Stealing Benefacio's Roses by Martín Prechtel

Author:Martín Prechtel [Prechtel, Martín]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-831-6
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

nine

STEALING BENEFACIO’S ROSES

Like Raggedy Boy singing alone lost in the woods, in the beginnings of my days in Panajachel I sang and played my guitar alone on the beach, but to feed myself I was soon enough giving concerts in rich people’s garden homes, which is where I saw Hipolita Cavek cleaning up after a soirée one afternoon.

Still a child of sixteen with skin like the belly of a golden seal, she was a Cakchiquel Mayan girl in service as a maid who was carrying on with the son of her employer, a pale-skinned, wispy-bearded, slacks-wearing twenty-two year-old from a family who owned several trans-oceanic shipping companies.

I was a half-breed guitarist with no shoes, madly in love with the possibility of being in love, hunting my own soul in the deep brownness of her Indian nature, a homeless romantic boy who thought she should be mine and that I was better for her.

During my concerts for his parents I sang my songs to her, to get her away from him for me, shooting, so to speak, my backwards arrows as I’d done so many times before, hitting in this case only myself, which meant this time that I was fired from my guitar job.

As anyone might’ve guessed this in no way stopped me. When I discovered where Hipolita lived, it turned out that she had seven little sisters and a baby brother, a mother and no father, who were all very much nicer than she would ever be.

Though welcomed whenever I visited her beautiful family, who were as poor as anyone alive, I was too shy to express my feelings when Hipolita disappeared every night to be with the white man, returning stoned on pot and staggering straight for bed.

At that time I was living in a tiny slatted dirt-floored hut on the east side of the river in a coffee grove surrounded at a distance by its Cakchiquel owner’s family compound of huts that lay between a gathering of boulders.

To get home every evening, just before the place where I had to wade the cold stream, on the high point of the trail, in a little piece of the uncut original forest sat a cottage of white-washed stone and clay Spanish roof tiles, behind a walled garden filled with brilliant and enormous roses.

Though in every respect the cottage seemed to have been built according to Quiché Mayan aesthetics, there was something about the eaves that came from southern Spain. The six-foot high walls of the garden, on the other hand, were totally Central American, for a foot taller than the average Guatemalan, they were topped off with a gruesome row of razor-edged broken bottle glass set firmly in the plaster.

Inside the walls, two large dogs, like Rotweillers but different, would throw themselves like angry jungle peccaries, crashing into the closed wrought-iron gate, gurgling, gnashing, snapping their jaws and barking whenever I passed in the mornings into town on the little hard-packed trail. But on my return in the afternoons they were usually sound asleep.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.