Evelyn spent several days in the clinic until she could swallow fruit juices and cornmeal and was able to walk again. Her grandmother went back to the village to organize Andres’s burial. Father Benito presented himself at the police station and made good use of his booming voice and his strong Basque accent to demand a copy of a signed and officially stamped report on what had happened to the Ortega family. No one took the trouble to go and interview Evelyn; even if they had, it would have been of little use, because she was still unable to speak. The priest also asked Nuria Castell for a copy of the medical report, thinking it might be useful someday. During this time the Catalan doctor and the Basque Jesuit met on several occasions. They had long discussions about the divine without reaching agreement but discovered that on a human level they were united by the same principles. “It’s a pity you’re a priest, Benito. Such a good-looking man staying celibate is a real waste,” the doctor joked between two cups of coffee.
The MS-13 had carried out its threat to wreak revenge. Gregorio’s betrayal must have been very serious to deserve such punishment, thought the priest, although possibly it had simply stemmed from an act of cowardice or a misplaced insult. It was impossible for him to know, as he had no idea what codes operated in their world.
“Rotten bastards,” he muttered during one of his meetings with the doctor.
“Those gang members weren’t born so rotten, Benito. They were once innocent kids, but they grew up in utter poverty, with no laws and no heroes they could emulate. Have you seen the children begging? Selling needles and bottles of water on the roads? Digging in the garbage dumps and sleeping out in the open with the rats?”
“Yes, I’ve seen them, Nuria. There’s nothing I haven’t seen in this country.”
“At least in the gangs they don’t go hungry.”
“This violence is the result of an endless war against the poor. Two hundred thousand indigenous people massacred, fifty thousand disappeared, a million and a half displaced. Guatemala is a small country; just calculate what percentage of the population that means. You’re very young, Nuria, what can you know of all this?”
“Don’t underestimate me, Father. I’m well aware of what you’re talking about.”
“Soldiers committing atrocities against people who are just like them, from the same race and class, born into the same bottomless misery. It’s true they were following orders, but they carried them out intoxicated by the most addictive drug: power with impunity.”
“You and I have been lucky, Benito, because we’ve never tried that drug. If you had power and impunity, would you make the guilty suffer as much as they do their victims?” she asked.
“I suppose I would.”
“Even though you’re a priest and God tells you to forgive.”
“I always thought that story about turning the other cheek was stupid. It only means you get a second slap,” he retorted.
“And if you are tempted by vengeance, just imagine what it’s like for mere mortals. I would castrate those who raped Evelyn, without anesthetic.”
“My Christian faith keeps failing me, Nuria. I guess it must be because I’m just a dumb Basque like my father, God rest his soul. If I’d been born in Luxembourg perhaps I wouldn’t be so indignant.”
“We need more angry people like you in this world, Benito.”
The priest’s anger went back a long way. He had been struggling with it for years and thought that at his age, with all he had lived through and seen, it was time to accept reality. Age had not made him any wiser or gentler, only more rebellious. As a young man, he had rebelled against the government, the military, the Americans, the usual rich people. Now his rebellion extended to the police, corrupt politicians, narcos, traffickers, gangsters, and all the others responsible for this mess. He had spent thirty-five years in Central America apart from a couple of interruptions when he was sent as a punishment to the Congo and to a retreat for several months in Extremadura to atone for the sin of pride and to dampen his passion for justice after a spell in prison in 1982. He had served the church in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, what was now known as the Northern Triangle, the most violent part of the world not at war, and in all that time he had never learned to live alongside injustice and inequality.
“It must be tough being a priest with a character like yours,” Nuria said with a smile.
“The vow of obedience weighs a ton, Nuria, but I’ve never questioned my faith or my vocation.”
“What about the vow of celibacy? Have you ever fallen in love?”
“Constantly, but God helps me and it passes quickly, so don’t try to seduce me, woman.”
