Description of Service- Chapter 2

Note: This is chapter of the novel based on my experiences in Honduras early in the decade. Chapter one is not finished and not really necessary yet. I will post the chapters, then take them down, one by one approximately weekly/bi-weekly. This is a work in progress and there may still be some incongruities. I appreciate your comments. All rights reserved by the author, me.

The working title is Description of Service though I have some others in mind as well.

2. October of 1974


In October of 1974, after the excitement of the war with The Sister Republic to the South, the western part of the country had fallen back into the almost unbroken slumber it had enjoyed for centuries. The region had seldom been visited by outsiders, not even in the long since forgotten time of the conquistadors. Out west, the hills, in their role as eternal witnesses to action and inaction alike, rise to smooth, green peaks with none of the silver to be found further east. Nor are those western lands close to the sea, like the coast to the north, where fortune seekers arrived from Spain many moons ago. The fortunate geography helps explain why this land has been left to its own devices for so long. It could boast only, on the one hand, a clear blue sky, merging in the distance with the green hills, the white tufts of summer clouds their intermediary, and, on the other hand, the fierce bands of Lenca Indians, who still defended the terrain even centuries after Columbus, on his fourth voyage to the new world, had set foot for the first time on what would become the Republic’s north coast. For centuries, the occasional light-skinned trader or explorer traveled as far as the capital of the republic, but seldom would they venture west, over the hills, to this land. There was no way to get there, or reason to go.

In the heart of the mild region has always sat a narrow plateau between two rivers, which was to become the site of the town of San Juan. The foreboding topography of Cerro Grande to the north, towering over the plateau, and its sister hills, flanking it to all sides, assured that even after the war, travelers so inclined could arrive in San Juan only from the northwest, onward from the shady backwaters of Gracias. The town of Gracias itself sits at the end of the road south from the large western settlement of Santa Rosa, high in the mountains towards the coast, and the settlement of San Juan onward still from there. To reach San Juan from the eastern regional seat in La Esperanza called for a more than thirty-mile trek by mule over tortuous mountains where temperatures drop below freezing too often. Those who migrated to the town had always come from the other, milder direction, and finding the passage onward, for all practical intents, closed, would be left with the choice to settle in San Juan, or go back.

Along that road from Gracias in more recent decades had come a handful of light-skinned people, speaking an unfamiliar dialect. These strange travelers would arrive in San Juan every dozen years or so, though no one kept an accurate count. But none had come in the years following the war, until one October afternoon in 1974. When the man people say was my father arrived in San Juan that October, the weather was unusually cold.

Spring, such that there is in Intibucá, usually comes around that time of year. It’s not that the seasons are reversed from northern lands, as one might guess when hearing that spring begins in what is usually considered fall in lands farther north. After all, in southern lands, spring starts in tandem with the fall to the north, creating an easy to grasp inverse relationship that is quite reasonable, once explained. It is important to understand, though, as you begin to read this story, that such rational conveniences seldom maintain their power of explanation in places like San Juan, Intibucá. The inverse season rule of thumb, for example, can only be successfully called upon when the seasons have conspired to maintain the traditional order which they follow in the more technologically advanced places where some brand of regularity has come to be demanded of everything from mail delivery to weather. It turns out such regularity is far more essential in countries where people plan in several degrees of complexity more than is common in San Juan, leading to things like space programs, or indoor systems to change the air temperature year round, making it uncomfortably hot when it is cold outside and unbearably cold inside when it is warm out, to the extent that often one is forced to remove layers of clothing inside when it is cold outside, or to carry a sweater about when the summer sun blazes down, as was not uncommon back home in the United States. Such preoccupations may add a desirable level of complexity to the lives of those in places that are not San Juan, Intibucá, but at least in that valley, the weather does what it will and the people adapt without much discussion.

In San Juan life was already complicated enough without concerning oneself with the irregularity and unpredictability of mother nature. To address the issue of temperature control, the homes were built of simple mud and straw. Besides the fact that those materials were all that was available in those white, dry Central American hills, such a construction also provided a formidable and cost-effective insulation, making the interior of a dwelling cool in the summer and warm in the winter, much as the technologically advanced devices of the north do in their areas. Along with the residents’ usually calm demeanor, the mud obviated entirely the need for air conditioning, and the mild climate usually made heating unnecessary as well, all of which was a happy coincidence in itself because, in 1974, the closest town with electrical power was still hundreds of miles away.

