A Light in the Night

Somewhere in Guatemala

Guatemala City wasn't far from Antigua. There was little I had been sure of during this trip, but I knew this. I remembered the ride from Guatemala to Antigua a few days earlier. It hadn't been particularly long then, and I wondered why the reverse seemed so long now. An old man next to me had just woken up.

"Excuse me," I asked. "How far until Guatemala City?"

"Guatemala City?" he grumbled.

"Sí."

"This bus isn't going to Guatemala City," he explained. He yawned, and closed his eyes. Our conversation was over.

"Excuse me," I said to a woman to my right, "How far until--"

"This bus isn't going to Guatemala City." She had said the same words as the old man, but unlike his words, hers showed concern. Her muscles contorted into an expression I had seem countless times during my travels, as though I were some sort of beached whale that didn't have the wherewithal to find the sea again.

"Oh," I sighed. I was getting quite used to getting lost. "Where am I going then?"

She told me the name of a small town not far ahead. When we arrived, she showed me the bus stop where I should wait for another bus to take me back to the capital. "Are you sure you'll be all right?" she asked. Her smile was genuine.

"Yes, of course." And I meant it.

A few hours later, I still meant it--meant it to each of the passersby who stopped to ask what I was waiting for. In the late afternoon people seemed to fully substantiate the woman's claim that a bus was coming soon. When night came, they became doubtful. And when the last of the lights turned off in the small store in front of me, the last of my optimism flickered out with it.

Shit.

There was nothing to do but wait. I had nothing but a notebook, and no way to see what I was writing. Then I remembered the novel in my bag, but I couldn't even see it let alone read it. I could do nothing but stare off into the darkness.

It wasn't a jungle--in the proper sense--around me. But if I hadn't seen it in the daylight, I might have thought it so. A low buzz ran like a bass, and occasionally the measures were marked with the scurrying of small feet or what sounded like the flap of wings. I looked around me at the few buildings that constituted the town whose name I had forgotten. People wouldn't build here if there were anything too ferocious, I told myself.

The night grew darker, and I forbade myself to look at the time. What good will that do? I thought. I had a fleeting thought that maybe time is a lot like money. Both mean nothing unless someone else shares your conception of them. Listening to the forest behind me, I knew there was no one awake who thought in those terms.

The street was growing lighter, and I walked to the side of the road, staring down the street where the bus had disappeared so many hours ago. There was a car coming, slowly. Of course, I had only seen headlights, but I knew enough about my own luck and public transportation to know it wasn't a bus. And yet as it approached, I saw that it was was large--whatever it was--and it was slowing down.

It looked rather like an apologetic van. Perhaps it had begun as something else, but pieces of metal were attached to it at odd angles so it seemed to have grown out somewhat. It gave the impression of an insect with badly damaged wings.

The driver in the front spoke out to me. Against the grumble of his ailing engine, I couldn't hear anything he said. I put a hand to my hear and shook my head. The engine died out, and the man repeated himself. And yet again I didn't understand.

He was speaking a Mayan dialect, and spoke it quickly. I spoke in Spanish, and asked him to do the same. There was no comprehension. I recalled the previous day in which I had hitchhiked with a Mayan family who spoke no Spanish at all. Yet that had been at some distance from Guatemala City. Apparently I was in a similar place--perhaps the same place for all I knew--because the man seemed confused that he wasn't being understood. I suppose he has a point. Spanish isn't the native language here anyway.

In time our charades ended, and the deafening noise of his engine began again. He and his vehicle inched forward so slowly that I thought I was going to have to push, until it hit a dip in the road and gained some speed, disappearing into the night.

I fumbled in my bag instinctively, trying to find something to pass the time. I felt the grooves of my harmonica, and did not resist the temptation to play quietly for a moment. Why do my travel plans always end this way? I thought.

It's because you don't plan, said a nasty voice in my head.

The nasty voice had a point, but as I thought on my lonely bench and the deserted bus stop, I realized I would have traded all the fine linen and hotel reservations in the world to be where I was right then.

A tall streetlight--hitherto dark--flickered to my right. In a moment the bus stop was bathed in a faint glow. I looked at the grooves of my harmonica again, and returned it to my bag. I withdrew my novel--bought from a vender in San Salvador who only seemed to sell Márquez--and began to read.

Thank God I got on the wrong bus, I thought.