Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  Janet rolled her eyes and started to put the note in her bag.

  “Wait a minute,” Haydon said. He reached out and took the note from her fingers. There was a book of matches inside an ashtray on the wicker table, and he tore out one of the matches and lighted the piece of paper and held it so that the ashes fell into the ashtray. The flames were almost invisible in the sunlight, and the paper seemed magically to turn brown and then quickly black.

  “Okay,” Janet said, watching the paper burn. “Just tell me what in the hell you want me to do.”

  CHAPTER 39

  To get a taxi Haydon walked out onto the boulevard and went several blocks toward the center of town, near the Plazuela Reina Barrios where he stopped by a eucalyptus tree on a corner. There was a monument there and a triangular intersection where another avenue came in perpendicular to the boulevard. Taxis were everywhere, but he had to stop three before he found a driver who wanted his fare. As they zipped up to the curb and stopped, he told each of them the same thing: he was being followed and he wanted to get away from the people who were following him. There was no danger of gunfire. He would pay a month’s wages for the ride.

  The first driver swore and roared away into the traffic. The second driver said, “No-no-no-no,” shook his head and raised both hands in a surrendering gesture and pulled away from the curb while Haydon was still talking. The third driver was young, which made a difference. Still he listened to every word Haydon said, the import of it registering on his face. When he heard the amount of money Haydon would pay, he checked his rearview mirror and jerked his head toward the backseat. Haydon crawled in.

  They had to wait on the traffic before they could get into the stream of cars.

  “I want to go to the Cementerio General,” Haydon said as the young man watched the traffic in his mirror. “But I don’t want anyone following me when I get there. I decide when it’s okay. I don’t care how long it takes.”

  The young man never said a word. The break in traffic came, but he still didn’t move, watching his mirror. Haydon said nothing. When the next surge of traffic was bearing down on them, the young man gunned his engine and shot out in front, roared across to the next lane, straight into the approaching traffic that was merging into the angle of the triangle that would take them into the boulevard headed west. His breach into the oncoming traffic caused an accident immediately. Tires screamed, and Haydon heard the fenders crunching as the driver, elbows pumping like pistons as he fought the steering wheel, fought the cab into a whiplashing alignment with the traffic heading west. He pushed the car past traffic, staying to the outside lane until they were near the Parque Centro América, and then he shot across to the inside lane, again causing a long whining scream of tires as cars slid sideways and drivers fought their own steering wheels to avoid collisions. Then they were speeding down beside the park, going south in the inside lane, a last-minute suicidal switch to the outside lane and into the short, poor streets of Zona 8, where the driver pulled into a driveway with a high wall and an open heavy wooden gate. The turn into the drive was reckless, and the left rear fender of the car caught a tree near the curb, but the driver hardly noticed and didn’t seem to care. Despite the mad ride his face never changed. Immediately he was out of the car, running back to the gates, and before the dust drifting into the windows had settled, the gates were closed and the young man was walking back to the car.

  The driver’s door was still open, and he sat down behind the wheel, his feet outside on the gravel, and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. He lighted the cigarette and ran his fingers through his longish black hair. It was curly, unusual for a Guatemalan.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he said, blowing the smoke out into the heat. He looked over the seat back at Haydon. “This is my girlfriend’s house. She works at Le Blé. You know Le Blé?”

  Haydon nodded. “Yeah, it’s a good bakery. Good coffee.”

  The kid grinned. “Yeah, good coffee.” He smoked. “Where are you from in the States?”

  “Texas.”

  “What city?”

  “Houston.”

  “There are many Guatemalans in Houston.” He smoked. “What do you do?”

  Haydon would not say he was a policeman. In Central America you did not admit you were a policeman.

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Abogado?”

  “That’s right.”

