Exasperated by the armies of tourists in San Pedro, a friend and I take a short trip around the shores of Lake Atitlán on the back of a pickup. Few tourists dare to try this local form of transportation, since the roads are rumored to be full of bandits. We didn’t see any, and had a wonderful afternoon.

Tired of Washington, D.C.’s middle-class office workers screaming their shopping plans via cell phone to an entire bus, and its rich Georgetown University students name-dropping about their latest “awesome class with Madeleine Albright,” I flew to Guatemala last December, thinking it was far enough off the beaten track to be a natural getaway.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

A single night on the shores of Lake Atitlán left me wondering whether I had left the United States at all. More than 20 English-speaking bars, screening the latest Hollywood blockbusters on portable LCD projectors, long ago transformed the once-traditional village of San Pedro into a winter break party-town filled with fun-craving American students looking for cheap beer and pot, I discovered.

Counting on the fingers of one hand the remaining days of my vacation, I determined to find some isolated, peaceful Mayan village with no tourists, whose traditional heritage was preserved intact; somewhere I could savor the beauty of this foreign land with only the locals to keep me company.

That was my thinking when I decided to head to Todos Santos, a tiny settlement squeezed between the ranges of the Cuchumatanes Mountains in the northwest of the country, five hours by bus from Huehuetenango, the nearest town.

On route to Todos Santos on the “chicken bus” — endearingly known by this name for the passengers’ propensity to use it for carrying chickens, and also ducks, pigs, and other domestic animals.

Village: Under construction

It was only when Todos Santos first appeared in my bus window when we turned a corner that I started wondering if I might have made another mistake. For some reason, the spot so gloriously described in my travel guide as a natural wonder, where tradition has kept the place intact for thousands of years, didn’t quite match the landscape I saw in front of me.

Steel poles protruded from the tops of the many single-storey buildings that made up the town, seemingly waiting for a time when the owners would have the necessary means to add a second floor. Where the houses were finished, their tops were covered with rusting metal roofs placed there three to four years ago, judging from their incipient state of oxidation. The thatched roofs and dilapidated barns of the solitary mountain villages in my native Romania had a more “traditional” air to them than anything I had seen here so far.

As I headed up the village’s main street and past the local market, I spotted yet another couple of American tourists. Even Todos Santos was not free of them. They were wearing lavish, white woolen shepherd’s outfits (undoubtedly stemming from a desire to fit in), laughing over some joke and buying fried chicken.

I gave them the customary American grin as I passed, and took a left at the southern corner of the town center — just as my travel guide indicated — looking for a cheap and hospitable place to stay. A small “hospedaje” sign nailed to the entrance of a house caught my eye. (Many Guatemalan families have turned their homes into backpacker hostels ever since the civil war ended in the late nineties.) I walked into what seemed like a living room opening out onto a central courtyard where a couple of girls were using a machete to cut some vegetables. There were no other guests in sight — and no Americans — and that was reason enough to make me decide to stay.

Although the travel guide wrote an ode to the beauty of Todos Santos, all I could see in the town center when I arrived was another “chicken bus,” a plain-looking church, and a woman returning from shopping with a bag full of vegetables.

When my rooming arrangements were settled, I took a short stroll around town, looking for some form of local entertainment. Not far from the town center, I knew I had found it when I heard music and loud voices coming from inside a small building. I was happy to come across the local pub. At one table people were playing cards; at another a group was laughing heartily while passing around a bottle of rum. There was only one thing wrong with this picture: everybody in the room was wearing a blue uniform. I had entered the police station.

I walked around a little while longer but couldn’t find a bar. Maybe because everyone in Todos Santos preferred the company of their family (or co-workers) when they felt like drinking, I reasoned.

Without much ado, I resigned myself to the idea of spending the rest of the day alone. I had one promising thing to look forward to after all: the sauna I had ordered for the evening when I rented my room.

A new metal roof in the village supposedly unchanged for thousands of years — this roof is still spotless, thus couldn’t have been more than a few months old.

“You’re not going anywhere!”

I headed back to my hostel, invigorated by the thought of my sauna. Behind me, trailed a group of assorted children, shouting “hola” to my back at accurately timed intervals.

