Alex
I was in the financial services business in the San Francisco area when the Internet bubble burst. Gone were the days when clients arrived with checks from exercising options. Instead, I watched their portfolios and my own disintegrate. I decided that I needed a B plan. Circumstances took me to Guatemala where I had fond memories from the Pan Am days. Lovely weather, lovely people, an intriguing diverse country. I went to Antigua to visit a client and thought, “this is not like anyplace I have ever been to before.”
In Guatemala it was possible to pay cash for a house and live on social security if the stock market went to zero. Very soon my B plan was underway. Land was purchased and construction started. With construction underway I traveled back and forth from the US. I asked a neighbor if he could suggest someone trustworthy to meet me at the airport. He suggested Alex whom he said was a good driver, trustworthy, prompt, and reliable. He had sponsored Alex for a taxi license so that he could rent an old car and become a taxi driver.
Alex was an attractive fellow with big dimples and a big smile. Longish, shaggy hair and jeans bunched up around his ankles as they were too long for his Mayan stature. He was prompt and a good driver who took good care of his car. I did not speak much Spanish at the time and was completely ignorant of the ways of those without a pot … That combination cost me quite a bit of money.
Never having been neither hungry nor homeless I was completely unaware of the manipulations and machinations that those without resources developed simply to make it through another day. The only consequence that they were aware of was starvation if they failed to find another meal. It was only much later that I realized that Alex was operating well below my innocent, New England radar.
I bought him new tires for his taxi as I wanted him to have decent tires on the car I was riding in. Within weeks I noticed that the new tires had disappeared replaced by old almost bald ones. Sold, no doubt.
During one ride to a friend’s house in a neighboring village Alex asked me if, since I was the only one who was helping him, could he call me “mama” or Tía Joan. I wrestled with that for a few days but eventually became known as “Tía Joan” and that name has lasted longer than Alex did.
Sometime later Estela told me that when he was born, Alex’s father denied paternity and tried to keep his mother from feeding him. At some point, as an infant, he was put out in the street to die but was picked up by an aunt who, lacking breast milk, kept him alive with rice milk. It was several years before he was reconciled with his mother who by then had left her husband. So, Alex did not have a great start.
One day Alex announced that he was leaving for the United States. He only had to wait for his passport. California was his destination. Estela and her children were distraught. He had a couple of changes of clothing, a toothbrush, a water bottle and two rolls of toilet paper in his backpack. He asked me if I could pick him up in Los Angeles. It was then that I realized that if he was successful, I might be stuck with him in my then home in the San Francisco area. I told him “No.”
It did not take long to realize that it would be a whole lot cheaper to buy an old car in Guatemala than to have to deal with Alex in California. An arrangement was hammered out, a contract signed, and, in the end, I was the only one who ever paid any attention to it.
Alex had a pretty good business I thought. Several neighbors used him, and we all recommended him to visitors who found him charming. But he never seemed to have enough money or enough to eat. Or so he said.
Alex’s relationship with Estela was clearly on the rocks and there were whispers of other children living in the market. He spent his days at Estela’s house and his nights with Marielos, which, as it turns out, is where those other children living in the market came from.
Things became darker and darker with Alex. Lots of lies and wild stories. For the first time he was not at the airport when I arrived. I called him and he told me he was having car trouble. I waited another fifteen minutes then took a taxi. Some nonsense about his car having been stolen, rope burns on his arms. Neighbors who arrived a day later said he had a “friend” in the car with them and they were followed by yet another car. We all decided that we were done with Alex.
Whatever he was really up to came to a screeching halt a few weeks later when he was pictured in the national news in the back of a police truck charged with heinous crimes.including kidnapping, rape and extortion.
Estela’s two older kids, Denis and Jackie, who may have remembered good times with Alex, were devastated. Astrid, the youngest who had never had much use for her father said, “I told you he was no good.” Marielos’s younger two kids were sent home from their pre-school until there could be a risk assessment and additional security provided at the school.
Could he have really been as bad as they were saying? Apparently yes, as it turned out. Lots of chatter about it all being a big mistake, he was totally innocent, he would be out in March. Morbid curiosity took ahold of me and when Estela reported that Alex would be in Antigua for a hearing, I suggested that we go. I wanted to look him in the eye one more time and see if I could see any sense of remorse, to see if I could begin to understand what he had apparently done.
Alex arrived along with a number of other “detainees” standing in a cage-like arrangement on the back of a pickup truck. Estela told me that I would have to pay a bribe to the police and then they would take him out of the truck. I told her to go and negotiate. She reported that their first price was three thousand quetzals, or about four hundred dollars. She told the police that they could keep him, that he was not worth that much. Eventually, she got them down to fifty quetzals or about six dollars which I agreed to. The police took Alex, in shackles and chains, out of the truck and directed him to a park bench where I was sitting. One of the police stood behind us with an automatic looking gun. School children went running by obliviously participating in a physical education class. His then four-year old son, Cristofer, kept running up to his father hoping for a response, a bit of attention but it never happened. Alex was intent on asking me for money which was a waste of his time. He was innocent, only needed bail money, home soon. None of it was true. I realized then that his eyes were empty. The windows to his soul were empty.
I knew then that I was going to be responsible for at least some of his kids.
And, yes, that is exactly how it turned out. And his kids are so much better off without a soulless, pathological liar in their lives. Cristofer told me recently that when his friends ask about his father, he tells them ‘I have no contact with him.” And, no, he does not.