Even in the face of such inconveniences, the people had managed to feed themselves adequately throughout the century or so since the cattle ranch on that site had slowly metamorphosed into a town on the plateau above the bank of the San Juan River. The ranch, miles from the nearest large settlements in La Esperanza far to the east, and Santa Barbara, through the maze of mountains to the north, turned slowly from a seldom-visited way station into a small, self-sustaining town. The neighboring cities were known to the San Juaneños, as the village inhabitants called themselves, through the tales of a handful of local traders who would make that long trek over the mountains from La Esperanza, to continue on to Gracias and Santa Rosa.

By 1974 the government of The Republic was opening a paved road that would lead from La Esperanza onward to the capital. Since there were no paved roads anywhere closer to San Juan, neither Felicidad Perdido nor her sister Soledad had ever seen a car. Felicidad thought she had a good concept of what an automobile might look like, though. Only four years earlier, the San Juaneños had been blasted into the modern era when the bombs began to fall. Before that unfortunate chapter of the town’s history, not even those in San Juan who had journeyed across the mountains to far away places, not the mayor, not the carpenter, or telegraph operator, not even the priest, had ever seen an airplane in flight. While the concept of the airplane was not unknown to the small group of more cosmopolitan town residents, the idea that one would drop explosive spheres of metal on their homes made little sense to the villagers, particularly in absence of any news. The telegraph, which, other than the traders, was the only means by which news could reach the village, had been down since before the planes began to appear. That in itself was not unusual, but under the circumstances it had become quite inconvenient that the miles of cable running off through the woods along the dirt track to Gracias had ceased to bring news of the outside world.

For a time, no one came from La Esperanza either. The war would, in the end, prove the impetus needed for the government to fund the project to build a road connecting San Juan with La Esperanza. The opening of a pass running along the side of the mountain range high above the valley, then down across to the next valley, would begin once the war ended and the skies were clear again. But for the time being, the residents of San Juan knew nothing of any of that, or of the war with The Sister Republic to the South that would lead their government to deem it finally necessary to connect the southwestern towns to the rest of the country, in so doing taking a giant step towards ending centuries of regional isolation.

The falling ordinance and general mayhem that accompanied those first days of war was discouraging enough to convince the citizens of San Juan to abandon the village. Don Nicolas Sanchez, the third, the town’s mayor and grandson of the owner of the ranch between the two rivers, fled with his family to Gracias. But the rest of the San Juaneños had no choice but to head for the cover of the caves on Cerro Grande, which had served as a refuge many times over the long history of the region. The pine covered slopes of Cerro Grande tower not only over the village but also the region, rising hundreds of meters above the valley before giving way to sheer granite. Since the town’s humble beginnings as a cattle ranch in a valley among the hills, Cerro Grande, aptly named “Big Hill” in the line with straightforward speech of the people who lived below it, had protected, provided for, and most of all frightened the inhabitants of the valley below. It is there, Felicidad would explain to me years later, that the spirits of the departed go to wander, dwelling in the limestone caves on the mountain, and coming down to the village only occasionally, by night, when they have business with the living. The universal agreement among the townspeople was that the mountain was for spirits and not for people, which made the trip up to those caves unsettling for Felicidad Perdido and her family.

The San Juaneños eked out a meager existence for several weeks from what remained of the corn and beans harvested earlier in the summer, and by foraging on the mountainside. The planes and their bombs ceased to appear after a few days, but the San Juaneños, fearful of attack by land, and in absence of any leadership after the departure of the mayor, remained on the mountain for some time, awaiting what might come. But there was to be no invasion by land. In a twist typical of this land, where the reasonable seldom happens but the incredible almost always finds a way to occur, it turned out that most of the country’s army existed only in the imagination of the General-President, and the speeches which he concocted from it. The money intended to pay for munitions and soldiers that might have made up the regiments the General-President had in mind had instead been used for residential construction projects in the zone of the capital where the country’s leaders lived alongside the most successful businessmen. The war had provided a convenient opportunity to write down imagined army forces by publicizing remote battles that never actually took place, in which great victories were proclaimed, at the unfortunate cost of even greater arsenals of imaginary supplies. A similar version of the same story took place on the opposing side.

So the actual imaginary nature of the non-existent forces on both sides of the conflict ensured that the war was to be as short-lived as it was glorious, which would have been a benefit to the San Juaneños, had they found out in anything resembling a timely nature. Instead they stayed on the mountain clear into spring, which followed summer that year, when they finally decided, timidly as individuals but a bit more ambitiously as a group, to come down and re-inhabit the town. The general disbelief to be expected at finding out that the war had been fought over the outcome of a soccer match, which they did the next year when the telegraph was restored, and traders started to reappear, never materialized, mitigated by the passing of time, and further reduced by what turned out to be relatively scant damage to the town. Only the market and the home of Don Nicolas had been destroyed.

