Читать книгу A Land Without Sin - Paula Huston - Страница 6

Tikal, Guatemala, 1993

I was looking for my brother. Whether or not Stefan even wanted to be found, I did not know. By now he could be the neo-Che of the Lacandon jungle, or lying in his own filth in a Chiapan jail, or even dead. Because of the way our family is, we’d only been in the same country at the same time on a very sporadic basis for the past sixteen years, the most recent occasion being his priestly ordination, so it was hard to say what was going on with him. But I was ready for anything.

In my clothes were sewn a false passport bearing a two-year-old photo of him, the best I could do, and a one-way ticket out of Mexico, in case we had to scramble. And because I didn’t know whose list he might be on, I had a fake passport of my own, one of several made for me when I dated a USIA man stationed in Burma. This USIA man’s theory was that no American female could be overly prepared for extended stays in international hotspots, and since it looked like that’s where I would be spending most of my time, I took him up on his offer. A helpful fellow indeed, he also taught me how to throw a knife, a handy trick he no doubt picked up in CIA school, even though he would never admit he’d been.

Besides the false passport, I had a false job, thanks to a fellow freelancer I first met back when I was still schlepping my cameras through war zones on behalf of the Associated Press. I bumped into Dirk a month ago in Burundi right about the time I heard about Stefan’s disappearance. Dirk told me that a Mayanist named Bource was looking for a good photographer who was used to roughing it and used to the jungle and didn’t care about making campesino wages for the next couple of months. Given the annual income of most freelancers, this could have been almost anyone—under normal circumstances, it would have certainly been Dirk, who would go anywhere, anytime, as long as there was a good chance of dying in a heroic manner and/or securing himself a book contract with a major publisher. But Dirk was getting married, a recent trend among my footloose cronies. “I’m thirty-eight,” he said, as though that would explain it. However, thanks to Dirk’s new direction in life, I now had my cover and an airtight excuse for snooping around in Central America, where I had not been for nearly ten years and which I had not missed in the slightest.

My false boss for the false job, Bource, turned out to be a bespectacled, formerly-handsome Dutchman in a red baseball cap who asked me, in a gloomy, preoccupied way, to please call him Jan. He, of course, did not know he was helping me in my scam, and clearly was not the kind of man who would understand the need for duplicity. He’d told me to meet him in Guatemala, in the island town of Flores, which was not exactly where I needed to be. But we were at least pointed in the right direction, and I could afford to be patient.

Jan’s son Rikki, a mere sixteen but already, I noticed, a stunning young pre-man, was extremely efficient and not at all gloomy, and the family truck, as his father had requested, was loaded and ready to roll at 3:30 that afternoon. We were headed for Tikal, perhaps the only Maya site in Guatemala with 100 percent name recognition, though I myself, being more focused on current events than dead civilizations, had always vaguely supposed it to be in Honduras. I’d been set straight on this by my Aviateca Airlines seatmate, a bearded Berkeley rainforest savior headed for the Biosphere Reserve, and his lecture pretty much covered my knowledge of the Mayas.

I spent the hour before we left doing a final check on all my photography equipment. Though I still had only the haziest notion of what my new job would entail—Jan had been stubbornly close-lipped about it—over the years, I’d learned what you should haul into the jungle if you were going to be there for a while. For instance, you never foray into boonies of any kind without your spare camera; in my case, that means hauling a second Canon EOS-1. Besides the two cameras, I had packed a tripod and a tiny can of WD-40, plus silica gel to protect the film from jungle rot.

Next, I pulled out my lenses. For an unsentimental person, I have a strangely passionate relationship with my lenses. First, there’s my workhorse, the 50mm macro for up-close work. Some of my best photographs over the years have been headshots, particularly of children, particularly in dire circumstances. I’m drawn to those faces. Somehow we click, those skinny kids with the big, sad eyes and me. Which is maybe why my one and only award of any consequence was for a shot of a baffled Afghan toddler—two, maybe?—standing in front of a just-bombed, still-burning house.

But I don’t confine myself to close-ups. There’s also my beloved f2.8 Ultrasonic, a slick 300mm lens for distance work, at which I’m not bad. I’ve found that if you’re willing to plant yourself in front of a scene, foregoing any fussy instincts to “arrange” the elements to suit yourself or other people, things turn up in the darkroom later you could swear weren’t there during the shoot.

