The Queen Jade

by Yxta Maya Murray

  Before us lay the road to Antigua.

  CHAPTER 18

  To reach the city of Antigua from the capital of Guatemala, we had to take southern side roads to avoid a washed-out section of the Pan American Highway. Alongside our Jeep, vans and trucks pushed through the mud and rain, while one notably battered brown sedan continuously veered behind us. Long, wide, and surrounded by new marshes and heaps of trash that had collected since the storm, the road jagged up through the highlands and toward the three sister volcanoes, the Fuego, the Acatenango, and the Agua. Green hills bordered the road. Dinosaur-tall banana trees sprung out of the wet banks alongside ferns, mesquite trees, and periodic dazzles of red bougainvillea. On the hills, I saw the sienna and pastel stucco houses that industrious folks had built on tall, impressively sound stilts.

  These homes, and the scatterings of shops visible along the way, had survived the most recent of the country’s catastrophes, as they appeared here after the 1920s, when the U.S. Corps of Engineers began to lay down the tracks of this thoroughfare. The PAH—also known as the Carretera Interamericana or (as it is also called) the “Highway of Friendship”—had been approved in 1923 at the Fifth Conference of the Pan American States. At that historic meeting, ambassadors from the Americas had passed a resolution calling for the construction of one massive avenue that would stretch from Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. Visionary and adrenaline-charged engineers soon began to blast their way through the wilderness. They pushed their tractors past the endangered jaguars and rare plants, ignoring the fearsome screams of the howler monkeys and the environmentalists, and carved the thin glossy road through the continent.

  In Guatemala, this link of the highway hugs the lakes Atitlan and Amatitlan, much as had the routes of de la Cueva and Von Humboldt, who survived their droughty treks by sucking the dewdrops off the fronds of river-fed flora and hurling their shriveled hides into the aqueducts, when they were lucky enough to find them. Later came the tar and machinery, and infant, slippery suburbs sprouted among the hills. The road fed commerce, merchants, industrialists. And it had seen other, more desperate inhabitants, as well.

  Sitting in the Jeep’s passenger seat and watching the arrow of birds shoot farther down into the sky, I thought how four decades after that historic assembly of the Fifth Conference, when civil war was raging in the country, the Indian rebels had begun to bomb out pockets of the highway. After the disastrous U.S.-led or-aided coup of president Jacopo Arbenz, in 1954, rebels destroyed sections of the road with handmade dynamite and other home-cooked explosives that they used to burn the cars of the crossing army. The soldiers then chased the insurgents up north, back into the Peten forest, where they shot them beneath the wet dripping leaves of the banana trees that shaded the moldering Mayan ruins. One hundred and forty thousand civilians died in the war, which spanned from the 1960s until a peace treaty was signed in 1996. And during each of those years archaeologists like my mother, Tomas de la Rosa, and (for a while) Manuel Alvarez had traveled the cracked avenues to reach the jungle, often crossing over patches scarred by crossfire or explosions.

  “My parents became friends with de la Rosa on this road,” I began to tell Erik. “In 1967, the year before I was born. They’d driven him back from the symposium on the Flores Stelae.”

  “In El Salvador, where de la Rosa surprised them with his paper on the hieroglyphs?”

  “Yes. My mother later said that she couldn’t drive along the highway without feeling sad—a few years later, she’d come back and saw that it had been bombed. She knew that bodies had been found here, too, after they’d been dumped by the military.”

  “The Disappeared. That kind of thing was sickeningly common during the war. The army murdered a lot of folks before the truce.” He squinted into the daylight coming through the windshield. “And I don’t know if the country’s ever going to get over it.”

  I looked out the window and saw two bright chicken buses, several pickups, trucks loaded with shivering plants and strapped-down heaps of scrap metal. All the vehicles sprayed rainbows of floodwater. I again noticed that brown sedan driving at a steady speed about one mile behind us. The car was a large, four-door, later-model Toyota, dripping with rivulets of greasy mud. The license plate was dented and illegible. The muzzle of the car was striped with sludge that crawled up the hood in snaky forms. The spattered windshield had two fan-shaped clearings carved by wipers, but I could barely make out the driver. This person was obscured in shadow and wore some sort of a wide-brimmed hat; he or she looked cut out of black paper.

