Читать книгу A Land Without Sin - Paula Huston - Страница 11

A week later we were done in Tikal, and Jan gave us a couple of days of R and R in Flores before we started the next leg of the journey. Though I’d only spent half a day on the island before heading out to the field, I was happy to return to the sinking town in the middle of Lake Petén Itzá. The house, which was not their house, Rikki explained, but a kind of way station for traveling archeologists and anthropologists, was on the high side of one of the flooded streets. My upstairs bedroom with its woven bedspread and green-shuttered window looked out across the shifting silver water, dotted with small wooden cayucos, toward San Benito.

It wasn’t just the view that made me happy. I like living in tents, but after ten days in the jungle, I was covered with bites and needed to wash my clothes in something besides cold water and camp suds. At least here we could heat well water on the stove.

We could also cook. And I was a pretty good cook. Peter, my first official boyfriend, passed on some culinary skills during the couple of years we lived together. Peter was in film school, I was in photography school, and what kind of creative geniuses would we have been without knowing how to braise, sauté, and whisk? Plus, he informed me early on, he liked to be surprised by food, and he couldn’t very well surprise himself, could he? So I learned, though I rarely demonstrated my talents these days because it was the kind of thing men were tempted to manipulate for their own ends. Now, however, with access to an oven for twenty-four more hours before we headed out, I decided to cook for the three of us, a real dinner that would take half a day to prepare.

I unhooked the two woven bags from the kitchen wall, stuffed a handful of quetzales in my skirt pocket, and went out into the street. The houses across from us sat in at least a foot of lake water, so the electricity had long ago been shut off, but there were still families in them, using candles, I suppose, and cooking over fires. A group of schoolgirls with tight, patent-leather braids skipped along, holding hands, and I watched as a cloud of white butterflies coming the other way dipped down toward their black heads. Christmas was only two weeks away, and Flores was ready for it. Colored lights were strung across the small open-front stores that sold baskets and weavings and leather belts and clusters of purses. Bells hung from the ceilings. People had set out crèches and candles in their window sills.

The air in the mercado was thick with incense and spices. I found pollo, pescado, pan, banana empanadas, cerveza. Fruit was piled in yellow, green, pink, and maroon heaps on brilliant Maya blankets, encased in thorny shells or tough husks, fruit that grew on trees in the jungle or swelled on vines. I bought too much food, more than we’d ever eat, but who cared? Some completely atypical domestic urge was apparently running the show here.

Rikki and Jan were out when I got back. One of them had left the radio on, and a Mexican tenor complained to me of his love wounds. A kingfisher sat on a post across the street by a tied-up boat that banged against the sides of the underwater house. I chopped onions and chilies, then stirred them around in the snapping grease of the frying pan, stopping halfway through to crack an icy beer for company while I cooked. As dinnertime approached, I found myself listening for the door and thinking about how I was going to surprise everybody.

When they finally arrived, though, taller Rikki behind his father in the doorway, both of them observing the set table, the candles, all the food, I could see that once again I’d made some kind of mistake, at least as far as Jan was concerned. Rikki was just Rikki, a perpetually starving sixteen-year-old. He couldn’t have been more delighted at the prospect of a feast. But something went over Jan’s face as he stared at my day’s work, the edge of a shadow, and after one piercing look at me, he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Somehow, as in the North Acropolis tomb when I had startled him so badly, I’d wandered into territory I didn’t belong.

This ruined the meal, in spite of Rikki’s stuffing himself. This, and what Jan said at the end of it, which was, “You could leave if you want.”

It took a moment to digest this. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Leave?”

“When I hired you, I did not think the project would be so rugged.”

“It’s not rugged.”

“I did not think you would get so interested.”

“Interested in what?”

“Has Rikki been teaching you how to read the glyphs?”

Actually, sometimes on those long, lazy jungle days when Rikki and I had nothing to do but wait for night to fall, he had indeed taught me some things. I knew, for example, about Glyph G, the nine Lords of the Night who each ruled their own hour of darkness. There was my favorite, monkey-faced G1. And then, probably more to the point in Jan’s paranoid mind, G3, which had our old friend the k’in sign buried right in the middle of it. My noticing this had led to a discussion, not Rikki’s fault, about the fact that k’in showed up practically everywhere, as common as a stop sign or an exit marker. I asked him why on earth we were recording something so mundane. He had gotten wound up and blurted out what he probably wasn’t supposed to: that it was this very quality, the fact that you could find it everywhere, that made it such a perfect code sign. Then he’d blushed like crazy and snapped his mouth shut, and I hadn’t gotten another peep out of him for an hour. Now, with Jan’s brooding gaze on him, he hung his head like a bad dog.

That made me mad. “What’s wrong with me learning a few basic facts?” I said.

“Our agreement was that you would never publish any of your photographs or drawings, and that you would keep whatever you are doing for me to yourself.”

“Who says I’m not?”

He was looking uncomfortable. “One morning I saw you going through a lot of paperwork in your tent. I cannot keep you on if you are working for somebody else.”

“Look, what are you thinking?” I demanded. “That I’m some kind of spy for the Maya Hunting Club, or whatever it is you people belong to? I don’t care if we shoot that damn glyph every night for another year as long as you get me to Chiapas.”

