The church was just across the street, and the sound of its bells announcing the hour drew me across the long bedroom floor to the window. I looked out, casting my gaze up toward the mountains and then down onto the cobblestone street below. The early-evening mist had settled on the rooftops of Todos Santos like a protective cover. The streets were quiet. My year in Guatemala was nearing its end, and until now, I had been ready for a change in my life since my return to the U.S. was approaching. Yet somehow this ethereal view from the window of my guesthouse made me pause. No, maybe not yet. Was I really ready to leave this place?
By the time I meandered the narrow streets of the village, all daylight had nearly escaped. I found Rosa’s house easily; the top of her Dutch door was open, and light from inside poured onto the dirt path out front. She had seen me coming, and in her hummingbird voice, she said that the water was warm and the chuj was ready for me.
She led me across the street, through a break in the bushes that lined an empty dirt plot where the chuj sat at the far left side. It looked like a miniature cinder block house of the plainest kind, no windows, with a pitched roof and a tiny open doorway that looked as if it was made for a large dog. There was a curtain affixed on the interior. She crawled inside. I crouched down and peered in as she pointed out the cauldron of heated water that sat over a smouldering fire and a pile of hot rocks just left of the doorway. Adjacent to it on the bench that lined the back wall was a pot of cold water and the empty plastic basin where I could mix the two using a small plastic bowl. It was self-explanatory enough. Then she left me and walked back across the street.
I stood in the dark for what felt like a long moment, wondering how to change out of my clothes in the middle of a clearing surrounded by houses. I wrapped my towel around my chest under my shirt as I pulled off my pants and underwear from underneath. Then I did the same for my shirt and bra.
I propped my bundle of clothes on top of a nearby bush before, wrapped in the towel, I crouched down on all fours and, clutching my soap and shampoo, half crawled, half squat-walked through the entrance. Once free from the doorframe, I nearly fell onto the bench that lined the back wall before I twisted around, sat upright, and planted my flip-flopped feet on the mud floor.
I had been travelling alone across Guatemala for the past week, with a few weeks left in my journey. It was the close of the year I’d spent living in the mountain city of Quetzaltenango—Xela, as it was commonly called—where I’d helped to run a local magazine. While I had travelled as much as possible over the course of the year, I didn’t want to return to the United States without having seen more of the country first, so I’d set off on my own with the mission of circling the country. I specifically wanted to get to the Mayan highland village of Todos Santos. I had heard that it was beautiful from the few I knew who had made the effort to get here. I also knew it to be a poignant casualty in Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, during which 200,000 people were killed, most of them the indigenous population massacred in scorched earth campaigns. It was a remote place where, in one unimaginable event, government soldiers had raided the town, locked up dozens of villagers inside the local church, whom they’d accused of being subversives, and massacred them all.
Todos Santos was also known (albeit very locally) for its chujs. Not exactly saunas, they were something like personal steam bathhouses known for being therapeutic and soul cleansing. Trying one was incredibly appealing to me. After a year of living in the Guatemalan highlands, I’d never truly adapted to the plummeting evening temperatures that would strike the mountains once the sun went down. I also hadn’t gotten used to cold showers. Most apartments and guest houses in
Guatemala supposedly boasted “hot water showers,” which were warmed by electric heaters. I had tried many. Positioned just next to the shower heads, these heaters would emit sharp, spine-rattling buzzes and sparks as drops of water inevitably fell against them. It justifiably sent a fear of electrocution through me every time I bathed. They were also incredibly ineffective, rendering the water only slightly warm at best. And so I had arrived in this remote mountain village with the idea that I would do some hiking (even though I didn’t consider myself much of a hiker), some reflection about the past year, rumination about what would be next for me (naturally I’d have my life completely figured out by the time I boarded my plane out of Guatemala City), and that I would, indeed, take a legitimate and soul-nourishing hot bath.
I also just really needed and wanted to get clean. By the time I’d reached Todos Santos, I’d already spent several days riding in buses and in the beds of several pick-up trucks. I was greasy-haired and dust-mottled and hated the bone chill of the mountain evenings. A chuj was what I needed, and so after rolling into town on an early morning bus and securing a place to sleep for the night, I set out to find one. After asking about it at the local Spanish school, I was directed to Rosa.
She stood outside her house when I found her, a petite woman with a broad face and long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her huipil, a traditional blouse, was navy blue with intricate yellow, pink and green geometric embroidery across the front and sleeves. Of course, she could arrange the chuj, she told me. She would just need several hours to prepare the hot rocks and cauldron of water; I could come back in the early evening when it was dark.
Inside my tiny cement womb, I allowed my eyes to adjust to the light before mixing the hot with the cold and throwing the water on my body. I moistened my bar of soap and began scrubbing with vigour, envisioning the water sweeping the dirt and dust from my body into long caramel rivulets that ran through the slots in the bench I sat upon, returning to the earth where it belonged. I lathered my hair with shampoo, relishing the suds that seeped onto my shoulders, hands and wrists. Throwing a little water on the rocks, I let them hiss steam and breathed in deeply, loving the warmth on my skin and how comfortable I suddenly felt.
When I was finished, I scooped up my bathing accoutrements into my arms, crouched down, pushed the curtain open and wormed my way out, dirtying my knees slightly in the process.
