A trip to Guatemala
Call it chance, fate, destiny or whatever you want, but when the Lo de Manuela team told me that we had just closed a deal with a Guatemalan rum brand for a collaboration in the next edition of ARCO, I had just landed at La Aurora, Guatemala's airport, and I took it as a sign. I went into a nice coffee shop in the center of Guatemala City, asked for the wifi and began to inform myself. The brushstrokes I found seemed more like a scenario of a Magical Realism novel than anything else: a town, son of the railroad, that creates a rum for its centenary, a wise guardian who protects that rum, a house above the clouds where the clocks have stopped, a festival of flavors and fragrances to reach the exquisiteness of nectar, a group of women who braid their destiny by hand... I was beginning to like it too much. As I usually travel aimlessly, I decided that rum could be my route during those days. That's how stories begin. The good ones.
The first thing my guide did was to tell me about her, about Lorena Vázquez, the mother of rum, Master Blender of Zacapa and a female standard bearer in a man's world.
Lorena, like a mother rocking her baby, whispers to her rum that it should not be in a hurry to grow, that maturity comes on its own because the years inevitably pass, and that richness of spirit is achieved by surrounding oneself with good influences: rubbing against good oak barrels perfumed with whiskey, cognac, sherry or Pedro Ximénez.
It was she who, in the desire to protect her long dream, took her offspring to mature at 2,300 meters above sea level, in a place very close to the sky and surrounded by clouds, which protect him like cotton wool: The house above the clouds, there where time does not pass and where the most intense effluvia dance and love each other in the rum barrels.
As we climbed the mountain (by helicopter, another great experience) what I wanted most was to meet her because I was convinced that I would meet one of those inspiring women who seem to have inhabited the earth forever... and huge was my disappointment when I ran into a phrase that I had not contemplated finding, naive of me, "Lorena is on a trip". When I told my team at Lo de Manuela they laughed: "a dose of your own medicine", they said. And it's true, I'm almost never there when they look for me, but in my defense I say that someone has to travel, right? Without Lorena, but with her spirit surrounding everything, I witnessed the whole process.
I have been in its sugarcane fields, I have seen the fingers of the native women braiding the petate that accompanies the rum, a beautiful mat of natural fibers that has given a chance to the local women to earn a living, and finally I visited Zacapa, the town that gives its name to rum and thanks to whose centenary, and decades of studying sugar cane liquor, gave birth to the rum that today, more than forty years later, brings us together at this ARCO stand, under the reeds and surrounded by greenery and parrots, symbols of my journey and of the landscape surrounding the motherland of this nectar that I now hold between my fingers.
With a wide glass and an ice fish accompanying the Zacapa rum, I wanted to share with you a feeling I had throughout this itinerary that began with a wink of fate and that today we close with a beautiful circle: how I wish my grandfather had accompanied me on this trip, he, a great lover of slow moments with a glass of intense rum in his hand, I know he would have enjoyed it so much! Also, and in the thread of this nostalgic squeeze, I can hear my grandmother saying something like: "but well; this bottle is a beauty! Let's find a nice place for it in our bar cabinet".
Anyway, friends, here's to this trip to Guatemala, to Zacapa rum, and to my grandparents.
I'm sorry I can't be with you today to sign this toast with a chinchín looking into our eyes, but a trip has come up... occupational hazard.
See you soon in some other corner of the soul.
