The Goddess from El Ranchio junction
“El Ranchio!” shouts the bus driver. A flock of peddlers cling to the windowpanes like locust to the crops, offering water bottles, rapidly melting ice cream scones and mango slices. The thought of being on their side of the window in a minute sends a shiver down my spine. I’m the only passenger dropping herself into this chaos. I’m trying to move with confidence, throwing my backpack on the floor and sitting on it pretending to read a book and evade my presence, but the attention focused on me sabotages my concentration.
It was 1997. The government of Guatemala has just signed a peace agreement with the guerrilla rebels and the rumor was that many of the newly unemployed armed fighters in the north of the country have taken up robbery. It was a bad timing to be lured off the beaten track and follow Alex to Coban; that city that offered absolutely nothing besides him, and then again he didn’t end up offering much either. So here I was, alone for the first time, waiting for the daily bus to Petén, to Tikal.
As I’m working on playing cool and concentrated in my book, I’m missing another bus that stops right beside my backpack. The sound of the driver peeing on his wheel in my vicinity is the only thing that makes me jump off the backpack and move it seconds away from being splashed. The peddlers die laughing and I join them. Ironically, I start feeling safer here. Every time a bus leaves, the junction becomes very quiet. The peddlers retreat to the tin pavilions to hide from the sun, and loose interest in me. It’s time to find out when’s the bus to Petén. “Excuse me, when’s the bus to Petén?” I ask in Spanish.
I think I really noticed her only after the question was already asked: very old, very skinny, her face’s wrinkled and her spine’s curved, her black and gray hair is gathered behind her back and her clothes are worn out. “In about an hour” she answers, “I’ll tell you when it’s here”. She turned away but I couldn’t. I kept following her with my eyes. She had a big pot covered with a cloth on a collapsible wooden tripod. She was too old and too weak to push her way between the peddlers onto the buses but she was very quick to lift up that tripod and rush towards descending passengers or private cars that occasionally stopped at the nearby gas station.
She would gently drop the pot near the potential costumer and lift up the cloth exposing the hot brown chicken legs. If the costumer nodded, she would quickly wrap it up with a hot tortia hidden in the cloth and offer it to him respectfully, with two hands, chin down and a slight bow. She treated every portion as if she was diapering a baby and all of this for less than 50 cents.
Her movements fascinated me. I think I witnessed the practical meaning of pure honor and humbleness for the first time and I felt big tears welling up in my eyes. Although it’s been 12 years since, I tear immediately up to this very day, as her image comes up in my mind. Even now at the moment of writing, and every time I re-read for editing. This person strikes a very deep trans-personal chord in me, and I remember missing home and feeling deep gratitude for the life that I have.
I was flooded with those feelings that people experience in the presence of Gurus and after deep meditations. Was she even a real person or a fallen angel, a portal channeling the misery and beauty of the world’s poverty? “Hey, Peténera!” she calls me suddenly; “there’s your bus”. Between all the hard works burdening her wrinkled curved body she was able to keep my request in mind too.
Six years later I arrived in Guatemala again, and the bus from Antigua to Panachchel dropped a few passengers at El Ranchio junction. The noisy peddlers did their routine but my eyes wondered beyond them, hopelessly looking for the world’s grandma with the chicken pot tripod. Six years of physical labor in this blazing sun must have killed her already. And no one else was selling chicken tortia. Maybe she had no offspring or maybe she was irreplaceable. I mean, the function is always replaceable- everyone could sell chicken- but one’s imprint on the souls of people they meet while doing that function is unique.
Twelve years have passed since the first and only day I saw her, and I see her image so clearly and that’s the only thing I need to think of in order to cry on demand. It makes no sense but so does life. And she ended her life without knowing her ripple effect; not knowing what she meant for a strange person in a strange country that engraved her on its heart as a symbol for honor and humbleness; not knowing she was and will always be someone’s portal to that tree of life, that something deep and unclear in the root of the world.
That is how I imagine sometimes the Goddess, the feminine part of God. In the Jewish tradition we call her Shehina and the story tells she is being exiled to earth where she suffers with the people until they’re ready to become her and heal that consciousness to reunite with God. So while in exile, she might as well be selling chicken tortia at El Ranchio junction. But since she is the Goddess, her every move is meaningful and fully present, revealing that grace that awakens one’s ability to see the world for what it truly is for just a moment, to connect to its texture and experience the suffering and the beauty wrapped together like a chicken in a tortia, only to emerge as pure gratitude in one’s heart.
p.s this story has nothing and everything to do with thanks giving. For those who celebrate it, feel free to share this story on your holiday.
Tags: chicken tortia, El Ranchio junction, Goddess, gratitude, Guatemala, honor, humbleness, old lady, thanks giving