Since the market was rapidly rebuilt, following the more immediate and concerted effort to rebuilt the mayor’s homestead, the Perdido sisters also quickly forgot the war. Their dwelling, which had gradually expanded over two decades from one room to several along the edge of the plateau overlooking the river valley, was intact. From this turn of fortune they understood intuitively that San Juan was now their permanent home. Two decades earlier, a small part of the Perdido clan had come to San Juan, a growing town of still no more than a couple hundred residents, from the hills of Belen, just across the municipal border to the west. In a move that would preface a much larger and more common migration in the coming decades, they left behind the matriarch and the land where the family had lived for as long as oral tradition provided a history, to move to a larger settlement and seek better economic conditions. From the small grouping of houses outside Belen where the Perdido family had always resided in its entirety, Angel Segundo Perdido brought his two sisters to establish a new homestead where the San Juan and Erandique rivers converge, a more promising terrain than those ancestral hills around Belen, where as Angel still says, one is as likely to fall off a mountain as to descend it in tranquility.

Upon arriving, Angel sought out the local patron, Don Nicolas the third’s father, Nicolas Segundo, the oldest son of the original Don Nicolas Sanchez, who had founded the town on his cattle ranch in 1908. By the time Angel Perdido showed up, the cattle business was failing to pay dividends for the Sanchez family as it had in decades past, so Nicolas Segundo had turned to selling land, which the family had in abundance, having been granted “the terrain in the valley of the San Juan River as far as the eye can see from the top of El Pelon hill,” by command of the viceroy of Spain on the eve of the war for independence, when land was abundant as ever. So Angel purchased, on credit, a large, barren parcel in the middle of the town, between the municipal square and the road to Gracias, on a small escarpment overlooking the river where it flows eastward just beneath the foot of Cerro Grande. He wasted no time in planning the home he would build there for himself and his sisters, beginning by ordering that mud bricks be made to construct a small room. Since bricks dry quickly in the summer heat, the foundation of the home was soon laid along the top of the escarpment to form a one room home. Having spent the one hundred lempiras he had brought from Belen on the bricks, Don Angel enclosed the room himself, using reed polls harvested from along the riverbed. Then he roofed the house with mats of woven leaves and as many palm branches as could be found at such altitude. So the family was only a few days without a roof.

The sisters quickly got to work planting a garden behind the home, and Angel sought daily work herding cattle in the hills around town. Aida, Felicidad’s first daughter, was an infant then. In a later era she might have been destined to be educated, and to go on to study in a faraway city. But in that day she was raised in the tradition of her ancestors in Belen, milling cornmeal and making tortillas throughout her youth as a kitchen apprentice. Even years later, by 1974, after sixteen years in San Juan, that was virtually all she had learned to do. Her cousin Maya trained her each day. Aida called Maya sister, though they were in fact cousins, Maya the oldest daughter of Soledad, born in Belen long enough before the move to remember her origins. As the elder Perdidos no longer considered Belen a place with a promising future, that entire generation of Perdidos had matured together in San Juan, either sent down from Belen at appropriate intervals, or, in the case of many of the youngest, born in the house overlooking the San Juan valley. So it was an unnecessary complication to remember, much less explain, exactly how each of the children roaming the house and the street in front was related to any other. The failure to prioritize the process of documentation of the provenance of family members provided the added advantage of helping the Perdido girls to overlook the perpetual absence of any male figure, save Angel, from the home. Long before adolescence it had become completely unclear who either girl’s father might be.

San Juan proved a fertile breeding ground, and Soledad and Felicidad each produced a number of children. Added to the number of children sent down from Belen, determining who belonged to whom was an undertaking forgotten after the time-consuming work of maintaining a bustling and healthy household. So few of the preponderance of siblings and growing children in the Perdido home knew who exactly their father was. At eighteen years of age Aida gave birth to her first child, Oduber, who was in turn presented with the unusual possibility of witnessing the birth three years later of his uncle Tito, Felicidad’s youngest son. Oduber still calls Tito his “little” uncle, though he calls Felicidad his mother, relegating Aida’s role in that three-way relationship to the kitchen, where she gradually turned into one of the village’s renowned cooks.

Adding to the confusion, the lack of a fatherly presence only encouraged the perception in town that each of the household’s children, in his or her own way, seemed to be the result of divine intervention. While the possibility of any such divine conception could be immediately ruled out in the case of Aida, who was course, stubborn, and often insolent, it seemed like the most probable explanation for Maya. Her green eyes and wavy black hair mysteriously punctuated a heavenly face light as anything that had ever been seen in the region, in a land where such features were unknown.

