eat too much and just being at Mrs. Hempstead’s outdoor table was worth anything.

She had a small porch jutting out from the back of the house, overlooking the garden and pool, clustered with brilliantly flowering vines, and with a view of the surrounding mountains. The tea was lovely: dainty cucumber sandwiches on home-baked bread, sliced paper thin and spread with butter from her own dairy; delicate cakes and cookies that she had taught her Ketchi cook to bake.

 

After tea we were bundled back into the camión for a drive around Cobán. Carli and I perched together on a single seat alongside the driver in the front so that Mrs. Hempstead and Doña Rosita could be comfortable in the back. The town is charming, old, and quite typical of that part of the world. The running commentary from the back seat peopled it for us.

Outside of town we drove up a rather forbidding road to the new stadium…which neither of the “girls” liked a bit since it was too small and the curves too tight for safe horse racing.

From there we drove up to a charming old church, high on a hill, heavy and white in the Spanish-Colonial style, with a door at least two stories tall. The church was surrounded by great white tombs of varying sizes and shapes.

The church fairly finished off our daughter. Even I was a little jolted, though I have seen some Latin churches. The nave was quite open with rows of benches only near the front. Around the sides were the usual statues of the Virgin and various saints…done in different styles, some old and quite charming, some pretty horribly modern plaster and bright paint. But set into one side of the church was a glass coffin with a life-size male figure looking more early Spanish that late Bible. Carli went rigid. Doña Rosita, who was accompanying us while Mrs. Hempstead stayed in the car, explained that after Good Friday the coffin is taken out of the church and carried in the Indians’ procession.

One interesting thing…the priests have been modernizing the church and in the process removed a beautiful old dark mahogany hand-carved screen that used to be at the front. (The “girls” were highly critical of the priest’s interference.) The screen had been put off in a storeroom adjoining the church. And the Indians went in there to pray directly in front of the carved, massive wooden piece, and to burn candles and leave flowers, just as if it still were in the church. The dirty floor in front of the screen was studded with wax and candle stubs and dried blossoms.

We wandered around the church’s burial ground for a while and Doña Rosita pointed out ancestors and close family friends, keeping up a running and vivid commentary on their lives and personalities.

The view from the courtyard in front of the church was breathtaking, across the rooftops of town and the surrounding mountains.

 

We drove through miles of Hempstead land, past coffee and tea and corn and cattle. Saw Doña Rosita’s charming little house…Chris and his brothers talked her into moving in with Mrs. Hempstead after she broke her hip. Doña Rosita is a nurse and still is active in medical work…doing experiments on the new, highly successful food supplement, Incaparina, which had been so effective in preventing death and semi-starvation among the Indians.

We saw the dairy. Knowing that Carli liked animals, Mrs. Hempstead gave instructions for us to go around the back of one group of buildings…and without 4-wheel drive we never would have made it. The Indian superintendent brought out a gorgeous white rabbit and gave it to Carli to hold while he found some pigs for her!

 

On our return to the house, we separated to bathe and dress for dinner, then gathered around the fireplace at an informal living area at the end of the large dining room. Guatemala gets cold at night and it was pleasant to have the fire and to have heavy dark draperies drawn across windows and doors.

Darling Ketchi maids scuttled back and forth dressed in their native costume…great full skirts of hand-woven materials and a sheer white huipil (blouse) with great flounced, embroidered trimming on the low neck; hair in one great long shining black plait with a huge floppy red bow at the base of the braid rather than at the end.

Dinner, again, was superb and beautifully served. Mrs. Hempstead’s table was covered with a type of native material I never had seen before and she explained that she always used Guatemalan material for her “outside” friends and imported linens for her Guatemalan friends.

Mrs. Hempstead and Doña Rosita are wonderful company and the conversation ranged widely. I was particularly pleased at Carli’s having a chance to see the special charm of gracious, well educated, and elderly ladies. They both went to school in England and France, have traveled widely, and still read greatly.

