We didn’t exactly go to Zunil looking for San Simón, but our friend told us she’d seen him there, so we thought that would be an interesting thing to do. We knew we would have to ask around, as he doesn’t have his own chapel but moves to different family houses each year. Physically, objectively, San Simón is a life-size, jointed mannequin who can sit in a chair, or lie down, and can be fed liquids through his open mouth. Culturally he is an entity somewhere between a Christian saint and an ancient Mayan god. Also known as Maximon, he is found in just a few villages in Guatemala and there are many indigenous people who fervently believe that lighting candles, praying to him and bringing him gifts of bread, eggs, alcohol and cigarettes, will bring them good fortune. We had heard stories of him from European friends, who also spoke of him with some reverence, as if seeing him had caused suspension of disbelief.
The day we went to Zunil was also Easter Saturday, which is the end of semana santa (holy week), the biggest holiday of the year in Guatemala. So we thought that even if we didn’t find San Simón there might be other interesting things to see, including textiles from the local women’s cooperative.
It wasn’t hard to find the central square in Zunil because the church, which faces onto it, was a brilliant square of white halfway up the hill. Its ornamented colonial facade stood out in the hard sunlight because the rest of the town, which spreads over the bottom of a deep valley, was built entirely of grey concrete bricks.
The ubiquitous grey of the built environment made the few dashes of colour more brilliant. On the main road, stalls sold farm produce so fresh their colours seemed to leap out of the shade – red radishes and strawberries, orange carrots, pale green cabbages, and bundles of deep green herbs. And when we got to the central square there were women selling cut tropical fruits in front of the church. The colours of the fruit - golden mangoes, pink watermelon, orange paw-paw and yellow cantaloupe - were repeated in the colours and patterns of the fruit sellers’ clothing.
All the traditional clothing I’ve seen in Guatemala is colourful by anyone’s standards, but it struck me in Zunil that they seemed to have a special enthusiasm for the newer iridescent colours and sparkling threads available in synthetic fibres. And there was no such thing as a plain colour – each of their long wrap skirts (cortes) and poncho-blouses (guipiles) had at least half a dozen colours, woven into intricate designs, or hand-embroidered. After a while I noticed that the medallion designs between the stripes in one woman’s corte included schematic dogs, and cats with arched backs, while another had rows of roosters and turkeys, and something that looked like an altar decoration.
My friend and I asked a woman selling fruit if she knew where to find San Simón. We established that he was mucho mucho arriba, or, way up high in the town.
As we started to walk upwards, in the direction we’d been shown, we came to a side street that was covered for about 50 metres by a large carpet, or alfombra. Although it looked just like a textile carpet it was actually made of bright-coloured sawdust, in the semana santa tradition. The base colours of orange and yellow and green had been overlaid with intricate designs made using stencils. There were quite a few people from the town waiting around the street. Almost all the women and girls, down to the tiniest toddlers, were dressed in brilliantly coloured guipiles and cortes. One child was so improbably tiny, and so beautifully clothed, that she reminded me of the display dolls some of my childhood classmates used to collect, showing girls in national costume from around the world. We guessed there was a religious procession due soon, although since we had just seen half a dozen over the previous two days in nearby Quetzaltanenago (Xela), Guatemala’s second-largest city, we weren’t too eager to wait around for it.
Next stop was further up the hill. There was a woman running an informal bar from a wooden shanty at the intersection, and a more salubrious looking bar in a neat white building nearby. I avoided a group of men who were quietly, but obviously, very drunk. Instead I asked a man who was sitting serenely by himself on the raised curb, although as soon as he spoke I realised that what I’d taken for sober dignity was in fact just the erect posture of a practised drunk. In response to my question about San Simón he answered belligerently, “Why do you want to find San Simón? He’s not a saint. He’s an idol! If you want a saint they’re in heaven!” I thanked him and excused myself, trying to wander off aimlessly as if I wouldn’t dream of going to see an idol, now that he’d me straight. I didn’t want to insult him, both because he was drunk and because it was a perfectly sensible point of view. We guessed he was probably one of the many evangelicals in Guatemala, a brand of Christianity that seems rapidly to be overtaking the Catholic Church, and which doesn’t accommodate pre-Christian crossovers like San Simón as readily.
But sometimes an idea takes hold of your legs and they just keep going, and then every now and then your mouth helps out, even though your mind might not be so sure. So we kept strolling up the dusty street in the hot sun, until the 10-year-old of the party complained so loudly about needing a toilet that we had to turn our minds to that problem. Not surprisingly, none of the bars or roadside tiendas had a toilet. Guatemalan men often relieve themselves against a tree or wall in the street and the women presumably hold on. But my partner remembered seeing a public toilet down by the church, a rarity in itself, so those two walked back down while my friend and I continued the search for San Simón.
Next we asked a little boy skipping ahead of his grandmother, who was in turn trying to drag his screaming sibling up the hill by one arm, but the boy ran back to her without responding. Then they all walked past us in silence, up the paved grey street only half the width of a car. Maybe the boy was shy of these two enormous pink women, or perhaps he didn’t speak Spanish but only Quiché, or maybe he’d been warned not to talk to strangers (the myths about white people stealing indigenous babies and children in Guatemala are apparently strong, with a factual basis in shady adoption practices over the years).