But just as I was climbing the steep cobblestone alley back to my hostel I was startled by a burst of shrill wailing and crying, followed by prolonged moans of inconsolable grief. Looking up, I realized that the cries were spilling out from a window just about where my room should be.

Even the children behind me froze in their tracks.

“¿Que paso?” I asked them nervously but they shrugged their shoulders in bewilderment.

With caution, I entered the house, crossing the living room to the inner courtyard, and tiptoed toward the kitchen. The lady of the house — a fast-speaking, no-nonsense woman in her 50s — was busy selecting firewood, pouring water into gigantic pots, and removing corn from the bottom of a sack. I hesitated from interrupting her.

“What happened?” I finally whispered again in Spanish.

She didn’t acknowledge my presence at first. Then suddenly she looked up, as if to ask what I was doing in her kitchen.

“What do you mean, ‘What happened?’” she shouted at high velocity.

Before I could attempt an answer, the cries from somewhere within the house began again. She raised her head to listen for a moment.

“Oh, that,” she said and resumed her housework. “The grandmother just died.”

My eyes bulged. I looked up in the direction of the wailing, wondering what was the appropriate thing to say. I felt genuinely sorry for the woman’s loss, but wasn’t sure what Guatemalan etiquette demanded. Fearing to do the wrong thing, I simply tried looking somber and observed a moment of silence in my head.

I was thinking about why my landlady had used the definite article in Spanish, “la” and not “mi abuela” as if the old woman had been everyone’s grandmother, when it hit me: I would have to spend the night under the same roof — maybe even in the same room — as the corpse. I would be sleeping with a dead body in a remote village in the middle of the mountains! Scenes from Night of the Living Dead and Dracula immediately came to mind and I panicked. (You would too if you had been born in a part of Romania called Transylvania.)

“That means I have to go! I must pack! I must find another hotel room!” I tried explaining in incoherent Spanish.

“What do you mean, find another hotel room?” my hostess thundered. “You are not going anywhere!” She gave me a menacing look. “You already paid for the room. And besides, the sauna is fired up and almost ready to use. What should I do with all the burned wood? Let it go to waste?”

She was right. There was no way I could leave now. It would have been simply rude.

I was still feeling guilty when a brigade of villagers dressed in brown suede jackets and cowboy hats entered the house and began hauling all the living room furniture out into the courtyard.

This was my chance to redeem myself. Without understanding what was going on, I grabbed a piece of furniture too — an armchair — and ran with it into the courtyard.

In 10 minutes, we had emptied the living room of all its contents, leaving only a massive refrigerator of the kind bars keep for storing cold beverages. But a few of us heaving together managed to move even that giant to a new location inside the courtyard.  
As my new workmates pumped my hand after a job well done, I blushed with gringo pride. Just then, another monster — this time of sturdy oak, painted a deep maroon — entered the room we had recently emptied: the coffin.

Now it all became clear: the living room was to be the place where grandma would lie in state for her last face-to-face gathering with the village. Pall bearing looked to be the next outdoor group activity, so I was most relieved when the lady of the house came rushing over to tell me my sauna was finally ready.

I took a trip up the mountain to admire the vista from above. I was a little disappointed when I realized the village was still “under construction.” None of the age patina characteristic of a traditional village — such as we have in Romania — was present here.

Last Rites

Naked except for a towel wrapped around my waist, I was not quite dressed for a wake.

My landlady had led me to a corner of the courtyard, to a bathroom where I had just taken off my clothes. My sauna was supposedly at the opposite end of the courtyard. I would have to walk past the kitchen and the newly assembled crowd to reach it. (By now half the village was chanting hymns in the courtyard.) However, my landlady’s matter-of-factness and the general chaos all around gave me enough courage to brave the crowds. But as I tried to whiz head-bowed through the assembly, the cold mountain air nipping at me, I was accosted by a silent, fast-moving girl of no more than 10 who handed me a thin candle stuck into an empty Coke bottle and motioned to me to follow her.

The structure she led me to resembled nothing so much as a fallout shelter, barely taller than a doghouse and sporting three wooden doors clumsily stacked one upon another as an entrance. I later found out the three doors provided for different levels of ventilation. If you wanted more air, you opened all three; if less, you cracked open just one of them.

