T A B L E_T A L K Have e-mail, will travel. Share your favorite Internet bars from around the world in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk ___________________ Making travel plans? Visit barnesandnoble.com for all kinds of great travel book bargains! ___________________   R E C E N T L Y Hot spots of the millennium Where will people be traveling in 2000? Travel experts predict the destinations of choice in the new millennium (12/24/98) Not finding God in Rome By Zachary Karabell At Christmas in the Eternal City, a seeker of truth discovers that sometimes the answer you don't get is the one you need (12/23/98) An innocent abroad, Part Two By Bill Barich A young writer in Florence encounters enduring lessons in art and love (12/22/98) An innocent abroad: Part One By Bill Barich A semester in Florence shapes a young writer's life (12/20/98) If you film it, they will come By Steve Rushin A passionate sports fan begins his cross-country pilgrimage with a visit to Iowa's Field of Dreams (12/18/98)   Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives     Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		__________Death in Antigua ____A HOST FAMILY'S TRAGEDY TWEAKS THE ________CONSCIENCE OF A TRAVELER IN GUATEMALA. BY STEVE KETTMANN | Pangs of conscience come cheap in Antigua Guatemala, almost as cheap as the beer and the food and the chance to move in with a family and turn Guatemalans' lives into colorful fodder for padding out a traveler's résumé. I've been visiting this former colonial capital since 1986, when I rotted there for months like so many other self-involved young gringos. Yet it wasn't until I returned again recently for a week-long dose of Spanish instruction that I gained any real sense of how the locals see the visitors who have overrun their beautiful, stone-paved city. Tourism has turned Antigua into a never-never land, but even before the tourist onslaught, it had a transcendent power rooted in its setting, high in a mountain valley and surrounded by volcanoes whose presence is so strong you can feel them lurking even on dark, moonless nights. Antigua was the capital of colonial Central America for more than two centuries, and when a 1773 earthquake leveled the place, the Antiguans who stayed behind inspired countless generations of loafers by doing pretty much nothing. They left chunks of rock and dismembered walls in place, like something out of "The Flintstones." A lot of that displaced rock is still there, making for excellent visuals for the latest batch of adventure-craving 22-year-olds. Antigua has more than 50 Spanish schools, and each week hundreds of students are in town, most staying with families and sprinkling currency into the local economy one $20 bill at a time. As in Amsterdam's red-light district, the commercial underpinnings of the arrangement are obvious, but life with a family has a real intimacy to it. You don't wake up each morning to the gentle shout of "desayuno," or sit through meal after meal, making whatever small talk is possible with your level of Spanish, without having some sense of connection with your host. That's why I made arrangements this time to stay in the same house as I had the year before. Gilda, the woman of the house, always took pleasure in being an agreeable presence, and she had even listened to my mangled-Spanish tales of various adventures in the capital with two (beautiful, crazy) Guatemalan women. It takes real patience to listen to even one such story without cracking, and Gilda sat through several, smiling sphinxlike. The morning I returned to Antigua, Gilda greeted me with a smile and announced she was putting me back in the same room as before. I was pleased that she remembered, and even more pleased when I threw open the door and recalled this was the same room where I had kept an overnight guest hostage one morning. (Gilda's 10-year-old niece had unexpectedly shown up for breakfast that day, and I hadn't wanted to scandalize her. Gilda wouldn't have cared, I felt sure, but still, I wanted to err on the side of caution. These are real people living real lives, I had reminded myself.) Within a day of my arrival this time, something went wrong. Gilda was suddenly not around, and I knew without being told that it wasn't to make the half-hour drive into Guatemala City to pick up laundry detergent or Technicolor plastic children's toys for the little store she was now operating out of her front door. One of the other students staying at the house, a young Englishwoman with an infectious smile, said she thought there had been some kind of accident involving Gilda's family. A bad one. Death, I should mention, had never been far out of mind during my previous visits to Guatemala. Tens of thousands of Guatemalans had been killed in the violent years that culminated with the December 1996 peace accords. Truckloads of baby-faced soldiers had been a constant presence in Antigua in the past, and not too many people could forget the cloud-passing-before-the-sun chill you felt deep in your bones when you made eye contact with a 17-year-old with a rifle in his hands and the dead-eyed gaze of one who had killed before and would kill again. I once interviewed a Guatemalan journalist in the capital who laughed off the bullet holes in his office window and casually confessed that his predecessor at that desk had been killed. The man reminded me so much of hard-edged, seen-it-all editors I'd loved and hated as a young news reporter in New York City, I did not doubt he was telling the truth. Still, I wasn't prepared for what Gilda said when she sat down for a meal with me and the other students, the Englishwoman and a young Australian. Yes, there had been an accident, Gilda said as I stared down at the milkshake-thick black-bean paste on my plate. N E X T+P A G E | You don't ask Mickey Mouse how his family is doing, do you?