“Somebody died,” Yolanda said, mournfully.
“Don’t get my kids upset,” said the landlord’s wife, looking suddenly completely temperate and grabbing three daughters from their truant positions in the kitchen doorway, and a fourth who was sprawled out in the living room. “This subject is bad for their emotional health.”
“Mine too,” the landlord said.
“Who died?” I asked in a whisper.
“Was it a local?” Erik asked.
“Oh, no, thank God.”
“Bad fortune even to say that.”
“It was a North American, like you.”
“Like me?”I asked.
“No, not so much,” one of the lodgers said. “She was dark—she was a Latin.”
“I’m a Latin.”
“More of a real kind of Latin.”
“Not Hungarian?” one of the neighbors asked.
“No, a Mexican?”
“A Mexican from America? Or an American from Mexico?”
“I think she was a teacher or something. A professor. She was going up to the forest, I think, or coming back down from it.”
“Anyway, that poor woman bit off a piece of bad luck. She was hit by a tree when the storm came, and then they brought her up here.”
“She’s in the morgue, madam, from what I hear,”said the handsome older man to me, carefully and clearly.
“I see,” I said, and then it took all of my concentration to keep my body and mind together, and to keep calm.
“He’s not talking about Juana,” Yolanda said. She focused on me very hard with her too-steady eyes and began to sober up through sheer willpower.
“No, it’s not her.” My voice sounded queerly flat.
I felt Erik take hold of my hand.
“No, it can’t be. It’s not her that died here,” I said.
“What’s wrong with your face?”
“She’s fine. Lola, don’t worry.”
“Is she going to faint?”
“No. She’s not going to faint.”
Unfortunately, Yolanda was right, as I didn’t faint. I stayed very conscious.
The men at the table went back to their drinking, but I just stood there for a long while, uncertain what my next move should be.
I couldn’t arrange my thoughts in a linear order. I went over to one of the chairs and sat down on it, and didn’t speak a word.
But I knew what I’d have to do.
CHAPTER 38
Four hours after the fiesta at the Hotel Peten Itzae had ended, and when the businesses and government buildings had opened, Erik and I walked into the thin light of Flores, through the stone pathways and past the blue-and rust-painted houses.
We made our way in total silence; I could hear only the ghostly sound of the lake’s waves on the shore, and the echoes of our shoes on the cobblestones.
We were heading to the police station, and the morgue.
As we made our way through Flores, we saw that it had been washed by the hurricane, and in the hour after sunrise the island took on colors of pale blue and ivory and a light, stony pink. Yellow, green, and turquoise hotels and houses lined the small streets; their buffeted facades peeled back in places, exposing a crumbling stucco, or delicate layers of colored paint. The lake surrounding the island was a dark blue mercury; it spread out into shades of cobalt and periwinkle and was bordered by poke boats painted marigold or bright green. A few men and boys rowed their boats over the lake and made their way to the nearby island of Santa Elena, with its language school and famous caves.
Erik and I had left Yolanda behind at the Peten Itzae. I’d deposited my mother’s bag there, too, and I hadn’t brought anything with me but that diary and my identification papers. This small load was tucked under my arm as we moved east and north around the island and crossed over the central square that is made up of, of all things, a basketball court. And then we headed west, turned right, and reached the Gobernacion Departmental, the large building that houses the governmental offices for the department of the Peten. The office was lit and open, and from behind the glass doors we could see officers dressed in blue uniforms behind a counter, and beyond them a warren of rooms.
“I can go in with you,” Erik said as we stood outside the doors. “Or I could just go in alone, if you like.”
“No, but thanks,” I said. “I’ll do it myself.”
“What are you going to do, exactly?”
I looked across the street at more of those placid blue houses. “Tell them I need to see that woman. To see—”
He nodded. “If you can identify her.”
“It’s not likely that it’s Mom,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“We don’t even know if they’ll let me in,” I went on.
“We don’t even know if those men at the hostel were right—we were drinking. They could have made a mistake. Maybe no one died here at all.”
I nodded. “There’s that, too.”
But as I was soon to learn from one of the officers—a friendly woman with curly hair and in one of those neat blue uniforms with a very stiff collar—someone was killed around Flores after being hit by a tree in the hurricane, and the victim was female, and a foreigner. The officer also informed me that she would let me in to see if I could identify the body, because up until now no one had.
After a bit of a wait, during which time Erik and I sat next to each other on benches in total silence, I was led into a room.
The room that constituted Flores’s morgue was small and buff-colored, with one metal table, a sink, and two file cabinets. Something was happening to me so that instead of being struck with hysterical blindness, which I would have much preferred, I was instead inflicted with a sort of hysterical alertness. I observed with a surreal clarity the black wavy speckles in the floor’s linoleum, which was cut into flat black tiles. A white plastic trash can stood behind the metal sink, and on the wall were signs in black and red Spanish script that I had trouble reading. Beneath the ceiling hung a row of scuffed yellow cabinets, and above them stretched long rectangular fluorescent lights.
