A one-legged Rastafarian joined me for breakfast, ordered coffee and a ham sandwich at my expense. These things happen on southern shores and neither of us seemed to mind. Flies rode the ceiling fan above our heads like a merry-go-round, peering down at us with each turn of the blade. Heat filled our noses like spilled turpentine and from his mouth the raw smell of an old dumbwaiter.
Outside, children's voices beneath a steady drone of darting tanagers.

We struggled through the usual chin-chin -- cuantos años, de donde, te gusta. The pages from high school Spanish books tumbled audibly through my head. How polite did I have to be...excuse me sir, but I can find no rasta-men in my book, and to be quite honest it's throwing me off? I machine-gunned y usted, y usted, y usted back at him, nodding at his replies as if I had a tic.
It was the type of restaurant where the help drifts off just when you need them most. In the corner a small girl with plaited hair had readied conch shells across a card-table as if at any moment a cruise liner would pull into port and double the town's population. They were arrayed before her, belly-up above her tattered dress. She was humming a tune. So sad really; I might have been the only tourist to pass through Lívingston since Sunday and I wasn't about to buy one of her shells. Her head lolled against a blue planked wall; paint cracked and faded like dried toothpaste. Stares are seldom bashful. But even when she wasn't looking, she was listening. I could feel it.

Sweat dripped audibly onto the table cloth.

The food came just in time and I fell into blessed concentration, savoring the golden yokes of scrawny chickens. Out of the corner of my eye I watched a bland-faced woman who'd come to lean against the sill. Propping herself up on t-square elbows she gazed down the hill, the slope, towards the sea, her head wrapped in a batik scarf, vibrant enough to blot her features from my memory. I couldn't decide whether she sat still because of the heat or the other way around. The breeze moved when she moved, like a rustling skirt; but not enough to dispel the haze from the river or stir up the dust in the street. Sand in the coffee would be almost welcome now.

I was in an open air restaurant along the town's main drag: a simple row of cement buildings, Caribbean in style and vibrancy of color, rising up the nubbin of a small peninsula on the Bay of Honduras. The large shuttered windows hinged inward and clipped to the ceiling. I, however, could see neither ocean nor river. The police-station across the way was a thinly veiled advertisement for Coke and Orange Fanta, reminding one of the great push American companies make from time to time in an effort to forge new markets. They hadn't been around for some time.

"Leg itches," stated the Rastafarian in perfect English.

"I'm sorry, what?" I struggled with the translation before realizing I didn't need to. Readjusted. Blinking..."--"...What did he say? My leg? He'd pointed beneath the table, to his stump...or below. Then, as dim-witted as a child, I stated the obvious…you speak Engl…
"New York," he replied licking mayonnaise from the edge of his beard as if that said it all. Turning a lazy eye to the window his face crinkled into a half smile as he folded a piece of iceberg lettuce into a suitcase of white teeth. The woman at the sill heard the crunch and turned her head. Their eyes met complicitously. "When you're finished with that," she said, "I want you home." Without warning the pink-conch girl sprung from her seat, shoveled the shells noisily into a yard of fish netting and quit the restaurant, the quick sound of her flip-flops snapped about my ankles. The woman laughed and left as well, moving off towards the water at a somnambulist's gait. The low throb of the fan gave a surreal audibility to her movements. A caress to her thick-bottomed walk.

In many ways, if one is inclined to such thoughts (and the comparisons are hard to avoid), Lívingston was like any other small town, isolated and provincial, with happiness and misery locked into the same slow step. But it is nothing like the rest of Guatemala. Even it's name suggests the foreign; perhaps a lost part of Belize, the furthest outpost finding itself on the wrong side of a border dispute. As a blip on the map it's only there because of its completely un-Spanish, and therefore exotic, name.

The guidebook had little to say on this matter, except there were no roads in or out of town: "Take a launch from Puerto Barrios or down the Río Dulce from Lago Izabal," and like the Garifuna towns elsewhere the population keeps largely to themselves having drifted ashore from St. Vincent over a century ago. More Caribbean than Latino, these settlements today dot the eastern skrimp of the Americas. And although they are by law bounded to various Central American countries, they are for all practical purposes not a part of them. Still, that did little to explain the sense of promise never fulfilled.