Last, I dragged out my two trusty zooms, the 28-105 and the 100-300 Ultrasonic, which is great for daytime photography. Based on the infinitesimal amount of information gleaned from my taciturn boss, I didn’t know how much of that there would be—outside daytime work—but the circular polarizing filter went into the pack anyway. Taking photographs at the equator is tricky business. The humidity level is so high that you might as well be shooting through fog, and that problem gets amplified by a persistent, jungly sun-glare that turns the sky silver; the polarizing filter is just about your only recourse here. Another reason to add my Minolta 4F strobe meter to the pack, which is good, I’ve found through years of jerry-rigging in the jungle, for measuring ambient light.

Light was actually going to be the biggest problem. One of the few things Jan let slip was that a lot of the shooting would be in the dark, either night shots of carved inscriptions, where raking lights could be used to bring the glyphs into sharper relief, or inside the pyramids themselves. I’d done some of this during a project involving Thai temples, my one major credit and a plum that would probably not fall out of the tree again, thanks to the precipitous end of my relationship with Robert, professional adventurer, poetic genius, photographer extraordinaire, and, as it turned out, major jerk.

One thing was clear: this gig with Jan and company was not going to be a big National Geographic–style operation like only Robert or someone of his ilk has the clout to command, with porters along to carry light stands and strobe lights and generators. We couldn’t even take Jan’s truck all the way in to where we were going. Three big packs was all we could handle. For a minute, I allowed myself to muse wistfully: a Norman 200 strobe setup would be just about perfect—we’d used them in Thailand—but then we’d have to have electricity, which last time I checked, didn’t exist inside most crumbling Guatemalan temples. Instead, Jan could provide me with a single rickety light stand, some quantum battery packs for off-camera flashes, and a couple of big lanterns. That would have to do.

In my obsessive little way, I also checked over my art supplies, though it was doubtful they could be replenished in Flores or even in nearby San Benito if something were missing. There were plenty of good drawing pencils, a graphite stick, and fine-tip pens, plus extra ink. Hauling loose drawing paper in a backpack is a recipe for disaster; I had found that out the hard way years ago. So I’d decided on a couple of ringed sketchbooks with 90 lb paper in them, which I put inside plastic bags to protect them from molding. On a whim, I’d also brought along rice paper and Conté crayons, though rubbings would no doubt be tough, given the depth of the carvings.

At 3:30 sharp, we drove the loaded truck off the island and onto the earthen causeway that crosses the lapping lake water, bouncing past the Santa Elena airport and onto the highway to Tikal, the only asphalt, Rikki informed me, in the whole Petén. I’d already noticed that Rikki did at least 85 percent of the talking.

Riding around in remote places with strange men was something I was used to, and in spite of the big question mark concerning my brother, I could feel myself getting primed for a new adventure. I knew a dog once who ran like a racehorse, tongue streaming back, black ears flying, and could run like that for hours and then go unconscious for half a day in the sun, twitching and dreaming, and wake up and start running again. There was nothing this dog was running toward, nothing it was trying to catch. Running was it, pure and simple. That was me at the start of something new.

We drove for perhaps an hour. A big stretch of scenery was taken up by a sluggish-looking military outpost, the jumping-off point, Rikki said, for raids against Tikal-based guerrillas during the eighties. My ears pricked up. Though I’d been in Guatemala during those days, I hadn’t been in this part of the country. Guerrillas were of vital importance to the Stefan question. I wanted to ask Rikki more, specifically if he knew what was happening on the Chiapan guerrilla front, but thought it prudent to shelve the interrogation about southern Mexico until his father was out of earshot. In fact, Jan was probably an empty well anyway. Men like him tended to avoid politics completely. In every messed-up country I’ve ever been there are the Jans—foreigners not connected with the government or business or humanitarian projects, scholarly oddballs who meander right through the middle of battlefields and whose sole reason for being is tied up in what has become of the pink river dolphins or whether Australopithecines ate more meat or vegetables.