  The kid looked at him, put his cigarette in his mouth and reached over the back of the seat and extended his hand. “Dolfo,” he said. He was a good-looking, very good-looking, young man and reminded Haydon of a young Hollywood actor who, one day after he became famous, would give interviews to magazines like Vanity Fair and tell how in his early years he supported himself driving cabs. He wore a fake Rolex and exuded the kind of confidence a young man acquired when he had to make his own way in a third world city that stayed alive by feeding on its own body.

  “Where’d you learn to drive like that?” Haydon asked.

  Dolfo was still looking at him. “I didn’t ‘learn’ to drive like that.” He smoked. “I just did it for the money.” He smoked. “Who are these guys following you?”

  Haydon shook his head. “We have a disagreement.”

  “Maybe I can help you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Who knows?”

  “I don’t think so,” Haydon said. He looked at his watch. He hadn’t heard a single car go by outside the gates, and they had been in the driveway ten minutes. The kid was right. Another five minutes ought to do it.

  “This is my home,” Dolfo said. “Guatemala City. I can help you. You will see how much I can help you.”

  “Where’d you learn English?”

  The kid shrugged and tossed his cigarette out into the driveway. “I work two years in San Diego, California.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I wash dishes in a Mexican café.” He looked out into the driveway.

  at a cinder-block wall with cactus growing at the base of it. “The immigration, they come to that place.” He waggled his hand with the dangling Rolex and moved it out the door. “Back to Mexico. This is three, no four times they find me, and one of those guys, he take me away to a corner and say if he see me another time he will cut balls. So I go to Mexico City for six months, but there is nothing there, and then I come here to my home.” He looked back to Haydon again. “But I will go to the States again. Not to San Diego. I want to go to college at the University of Texas.” He nodded seriously.

  Haydon doubted college was what he had in mind, but the kid probably thought Haydon would find that admirable.

  “Let’s go,” Haydon said.

  Dolfo looked at his fake Rolex. “We wait some more.”

  “No, it’s long enough,” Haydon said.

  “This is very important?” Dolfo asked.

  “Very. We’ve got to be careful.”

  “If these people follow you when you get into my car, then they will be look for this taxi, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  The kid thought a moment. “I have a friend, maybe he will give me his car. I will tell him he can have my taxi all day tomorrow and keep the money he makes if he will let me have his car today.” He raised his eyebrows and looked at Haydon to see what he thought of this scheme. “Huh?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Bueno. Wait here. He is two houses that way,” he said, pointing his flattened hand. “Five minutes, okay? You wait here. I will honk”—he made the motion with the heel of his hand—“two times. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Haydon said. “Five minutes.”

  The kid jumped out of the car and ran back to the gates and was gone. Haydon got out of the taxi. The courtyard was small, bare, a single pirul tree providing a wispy shade over the hard-packed dirt yard. The house was a cinder-block cube like all the others, and there were two chickens on the other side of the crumbling sidewalk that led to the front door. Now that he was out of the
taxi, he could hear faint strains of ranchera music drifting through the open, screenless windows from the darkened interior of the house. Haydon had the feeling that there wasn’t any girlfriend who worked at Le Blé, and if there was, this wasn’t her house.

  But he didn’t have time to worry about it, A car honked twice outside in the street, and Haydon hurried to the gates, pulled one of them open enough to get outside. Dolfo was waving at Haydon from behind the wheel of a sun-bleached, red Japanese Starlet.

  They headed toward town, through the tight streets of Zona 8, and then they hit the busy commercial thoroughfare of Avenida Bolivár where Dolfo drove only a few blocks before he exited north and got on 5a avenida, which ran straight to the cemetery and along its powder-blue façade. At 20 calle, which came up the hill from the city and ran straight into the cemetery’s Greek revival entrance, Haydon had the kid pull over to the curb. He paid him as he had promised amid Dolfo’s fervent insistence that he could be useful still further in many, many ways—the question of money never arising as he fired suggestions, examples of the kinds of services he could be relied upon to provide. Haydon said no, thank you very much, but finally had to accept the young man’s telephone number, which the youth pressed on him with an entrepreneurial urgency that Haydon was too embarrassed to decline.

