Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  The more practice they had in working jade, the more respect the modern carvers felt for the ancient craftsmen. They discovered that the stone wasn’t apt for exceptionally detailed carving, owing to its large crystals. But they also found that it was a joy to work, with a substantial, sensual feel in the hand. True, its exceptional density made it demanding—not so much in the carving, thanks to their diamond-tipped instruments—but later, in the care required to polish it. As Bob Terzuola says, “When you finish a jade carving, you know you’ve accomplished something.” But jade’s hardness also makes it forgiving of mistakes. Whereas a slip of the chisel can ruin a marble statue-in-progress, the gradual scratching necessary to carve jade makes it difficult to commit a serious error, as each movement is too incremental to do much damage.

  Even while their carvers were still mastering their technique, the entrepreneurs were eager to start selling some pieces—and to mark the return of the jade industry to Guatemala for the first time in five centuries. They painted the exterior of their factory/showroom jade green and installed some elegant wooden displays in a front room. But in the beginning, there wasn’t much merchandise to fill them. For their premier products, they chose the simplest and most economical to produce—jade blocks in a variety of sizes. In July 1975, there was a gala grand opening of their enterprise, which they named the Jade Factory. Friends came and admired the merchandise, but the blocks made for pricey bookends or doorstops. Had they ever thought of carving something else from jade, the friends asked delicately—say, jewelry?

  So they ordered a supply of wire, gold beads, and freshwater pearls from a company in the States, and jewelry making became a family pursuit. Ridinger’s youngest daughter, Angela, recalls walking home from school on those quiet, car-less streets of Antigua, doing her homework, then sitting at the kitchen table and assembling necklaces and bracelets. Her girlish designs tended to be delicate, combining diminutive jade beads and pearls, while Johnson’s tended to use larger, more rustic beads closer to the ones strung by the ancient Maya.

  Jay Ridinger was among the first foreigners invited to join the Antigua Rotary Club, and one day he had them in to tour the jade factory. His Spanish was still rough, but Johnson happened to overhear a conversation between two Guatemalan businessmen standing behind her. It takes an American to invest in something like this, commented the first man. Yes, said the second, you’d never find a Guatemalan starting a jade business. Johnson realized it was true. Guatemalans with money to invest tended to put it in coffee fincas or textile factories or other traditional ventures rather than in something new and unproven. There had been admiration in the exchange, she realized, but also a tinge of resentment that left her with an uncomfortable feeling.

  And so Jay Ridinger discovered that, like prospecting for jade, owning a jade mine was not what he had imagined. For one thing, it wasn’t a mine or quarry in the usual sense, since the stone wasn’t dug out of a great hole in the earth but was collected from boulders or small outcrops at ground level. And people were still skeptical that what he and Johnson had found was jade at all. Even those who should have known better were among the most vocal doubters. One of their first sales was a simple beaded necklace, purchased by a tourist from Washington, D.C. Returning home, the client happened to be seated at a formal dinner next to the wife of the Guatemalan ambassador. When the woman showed off her necklace, the señora contemptuously informed her that she’d been cheated: Everybody knew there was no jade in Guatemala.

  But the natural market for their stone, Johnson believed more firmly than ever, was not in Washington or Houston or Chicago but in Guatemala—and not among skeptical Guatemalans, like the ambassador’s wife, but among foreign tourists, who would be more susceptible to jade’s charms while vacationing in the land of its origin. They weren’t really selling jade, she realized, but like the purveyors of any luxury good, were trading on an image. Yes, diamonds were beautiful, but what induced young men to spend thousands of dollars on them? Not the stones’ sparkle, but the conviction that diamonds were “forever,” reinforced over generations of clever marketing. And so, she resolved to play to jade’s strength, the same qualities that Johnson herself had found so affecting—its deep history and its ties to the great civilizations of the past. David Sedat’s slogan, “The story sells the stone,” became her mantra.

