Happy Friday! I´ve finished up my first week of classes, and feel pretty good about my ability to communicate, although all the puppy dog eyes in the world aren´t enough to convince my teacher I´m ready to tackle the subjunctive again. I miss Raul´s gentle, student-centered approach to instruction at the Abraham Lincoln Center in Cuenca, but have to admit that Oscar knows his stuff.
After morning classes today, a microbus-load of us went out for a bit of tourism. We visited Las Fuentes Georginas, a set of pools from a sulfur hot spring outside of town. After a bit of hiking and soaking and lunch, the bus took us on a winding country road to the pretty highland town of Zunil, to visit the local...um, lemme think how to describe this.
So, in many Latin American countries, large sculptures of various saints and biblical figures take a surprisingly and literally active role in the spiritual life of the community. 3 months ago, I was in Antigua for Holy Week, and almost everything revolved around the movement of several statues in procession through the town. My second summer in Ecuador, a statue of the Virgen of Carmen was making the rounds, and I remember bumping into it (and its swanky tour bus) in pretty much every large town I visited.
In Zunil, there´s a statue with a slightly different flavor. San Simon is a semi-pagan semi-Catholic juxtaposition of a Mayan deity, a Catholic saint, and...well, the statue kind of looks like Walker, Texas Ranger. His more common name is Maximon, an amalgamation of the Mayan god´s name, Maam, and Simon.
Every year, the fraternity of San Simon chooses a family to host the saint: the adults, if they were working, quit their jobs and everyone dedicates themselves to caring for the icon. The statue sits on a throne, dressed in cowboy gear with a hat, a bandanna, and a huge pair of black sunglasses. A cigar dangles from his wooden lips; he holds a bowl of money in his lap. I honestly don´t remember how the alcohol was hooked up to him, but he received several glasses of whiskey a day. Maximon, in case you´re wondering, is not the most sedate and ethereal of figures; legend has it that the Mayan diety Maam started out his career as a mortal man who had his arms and legs cut off after sleeping with every woman in his village. The Catholic church attempted to identify the bifurcated San Simon with Judas Iscariot, not Maam, and he´s widely known as the one you go to if you want a side of mala suerte for someone else to go with your own prayers for health and safekeeping.
It cost us each 8 quetzales to enter this year´s temple, which was, of course, in someone´s home. The room flickered with dozens of candles, and one of our teachers explained. Blue candles for health, red for love, white for purity, green for money and...um, yup, those black ones mean that the penitent was asking for death. ¨¿Puede ser metaforico?¨ I didn´t get an answer.
On offer that day for Maximon: a raw chicken, bottles of whisky, some vegetables and a handful of herbs. The man of the house fussed over the cigar in his mouth. A woman in Mayan skirts walked in and out of a side room, doing household chores, while an older man sat in the back and flipped through a newspaper. A farmer came in and approached the statue, addressing it aloud to request something I didn´t catch. He passed one red candle and one green one over the saint´s body and made an offering I didn´t see. Our teacher took us to the roof of the house to show us a Mayan altar, with three smoking piles of ash and debris. Eggshells, paper scraps, candle bits and bundled herbs, burnt by the community priests at the request of the faithful.
We thanked the hosts and left, walking a few blocks downhill to the Catholic church. It was, as they often are, a soaring and ornate building, carved with little birds and vines like a frosted wedding cake. Inside were the usual statuesque subjects--a stoic, pious Mary, Saint Joseph with a donkey, a handful of apostles and a flagellated Christ with the blood sculpted on. I dropped a few coins in the offering box and we headed back to Quetzaltenango.
Just in time, as it turned out, for another religious experience, as three of us found out about The Bakeshop. Two days a week, a group of American Mennonites open shop near the mall to sell whoopie pies, brownies, blueberry yogurt, and bags of granola.
Everybody´s got some kind of offering to give.
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