Colors of Chichicastenango
by Dominic Hamilton

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A clear, bright dawn in the hills of the Highlands sends the morning mist scurrying for cover. Bleary-eyed Indians carry Sisyphean sacks, strapped to their backs with headbands which furrow their foreheads. Cooking pots and cauldrons bubble, sending huffs of smoke through the half-light. The applause of tortilla-baking women as they flatten the dough from palm to palm and back again echoes through the marketplace. Crying, sleeping or wide-eyed children loll in slings on their mothers' backs. Over stalls and across the cobbles, apples, oranges, mangoes, lemons and limes tumble from their pyramids.

Colours run amok in the market. Impossible combinations of scarlets and vermilions, pinks and purples, blues and rainbow hues storm the senses. Impossible to tell people's clothing from wares to sell, merging in the melee with malevolent masks and painted effigies, while ceramic whistles, pipes and flutes are laid out in higgledy piggledy logic from every vantage point.

Age-lined men, weary from their all night vigil, swing incense from old powdered milk pots tied to string. They squint down the steps of the white washed church and wail laments and prayers to the steely-sharp morning air. The embers of the night's fires glow dimly, palls of copal incense billowing. Women begin to gather at the bottom of the church steps, bouquets of lilies, roses, hyacinths and broom-like bushes smothering their children at their feet. Plastic plate and tupperware vendors emerge, everything must go, too cheap to be true.

Through the growing clog of alleyways of traders, children knit-one pearl-one between the legs of old people, causing them to stumble and curse. The odd trader, late, attempts to plough his way through the field of bodies. More curses and cries fill the spiced air as business warms to the day. Lined in ranks of two, white sacks brimming with beans, peppers, chillies and spices look like playground hop-scotch patterns seen from above. Cloth stalls and food stands, fruit vendors and trinket sellers vie for custom, flogging everything from Mayan pots and pans to the infernal Quasimodo shrill of this year's novelty item, alarm clocks, battery not included, lasts a lifetime.

The church bells ring out over the market square in quick-fire-quick succession. Perhaps God doesn't wait up here in the Highlands. Time for mass. The leather-faced headmen of the cofradia brotherhoods, clad in thickly-woven shawls and three-quarter length trousers, make their way to the church. Some clutch staffs, the silver emblems of the sun at their tips shining and blinking in the light. Before climbing the steps, the men perform a bees' dance, buzzing around each other in elaborate mesmerising patterns. Up the steps and through the heavy, studded doors, into the smoke choked transept they pass. They stop at foot-high, door-sized rectangular planks interspersed along the central aisle, upon which dozens of weeping candles drip-drop wax onto the worn flagstones. The men mutter and prey, focused intensely as they add their candle, like witchdoctors piercing a doll with a needle. I catch the words maximon, the name of the mischievous spirit of the Mayan Highlands.

Slowly, the rest of the faithful pass under an archway to the side of the church, through the cloister where a painted banner reminds people of Monsignor Gerardi, the human rights campaigner recently murdered by gunmen. Slowly, the church fills.

The entire front right flank is taken up with Mayan women, the colours of their decorative tocoyal headresses glowing in the gloom. Hundreds of candles wax and wane in the draughts, depositing another sooty layer over the sombre oil paintings which bare down upon the congregation. The floor is awash with pine boughs and branches, and flowers, petals and kernels which crunch underfoot. Three simple stained glass windows cast cubes of suspended haze across the hall, but it takes time for the eye to adjust and details to be prised from the penumbra. Children are eerily silent, or sleep, while the pews fill with shuffling feet.

The mass begins. The dour sermon seems at odds with the jolly singing of a girl choir accompanied by musicians which punctuates it. The words of work and sacrifice, of mea culpa and repentance jar with the sing-song innocence of the tunes played, as if the Old World was trying to sedate the New's childlike enthusiasm. The men of the cofradÕas sit, fidgeting quietly on seats to the sides of the altar. Locals and tourists alike line up for the taking of the host. I leave for the blinding light outside, my head full of incense and sad thoughts.

The day heats up, making walking through the sea of bobbing heads take an age. Earlier, at first light, it already seemed there were hundreds of people, all knowing where they wanted to be, all in more of a rush than the person in front, me.

Then, the municipal buildings and arcades where families slept the night were still cradled in slumber. Bodies lined their fronts, like sardines packed in a tin, swathes of tapestry and patchwork spreads washing over them. The mountain air grew benevolent, warming weary bones by degrees.

At the food stalls, impatient girls and their bulging-forearmed mothers slopped ladles full of hot cinnamon rice milk -- which sounded like mosha -- into a bowl with cornflakes, or a glass with a bun. Steam escaped from everywhere, caught momentarily in the light piercing the gaps in the black and blue sheets of tarpaulin. An old woman beside me with cloud-white hair bent and slurped over her bowl, while her grandson beside her picked morsels from his bun to feed a stray cat. I wandered from pillar to post, hiding, smiling occasionally, chatting to stallholders and taking photos.

Now though, the mist is tucked away somewhere, and with it the magic. I return to my hotel, get my motorbike and leave, chasing it to the next village, the next market, the next morning.

The author previously wrote the articles Belize Leads the Way, Venezuela's Gran Sabana and Tepuis. He is currently working on a guidebook for the region. Check out Venezuela Voyages site http://www.VenezuelaVoyage.com.

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