  Since tourists didn’t come to Guatemala with these associations preformed, the entrepreneurs would have to create the image they desired. When their workers became more skilled at carving and they expanded their merchandise beyond simple blocks and beads, they eschewed the elephants, Buddhas, and hearts that were mainstays of Chinese jade vendors and resolved to carve only reproductions of Mesoamerican figurines and masks (which made some archaeologists even more suspicious).

  For this kind of work, Bob Terzuola outfitted their workshop with flexible-shaft drills. These consisted of a motor, about the size and shape of a large coffee mug, which was hung from the ceiling above the worktable. Attached to the motor was a flexible shaft about two and a half feet long, like the kind that dentists used before they switched to compressed air to power their implements. The motor was regulated with a foot pedal, and at the end of the shaft was fitted a carving tool whose shape varied according to its purpose. Dentist’s drill bits often proved ideal.

  In the showroom, rather than locking their merchandise behind glass, Ridinger and Johnson displayed everything on open counters and shelves, so browsers could experience for themselves jade’s cool, heavy feel in the hand. And, drawing on her archaeology credentials, Johnson began an educational barrage, lecturing about Mesoamerican jade to anyone willing to invite her, and some not so willing—the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, the American diplomatic corps, the postal workers’ union, the fifth-graders in the local schools, and cruise ship passengers. They would later build a small museum in the back of the store, exhibiting their reproductions along with the ancient tools and stone fragments they’d found.

  As they honed their marketing strategy, sales improved, and the partners gradually added employees—a truck driver, more carvers, salespeople. They also yielded to the market and began to carve elephants, Buddhas, and hearts.

  In January 1976, they appeared to get the break they’d been waiting for. Ridinger and Johnson were in the shop when an American tourist burst in wanting to know, “Is this the place?”

  “The place for what?” Johnson asked.

  The man took a newspaper clipping from his pocket. “Is this the jade factory that was in the New York Times?”

  Ridinger and Johnson stared at the headline: “Brilliant Traces of Maya Civilization Are Newly Etched in Guatemalan Jade.” Beside it was a photo of Jean Deveaux, bent over his grinding wheel. Apparently, a Times reporter had happened into the store when the others were out. Despite Johnson’s urging, Ridinger hadn’t severed his partnership with the Belgian, whose pieces were sold in the shop, but by then relations were so strained between the associates that Deveaux had never even told them of the visit.

  Deveaux was the hero of the story (“a Belgian stone-carver has rediscovered an ancient Maya jade quarry in the jungles of Central America”), and Ridinger and Johnson weren’t even mentioned by name. But otherwise the piece hit every note they could have wished: jade’s significance to vanished civilizations, the long mystery of its sources and their recent rediscovery, the return of the jade industry to its homeland. “It is all a delight to the eye,” the article went on. “But what is most striking is what looks like traditional Maya jewelry set out on soft felt counters and tagged for sale, instead of in a museum or the back room of an antiques shop. The jewelry not only looks like something a Maya priest might have worn, but it comes from the very soil he once walked.” Who wouldn’t want to bring home a piece of that? If the eager American were any indicator, more tourists would be finding their way to the partners’ shop.

  Then, just a few days later, at 3:01
a.m. on February 4, 1976, Guatemala was struck by one of the worst earthquakes in its history. Centered about a hundred miles northeast of Guatemala City, the 7.5-magnitude quake shook the country for thirty-nine seconds, followed by hundreds of aftershocks. When it was over, nearly twenty-five thousand people were dead, more than seventy-five thousand were injured, more than three hundred towns were leveled, and more than a million people were homeless. Casualties were reported in seventeen of the country’s twenty-two administrative departments, with most suffered in the countryside, when thick roof beams and heavy tiles collapsed on campesinos sleeping in mud-brick houses. Said one farmer to Time magazine, “We cannot build of adobe again. It is of earth and it is our coffin.”

