Читать книгу I, Rigoberta Menchu - Rigoberta Menchu - Страница 12

‘When I went to the city for the first time, I saw it as a monster, something alien, different.’

—Rigoberta Menchú

I felt grown-up for the first time when at the age of seven I got lost in the mountains. That was the time when we came back from the finca to the Altiplano and my brothers and sisters and I all fell ill. We’d got back from the finca in an awful state. When our money ran out, my father said if we went back down to the finca with sick children, he’d be left alone to bury his children there. So he said: ‘The only thing to do is to go up into the mountains and collect mimbre.’ My elder brothers and sisters, my father and myself. In fact, we children often went up to collect mimbre when we had some spare time because it grows near where we live. My father also went whenever he had a moment, or a week without other work. So we all went to cut mimbre. In a week, between the lot of us, we collected a quintal (a hundredweight) of mimbre. Then it was dried. We pulled it along with ropes and collected it together. Some of us stripped the bark off and some rolled it up. We’d gone further up into the mountains that time and up there if you’re not careful you can get lost. We had a dog with us as a guide. He used to look out for animals and knew the way. That dog used to guide us everywhere in the mountains. Anyway, the blessed dog saw we didn’t have any food; we’d finished the food because we’d been in the mountains for over eight days. The poor dog was hungry, so one night he went back home. He’d gone before we realized it. We’d no idea where we were. It was the rainy season: June or July, if I remember right. So there were lots of black clouds and we couldn’t get our bearings. My father was very worried because if we stayed in the mountains, we could be attacked by wild animals. How were we going to find the path? So we started walking and walking, on and on. We didn’t know if we were going further into the mountains or out of them. We couldn’t hear the noise of animals from any of the villages. We couldn’t hear any dogs barking. Usually when dogs bark in any village, the sound carries a long way in the mountains. But there was nothing. And then, the others were so busy looking for the path, they forgot about me and I was left behind. I didn’t know which way to go and my father was almost in tears looking for me. In the mountains, it’s the one furthest ahead who decides the path: he opens the way for the others to pass, and that’s how we were going along, in a line. Since I was the smallest, and my brothers and sisters were so tired and annoyed from having to walk so much, they didn’t want to be bothered with me and so I dropped back and got further and further behind. I started shouting but no-one heard me, they just went walking on. I had to follow the trail they made, but there came a moment when I just couldn’t see the way they had gone. My father turned back to find me but he couldn’t find the same path back and so they lost me for seven hours. I was crying, shouting, but no-one heard me. That was the first time I felt what it must be like to be an adult; I felt I had to be more responsible, more like my brothers and sisters. When they found me, they all started telling me off, that it was my fault, that I didn’t even know how to walk. So we were walking like this for three days without anything to eat. We cut bojónes and ate the tender part of the plant, as if we were chewing meat. We were getting weaker and weaker, and still had to carry all the mimbre we’d cut. And that’s when that damned dog–perhaps because he realized we were near the village–came to meet us. He came to meet us so happily, but we could have killed him, we were so angry. My mother and all our neighbours were very worried. They didn’t know what to do because they knew that if we got lost in the mountains, a lot of them would have to go out and look for us. Of course, with the dog they would have found us, but they were still waiting in the village, all very angry. It’s something I’ve never forgotten, because of the anger I felt at the way we live. After all the work we put into cutting the mimbre, we couldn’t carry it all, especially when it rained. We had to throw away some of what we’d cut and got back to the village with only some of it. In those days, in the capital they used to pay us fifty quetzals for each quintal of mimbre. So for five or six members of the family working the whole week, all day long, up the mountains, we got fifty quetzals the quintal. On top of that we had to meet all the costs of transport from our village to the town and from the town to the capital.

So we set off for the capital. My father loved me very much and I was very fond of him, so it always fell to me to travel with him and share his suffering with him. We arrived in the capital. In those days it made me really angry that I couldn’t understand what my father and the man he wanted to sell the mimbre to were saying to each other. The man was telling him he had no money and wouldn’t buy the mimbre. He was a carpenter, an old man. In Guatemala they still use mimbre for furniture and it’s usually the carpenters, especially carpenters in Antigua,^* who buy the mimbre to make their special kind of open wickerwork. So we went there and I could see the gestures the men were making to my father but I didn’t know what they were saying. Afterwards my father was very worried because they wouldn’t buy the mimbre. We went looking for other buyers but for us the capital is like another world: one we don’t know, because we live in the mountains. In the end, my father had to leave the mimbre with the first man who only paid him half what he asked. And we went back home with only 25 quetzals. After so much work! We returned home and it was awful because we found my mother had been really counting on our work and thought we were coming back with a lot of money. And we had hardly any. My poor mother nearly died of anger and rage at the fact that after all our suffering we hadn’t any money. She felt sorry for all us children because she knew the hunger and cold we’d gone through collecting the mimbre. In the end, we were forced to go back to the finca to get a bit of money together.

