The Queen Jade

by Yxta Maya Murray

  I finished the job, picked up the sheaf from the copier, and handed it to her; she crouched down and zipped open her duffel bag, a buff-colored vinyl Hartmann. Inside were some clothes, and books, and one of her small salmon-colored diaries.

  I picked the last item up, and she deftly reached her arm above her head while still looking down at her duffel and extracted the journal from my hand.

  “Thank you, Monster,” she said. “You know you’ll get spanked if you snoop.”

  “Just doing my best to detain you,” I replied.

  She stood back up and frowned at me.

  “Yes. So. I guess that’s it.” Her mouth wobbled a little in her face.

  “Yes, I guess so,” I said. “Will you say hi to Dad for me?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Are you going to—drop in on Yolanda? Give your regrets?”

  “It would be awkward, I think….”

  I tilted my head. “I’m going to miss you, Mom.”

  “You’d better.” Her mouth quavered some more. “Whom am I going to yell at? And who’s going to listen to all my complaining?”

  “I’m sure you’ll find somebody. You always do. And you’ll only be gone, what—”

  “Two weeks. If the weather holds out. Not very long at all.”

  “Two weeks is really nothing,” I answered, in the same stout way. She looked at me. “Awful Thing—”

  And then, as the two of us are both absolutely emotional ladies, our eyes began to turn pink and squint, and our noses twitched.

  “Oh, agh!” we both said, and mashed the tears from our faces.

  She stood up and wrapped her arms around me again so that I emitted a quick, sharp noise. Her shining pale hair swept around my face. She wore no scent and smelled absolutely clean, like pure soap, combined with the warm mustiness of her tweed.

  “You are my darling sweet Creature,” she whispered. “And I’ll see you soon. We’ll catch up more then.” Here she gave me one last squeeze and kissed me, but when she brought her face back up, I could swear I saw that old Machiavellian glint in her eyes. She began moving toward the front door, and I thought that in her mind she was probably already in Guatemala, heading toward the jungle, where she would dig inside that soft galling mud that she loved.

  Outside, the cabman groaned and muttered as he dragged the luggage to the car. She stood in the doorway of The Red Lion with her silver hair flying about in bunches, her cape sweeping around her shoulders, her busy hands pointing as she shouted her many organizational orders at the driver.

  ” ‘Bye, my beautiful Beast!” she called out to me as she left.

  And I felt no chill, no shudder, when she got into the taxi and slammed the door.

  I should have, but I did not feel anything odd or ominous as I watched my mother wave at me through the cab’s window, turn the corner, and disappear.

  CHAPTER 2

  Four days after my mother left on her holiday, my Pinto fainted on the freeway, and I found myself traveling by bus from Long Beach to UCLA to meet with an English professor who was selling some rare books. After paging through my Los Angeles Times, paying special attention to an article titled “Heavy Rainy Season Offers Relief to Parched and War-Torn Central America,” I got off at my stop and lugged my laptop computer to the office of the prof, who had indicated an interest in unloading his complete library of Jules Verne classics. Unfortunately, the meeting lasted only five minutes, as I’d been beaten in time and price by a millionaire Verne fanatic from Wales.

  I assuaged my disappointment by gawking at the school’s assortment of twenty-year-old football players for a quarter of an hour, then went to look up the book my mother had mentioned—Alexander Von Humboldt’s journal—in UCLA’s University Research Library. In contrast to the old brick and tracery that characterized the school’s great hall and undergraduate library, this beige box was strictly modern 1960s simplicity.

  The second floor contained works of archaeology. A quick search revealed that Alexander Von Humboldt’s 1834 Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent had been checked out, though I did find my parents’ first, slightly tattered masterpiece, The Translation of the Flores Stelae: A Background for the Study of the Meaningless Maya Text (first edition, 1970), alongside Tomas de la Rosa’s spanking Meaninglessness in Maya Iconography: The Flores Stelae Resolved (Oxford University Press, twentieth edition, 1998). Both of the books analyzed certain famous Central American relics, which are a succession of four blue Jade stones covered with hundreds of Maya hieroglyphs.