At any rate the indirect approach to defining the girls’ lineage had distinct advantages. Aida and Maya had both understood from an early age that there were many things about the world which they would never understand. Where or how they had been conceived was one of them. It was not that their mothers would ever have taught them to lie. The complete lack of information about the existence or lack thereof of a father was for the pair of adolescents simply a chance to master the avoidance of getting to the heart of matters, a necessary coping skill in an age and place that almost universally refused to provide even the most basic of answers to life’s most profound questions. Furthermore, any inborn temptation to search for truth, and its derivatives of justice and liberty, pursuits which had no practical use, and held no promise of making things any better, was healthily expunged at an early age.

Though the girls could never have suspected it on a conscious level, this socially conservative approach shared by their countrymen would save the family, and indeed the town, a great deal of suffering in the immediate future. Steering clear of the fundamental questions of life, and concentrating on one’s own immediate affairs, could assure that no one ended up in an unmarked grave. The family knew how to not discuss matters, and so the members never crossed anyone of importance, and so it grew and prospered. For each new pair of children to arrive, either by birth or from Belen, Angel would begrudgingly send for the builder to add another room to the house along the edge of the precipice overlooking the valley. In that way the house had grown from one room, to two, to three, to four, until it was easy to lose count of the bedrooms in the maze of dimly lit passages concocted by the local brick-maker turned mason, who doubled as a novice architect.

And as the home and family grew on the escarpment above the ravine, slowly the town grew around it. Paths were opened where streets would one day run. But well before the grid of roads in San Juan had been cut from the weeds and bushes of the dry plateau, the plans for the town had been derived by San Juan’s first mayor, Don Nicolas, the first. Just after the turn of the century, when the Sanchez cattle ranch still occupied the place where the town would one day sit, and the valley still looked as it had since time immemorial, it was mutually decided by the local landowners, of which there were two, that the area’s future would be great. Planning was needed, the eldest Don Nicolas thought. In the evenings after his day’s work on the ranch, the ambitious young man would sit by candlelight over a map in progress, connecting with short strokes of his plume pen three parallel streets crossing the plateau from southeast to northwest, along what would eventually be the main road between La Esperanza and Gracias. The plaza for the yet-to-exist ville he placed in more or less the middle of the map, where a giant Ceiba tree had already, unbeknownst to it, been at the business of marking the center of San Juan, at the spot where the town was founded on a bright afternoon in 1908. For witnesses, Don Nicolas called on the handful of local Indians who worked on his ranch, and the neighboring rancher who had dropped by from the next valley on unknown business, and helped conceive the idea of the ceremony christening the town over a few bottles of aguardiente the previous afternoon.

That Don Nicolas proclaimed himself the mayor didn’t bother anyone, since, for several years, town or not, little happened. Despite that inauspicious beginning, at the urging of the new mayor, the Catholic mission in Gracias saw fit to employ a score of newly baptized natives to build a large church on the square across from the Ceiba tree. Long before its tall white facade was finished, the church was dedicated in the name of San Juan, and as such gave the town its name, which would stick, with adaptations over the years to distinguish the town from other nearby settlements of the same name, largely because of the immensity of the church relative to everything else in the region. Thus was replaced the original name which Don Nicolas had given to his town at that ceremony years earlier under the ceiba tree, which had at any rate long since been forgotten. Even in 1974, the large Catholic temple could, on Sundays and holidays when Christians were so disposed, easily have housed all of the town’s residents below its impressive mahogany vaults, which tested the limits of the local mud masonry. The building had presumably never been filled to capacity, much less in the era when it was built, at which time the presence of entire population for many miles around would not have exhausted the cavernous space inside, even had the locals understood the intended use of the grand structure, which many, still to be introduced to western religion, did not.

