By Marco Villatoro

They had placed the girl on a cement bench just outside the hospital. Francisco and I arrived with a pine coffin, one he had hammered together that morning. In the past few weeks, he had been busy making coffins. Cholera had swept through the jungle towns of Guatemala, killing people by the hundreds. The hospital didn’t cure anybody. It was more a waiting room for the dying. They had run out of supplies. Families of the sick had to purchase their own bags of insulin at the town pharmacy and bring them to the hospital, which the nurses used to keep the victims hydrated.

The inside of the ramshackle clinic smelled of vomit and shit. The sick were laid out, one next to another, on beds, foldable cots, rugs on the hallway floors. The nurses couldn’t keep up with the cleaning. Once someone died, the orderlies carried the body outside to the waiting families, while more victims of the disease stumbled through the front door.

The dead girl on the bench had no family waiting for her. Francisco and I, church workers, stood in their stead. Two orderlies had carried her out on a stained stretcher. She was half-wrapped in a bed sheet. One orderly apologized for leaving her on the bench but said there was no room inside to keep the cadavers.

The slab she lay on, the unpolished, concrete, backless bench, was cool to the touch. She was still warm. She was dressed in the indigenous clothing of her people: a dark red blouse with tiny embroidered flowers around the neckline, and a wrap-around skirt woven out of the green, blue, and white threads of the Q’eqchi’, one of the two dozen distinct Mayan tribes spread throughout Guatemala. Her clothes were not stained. I figured the cholera had emptied her out in her home, and someone had dressed her before bringing her to the hospital. The fever had finally done her in. The shell it left behind was still beautiful. She was eleven, maybe twelve years old. Mother’s milk in her first years had stitched in her some length of bone, but poverty had stretched her skin over her cheeks like a tight brown tarp over scaffolding. But she was lovely. She would have bloomed into someone a village talks about.

My wife Michelle and I had lived in Guatemala for about three years when the cholera broke out. We were missioners of the Catholic Church. We had worked with both Mayan and mestizo (“mixed”) people who were as concerned about land rights and cooperatives as they were baptisms and holy days. All of our organizing work shifted once the illness came to our small jungle town of Poptún.

Francisco and I placed the coffin beside the bench. An orderly ran out of the hospital. He apologized as he worked the stained bed sheet out from under her body. “We’ve only got so many,” he said, as he pulled the sheet’s edge out from under her hip. He hurried back in.

Francisco had built the coffin. I put her in it. It wasn’t my first dead body, though the others had all been babies, most who died before their first birthday from worms, amoebic dysentery, or some strange fever that had its roots in poverty. Not that I was inured to handling dead babies; but it had become one of my religious tasks, a service to the families of the dead.

This girl was the oldest corpse I had ever touched. I dug my left arm under her shoulder blades and slipped my right hand under her thighs. She was warm and felt alive for it, but her one loose arm fell and dropped to her side. Death makes us heavy. I had to hoist her from the bench and jostle her slightly to balance her weight in my arms. Her head slipped off my shoulder and fell, pulling tight the dark brown skin of her neck. I adjusted her again to take her out of that awful position. Her head plopped back into the curve of my shoulder and neck, like a child who’s asleep. Her face was right next to mine, her lips close to my ear. The movement unkinked her throat. Her mouth was open. Trapped air in her lungs slipped one last time over her larynx. She whispered Aaaahhhh to me.

The mother arrived with two clear plastic sacks of insulin that she had bought at the pharmacy. She was young, maybe mid-twenties, and dressed just like her daughter. She didn’t speak Spanish. She stared at her child in my arms and yelled in Q’eqchi’ then rushed to my side and spoke indigenous words that I will never know. Her body rattled. She dropped the insulin bags. I apologized over and again in Spanish. She didn’t understand. I crouched and lay the girl in the coffin, straightened her head, which kept rolling to one side, crossed her arms over her chest, pressed her legs together and tucked her dress under her calves, like a clumsy mortician. Her mother knelt next to the coffin and caressed the girl’s face. Francisco gave her a moment then gently spoke to her in Q’eqchi’ while pulling her away. When we placed the lid and Francisco started hammering, the young woman raised her head and cried out as though hating the heavens.

