The Life and Death of Antonio Sajvín Cúmes

A member of Antonio's family holds his portrait. All photos by Emily Kaplan.

In the spring of 2013, Antonio Sajvín Cúmes—a middle-aged man in Santa Catarina Palopó, Guatemala—began to disappear.

For several months, several times a week, he had been walking the same route: he’d leave Santa Catarina Palopó in the morning and follow the road that led high into the forest, thousands of feet above the glittering, volcano-ringed splendor of Lake Atitlán.

The journey took him hours: carrying a small knapsack, he walked past medium-sized villages, then small ones, then single shacks dotting the mountainside. As he climbed, he passed fields upon fields of onions and maize, tapestried into the landscape like richly colored cloth.

Every so often, Antonio would stop and look across the shimmering expanse of the water, squinting his eyes to try to make out structures on the far side of the lake. Sometimes, he’d hum a melody from his childhood, or sing a few bars of songs he’d heard on the radio: Voy a reír, voy a bailar, vivir la vida, la la la la…

Mostly, though, Antonio simply walked. His ascent was a steady, silent meditation: Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot.

Now, Antonio was reaching the summit: the space between trees was growing smaller, and the air around him thickened and cooled. Soon, he found a clearing. He took another drink of water, then set down his pack against the thick trunk of a sycamore.

Antonio sat down. He drew his knees into his chest and closed his eyes. He breathed in, then out. In, then out. He was listening for the word of God.

At the same time, Antonio’s 17-year-old daughter Maribel was returning home from school, riding in the back of a dusty pickup truck. When the truck reached the big white church in Santa Catarina Palopó, Maribel whistled for the driver to stop. She motioned to the men squeezed into the hatchback with her, mostly agricultural workers in broad-brimmed hats and dusty jeans. They moved their legs to one side, allowing Maribel to quickly grab her backpack, arrange her long wrap skirt, and hop down onto the pavement. As she followed the road past the church and up the hill, nodding at the shopkeepers and bent-backed women with their gnarled walking sticks, Maribel wondered whether her father would be home.

For years, she’d cherished afternoons with her father. They’d sit side by side on the concrete floor next to the fire stove in their small tin-walled home. Antonio would help with her schoolwork—though Maribel seldom truly needed it—and they’d talk about politics and the law. Antonio was Maribel’s role model and closest friend; it was he who had scrimped and saved to send her to school. He believed gaining an education was the way to make an impression on the world.

These days, though, Maribel often came home to an empty house. Antonio had been disappearing more and more—recently, it was several times a week. Her mother was out selling scarves and purses on the street, and her sisters were at school and at work. But she didn’t know where her father had been going.

In Antonio’s absence, Maribel, her mother, and her sisters, Aracely, Ingrid, and Josefina, would pass the evenings together in anxious near-silence, the girls doing their homework on the concrete floor while María rolled tortillas and stirred a pot of black beans over an open fire.

Antonio did eventually come home, arriving later and later into the night. Maribel would hear him come in well after she and her sisters had gone to bed, packed tight together on a hard straw mattress. Her mother would wait up for him, and Maribel would hear them whispering furtively in Kaqchikel, the indigenous language her parents grew up speaking. Antonio would seldom answer her mother’s questions, Maribel had noticed; instead, he’d tell her to go to bed, then sit outside the bedroom’s closed