Description of Service Chapter Four- A Town Built on a Plateau

4. A Town Built on a Plateau

“I can barely remember my first years, before I came here, to San Juan” Anhiel said, as he grinned in a way that had, over the years, etched an indelible smile on his good natured face, now highlighted by a beard grayed through the slow, steady passing of time in that village.

“Coming here to build this house was a great adventure for me. I had never left Belen before that.” If four decades had gone by since then, his weathered face made the time passed, much of it sitting there on the stoop of the house he had built watching the townspeople go by, seem like much more. As he leaned back, and stared up at the massive rock walls of Cerro Grande, which jut upward, across the valley behind the original Perdido home, his face mirrored the sincerity of those hard, cold granite peaks, softened now by the slowly dimming afternoon light, as it faded from bright yellow to a faint orange.

“It wasn’t easy,” he continued. “Until the opening of the road to La Esperanza, there were no building materials in San Juan.” A sparkle glimmered in his eye as he remembered those days. “No cement. No steel rods. Everything was made of mud. There was no way to build upward.” He thrust his arm skyward, to show the height that he now understood could be expected of buildings elsewhere.

When Anhiel was sent down from Belen, at the age of thirteen, the family had finally outgrown that rambling house overlooking the valley, now unrecognizable from the one-room structure built by Angel all those years before. The arrival from Belen of new family members had been a constant strain on resources, including space in that home. But Soledad and Felicidad, like good matrons anxious to accommodate, were reticent to concede the improbability of fitting an indefinite number of relatives under the one roof.

As the head of the growing household, Angel, who could do little to stem the flow of new inhabitants into his home, was left with no option but to look for ways to improve his economic lot. He now had a child of his own to support as well, his new wife having given birth to a son, Angel Segundo. Through the class of sheer determination born of absolute necessity, Angel managed to secure for himself the job of telegraph operator in San Juan, a coup at least partially attributable to the not unimportant detail that there was, at the time, no telegraph in the town.

While rooting about Gracias one day, Angel had the fortune of being the first to discover the possibility of the existence of such a post. Slowly sipping a beer at the local cantina, he overheard two patrons talking about their work for the state-owned telegraph company. They were telegraph operators in nearby towns, they told him when he investigated further. It didn’t take them long to disclose, over several more beers, that they also earned ample salaries for limited work.

Angel was intrigued. As the liquor continued to flow, he was able to convince his new acquaintances of the existence of San Juan, of which they had been in doubt. They explained to him how an obscure state statute, designed to integrate the municipalities of the area, would provide money to run a telegraph line to any town in the region where someone was willing to purchase a telegraph machine, and learn how to use it. The job came with a handsome monthly salary in perpetuity, the bi-monthly collection of which, it turned out, was the motive for their journey to Gracias on that day.

Not more than a couple hours later, having spent the last of those particular paychecks, and then some, at the cantina, the pair of telegraph technicians stumbled out of the bar and down the street to the local telegraph offices, Angel in tow, determined to see their new friend employed as well, so as to augment the salary pool from which to pay for their bi-monthly drinking expedition to Gracias. Finding the office closed for the siesta, the increasingly unruly group clamored onward to the home of the office administrator, who, on the condition that the three drunks leave the vicinity of his premises without delay, agreed to meet with Angel about setting up a telegraph office in San Juan.

Saving up from his occasional cattle herding, Angel was soon able to purchase, from the same office administrator whose home he had visited that day, his own telegraph machine, at a markup from the normal price which would have been considered outrageous, had it not been for the further understanding, completely unspoken and undocumented though it may have been, of the administrator’s agreement to initiate the necessary paperwork to have Angel hired, and the telegraph line extended to San Juan. If the process of setting up the actual line from Gracias took nearly a decade more, and in the end had very little to do with the hiring of a paid operator for the post in San Juan, the contracting of Angel as a permanent employee of the state was handled in a much more expedient manner, given that once a new employee began to collect his salary, he could in turn pay monthly association dues to the company’s state appointed representative in Gracias, in this case that same administrator in charge of the hire, who had also sold Angel his new telegraph machine, mostly on credit.