Finally my friend asked a middle-sized girl and her impish brother if they knew where to find San Simón. The girl stayed with the tienda which they seemed to be minding, but the boy promptly dashed up the street with my friend in tow, pointed out the house door, and explained that we had to ring the bell and wait for it to be opened. But this was only after we’d all been up to the main road, found the San Simón sign another man told us would be there (hanging from a large sign that advertised a local beer), then walked down past the unmarked correct house, and ended up back at the intersection with the bar and the dignified drunks. Anyway, the little boy was pretty tickled by earning two quetzales (2Q) so easily – the equivalent of 26c US.
While my friend and I sat on a sunny step nearby and waited for the return of the toilet expedition, a young indigenous couple arrived at the San Simón house door and rang the bell. She wore a guipil and corte and carried her baby in a striped shawl slung across her back, in the usual way. He was dressed neatly in shirt and trousers. Neither wore shoes. They both seemed serious and preoccupied, their clothes were a bit threadbare and they looked hot and dusty. The door was opened and they stepped inside.
When our turn came we were asked for 5Q (70c US) to enter – one of the ways San Simón brings good fortune to the family which wins the bid to host him – and walked into a dark, enclosed courtyard where a few family members sat around a cooking fire. Immediately in front of us was a room lit only by a dozen candles sitting on the floor, and to the side was a little tienda selling San Simón statues, and offerings, especially small bottles of the sugarcane firewater, aguardiente. The host told us that San Simón was resting, as he had been sitting up in the other room throughout Good Friday, and would need to do that again on Easter Sunday. The host lead us into the room with the candles, which contained a beautifully carved mahogany bed, almost the only piece of furniture and certainly the only thing of beauty so far evident in the low, grey brick interior. The home-made covers were pulled up to the neck of a shiny pink-faced San Simón, who wore a black leather sombrero and a black knitted scarf over his mouth. Two men stood at the back of the room, with the candles between them and the bed. We joined them there.
I then realized that the young couple we had seen enter were standing next to San Simón’s head and that the man was addressing him in a pleading tone. The accent sounded strange, and it dawned on me that he wasn’t speaking Spanish, but a Maya language, probably Quiché if he was a local, which I’d heard on Guatemalan TV a couple of times. So I felt less worried about intruding on their prayer, even though it was a semi-public one, because they knew we at least could not understand what they said. The man took San Simón’s hat and placed it on his own head while he spoke. Then he took the small bottle of aguardiente (which he had presumably bought from the host for 7Q), poured it into a pottery gravy jug, pulled down the scarf from San Simón’s mouth, and slowly fed it to him. The young man then replaced San Simón’s hat and scarf, and stepped back to allow his wife to move forward and pray.
After a while the young couple turned away to leave the house and the host gestured for us to move forward. Then my son said he too wanted to give aguardiente to San Simón. I was a little horrified, but we agreed to let him, thinking that it wasn’t very consistent to bring him along and then not allow him to participate as others were, even if the three adults in the party would have preferred to be a bit less hands-on. (Of course this type of logic does have its limits, but this seemed pretty harmless). So my son and I approached the head of the bed, while my partner stayed back to take the one photo we’d agreed on, for the price of 10Q. I let my son feed the drink into San Simón’s rounded plastic lips, finding myself a bit revolted by the thought of doing it myself, and preoccupied with wondering where all the aguardiente was going. (Afterwards my friend, who described the San Simón phenomenon as “ a bit creepy”, suggested they probably have a tube going into a bucket, then rebottle the drink and sell it again – although I think the bottle we purchased did have a sealed lid). Anyway, the upshot of all that was that it didn’t even occur to me to ask San Simón for anything, which was probably just as well, as it saved me from yet another moral dilemma.
After we finished and moved back, the host quickly stepped forward and covered San Simón’s mouth with the black scarf. Apparently we had made a faux pas by not doing so.
On our way out the host showed us the other room where San Simón normally sat in a chair. That was set up like a chapel with a vacant black wooden seat in the centre, and a table in front of it that held many loaves of the special round Easter bread, cigarettes, candles and bottles of firewater and whisky.
Afterwards, back out in the bright sun and dusty streets, we did go to the Santa Ana women’s textile cooperative, where they offered beautiful handmade clothing and fabrics. We also saw the procession, at least the beginning of it, headed by a column of masked and plumed young men wearing blonde wigs and the armour of the Spanish conquistadors, who did a slow funereal dance, pacing forward and then back. But all of this seemed almost work-a-day compared with San Simón.
The next day, which was Easter Sunday, we set off in the morning to beat the worst of the traffic returning to Guatemala City after the holidays. On the way we stopped at one of the many roadside stalls, interested in a rustic wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, which we did buy, albeit after the price did some strange things (due to the arrival of the father – “I have Mayan antiques up at my house too” - after the boy had apparently started the bidding too low). But we also bought another statue, a carved man wearing fabric clothes and a black sombrero, who had a wooden cigarette in his mouth and was sitting in a small black chair.
I returned to the car after the bargaining process and handed the two plastic bags into the back seat. A few minutes later, after some rustling, I glanced into the back seat and was surprised to see a foot-high San Simón sitting in his chair on the seat next to my son.
We got back to Guatemala City safely, and also in record time, neither of which can be taken for granted at the end of semana santa…
But I wouldn’t want to encourage too many ‘idol’ thoughts.
Mariposa Pesada
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