or in Antigua or in the city, she traveled by bus with books of poetry in her knapsack. Rimbaud, Celan, Denise Levertov, I remember were poets he named. The British journalist and I weren’t close friends. The reason he came over to sit with me in Bar Quixote when I was drinking alone one night was because he was excited to tell me about his love affair with the nun from Indiana, and the reason he was so excited was because her last name was Goldberg, too, though she was “half-Jewish” by birth. I’m only half-Jewish, too, I told him. Do you think you might be related? he exclaimed. How many half-Jewish Goldbergs could there be? That made us both guffaw. Though she had a Catholic mother, she’d had to convert, because she’d never been baptized. He told me about another writer Sister Julia was into, Natalia Ginzburg, an Italian, half-Jewish and a Catholic convert too. That was the first time I ever heard of Natalia Ginzburg, but I didn’t read her until a few years later when I found some of her books in Spanish translation in a Mexico City bookstore. The British journalist told me he was in love with the missionary nun, but she refused to abandon the religious life because the people she was serving so needed her, the Ixil Maya being one of populations hardest hit by the war, the army’s now-notorious scorched-earth campaign of massacres, and its other well-documented crimes and horrors. As long as Sister Julia was living in a way that brought her closer to the meaning of Jesus Christ as she understood it, she didn’t care what other sins she was committing, was how my friend explained it. He said, She likes to call herself a Jesuit Anarchist. It’s been something like fifteen years since I last spoke to the British journalist, but I see him on TV quite a bit. He’s become an expert on the Taliban and Al Qaeda. I have no idea whatever became of Sister Julia Goldberg, but I doubt she was killed. As far as I know, whenever they murdered an American nun in Guatemala or El Salvador, and they murdered more than a few, we heard about it.
Of course there were millions of centroamericanas there, too, more or less my own age, born on the isthmus and still living there. Surely among them was the romantic companion I so longed to find. I even told myself that it would be a logical way to resolve my sometimes-confusing identity issues, to have a serious relationship with and eventually marry a centroamericana, as tritely prescriptive as that sounds now. But over the next decade, I only had a few one-nighters and brief involvements, which I was never able to keep going much longer than a week, with a mix of local and foreign women I can count on one hand. No real intimate connection or electricity, not smart or funny or political enough, that’s the sort of thing I’d tell myself, whether she’d cut out first or I had. Instead, I’d carry around some absurdly far-fetched, unrequited crush or obsession, I could keep one of those going for years.
There were two bedrooms in the apartment, originally built for Abuelita’s sister Nano, over my abuelos’ house, and for a while Penny Moore lived in one of them. She was the most important human rights investigator in Guatemala, though she did that anonymously. Her cover was working as a stringer for one of the American newsweeklies, where not even her editor knew her secret. I accompanied her on a lot of her information-gathering trips up into the Quiché, Huehue, and Rabinal, and one time we crossed over from Mexico with an Ixil guide named Maria Saché, who led us to the camp of a nomadic Maya refugee group, one of the comunidades de población en resistencia, who’d fled into the mountains and forests to evade the army, living on wild plants and roots when they were on the run, sometimes able to settle long enough to harvest a season of corn, and improvise a little school. Even deep inside the rain forest, sometimes the only drinking water the refugees could find had to be squeezed or sucked from machete-hacked tree vines and roots that fathers held to the lips of their children, they’d even offer the chance to draw a few sips to a pair of thirsty journalists before taking any for themselves. I did my own reporting, too, in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America, every year publishing three or so magazine pieces, and those occasional freelance checks were what I lived on. I saw a lot, but not as much as Penny and a full-time correspondent like my other closest friend, Geronimo Tripp, always rushing off to the latest hot combat zone. But in Guatemala City I stayed in my room a lot, too, trying to get my novel going, writing by hand on legal pads or pounding with two fingers my little Olivetti portable. Or I’d spend entire rainy season afternoons