  Finally the kid drove away leaving Haydon standing on the dusty curb of 5a avenida, facing the front of the Cementerio General. Across on the other side, the high walls of the cemetery were already providing a lengthening shade from the westward falling sun. The cemetery entrance was an architectural bastardization of Greek and Roman styles, having a tall Roman arch flanked by neo-classical pilasters and crowned with a staid Greek pediment. This romantic amalgam was bordered on either side for fifteen or twenty meters by the tall windows of the administrative offices. Beneath the windows was a wainscoting of dark paint. Along this wall groups of Indian women in their brilliant native costumbres sat at the base of the wall, their darkened and weathered faces peering out from behind mounds of fresh flowers, cerise azaleas, crimson and fleecy carnations, bloody and coral roses, snowy lilies and creamy gardenias, saffron marigolds and gold lantana, pink-bordered frangipani with peach centers, a rainbow of hibiscus, and the ivory and theatrical floripondio. A wealth of color offered by girls and women on the brink of starvation, flowers for the memory of the only people on earth who were more disadvantaged than themselves, the dead.

  Haydon crossed the wide dusty street and entered the deep shadows of the long portico that soon opened into the cemetery grounds. The main avenue stretched out ahead of him, flanked by massive cypresses and cedars, their trunks painted white to form a bright colonnade beneath a dark canopy of green, and at the far end of the avenue, in front of a hazy sky, the cupola of a rich man’s crypt. To either side other lanes branched off the main one, all of them lined with trees, mostly palms that reached nearly to the clouds before they burst into sprays of green fronds.

  The main, more carefully tended, avenues and calles of the cemetery, the ones nearest the graceful arched entry, were dedicated in death, as in life, to the everlasting dwellings of rich men’s bodies. Here the self-centered and arrogant wealthy ignored priestly wisdom and made every effort to bridge the gulf that separated what they had been in life from what they had become in eternity. Block after block of lavish mausoleums and tombs and crypts and vaults lined the shady lanes and avenues. Here was a mammoth mausoleum of stone that seemed to be an architectural blending of an Egyptian and Mayan pyramid, its doors of massive sheets of copper engraved with the images of an Egyptian king and queen surrounded by hieroglyphs and overspread with the embracing wings of a vulture. There was a miniature Tudor house of stone and wood, a miniature mosque with minarets, a miniature cathedral, a miniature Greek temple, many as large as actual houses. There were lesser crypts, too, of cottage size, and a vast array of motifs and styles—Swiss chalets, A-frames and dachas, modern and geometrically daring designs of glass and tile, bungalows, clumsy knockoffs of architectural themes reminiscent of every conceivable trendy modern design, kitsch run amok. All of these, odd little houses of the dead, many of them deteriorating as any house would if neglected. It was an altogether peculiar demonstration of how truly awkward the living felt in their inevitable confrontation with death.

  And then there were the poor, the legions and legions of dead who claimed only the small space their bodies displaced. For these there were rows upon rows of low cement rectangular crypts, complexes ten meters high, a city block long, and of a depth that would allow two bodies to be laid end to end, one pushed in from one side of the crypt and another from the opposite side of the building. These crypts were nothing more than coffin-sized cubicles stacked one upon the other, ten high. As each body was shoved into its space, a cement plate was fitted into the opening and plastered over. Sometimes the family paid extra to have the dead’s name scratched into the cement plate, sometimes they couldn’t afford it and painted it themselves. Sometimes they didn’t. In any case, after several rainy seasons alternating with scorching veranos, the names were gone. But on the front of each plate, almost without exception, a little device of some sort was provided as a receptacle for flowers, and the long flat façade of these crypts was forever decorated with flowers, fresh and wilting and dead, and in all hues, bright and fading and dead. The plaster cracked and flaked off the fronts of the crypts, and some who treasured the maintenance of such things would repair them, while others who were too poor or too tired to maintain what housed only dusty bones and memories, did not. The broad sidewalks in front of the crypts were cracked and intruded with sacrilegious grasses, and the dead who were poor on earth rested in their plain, narrow eternities, quiet and unobjecting, while the dead who were rich on earth did the same, in a more lavish silence.