Michelle was working in another part of town. I sent word to her that we needed our Jeep to take the child and mother back to their village. She arrived ten minutes later, parked close to the coffin and opened the back hatch. She comforted the mother, put her arm around her and let the woman weep and yell, a mix of mourning and rage. Francisco and I loaded the coffin into the Jeep, but it didn’t fit. We had to leave the hatch open. That was a worry. The pock-marked, stony roads could chuck the casket out of the Jeep.

Francisco left to check on the sick inside the hospital, I suppose to take a preliminary body count. I opened the passenger door for the mother. She hesitated, looked at me as though deciding whether or not to trust me, then looked at the vehicle and its interior, all of it strange to her. But she was too broken to argue, and climbed in. In between sobs she said the name of her village, a hamlet near a village called Machaquilá. Michelle drove us out of town.

Nearly a third of the coffin stuck out through the open hatch. The roads made it impossible for Michelle to drive smoothly. I had to press my forearms against the head of the box to keep it from falling out. Dust bellowed in and left a thin sheet on the coffin’s lid. All those preparative acts of faith—the crossing of the arms over her chest, straightening her head—had been a waste of time. She rolled inside. Her forehead bashed against the pinewood walls.

The hamlet was far beyond Machaquilá. I don’t remember its name. We crawled over the jungle road for nearly an hour before reaching it. Night came on. We crested a hill. The coffin slipped a few inches. I hugged it. The headlights slashed across the hamlet’s thatched roofs and adobe walls. A tiny, humble village of a humble people. That’s what we liked to say about the Mayans, we from outside their world, religious foreigners of a five-hundred-year old history of religious foreigners to whom the Mayans lowered their heads in humility.

Not now. Not this village. They stepped out of the flickering shadows of their adobe homes, away from the few candles that burned inside the huts, and into the violent slash of the headlights. Women and girls were dressed in the same clothes as the dead child. The men wore western clothing—old, button-down shirts, jeans, some with baseball hats on. One wore a faded Michael Jackson t-shirt. They didn’t cower or look confused by the Jeep, having seen vehicles before in town and on the roads. Most of the women, isolated in the village most all their days, stared at us. Some backed away. But they all knew why we were here.

A woman saw the coffin sticking out of the back and yelled something in Q’eqchi’. One young man walked out from behind a hut, his lithe arms to his sides like a man with invisible holsters on his hips. I wondered why he hadn’t been at the hospital. He had his work machete still tied to his belt-rope. He had probably worked all day in a rich man’s fields, clearing the land for cattle.

Michelle parked. The mourning filled the air. I had never heard an entire village cry, not in this country, where children dropped dead every day. The father stared at me. I had never seen an angry Mayan man.

His wife, sitting in the passenger seat, cried out his name, “¡Cux! ¡Ay, Cux!” She was trapped inside a metal box, that’s what the Jeep was to her, a thing she had rarely seen before, much less ridden in. The car door made no sense. She hurled herself against the vault of steel and vinyl. She beat her palms against the glass and screamed. Michelle reached over and grabbed the handle. The mother tumbled out and crawled. The headlights caught her: the earth puffed with the rub of her knees and palms. Her husband Cux picked her up, held her, while others gathered around them. An old man and a teenage boy hauled the box out from under me. They didn’t look at me, as though I wasn’t there. No hello. No customary, Mayan-humble greeting. They pulled her out and didn’t close the hatch and carried her into the black jungle where the headlights couldn’t reach. The entire hamlet followed, each of them disappearing into the night, leaving us alone before their empty adobe homes. Michelle turned and looked at me. We sat there for a long moment. She reached over and shut the passenger door. I slammed the hatch closed and twisted the lock, as though all of Guatemala outside the Jeep were too much. I needed this vehicle and its hermetic seal of my own country.

*****

That day still grips me, a first-world Salvadoran-American who, for a few years, had dwelt among the poor. Michelle and I had seen, during our time in Central America, what the statisticians refer to as a high infant mortality rate. But the stats show only numbers. They cannot reveal what that rate does to a people, how it forms within them certain beliefs, superstitions, and tricks of psychological survival. Many parents we worked with did not name their babies until the child’s first birthday. To do so meant becoming too attached. Twelve months of survival put meat on a baby’s bones, especially if the child had been breast fed. A first birthday meant a name and a sigh of relief. Not naming the baby was a psychological ruse, Don’t get too close. It never worked.

