Vucub-Kamé could attempt to sway her this way, but he suspected she would turn him away.
What to do, then.
Vucub-Kamé’s owl had brought him an interesting tidbit that day. Before, the owl had captured Hun-Kamé’s full laughter in a white shell. This time it brought two shells. Tucked neatly inside a black snail shell lay Casiopea’s sigh. It was a delicate thing, like a nocturnal butterfly. Pretty too. In strokes of crimson and blue it painted a picture of the most exquisite heartache.
Vucub-Kamé was able to somewhat re-create the mind of the woman who had breathed this sigh. He could not know everything, but he drew conclusions, and they were sharp and accurate since he was, after all, a daykeeper, used to teasing stories out of the smallest leaf and pebble lying on the road.
He thus surmised that Casiopea Tun, rather than being drawn by treasure chests and pageants of power, was infatuated with his brother. Hun-Kamé was the prize she desired.
Vucub-Kamé knew he must play upon this weak point, but he had not quite determined how he might accomplish it. Now, however, as he pondered the waters of the lake, his thoughts solidified.
If Hun-Kamé she wanted, Hun-Kamé he could grant, in a fashion. Truly, there was no other way they might expect to be together, for otherwise such an exercise would be immediately doomed.
And Hun-Kamé? Would he not oppose such a scheme if he were made aware of it?
But, ah, there was the matter of the second shell. This one was yellow. Hidden in it was another sigh. The mind of the one who had uttered this sigh, Vucub-Kamé could not re-create as fully as in the case of Casiopea: it was Hun-Kamé’s sigh, his immortal Xibalban essence shielding naked thoughts and desires. However, enough of the mortal element was audible to Vucub-Kamé that, although haltingly, it painted a different picture. Not exquisite in its construction, nor light like Casiopea’s, but crude like an unfinished carving. The sketch of a man in that sigh.
Here was the mortality that afflicted Hun-Kamé, and that Vucub-Kamé had thought would lead to a contest and a decapitation. Now he glimpsed another path, more subdued but less onerous. Left or right the road splits, what did it matter the direction it took if Vucub-Kamé obtained his crown?
Because Hun-Kamé’s sigh made one matter clear. That, unbelievably, immortality weighed on him, it chafed, he struggled against it.
Has a god ever abdicated his eternity for a woman? No. Such idiocies cannot be expected of anything immortal. But mortals descend into paroxysms quite often. And what was Hun-Kamé now but half a fool, his voice young, his eye almost bereft of shadows? He sighed and he yearned, and in that yearning lay a weakness to exploit.
Both of them stupid puppets of harmless flesh.
Vucub-Kamé tossed the shells into the water. They caused ripples, but in those waters he could see no futures, nor did he intend to. The gesture was one of defiance against the chaos that conspired against him.
“It is my kingdom, for me alone and for me to keep,” he told the water.
Silver eyes and a smile like the edge of the voracious sea, Vucub-Kamé whirled away and walked back to his palace.
The tracks changed in Mexicali. The rail became a narrow gauge, and this smaller train they had swiched to rattled painfully, finally reaching Tijuana. It was terribly hot: they called the road south of Tijuana the “road to hell” for a reason. Even the shade of the whitewashed shed that served as the train “station,” with a few benches and little else for show, offered no solace. Hun-Kamé and Casiopea fanned themselves with their hats and contemplated the border town.
Prohibition had been good to Tijuana. Avenida Revolución, the artery of the city, was jammed with hotels and establishments selling curiosities to the tourists. There were rows of eateries, many advertising themselves in English. Peddlers walked around the streets trying to entice the newcomers with their wares. At a corner, a man stood with a donkey painted as a zebra, offering to take photographs of children riding on its back for a low fee.