  CHAPTER 40

  According to his watch, Haydon was a little over two hours early for the meeting at five-thirty. He did not directly follow the route described in Lena’s message, but rather walked to the first calle and turned into it in the opposite direction from the meeting site. The Cementerio General was, he recalled, the oldest burial ground in the city, and its narrow lanes were lined with old cypresses and stone pines and palms and cedars and amates and even wispy pepper trees. This lane was flanked by majestic palms, their high crowns a lush dark green against the hazy, glaucous sky. Large crypts faced each other from either side of the lane, structures of fine stones with statues in the romantic tradition portraying the deceased in the proud glory of his earthly form, or idealized personifications of his virtues.

  Haydon followed this shady, shallow slope until he came to a cross lane which he took to his right, west, in the general direction of his ultimate destination. Here he saw the sides of crypts, allées of cypresses and pines, little paths behind the mausoleums where small sheds in which the caretakers kept their tools were tucked away out of sight.

  Occasionally he would see an old man moving through the cypresses, carrying a hoe or machete or pruning saw, sometimes two old men together, in sweaty shirts and ragged straw hats. They moved amid the rippling shadows of the tombs almost as if they themselves already had joined that other world, walking silently, always just out of shouting distance, now there, now gone, apparitions, the true dwellers of the necropolis.

  Before he reached the next calle, he heard the faint piping trill of what sounded like a panpipe. He turned his head to hear it better, though he needn’t have, for he and the music were approaching the same intersection. And then he realized it wasn’t pipes at all, at least not the kind he imagined. What he heard was an incongruous mixture of melody and place and instrument. He stopped just short of the intersection, one row of tombs back from the black hearse that, covered in a film of summer dust, crept into the crossroads beneath the ancient cypresses and palms. An obese driver, seemingly wedged behind the wheel of the hearse, stared straight ahead, one arm hanging out the window, his job requiring no more concentration than was necessary for swatting flies.
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  The hearse entered into the intersection with its back door opened wide to reveal the casket inside. Close behind followed a loose rabble of a crowd, silent Guatemalans, all of them dressed in black, the women shawled and veiled despite the afternoon heat, the men in ill-fitting and dusty suits, their dingy, tieless shirts buttoned at the collar. They tramped along stoically in a swaying rhythmic shuffle, their dusty shoes—and bare feet—kicking up little puffs of powder, which, because the afternoon was as still as a held breath, rose no higher than their knees before it settled back to the earth only to be raised again by the people behind. These self-absorbed mourners, these new and unaccustomed city dwellers so recently from the countryside where their ancestors had buried their dead for thousands of years, had forfeited the keening of their forefathers to a tape recording, broadcast over a loudspeaker mounted behind the driver. The dirge was “Home on the Range,” interpreted by the shrill up-and-down notes of a calliope’s dolorous piping. This odd, melodious requiem rose up through the boughs of the cypresses and drifted out over the crypts with a morose gaiety, riding the dusty sunlight as it stole obliquely through the palms and struck the sides of the tombs as a post-meridian glow in the first moments of its softening.

  Haydon stood transfixed as the grievers moved by through the rippling shadows, unwilling to move until the last mourner was well past and the notes of the calliope were fading among the tombs farther down the sloping lane. They were gone.

  He was now parallel to the main avenue, monitoring his own progress as he reached each new lane. Just before he came to the end of the avenue where he had been instructed to turn right, he walked back toward the colonnade of white-trunked cypresses and crossed over to the other side into a warren of crypts, long alleys of flat-faced sepulchers on the one side, dead and dying flowers draped upon their chipped façades like the hanging gardens of Babylon in an age of drought and famine, and on the other side, lichen-covered stone vaults, rows and rows of them as far as he could see.