When I was in ninth grade, my father ran away from home.

One frostbitten New

England morning, he climbed into his gray Toyota and drove toward Guatemala. He
left a letter for us written in blue pen on a single sheet of my school notebook paper.
Somewhere around DC, he turned back. I have always wondered how his life, and mine,
would be different had he kept driving. His longing has haunted me ever since. It is
why I am here in Guatemala, living day to day, page to page. I want to understand how
my father could possibly love a country more than his family.
I am sitting in a library in the Western Highlands. Tattered spines of paperbacks line
the locked doors of the glass wooden bookshelves. Paulo Freire. Rigoberta Menchú.
John Updike’s Rabbit Run. The library is one room with three square wooden tables
and posted on the white wall, a map of the world. It is an upside-down map: North
America is in the southern hemisphere; Australia trades places with Europe. A window
the size of a door places afternoon light in clean strips across the cool tiles. Outside,
clouds cast shadows over the mountains.
The one librarian’s name is Aracelis. She is rosy-cheeked and wears a pearl white
sweater with a fur collar. Her black hair is thick and long like mine. She hovers over my
desk, examines the black marks I have scribbled between the thin tan lines in my
leather-bound journal. She leans in. My shoulders tense. I have seen her before. I
return to this library like I return to this country, over and over. But today, it’s as if my
face has a sign that reads: Tell me your story.
“My father lives in the United States, in Arkansas City, and when I was three he left
Guatemala to work, but he always called and said he had gifts for us—my mother, my
sister, and well…my father, for me, he was just everything, hope, a hero, until one day
when it was my sister’s birthday and we had the cake ready, the food, everything, and
the telephone rings and it’s him.”
All this she tells me in one long black hair of a sentence. She talks with her hands and
her eyes dart left to right. She speaks as if we’d penciled this conversation in our
calendar weeks ago, like she’d been practicing it while twisting along the narrow,
cracked sidewalks in the pink light of sunrise, the orange light of sunset.
“So he says, look, I’m only calling to say that I have another family now. I don’t love
you anymore and I’m never returning.”
We both nod. Me, side to side, and she, up and down.
“I didn’t want to say anything to my sister. So I waited until my mother asked me what
was wrong. I had to tell her. My mother sat down and she cried. Then my
grandparents. My sister. And me.”
“Maybe he was lying,” I say. “Sometimes life is hard in the U.S. People can’t find work. A
man can feel like a failure.”
“No.” She pulls down her sweater. “After that I didn’t want to have anything to do with
him. Yo sufrí. I even had to go to the hospital…yes.”
In the window I spot an old man pushing a rickety wagon full of empty gas tanks. The
shade from his cowboy hat hides his face. The high sun has moved its attention to
another latitude, another longitude. Seated at the wooden table, I want to cry, not for
Aracelis, not for her father, but for mine. He could not do what other men did, my
father, who has been homesick for forty years. And yet a feeling of gratitude swarms
me. Thank God he didn’t have the guts. Thank God my father came back, and that I, his
daughter, can relish the warmth of both suns. That is what I felt as I listened to Aracelis
that afternoon in the library, when I stared long and hard at the upside-down map.
—
Jennifer De Leon is the winner of the 2011 Fourth Genre Michael Steinberg Essay
Prize. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Ms., Briar Cliff
Review, Poets & Writers, Guernica, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010, and
elsewhere. She has published author interviews in Granta and Agni, and she has been
awarded scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference,
Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Blue
Mountain Center, and the Sandra Cisneros Macondo Writers’ Workshop. The editor of
the anthology, Wise Latina: Writers on Higher Education (University of Nebraska Press,
2013), she is also working on a memoir and a novel.