By Nona Fernández Silanes | Guatemala
It’s five in the morning, and the sun is rising at La Terminal market.
Since dawn, thousands of men and women have arrived, setting up their goods to begin the daily ritual of buying and selling.
The heart of the trade that defines all of Guatemala City’s commerce beats here. The transaction takes place in this small city of damp corridors where everyone has a role, where each person is a piece of an ancient, chaotic game.
My place here is unclear.
I am a foreigner. I don’t know the codes; I can’t read the subtext.
I’ve only been here a couple of days. I understand little of this land I find myself in, and in this early morning walk, I’m searching for something—I don’t quite know what—probably a clue to help me better understand this country.
I imagine that clue is not sold like the other things circulating here. I imagine I won’t be able to haggle for it if I do find it, and that leaves me off the board in this game. But I’m willing to try to fit in, so I enter the market and begin my hunt in this explosion of colors, aromas, textures, lights, sounds, temperatures, music, shouts, and whistles that tangle together, creating a highly complex sensory experience.
Maybe Guatemala is just that, a highly complex sensory experience. And maybe my search strategy should be surprise, awe, the sensory overload in front of everything that comes my way.
White warehouses, full of shiny onions. Red warehouses, packed with tomatoes and smiling merchants.
Green warehouses, overflowing with limes. Yellow warehouses, brimming with corn. Black warehouses, with black vendors, their faces and clothes blackened by the coal they sell and carry. Aisles filled with unknown fruits, vegetables I never imagined. Fish of all sizes for sale. I see shark heads, crab antennas, shellfish. In another section, there are meats and sausages. And in another, legumes. I see chickens tied up in baskets covered by nets, goats walking with their owners, who milk them, offering the fresh milk. A man sells figurines of saints, virgins, angels. There are stalls selling clothes, shoes, socks, sweaters, underwear. I see plastic toys, masks, hygiene products, tonics for hair, for wrinkles, for better sex. A woman walks by selling remedies. Five for pain relief. Five for pain relief. Five for pain relief and Neurobion.
I suppose the clue I’m searching for to understand Guatemala is hidden beneath the disordered movement of all these people. Surely, it’s lodged in their bodies, in the sum of all their bodies. In one corner, a man praises God with a microphone in hand. In another corner, another man praises the same God with another microphone. And in another corner, the same thing happens. And another. And another. And another. Glory to God, glory to the Almighty. Glory to God, glory to the Almighty. Most of the stalls have names of saints or virgins. La Bendición warehouse, El Divino Niño, Tomatera de San Miguel, La Auxiliadora fruit stand. The walls are plastered with posters announcing vigils and graffiti with phrases protecting the market. To God be the glory, I read on the front of a house. Glory to God, glory to the Almighty. Glory to God, glory to the Almighty.
A group of men carry towers of bananas on their heads. Then they run to throw them into the banana warehouse. Seventy-five kilos of bananas on their heads, so they say. Seventy-five kilos of bananas for which they will be paid, and then they’ll invest that money into an electronic machine. It’s a colorful machine that offers a game of chance. A coin in the slot, a button pressed, and their fate is sealed. A big prize may come, doubling the number of coins thrown into the machine. Or they might lose everything. The seventy-five kilos of bananas carried on their heads, for nothing. I watch the game again and again. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose and go back to carrying bananas to gamble on luck. Seventy-five kilos of bananas.
You’ll get fly glue, you’ll get rat glue. Put down fly glue, put down rat glue. It’s hard to organize so much stimulus. Everything here is a big chaos, complete disorder. And in that explosive logic, outside of any logic, I begin to feel dizzy. I no longer know exactly where I’m going. At times, I think I’ve already been to certain stalls, but I’m not sure. At times, I think I’ve seen faces, voices, smiles, dental crowns before, but I couldn’t confirm it. The streets have no names, there is no compass or point of orientation. Just an unnamed energy pushing me forward between sellers and buyers, between carts and baskets, between little pieces of meat, tortillas, and horchata.
What are you buying, what are you looking for, what can we get you?
There are plastics, there are piggy banks.
Hawaiian pineapple, Hawaiian pineapple.