Content with his new employ, Angel would wait patiently for the line to be up and running, an undertaking for which the level of motivation on the part of the company authorities left much to be desired, largely because no one stood to gain from the accomplishment but the public who might have used the line. In the meantime, and there was quite a lot of that, Angel was content to sit day by day in the would-be telegraph office that he fashioned by clearing Felicidad and her children out of their bedroom, which, inconveniently for her but ideally for the telegraph business, opened directly onto the street in front of the house, which had slowly become a major thoroughfare, such as there was in San Juan. Angel painstakingly went about the facets of the job possible without a working line, namely collecting his bi-monthly government salary, and the rent the government paid him for the still-useless telegraph office which had necessitated the displacement of his sister. When passersby eventually began to mock his perpetual inactivity, sitting as he did all day long behind a desk, for no apparent reason, Angel made further plans to have a sign made to hang out front, but he quickly abandoned them when he realized the risk of being prematurely associated with the state government, which ran the telegraph operations, and, like all other things foreign, was of general suspicion to the San Juaneños. Still, he opened the office doors each morning, and dutifully sat behind his desk, awaiting further instructions from his supervisors in the capital, who were for quite some time, unbeknownst to him, completely unaware of his existence. With time, Angel became so comfortable in that routine, that he would have rued the day many years later that the telegraph line was finally enabled, had he or anyone else in San Juan been informed in anything resembling a timely manner that the feat had been accomplished.

Whatever the seriousness of his work, word of Angel’s newfound economic status enticed even more members of the Perdido clan to come down from the mountains to San Juan, where they installed themselves, each in turn, in his house. Clarita, the youngest daughter of Angel’s generation, came with her three children during a particularly bad drought during which Belen, like so many small towns in the hills, ran dangerously low on food when the corn harvest failed. Then came Metches, the next oldest sister, who arrived with her six children, who she planned to leave with their aunts in San Juan, to attend the newly opened primary school. That group installed themselves in a newly added room at the far corner of the property, which Angel had built months earlier for his own private use. Metches became quite comfortable there, and though she constantly intended to do so, she never found the time exactly right to return to Belen.

In the end, only two of the elder generation of Perdidos remained in the mountain home in Belen. Constance, Angel’s aunt, if only a few years older than he, stayed behind to take care of his mother, who was growing older and lonelier by the day. The two old women subsisted off their modest collection of livestock and a small but healthy garden, as they slowly slept away the numberless days and nights on the mountainside. Left behind, the woman who had given birth to Angel, and had bestowed one of her own given names on each of his two oldest sisters, Felicidad and Soledad, fluctuated for a time between those two dispositions, and finally settled on the first, wrapping her solitude in the embrace of the happiness derived from a deep and intuitive feeling of completion born of the understanding that her children were, now, better off than she had been.

In that way, the woman and the old mountain home faded slowly from memory. It was not until several years later that Angel awoke from a siesta at the desk behind his telegraph station on one hot summer day, and came to the realization that all the family members of such a mind or a viable age had moved in with him in San Juan, that he decided to return to Belen for his mother and aunt. But time and events intervened, day by day delaying any such excursion, to the point that it would be several years more before he made the trip. When Angel finally undertook the long hike up the mountain towards his birthplace, for the first time in decades, he was unable to locate, among the now unfamiliar twists and turns of the hills, the house in which he grew up. When he had wandered the countryside for three days, and slept two nights under the stars, without success finding familiar ground, he quietly returned to San Juan, and never spoke of Belen again.

While the Perdido homestead in Belen was withering in silence, the representation in San Juan flourished. Felicidad, slighted when Angel cleared her out of her room to make space for his office, and unwilling to continue to live ten to a room with her younger sisters, nieces and nephews, set Anhiel in motion on the building project.

Anhiel was a mason trained with utility rather than longevity in mind, and his works reflected that approach. If he couldn’t remember exactly when the house he built was finished, or for how many years it has stood, he did know that it was completed around the time Don Teyo, the local master carpenter, whose story Anhiel enjoyed telling time and time again, died.

