Marsh Hawk Review
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Deborah Diemont Part of It Summer 1994 There were helicopters overhead, and that was part of it. There were tanks in the zócalo filled with hard-hatted soldiers in fatigues, and that was part of it. The two men who worked the front desk and kept the hotel clean were both twenty years old and both named Francisco. We thought of them as "Los Dos Franciscos." My husband and I, twenty-seven and twenty-six respectively, felt old in relation to them. One of them was mestizo with an aquiline nose and lighter skin; the other had brown skin and a wide nose. The Spanish-nosed Francisco had long, wild hair, and the indigenous Francisco had a crew cut that was growing out. It would have felt soft to touch. We were on our honeymoon. It was six months after the Zapatista uprising and we'd managed to know nothing about it, though we knew more generally about trouble in Mexico and Central America. Through my political science classes, at the University of Texas, I'd been introduced to caudillo governments, civil wars, CIA coups, banana republics and liberation theology. We'd been to Belize and Guatemala, two years before, on a two-week vacation, our first as young lovers, our first as full-time working people. Now, newly married, we were backpacking for three months, riding old American school busses, swimming in bath-tub warm oceans, attending Spanish language schools, fighting with each other, getting sick and sunburned, and being swept up by landscapes that felt utterly foreign. We walked around with a Lonely Planet phrase book, testing phrases, receiving answers we didn't understand. People gave us directions using unfamiliar gestures, pointing with their elbows or their lips, circling an index finger in the air like a lasso. A la derecha. Directo. Right turns and straight paths sounded the same. Our last bus, first class, had been boarded by campesinos, bandanas covering their faces, who may or may not have been Zapatistas, demanding cooperación—a few pesos from every passenger. They'd thrown a log in front of the bus to stop it, a protest or Robin Hood tactic that continues to this day. It was a first-class bus with a driver's assistant, a woman in an immaculate skirt, blouse and blazer, who walked down the aisle, stopping at every seat to collect our money. After she paid the masked leader, our bus was waved on. At the moment the bus was stopped, we'd been watching, Disney's "The Little Mermaid" on overhead monitors. Sebastian, the lobster, was singing, "Bajo la mar." As we neared San Cristóbal, the husband of a Dutch couple we'd befriended, also on honeymoon, took pictures, with the wide-angle lens of his Nikon, of fox holes along the road. I couldn't believe his courage, his stupidity. Our second and final night at the hotel, we bought a bottle of rum and shared it with The Two Franciscos, talking with them as best we could in our limited Spanish. I asked them how to say "chicken man," (I meant rooster), which had them in stitches. Though little else on the main street, now a pedestrian walkway, is the same, that hotel is still there some 30 years later. With our grown daughter, we climbed the tile steps to our room and then up to the roof where I stopped writing when Francisco One came up to hang the laundered sheets. He pointed to the chopper overhead and told me, "Militár." |
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