“Hell, trust me it’ll all fly like a bird,” Krieger had assured Lupi. Krieger also said this might happen: as they caught him up in their arms once he had made his crossing they worked together to remove his clothes and brought him back to the clear grass-bottomed pool dammed above the bridge. He gave himself over to their hands. The women touched as frankly as the men. There was so much gentleness to the way they bathed him he did not cry out at the cold. His head was pushed under the sharp water and when he opened his eyes in its absolute clarity he could see feet stirring up the bottom, calves, the silver trails—rising beads of air, so many legs, the men in their breechclouts, the women’s legs naked, the brown triangles between their thighs. Pulled out of the water he gasped for air and was led to the bank again. The women let their skirts back down.
Breechclout and a dyed poncho with what seemed to be a duck-down fringe (it was: Muscovy) were given to him after he was dried in a blanket. One showed him how to secure the poncho with a tie-belt around his waist. The women were gone, having turned their backs on the group so that Lupi noticed their hair tied in queues and greased. He was allowed to put on his brown shoes (several of them who wore tapir-hide sandals looked at these wing-tips with undisguised mirth), but the rest of his clothes were placed in a basket which he was handed to carry. No one uttered a word—they did not converse among themselves—but everyone smiled, including Lupi; instructions were accomplished in simple hand language. Three toted blowguns, toylike reed affairs, and when Lupi pointed at these, clay pellets were brought out of pouches with great enthusiasm, stuffed into the mouthpiece and shot with frightening accuracy at flat stream stones tossed away in the air. He was offered his chance to try one of these out, but declined, feeling somehow that indistinct tables of sophistication had been turned on him. How well would Krieger fare down here? he couldn’t help but wonder. Maybe not so well.
The half mile they walked was a landscaped terrain that hadn’t been visible from the stony perch where he had spent the night. Here over a low rise were rows of harvested corn stalks laid out with regularity. A system of irrigation, probably fed by another spring, was evident in a series of finely manufactured sluice gates of fitted lumber and with decorative sliphooks forged of silver and fixed like exotic mechanical birds atop each.
They passed other fields and orchards before turning through a dense stand of old trees and arriving at the stone wall that ran, much like a Roman oppidum or one of the perched villages in Provence, the boundaries of the village. He entered through an archway. The extreme declivity on which the village itself hung was unexpected. On leaving the cobbled plaza just at the entrance, he could see rows of humble dwellings and walkways, or streets. These dropped at angles so intense they made him dizzy. It was sheer architectural bravura, a cliff village formed in concentric circles. Across the gorge over which the village was situated ran a jagged rim of rock whose nearest walls stood in shadows except along the peaks of fractured stone. Because the village, down into which he was led along granite stairs worn smooth by human feet, boasted shade trees beside its crude fountains, while the cliffs not a hundred meters away were barren of vegetation and looked impossible to scale, he could see this site had been chosen both for its natural fortification and the sun’s presence through the seasons.
Through a maze he was brought to a tiny dispensary. Here the scratches on his hands were dressed with (as he imagined) virgin wax, a kind of rosin or colophony, and incense that first had been melted over a flame into the other ingredients. And once this was done, he made his way across the plaza, up a narrow flight of stairs into the only dwelling that stood two stories, cantilevered along gables to provide a thatch-covered porch, where Olid awaited him in his sitting hammock. The old man wore a long tunic and a sash embroidered with crane feathers. An African gray parrot rested on his shoulder. A slight boy with a machete (and, Lupi thought, didn’t it seem curious how factory-manufactured the blade looked?), its handle corseted with ribbons, stood away to one side. The parrot uttered a series of derisive clicks and squawked, “Nonne hie facit ventum latrare et garrire?”—this is he who makes the wind bark and chatter?
“Ego? Non ego …” Lupi began, but when he saw he was answering the parrot he interrupted himself and addressed Olid, formally: “Signor Cristóbal, Matteo Lupi sum,” thinking that now for the first time since the baptism, or humiliation by water, or whatever it was they had accomplished back at the stream, he felt nervous. This might have been the language, however. He was willing to admit that as a possibility.
“Nonne … hic facit … ventum latrare?”
“Non ego, sed alii, others … the soldiers …”
A large earthen bowl lay at Olid’s feet, brimming with what Lupi presumed were anathemata—consecrated objects (pair of bifocals, a mummified bat). Olid tapped at the lip of this bowl with his walking stick. He grunted. He cleared his nostrils, sucking back into his sinuses—and again, it seemed, the gesture, its purposive quality, dignified, distinguished.
“Nonne epistulam accepisti a Sardavaal?” You received the letter from Sardavaal?
“Accepisti a Sardavaal,” the parrot talked as sparrows twittered in the thatchery, and Olid brushed at it. The blue-tipped tail flicked indignantly as the bird hopped off and over to a wooden railing.
“Sardavaal.”
Lupi counted out a full half minute before intoning the name again.
“Cur non venit ipse Sardavaal ad hoc narrandum mihi?” Why hasn’t Sardavaal come to tell me this himself?
He is no longer in this country.
Why has he left?