The Mayan girl wasn’t the first person I’d put in a coffin. Michelle and I had participated in babies’ funerals before. I remember one nameless child, perhaps nine months old, who I put into a rush-job of a box, its corners uneven, with a few bent nails on the edges. The small family stood around me. The mother, between sobs, cursed herself for rousing the wrath of God. She confessed to having thought about what name to give the child in recent weeks. She couldn’t help herself. She had considered names, ones that she had never uttered, just thought. But God, she cried out, had heard her thoughts and was punishing her for them. Her silent, motherly considerations had been a form of pride, or independence, things that God won’t put up with. Having the babe die was the Lord’s way of putting things straight. She said all this while I placed the baby in the box, atop a folded blanket. Right then, a half-inch, gray, curling worm crawled out of the baby’s nostril. The mother screamed. I picked the worm off his cheek, tossed it next to my boot and crushed it.

They too were Mayan but had lived in Poptún for years and were cut off from whatever village they had left behind, like many who hoped to find a better life in a town that, compared to the hamlets, was a city of opportunities. Isolated Mayans. That is a cultural, indigenous oxymoron. That day, no community walked to the cemetery, only the mother and father, two surviving children, Michelle and me. We buried the nameless child. They asked me to say a prayer. I, atheist, asked God to bless the innocent soul of. . .and I had to stop. No name. The mother, who now had anger in her wet, swollen eyes, dared to evoke God’s wrath once again, “I meant to name him Javier, after his grandfather.” I. Her taking the sole ownership of naming the child surprised me. It felt like a threat: anyone who dared to shush her for saying the name, or who came down from heaven to give her a smack across the face, would have to deal with her newborn wrath.

The twelve-year-old Mayan girl outside the hospital had a name, though we never learned what it was. She’d had a name for eleven years. To be so old meant that she was maciza, strong, durable, one of those people whose physiology could overcome most illnesses. But this was cholera, a bacterium that lives naturally in coastal waters, and infects fish and seafood, which people eat. It is highly contagious and can sweep through a town within a few days. Poor sanitation, contaminated water, inadequate hygiene—all the things of poverty—spread it. It is a violent way to die: projectile vomiting, uncontrollable diarrhea, spiked fevers, delusions. A victim loses a liter of fluids an hour. The veins desiccate. Blood thickens. The body becomes an internal desert. Shriveled skin, sunken eyes, low blood pressure, irregular heartbeat. The muscles cramp to the point of ripping off the bones. Shock can bring on death within minutes.

It can kill anybody, even first-world folk, but we have a far better chance of survival. Both Michelle and I had our bouts of sickness in Central America, especially stomach illnesses that had us running to the latrine every few minutes. I’ve had worms crawl up my throat. But we could drive to Guatemala City, where we had access to better health care. We had eaten well all our lives, as had our ancestors. We were not poor. It’s not simply the cholera that kills. Poverty sets the scene, generations that have never had enough to eat, who work the hardest jobs without having enough nutrients. The life expectancy in Guatemala is between forty-five and fifty. Around twenty-five babies out of a thousand die (in the U.S., it hovers around six per thousand).

We studied these statistics in college classes. Those numbers fed into our fledgling, romantic notions regarding working among the poor and oppressed. But they didn’t prepare us, at all. We were both twenty-three and had been married a year when we first moved to Central America. Two young fools in love, ready to save the world.

We didn’t save anybody. We simply joined in, as much as outsiders can, the daily lives of a people who never asked us to live with them. Some were thankful for our presence and our participation in their struggles. Most, I suspect, were indifferent to two more gringos who were passing through. Others, such as the girl’s hamlet, couldn’t stand the sight of us. I don’t blame them. Sometimes I think we weren’t dwelling among the poor but stumbling through their lives. I stumbled into the job of handling the dead. I wanted to do it, a macabre notion to some. Not to me. The girl on the bench rises in me like a ritual. I have loved her for decades and can’t explain why. Perhaps because she wasn’t a statistic—No. It was because she sighed. Sometimes I still feel it on my left cheek, whenever someone living is so rude to kiss me there and wipe her breath from me.

Marcos Villatoro is the author of several novels, two collections of poetry and a memoir. His Romilia Chacón crime fiction series has been translated into Japanese, German, Portuguese and Russian. He has written and performed essays on PBS and NPR. His latest work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. After living several years in Central America, Marcos moved to Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at Mount. St. Mary’s University.