The main road runs perpendicular to the river, paved to the top of the hill only. From there the one-story view of storefront or restaurant or church slipping down towards the sea. Poor as dirt this scene, but unhampered, except perhaps by the desire to take it all in at once: an occasional red-tiled or rusty tin roof, beaten and faded and corroded by sea salt, a tiny rash on the epidermis of the Yucatán. Yet the whole peninsula is racked with fever, every structure holding an open invitation to what breeze can be found.
The Rastafarian and I passed small talk and a cool silence back and forth like sugar for the coffee until he emptied a bag of marijuana onto the table from the hollowed end of his crutch. I sipped my coffee and relaxed. Strange how that works.

"Was that woman your wife?"

"No."

"But she wanted you home."

"Not my home."

"¿Y usted, adonde vives..."

"Listen, little man," he said, emptying the tobacco from a Lucky Strike into a second pile. "Don't try so hard." He pinched off the filter and flicked it into the sunshine. "You've been about town for two days now. You came from Puerto Barrios. You eat in the same restaurant. You've taken a few photos, even talked to myth-making abuelas without knowing what they are capable of. There isn't two days worth of things to see here and you haven't seen half of them. Hell, you don't even speak Spanish, at least not very well." Little by little he refilled the hollowed paper after twirling one end closed.

"So I'm curious, why are you here? Why Guatemala?"

"I don't know," I replied with quick little shakes of my head. Perhaps I should ask about these abuelas and move on with my day, I thought, shoveling beaned rice onto my fork with a finger. It fell on the way to my mouth. "My parents have been," I added, "said it's beautiful." I couldn't stop staring at his hands. He looked at me.

With difficulty he crossed leg over stump. "Did they visit us?"

"No."

"Then why," he paused to lick a spot were the paper had torn, "...then why are you here?"

"I don't know," I repeated, trying my fork again. The world around me sank in just a little then, a depression on the side of my protective bubble, the one that read: caucásico, dinero, educado...khaki pants, the book, I'd invited him to sit down, the presumption was easy if not all together true. Yet despite all this it seemed correct somehow, to be here, in Guatemala. I felt expected.

He'd finished fiddling with his dope. Two joints lay drying in a swath of sun like white tamales. Papers sutured length-wise with brown coffee stains from his tongue. The checkered table cloth was intricately patterned with detritus of ham sandwich and shake like a child's game. Slowly he began wiping the table with the side of his hand, gathering piles, but mindful of his weed. He had a big hand, nails paired tight, fingers thick, but ashy. His palm reminded me of a rumpled bed.

For a minute the sun lapped at the edge of my coffee cup, hesitant, then spilled over the side as I raised it to my face. I used two hands. I soaked in that smell.

"May I," he asked nodding to the water-stained copy of García Márquez that I'd been reading. His words slid together. Lívingston was waking up. Two women passed the window, yellow plaid dresses absurdly pressed, with sun-bonnets kitched back so as not to hide the face God gave them. They dressed like mannequins in a church-shop window. And the noise they made with their laughing! As if this language were a drug, "the nepenthe of Garifuna" I wrote in my notebook later -- it sounded like somebody's dissertation topic. They rounded the corner and were out of sight.

Across the table the rasta smirked as if he knew Márquez personally, then turned to the back to read the reviews. I'd bought it specifically for the trip. Livingston, or Puerto Barrios anyway, was also tied to the history of the banana plantations.

"If you're going to the falls today," he said without looking up, "watch your back."

I didn't reply. It turns out I was going to the falls: Las Siete Altares, The Seven Altars. "It's a long walk north (approx. 8 k.) but worth every step." The guidebook also said that in recent years it was a place where frequent robberies occurred. Headlines reading "estrangero encontra la ultima fina," ran through my head. The colors outside the restaurant warbled in the sun, the overt green of the trees, a dry road the hue of my skin, the cola-red of the advertisements. A sign pointed to the undertaker's house behind the church. Dust clung wantonly to each.

He handed the book back and fixed me with a long stare as if he knew I would meet her and could smell the coming day on my skin. God! what was that for? I wondered, leave me there tugging on the book like that. I scratched behind my ear. The continuous rubbing of his stump was an uncomfortable sight. I kicked back a lukewarm shot of coffee and stood to leave. It occurs to me now that lukewarm is as cold as things got there in Lívingston.

"La cuenta," I signed to the cook-cum-waiter, scribbling in the air with one hand and digging for money with the other. The man who'd joined me for breakfast sat scratching his beard. He swirled the coffee around the inside of his cup. His eyes were calm, lids half closed. He looked from me to the tamales he'd rolled and left in the sun. Two fucking joints and a rasta who'd had a mishap.