After burying Andres alongside his brother, Concepcion rejoined her granddaughter at the clinic. Father Benito took them to a friend’s house in Solola, where they would be safe while Evelyn convalesced and he looked for a coyote he could trust to take her to the United States. Evelyn had her arm in a sling and every time she inhaled her ribs were a torture. Since Gregorio’s death she had lost a lot of weight; in recent weeks her adolescent curves had vanished. She was so skinny and frail that it seemed the slightest gust of wind could sweep her into the skies. Not only had she said nothing about what happened that fateful Easter Saturday but she had not uttered a single word since she came to on the mattress in the pickup. The only hope was that she had not seen how they slit her brother’s throat, that by then she had been unconscious. Dr. Castell ordered them not to try to ask her any questions; she was traumatized and needed peace and time to recover.
As they were leaving the clinic, Concepcion Montoya raised the possibility that her granddaughter had been made pregnant. This had happened to her when she had been raped by soldiers in her youth: Miriam was the result of that abuse. The Catalan doctor shut herself in a bathroom with the grandmother and told her in a whisper that she need not worry about that, because she had given Evelyn a pill invented by the North Americans to avoid getting pregnant. It was illegal in Guatemala, but no one would find out. “I’m telling you this so that you won’t go thinking of some homemade remedy for the girl. She’s suffered enough.”
WHEREAS BEFORE EVELYN HAD STAMMERED, after the rape she simply stopped speaking. She spent hours languishing in the house of Father Benito’s friends, showing not the slightest interest in all the novelties there: running water, electricity, two toilets, a telephone, and even a television set in her room. Concepcion intuited that this word sickness went beyond the doctors’ competence and decided to act before it became lodged in her granddaughter’s bones. As soon as Evelyn could stand properly on her feet and breathe without stabbing pains in her chest, Concepcion said goodbye to the kind people who had sheltered them and left with her granddaughter for Peten on a lengthy, bone-shaking minibus journey to visit the shaman Felicita, a healer and guardian of the traditions of the Maya. Felicita was famous: people came from the capital and from as far as Honduras and Belize to consult her on matters of health and destiny. She had been interviewed on a television program, where they estimated she was a hundred and twelve years old and must be the oldest person in the world. Felicita never denied this, but she still had most of her teeth and two thick braids hanging down her back, too many teeth and too much hair for someone so old.
It was easy for them to find the healer, because everyone they asked knew her. Felicita showed no surprise when they appeared: she was used to receiving souls, as she called her visitors, and always welcomed them warmly in her living house. She claimed that the wood of its walls, the beaten earth of its floor, and the straw of its roof were alive, breathing and thinking like all living beings. She would ask their advice for the most difficult cases, and the materials of the house would answer her in dreams. Her house was a round hut with only one room, where daily life went on alongside her ceremonies and cures. A curtain of serape blankets enclosed the small space where Felicita slept on a bed of rough boards.
The shaman greete
d her new arrivals with the sign of the cross, asking them to sit on the floor, and served bitter coffee to Concepcion and mint tea to Evelyn. She accepted a fair price for her professional services and put the banknotes into a tin box without counting them. Grandmother and granddaughter drank in respectful silence and waited patiently while Felicita watered the medicinal plants in pots lined up in the shade, threw grains of corn out for the hens wandering about, and then put beans to cook on a fire in the yard. After she had completed her most urgent chores, the old woman laid a brightly colored woven cloth on the floor. On it she placed all the elements of her altar in strict order: candles, bundles of aromatic herbs, conch shells, and various Maya and Christian religious objects. She lit some sprigs of sage and cleansed the inside of her house with the smoke, walking in circles and chanting incantations to drive off the negative spirits in an ancient tongue. It was only then that she sat down opposite her visitors and asked what had brought them there. Concepcion explained the speech problem afflicting her granddaughter.