I crawled through the entrance on all fours trying to hold on to the towel and my bending candlestick at the same time, while from the doorway, the girl quickly explained in Spanish how everything worked. Before she left, she dropped a molded bar of soap next to the wax-spotted plate on which I laid the candle.

The inside of the sauna smelled of smoke. Next to a smoldering fire in the corner, four copper vessels were arranged in the order of the temperature of the water they contained. My honorary seat was made of five wooden boards placed side by side on top of a drainage hole. Even with my feet folded under me, I could barely sit upright. A little taller and I would have gone through the burned earth ceiling now grazing my head.

With the girl gone, I removed my towel and proceeded to mix the water in the pots with gusto. The faint sounds of chanting trickled in from the cold, and the smoke from the wooden fire tickled my nostrils. I poured a cup of birch-scented water onto my shoulders careful not to hit the ceiling, and let it slide over my skin. As the chanting outside turned into a ritual beat and the water kept falling over me, the experience started to resemble an ancestral Mayan ritual.

As night fell, the cries from the funeral assembly grew louder. I peeked through the cracks of my hideout and saw the grandmother for the first time as she was slowly carried downstairs in her giant maroon coffin. She looked at peace but the women around her were wailing and throwing their hands to the sky. I watched her slowly disappear into the living room, like an apparition from another world.

But I felt her admonishing eyes still on me after she was gone, scolding me for using the firewood she probably chopped herself and brought to the house the day before. What was I doing in the midst of this people whose language I barely spoke and whose customs I didn’t understand, shamelessly pampering myself in the midst of their grief? I felt as fake as the American tourists clad in their shepherd’s coats. A single tear of sorrow and regret, mixed with sweat from my heated forehead, trickled down my face — my small acknowledgement of this old woman I had never known.

A girl was carrying food on her head as I was returning to the village on a rarely traveled footpath. She didn’t see me as I took a picture.

Two’s company

Once I had put my clothes back on, I tried mingling with the crowd but the odds were against me as my Spanish wasn’t good enough to express my condolences. I didn’t even know if condolences were expected of me anymore. The crowd seemed to have shed its earlier forlornness and to the sound of reggaeton music coming from the kitchen, people were loosening up.

Feeling even more out-of-place now, I thoroughly welcomed the arrival of a confused tourist, attracted by the crowds and the flames from the cooking fire that had by now reached camp-site proportions. He was a tad surprised when he learned what the crowds were really about, but since this seemed to be the only spot in town (other than the police station) vaguely resembling a social scene, he chose to stay.

My landlady brought us two beers and, with them in hand, we went to the living room to pay our short respects to the reposing grandmother, and then found a relatively quiet corner to sit and chat.

It felt good to find someone who related to this whole strange affair from the same perspective I did. For once, I was happy to be just another tourist, and to have another one to talk to.

We shared impressions from our respective travels and exchanged itineraries. The 50-something-year-old American was traveling the same route as I was, but pretty much in reverse.

We gave each other tips about places to visit and places to avoid. We even agreed to see each other again a few days later in a bar in Antigua, our joint final destination. Hanging out with an American backpacker didn’t seem like such a terrible ordeal anymore.

I went to bed content, thanks to a few beers, my visit to the sauna, and a good conversation. Having the body of a dead grandmother downstairs in the living room now seemed the most natural thing in the world.

When I was finally ready for bed, I returned to my room on the second floor. Underneath it, people were still paying respects to the grandmother, who was lying in her coffin in the living room.

As expected, I never saw the American tourist again. The next day, as I checked out of the hostel on the way to the bus station, I threw a last look at the coffin, unmoved from its location in the living room. I knew I wasn’t going to see my Mayan grandmother again either.

Bouncing in my bus seat as Todos Santos disappeared behind me, I realized I wasn’t all that different from my fellow tourists. I finally accepted that, like them, all I’d truly wanted from my vacation was a place to relax and unwind. And that’s what my vacation to Guatemala had been, even if I had had to share it with a dead grandmother. The adventure to places where no man had gone before would just have to wait a little longer.

In The Fray Contributor