'Excuse me,' I said. 'But what are you hoping to win?'
'You did not see the statue?'
'No.'
'It is on the table - come.' He took me around the back of the crowd and pointed. The lady in the black shawl, seeing that I was a foreigner who craved a look at the statue, lifted it up for me to admire.
'It is beautiful, no?'
'Very beautiful,' I said.
'I think it is very expensive.'
'Of course.'
Some Indian women heard. They nodded; they grinned - they had no teeth; they said it was very lovely, and they went on speaking their names, or signing, and paying their money.
The prize in the lottery - it was more than a statue - was extraordinary. It was an image of Jesus, about two feet high, with his back turned. He wore a crown of gold and a bright red cape with gold fringes, and with his right hand he was knocking on the door of a cottage. It was almost certainly a copy of an English country cottage - a plastic cottage wall of stone, and plastic beams at the eaves; a mullioned window with plastic panes; and an oaken plastic door surrounded by rambling plastic roses, some blue and some yellow. They were not morning glories - they had plastic thorns. A Catholic education had introduced me to Jesus on the cross, in a boat, being flogged, working in a carpentry shop, praying, denouncing the moneychangers and standing in a river to be baptized. I had never seen Jesus knocking at the door of an English country cottage, though I had a dim memory of a painting depicting something similar (five months later, walking through St Paul's Cathedral in London I saw Holman Hunt's 'The Light of the World' and was able to link it to that Guatemalan set-piece).
'What is Jesus doing?' I asked the Guatemalan man.
'As you see,' he said. 'Knocking on the door.' Knocking is a violent word in Spanish - more like hammering or throttling. Jesus was not doing that.
'Why is he doing that?'
The man laughed. 'He wants to go in. I think he wants to go in.'
The lady in the black shawl put it down. She said, 'It is heavy.'
'That house,' I said, gesturing. 'Is it in Guatemala?'
'Yes,' said the man. He stood on tiptoe and looked again. 'I cannot say.'
'Does the house represent anything?'
'The little house? It represents a house.'
We were getting nowhere. The man excused himself. He said he wanted to have his picture taken.
There was a priest nearby.
'I have a question, Father.'
He nodded benignly.
'I have been admiring the statue of Jesus in the lottery.'
'A beautiful statue,' he said.
'Yes, but what does it represent?'
'It represents Jesus, who is visiting a house. The house is represented. You are an American, no? Many Americans come here.'
'I have never seen anything like it before.'
'This is a very special lottery. Our feast day.' He bowed. He wanted to get away from me.
'Is that in the Bible? Jesus at the little house?'
'Oh, yes. Jesus goes to the little house. He visits the people, he preaches and so forth.'
He sounded as if he was making this up. I said, 'Where exactly in the Bible-'
'You will excuse me?' he said. He gathered his skirts. 'Welcome to Guatemala.'
Perhaps he thought I was mocking - I wasn't; I was only seeking information. If my hotel had been something other than a flophouse, run by a bad-tempered hag, I might have found a Gideon Bible in a table in my room. But there was no table, no Bible. 'I have a room with a bath,' the hag had said; the bath was a rusty shower pipe suspended from the ceiling on a loop of wire. Two days in this hotel and I was ready to board any train - even a Guatemalan one.
Some time later, I found the Biblical text from which that lottery prize had been derived. It was in Revelation, not far from the earthquake reference ('behold there was an earthquake, and the sun became black . . .'). In Chapter Three, Christ says, 'Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten; so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.'
I used my time in Guatemala City to recuperate from the strenuous train-ride I had had from Veracruz. I needed long walks and a couple of good nights' sleep; I made a phone call to London (my wife missed me, I told her I loved her; my children said they had made a snowman; this telephone call cost me $114), and then a tour of the bars where, hoping to meet Guatemalans with lively stories, I was surrounded by disappointed tourists. I walked from one end of the city to the other, from zone to zone, through the curio market (embroidered shirts, baskets, pottery - the clumsy work of defeated-looking Indians) and the food market (skinned pigs' heads, black sausages and the medieval sight of small children binding up bouquets of flowers with bleeding fingers and being shouted at by cruel old men). It was a large city, but not a hospitable one. It had a reputation for thievery; and yet it did not strike me as dangerous, only commonplace and sombre. I suggested to the hag at the hotel that the city seemed to me sadly lacking in entertainment.
'You should go to the market at Chichicastenango,' she said. That's what everyone does.'
And that's why I don't want to do it, I thought. I said, 'I am planning to go to Zacapa.'
She laughed. I had not seen her laugh before. It was quite horrible.
'You came here to go to Zacapa!'
That's right.'
'Do you know how hot it is in Zacapa?'
'I have never been there.'
'Listen,' she said. 'There is nothing in Zacapa. Nothing, nothing.'
'There is a train to Zacapa,' I said. 'And a train out of it, to San Salvador.'
She hooted again. 'Have you seen that train !'
This was starting to annoy me. I wanted to tell her what I thought of her hotel.
She said, 'When I was a small girl my father had a farm in Mazatenango. I used to ride the train all the time. It took a full day ! I liked it, because I was a small girl. But I am not a small girl anymore' - this was incontestable - 'and I have not taken the train since. You should take the bus. Forget Zacapa - go to Tikal, see Antigua, buy some things at the market - but don't go to Zacapa.'
I went to the railway station. There was a sign over the two ticket windows. It said, It Is Much Cheaper To Go By Train! Over one window was lettered, To The Pacific, over the other, To The Atlantic. I paid a dollar and bought a ticket to Zacapa, which was halfway down the Atlantic line.
The train was not leaving until seven the next morning, so I went for my last long walk. This took me to Zone Four and a church I had not really expected to find in Guatemala, or this hemisphere. To say the Capilla de Yurrita is mock-Russian orthodox in style is to say nothing, though it has onion domes and ikons. It is a crazy castle. Pink rectangles are painted on its concrete walls to resemble brickwork, and on its main steeple are four gigantic ice-cream cones; beneath the steeple are fourteen pillars, decorated like barber-poles. It has balconies and porches, and rows of cement buds on its castellated roofs, four clocks showing the wrong time, gargoyles and a twice-life-sized dog clinging to one of the cones. On the façade are the four Evangelists, and peeping out of windows the twelve Apostles, and three Christs and a two-headed eagle. It is red and black, rusty metal and tiles. The oak door panels are carved, the left shows Guatemalan ruins, the right Guatemalan tombs, and over the door, in Spanish, a scroll reads 'The Chapel of Our Lady of Anguish' with a dedication to Don Pedro de Alvarado y Mesia. On Don Pedro's shield a conquistador is shown driving an army into retreat and beneath it are three volcanoes, one in eruption.