The healer’s eyes glinted below the wrinkled lids as they examined Evelyn’s face for a long couple of minutes. “Close your eyes and tell me what you see,” she instructed the girl. Evelyn did as she was told but could not find a voice to describe the scene at the bridge or the terror she had felt when the tattooed men seized Andres and beat and threw her to the floor. She tried to speak, but the consonants stuck in her throat. With the despairing efforts of someone drowning, she produced a few spluttering vowels. Concepcion interrupted to describe what had happened to her family, but the healer shushed her. She explained that she channeled the universe’s healing energy, that this was a power she had received at birth and cultivated with other shamans throughout her long life. This was why she had traveled great distances in a plane to visit the Seminoles in Florida and the Inuits in Canada, among others, although her greatest knowledge came from the sacred plant of the Amazon, which was the way into the spirit world. She lit some herbs in a clay pot painted with pre-Columbian symbols and blew the smoke in her patient’s face. Then she made her drink some disgusting ayahuasca tea that Evelyn could barely swallow.
The potion soon began to take effect, and Evelyn could no longer stay sitting upright. She toppled onto her side, her head in her grandmother’s lap. Her limbs relaxed, her body dissolved like salt in an opalescent sea, and she saw herself enveloped in fantastic, violently colored whirlwinds: sunflower yellow, obsidian black, emerald green. The nauseating taste of the tea filled her mouth and she retched and vomited into a plastic bowl Felicita placed in front of her. Eventually the nausea subsided, and Evelyn lay back on her grandmother’s skirt, trembling all over. The visions came in rapid succession. In some of them, her mother appeared as she had last seen her; others were scenes from her childhood, bathing in the river with other children, or at age five riding on the shoulders of her elder brother; a jaguar with two cubs emerged, then again her mother with a man, possibly her father. All of a sudden she found herself beside the bridge where her brother was hanging. She cried out in terror. She was alone with Gregorio. The earth giving off a warm mist; the rustling of the banana trees; huge flies; black birds suspended in midflight; violent, carnivorous flowers floating in the rust-colored water of the river; and her brother crucified. Evelyn went on shrieking and shrieking as she tried in vain to run and hide. She could not move a muscle; she had been turned to stone. From afar she heard a voice reciting a litany in Mayan, and felt that she was being rocked and cradled.
After an eternity she slowly became calm and dared to look up. She saw that Gregorio was no longer strung up like a carcass in a slaughterhouse but was standing intact on the bridge, without tattoos, exactly as he had been before he lost his innocence. And beside him was Andres, also intact, calling to her or waving goodbye with his hand. She blew them a kiss in the distance and her brothers smiled, before gradually fading against a purple sky and vanishing altogether. Time became warped, twisted; she no longer knew if it was before or after, or how the minutes and hours were passing. She surrendered completely to the power of the drug and, as she did so, lost all fear. The mother jaguar returned with her cubs, and Evelyn dared to stroke her on the back. The fur was rough, with a swamplike smell. The enormous animal accompanied her as she entered and left other visions, watching her with amber eyes, showing her the way when she got lost in abstract labyrinths, protecting her when any evil being came near.
Hours later, Evelyn emerged from this magic world. She found herself on a mat, covered in blankets, bewildered, and with her body aching all over. She had no idea where she was. When finally she managed to focus, she saw her grandmother sitting beside her, reciting the rosary, with another woman she did not recognize until she said her name: Felicita.
“Tell me what you saw,” the shaman instructed her.
Evelyn made a supreme effort to speak and to pronounce words, but she was very tired and could only stammer “brothers” and “jaguar.”
“Was it female?” asked the healer.
The girl nodded.
“Mine is the feminine power,” Felicita said. “That’s the power of life that the ancients had, both women and men. Now it is asleep in men, which is why there is war, but that power is going to reawaken, and then good will spread over the earth, the Great Spirit will reign, there will be peace, and evil deeds will cease. I am not alone in saying this. It’s prophesied by all the wise ancient women and men among the native peoples I have visited. You also have the feminine power. That’s why the mother jaguar came to you. Remember that. And don’t forget that your brothers are with the spirits and are not suffering.”
