A cool glance at schizophrenic passion

Patrick Skene Catling

RITES: A GUATEMALAN BOYHOOD by Victor Perera

Deutsch, f8.95

Guatemala is the most spectacularly beautiful country in Central America. It is also politically perhaps the most savage. Not even the loathsome Somoza family of Nicaragua was more cruel in the dirty- tricks department.

When I first visited Guatemala, in 1954, the official guidebook called it 'The Land of Eternal Spring . . . ancient, historical, colourful, picturesque, modern.' It was pleasant to drink aguardiente and lime on a terrace on the shore of Lake Atitlan, which had been admired by Aldous Huxley as ardently as he ever admired anything. In Beyond The Mexique Bay, he called it 'Lake Chromo'. Hummingbirds helicop- tered from orchid to orchid and the sun set in magnificent red and orange gaudiness in great accumulations of clouds above the Pacific, beyond the volcanoes.

Arbenz was the President then, slightly to the right of Gaitskell, I thought; but John Foster Dulles viewed Arbenz's 'agra- rian reform' with Cold War alarm, espe- cially the expropriation of land on which the United Fruit Company of Boston was not growing bananas. The other Dulles, Allen, ordered the CIA to support the so- called revolution which put Castillo Armas in the National Palace — in fact, by means of a small invasion from Honduras, that obedient, mercenary republic which the United States still finds convenient as a base for counter-revolutions. President Castillo Armas's public-relations staff showed us amenable foreign reporters mutilated corpses, men who had been ex- ecuted whilst being hanged upside down by their genitals. To be really humiliating, tor- ture must include an element of sadistic sexuality. Those particular atrocities were said to have been committed by the out- going regime, but one never knows with the Guardia Civil, which is always adapt- able to the requirements of new masters.

Having spent two subsequent, long- separated six-month periods in the escapist bliss of the Guatemalan highlands, I took up Victor Perera's memoirs in an awful mood of fascination and dread. The idyllic serenity of the countryside and the enormi- ties of the police basements of the capital, both aspects of the Mayan-Spanish herit- age, have induced a sort of schizophrenic passion, beyond the normal range of WASP behaviour and emotions. Folk memories of human sacrifice on the pyramid-temples of Tikal and present awareness of North American materialism, as exemplified by the shops of Guatemala City's Sixth Avenue, which is about as ele- gant as a small-town Main Street in Indi- ana, seem to have bent the Guatemalan national psyche into an awkward and un- comfortable shape. Consider then the additional stress of growing up in that place as the child of Sephardic Jewish immig- rants from Jerusalem.

Victor Perera's father and mother were descended from rabbis. The father was himself a Talmudic scholar. 'In Guatema- la,' Mr Perera relates, 'he began life as an itinerant• peddler. (Why Guatemala? Father never explained this to my satisfac- tion.)' Even so, 'with only a few phrases of Quixotic Ladino Spanish,' he sold cloth to Indians and eventually established himself in bourgeois comfort as 'one of Guatema- la's leading merchants.' Victor was brought up in a domestic atmosphere of scho- larship, humanism and loyalty to Zionism — perfect training to be a Guatemalan cultural misfit.

The author naturally fitted more harmo- niously into the intellectual society of New York, where he became for a while an editor at the New Yorker. His adult profes- sional conditioning seems to have been more significantly influential than the childhood which is the main subject of this fragment of autobiography. Here is the view from Manhattan of a boy who was first and always a Jew by temperament, affinity and instruction and a Guatemalte- can merely by temporary geographical chance and legal technicality.

Mr Perera writes in the carefully res- trained, plain, flat, cool New Yorker man- ner, which was developed most skillfully by E. B. White, under Harold Ross, and per- sists in humourless imitation to this day. The prose is simply formal, but not very; every now and then there is a down-home colloquialism, as if to demonstrate dis- armingly that the writer is a good Joe who does not take on airs. There is something to be said for underwriting rather than overwriting but a middle way would be preferable. The reader may long for an occasional variation of tone, a flash of emotional fire or ice. Acolytes of White apparently believe that it is unsophisticated to give any impression of being impressed by people and events, and sophistication is obligatory in a magazine carrying adver- tisements for perfume, bourbon and Brooks Brotherly haberdashery, although it is permissible to present objective evi- dence from which the reader may be able to deduce the writer's emotional re- sponses.

Ubico was the dictator who ruled Guate- mala during the first ten years of Victor's life. When Victor attended the Interna- tional School it was run like a military academy and the pupils or cadets wore uni- forms modeled on those of the US Army. 'Father remarked at the dinner table that Guatemala's political history was being re- enacted at the I.S.'

Though Guatemaltecans often deplored the influence of 'the Colossus of the North,' as they called the United States, Victor, like many of his contemporaries, adored American pop culture. He used to loiter for hours in the airport, eavesdrop- ping on American tourists and sometimes being heard by them: 'My, what a pleasant young man,' one globe-trotting grandmother would say to another. 'Where do you suppose he learned such nice English?'

'Why from the gods, ma'am,' I could have told her, 'like the rest of us True Believers. We learned it from Captain Marvel and Gary Cooper, Walt Disney and Sheena of the Jungle. JimMy Crickets [sic], ma'am, couldn't you tell? We've gone to school in that never-never land over the rainbow that spans from sea to shining sea, where the good guys always draw faster and drink milk instead of firewater; where they shout, "Re- member the Alamo!" "The game's up,

Nemesis!" "Here's lead in your yellow bel- ly!" as they zap all the bad guys from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripo- li. . . Where the bad guys say, "Achtung, Himmel!" and "Cheesit, the cops!" and "I keel you, you dirty double-crossing peeg", where they shout "Banzai!" when they mount an attack, and commit hara-kiri after they muff it — as inevitably they must. Where Crime Never Pays, but the Avenger's work is never done against the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. . . Gee whillikins, ma'am, I might have said, 'hadn't you guessed?'

Mr Perera nostalgically recalls his boy- hood yearnings for the powerful North and simultaneously mocks the xenophobic gringo sentiments they exemplify. Perhaps his childhood was ideologically even more muddled than he suggests.

In the final chapters of this very interest- ing small book, Mr Perera tells of adult visits to his native but alien land. By then his political judgment was clear. Reviewing the Guatemalan history of his own life- time, he decided that by 1954 'the "Guate- malan Spring" was over: . . . a military strongman was again in the presidency.. That year one half of me ran away in anger to the mountains.'

Revisiting Guatemala in the Eighties, he learned about the rival 'death squads,' who were murdering 20 persons a day. Deliber- ate killings have been even more traumatic than widespread death by earthquake. There is a nasty scene in which Mr Perera holds a stag party in Guatemala for his former schoolmates. The class bully, a drunken chauvinist, reviles and threatens his fellows, including the unhappy author. This chapter is the strongest in the book, realistically sombre, in contrast to the bright colours of Karen Barbour's jacket, which is authentically, heatedly romantic. Viva Guatemala! — if possible.