Glaring Ghosts

Back in the day Antigua was full of small bookshops selling rather small books, many of which were about its famous fantasmas. 

It was then possible to speculate that the city belonged to its disembodied inhabitants, the rest of us just passing through. Nowadays of course, if any ghosts remain, they must have moved out to special gated communities laid down on the fringes, and will tend to limit their time spent haunting the historical centre...avoiding Antigua at the weekends, heaven forbid, so to speak.

It's been one of those weeks when I have been attentive to our own ghosts, in particular to the frankly absurd number of people of our acquaintance here in Guatemala, lost to either acts of senseless violence or silly, avoidable accidents.

One family has become emblematic of this dark phenomenon for us. Three brothers: one died in his car outside a bank in the capital, riddled with bullets. Just a few years before another had perished an insidiously dumb industrial accident. One remains.

 

Yesterday I had a sudden flashback to an evening at El Manhattan, a night club (panic not, the British rather than the Guatemalan variety, with the g and h in proper position) in Antigua, which now goes by the name of La Bodegona. 

 

You can still see the little arched niche of the taquilla out front.

The bar was located more or less where you'll find the cured meat refrigerators nowadays. In my reminiscence 'R', a love rival, is seated at a small round table giving me the stink eye as I pick up a drink. I guess it would have been positioned roughly where the Bodegona now stacks up the stuff from Pricesmart, on sale here at considerably scruffier prices.

I can't recall how long 'R' spent haunting me at the Manhattan that night, but in retrospect it seems like ages, especially as a few years later I learned that he'd met his end violently.

He was alone then, but was usually accompanied by his regular wing-man, a lanky lad named 'T', almost always at his side when we'd run into them on the streets of Antigua, usually part of a group of four, all of them 3-4 years our junior.

This whole package of memories that seem hard to distinguish from hallucinations came back to me yesterday because while we were standing at the corner of our local park engaged in conversation with some family members, a motorbike rounded the corner and its rider took a significant pause in order to gawp at us, his face a picture of nascent heavy processing. It was 'T'. 

 

And of course he wasn’t wearing a helmet.