Rain in Xela
I came into the city of Quetzaltenango- which absolutely everyone calls by its Maya name, Xela- for the second time on a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon. I got a taxi from the Terminal de Minerva bound for the Casa Latina, where I would be staying and studying Spanish for the next couple weeks. Finally after a month of studying my native language I’d be learning to better speak the language of the land I was traveling in.
Unfortunately, the taxi driver thought I’d said Casa Argentina, a hostel that does happen to be on the same street, though some blocks away. When I got out and saw his mistake, he said there was no such thing as Casa Latina- no hay- and insisted that this was what I wanted. Sighing, I let him go, and started walking up and down the street in the gray rain carrying my bags. A further difficulty was that the online image of the school, a grand edifice of stone and columns, bears no resemblance to what can be seen on Calle Diagonal 12, a faded white three story residence made of concrete.
About the third time I’d walked by it, I noticed a little beat up sign on a garage-door type gate that said Sol Latino, the name of the school, and rang the bell. A friendly older man named Orlando answered and welcomed this sodden traveler in. He showed me to the third floor, where the student rooms are, and when we came in a young woman greeted us, wearing what seemed to be all of her clothes and wrapped up in a blanket. I introduced myself, and Orlando showed me my room, a small dark space with a window opening onto a concrete lightwell, told me that classes started at nine the next morning, and bid me a buenas noches. I dropped my bags, changed into dry clothes, and went out to check out my surroundings.
My blanket-covered roommate was Yadira, a nineteen year old from Oregon. She’d left college after a year at a hippie school in North Carolina that she hated, and was down here to learn Spanish and perhaps better connect with her Mexican roots, though she’d learned there is a wide gulf of culture and animus between Guatemalans and Mexicans.
At the moment of my arrival she was fighting off both some kind of sickness and the incessant cold and damp of Xela in rainy season. I couldn’t tell at first, but behind her glasses she has these striking green-blue eyes, and hair all the way down her back. Between sniffles she gave me the rundown on the place, the school, confirmed that there was, in fact, no heat, put on a pot of chicken soup she’d made, and proceeded to horribly burn the rice inside.
And so in my first hours in town I became acquainted with the primary elements which would define my time there. The Casa Latina, Yadira, the cold and rain. It was bizarre to me that this far into the tropics, a place could be so cold, but elevation goes a long way, and Xela has quite a bit of it, sitting at 7,700 feet above sea level. The day before I’d been swimming in the sun at Lake Atitlan; it felt like my two-hour bus trip had taken me to another country. The only thing I could think to do to warm up and get situated was to cook some dinner; I went out wandering and found a little supermarket and slow cooked some pinto beans and quesadillas and felt more at home.
The next morning I met Ana Maria, my Spanish teacher, and liked her right away. She is smart and enthusiastic, great at speaking in a slow and clear manner that I can understand, and has a natural sense of when to slow down and when to forge on ahead. I took a placement test, and despite the fact that I had a lot of vocabulary, my glaring weaknesses in grammar and pronunciation condemned me to the basic level. After a couple days, Ana admitted that I was an unusual student: the most advanced basic Spanish speaker she’d ever had. This made sense given that I’d spent almost a year of my life in Spanish speaking countries, talking to people, but had almost no formal schooling. We started in on the real basics, the pronunciation of each letter, greetings and the proper responses, and then into regular verbs in the present.
The schedule was four hours of class with Ana Maria, from 9 to 1, five days a week. We’d sit out on the balcony of the second floor, and I’d drink tea and she’d drink coffee, and we’d watch a promising morning get swept over by thick dark clouds coming over the mountains from the west. Class would start out with some conversation, simple things like what did you do last night, tell me about your family, which would eventually stretch on and out into various topics. I liked talking to her; in a different life we would have been good friends. At some point I’d feel like we needed to start into the material I was learning, and would shuffle my papers around and open my notebook, and she’d get the hint and ask if I had my tarea, or homework, and I’d say por supuesto, of course. I’d read her what I’d written, she’d correct my mistakes, and then we’d dive into the grammar, surfacing for some more conversation whenever she could tell my mind was full.
At one we’d call it a day, my head swimming with verbs and conjugations and prepositions and articles. After cooking some kind of lunch, for the first few days I’d be so exhausted that I’d need to take a long afternoon nap, and generally by that point it would be raining anyway. Part of it was the conditions; it was a rough adjustment to the altitude and not sleeping well with nights in the 40s. But this whole learning a language thing was a much larger undertaking than I’d thought, and it’s hard to overstate how tired my brain would be after four hours.
