Letters
A face at the window
Sir: As curious as the story of the shadowy figure at the window in the empty building opposite Patrick Marnham's hotel in Guatemala City (17 July) is the story of how the building came to be empty.
The only hotel near the presidential palace which is popular with visiting foreigners is the Pan-Americano, at the cor- ner of 6th Avenue and 9th Street in Zone 1. Opposite the Pan-Americano is the place to which Mr Marnham must be referring. The upper floors of that building constituted, until last year, the well-known and long- established Pension Asturias, which was at one time a favourite with academics work- ing for extended periods in the archives of Central America.
I stayed at the Asturias for several months last year, by which time it was in notable decline. The couple running it, friendly but hilariously inefficient, spoke often to me of their plans to redecorate the pension as a first step to reclaiming a share of the tourist trade. I pointed out each time that the tourist trade was melting away at a rate inversely related to the surging political violence. They were always struck by this information, and rather depressed.
In the week before my departure for Mexico at the start of last May, a brisk and well-dressed woman from the Ministry of
Defence arrived at my room one afternoon, announcing that she had taken over the pension, that changes were to be made, and that all guests were to clear out by the end of the week. Since I was about to leave anyway, I neither resisted nor asked very many questions. Within a few hours, the ejected couple had produced an army of what I took to be their relations. These peo- ple worked almost without pause for the next four days to remove all the contents of the pension to some undisclosed destina- tion. I had to argue at length to retain my bed on the very last night.
Mr Marnham's figure peeping through the window of the abandoned Asturias is presumably a factotum of the lady from the Defence Ministry; it doesn't sound as if many changes have been made about the place. What makes this pecularity notable is that it is in every way typical of the possibility for collapse and sudden chaos just below the comparatively stable surface of everyday life in Guatemala. But given the sort of thing that the population of that sad country are constantly made to put up with from their uniformly awful leaders, it is sur- prising that they manage to struggle on at all.
R. C. Watson
Peterhouse, Cambridge
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