There were people here who no longer wished him well.
Sardavaal is a man of courage and would not run away.
He departed of his own free will.
The letter from Sardavaal? “Quis epistula haec a Sardavaal?”
It came from very far away.
“Nonne tu emissarius eius?” You’re Sardavaal’s emissary?
Yes, I am.
He would not come to save Olid from these dogs of wind himself, not his friend?
Sardavaal loves Olid. The chattering in the wind is not animals nor of nature but men in metal leviathans or dragons if you can imagine that have come here to kill themselves but they will kill you while they butcher themselves.
Mistake?
Incidental, not a mistake, and not not a mistake.
They kill me?
(Olid scowled, his whole face became glazed.)
“Etiam, ad Olid interficiendum quoque,” yes, to kill Olid too.
Sardavaal says this? They are here to kill Olid?
Yes, Sardavaal says so.
You are this wolf, this wolf of Sardavaal’s epistle?
Yes.
You shall take me?
Yes.
To Sardavaal, you will take me to him?
Yes, I will.
And what will happen to my families?
Your families?
All those here.
I … they will be safe.
Sardavaal sends an assurance they will not be harmed by the dogs of the air?
Yes, he does.
Sardavaal says they shall be safe.
Yes.
They will be safe if I go.
Because you go.
Olid nodded and kept tapping the bowl with his stick. An hour passed before they were brought canjica, a cornmeal porridge cooked in milk, fried green pineapple, broiled meat and afterwards coffee and cornstraw cigarettes. Lupi ate, choking on his food at the confidence he had engendered in Olid with his impromptus about Sardavaal. If Krieger had only seen the performance he had given, he thought, and then began to wonder why Krieger’s approval, Krieger’s ability to get through situations, suddenly mattered to him. He didn’t know Krieger. And of course it was worth far more than they were paying him to be able to go through all this in the first place. He, Lupi. Not Krieger.
Olid finished his meal and sat for another hour. Finally, he spoke.
Prima
ergo luce abibimus.
Which meant that they would leave at first light.
5.
THE COACH OF THE bus was made of wood and inside it passengers sat on wooden benches. Neither the windows nor the windshield was fitted with glass and the driver wore goggles, an accessory which made his demeanor seem both menacing and imbécil. Jaw advanced under these goggles, speaking to no one and giving off an air of solemn authority, he reminded Krieger of—
“Boris Badinoff? the Rocky and Bullwinkle show? you know, flying squirrels? F-fan mail from f-flounders?”
His companion ignored him.
Danlí to Tegucigalpa usually required between two and four hours by bus, depending on how much time was lost with mechanical breakdowns, flat tires, luggage fallen off the roof rack, stops to siphon gas from the drum mounted on the back into the tank, or to show papers to local authorities. In a landscape solid and pale with the mountains falling away in ranges it seemed improper, wasteful, wrong to be thinking of old cartoons and foul little jefes—so thought Krieger, and as he did the bus crossed a ditch which tossed his companions against the seatbacks in front of them. He retied his laces, each sole placed one at a time on the knee of his trousers.
Three members of a marimba orchestra stinking of mesquite carried on at length and at the top of their lungs about the wire and rope that encircled the body of the bus to ensure its holding together over the potholed and occasionally muddy dirt road. Lupi and Krieger, in order to avoid them, had sat at the rear just behind a woman with baby in arms and her young son who brought with him a rooster in a woven basket. Olid, quiet, in the suit of clothes he had been given to wear, was seated opposite. A skinny soldier, beret tucked under his epaulette, had sequestered himself behind the driver, gently and vacantly to pick his nose in the soft morning air.
“I remember the first time I saw the ruins of Zaculeu in Guatemala I thought, Christ this stuff is straight Bauhaus,” Krieger said. “You ever see any photographs of the place?”
“No.”
“Clean lines all those lime-white vertical terraces mounting up and up and up with such regularity to the sky and how you can’t help but stop and think all the atrocities that took place up there in the name of some indifferent boogawooga god, you say you never saw a photograph?”
“No,” he repeated, noting they had already come to a stop so the driver could rewire the rearview mirror.
“Capital of the Mam Maya kingdom of pre-Columbia, couple hundred yards off the Río Selegua, etcetera, anyway United Fruit, like I was saying, UF had dug this place up as an expression of social responsibility back in the late forties and for each and every antiquity that ended up in the display cabinets at the Instituto de Antropologia y Historia how many more were spirited away for your Park Avenue marble mantelpieces? Let ’em keep the bird bones, the shells, all that crap their anthropometrists can diddle away with their calipers and their pocket calculators till the cows come home, whatever, but the really choice stuff? your basic Aztan polychrome vase, your Qankyak tumbaga and gold, your tripod bowls so gorgeous it makes your heart melt, your censers, etcetera? forget it! we’re, what, twenty-five years later you think any of these fuckbusters can even donate these things to a museum admit all the stickyfinger shenanigans going on there?”
“They could do it anonimo.”
“My ass anonimo, these guys don’t do anything unless their name winds up on a brass plaque somewhere. Who knows how much priceless pottery’s been fed into the garbage to avoid the embarrassment of the heirs finding out dear old dad was as smarmy a culture-rapist as Goebbels.”