  Opening the cover of my parents’ Translation, I turned to a photo of the Stelae’s carvings:

  My parents deciphered these symbols as Princeton graduate students in the 1960s, using the few Spanish colonial texts that contained clues about the as-yet-uncracked Maya code (a lost language that was only fully deciphered in the 1980s). After two years spent in painstaking translation, however, they were crushed to discover that this text—such as it was—amounted to nothing but gibberish, and when translated literally read:

  The of story the Jade once was I king Jade

  You without lost I’m too lost I’m too lost

  Fierce king true a jade under born noble and jade

  What could such babble mean? they’d wondered. What could the Maya have been trying to say with this weird jumble of words? When another year had passed, and they’d checked and rechecked their translation, my mother sank into a terrible gloom. She’d filled notebook after notebook with this jabberwocky, but it was no use; she began to see all her academic efforts as the squanderings of a fool.

  But it was in the pit of this terrible despair that she struck on her brilliant hypothesis: That the Stelae could not be read—nor were they ever intended to be any kind of coherent text. The Stelae were only a sort of ancient wallpaper, a meaningless and confused ornament akin to the abstract patterns one might find today in a Tiffany window or a Laura Ashley print. With great excitement, she and my father wrote an article arguing that the text was senseless from a reader’s point of view, a thesis that they hoped would make them the acknowledged world experts on the Flores Stelae.

  They would fail miserably in their ambition. On the eve of their paper’s publication, they were preempted at a 1967 El Salvador symposium on the hieroglyphs by a Marxist radical, antimilitary insurgent, and genius Guatemalan archaeologist named Dr. Tomas de la Rosa. After his blockbuster talk, Meaninglessness in Maya Iconography, he had become the equivalent of a rock star in the world of archaeology.

  My parents didn’t hold a grudge, though. The three scientists even surprised themselves by becoming friends, despite Dr. de la Rosa’s increasingly dangerous involvement in the bloody thirty-plus-year Guatemalan civil war.

  For decades, their fellowship survived his waxing eccentricities. Beginning in the late 1970s, de la Rosa risked his titanic academic reputation by searching the Guatemalan forest for Beatriz de la Cueva’s Queen Jade. My mother also took in his very difficult daughter Yolanda to live with us for five years after de la Rosa was suspected of bombing an army colonel’s home, in the process killing a young accountant as well as severely scarring a lieutenant guard. Yet the families’ differences remained too marked. The archaeologist’s extreme nationalism could make him a difficult companion, and his alliance with my parents would not end well.

  In 1977 guerrillas killed two of de la Rosa’s conservative university friends in retaliation for the army’s genocidal crimes against Marxists and farmers, and afterward de la Rosa seemed to suffer a nervous breakdown. He removed himself from the rebellion and dove back into his scientific efforts with double zeal, expressing his patriotic views by objecting to the number of “foreign” archaeologists shipping off his jungle’s treasures to non-Guatemalan museums (including Princeton’s, where my Mexican parents worked).

  De la Rosa’s most brazen protests were his sabotage of foreign excavations, which he achieved by posing as a guide and leading visiting professors into
the trackless and dangerous forest before abandoning them. His high jinks culminated in 1982, with a nasty little incident involving my father’s near-drowning in a quicksand pit, which imbued my dad with such a galloping jungle phobia that he’d feel faint if he so much as watched an episode of Tarzan.

  My parents had been sworn foes of de la Rosa ever since.

  The first sign that their hatred had cooled occurred only two weeks ago, when we received the news that the great man had died of pneumonia in the jungle. Judging from their awkward silence, I could swear they felt some grief.

  In the shadows of the library’s stacks, I saw “De la Rosa” spelled out in gilt lettering on the spine of his book. I read it with a shiver. It reminded me of meeting the very contrary Yolanda de la Rosa when I was a young girl.