  “Who’s that?”I asked.

  “What?” Erik swerved around something. “Just give me a minute. The road’s difficult here.”

  As we drove farther along, we came into view of brown cliffs strung with green trees, and a light silver rain began to fall. Behind us remained the brown sedan. The dark driver’s hands beat on the wheel in a particularly impatient and agitated manner, and then they reached up to squiggle off some fog that had collected on the windshield.

  Watching this, I felt something nervous and electric pass through my chest. But Erik, not noticing anything, pushed on the gas and bent around the drive until we came into view of the volcano Agua.

  “Now what were you talking about?” he asked.

  I took another look behind me, but I still couldn’t see the silhouetted figure in the sedan well enough to tell. And so, until I could be sure, I wouldn’t say anything to Erik.

  “Nothing,” I said, looking up at the magnificent Agua before us, which was wreathed by blue and black clouds.

  But inside I knew—I could feel—that the person following us in that car was Yolanda.

  CHAPTER 19

  I did not catch sight of any Stetson-wearing enemies when we first entered the Hotel Casa Santo Domingo, as so many other details caught my eye. My mother abhorred paying over fifty dollars for a room, so Erik and I had spent the past two days searching through colonial Antigua’s budget motels before wandering into this graceful baroque resort. The Casa Santo Domingo, a rambling half-restored ruin of a seventeenth-century monastery, is a place of long, dark, shadowy stone hallways illuminated by beeswax candles. This network of chambers leads down into an actual catacomb, where the orderly tombs of the higher priests and the jumbled bones of the lesser friars have been excavated. Above, the monastery opens out into voluptuous atriums filled with violet hydrangeas and scarlet poppies, arrayed in still-perfect rows.

  The staff had worked quickly to erase any signs of Hurricane Mitch—the toppled palm trees had been cleared, and one or two broken windows were even now being repaired. Moreover, there was no sign of a lack of business: when we arrived to talk to the concierge, a concert had just let out, a travel group had just arrived, and the foyer was filled with many elegant people.

  We had been waiting for a word with the busy concierge for about an hour when I began to hallucinate Yolanda. Erik and I stood in line at the reception desk, surrounded by women dressed in tulip-tinted shifts and vertiginous heels. The men wore three-piece suits, with the corners of peacock handkerchiefs emerging from their pockets. Peering between these shimmering bodies, I thought I detected a flash of bright black hair, and heard a familiar laugh. I was sure I saw a figure stamping through the crowd with a gait that I recognized. But when I went searching through the throng, I saw no signs of anyone that I knew.

  Before I became completely obsessed by the hope that Yolanda might be following us, my attention was distracted by the concierge.

  She had an elfin face and coffee-colored eyes. She wore a dark green suit with a rectangular brass nameplate pinned to her chest. It read “Marisela.”

  “Juana Sanchez was here one week ago,” she said, glancing at Erik and then back down at her computer.

  Erik and I shot looks at each other.

  “Finally!”I said.

  “Did she leave a message?”

  “I don’t believe so—but please wait one moment while I check.”

&n
bsp; “That means we’ll have to go to Flores next,” I said to Erik.

  “There is—something here,” Marisela said. “A note on the computer about her stay.”

  “What does it say?” I asked, in a louder voice than I’d intended.

  Her dark gaze fluttered over at me, then back again at Erik.

  “Could you read us the note?” he asked.

  “No, there’s just an asterisk by her name,” she said. “We usually mark a guest’s file when they leave items behind, or if they do leave messages. I’ll have to ask the manager. Though I don’t have time at the moment. You see how busy we are. Perhaps you could wait in the bar.”

  I nodded. “All right.”