The number of saloons had doubled in the span of a few years. Gambling clubs mushroomed: Monte Carlo, the Tivoli Bar, the Foreign Club. Raunchy establishments mixed with others that promised a glimpse of “old Mexico,” a false creation more romantic than any Hollywood film. But what did the tourists know? The Americans streamed into Mexico, ready to construct a new playground for themselves, to drink the booze that was forbidden in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco, but flowed abundantly across the border. Lady Temperance had no abode here. The longest bar in the world was in Tijuana, and it charged fifteen cents for a beer. Even as far away as New York people talked about casinos like the Sunset Inn, where one could win or lose a fortune playing faro and monte. There was music too. Dancers, even magicians pulling rabbits out of hats.
Everyone visited Tijuana, jamming the crossings at Calexico and San Ysidro. Gloria Swanson, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, they all ventured there. Rich men in tweed suits from back east, very formal, would let loose upon the dance floor. Wild types with a thing for jazz hustled their way through town. Criminals, prostitutes, liquor runners, and the cream of the crop, crammed together, smoking cigarettes, pushing back tequila, slamming down the dollar bills.
Casiopea and Hun-Kamé found their way across this haven of hedonism and into one of its hotels, where they spoke to a clerk who said that they’d need to hire an automobile to get to Tierra Blanca.
“It’s the damn best hotel and casino in this state. You head off down the coast, past Rosarito,” the clerk told them. “There’s cars willing to drive you down in the morning, but they get scarce at night.”
Since it was now nighttime, and since they were both tired from their adventure in El Paso—although at this point Casiopea was always tired, not for any reason—Hun-Kamé booked two rooms. The clerk assured them he’d fetch them an automobile in the morning.
Casiopea lost no time in slipping into her nightgown and falling upon the bed. The room was cramped and stuffy. There were also too many pillows, and she shoved them to the floor.
She had evaded Xibalba the previous nights, but now the nightmare returned. She saw the Black Road, the gray landscape with its strange plants. Casiopea had the sensation she was not alone, the rustling of wings alerting her to something strange in the air. Again she arrived at a lake of pure blue, glowing softly, and then there was the blood welling from her wrists. The blood ran down her body, the skin sloughed off her bones, leaving the pulsating flesh, and birds with mighty beaks pecked at her, tearing chunks of meat. They pecked her bones clean and then those bones were laid beneath the obsidian throne, and Vucub-Kamé sat on this throne with a necklace made of human skulls around his neck.
She woke up screaming. The rooms were connected, and Hun-Kamé must have heard her because he rushed in, looking startled. At first Casiopea said nothing. She was terribly embarrassed. She’d roused him, and he seemed entirely unsure of whether he should speak or dash out.
“What is it?”
“I died,” she told him, her mouth trembling, although she had meant to say “I had a dream, I’ll go back to sleep,” even if the dream had followed her, the room eerily quiet, the shadows much too dark. On the floor, a pillow might have been a wild creature ready to strike, and the wallpaper, it was the foliage of a distant jungle.
“I was in Xibalba.”
The name, so soft, like an insect’s wing, and his face, upon hearing it, strained, uncertain. She kicked the covers away and stood up, her voice hoarse.
“What happened there?”
She shook her head. “There was blood, my blood. The road turned crimson with it. I don’t want to say more; you told me we shouldn’t speak about certain things.”
She rubbed her left hand, which ached, and looked down at the floor, careful to avoid the too-dark shadows in the corners, which resembled black wraiths. She knew, if she stared at them, they might shift and grin at her.
There was the memory of death in the darkness, dream-death, but not any falser for its oneiric nature.
“It hurts again?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. Not just the hand. The head, her body, pain like a current running through her. Pins and needles in her arms and legs, a sour taste in her mouth. The pain came and went, but it didn’t end.
He reached out and held her hand. The ache diminished and he released her. She looked up at him. “I apologize for the discomfort, both the physical pain and the pain gazing upon Xibalba may cause you,” he said. “I know that contemplating my kingdom of dust and smoke is no simple thing for a mortal.”
“ ‘Yesterday a dream; tomorrow dust. Nothing, just before; just after, smoke,’ ” she replied.