You’ll get fly glue, you’ll get rat glue.
The voices echo in these damp corridors of half-finished buildings, towering toward the sky. If I look up, I can see clotheslines, the face of a child or the silhouette of a cat peeking out of tiny windows. Families who have made these nests their homes, balancing carefully to avoid falling. Like a tower of seventy-five kilos of bananas on a man’s head. I wonder if these structures, just like a man’s head, can bear the weight without collapsing. Without falling.
Repent for your sins. Glory to God, glory to the Almighty.
A sour stench, a mix of garbage and excrement, comes from the dump area. The waste from the entire market ends up here. In this final stage of the transaction chain, a group of women endures the stench to collect plastic in the rain that has started falling. There are no colors here. The stench consumes everything. They tell me they get ten quetzales for a bag full of plastic. Ten quetzales for a whole day’s work because they never manage to collect more than one bag. They complain of hunger. They complain of thirst. They want coffee, they want a soda, they want tortillas. And while they complain, they continue collecting trash as if they were gathering corn or strawberries in a field. They do it to the rhythm of the machetes. Dozens of machetes cutting through coconut shells. The men across from them peel the fruit to sell it, and the percussion of their blades is the background music in this last station of the game.
There’s something ancient in this madness. As I walk, trying to find the clue that will help me understand Guatemala, I see the porters carrying all sorts of goods on their backs. I’m not just talking about the banana carriers; I’m talking about many others who have always been here, moving from one place to another. Only now do I become aware of them. Small men bearing tremendous weights on their bodies. They walk with their heads down, looking only at the path they must take to quickly reach the unloading point. They’ve accompanied me throughout this entire journey; they’ve crossed my path, and I’ve had to step aside again and again to let them pass with their urgent load.
One of them shows me the tool he uses to do this. It’s a mecapal, he tells me. A wide strap tied at its ends to two ropes used to carry the load. They place the strap on their forehead to protect their head and neck, which serve the dual purpose of balancing the burden from the forehead and distributing the weight across the body so that no muscle escapes the strain. As he explains this, I understand why they walk without lifting their heads. The mecapal strap on their forehead and the weight they carry don’t allow them to. The job of these men is to transport the load, to bear the weight on their backs, not to look beyond, not to lift their heads.
I search for information about the mecapal on my phone, and Wikiguate tells me that it’s a tool that began to be used in Mesoamerica. I read that it survives from the era of slavery, when indigenous people were forced to carry heavy loads on their backs, supported by the strap on their foreheads. Using the mecapal requires the body to lean forward as if bowing, limiting vision. All this system of exchange that takes place here daily, this whole transaction game on which the entire city depends, wouldn’t work and never would have worked, from Mesoamerica onward, without these men willing to carry the load. For centuries, they have been doing this, looking at the ground and moving forward without lifting their heads.
Simone, the man behind the images that accompany this chronicle, a key figure in my journey (whom I only mention now, toward the end of the writing), upon seeing my interest in the mecapal, throws me a phrase I’m not sure where it comes from. Maybe it’s his. Maybe he read or heard it somewhere. Maybe someone told it to him, and now he’s simply passing it on, like an ancient message that reaches me in the same way revelations or key clues for understanding Guatemala arrive.
“The world’s view ends with the mecapal strap,” he says.
The tour through the market comes to an end. We’ve spent four hours entangled in this labyrinth. My place here is still unclear. I am still a foreigner who doesn’t know the codes, who doesn’t know how to read the subtext, and it’s likely that after all this journey, I haven’t understood anything about Guatemala.
I leave with my gaze lowered, staring at the ground, with the sensation that I have always carried a heavy load on my back, like a tower of seventy-five kilos of plantains.
Perhaps everything—Chile, Guatemala, all Latin America—boils down to that: the strap of the mecapal blocking our ability to lift our heads.
The world’s gaze ends with the strap of the mecapal.
Credits
Text: Nona Fernández Silanes
Photography: Simone Dalmasso
Local Support: Carmen Quintela
Curation and Editing: Emiliano Monge
Centroamérica Cuenta | Guatemala City, May 2022