The bus started up again in a slow trail of dust.
“Say, Lupi, you ever eaten quetzal?”
“What?”
“Quetzal, the most beautiful bird on earth, psychedelic colors like you wouldn’t believe, sacred to both the Mayans and the Aztecs, absolutely delicious. Roasted, broiled, not as gamy as quail. How’s our friend there doing?” Lupi looked at Olid’s face and felt a quick pang of guilt pass over him. Bernhardt, he thought. Bernhardt, him and the landlord. Got to eat, got to pay your rent. Supply and demand. Food and roof. Olid’s face drawn down into its peculiar silence, for he had said nothing since they left the village together before dawn, had refused the dried fruit and water Lupi had offered him.
“He seems to be—” Lupi began.
“Not that I take a dim view of it, of course, culture-rape I mean, so normal in the course of events it’d be like frowning upon the fact the sun insists on rising every morning. Still and all, but this Zaculeu project was United Fruit’s great contribution to Central America and I was flown in to study the results.”
“He doesn’t seem very well to me,” Lupi broke in, looking at the viejo.
“Oh, he’s okay, little sleepy. But what was I saying, the results of this million-dollar dig—what do you think they came up with?”
Lupi shrugged, folding his hands in his lap.
“Syphilis, man. That is, they didn’t get syphilis, well maybe they did maybe they didn’t, but—hey, Lupi, d’you ever hear the one about the sylph named Phyllis with syphilis?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. You should read Woodbury and Trik’s monograph on the thing, Goff’s great treatise on pre-Columbian syphilis and it all came out of Zaculeu. Goff was able to use two crania found at the site to prove that the geographic origins of the disease which everybody had assumed were Old World were in fact New World so that the Guatemalans had this information passed down to them by good old Goff out of Hartford, Connecticut, insurance capital of the world, that syphilis ain’t our forefathers’ fault, ain’t attributable to the conquistadors but instead to these grubby, infected little highland Mayans, among others, declared that Europe showed no evidence of the existence of las bubas before the Niña and the Pinta arrived back in port in Lisbon at the end of Columbus’s first voyage with some sick Indians, lovely stuff isn’t it? great Old World attitude displayed there, give the Guatemalans something to be grateful for like whether you should thank the guy who’s only got one of his boots on your head and not both, but anyway Zaculeu was as well-integrated a job as I’d ever seen, seventy-four weeks is all the time it took to excavate and as I say a marvelous public relations number plus the benefits of keeping up the grand tradition of trafficking jade, pottery, etcetera, under informal if not formal immunity, and so I recommended the company strongly consider setting up subsidiary number one hundred and something, getting into the business of dry-season excavations, granted we were based mostly in Salvador and Honduras and a lot of the plummier sites were in the Yucatán, southern Mexico, Guatemala, around in there, but there was always Naco, pretty near San Pedro Sula a few hundred miles northeast of here, and we had warehouses and facilities there, so one thing leads to another and I’m liaison officer for the company on three of these projects simultaneously.”
“But I thought you said you—”
“One not far from Naco, other two near Yuscarán, not to forget of course we could fudge like chocolatiers if anything seemed too flimsy, but I began to notice, Look Krieg you’re making more in this collector market than you are on salary, learn a few of the basic tricks of the trade like mislabeling pieces, say like this necklace”—Krieger held his hands out before him, and rosaried the invisible jewelry—“this necklace, uhm, yeah this piece’s, let me review my notes” (pretending to flip through a pocket-size notepad) “ah, yeah, this here’s from Palenque … or wherever more prestigious site you can mark it up, say, well look this guy’s a steady customer jack it up ten-twelve times its value, give the sucker a break …”
“The necklace?”
“Yeah, the price the price. And so I took a leave of absence, safety net against things not working out and six months later—”
“I guess it didn’t work.”
“It worked it worked fine, etcetera, but now recently the market has gone soft, harder to get good inventory profit margin shot to hell by these weaselly greedy subpar we
tbacks on the one hand and your basic diminished constituency of buyers on the other, back in New York all these cokeheads snorting at their thumbnails in toilet stalls forty floors above street level get on the old horn push through some quick bond sales meantime you look down your phonecord to see you’re floating over your desk and the only thing that’s keeping you from floating away up to the ceiling is the cord which you hang on to with both hands for dear life and the guy at the other end’s saying Morgan Guaranty what? these assholes with more grams in their desk drawer than gray matter in their skulls and you think they’ll buy good pre-Columbian pieces these days? naw … like hey, wow, geewillikers man, aren’t they really like crackin down on that now? and what does it matter to them that there are easy ways to get around it—the best one I know is you take your piece, a jaguar vase say, and you break it, ship it up in shards in separate boxes, bunch of valueless stuff there at customs right? and then you bring your restoration man in to put it back together again—naw … I mean like these asshole Wall Street types saying I … am … aware CDs flat as pancakes, so’s money market, but like … insider trading’s the way to fly.”
Come Sunday Page 9