“Old Don Teyo,” one of Anhiel’s variations would begin, “eased into San Juan more than thirty years ago. When he got here, he was already so old, he could no longer remember exactly where he had started from. He wasn’t planning on staying here for long. He was on his way out west to the town of Ocotepeque. He came riding in, from over the mountains, on a mule caravan from La Esperanza. The way he used to tell it, that day he arrived, that caravan went south towards the border, and there was no way for him to continue onward to Gracias, which wasn’t unusual in those days. Sometimes there were no caravans for weeks. You could walk from here to Gracias in a day or two, but Teyo was old and tired, so he took a room on the outskirts of town, near the fork in the road where the trail splits and heads west. He wanted to be near the spot where the caravans come together, before leaving town. He thought that way, he could be informed quickly when the opportunity came up to join a caravan headed west.

“In the meantime, Teyo started looking for temporary work to tide him over. He started a few construction projects here and there. Before long, he got his chance to go on to Gracias, with a group of traders headed west. But Teyo was in the middle of building one of the houses up the road, so he passed. That’s about the time when I first met him. He was eating his meals in Mama Feliz’s kitchen, in that home, that house right in front of us,” Anhiel said, pointing at the old Perdido house. “Before she moved over to this side of the road, Aida used to cook meals there, for passers through, to earn some extra money.”

“Well, old Don Teyo saw me at work on this house, and he wasn’t the type of person to see someone needing a hand and not lend it. He knew a lot about building that I didn’t, then. I was about thirteen or fourteen and had never really built much of anything. Mama Felicidad wanted to make a deal with him. She would trade room and board if he would work on her house. She was still mad at Angel for kicking her out of her room, to make space for the telegraph office. She wanted out of that house as soon as possible. But Teyo wanted to stay where he was. He wanted to always be close enough to that route to Gracias, so he could pack his things and leave town on a moment’s notice when the chance came up. Or so he said. But he agreed to help on this house part time in exchange for the meals, so we went to work together.

“Over the years, that path to Gracias turned into a road. The cars began to come and go soon after. They built the restaurant at the crossroads, and once the road had been widened and plowed, there was pretty regular transit between here and Gracias. Don Teyo watched all that from the patio outside his room by the crossroads, still renting by the week. But he never took any of those cars leaving San Juan.

“The town grew, and so there was always enough construction work to keep him busy. When he wasn’t working elsewhere, we worked on Mama Feliz’s house. We built the front room first, and the walls facing the street to block off the property, and then we closed in around them. Mama Feliz came over as soon as we had the roof of the first room covered, and she brought Aida with her to cook. It was warm and dry that summer. She said she had slept in worse her whole life, and she wasn’t about to let the lack of a few walls keep her out of her house. She was so proud.”

“Once we had the basic parts of the house finished, Teyo took me on as his apprentice, and we started doing some other jobs. As he told it, he had never actually been trained in anything in particular, and I could learn that way too.”

Anhiel remembered when the Teyo had told him how, in that place he couldn’t quite remember anymore, where he had grown up, the old master had been confronted with the necessity to build, or maybe rebuild something, though it was never clear exactly what, possibly as a result of one of the frequent natural disasters that frequently tormented the very poor both in San Juan and in the area where Teyo was from, wherever that was. That informal training resulted in a practical ability to build structures which were just good enough to pass muster upon inspection by the proprietor, and thus for Teyo to avoid most of the responsibility for repairing any defect discovered at a later point, be it ten minutes or ten years. Walking around with the tools of the trade, a rock tied to a string for leveling, and his spade, crafted from a sheet of scrap metal tied to a rather dubious sprig of pine, he had slowly become the local authority in matters of construction.

All the other professionals in San Juan, such as they could be considered, had gained their positions through a similar combination of longevity, tenacity, and sheer connivance. For most of the history of San Juan, professional training hadn’t been an issue. The simplicity of design of village life limited the necessary professions roughly to the fields of construction, agriculture, and food preparation. To that group of jobs, over the last few years, had been added the new fields of school professor and policeman, but those were staffed by outsiders sent by the government.

“Teyo thought the lack of formal training made him less suspicious,” Anhiel continued. “He spoke about building in a way people could understand, and I learned that way.”