  In the hardest-hit department of Chimaltenango, not far from Antigua, a quarter of the population was killed or injured and 97 percent were homeless. Throughout the country, roads were closed by landslides, making access to the affected areas nearly impossible. Electricity and drinking water were cut off for days. Food soon became scarce, and there were reports of people eating rats. Nearly half of Guatemala’s hospitals were destroyed, and emergency morgues were set up in soccer fields and alongside roads, with bodies wrapped in bed sheets or scraps of plastic. Many victims were buried, unidentified, in hasty graves, where some were exhumed by packs of hungry dogs.

  In Antigua, which had been abandoned in the eighteenth century after repeated earthquakes, houses were destroyed and public buildings were toppled. At the Jade Factory, the front walls collapsed, exposing the store to the street; inside, the display cases tumbled forward, spewing their contents on the floor. Around the corner, the kitchen wall of the Ridingers’ rented house fell in and the tile roof slid into the garden. Jay and Mary Lou started sleeping in the Travco until they could find another house to rent, while Angela slept outdoors in the patio of the factory/showroom. Many people with the means simply left. Those who remained responded with paranoia, generosity, or greed, depending on their character. Jay Ridinger found a farmer with a supply of carrots for sale and started a soup kitchen; Mary Lou Johnson set up an earthquake information center, displaying maps of fault lines and summarizing the latest seismological research.

  Originating in the Motagua Valley, where the Caribbean and Central American tectonic plates grind together, the earthquake was provoked by the same forces that had created the country’s spectacular volcanoes—and its jade. But no one was thinking of luxuries like jade any more. Although President Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García assured his people, “Guatemala is wounded but not to death,” it would be years before the country recovered.

  It would also be a long time before tourists returned to Antigua. With a slow market for their jade in Guatemala, Ridinger and Johnson carted some of their jewelry to Texas and the Midwest and held trunk shows at the homes of friends and relatives. But they found there was little demand for Guatemalan jade in their native country, either. Americans, like Europeans, had no cultural affinity for the stone, and the few collectors concentrated on oriental jade. The irony was not lost on Mary Lou Johnson: Ridinger had been attracted to jade not only by the challenge of rediscovering the lost sources, but by the promise of building a lucrative business. They had managed to find jade, fill a workshop with equipment, and learn to carve the stone, only to discover that it was nearly unsalable—first in Hong Kong, then in Antigua, and now in the United States. Guatemalan jade may have been the most precious substance on earth to the Maya, but a millennium later, no one seemed to want it.

  With the investment in land and equipment and the overhead of the store and factory, the business had exhausted Jay Ridinger’s savings as well as an infusion of cash that Jerry Leech had raised from investors in Chicago. The partners cut staff to a minimum, and Ridinger finally extricated himself from his agreement with Jean Deveaux. But the business wasn’t generating enough revenue to maintain itself. Leech and Ridinger had a falling out, and Leech returned to the States. Then, in December 1977, Ridinger began a new joint venture: After nearly four years of living and working together, he and Mary Lou Johnson were married in an outdoor, Renaissance-dress ceremony at Betty Kempe’s Villa Santa Monica in San Miguel de Allende.

  The area around the Motagua Fault was the one place in Latin America where deposits of jade had been discovered. But the question remained, since the days of William Foshag: Was the Motagua the only source of that stone for the ancient Mesoamericans? Mexico and Costa Rica were both rich with carved pre-Columbian jades, and espousing the so-called criterion of abundance, many experts believed there must be deposits of jade in those countries as well. The way to resolve the issue was to analyze geological specimens from the Motagua and carved jades from museums, and compare the two groups. If all the museum jades matched stone from the Motagua, that would suggest that the Maya and others had mined only that area; if not, it would imply that there were other pre-Columbian sources still waiting to be discovered.