hidden away in the upstairs mezzanine of Pastelería Jensen, a café in the center, writing in my notebook or reading novels in those British paperback editions that I bought in the little foreign language bookshop one block over, owned by a young French-Guatemalan Jewish man. He had books in English, French, German, even Japanese, but he never stocked any title known to be politically left. I remember a young French backpacker type coming in and asking for Che Guevara’s Motorcyle Diaries, and the bookstore owner looking like he was about to have a heart attack. He meticulously wrapped every purchased book with brown paper and tape, but if you tried to strike up even the smallest small talk with him while you patiently watched and waited across his counter, all you’d get back were terse nods, which must be why my memory of his very large head atop his small, slender body and his marzipan-pale, mole-splotched, sensitive face and thin, stricken lips remains so vivid. Sitting up on that café mezzanine with my little individual pot of coffee, I’d unwrap the brown paper around whatever black- (The Sentimental Journey), light-green- (Andre Gide’s Journals), or orange-spined (The Comedians) Penguin I’d just bought, hold it to my nose, and riffle the pages to inhale that nutty mustiness possessed by any book steeped in a Guatemalan rainy season. Tío Memo used to come into Pastelería Jensen from the store every afternoon at five on the dot for his coffee and oatmeal cookies, always accompanied by at least one of my younger girl cousins. Usually I’d leave my table to go downstairs and sit with them for a bit.
Penny Moore strode into my bedroom holding a gardening hand rake and said, You should have this. But we didn’t have a garden or anything like one. Her rake had five iron prongs, each filed or lathed to a sharp point. Someone had recently given it to her. She’d been keeping it by her bed, ready to use it as a weapon in an emergency. I’m trying to remember exactly what color its wooden handle was; a grayish shade, I think.
It was one of those times when Guatemalan G-2 Military Intelligence and the death squads seemed to be launching another of their sporadic killing frenzies. The dreaded intelligence unit known as the Archivo was then headed by Tito Cara de Culo, still just a colonel. What seemed different now was that they weren’t only targeting Guatemalans. A junior diplomat from one of the Scandinavian countries had apparently spent several days in a guerrilla camp, not necessarily inconsistent with her information-gathering duties; in the middle of the night, intruders stealthily scaled the wall outside her rented home, climbed in through her bedroom window, repeatedly raped and stabbed her, and left her body for dead as a message that the people it was intended for would not misconstrue. Miraculously, she survived and was immediately evacuated by military air ambulance. There was a lot of nervous whispering going around about who was getting threats, who’d already fled, who might be next. Embassies and international aid organizations were all freaking, ordering staff living in apartments and homes conceivably vulnerable to wall-climbing agents of freedom to move into gated, multistory condominium complexes with good security.
Penny Moore, nonpareil information gatherer, also had a lot of contacts among the guerrillas. She’d received probably many more threats than she’d let on to me. It wouldn’t be so hard for people with the required skills to reach our windows from the sidewalk or the roof. We knew that the “bad guys”—Military Intelligence, other Guat officials, the US embassy—must suspect that Penny wasn’t just a magazine stringer, even if they didn’t know for sure. Maybe they didn’t think one person could be behind those voluminous human rights reports that were causing the Guatemalan military government and the Bonzo administration in Washington so many headaches. They didn’t think one boyishly skinny, long-legged girl whose ears stuck out through her thin black hair, who had a laugh like a neighing donkey, who’d first come to Guatemala as a Fulbright scholar and college student to study bats in Mayan mythology could be doing all that by herself. One day she told me that until she let me know otherwise, we both had to stay away from every Guatemalan we knew; a deep source had told her that Military Intelligence had put a tail on us.
Our alarm system was beer and soda bottles stacked on the seats of chairs underneath all our windows, so that if they came in, bottles would fall to the floor and shatter. I’d developed a strange tic inside my cheek that twitched constantly. From that time on and even to this day, if I’m walking on the sidewalk and the door of a parked car suddenly