A Lineage of Guilt: Part One

Aren't we still Kings here too?

Antigua, Guatemala is a city of doors and walls and I want to see behind all of them.

It takes me five days to make friends with the expats in town and six days to regret it.

Tequila. Mezcal. Gin. Ron… that’s the Spanish word for Rum. Cigarettes. Drinks pile up in front of me. Somewhere between a hand crafted cocktail and a top shelf sipping spirit, a shot of fireball appears. The women are rolling dice and telling me to take my turn. I don’t understand the rules, but I play anyways, though not before protesting that I don’t have enough cash to buy everyone shots.

They don’t care. Nobody cares. There are enough older men in this bar, in this town, to pay for all the shots in all the world. Except that’s not entirely true but after the second rooftop terrace, I don’t touch my wallet. 

The night begins on the rooftop patio of The Snug, an Irish bar next to a narrow park lined with water basins on the east edge. This is where families used to laundered their clothes. Some still use it for bathing. There are three volcanoes surrounding us. Volcán Agua to the left, and Fuego and Acatenango hiding behind clouds to the right.

It is the 75th birthday of an expat named Tom. He had his hair dyed yesterday for the occasion and sports a porn star mustache that has also been dyed shoe polish brown. I was invited to the party by a firecracker named Carrie who cut my hair yesterday (after giving Tom his birthday look). She has lived here for four years.

When I arrive at the party, she’s nowhere to be found and the only person I recognize is Ross, an American expat in his early 50s or late 40s who lives in the room across from mine at the guesthouse.

Ross is sweet, welcoming, and introduces me to everyone he knows at the party. They are predominately older, white Canadian and American men who “came for a month and never looked back.” 

But not all of them are white or men or live here full time. Ross also introduces me to Dame, a black man around my age from Nova Scotia, who soon leaves to play guitar at another bar, and Manuel, a Guatemalan man who’s lived all over the world but chose to return here.

When Ross tells us his favourite thing about Antigua is how well the expats mingle with the locals, Manuel snorts and says, “Please. I’m the only brown person here.”

From my perspective I cannot confirm or deny this. As much I judge those around me, I do not truly know how to delineate between Mayan, Guatemalan, Spanish, colonizer, local, expat, immigrant or visitor—who belongs to what, where, when, and how. 

The sun sets without drama.

It is a cool, windy night in the land of eternal spring and the crowd dissipates as the light fades. I watch Tom sit by himself at the bar, looking content, as I finish off the dregs of another Kelly’s nachos—Kelly Grande she calls herself after she discovers we share the same name—as a young Danish woman across from me tells me she hopes “never go home” as we pick the plate clean of leftover cheese, and leave the terrace to head down the narrow spiral staircase and out onto the street, parting ways for about an hour.

Soon I will find her at the bar where the fireball appears. 

Ross isn’t the only expat who rents a room at my guesthouse. There is another older white American man, a 74 year old from Minneapolis who we’ll call “Friar” because that is what his hair reminds me of.

He gives me the creeps, this man: his hairdo, his shuffle, the dry white of his face. He is not a part of the group Ross calls the “Antigua family” and I don’t wonder where he fits in. I just think about how uncomfortable he makes me.

I didn’t come to Guatemala to think political thoughts, but it seems the dynamics of power and patriarchy never sleep. I can’t help but do the math.

I came here—not to escape, but—to focus on myself: my writing, my journey. After two and a half years of activism and organizing and advocating, something had to give. I thought it would be easy to get away from the pull of the drama of the world.

I thought I could live in the space between with people like Carrie, my hairdresser, who scrawled a message across the top of her salon mirror:

NO TALK OF RELIGION, POLITICS, COVID, VACCINES ♥️ LET’S FOCUS ON GOOD THINGS

“I’ll cheers to that,” I said when I read it, relieved for the permission to stand down. But, later that night, somewhere after the first shot of tequila and before I “accidentally” spill the shot of fireball handed to me, I am drunk and waving my arms around, telling my new friends about my arrest and how evil the Canadian government is for allowing old growth forests to be logged for profit.

One woman, an American just slightly older than me, coupled here with an older Canadian man, asks, “We don’t need those trees, do we? Won’t they just grow back?”

I freeze, unable to find words before bursting, “OF COURSE WE NEED THE TREES. It takes hundreds—thousands—of years for them to grow!”

She shrugs. Drinks her drink. But the rest of the patrons at the bar seem to get it. I have their attention—they are staring at me, eyes wide—and now I want to make some sort of point, but there is no point to be made.

“It didn’t work,” I say. “The protesting. My arrest. It didn’t change policy.”

I sigh as they continue to stare. I want to offer them something, anything, so I say, “But it changed me. That’s not nothing. And coming together to build community against destruction is the most beautiful thing. We got a taste of how it could be different. Even if we failed, it’s so complex, you know…” I trail off.

A handsome young man from Guatemala City sitting down the bar looks me in the eye and says, “At least you tried.”

I give him a small smile. He’s right. At least I tried. I always try. For good. For connection. For adventure, for expansion, for oblivion. I try.

We move to another bar across the courtyard and I side step the spilled fireball and steal cigarettes from strangers and ask Ross if he’s ready to go home because I don’t want to walk alone and I wake up the next day hungover, filled with relief and regret and I remember —

A Lineage of Guilt. This is what I feel when I drink too much.

Guilt: perhaps why I, unprovoked, recount tales of my personal protests—drunk on expat dollars, drunk old man dollars, drunk because I am female, attractive, here. I would never consume that much if it wasn’t free, at least not now or not anymore.

But when I shook the Magic 8 Ball at Carrie’s hair salon that afternoon, asking if I should throw caution to the cool January Antiguan wind and go out and let go, it said, “Yes. Definitely.”

So here we are now.