This is what I remember about Guatemala

Abstract

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, Gualan, 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