It’s five in the morning and dawn breaks at La Terminal market.
Since dawn, thousands of men and women have come to settle down with their merchandise to begin the daily ritual of buying and selling.
The heart of the exchange that defines Guatemala City’s entire commerce occurs here. The transaction takes place in this citadel of dank corridors where everyone plays a role, where everyone is a piece in an ancient and chaotic game.
My place here is not clear.
I am a foreigner. I don’t know the codes, I don’t know how to read the subtext.
I’ve only been here a couple of days. I understand little of this territory in which I am and on this morning walk I am looking for something, I don’t know what, probably a clue that will help me better understand this country.
I imagine that track is not sold like the rest of the things that circulate here. I guess I won’t be able to haggle if I find it and that condition leaves me off the board in this game. But I am willing to make an attempt to fit in and so I enter the market and begin my hunt in this burst of colors, aromas, textures, brightness, sounds, temperatures, music, shouts and whistles that intertwine modulating a highly complex sensory experience.
Perhaps Guatemala is just that, a highly complex sensory experience. And perhaps my search strategy should be surprise, amazement, the short circuit of the senses in the face of everything that appears ahead.
White sheds, full of bright onions. Red sheds, with boxed tomatoes and smiling merchants. Green sheds, crammed with lemons. Yellow sheds, full of corn. Black sheds, with black vendors, their faces and clothes blackened by the sale and loading of coal. Aisles with unknown fruits, vegetables that I never imagined. Sale of fish of all sizes. I see shark heads, crab antennae, shellfish. In another sector appear meats, sausages. And in another, legumes. I see hens tied up and locked in baskets covered by mesh, I see goats walking with their owners, who milk them offering milk. One type offers figures of saints, virgins, angels. There are places selling clothes, shoes, socks, jumpsuits, panties. I see the supply of plastic toys, masks, toiletries, hair tonics, for wrinkles, for the best sex. A breast walks selling medicines. At five I dolo. At five I dolo. At five the dolo and the neurobion.
I guess the clue I’m looking for to understand Guatemala is hidden under the disorderly movement of all these people. Surely it stays in their bodies, in the sum of all their bodies. In a corner the voice of a man praises God with a microphone in his hand. While in another corner the voice of another man praises the same god with another microphone in hand. While in another corner the same thing happens. And in another. And in another. And in another. Glory to God, glory to the pulento. Glory to God, glory to the pulento. Most of the places have names of saints or virgins. Deposit La Blessing, El Divino Niño, Tomatera de San Miguel, sale of fruit La Auxiliadora. On the walls there are posters announcing vigils and graffiti with phrases that protect the market. To God be the glory, I read on the front of a house. Glory to God, glory to the pulento. Glory to God, glory to the pulento.
A group of men carry banana towers on their heads. Then they run to throw them into the banana shed. Seventy-five kilos of bananas on their heads, so they say. Seventy-five kilos of bananas for which they will receive a payment that they then invest in an electronic machine. It is a colorful machine that proposes a game of chance. A coin in the slot, a button pressed and the die is cast. A great prize can come and double the amount of coins thrown into the machine. Or you can lose everything. The seventy-five kilos of bananas, loaded on the head, for nothing. I watch the exercise over and over again. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose and reload their banana head for luck. Seventy-five kilos of bananas.
The fly catcher takes him, the rat catcher takes him. You have to put fly paste on it, you have to put rat paste on it. Difficult to organize so much stimulus. Everything is a great chaos in here, a complete disorder. And in that explosive logic, out of all logic, I start to get dizzy. I don’t know where I’m going anymore. At times I think there are stalls I’ve already visited, but I’m not sure. At times I think there are faces, voices, smiles, dental crowns that I’ve already seen, but I couldn’t say that either. The streets have no name, there is no compass or any point of orientation. Only an unspeakable energy that pushes me and makes me advance between sellers and buyers, between cars and baskets, between carnitas and tortillas and horchatas.
What are you going to take, what are you looking for, what do we give you.
There are plastics, there are piggy banks.
Hawaiian pineapple, Hawaiian pineapple.
The fly catcher takes him, the rat catcher takes him.