A male officer with papyrus-colored hair wheeled something into the room on a metal rolling table. This mass was covered not with a white sheet but with a cotton blanket, woven in marigold and black designs. It was something like a blanket for a bed, or a very large shawl.
He turned it back, gently, so that I could make the identification.
The woman underneath the blanket had dark hair and a face of indeterminate color, with high cheekbones and a brutally sculpted jaw, made severe by the drawing back of the skin. I saw the precise fringe of the eyelashes and eyebrows that had been plucked into a delicate arch. Her thin lips distended in a dissatisfied expression. The hair fell back from her face; her nose was long, not hooked like an eagle’s, thin at the bridge and flaring at the nostrils; she had pierced ears but wore no earrings. Her neck was long and pale above the shawl-like blanket. Peering closer, I saw that on the far side of her face, which I couldn’t make out too well because of my angle, there was a bruise.
A few minutes later I left that room and moved again through the corridor, covered with more of that black-speckled linoleum and abraded by white lights. I went back to the waiting area with the bench where Erik waited with my papers and my mother’s diary stacked up next to him in a neat pile.
He looked up.
“It wasn’t her,”I said.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“It wasn’t her.”
“I’ll take you somewhere, Lola,” Erik said. “Somewhere you can rest. You look terrible.”
“They said they thought she might be Hungarian,” I said.
And now my body and my hands and my face were moving all by themselves, and I couldn’t do anything to control them or stop it.
CHAPTER 39
Erik hired a cab that took us across the spit to Santa Elena Island, and the cave of Actun Kan. The cavern sits behind a patchwork of hills, half hi
dden, and is famous for its burial chambers. Limestone formations score its walls; the Indians believed that some of the patterns looked like their snake gods, which is why its Spanish name is La Cueva de la Serpiente, or the Cave of the Serpent. Other visitors have said that the limestone shapes favored the rain god called Chac, and the Europeans believed they intuited the face of Saint Peter there.
The cave glimmered with small electric lights strung within its hollow; the hurricane’s rains still soaked the ground, and in some places the water stood several inches high. Erik had the driver maneuver us up to the small lot before its mouth, and when we emerged from the cab the opal sky descended onto the small buttes, stained dark burgundy and iron from the rain.
Erik put his hand on my hand, which still gripped my mother’s journal. “I thought this might be a nice place to bring you after that scare. Someplace peaceful.”
“It is.”
He looked back at the car, a small green pirate cab driven by a spiky-haired teenager wearing an AC/DC T-shirt.
“You want me to wait for you here?” the cabbie asked.
“Just a second,” Erik said. He looked at me. “What would you like to do now, Lola? We can do anything you want. We can relax here for a while, and have the driver come back. Or we could go looking for your mother in town. Or we could talk. About whatever you like. Your mother. Or—I don’t know—the Stelae. We were talking about codes—I have some ideas; it might take your mind off the last couple of days.”
But I wasn’t ready to talk about jade yet this morning, or Von Humboldt, or how my mother had written about the Stelae and the maze and its decipherment.
“We’ll do all that, Erik,” I said, “but right now I’d like to be alone. Just for an hour or so. To be by myself and think.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“An hour, all right. I’ll go into town and scramble around a few of those B & Bs to see if anyone’s heard of your mother. Maybe get some supplies. And then I’ll come right back here and get you.”
I smiled at him, and he squeezed my hand.
Above us, a light drizzle began to pluck at the wet mud at our feet. The sky looked heavy, and very low; magenta and coral streaks brightened the clouds.
The cabbie slid off in the green car with Erik in tow. I watched them leave and pulled my collar up against the rain. Then, tucking my mother’s book under my arm, I went off by myself into the cave.
The dark cavern rang with the sound of insects and my own footsteps as I slogged through the wet pools that had flooded the threshold. The electric lights cast a brassy glare on the limestone walls, which looked smooth initially, but then revealed themselves to be formed of intricate layers of dripping stone, as if that limestone was once a substance as soft as water. As I went deeper, the grottoes grew blacker and the water colder, but the lamps shone bright enough so that I could see stalagmites growing out of the floor in the white twisting shapes of wax. I also glimpsed the bumps and ridges in the stone walls, which didn’t look anything to me like snakes or gods or saints, but more like writing in a foreign language, or random scratches and ridges made by someone’s hand. I ran my hands over the limestone, and when I did, grit came off on my fingers. I wandered through the black and bright tunnels and rooms of Actun Kan, and did not understand any of the marks that I passed by, until one of the signs on the walls did look familiar. Tromping through the water, I leaned forward and peered at the scrapes on the wall. It seemed that I was staring at a very old hieroglyphic language. The marks were nearly rubbed away, though still embedded in the stone; almost illegible. But when I brought my face closer, and ran my fingers over the characters, I made them out:
Marisela y Francisco 1995
And that pretty much ended my experiments with cave paleology. I continued walking, holding my mother’s journal, until I reached a high-domed chamber in the cave, which was well lit enough to read by. I sat down on one of the higher stones on the edge of the room. Green and brown lizards danced over the stones and up the walls; insects flew in small storms that I batted away with my arms. I sat with my knees up to balance Mom’s journal on them, and my thoughts were accompanied only by the eerie tink of swimming salamanders and the echoes of pond-diving toads. The shock of thinking that I had just been about to identify the body of my mother, and the hard jolt of seeing that other woman, combined with my earlier panic at having read Juana’s confessions, made me feel lightheaded.