  Counting Foshag and Leslie’s jade from Manzanal, Norman Hammond’s from Usumatlán and El Jute, and the Ridingers’ stone, geological samples from five different locales were available for study. Hammond and his colleagues subjected the specimens to electron microprobe and neutron activation analysis. In the first test, the rock is bombarded with electrons, causing it to emit x-rays; since each element produces a distinctive x-ray pattern, researchers can determine which elements are present in the stone and in what proportion. In neutron activation analysis, a sample is exposed to a source of neutrons, causing some of the atoms’ nuclei to become radioactive; the radiation released similarly indicates the chemical composition.

  Most of the elements would be the same across all samples—the silicon, oxygen, aluminum, and sodium that are jadeite’s main constituents. But minute traces of other elements should also be found, holdovers from the stone’s formation, and these, the researchers hoped, would give each specimen a unique chemical “fingerprint.” In the end, though, the trace elements fell into no clear pattern, and the samples proved largely indistinguishable, forcing Hammond and his colleagues to “a somewhat indeterminate conclusion.” They held out the hope that one day investigators would be able “to characterize at least some jade sources firmly,” but first, a wider selection of jade deposits would have to be found for testing.

  In 1976, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Peabody Museum at Harvard took up the challenge, launching an ambitious study known as the Mesoamerican Jade Project. This time, the plan was to analyze a wider selection of geological samples as well as some museum jades; when the compositions of the raw jade and those of the artifacts were compared, it was hoped that some would match, showing that the jade in a certain carving had come from a specific location. The museum jades would be tested with neutron activation analysis, since that technique didn’t damage the samples. But even so, the curators would have to wait six months to get their items back, once the induced radioactivity had dissipated.

  The first field director of the Mesoamerican Jade Project, charged with traveling Guatemala and collecting the geological samples, was a man named Russell Seitz. Then Seitz was succeeded by Ron Bishop, an archaeologist also trained in chemistry, who was working at Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island. But for both men, the results were disappointing. “After five years of work,” Bishop found, he “had more questions than answers.”

  For one thing, their search hadn’t turned up any significant new deposits of jadeite. This meant there were still only a few geological specimens available for testing, most provided by the Ridingers, along with Foshag and Leslie’s samples, some borrowed from museums’ gem collections, and a few discovered by Bishop. And, like Hammond, et al., Bishop found jade an inapt candidate for such a study, since two specimens taken just feet apart could present different chemical profiles.

  Bishop did discover, though, that the differences in jade taken from distinct sources was greater than the differences among samples taken from the same source. So, eve
n though there was no trace-element “fingerprint,” no foolproof way to track an individual artifact to a specific location, certain similarities did emerge—just as members of the same family, though they have different fingerprints, may share an inherited resemblance. And based on this looser criterion, only about a third of the museum jades—excavated as far north as Chichen Itza and as far south as Copan, Honduras—were similar to the stone currently being taken from the Motagua. The artifacts fell into six clusters, suggesting that their jade may have originated in half a dozen distinct locations.

  The Ridingers’ jade was in the same group as about 10 percent of the jades that Edward Thompson had raised from the Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza. Mary Lou Ridinger was amazed to think that some of their stone may have been carried all the way to the Yucatan, some four hundred miles distant, perhaps a thousand years before. But just as startling was the study’s other implication: If the raw material for the antique jades had come from six different places, and the Ridingers’ mine accounted for only one, then five more pre-Hispanic sources were still unaccounted for.

  In 1977, after the start of the Mesoamerican Jade Project, tourists had begun to trickle back to Antigua. By the following year, the Ridingers believed they had survived the worst of their financial crisis, and, despite natural disaster and civil war, they continued their search for new deposits of jade.

  Around this time, Mary Lou Ridinger was prospecting in the eastern Motagua Valley with her friend Charlotte Thomson, one of the instigators of the Mesoamerican Jade Project. Driving rough dirt roads, they were scouting tributaries south of the river and using geological maps to trace serpentinite outcrops and tectonic boundaries. But with daylight fading and gasoline running low, they headed back to the Longarone Motel for the night.