The material we covered in the first week I more or less knew in terms of words and their meanings, but the conjugations, the pronunciations and grammar were a crucial foundation that had not been properly laid. Ana Maria was insistent at correcting me and still able to be encouraging. One of the real challenges of Spanish for an English speaker is that a number of the vowels are switched around. “A” is “ah”, “E” is “ay”, and “I” is “e”. Mixing up i’s and e’s is my consistent pitfall, along with the articles el and la, and the baffling group of shape-shifting prepositions en and de, para and por. For instance, para translates to (mostly) “for” as well as “to”, “in order to”, “near” and “by”. Meanwhile, por can also be “for” in other specific circumstances, but also “by”, “because of”, “through”, “per” and “around”.
Xela is a far cry from the tourist paradise of Antigua. For one it’s a proper city, the second biggest in the country. No one was trying to sell me anything- it was a pleasure to be off the gringo trail and around Guatemalan people just going about their daily lives. While it lacks the grandeur and charm of Antigua, there is a realness and a grit to it, as well as plenty of history and quirkiness. Winding cobbled streets up and down the hills, gothic stone buildings of a very 19th century feel. Just about every day I’d take a walk in some direction and see what I could see, find a plaza and watch the city life happening. I’d get lost and then find my way back again.
There was an old-fashioned market directly across the street from the school, with all kinds of fresh locally grown fruits and vegetables, dry grains and beans in big burlap sacks, meats and eggs. All run by Guatemalan women who call out their wares as you pass by, and will gladly haggle you over an onion. You could also buy a couple tamales or miniature chile relleno or tostada with chicken for a dollar. Much of what I ate in Xela came from this market, and it was a godsend, as after paying for school and my room, there was very little left in my budget. A lot of rice and beans and lentils and tomatoes and avocados and chorizo. Not so bad.
As the only residents of the Casa Latina, Yadira and I spent a good bit of time together, and turned out to be good company for each other. Despite the difference in our ages, we could see and hear each other clearly across the divide. This is the leveling effect of traveling: no matter wherer we’d come from, at this moment we were in the exact same place. At lunch and dinner we would cook side by side; her method being to throw all items into a pan and cook them as fast as possible, mine taking a lot longer. Sometimes we would eat together; on the third night there I cooked us a big mess of eggplant and tomato pasta; either way we’d sit and have long conversations over and after our dinners, and distract each other from our homework.
About traveling, the difficulties of learning Spanish, the state of things in the US, her return to college, her (Guatemalan) boyfriend- at college in the states- who was coming in a few months. We had good conversations. She’d had a crazy trip so far- having been in Puerto Rico for Hurricane Irma, then in Mexico City for the big earthquake in early September, and having to flee both places. She seemed perfectly happy for the moment to hide out in the Guatemalan highlands despite the chill.
In addition to the four hours of class, I was spending several more hours a day studying and doing homework. To retain anything, I’d have to review what we’d learned that day, and copy over the whole lesson. Ana would also give me an assignment, from writing twenty sentences to two page stories. And so this was pretty much my life: class, cooking, eating, napping, studying, cooking, eating, studying, sleeping, then repeat.
By the fourth day of class I had more or less got my bearings, both to the conditions and to the workload. The sun finally made a sustained appearance, and I was feeling inspired enough to forgo my nap that afternoon and take a walk up into the green hills that ring the city, above the church with Cristo Vivo written in giant white letters for the all to see, to the Panorama Cafe. I got myself a thick steaming cup of hot chocolate and did my studying in style, with the whole city laid out below like a satellite map. It felt like a minor victory just to have the energy required to climb half an hour at altitude; a little bit of sunlight goes a long way.
That Friday afternoon it was raining again, and I was sitting in the cozy Cafe Quartito, just off the Parque Centro-Americana, the main plaza in town. The Quartito had quickly become my favorite place when I needed to get out of the building where I took classes, ate and slept, and I had begun the process of drinking my way through the various unfamiliar jars of herbs and flowers along the front counter. What appeared to be a little nook of a cafe opened up into a stone-paved courtyard, that they had tented over for the rainy season, and there was great pleasure in listening to the rain pour down on the tarp, warm beverage in hand. A week of Spanish classes was complete, and while I was nowhere near where I wanted to be, the language was becoming clearer every day. The downside is that as it does, I can see how much there is still to know.