It was an automatic reflex. In her desire to soothe herself she’d stretched her mind, looking for something familiar, and ended up finding the old tome with Quevedo’s sonnets. A poor choice, but one made in haste.
“Pretty words,” he said. “What do they mean?”
“It’s a poem, from one of my father’s books. It was titled ‘He indicates life’s essential brevity, unexpected and with suffering, assaulted by death.’ I don’t think I’d mind if life was brief if only…”
“If only what?” he pressed her, when she didn’t speak.
“You’d laugh.”
“I don’t much laugh at you.”
Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have said a word to him, to anyone, but her fear clung to her like a spider web, and in her attempt to shake it off she forgot she should have been mortified about speaking so plainly. Babbling, truly. In the end, what did she care? And had she not told him so many things already?
“I’d like to dance. The dances we couldn’t dance in Uukumil. My mother, she said a waltz had been fine in her day, but now she’s heard people dance too fast. But I’d like to dance fast.”
She wouldn’t know where to start, couldn’t imagine how they did the Charleston, but words were whispered, even in towns like Uukumil, about the dances and the shoes and the dresses the girls wore. Enough to seed the idea in her mind, let it take root.
“And what else?”
“Swimming at night, in the Pacific. To taste the water, taste the salt. To see if it tastes any different from the water of the Yucatán.”
He chuckled at this.
“You said you wouldn’t laugh!” she chided him.
As she spoke, the sounds of the city returned. The distant, strident note of a trumpet blasted the night, the laughter of pedestrians spilled against their window, and the room became ordinary: the headboard, smooth and lacquered, the pillows on the floor a pale lump of cotton, the wallpaper a pattern of rhomboids. Casiopea and Hun-Kamé were ordinary, too, sitting in the semi-darkness of any spring night. They’d scared away whatever odd shadows had crept by their side.
“I don’t laugh out of malice. As I’ve said, I like your daydreams. I’ll tell you what, when this is over, I’ll give you many gifts so that you may go dancing and swimming as you wish,” he declared and made a motion with his hand, tossing upon the floor dozens of black pearls, which rolled under the bed, a chair.
She caught one, and it dissolved into nothingness between her fingers, an illusion, like others he used. Now it was Casiopea’s turn to chuckle.
“They’re not real. You’re giving me fake pearls. It’s like handing me a slice of cake and taking it away.”
“It’s merely an amusement, for the time being. But I will pay you back, when it is all over.”
“When it is over,” she repeated, and she couldn’t help the uncertainty in her voice.
The Black Road, the blood on her hands were gone but not forgotten. The hand hurt, with its bone shard that was death, and she knew herself minuscule and mortal.
“I won’t lie to you,” he said. “I don’t know what awaits us in Tierra Blanca. My brother is a liar and a traitor, and if he lopped my head off once, no doubt he will attempt to do it again. You have been brave, and you might have to be braver.”
“I won’t stop now, not when we are almost there,” she replied, not wishing him to assume her worries meant she’d falter at this point. “And afterward, when you are a god, we’ll laugh at all the trials we went through. Maybe they’ll even tell stories about us, like with the Hero Twins.”
She smiled. Casiopea thought this would reassure him, but instead he was rattled; he looked away. She’d been scared and now it was his turn to look anxious. She felt his dread, as if it were scraping against her skin, but it was a different sort of dread. She feared death, Xibalba, the bone shard in her hand. He feared something else.
“Listen to me, there’re not many hours in the night left. Everything will change soon,” he said, hurriedly, as if someone were chasing him. As if to emphasize this, he began pacing, back and forth he went. “Tomorrow I may be someone else. I’ll regain my throne, I’ll change. Six hours, sixteen, maybe not tomorrow, maybe sixty hours, but no matter, soon. I’ll look at you with different eyes. You must trust me, now, when I speak to you, will you?”
He kept talking, unwilling to give her a space to raise her voice, his words apparently of the utmost urgency.