Exhausted, Evelyn fell into a deathlike, dreamless sleep. Hours later, she awoke on Felicita’s mat refreshed, aware of all she had been through, and ravenous. She devoured the beans and tortillas offered by the shaman, and her voice when she thanked her came tumbling out, but sonorously. “What you have is not a sickness of the body, but of the soul. It may get better on its own; it may go away for a while and then return, because it is a very stubborn sickness; and it may never be cured. We shall see,” said Felicita. Before saying goodbye to her visitors, she gave Evelyn a card of the Virgin Mary blessed by Pope John Paul during his visit to Guatemala, and a small stone amulet in the fierce shape of Ixchel, the jaguar goddess. “You will know suffering, my girl, but two powers will protect you. One is the sacred mother jaguar of the Maya, the other is the sacred mother of all Christians. Call on them and they will come to your aid.”
THE REGION OF GUATEMALA CLOSE to the Mexican border was a center for contraband and trafficking. Thousands of men, women, and children tried to eke out a living on the margins of the law, but it was hard to find a coyote who could be trusted. There were some who after receiving half their payment left their charges abandoned anywhere in Mexico, or transported them under inhuman conditions. Occasionally the smell would give away the presence of a container bearing the bodies of dozens of migrants who had died of suffocation or had been broiled in the relentless heat. Girls faced greater danger, as they could be raped or sold to pimps and brothels. Once again it was Nuria Castell who gave Father Benito a helping hand and recommended a discreet agency with a good reputation among the evangelicals.
The agency was run by the owner of a bakery who had a sideline in smuggling people across the border. She was proud of the fact that none of her clients had ended up being trafficked, kidnapped en route, or murdered; none of them had fallen or had been pushed from a train. She could offer some degree of security in a fundamentally risky business. Taking what safety measures she could, she left the rest to the Lord, who took care of his subjects from his kingdom in the heavens. She charged the usual price smugglers demanded to cover the risks and costs, plus her own commission. Communicating with these coyotes on her cell phone, she would monitor their trail, always knowing which point of their journey her clients had reached. According to Nuria, she had not lost anyone so far.
Father Benito we
nt to see the woman, who turned out to be in her fifties, wearing thick makeup and with gold everywhere: on her ears, around her neck and wrists, and in her teeth. The priest asked for a reduction in the name of God, appealing to her better nature as a Christian, but she avoided mixing faith with business and would not budge: they had to pay the coyote part of his fee in advance, plus the whole of her commission. The rest was to be paid by the relatives in the United States, or by the client—with interest, of course. “Where do you think I can find that amount of money, señora?” asked the Jesuit. “From your church’s collection,” she said sarcastically. In the end this was not necessary, because the money Miriam sent was enough to cover Andres’s burial, the agent’s commission, and 30 percent of the coyote’s fee, with an IOU for the rest once Evelyn arrived safely. This debt was sacred: no one could avoid paying it.
The people smuggler chosen by the baker to help Evelyn Ortega was someone called Berto Cabrera, a thirty-two-year-old mustached Mexican with a beer paunch. He had been doing this for more than a decade and had made the trip dozens of times with hundreds of migrants. When it was a matter of people he was totally honest, although with other contraband his principles were more flexible. “Some people look down on what I do, but I’m performing a social service. I look after people, I don’t take them in animal trucks or on top of trains,” he explained to the priest.
Evelyn Ortega joined a group of four men who were heading north in search of work, together with a woman with a two-month-old baby who was going to join her boyfriend in Los Angeles. The baby would be a hindrance on the journey, but his mother had pleaded so earnestly that in the end the agency’s owner relented. The clients met in the back of the bakery, where each was given fake identity papers and warned about the adventure they were about to embark on. From that moment on they could only use their new names; it was better for them not to know the other passengers’ real ones. Head bowed, Evelyn did not dare look at anyone, but the woman with the baby came over and introduced herself. “My name now is Maria Ines Portillo. What about you?” she asked. Evelyn showed her identity card. Her new name was Pilar Saravia.