Spanish Mynor

Out of my first twelve hours in Xela, I spent eleven in the abyss, waking up at 7 am with my shoes still on and my bag half unpacked. Ludy greeted me as I toddled groggily out of the bedroom rubbing my eyes, probably identical to the seven year old who usually emanated from it. She beckoned me over to a breakfast of cantaloupe, honeydew, and banana with a communal bowl of yogurt and granola-like grain—the standard homestay breakfast, I would learn. She readied herself as I ate, I thought to take Rodrigo to school; it turned out I was the child whose hand she was planning to hold.

Sunlight feels different in Xela than I am used to, I think because of the 7,500 foot altitude and low humidity. You can sweat in a sunbeam and shiver in a shadow five feet apart. At no time is this more apparent than in the morning when light rays wander through cross streets at random, accosting every pedestrian they encounter before asserting their dominion over the low-rise buildings. I stumbled after Ludy and matched her brisk pace through the narrow alleys as we followed a growing roar and a scent of gasoline to a freeway that’s spine we traced all the way to my school. Before leaving me, she mimed the directions home and gave a questioning thumbs up to see if I understood the way. I gave her a thumbs up back, pretending the answer was yes.

My school was called Pop-Wuj. I later learned it is the local spelling for the Popul Vuh, the Mayan book of mythological history. Xela is widely considered the capital of Mayan culture, and such references to its origins are ubiquitous. Walking up a narrow set of stairs, I stopped at a doorway barricaded with vertical bars like a holding cell. A smiling woman sitting at a desk through them buzzed me in and greeted me. My deer-in-the-headlights look and sputter of Spanish accented gibberish convinced her to lead me silently through a tiny kitchen and break room with a couch and a fireplace to a classroom with only one small table, chairs on either side, and a clear plastic sheet spanning the meridian—obviously an artifact of covid. I sat down across from a hunched, bespectacled man, half expecting him to pick up a phone and start giving me legal advice. Instead, he quickly assessed my level of Spanish, which was probably a 1 if rounded up.

He introduced himself as Mynor and we fumbled through a halting conversation until he switched to English to explain to me the history of the school and what it would look like for us to spend five hours together five days a week. Mynor founded the school thirty-two years prior with his friend Freddy. He showed me a picture from the school’s first year of the two of them in the tiny kitchen drinking coffee. I looked through the doorway at the room, which looked the exact same, then back at Mynor, who did not. In the photo was a scrawny kid with coke bottle glasses and a full head of curly black hair, his friend Freddy a beanpole towering over him with the same do. (Their nicknames in town were still Colochoand Colochito or “Curly” and “Little Curly,” despite both being bald for over a decade now.) The senior Mynor observing me through the cellophane was wizened and tired looking. He told me I was one of only two students currently enrolled at the school, where they would usually have up to thirty and a commensurate number of teachers. I asked him why business was slow this year, and he speculated either covid or the political turmoil currently plaguing Guatemala: the new president-elect Bernardo Arévalo and his center-left party Semilla were being stymied in their accession to power by the country’s establishment-friendly attorney general Maria Porras. Protesting her defiance of popular will, citizens blockaded major highways throughout the country for nearly a month. Although peaceful and organized, the protests and subsequent headlines made many would-be tourists, already wary, even more skittish. Hence, Mynor and I sat alone in a room where every lull in conversation was a pregnant silence, unless broken by a speeding moped.

He asked me to take out my notebook and pencil, and I responded, “What notebook and pencil?” We were off to a great start. He suggested we go out to the shop to get my school supplies. Being the sole student of a teacher at a school with no particular curriculum, the boundaries and structure that usually define a classroom didn’t exist. This was not the first time I had shown up to a class empty-handed in my life, but it was the first time the teacher had simply turned addressing the problem into the lesson for the day. We walked to a little shopping mall, where I got the supplies as well as cash and a local SIM card with his help. He said he forgot his breakfast at home that morning and suggested we stop by his favorite food stall at the open-air market for a bite to eat. There we had a Guatemalan staple called mosh that is basically cream of wheat in a cup and miniature tamales of Mayan origin called chuchitos. We walked by a park in front of city hall where many massive, old trees had just been felled, deemed a public danger by the mayor. A frenzy of people chopped up the trunks and branches for firewood.

On the way back to Pop-Wuj, he tried to take me on a tour of his niece’s dental school but was turned away by the armed guard at the front door. As we walked away, he complained to me. “I grew up during the war! People shooting each other in the street every day. Now a security guard won’t even let me visit my niece at school. It’s ridiculous!”  These curmudgeonly musings were some of the most entertaining parts of my days with Mynor. Spending five hours one-on-one with anyone, but especially an old man, you start to become aware and—in my case—endeared to their rhythms. He was lactose-intolerant but loved mosh, which has milk in it; an hour or so after drinking it, he would become short-tempered before eventually excusing himself to the restroom and returning in better spirits. He had sciatica and would frequently wince and flinch walking on the uneven streets of Xela. He would brag about starting Pop-Wuj, his many friends in town, the free coffee he got at Panera Bread from the latino baristas when visiting his sister in the states. He loved volleyball and played every weekend and had climbed Tajumulco (the tallest mountain in Central America) 114 times.

Over the course of the week, our relationship began to remind me of one I developed with a Buddhist ex-monk from Thailand whom I spent a couple of days hitchhiking through Tasmania with. The ex-monk was nearly seventy and had spent ten years at a monastery, yet he boasted continuously about creating the fourth highest-rated show on Singaporean local television and showed me art for a slew of sci-fi novels he’d written that looked, to judge books by their covers, horrendous. He made mildly creepy comments to my friend (the one from my first blog post actually) that she tolerated because we were getting a free ride through the middle of nowhere. A fascinating character study in himself, he also dispelled whatever illusions I had held about wisdom and maturity necessarily coming with age and reflection. In the old man was still the boy, puerile and preening. It was oddly comforting.

Mynor instilled the same feeling. To him, we were peers. We cooked together and split the cost of meals. He complained about family members and friends and not having enough money and bragged about his brilliant nieces and sister and that he had been an engineer. I felt no anxiety speaking Spanish with him thanks to the dynamic he created, and by the last days of the week we spent together, English barely entered the conversation. I began to think in Spanish, albeit child-like thoughts. With Ludy and Rodrigo, I began to ask and understand questions and even be able to wade through conversation at a slow, plodding gait. I started venturing out to the market for street food when I was hungry and asking store clerks if they had items I would try to pronounce off google translate. Though I was still light years from fluency, in one important way I had eclipsed all other attempts to learn languages in the past: I was truly willing to make a fool of myself. I owe much of that development to Mynor and to Pop-Wuj, but also to Guatemalan culture, which is exceptionally patient with and kind toward gringos butchering Spanish.    

I was barely at the foothills of the mountain I intended to climb in learning Spanish when another peak presented itself. It was the Volcano Santa Maria, and my first hike with Quetzaltrekkers.