The church had been built on the one side of the town plaza without direct access to the main road, much to the dismay of Don Nicolas, whose plans demanded otherwise. Unfortunately Nicolas had been absent on one of his long business trips to the capital when the construction began. Noting upon his return, with a degree of irritation, the erroneous location of the house of worship, Don Nicolas assured that the main path from the direction of La Esperanza was made to lead directly to the small municipal building being installed on the corner facing the plaza, the construction of which he supervised himself to avoid any further discrepancies. The main road was then carved from the plateau by the whole of the ranch’s staff, the members of which were beginning to wonder if Don Nicolas intended to give up the cattle ranching business completely to pursue the planning of the still empty town. Following their boss’ strict orders to the tee, the caused the road to run, as it still does, from the southeast up a hill, and into town, passing the town square, and continuing northwest, where it merged with the track to Gracias. Don Nicolas also felt obliged to order the opening of a second main street to the southwest, lest the bishop think him a less than god-fearing man, leading directly to the church, which due to the space constraints of the plateau ended abruptly at the central plaza in front of the church. The mayor was quite irritated at having to do open two roads when one would have done if his original plans had been followed. To make matters worse, the locals refused to use the roads, since they didn’t lead anywhere in particular, and Don Nicolas was forced repeatedly to order the tracks reclaimed from the infringing bush. This process frustrated the patriarch to the point that he eventually ordered the workers quarters leveled and moved to the other side of the plateau, an action which finally produced the desired effect of increasing traffic along the main road and establishing it as a major thoroughfare, along with a third, parallel path which split the block that was eventually sold to Angel. The path leading to the church was still overrun with growth, but Don Nicolas felt he had complied with his duty towards the church where roads were concerned, and let that one fall gradually into disrepair.

The third path, which led to the homestead of the mayor, would then become the town’s other main road, running northwest for about a mile, directly to the gate of the Sanchez compound, home in Angel’s day to the family of Don Nicolas Segundo, who became the town’s second mayor after the death of his father. In addition to selling some land, Segundo, as he was called when he was not present, also began to encourage the villagers to take over the cattle raising in the area. Having been duly encouraged, occasionally at risk of losing the property Segundo had lent them money to buy from him, they would now lead their cattle up the path in front of the Perdido house to sell to the town patriarch. Don Nicolas had not given up the cattle business entirely. He was now in the business of buying live cattle from the townspeople, at a little below whatever the market price was, and processing the meat to be sold in the town’s market. Due to the town’s unusually stringent health standards, which had been introduced by Segundo after he became mayor, this process could only take place in factories adequately equipped for such processing. It also happened that the only adequately equipped facility, according to the mayor, who decided such things, was in fact an open field behind Mayor Segundo’s home. In that way Mayor Don Nicolas Segundo, as a concerned town leader, assured a healthy and sanitary source of fresh meat and produce for the people.

It was on the other side of that cattle run, in the orange grove between the municipal building and the original Perdido house, that Felicidad eventually began the construction of her own home. Don Angel’s original house had grown laterally as far as it could, sharing a wall with the neighboring homes on either side, and bounded in back by the precipice of the plateau’s edge, and in front by the path to Don Nicolas’ home, which, by the mayor’s edict, was not to be obstructed for any purpose, because of its importance to the well being of the townspeople. So Felicidad slowly amassed supplies with money she saved from selling the meals Aida prepared to what passers by there were, and there among the orange trees, her teenage nephew Anhiel, who had been sent from Belen for the purpose, built, room by room, the structure in which Aida’s children would spend their youth.

By 1974 the path between the two Perdido houses had the semblance of a road, which if followed straight ahead, led all the way to Gracias. It was down that road one cool spring afternoon, soon after Felicidad had completed the protracted move into her new, somewhat completed home, that the first automobile ever to reach San Juan lumbered into the valley under the waning light that blankets the town each afternoon after the sun disappears behind Cerro Grande. At the controls of the machine was a light -skinned man with dark hair and eyes, and a suit to match. In the years since the war, the San Juaneños had become even more disposed to accept the novelties which the outside world seemed intent on thrusting upon them, so there was little reaction to this development, apart from some mild curiosity about the automobile. One of Segundo’s sons, who had picked up a variety of languages on his travels to the capital, was sent for, and it soon became clear that the man inside the machine was something in between lost and crazy. He explained that he had come south from America, an explanation the townspeople considered less than satisfying since America was also where they lived, and it made little sense to them for a recent arrival to departed from his arrival point. The man managed to further convey that he hoped to sell the automobile and move on to La Esperanza by caravan. Having done a much better job, in the estimation of the townspeople, of explaining his destination than his provenance, the mayor was sent for, as the only one in town with the authority or financial wherewithal to resolve such a situation. The automobile being a novelty the mayor immediately realized he couldn’t live another day without, Segundo proved more than willing to buy the car, at a price that, for converse reasons, seemed more than fair to both the parties.

Using the proceeds from the sale, the light-skinned man rented a room from Don Angel, at what might have been considered a slightly inflated price, had there been a going rate for room rentals in San Juan. The traveler enjoyed the hospitality of the Perdido home, and stayed on for what, as Felicidad tells it, turned gradually from a few days into a number of months, in manner quite natural in the countryside. The whole anecdote would have served for little aside from another hazy chapter in the faded and dubious collective memory of the town, except that, a little more than nine months later, Maya gave birth to a light-skinned, green-eyed baby boy.