"Well, nice to meet you," I said slipping ten quetzales beneath the sugar bowl. The same sided hand-shake seemed fitting.

At the door I turned back: "Señor, what myth-making abuelas?"

"It's nothing," he said slowly lighting a splif, "old women just like to talk."

Paint from the door frame came away with my hand as I stepped into the street.

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THERE'S A myth in Lívingston as old as the town itself that comes pea in a pod with such paroxysms as the wishing well or fallen eyelashes. Broken headlights on oncoming vehicles, etcetera. How strangely universal this sentiment seems to be, the desire to wish. Only here in Livingston, where two motor bikes linked arm to arm is the closest approximation to a car that they've seen in town, here the device relates to a certain kind of water fowl with an overtly loose esophagus. But not just one. Three. Three pelicans flying in row and you get to make a wish, done by kissing pinched finger tips. An Italian "Bravo!" You couldn't buy a better sign of good luck. One of the old women had told me this.

I muddle along the dark coast for nearly an hour, feeling the heat meld the backpack between my shoulders and keeping an eye out for los bandidos. And all the while I'm walking, eating up sand and the lonely coast, oblivious to the tight gullet skreens of the gulls, when I realize that I've stopped next to squared patch of land with a sparse row of hibiscus abloom with butterflies. There was hardly such in town, but here along the coast, in the center of this plot, sits a two-story house. To the right flows a green-brown river, its mouth fanning open to drink from the sea. It wends out of the rain forest, swallowing paths and dry sand beaches -- my path and dry sand beach. The far side is perhaps twenty meters across: too far to jump and no telling what I'd find in the muck if I swam. I thought of bushwhacking up-stream to see if it narrowed, but the idea was not appealing.

Not only is the house distinguished for its locale, but it is built up on legs, like a child on tip-toe peering out over wood and wire fence to check the time by the sea. The lazily manicured lawn is perfect for nap taking in the sun. Palms and pineapple bushes are scattered like bird seed, staged against the backdrop of the Yucatán. Smoke trails from the window of a cement block hutch adjacent to the house but closer to the green-brown river water. A clothes line links hut to house and somebody's linen is snapping lazily in the breeze. Upriver, two squirrel monkeys are washing nuts from thin bouncing branches, or pretending to, as first one then the other glances my way.

I'm thinking about how to cross the river, about who lives in the hut and in the house; wondering what the green-brown water would do to my Nikon, or the crocodiles to my leg -- surely there must be crocodiles. I'm standing in a dusty corner of dark sand on the edge of the Yucatán Peninsula, tropical coast stretching from either shoulder, hot sun igniting pigment in my skin like a call for help, and suddenly I'm not thinking anything at all. I'm simply standing; standing and staring. Staring without focus when out of the corner of my eye something flaps into view. Pelicans. As graceful as they are funny looking. Three of them, back to front across the horizon; from right to left, from Lívingston towards the falls, from the rain forest to the river I have yet to cross. And already I'm kissing my finger tips and watching them pass.

I turn back only to look into the face of a young girl looking at me. What's more, she is not on the bank as one might expect, but in the river, toes gripping the slick wood of a dugout canoe. She is lighter in coloring than the Garifuna town, heavy of hair, lithe in the limb and quiet as the breeze. Her brow is an inquisitive pinch, eyes widespread and dark. It is a moment so pure that already I was dreading its loss, but I have not finished with the pelicans so I inadvertently suck her in over the tops of my wishing fingertips, like a gasp.

Immediately I begin fumbling for my camera, shaking at the simple beauty of this scene; the girl's skin licked by sunlight, the breeze pushing through the trees behind her; not realizing for a moment that I could be wronging her from the start. Her fingers curl around the only oar. Bony elbows cocked east and west. Pelicans long since forgotten. But what if I hadn't brought my camera, I think, could I have been just as happy drawing her likeness in the sand? Would her daguerreotype still be as firmly imprinted in my fleshy silver brain? Could Guatemala then be forgotten?

"Scusa," I said in Italian, because it was foreign, because my Spanish had fled. It hurt to put the camera away if only because the act called further attention to its presence.

It was with benign regard that she noted this strange habit of foreign men. She just stood, swaying in her boat and taking me in. Her long hair maintained some of the unruliness of coastal towns and was pulled back but not quite parted. A light breeze pushed the floral skirt a hand's width up the spindly thighs; bare feet wet with the dark stain of a puddle. Her tongue suddenly clicked on the roof of her mouth and she looked away. But when I followed her gaze half expecting to see the Rastafarian watching me in silhouette from the water's edge, it was her voice that called me back. "Me llamo Reina," and she smiled slightly as if I'd be pleased with her name. I remained silent, and I believe, expressionless, aware only of the slight tug of unwanton serenity.

