The House of Doña Gilberta

La Esperanza, Huehuetenango, Guatemala

Meet the house of Gilberta:

 

 

 

Matriarch Doña Gilberta: (Bottom right) A taciturn and pious widow in her mid fifties.  She speaks little and gently but has a spine of iron.  When her husband died years ago there was no man to take over the job of milling, washing, raking, sacking and hauling the coffee harvest.  So she did it herself.  Now she presides with a passive power over the mid-sized and prosperous finca, employing more than fifty people in harvest time.

Baby Belen: (top left) Baby Belen was terrified by me from the outset.  About the cutest toddler I have ever seen, she would scamper around blissfully until catching sight of me-- a large, slightly unkempt blond man with a chunk of metal embedded over his eye. She would instantly wail and run for the cover of her mothers' skirts.  It became my mission to win over Baby Belen, a goal not made easier by the favorite game among the other kids, which was "make Baby Belen cry by carrying her over to the Gringo."  But after a long time she would finally sit down by me and babble happily in an invented language.  At this point my work was done; I left soon after.

Alvin, Angelica, and Orida: (The two kids under my picture and the cross-armed sombrero girl) The pot-bellied children of the distant relatives who lived seasonally in a cramped concrete room across the patio. They came for the coffee harvest and it was probably the best period of the year for the three, who got to share the toys and some of the special treats of the rest of the kids.  But not enough-- Oreida was always desperate for a hug from me, Angelica barely talked at age four, and Alvin was very small for his age. 

Madaí: (Third down on far left) The youngest of Doña Gilberta´s five grown daughters.  Shy, she hid in other rooms until the second day of my stay.  She was crippled by polio at an early age and now walks with a lurching painful gait. 

Muscle Man Mariseldo:  Mariseldo is an in-law... well actually technically he is an in-law candidate.  You see, there had been many suitors for Madaí.  Through the last testament of her father the house was left to her and anyone who married her would probably get a good share of the coffee profits as well.  Suitor after suitor was rejected by her mother and four older sisters, who recognized that the suitors just wanted Madaí's money and so tried to protect her from a life of misery married to potentially abusive men.  Mariseldo, from a poorer but not impoverished family, fell in love with her at church youth group, and she loved him.  But she was trapped by her older sisters.  They had experience and did not believe in true love.  But Mario swept in with twenty glistening stallions and carried her off to live on his estate forever and ever.  Well, not exactly, but she did leave to live with him, after which her sisters consented to a sort of trial for Mario.  So they live together in the house of Gilberta, and Mario works hard on the finca to prove his earnestness so that permission may be granted to marry.

I spent most of my time working with Mariseldo in the coffee harvest.  Gigantic bins above the house were full of the plump red berries brought from the workers from the shady groves of coffee trees climbing the steep hillsides.  We ran the coffee through a machine that takes off the red fruit and leaves the white bean in a long trough flowing with water.  The better beans are dense and sink while those of lesser quality float and are siphoned off.  But the trough remains deep with white, lustrous, well formed beans that we shove out into a draining mound.  If the weather is right we then spread them out on the broad patios and terraces carved into the hillside where steam lifts off of them in the equatorial sun.  For days our work is raking out the coffee, sacking it and trading it for half dry coffee in storage, and piling it up again to tarp for the nightly dew.

Sometimes it would threaten to rain and all of us– men, women and children– would rush in a mayhem of rakes, shovels, brooms and dustpans to gather and cover the coffee before days of work were ruined by the rain.  One time the rain arrived at the same time as the shoe vendor that came to sell to the women.

 "It´s going to rain," yelled Mariseldo at the cluster of women ooing and ahing at sandals and flats and high heels.  While usually an announcement that takes precedence over everything, there was no response this time.  Mariseldo and I were huffing and puffing from our hustle to gather all of the coffee. A drop fell.

"Hey ladies! Look at us here, you´ve got us dancing!  A little help!"

Madai and her sisters clustered around a glittering pair of red high heels. The rain began to fall harder.  The women scrambled to protect the shoes with a plastic bag.

"Uh, are you going to help us or not?"

But his pleas fell on deaf ears and I said, "I think this is one we're not going to win," and Mariseldo and I continued sweating and dashing around the plaza to save precious days of work.

There came moments in the hottest afternoon sun when Mariseldo would stoop to one knee and scoop up a handful of parching beans in his palm and grind off the small husk with his other hand.  He would put one in his mouth, and with a far away look as if he was listening for the distant rumors of movement in the earth´s crust, he would slowly chew it.  Then he would drop the beans which rattle like spilled Skittles and declare the coffee ready to sack.  We would fill bag after fiberglass bag and sling them onto our backs, doing our best to act like they weighed nothing although they really weighed over a hundred pounds.  We would lug them to a big warehouse up the hill where it was sold. The warehouse had a monumental Starbucks logo painted on the cinder-block wall, and stood above the trashy dirt square of the village and the tin-and-stick huts of the pickers.

When we weren´t working the coffee, the main mission of Gilberta and her daughters was to make me so fat that I couldn´t possibly walk away from the finca if I had wanted too.  On the second day they killed the old red rooster and made a the traditional dish of Ki Kik for me.  Breakfast was sometimes hot dogs and eggs slathered in mayonnaise, of course with bottomless tortillas.  One of the daughters had worked as a manager in a McDonalds in the states and as a very special treat they got patties and condiments and fried up some hamburgers MacDonalds style... I´m Lovin´It.  But the chief of all delicacies was cow hoof soup, served one day for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Recall to mind that hooves were used in the olden days to make glue, and you´ll have a pretty good idea of how the soup went down (but never went far enough down).

The  house of Gilberta.

While I arrived only intending to stay the night, the combination of three hot meals a day (of whatever quality), the opportunity to work, the offers to do my laundry, the joy of little kids running around, the friendship of Mariseldo, and the motherly affection of Gilberta and her daughters was enough to make me stick around for almost two weeks.  But after that time I was starting once more to feel the pull of the road, and decided to leave the next Monday, which happened to be my birthday.  I planned to get up in the predawn and leave quietly, having said my thanks and goodbyes (and delivering a goodbye poem) the night before.  I set my alarm for 5:00 AM.

But at 4:30 AM I was started awake by ranchero music booming from a stereo outside my door.  "Happy birthday to you" the singer wailed in a very bad accent.  I staggered out of bed bleary-eyed and opened the door to Gilberta, Mariseldo, and half the family awkwardly grinning at me as the birthday music blasted on.  Mariseldo stepped forward and presented me a cap they had gone and bought for me.  Doña Gilberta loaded me down with treats and food and medicine for the small cold I had.  One of the little ones stepped forward and gave me her little plastic ring. 

I had intended to go through Guatemala with less and less in my backpack as time went on, always leaving things behind.  As I stepped out of the gates of Gillberta's house with a pack laden with their gifts, I realized that might be harder than I thought.