If there’d been a reverse button, I would have hit it, but the words were already out, filling the air like the lingering odor of frying onions.

“Why Chiapas?”

And suddenly, though still angry, I was tempted to spill it. The case of the unofficially missing priest. But that was impossible, so instead I mutely lowered my head.

“Do you need help of some kind?” he said quietly.

Again I shook my head no.

He frowned. “But you are happy with this job?”

“Very.”

I could see him thinking all this over. Then he put his hands on his knees and stood up. “All right then. We leave in the morning for Palenque. It is a two-day trip, a long two days. We will take the truck as far as the Usumacinta River. You two had better pack.”

Rikki offered to do the dishes, and I went upstairs. Palenque. Where the wife was. I took off my skirt and sandals and crawled into bed in my black T-shirt, where I lay staring at the ceiling. A dim light from the street undulated across it like water. For a couple of long moments, I felt strangely queasy, as though the dinner had suddenly turned against me, which, in a sense, it had. I found myself thinking of Chicago again and, much to my surprise, whether or not I was living the way I should. Whether I should have just married some Italian or Pole or maybe even Alexander, straight out of high school, and settled down in a Polish or Italian neighborhood a few miles from Hana and Bruno and given that sad pair a couple of grandkids to distract them. Whether, if I’d kept on going to Mass, Stefan wouldn’t have gone searching all over the world for someone he could talk to. We’d had a family, I thought, screwed up as it was. I had always assumed Stefan was the one who broke it to pieces, but maybe not.

Drowsing, I tried to imagine myself married, but couldn’t. So I thought about the secret thing I’d purchased today, along with all that gorgeous fruit, at the downtown Flores market. A lovely boot knife, just like the one the USIA man had taught me to throw. Because you never knew what would happen next, especially in places like the Petén, across which we would be driving, or Chiapas, where guerrillas and the Guardia Blanca roamed like antelope across the plains.

The other, the bit about my wasted life, was just the kind of sentimental schlock you think about alone in bed in strange countries. And I realized a long time ago that it’s not some weird bug from Africa that finishes off people like me. It’s self-pity. But just to make myself feel better, I crawled back out of the sheets and rooted through my camera packs, supposedly double-checking, but really to feel the familiar shape of them against my fingers. Then I got back under the woven blanket, turned over and went to sleep, which is what I should have done in the first place.

Jan was not kidding about the length of a single day when you are crossing the Petén. It might have been even longer, but luckily we were waved on through the military checkpoint at La Libertad where a guy with a .38 in his hand was directing a bus search that looked like it was going to take a while. After La Libertad, we rocked west for hours through long stretches of open savannah, ragged with burnt tree stumps, what was left of the rainforest after three decades of civil war and thousands of highland Maya refugees streaming north into the jungle, burning trees to plant their little cornfields, and right behind them, the loggers and the oilmen and the cattlemen.

Occasionally, the forest reappeared, and a group of men would emerge from a muddy track through the trees, feet bare, machetes slung across their backs. They would stare at us patiently as we rolled by until Jan stopped and motioned toward the bed of the truck. Then we would jounce along with our new passengers for a few kilometers until they knocked on the back window. Jan would stop, they would leap down, duck their heads and murmur “Gracias,” and once again vanish into the trees.

Rubber tappers, maybe. Strong, undernourished little men with broken teeth and dirt ingrained in patterns like tattoos. I’d seen the same kind of men in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Thailand, Burundi. It didn’t matter what forest or desert they were in. Each of them had eight to ten kids and half of those would die, especially if yet another war between this big man and that big man broke out. It was okay with me that Jan kept picking them up, but I hoped nobody tried to make off with our stuff.

Hours later, we pulled into Bethel. Even in the dark, you could see that it was a mean, unfriendly little hole dominated by young, drunk soldiers, some without their shirts on but none without their Uzis or AK-47s. They ambled around town in groups, swinging their complicated guns as though they were plastic toys and staring at us imposingly, as they had been taught to do. The trick was to ignore them without displaying overt disrespect.

Immigration was housed inside a concertina-laced military compound. The officer was in army uniform and asked for double the going visa fee. We handed over our papers, and I held my breath as he glanced down at my name, Eva Kovic, hoping the “Kovic,” shared by Stefan, wouldn’t ring any bells for him. Though I had the phony passports tucked away if I needed them, I was saving those for a last-ditch escape. The guy seemed more interested in my legs than in my passport, however, and I threw in an extra five bucks just get out of there.

After we found a boatman willing to do a night run to Corozal, we unloaded the truck and carried the gear down the steepest and muddiest excuse for a landing I’ve ever seen. But across the river was Mexico, and in Mexico was Chiapas, and in Chiapas was San Cristóbal de las Casas, the last place anyone had seen my brother, so what choice did I have? Then we were on the water and it was slipping by us, glimmering with starlight, and the familiar night noises of the jungle were drifting out of the mist. I found a spot in the middle of the boat under a palm roof and tried to put myself in order.