I stood for a moment in that little yard in my towel, absorbing the soft sounds around me, distant dog barks mostly. I looked up. The stars created a net over this little mountain town, their white lights cutting through the inky black darkness like diamonds. My body still felt warm, as if my clean skin somehow gave me a new protective barrier against the chill and filth I’d longed for days to escape. I dressed and then walked through the break in the hedge toward the light spilling out from the top of Rosa’s Dutch door.
She invited me inside. The mud-brick house was one large rectangular room with an uneven dirt floor. The perimeter of the room was lined with piles of assorted things—boxes, broken furniture, the ubiquitous grain sacks that I’d seen everywhere in Guatemala filled with pieces of wood, old shoes, clothing, and clothing hangers. To the left of the entrance were two twin beds pushed together. Above them hung two large photo collages covered with plexiglass. Many of the photos were of Rosa’s two young daughters, Lady and Eva, who were sitting near the fire in the centre of the room.
Two or three pigeons wandered amongst the piles of items heaved against the walls, their soft coos rising from the mess. The downy white feathers they had shed clung lightly and weightlessly to the periphery of salvaged goods. More feathers were scattered around the floor. A fire burned openly in the centre of the room, over which was placed a flat metal skillet. A set of small stools and short–legged chairs that seemed to have been made for children formed a circle around the fire.
I handed Rosa the remaining payment for the chuj. I had already given her some money that morning so she could buy the wood. She tucked it into the folds of her huipil and then asked me if I would like some atole, a traditional porridge made of cornmeal and milk sweetened with sugar and cinnamon. It was a drink I’d come to love, but one I couldn’t always find regularly. I gladly accepted.
She sat down on a small bench next to the fire, and I sat across from her. This was where she cooked, and this was how she heated her home. A pitch black circle stained the ceiling directly above, its edges creeping stealthily outwards. Apart from the Dutch door and two tiny square windows I saw on the opposite wall, there was no other way to ventilate.
After handing me my cup of atole, she extracted a small round ball of dough from another pot on the floor, which she began to flatten with her fingers in an effortless drumbeat to form a small, thick Guatemalan-style tortilla, the kind I’d spent the last year using to scoop up my black beans.
I sipped. The four of us spoke together in Spanish with Rosa every so often breaking off into traditional Mam to speak directly to her daughters. I told her about my job, about the trip from Xela. We talked about the chuj and how she, Lady and Eva had taken their twice-weekly bath in it just yesterday.
From time to time, I heard some scraping sounds against the outside of one of the walls of the house. She told me it was the pigs they kept. Then I asked her where her husband was.
“He is dead,” she said, her voice not changing its rhythm.
“Dead?” I replied, slowly and hesitantly.
She explained to me that one night, several years earlier, he had gone out with his friends to celebrate the victory of the presidential election. He never came home.
“The next day we found him,” she said. “He had bruises on his throat. We never found out who did it.”
After his death, she explained, her husband’s family, with whom they lived, forced Rosa and her daughters to leave. They had to learn to survive on their own.
She’d found the one-room house to rent across the road from her cousin, and there they lived with the cooking fire in the centre, the detritus stacked against their walls, and the pigeons wandering around its edges.
Her cousin had a slightly bigger house. Together, they had formed a partnership with the local Spanish school, agreeing to host visiting students in her cousin’s spare room. Rosa helped to make the meals. She also rented out her chuj, and she taught traditional weaving. If I wanted to, she told me, I could stay at her cousin’s house.
She did not change her voice as she told me this story, nor did she alter the consistent rhythm of her cooking, her fingers continually patting out the tortillas to throw over the fire. When she broke some eggs onto the skillet, she asked me if I wanted to eat some, too.
I’d spent the past year of my life in this country, trying to understand its cruel history, trying to somehow do something meaningful, to make sense of things in writing. Circumnavigating it by myself had been my last effort to “see” it and to figure out what this experience meant for my future before I would return to the U.S. Just one week into my trip, I’d found myself absorbed in battling my own loneliness and a familiar depression while trying to convince myself that I was strong enough to make the three-week journey on my own. The combination of cold mountain air and dearth of hot showers was enough to practically consume all of my focus as I’d wandered through the last few days. How ridiculous I’d been, how inward I had looked.
I wondered if Rosa thought often about who had killed her husband. When she lost him, she had also lost her support network, ostracised by her family and forced to raise two little girls on her own. It was a fate not unlike many other women around the world who found themselves, often for unexpected reasons, rejected and alone, as if culpable in the creation of their own tragedies.
Was her husband’s killer, or killers, among those who still lived in this mountain village? Had he been a friend? A stranger who had happened to be there that night, brought to rage by alcohol or a quick temper, or both? Could he be one of the men I’d seen standing in the jail near the town’s central market, a one-room place with a dirt floor and two steel-barred doors, outside which others on the street gathered to chat?
She didn’t know, she said. Or maybe she did, but she didn’t want to tell me, a stranger who had paid her for a bath, accepted her offer for dinner, and agreed to leave her guesthouse to rent her cousin’s spare room.
How does one live with that thought? Did she still feel safe here in her village? In that moment, I didn’t know how to ask her more. She just seemed so light, smiling, her voice a song. And so instead, I asked her about the pigeons. Why did they have them in their house?
“They help us,” she said. “They keep our bad dreams away.”