  “First thing we’ve found since we got here,” Erik said to me.

  “I just wish it had been her,” I said.

  “Would you happen to know if they have any good champagne in that bar of yours?” he asked the concierge. “I think we’re both feeling a little ragged right now.”

  Marisela assured him, with another mothlike flutter of eyelashes, that they did. Little else was needed to persuade him. He led the way, and I scrutinized the ladies around us as we made our way through the perfumed crowd. In the next few minutes we found ourselves in a very swanky saloon, attempting to relieve our anxiety with a good strong drink.

  The bar was dark, fashioned from mahogany with rich gold and brass fittings. The light was almost a burgundy color, but a television hung above the counter, showing bright and distressing images of the ways that Mitch had ravaged the country’s north and eastern areas. Up in the north, there were helicopters, people starving, and villages that had been swept away by the storm. Next we saw pictures of blue jade tumbling from a landslide in the Sierra de las Minas, which had been detected by resident gemologists in the days after Mitch. A Harvard Peabody scientist held a cobalt boulder in both hands, revealing its purple and gold veins, and the light glanced off the patterns in starlike rays. The television reporter said that the geologists studying the matter were still confused as to the exact source of the stone, though they expected there would be some breakthrough soon.

  All these pictures together had the effect of making me feel sick.

  “Could you turn the TV off?” I asked the bartender. Without looking up from the paper he was reading, he raised his hand and flicked the knob on the box so the screen went dead.

  Erik squinted at the wagon wheel under the western-inspired glass tabletop. “I can’t believe she stayed here. She usually prefers grubby little motels and yurts.”

  “I know.”

  “Not that I mind. The beds here are supposed to be fabulous. But a thread count over one hundred gives her gout.”

  “I have no idea what was going on with her.”

  After some minutes of mulling over this mystery, Erik shifted in his seat, so that the hieroglyphs on the decal of his T-shirt caught the chandelier’s light, and my eye. I knew how to read hieroglyphs, though I was no expert. And I’d seen the images of the Stelae many times before because of my mother’s work. But I thought I detected some pattern in the jade pictures there that seemed newly familiar. I saw images of sun gods and of holy men. My attention locked on these pictures for a moment, and I stared at the decal.

  “Well,” he said. “We should talk about something. If I’m just going to think about how we’ve missed your mother and about how a bunch of Harvard idiots are getting all the jade and glory while I sit here staring at wagon wheels, I’m going to lose my mind.”

  “How about this?” I brought my hand up and began to touch the icons on the shirt, pressing Erik’s large and plush chest with my fingers. I think he liked it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What is this?” I asked, pointing to the image of a male or female face in profile. “That’s the symbol for jade?”

  “Oh. Yes.” He nodded. “That’s it—that’s good.”

  “I remember reading about this image in one of de la Cueva’s letters to her sister Agata,” I said. “She wrote about a lesson where Balaj K’waill taught her this hieroglyph. He was tutoring her in the Maya language, and said this was an important image in their language. Then she made this joke about how ‘jade’ in the European tongue had a double meaning. How it’s a word for a bad woman.”

  “I’ve read that passage,” Erik said. “In graduate school—it’s famous. It’s one of the first documents ever used to decipher Maya writing. Back in the 1800s decoders were already referencing it. And your mother used it, too—at Princeton. To help translate the Stelae.”

  “I don’t think I knew that,” I said.

  Erik put his hands on the table and laced his fingers together. “That’s how these things happen. Clues found here to be applied there. It’s another form of detective work, decipherment. Which I used to be really interested in—I told you that already, didn’t I? I mean the classic form of decipherment—the breaking of concealment codes, not of other languages like this.”

  “You told me a little bit about it. Not everything.”

  “I started out studying the Roman ciphers, but after a while I became interested in the Maya’s language code. And I think I became an archaeologist on account of the Stelae—their hieroglyphs. The translation problem.”

  “Because of my parents’ writings on it?”