If Stefan were in a place like Bethel, a Mexican version of it, then he was in the hands of bullies and sharks. And when the bullies had you, it usually meant torture. The least creative of them tended to rely on cigarette burns, but there were fancier methods—forcing a mixture of chili piquín and bubbly water into the nasal cavities, for example, and then attaching electric wires to the genitals.

I couldn’t think about that. I had to stick with my first hunch: that the Red Bishop would have gone to war over Stefan’s disappearance if he thought it were a political kidnapping. I had to stick with Jonah’s growing conviction—mine too—that my brother had gone off on his own to accomplish some secret purpose entirely unrelated to the obvious issues of church and politics. Thankfully, in less than forty minutes, we saw the first lights on the Mexican side of the river.

Compared to the immigration station at Bethel, Corozal’s was a palace, a Spanish adobe with a tile roof and a long veranda. Jan left us with the luggage and went off to get the lay of the land. After a murmured conversation at the door with someone I could not see, he came back and told us we could put up our tents on the lawn. Pathetically thankful to finally be in Mexico, I fell asleep the minute my head hit the pillow, only to bounce back out of bed when the roosters began to crow. From the veranda steps, I had a ringside seat on Stefan’s world. Smoke from breakfast fires drifted in the air. Women with enormous striped jars on their heads made their way toward the river across a field of stubble. Three barking dogs chased each other around the comedor beside the dock where we had come off the boat the night before. Far off, in the opposite direction from the rest of town, lay an acre or so of palm frond shelters, most of them collapsed, and part of a surrounding wire fence that was still standing.

The immigration officer-in-residence, still damp from shaving and looking very spruce in his green uniform, came out to sit beside me on the steps. He could have been an older brother of the Italian at Tikal. I had my automatic thoughts, especially about how long it had been. He asked me in Spanish how I had slept. I told him wonderfully well. He asked where we had been. I was not sure what to say, so I pretended not to understand. He asked how I liked Corozal. I said it was delightful to be in Corozal.

We were getting along just fine.

I pointed to the ruined encampment up the road and asked him what it might be. Refugees from across the river, he said. But they are no longer here. He shook his handsome head. The Guatemalan army kept violating the border to get at them.

“That is very sad,” I said.

We sat watching the women go by with their striped jugs. “Did you grow up in this town?” I asked.

“No, no,” he told me. “I am from Tuxtla Guittérez, do you know that place?”

I shook my head.

“That is where my wife and son are,” he said, giving me a regretful look.

“I see,” I told him, equally regretfully.

Jan chose this special moment to come crawling out of his tent, yawning and stretching and looking like a rumpled Dutchman, with Rikki following in short order, checking his watch. The bus was supposed to leave for Palenque at 8:00, but who knew when it would really go, since we could see it parked behind the comedor minus its driver, who was presumably inside enjoying his beans and rice and tortillas. We went down to join him, accompanied by our friendly officer, and by the time everyone finished breakfast and wandered out to our ride, it was nearly 9:00. The officer stood with us in the crowd and the rumble and the black fumes while a couple of nimble guys tied boxes and satchels to the roof. When it was time, he helped me up, his brown hand big and warm under mine, and we gave each other one last regretful look.

Our bus pulled into town ten hours after leaving Corozal, and the young bucks climbed back on the roof to unload our packs, which I could not stop myself from immediately checking after a long day of secret fretting. No matter how often I sally forth in this vagabond life of mine, I am constantly plagued by worry about my equipment. Not only do I have thousands of dollars invested in all this gear by now, it’s what allows me to live the life I live. Losing a camera would be like losing an arm.

She—the wife—wasn’t at the bus stop to meet us, so we took a taxi, which ferried us through the hotel district and past the zócalo in front of the church, then north to a residential district on the outskirts of town. The neighborhood surprised me. I hadn’t let myself think much about the wife or where she—they—would live, but this collection of small farmsteads was not the kind of barrio in which you’d expect a gringa to take up residence. We passed fenced yards with chickens scratching in them, some with pigs and burros. At one place, a good-sized Brahma cow hung her mournful head over the gate.

The taxi stopped in front of one of the poorer-looking places, a cheap box of cracked yellow stucco with a burro tied up in the front yard and an old red jeep parked in the driveway. Puzzled, I looked at Jan. He was gazing intently out the window as though this were not his house and his wife were not inside it. Rikki, on the other hand, was already climbing out of the car, dragging his hand over one long ear of the donkey as he passed it on his way to the porch. “Mom,” he called, “we’re here. Merry Christmas!” And then went in and closed the door behind him.

Jan sat for another couple of moments, and I wondered if the two of us were going to wind up going off somewhere to rent a hotel room together. Finally, he sighed and slowly got out of the taxi, giving me a sad, abstracted look as though he’d forgotten I was there. Together we unloaded the trunk and the backseat, and he paid the driver. Then he turned toward the house. “Six months ago,” he said, as though I’d know what he was talking about, “she would have at least been out on the porch.” I had no idea what to say. “Well, come on in, then,” he said. “She will be dying of curiosity by now.” That didn’t sound so good either, and I thought about climbing back in the taxi and taking off for San Cristóbal, where at least I had something important to do.