About mid-evening we went off to bed, Mrs. Hempstead coming along to make sure that the maids had turned down the beds properly and given each of us two hot water bottles…Carli’s first experience with that delightful and, in my mind, out-of-the-past, bit of comfort. We were asked what time we wanted coffee, and then we settled for the night.

 

At 7:30 the next morning a gentle knock preceded the maid with a beautiful tray, complete with a flower…the first breakfast-in-bed I’ve had in years. The Hempsteads primarily grow coffee and are very proud of it. She has a maid whose job is to roast the coffee daily, grind it, and make the coffee essence…a very rich distillation that you then cut to taste with hot water. So you can imagine that the coffee was matchless. With it was toasted homemade bread and marmalade. Let me say it was a luxury I would be happy to enjoy daily. Carli, of course, was equally happy with her taste of life-as-it-should-be.

 

Although I fretted about those two elderly women jouncing along the roads, they were insistent on sightseeing. The countryside all is beautiful and their running commentary was fascinating. The backseat was a constant argument…no matter what one said, the other remembered it differently and they had a glorious time back and forth. Meanwhile, I was entranced.

Throughout the visit I was never sure what time era we were in, since one moment we were galloping across the countryside with the girls’ beaus and the next we were just last week. Mrs. Hempstead has a town house in The City but hates it because all the new building has simply destroyed the charm of Guatemala! In contrast, Tegucigalpa has kept its graciousness, she says, somewhat to my confusion since I’ve heard how modern it is…and then her son Chris comes into the conversation, age 8!

First we went to the next town to see the market. Carli went into this town’s church with misgivings, but survived. The thing I remember best from this one, which Doña Rosita pointed out with utter loathing, was a hideous statue of a young man in a modern brown suit, oxfords, bow tie, and halo. Doña Rosita sniffed and remarked, “I know Christ never wore a bow tie, and I don’t think the saints did either.”

We detoured to another little town, Santo Tomás, which according to Mrs. Hempstead was the one place the Spanish never could subdue during the Conquest. Later, after the Spanish were in control of the country, the King sent two huge brass church bells to the community in recognition of their bravery.

We went to the church here, which to Carli’s delight did not have a glass coffin. As a matter of fact, it was being rebuilt following an interior fire some years ago, so little of it was in the original state, though it was the usual massive white Spanish-Colonial style.

Rodrigo, the driver, offered to take us up to the bell tower, so we started up a wide, uneven set of stars in one wall (no guardrail, just open stairs). At the top they turned to the right and narrowed to barely body-width, disappearing into a steep tunnel. Rodrigo went first, and most reluctantly Carli and I crawled after him. Midway up the tiny, narrow, irregular stairs we were in almost total darkness since Rodrigo blocked the little light at the top.

We finally emerged onto an open stone platform alongside the bells, nothing between us and the distant ground but a few tiles on the roof, another story lower. We clutched at the arch and enjoyed our view of the village, farms, and mountains, praying that we not faint. The bells were lovely, great ancient greenish bronze with archaic inscriptions, and they were lashed in place with the original thongs, made of elephant hide, according to Rodrigo.

I missed some of the things Rodrigo told me since the Cobán accent is a little foreign to my version of Spanish. But I was quite aware of his meaning when he laughingly told us that we were among the first women ever to see the bells since it is not permitted and in the past they have even hung a woman who climbed up there. Later Joan was amazed that we had been up there since her sister-in-law had been run off fairly firmly not too long ago.

 

We had time for a lovely lunch on our return to Mrs. Hempstead’s home, and left that afternoon. It was a wonderful visit for Carli and me, and an experience I feel we both were very lucky to have had.

Joan met us back in Guatemala, and another Hempstead, Baysis, absolutely insisted on our spending the night with her. Her husband, Allan, was on the finca (plantation) and she was alone. She has a huge, beautiful home that would look perfectly in place on the outskirts of Atlanta, frame-and-stone, white board fences around acres of lawn, gardens, and orchard. We had a lovely afternoon and evening, went to a movie, and left for Belize next day.