Driving
through those mountainous hillsides, clouds covering up the pueblos like the
country’s best kept and most shameful secret.
All the overpopulation, the poverty, the indigenous, the brisk, red,
wind-burnt cheeks carrying firewood down the mountain. The clouds are shading them, hiding them from
the rich elite that might be passersby on the carreterra. Yet like
development and aid projects abounding, these clouds come and go and they can’t
hide these secrets forever. Out from the
clouds emerges those rebels, those little hoodlums, those curious little niños who without even knowing it have
ventured from the pueblo to the highway to reveal this best kept secret. So many tiny hands waved at me on my drive
back from Lake Atitlan on Sunday. I
gazed out the window thinking about all the stories hidden from my eyes by
those clouds. It was the best moment of
their day. It was their adventure. It was their trip to the airport to watch the
planes fly overhead. It was their
forbidden peaking through the cracks to observe the rich next door neighbors.
I’m not sure if they had to sneak out to do it.
They just sat there, in groups of four of five, holdig each other with
the most innocent intimacy, and the most apparent excitement and
curiosity. Gigantic smiles draped from
ear to ear, eyebrows raised in the hopes of a wave back. Every car, and I mean every car was honored with a wave from these kiddos, like beauty
pageant stars that are never ingenuine and never get tired of waving.
I was
distracted long enough from my novel long enough to ponder all these tiny,
scarred, Moreno hands waving at me
all afternoon. What is it they were
hoping for? What is the feeling they got
when I waved back at them. Do they dream
sometimes, at night in those clouded, shaded, cold hillsides, that someday they could drive in the car on that
highway. If they did, would they wave back?