The voices echo in these damp corridors of half-finished buildings, towering towards the sky. If I look up I can see clothes on the line, the face of a child or the silhouette of a cat peeking out of the small windows. Families who have made their homes out of those aviaries, balancing so as not to fall. Like a 150-pound tower of bananas on a man’s head. I wonder if these constructions, like a man’s head, can withstand the weight without collapsing. Without falling.
Repent of your sins. Glory to God, glory to the pulento.
An acid smell, a mixture of garbage and shit, comes out of the landfill sector. The waste of the entire market comes to give here. In this last enclave of the transaction chain, a group of women chews the stench to collect plastics in the rain that begins to fall. There are no colors here. Here the stench consumes everything. Ten quetzales for a bag full of plastic is what they give them in exchange, they tell me. Ten quetzals for a whole day of work because they never manage to collect more than one bag. They complain of hunger. They complain of thirst. They want coffee, they want a soft drink, they want tortillas. And while they complain, they continue to pick up garbage like someone who picks corn or strawberries in the field. They do it to the rhythm of machetes. Dozens of machetes hitting coconut shells. The men, there, are peeling the fruit to sell it and the percussion of their blades is the background music in this last stage of the game.
There is something ancient in this delusion. As I walk trying to find the clue that will make me understand Guatemala, I see the porters carrying all kinds of merchandise on their backs. I’m not just talking about the banana trees, I’m talking about many others who have always been here, moving from one place to another. I am only now aware of them. Small men with tremendous weights on their bodies. They go with their eyes lowered, looking only at the path they must travel to quickly reach the place of unloading. They have accompanied me throughout this journey, they have crossed my route, I have had to step aside time and time again to let them pass with their urgent cargo.
One of them shows me the instrument he uses to do it. It’s a mecapal, he tells me. A wide belt that is attached at its ends to two ropes with which it supports the load. The girdle is placed on the forehead to protect the head and neck, which have the double function of balancing the bulge from the forehead and distributing the weight throughout the body, so that there is not a single muscle that do not submit to the load. When he explains it to me I understand why they walk without looking up. The girdle of the rope on the forehead and the weight they carry do not allow them. The job of these men is to carry the load, to carry the weight on their backs, not to look beyond, not to lift their heads.
I search my cell phone for information about the mecapal and Wikiguate tells me that it is an artifact that began to be used in Mesoamerica. I read that it survives from the slave regime, in which the indigenous people were forced to carry heavy loads on their backs, supported by the belt from their foreheads. The use of the tumpline requires the body to lean forward, as if bowing, limiting vision. This whole system of exchange that takes place here daily, this whole game of transaction on which the entire city depends, does not work and never would have worked, from Mesoamerica onwards, without these men willing to carry the load. For centuries they have been at it, looking at the ground and advancing without raising their heads.
Simone, the man in the images that accompany this chronicle, a leading character in my journey (whom I only mention now, towards the end of the writing), upon seeing my interest in the rope throws a phrase at me that I am not sure where it comes from. Maybe it’s from him. Perhaps he read it or heard it. Perhaps someone told him and now he simply transmits it, like an ancient message that reaches me in the same way that revelations or key clues to understanding Guatemala arrive.
“The look of the world ends with the girdle of the tumpline,” that’s what he tells me.
The tour of the market comes to an end. We have been four hours tangled in this labyrinth. My place here is still not clear. I am still a foreigner who does not know the codes, who does not know how to read the subtext, and it is likely that after all this trip she has not understood anything about Guatemala at all.
I leave with my eyes lowered, looking at the ground, with the feeling of having always carried such a heavy load on my back, like a tower of seventy-five kilos of bananas.
Perhaps everything, Chile, Guatemala, all of Latin America, can be summed up to that, to the belt of the rope blocking our possibility of raising our heads.
The look of the world ends with the girdle of the tumpline.
Author: Nona Fernandez Silanes
Cinematography: Simone Dalmasso
Curatorship and editing: Emiliano Monge
Central America Account
Guatemala City, May 2022
This chronicle is part of the Cuenta Centroamérica project, under the curatorship of the Mexican writer Emiliano Monge, and in which three writers from Ibero-America, participants in the Central America Counts Festival 2022wrote about emblematic sites and characters of Guatemala City.
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