  Yolanda de la Rosa was the best enemy I ever had. And I had not seen her in eighteen years.

  I closed my eyes and imagined how all around me, the books dreamed their dark dreams on their shelves. I found the idea comforting.

  My parents’ Translation was still in my hands. The gold lettering on the black binding had begun to fade, which made me smile. I like rare old books to look their age.

  I restored it to its shelf and went in search of a librarian who might help me find a copy of Von Humboldt’s journal.

  CHAPTER 3

  I found a woman on the first floor of the library. Stationed behind an information desk, the librarian had a long blond braid, no glasses, blue eyes, and wore a wool turtleneck that fluffed up to her chin.

  “As you noticed,” she said, “we do have a few books dealing with Von Humboldt—the work on Aimé Bonpland is particularly good, I think—but as for the Von Humboldt Narrative, that won’t be back for …I simply can’t tell you. It’s possible it will be months.”

  “Months?” I asked. “Could you tell me who checked it out? Maybe they can let me borrow it for a couple of hours.”

  “That, unfortunately, is totally prohibited by our confidentiality rules.” Her eyes darted back and forth across the computer screen, and then narrowed suddenly. “But then again, don’t you think that confidentiality rules only apply if the person in question is deserving of some confidence?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Deserving of some confidence,” she repeated. “Should we really be so scrupulous about the unscrupulous?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m still not getting you.”

  The librarian tapped out something obscurely condemnatory onto the computer’s keyboard, then leaned over her desk and whispered to me in conspiratorial tones. “I think I actually will give you the name of the person who has simply stolen the Von Humboldt. I’ve so had it up to here.” She drew her finger across her turtleneck. “I really just don’t even care anymore. If he wants to act as if this is his own personal collection without giving any consideration to the feelings of those who happen to work in this library, well then, too bad for him if I let his name slip, don’t you think?”

  I looked at her without blinking. “Yes, I guess I do.”

  “I mean, there are limits, aren’t there? He’s had that book for a year and a half now, even though I’ve sent him message upon message upon message upon message … and he hasn’t returned even one of them. I haven’t heard one word from that man. It’s simply too much.”

  I nodded.”Absolutely.”

  “Very well, then—it’s Gomara,” she said, curling her lips around the three unsavory syllables.

  “Erik Gomara?” I blinked, as I’d heard that name too many times already. “The archaeology professor?”

  The poor girl edged back from me and tucked her chin even deeper into her turtleneck. “You’re acquainted with him?”

  “Not at all. That is, I’ve seen him around, at parties and things—my mother’s in his department. She’s told me plenty about his reputation.”

  She relaxed and half-smiled.

  “Oh, yes,” she said with some satisfaction. “So you do know.”

  She gave me directions to the apparent lothario’s office, and I’ll admit I entertained tantalizing fantasies of some fabulous dark Casanova as I wandered over there.

  But as soon as I saw him, the fantasy faded. My erotic enthusiasms tend toward firefighters and policemen, and are utterly withered by chattering scholars. I like my men brooding, hyperactively muscular, and nearly mute.

  Eric Gomara missed on all three counts.

  Hello, Professor Gomara?” I’d caught him as he was walking out of his office in one of the stucco square boxes that made up the Humanities Department. I had no trouble recognizing him from some of those decidedly unstimulating department soirees my mother had dragged me to in the past few years.

  “Yes?” Gomara was in his mid-thirties, and of a towering height and stocky build that he dressed up in elegant woolen slacks and a crisp white shirt. He also had quick-moving wide hands and large, dark, very intense eyes probably fairly capable of hypnotizing ingenues, though right now they were extruding impatiently as they stared into mine. “And don’t call me that. Makes me sound too old. Known to everyone around here as Erik.”

  “Hi, Erik, I’m looking for a book—I was told to ask you about it? You’ve kept it past its due date, I believe. Von Humboldt’s Narrative?”

  “Ah, I see you’ve been talking to Gloria.”