Who knows how much time passed. Part of me, I think, is still standing there, like footprints that have grown hard with the sand.

"¿Quiere atravesar?" Her voice was young. Shy, but not shy.

I nodded. "Sí."

She waited a moment. Biting slightly at her lower lip. "¿Quiere pagar?"

I shrugged. "Sí."

"¿Cuanto va a pagar?"

I was doing my best to follow her train of thought. Guessing really. I shrugged again. The ubiquitous green of the rain forest seemed to pull off the trees with the flight of a dozen long-tailed manakins, birds uncomfortable with the stirrings of the heart. She was young, twelve, maybe thirteen, but balanced herself against the only oar the way a heron scans for fish. One end parted the water and disappeared in the river bottom beside her.

"Lo que quiera," she said as I rubbed my thumb and first two fingers together. Of course. Whatever I wanted. The dugout glided gently towards me, wedging an inch or two into the dark sand with the sound of paper tearing. I didn't think it would hold us afloat. I huddled down in the bottom and let the bilge soak through the seat of my pants.

This was her domain and it was with ease that she adjusted herself to the boat which seesawed at the slightest movement. A certain sadness had crept between us that I hoped to preserve by not speaking further. There are times when the human voice is ugly and distracting no matter what the utterance. And again I had the camera and snapped a picture which I keep to this day.

Even then I knew that the Rastafarian was right: I did need to watch my back. My life that morning had come into some crooked alignment to allow this to happen. I was falling in love, with this girl and this country and the monarch butterflies in the yard. But especially this girl, aptly named, who I'd sucked in while making a wish on three pelicans' backs.

--------------

I SAW her again in town the next day. A flash from the restaurant where I was dining by the window. The bright beauty of noon had seized the town in a fit of joy. Children were returning to school; girls with their dark hair combed, bows and blue dresses that could have fallen from the sky, white fringes hazy from the sun, like the exhaust of airplanes that fade while you watch.

I hear the creaking wheel-barrow and feel the aching knees, long before I see him, the ice-man in his wrinkled fedora, the darkest man in Lívingston. Someone's Fanta must be getting warm, I think. He is making his rounds. The bleached block of ice is shrinking in the cradle before him as he passes, soft and clear around the edges. Several boys in gray shorts run past, louder than the rest; it's the uniform of boys that age, gray shorts and noise. One stops. He runs a dirty hand over the ice, then over his face, spitting the wetness between his fingers. The old man swats at him with his hat and mumbles in Garifuna, but he only circles and comes back. He is like a fly this boy, except that he is calling the man tío and smiling. He pats the ice again, ducks the hat once more, and runs off to join his friends. The burst of his giggle lingers as the cart begins to creak once again.

From the back of the wheel-barrow I follow the trickle of mud with my gaze as the man heads towards the river, past a tienda and left towards the ocean. But I stop when a pair of Mary Janes and white socks obstruct my path; recognition of those skinny calves is instantaneous as different parts of my body jolt en concierto, a tightening of the thigh, the compression of my sternum, like a perfect little melody returning just when you thought it was through; a beautiful and unexpected recapitulation. She is Reina; she is beautiful. Lost it seems, in a world all her own.

She too is wearing one of those lovely sky-blue dresses and is following the same mud trail as if it were a balance beam. She chooses her steps carefully and slows just outside my window. Reina teeters a bit and raises her arms to correct her balance, then moves on. Her hair is streaked with sun as she moves past the church. If only I could touch that streak; to be burned by its hot softness between my fingers, to walk the balance beam in tandem behind her, feeling her weight shift. I hold my breath. The waiter is standing next to me. He is asking me questions, but I cannot look. Can't he see I'm holding her up with my gaze? If I look she will fall, or worse, disappear. His patience is annoying. I haven't heard a thing he has said, only that he is speaking. But just before I give in, before I pay and leave and break my concentration, the girl turns her head. She has seen me there, watching. But how did she know? Slowly, she raises her hand from the hip, the right one, an inch or two from the blueness of her dress, that piece of sky. A wave, perhaps. Then, as if in slow motion, everything returns to normal. The waiter touches my arm. The ditter of town is again complete. And Reina turns her back and heads into the yard of the school.

christopher o'brien