Sometimes we took mountain mushrooms and herbs from the fields to town as well. We sold them and came back with a few centavos in our hands. But for us children, our work was mainly collecting mimbre.

My first visit to the capital was a big step in my life. I was my father’s favourite; I went with him everywhere. It was the first time that I’d been in a truck with windows. We were used to travelling in closed lorries, as if we were in an oven with all the people and animals. It was the first time I’d ever sat on a seat in a truck–and one with windows. I didn’t want to get in at first, because it wasn’t like the trucks I knew. So my father said: ‘I’ll hold you tight, don’t worry. We’ll get there all right.’ He gave me a sweet so I’d get into the truck. And so we set off. I remember the truck starting up…I hardly slept at all looking at the countryside we passed through from Uspantán to the capital. It impressed me very much, it was wonderful to see everything along the way–towns, mountains, houses very different from our own. It made me very happy, but also a bit frightened because I thought, as the truck pulled away, that we would go over into the ravine. When we reached the capital, I saw cars for the first time. I thought they were animals just going along. It didn’t occur to me they were cars. I asked my father: ‘What are they?’ ‘They’re the same as the big lorries, only smaller,’ he said, ‘and they’re for people who only want to carry small loads.’ ‘What we go to the finca in, what the workers ride in, is a lorry for our people,’ my father said, ‘and what we’re travelling in now is what people go to the capital in, just to travel, not to work. And those little ones, they belong to rich people to use just for themselves. They don’t have things to carry.’ When I first saw them, I thought that the cars would all bump into each other, but they hardly did at all. When one stopped, they all had to stop. It was all so amazing for me. I remember when I got home telling my brothers and sisters what the cars were like, how they were driven, and that they didn’t crash into one another or kill anyone, and a whole load of other things as well. I had a long tale to tell at home.

My father told me: ‘When you’re old enough, you must travel, you must go around the country. You know that you must do what I do.’ That’s what he used to say. After we sold the mimbre and got so little money for it, my father went to the office of the INTA.^* My father went to the Agrarian Transformation offices, as they call it, for twenty-two years. When people have problems with land, when they’re sold land, or when the government wants to settle peasants in other areas, they go through the Agrarian Transformation Institute. They give you a certain day on which you have to turn up and anyone who doesn’t keep his appointment is punished, or fined. My father explained to me that there was a prison for the poor people and if you didn’t go to that office, that’s where they put you. I didn’t even know what a prison was. My father said the people there didn’t let you in unless you showed them respect. ‘When you go in, keep still, don’t speak,’ he said. We went in and I saw my father take off his hat and give a sort of bow to the man sitting at a big table writing something on a typewriter. That’s something else I used to dream about–that typewriter. How was it possible for paper to come out with things written on it? I didn’t know what to think of all those people but I thought they were important people because my father took off his hat and spoke to them in a very humble way. Then we went home, but after that, every time my father went to the capital I wanted to go with him, but he didn’t have the money to take me. There were so many interesting things, but also things that I didn’t want to see, that frightened me. I thought, ‘If I were alone, I’d die here.’ The city for me was a monster, something alien, different. ‘Those houses, those people,’ I thought, ‘this is the world of the ladinos.’ For me it was the world of the ladinos. We were different. Afterwards I went to the capital a lot, and it became more familiar. But my first impression stayed with me. I remember that my father and I were very hungry. We didn’t have anything to eat. My father said: ‘We’re not going to eat because we’ve got to go here and go there.’ We went all over the city. But I was very hungry and asked my father: ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but we’ve still got so many things to do.’ And instead of food, he bought me a sweet to suck. That impression stayed with me as well–that every time my father went to the capital I thought of him going hungry. I’d never had an ice cream, a nieve as they call it, so my father once bought me one for five centavos. I ate it and it tasted very good.

We spent three days in the capital. My father had a friend there who was from our region, he used to be a neighbour of ours. But he’d started buying and selling things and moved to the capital. He had a house on the outskirts of the city, a tiny shack made of cardboard. We stayed with him. I was very sad to see the man’s children, because before they moved away we used to play together in the countryside and go to the river. I cried when I saw them because they asked me: ‘How are the animals, the rivers; how are the plants?’ They wanted to go back and I was very sad for them. They hardly had any food to eat in the house. They couldn’t give us anything to eat because they had hardly any food. Anyway, that’s where we stayed.