  “Gloria?”

  “One of the disgruntled employees of the university? Wants to shoot me? The librarian.”

  I laughed. “That’s right, I have. I hope you don’t—”

  I was going to say, “I hope you don’t mind,” here, but Erik was already brushing past me, saying, “Sorry, but my research assistant is currently working with that book—I’ve written a paper on it, you know—and so I won’t be able to return it for at least a month or so. Good-bye.”

  “But, Professor.”

  “Must leave.”

  “Professor, I’m still talking to you.”

  At this, he did turn around, with a little more interest than before.

  “Ye-es?”

  “My mother told me I should look it up. I’m planning on translating some of Beatriz de la Cueva’s writings, and I think Von Humboldt’s work might be relevant. In fact, you know her.”

  “Who? De la Cueva? The Spaniard? I haven’t studied her in a long time, but I do know that she influenced Humboldt, the poor bastard.”

  “Um—no. You know my mother. Juana Sanchez.”

  A pause here, then he said: “Oh, yes. You must be that daughter of hers. The … bookstore owner.”

  “Yes.”

  “Haven’t I seen you lurking around faculty parties?”

  “I wouldn’t call it lurking,” I said.

  “My God, that’s all we ever do at those fiestas. They’re too abysmally boring to do anything else.”

  “When might you let me see that book?”

  “As I said—Ms.—Ms.—well, Sanchez, obviously.”

  “Lola Sanchez.”

  “Lo-la,” he said. “So. Your mother’s interested in Von Humboldt?”

  I explained again that I was the one interested in Von Humboldt, and that my mother had left for Guatemala.

  “Oh—I knew that. In fact, I asked to go south with her. I mean, I’m from Guatemala. Lived there until I went to graduate school. But she said no, absolutely not. Not too encouraging. I guess you know that she sometimes likes to pretend she’s not the biggest fan of mine.” He paused, looking at me. “But it’s possible I could help you. What’s seven years of insults between friends?” He smiled with half his mouth, then hesitated again.

  “Professor?”

  “Sorry. Just thinking. Right now, I’m going to the Huntington Library, where I’m a reader.”

  “A what?”

  “A reader. I have reading privileges? And they have a great eighteenth-century collection of de la Cueva’s works, if I remember correctly—the Letters and so on.”

  “I’d love to see those. I’ve read the letters, but not in so early an editi
on.”

  “They also have a nice edition of Von Humboldt’s Narrative. If you’re interested. You could follow me in your car, and I’d get you into the Reading Room. You could take a look at the books there.”

  I told Erik my Pinto was malingering in the garage, and I’d come by bus.

  “In that case … why not?” he said. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “I can just wait until tomorrow,” I said.

  “You can wait? If you’re not in such a hurry, then why are we having this conversation at all?”

  “I never said I was in a hurry. I just want that book.”

  “And I explained, I don’t have it. So do you want to go, or not?” He looked at his watch. “God.”

  “Fine—I’ll go.”

  “Good.”

  Five minutes later, he strode down the palmy quad toward his car, passing smiling throngs of midriffed undergraduates who seemed to have hulaed out of the hedges like fairies. I followed along, or rather, pressed my way through the girls, grasping my laptop as if it were a safe-conduct.

  CHAPTER 4

  Inside Erik Gomara’s elderly Jaguar, with its clattering bucket seats, we hurtled toward the Huntington Library in Pasadena.

  “Sorry about the jalopy,” he said near the end of the trip, popping into his mouth a chocolate peppermint that he had extracted from his jacket pocket. “It’s an indulgence I can’t quite seem to do without. Would you like a mint?”

  “There’s a car right there, in front of you,” I responded. He didn’t subscribe to the theory of personal vehicular space, repeatedly almost kissing bumpers with the car ahead of us.

  “What is she doing in Guatemala again? Weren’t they having some sort of bad weather?”

  “What?”

  “Bad weather?”

  “Oh. Some rainstorms, yes. But she just went up there for a vacation.”