MARIA MAGDALENA
Finally we arrive at a Spanish style old house blocked off from the street with big blue metal gates, the house, where Zeyno has been living for the last five weeks with a woman in her 70s, Maria Magdalena. Her two children live in America, the other two in Guatemala, one of which is in Xela offering Maria Magdalena several grandchildren visiting her on a daily basis. The big metal gates allow entry into a court yard after quite some screeching and squeaking. Cement covers the ground in the court yard, around which are several doors painted with bright greenish blue. One of the doors opens into a room with a bathroom in, the largest of the rooms Maria is renting out to the students of the Spanish school Zeynep attended for four weeks. The floor is covered with textured flowery tiles. Although it looks pretty dilapidated, I will discover later on that this room actually is the ‘luxury suit’ compared to the rest of the house.
The second door opens to the main house with three rooms and a kitchen. One of the rooms is Maria’s bedroom, in which is the only bathroom in-house, saved for her own use. Tenants are assigned to use a shared bathroom, which is out in the yard, akin to the squatting homes in Turkey. Zeynep and I will share her bedroom for the one night I will stay there, just for the sake of getting to know how at least a local actually lives and also to avoid the potential bed bugs that are routine residents of most hotels in Guatemala, I hear. I do check the bathroom out in the yard, my goodness, I would have to clean that place for two days before being able to use it. I can understand, now, why Zeyno was doing sponge baths during the week and taking her showers at hotels during her weekend travels for the last 4 weeks. I will wait to take my real shower at Casa del Mundo, to which we will move tomorrow. Sponge bath before going to bed will have to do in this house. I am embarrassed with my American way of feeling and thinking, but I can’t bring myself to getting in there to make myself dirtier than I already am having flown for half a day.
My humble bedroom of one night
Fortunately, the tenants of the ‘luxury suit’, who are Zeynep’s friends from the Spanish school keep their door unlocked so that we can use their bathroom, the toilet, that is, very happily, it is clean. Zeynep is very comfortable, not the way I was sensing she was feeling during the first couple of weeks of her stay here. She is so as-a-matter-of-factly in a very sweet way. “Well, at first it is hard, the concept of hygiene here is totally different than ours. After being a bit frustrated for about a week or two, you come to terms with this, accept the fact that you must consider anything and everything you touch will be dirty and develop a way of protecting yourself without asking for too much from the locals.” Hence, all the plastic garbage bags covering surfaces to create a lining for toiletry, for clothes, for sheets, for electronics when they are not in use… Human kind can be extremely creative.
Fortunately, the tenants of the ‘luxury suit’, who are Zeynep’s friends from the Spanish school keep their door unlocked so that we can use their bathroom, the toilet, that is, very happily, it is clean. Zeynep is very comfortable, not the way I was sensing she was feeling during the first couple of weeks of her stay here. She is so as-a-matter-of-factly in a very sweet way. “Well, at first it is hard, the concept of hygiene here is totally different than ours. After being a bit frustrated for about a week or two, you come to terms with this, accept the fact that you must consider anything and everything you touch will be dirty and develop a way of protecting yourself without asking for too much from the locals.” Hence, all the plastic garbage bags covering surfaces to create a lining for toiletry, for clothes, for sheets, for electronics when they are not in use… Human kind can be extremely creative.
Maria Magdalena is a chatty, affectionate woman, who has prepared tea and watermelon for us, before dinner, for my arrival. It is clear that she likes Zeynep. Zeynep already has told me lots about her and how she developed a grandmother granddaughter type of a relationship with her over the last four weeks. I am grateful for that knowing how important my mother has been in Zeynep’s life and how painful it still is for all of us, but much more so for Zeynep to see my mother disappear gradually toward her end after a very unfortunate car accident. She was telling me on the phone how she was spending most of her free time with Maria, chatting with her, watching TV together lying at the opposite ends of the same sofa, like family members. Her American friends were astonished with how close a relationship Zeynep had built with Maria, when it felt so natural to Zeynep since these had been just some of the things she had done with her grandmother as she was growing up.
Maria and Zeynep
Maria and I exchange a few appreciative sentences to express our mutual gratefulness. I can use my Spanish! What a wonderful satisfaction it is to be able to communicate in another language other than Turkish and English, both fully part of me now. A kind of rejuvenation. I decided to learn Spanish a few years ago and gave it a try on several occasions, which helped me with establishing a background for it. But my real effort started after Bill’s death. The pain was so hurtful, I had to do something with myself to reduce it to a bearable level. I increased my exercise program to every day, helped a bit but not much. I started taking out Spanish teaching CDs from the local library to listen to in the car, after all that was when I was most exclusively all by myself and with my thoughts and my sadness. It helped tremendously, to my pleasant surprise. I then signed up for a Spanish class at the university for the spring semester. It was indeed working. That is how I decided learning something new that requires all of you is, if not THE, but one of the best remedies to grieving the loss of something or somebody special.
Maria and I exchange a few appreciative sentences to express our mutual gratefulness. I can use my Spanish! What a wonderful satisfaction it is to be able to communicate in another language other than Turkish and English, both fully part of me now. A kind of rejuvenation. I decided to learn Spanish a few years ago and gave it a try on several occasions, which helped me with establishing a background for it. But my real effort started after Bill’s death. The pain was so hurtful, I had to do something with myself to reduce it to a bearable level. I increased my exercise program to every day, helped a bit but not much. I started taking out Spanish teaching CDs from the local library to listen to in the car, after all that was when I was most exclusively all by myself and with my thoughts and my sadness. It helped tremendously, to my pleasant surprise. I then signed up for a Spanish class at the university for the spring semester. It was indeed working. That is how I decided learning something new that requires all of you is, if not THE, but one of the best remedies to grieving the loss of something or somebody special.
Of course there will come times I will be at a loss with what Maria was saying. Zeynep knows me all too well, reading my facial expression will come to my help right away. I can’t believe how Zeynep’s Spanish has sky-rocketed in only 4 weeks. Her accent sounds like she has lived here all her life. Her intonation has the same musicality of the locals. When I get out of the picture, Maria and she carry on a beautiful conversation, only half of which I can understand. I gradually start getting a sense of who Maria is. It is clear that this woman is not of low SES. Even if her house and the way she runs her financial affairs are similar to the lowest of the low in America (even in Turkey), her manners, body language, and the way she treats us are more attitudes of the middle class. Zeynep verifies that she actually is a middle class woman in Guatemalan standards. It is heart breaking to see the distinct divide between the living conditions of the middle class in America (even in Turkey) and in Guatemala even if there isn’t much difference between how people from the same SES, pretty much all over the world, think and feel.
Maria has other tenants in her upstairs rooms that are accessible from the same courtyard. The next morning, I see one of her tenants getting out of the bathroom in the courtyard. So that place, in worse condition than any port-a-potty I have seen in the USA is indeed used by her tenants and not only for a pee squatting up in the air but for a shower, too!! The guy getting out of the bathroom is akin to his tiny self, expelled from his mother’s womb a few decades ago. He didn’t even bother using a towel to cover up himself if what I unexpectedly catch with the angle of my eye is not an illusion. He just walked the few steps across the yard in his natal attire; I wonder whether this is Latino machismo, or not expecting anybody awake at that hour of the morning, or simply an innocent choice of a naturist.
Fig tree and figs in the rear corner of Maria's courtyard
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