The following day was Yom Kippur, the most important day of the year in the Jewish calendar. A day of fasting, a day of serious self-reflection, a day to take stock in where you were and how well you were living up to the person you want to be. Usually this was the one day of the year when I would go to synagogue, but there was none to be found in Xela. The nearest gathering of Jews to me was back at Lake Atitlan; in the town of San Pedro there is a Chabad house, an orthodox hostel built for all the Israeli travelers that go there. They were having some kind of services for Yom Kippur, and I was considering going. I could hear some prayers and songs and the sound of the shofar, the ram’s horn that is blown ceremonially at dusk; be with other Jewish people observing the day. But I couldn’t decide whether traveling three hours to be with other Jews was what the day was really about. Or was it about finding Yom Kippur inside myself? I went to sleep that night without having decided.
Jewish people like to say to each other: “have an easy fast” or “may it be an easy fast”. I made it through, but this Yom Kippur was not in any way easy. Many of the things that were already challenging came to the forefront; the feeling of being out of place, cut off by language and culture from the people around me, extraneous on these narrow streets, being sick of rain. All this was exacerbated by going through this intense spiritual day by myself, doing something that very few people in Xela had likely even heard of.
When I woke up in the morning, it seemed crazy to go to the bus station and get on a chicken bus and ride several hours over mountains while fasting. It’s crucial for me to get out of the place where I normally eat, so before very long I left the Casa Latina and walked west. Within a few blocks I came upon a funeral procession, which seemed somehow appropriate for the somber day. I followed at a certain distance, and into the Cementerio General, the city cemetery. There was a whole world in there, a city of the dead, with funerary buildings constructed of concrete blocks just like those outside. There were streets and alleyways, neighborhoods for rich and poor, some that had once been upscale but were now crumbling from neglect. Trash and flowers and families and workers. As the procession slowed as it neared its destination, I felt like I might disturb them with my presence, so I wandered off, looking at names and dates and stones and considering life and death with an active volcano lurking quietly in the background.
After an hour I found my way out of this city of the dead on the opposite side, and just continued in that direction. The streets were busy with people and dogs cars and motorbikes. It seemed like every building was a restaurant or bakery or market or house with food smells coming out of it; seemed like the whole city was eating. I felt like I needed to get out. What had been a cloudless day turned dark; I walked my way right out of town as the rain began, up a long hill to where the road turned to dirt and puddles, where dogs barked ferociously at me. Walked along this road until I was coming into the next little town, Llanos del Pinal, with the same volcano, Santa Maria looming out of the clouds above. I was soaking wet and getting cold, and in the darkened afternoon I thought it couldn’t be long until the end of my fast.
Walked all the way back in wet shoes, about seven miles in all, but when I walked into the third floor apartment at the Casa Latina, I found to my horror that it was only 2:30, when I was sure that it would be at least five. I sat down on the couch and dejectedly started taking off my shoes and socks, not knowing how I would make it through the next four hours. Yadira came out of her room and asked me how my day was going, and I became very emotional, expressed my great frustration and personal difficulties. She seemed sympathetic but also like I might be a little crazy. Maybe I was.
This is just what I’d been concerned about, that observing a day of atonement where no one else was, where no one could understand what I was going through, in difficult conditions in a big Central American city, would be super challenging. It was. Not having it in me to go back out in the rain, I decided that reading about Yom Kippur online would be the best thing I could do. I retreated into my room and found the story of Jonah and the whale, which is traditionally read on that day; then about the sons of Aaron, brother of Moses, who died after seeing God, the goat for Azazel which is sent into the wilderness, the ritual cleansing of the Cohen Gadol, the high priest of Israel, before he entered the holy of holies of Solomon’s temple. Mysteries all. Read about the meaning of wrongdoing in Judaism, that at its base it means bringing yourself away from God and your higher self; how those who return to righteousness after knowing the alternative are the most holy. I read everything I could find that was tangentially related to Yom Kippur, and it was still not even four o’clock.
Yadira was starting to cook some food, and I had to go walk again out of necessity. I put on dry socks then my wet shoes, and went back out, and thankfully the rain had lessened into a faint drizzle. This time I set out to the east, and walked the stone street clear out of the city in the opposite direction from before, up and down hills to the bottom of the mountain called El Baul that is a city park. The streets were quieter now, and it was easier to be in my solitary fast when I was actually alone. Walked until my feet were swollen and painful from many many miles in wet shoes, and the sun mercifully went down at last. On my way back to the Casa Latina I saw a cafe that I’d been eyeing for some days now, where rumor had it they made decent bagels. I went in and looked at the menu and one of the items was a Tempeh Melt Bagel, and in amazement I ordered it, never having imagined such a thing. The bagel was better than decent, though my hunger and exhaustion certainly helped, and either way I was a happy jewish hippie.