I looked down to steady myself. The journal remained on my lap; the tin lock hung broken from the boards; water damaged part of the spine, and there was a rip in the salmon-colored binding cloth.
From far off came the splashing sounds of animals swimming in the pools that lined the cave. A small brass lamp, fixed into one corner of the cave’s ceiling, sent out light that fell across my legs and my arm like a stroke of gold paint.
I opened my mother’s journal again.
October 19
Next day. Spent the morning looking at things I’ve written in the past week, and it strikes me how hard it is for anyone to ever forget their past no matter how much they’d like to.
Though forgetting de la Rosa is probably beyond my talents.
Lola’s always reminding me of him, for one. The strange thing is that I think she takes the most after Manuel. Not just that she’s a bookish thing, or sometimes a little shy, but rather that she has his same constancy and stubbornness and timidity—she never did take to life out here with me in the bush, like Manuel with his maddening phobias.
I’ll have to face it, eventually. She’s an armchair creature. She’ll never come out to Guatemala with me now.
I chuckled, and my laughter bounced back to me from the cave walls. I knew that in my last few days of tracking, flood-jumping, car-crashing, Yolanda-surviving, and army-caravanning, I was setting some kind of macha record the likes of which the great Juana Sanchez would find hard to beat herself.
Then I began reading again and stopped laughing.
But still, she has the other’s hair, his build, his face, his hands, his eyes, doesn’t she?
It’s funny how someone can appear exactly like someone else you hate, and you can love them so much that it justifies your whole life.
Because I think that my loving Lola has justified my life. It’s the one really good thing I think I ever did. Even if Tomas never loved me.
Still, I have my regrets.
What’s that old song again?
I lost you
I lost you
I’m lost, too
My darling
Nevertheless …
I should perhaps remind myself that I have another consolation, in addition to our daughter.
And I believe that it is time that I turn my thoughts to that subject, again.
For it is no small matter that I, and not my beloved rival, have cracked the puzzle of the Queen Jade.
I gripped the diary with both hands and read these passages again and again.
And the strange thing is that I think she takes the most after Manuel. But she has the other’s hair, his build, his face, his hands, his eyes. It’s funny how someone can appear exactly like someone else you hate … Our daughter.
There seemed no other way of interpreting these writings. Tomas de la Rosa and my mother had an affair in the year before my birth. De la Rosa was my father. Not Manuel Alvarez.
CHAPTER 40
Perhaps the human heart should only confront a few revelations at a time, but in the gloom of my cave I was learning secrets. And I was starved to understand the rest.
As I read, my back grew stiff, and my neck as well; it became increasingly humid in the cavern. The light from the brass torch attached to the wall broke into glistering coins of gold that swam on the surface of the pools. Mosquitoes hovered over the water, and on account of the torch these too turned burnished and oddly lustrous. I turned the pages, and that crisp flicking of the paper echoed clearly and precisely in the stone chamber.
&nb
sp; Then I came to an entry written just before she’d left on her trip to this country I now found myself in.
October 20
I’ve decided to leave for Guatemala in two days to locate the Stone, despite the gloomy weather reports on the news.
It no longer seems adequate to me to simply publish my findings concerning the Maze of Deceit. Rather, I would prefer to go alone, and finish Tomas’s work. This will be my way of paying my respects.
What findings on the Maze of Deceit? I continued paging through the book, at a quicker pace.
October 25: 8:00 P.M.
In Antigua now, and the rain’s getting worse by the second. Just in case I run into a squall while out in the jungle, I’ll write down here a copy of the decoded text, for safekeeping. And I’ll keep my diary at the Hotel Casa Santo Domingo.
THE MAZE OF DECEIT
Half a year ago, I was obliged to take on the task of editing a monograph authored by the insufferable Erik Gomara on Alexander Von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. Though I dreaded to take on this interminable job, it turned out to hold for me the most marvelous consequence: for when I reread the German’s telling of his efforts to capture the Queen Jade, I found that certain descriptions of the Maze of Deceit bore a strange resemblance to the images on the Stelae. Von Humboldt’s report of the labyrinth’s confusing “passages” and “signs” recollected for me a haphazard pattern that Manuel and I had translated from the Flores panels back in the early 1960s.
Could there be a relationship between them? As I tried to recall any other accounts of patterns that related to the mazes or the Jade, I remembered also some fragments from Beatriz de la Cueva’s Letters that might shed some light on this fledgling theory.
The Queen Jade Page 20