“I deal in illusions. It is my gift. But it’s not an illusion. Who I am right this second with you. Do you understand? I can’t say it any better. Remember me like this, if you choose to remember me at all.”
“You’ll forget me,” she said. It was obvious in that instant what he was trying to get at, the fallibility of a god’s memory, and he stood still at last.
“No, not forget…but it won’t be me remembering and I won’t…it’s a heart here, inside this body,” he said, pressing a hand against his chest “But this is not my body, Casiopea. It’s this suit I wear, for a moment, and the moment will cease. And when that happens…”
“You will be like a stranger to me,” she concluded, and her heart, troublesome thing that it was, stuttered.
“Yes.”
“There is no ‘after,’ ” she whispered.
It wasn’t fair. But there wasn’t an “after” in stories, was there? The curtain simply fell. She was not in a fairy tale, in any case. What “after” could there be? He, sending her a postcard from the Land of the Dead? They would become pen pals? Maybe in the end what would happen is she’d hitch a ride back to her town and spend her days sweeping the floors of her grandfather’s house, nothing to show for all her efforts. Back to the first square on the board. If she didn’t end up keeling over in the next few hours, if buzzards didn’t rip her flesh.
“You’ll have your black pearls. Your heart’s desire,” he said. He sounded charitable and for once she despised his politeness. Better that he had offered her nothing.
She laughed at his words. She had never desired pearls. He didn’t know her, she thought. He didn’t know her one bit.
She woke to an ache so deep in her bones and such copious sorrow that she thought she would not be able to rise from bed. The world outside seemed muted and gray, which she thought fitting. Had it not been gray for her since birth? The burst of colors she had experienced during the past few days was the anomaly.
The mirror revealed the face of a sickly girl, her eyes heavy.
A dying girl, Casiopea thought. She inspected her left hand, trying to find the point where the splinter lodged.
There came a knock on the bathroom door. Hun-Kamé said something about leaving soon.
Casiopea jutted her chin up and put on a short-sleeved yellow dress with a small flower corsage pinned to the waist.
When they stepped out of the hotel, Martín was waiting for them. Casiopea was so surprised she almost dropped her suitcase. Hun-Kamé did not seem bothered by the unexpected appearance of her cousin, who leaned against a sleek, black automobile. Next to Martín stood a chauffeur in a neat white uniform.
“Good morning. We’ve
been sent to pick you up. Lord Vucub-Kamé wants to speak to you,” Martín said, folding the newspaper he had been reading.
“How gracious of him,” Hun-Kamé replied. “We could have made our way on our own.”
“No need. Please get in.”
The chauffeur held the door open for them.
“Should we?” Casiopea asked, grasping the crook of Hun-Kamé’s arm.
“It will make no difference,” he replied.
They sat in the back, Martín riding in the front. They did not talk. Casiopea’s cousin fanned himself with the newspaper as the car rolled out of the city and continued down south. Even this early in the day it was already warm.
The sun bleached the land around them and leached the life out of Casiopea, who lay listless in the back of the automobile, once in a while running her hands through her hair.
She was so tired now, and she did not want to think what this meant. She tried not to pay attention to her throbbing hand, which she pressed against the window.
There came into view a white building surrounded by a lush greenness that defied the desert heat, twin rows of palm trees leading toward its front steps. An oasis, if she’d ever seen one. Casiopea blinked, blinded by the building’s whiteness.
It was a precise, powerful structure. They’d been in nice, fancy hotels, but this was beyond fancy. It seemed…it seemed almost like a temple, a palace like the ancient ones in Yucatán, although there was nothing in it that fully imitated the Mayan buildings she was familiar with. Not quite. The resemblance was in the boldness of the three-story building or the whiteness of the walls, which made her think of limestone, of salt. As the automobile stopped before the front entrance, she was able to make out the carvings decorating the exterior. Fish, sea stars, sea turtles, aquatic plants. The double door, which a porter held open for them, was made of metal, a lattice of water lilies.
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