“That was around the time they first started sending teachers to San Juan, and they opened the school. But I never went, Mama Feliz didn’t believe in it. At that age I was too old to learn anything new at any rate. Back in those days, people were suspicious of the teachers, because they were sent by the national authorities. This is a Conservative town, and the Liberal government sent them. It was the same with the soldiers, who showed up suddenly to police the town. No one thought a job should pay if it was something that a person could do himself. San Juan has always been safe, and gotten by fine, so what use did we have for teachers or policemen? “

So Teyo was also Anhiel’s teacher, if only in the local sense. And Teyo had also become the town’s expert carpenter, if by chance, just as Angel had become telegraph operator. In this new and growing place, one could be almost anything desired. As the local builders, Teyo and his apprentice Anhiel would do the best job they could with limited supplies and knowhow, and come back and fix what needed fixing later. Unfortunately for San Juan, and other towns like it, the same principal applied in somewhat more pressing professions like medicine and governance. In the face of a lack of choice, presence and willingness was necessarily substituted for ability. Only in the eminent matter of religion was a respectable expert sent by an outside authority, deeply concerned with leaving nothing to chance.

But there was less worry regarding Anhiel’s chosen profession, and there was much building to be done, so Teyo settled into his place. In that way, working by day and taking his meals, morning, noon, and night, in Felicidad’s kitchen, Teyo had lived most of his life in San Juan, day by day.

“With Teyo, I built half of San Juan,” Anhiel boasted. “But we never built a home for him. That is one regret I have. He always planned to move on somewhere else. Even after three decades, to the end, he still planned to go. Mayor after mayor tried to offer him land to build on. But they gave up. Teyo refused to put down roots.

“So in between jobs, we kept working on this place. We built the rest of the rooms you see now, one by one. Aida was making some money selling meals, and Mama Feliz began to raise her pigs out back. And slowly, room by room, we built the house up around the courtyard, as it is today. Aida gave birth to her first child – Oduber - right away too,” Anhiel said, laughing, “to help fill up all the rooms we were building. Then Tito was born, and then Delma, who lives in La Esperanza now- she was Aida’s second, then came Patricia and then Nancy, and there was my cousin Maya with her little baby son…,” Anhiel trailed off into a deep, extended silence. Moments later, as gradually as he had slipped away into his memory, he came back into the present. “As we built, the house filled itself.”

“It was years before everything was finished. And that very week that we finished the back room by the gate, when Mama Feliz finally declared that the house was finished, and we opened the champaign to celebrate, that was the week Don Teyo died. It was sudden - but somehow his death was not unexpected, not to me, or to anyone in the family. We had skipped around, Teyo and me, from project to project over the years, but we were always working on this house, throughout. We knew he would leave us when it was finished. When he saw it complete, when he had spent his energy, he had done what he had come to do, and he was satisfied.

“That day, he told me something I never thought I would hear. After all those years, he said that maybe San Juan was the place for him. He said he felt like he was finally home. That afternoon, he went to his room to rest. When he didn’t show up for dinner, I knew what had happened. He was always at the table just before sunset. But not that day.

“I walked up the road in the dusk, with the light fading like it is now. I found him in bed, alone, peaceful as could be. We tried to figure out how to contact his family, but no one knew. He had never told anyone where he had come from, not even me. He always said he didn’t remember anymore. He didn’t have any money saved, but everyone in town pitched in to pay for his burial. By then he had built almost every house in San Juan. My last job, with him, was to build his tomb, down in the cemetery. I could feel his spirit looking over my work, as he had all those years.”

Anhiel stopped again, this time to behold the setting sun in silence, as it sped towards its daily resting place behind the mountain. It was dusk in San Juan. When the light was gone, Anhiel turned to me and, placing his hand on my shoulder, spoke again. “But I will always remember Teyo by the work we did together. Speaking of which, the kitchen is still just as we built it then. Let’s go have some dinner.”

I would eat countless meals sitting in the alcove of that kitchen, my back pressed tightly against the mud wall. Quietly I would sit, morning, noon, and night, day after day, as this man Anhiel described, but who I never knew, surely did as well, accompanied only by those heirs to the Perdido legacy, at work in the kitchen before me. One rotated meat over the open flame, and another pounded cornmeal into tortillas, their frames, plump from working with food all day, rescued from the darkness by the warm glow from the stove in corner. Sometimes, like Anhiel, I thought I could feel Don Teyo with me there, too. The amateur arrangement of the kitchen, sprung from the minds of those two untrained masons years before, yielded an inexplicable feeling of companionship amidst isolation. Perhaps, I would think in the years to come, the unusual design that placed the dining room in such proximity to the warmth of that kitchen, had been no accident.