  “That’s part of it. Like I said, I always thought that they—and de la Rosa—had gotten the translation wrong.”

  “Did you ever tell my mother that?”

  “First time I met her—and you can imagine how well that went off.” He laughed. “Actually, why don’t we look at them? The Stelae. To pass the time. I have the paperback your dad gave us in my bag.”

  Erik began poking through his stuffed knapsack and pulled out a copy of my parents’ book, which detailed the markings of the Flores Stelae.

  “Again, the Stelae aren’t in cipher. One or two scholars played around with that idea for a while, in the sixties, but they turned out to be wrong. Neither the Maya or the Olmec used puzzles of that kind, because logographic writing—hieroglyphs, of the sort used by the Maya and the Sumerians, and the Egyptians—just isn’t flexible enough for ciphering. That’s an invention of the Greeks and Romans, who used alphabets. Caesar used a device called a transposition code. And then there are the stream codes—complex riddly things. But all language is a kind of code, and so are the hieroglyphs of the Maya and the Olmec. No one could read them at all for centuries.”

  “Why were you so interested in ciphers?”

  “One of my first papers was on Oscar Angel Tapia and his mirror writing—but I began working on those sorts of problems as a kid. Lewis Carroll’s bizarre little puzzles. The cipher of Augustus. Morse code, Mary, Queen of Scot’s puzzle-embroideries.” He cocked his head. “Am I rattling on?”

  “No. It’s good to talk. And I love ciphers—when I was young, for me, it was the scarabs in She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.”

  “By Haggard?”

  “Right. The Greek uncials that he starts that story with. Also, Poe’s Gold Bug.”

  “Your mother probably got you started on stories like that.”

  “Probably so.”

  “My father introduced me. He was a mathematician. A widower. Spent his life untangling riddles like these. I picked it up after him.”

  “So, it’s kind of similar to how I became interested in them. Because of my folks.”

  “Probably not as much as you think—nothing adventurous, really, in it.”

  He paused. I waited. He ate some of the Japanese mix the waiter had brought over, then said, “I was a bit of a solitary kid. Nothing like the heroic and very muscular Casanova that you see before you today. Do please take that look off your face, you maddening feminist, because I am only joking. What I mean is that I was this awfully fat little child prodigy, very emotional and brainy and lonely, and once my father told me that one day I’d crack the riddle of my loneliness—that’s how he put it. He said that—the heart was like a puzzle. You
just need to put it together. I didn’t happen to know that he was talking to me in metaphor, so I took his advice very thick-wittedly and literally. I began reading all his books on cipher, and by the time I was twelve I was studying Lacedaemonian military code instead of going to those sweaty school dances. Which turned out to be exactly the wrong move, as far as girls were concerned. Didn’t get much in the way of dates until I was almost twenty, and we moved here.”

  “I can barely believe that.”

  “Yes, ha. Funny what growing a foot will do. Getting away from the war probably didn’t hurt, either.” He drank some more wine and slipped his eyes over at me. “Though I’m happy enough about all that now because being such a mole meant I was able to spend all my time with my dad when I was a kid. I didn’t really meet someone else that I could work on ciphers with until I met Dr. Sanchez.” He took another sip, then hunched his shoulders up around his ears. His mouth drooped. “How did we get on this subject? Oh—codes. Codes.”

  “Erik, I want to thank you again for coming with me.” Huge unexpected feelings of friendship began swelling in my chest, and I had to flick my fingers around my eyes as if I were batting off invisible midges. “I want to thank you very much.”

  He tucked his chin down. “Yes. Well. You’re welcome. Your mother—you know—she’s a pain in my neck. But I don’t mind her that much. I’m happy to have come.”

  I stared at him. “You really came here for her, didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “For her. Not for jade.”

  “Oh, let’s not get into that now.”

  “You did—you did. You came here because you really care about her.”

  He paused, then: “It might have been one of my reasons.”

  “The others being?”

  Erik met my eyes and smiled. “I thought we were reading this book.”