We stopped briefly at the entrance to the park while Jan checked in at a guardhouse, then took a narrow dirt road that veered away from the groups of straggling tourists heading toward the Great Plaza of Tikal and went straight into heavy forest where we clattered along for some time seeing nothing but trees. Rikki explained that this was a guard road that would get us a couple of miles closer to where we were going, but that the last part would be a hike. Ahead on both sides was nothing but green.

After a while, the ribbon of brown ahead of us began to narrow and then, abruptly, vanished. Jan nosed the truck between two magnificent ceiba trees and turned off the engine. The windows of the truck were open to the screechings and strange cries and hollow boomings of the jungle, noises that reminded me of lush and deadly Burundi. Above everything else was the crashing in the trees that signaled monkeys were moving in. Something orange and yellow flashed in front of the windshield and landed on a branch not far off the ground—a black toucan with his brilliant beak. Jan opened the truck door.

The pack was heavy but all right. Once upon a time, I’d been lost in a rainforest and was not hot to repeat the experience, so on the trail I stuck close to Rikki. It was strange to think that several hundred tourists were climbing pyramids only a mile or two away and we could neither hear nor see them. In spite of the weird airlessness you get in jungles, the climate wasn’t so bad. I’d expected to sweat—I remembered sweating a lot when I’d been in Guatemala before, though maybe that had just been nerves—but instead there was a pleasant balminess I was immediately grateful for. Jan handed me a water bottle. As I was upending it into my mouth, it began to rain, just a dripping at first, as though it were coming straight from the trees, and then a more serious thrumming that signaled a downpour on its way. He motioned, and the three of us huddled together beneath a tall shrub with six-foot brilliant green leaves that ended in fringes.

“Look,” said Rikki, crouching. I squatted beside him and in the dim, rainy light saw a weaving line of leaves marching steadily off into the forest. Leafcutter ants, large but dwarfed by the pieces of leaves they carried, which were at least five times their size.

Jan was not interested in the ants. He said in his prim Nederlander way, “There is a small temple where we are going. If it keeps raining, we can sleep inside.”

“So put on the ponchos?” said Rikki.

“Yes.”

We each dug into our packs and draped ourselves in khaki rain gear, then hoisted everything back on our shoulders and went out onto the trail. Ten minutes later the sun broke through and steam began rising from the forest floor, and after another ten minutes Rikki said, “Can we stop? I’m dying inside this poncho,” which of course I was also, but not about to admit it. Jan looked back at the two of us and just then a shaft of weak sunlight caught him right across his Dutch face, and I saw him old in the way you sometimes see people on film when you are developing it and realize you have seen the future. There’s an age one has to be for this to happen and it’s not my age, not yet, but sometime within the next six years.

In spite of what my extensive preparations for this trip might suggest, I was not actually terribly worried about Stefan yet. We’d been out of touch more than we’d been in it—my fault, mostly—and for a long time, if we communicated at all, we went through Jonah. Jonah, no doubt voted “least likely to become a monk” in his high school yearbook, was indeed a monk, based at a Camaldolese Benedictine hermitage in California (“Camaldolese” equaling “reasonable hermits who live under a rule,” he once told me, laughing). This was where Stefan in his late twenties, no longer seeking enlightenment in Nepal, no longer hammering away in grad school, spent three apparently fruitful Big Sur years. Fruitful, in the sense that he seemed to have finally figured out what he was going to do with his life and why he was going to do it, though I couldn’t in a million years grasp his logic. As a monk, Jonah was unable to change addresses whenever he felt like it. Thus, he provided us a convenient mailbox.

Over the past several years Stefan had sent a series of slightly disturbing letters to Jonah, intermixed with a couple of red herring versions of the same thing to me, then several somewhat more disturbing ones to Jonah, and then silence. This silence had gone on for only eleven weeks so far and probably meant nothing, given the fact that Stefan and I share the same penchant for secrecy and independence, not to mention how long the gaps between letters usually were. But Jonah, who for a monk is quite the worrywart, was by definition trapped and helpless to go check things out on his own. He had put a call through to the diocese in southern Mexico where Stefan was stationed, only to discover that no one had anything to say about my brother’s whereabouts. Stefan was not there, but as far as they were concerned, he was not missing either. When I made my own call, I ran into the same stone wall. This, I found irritating. Though as I say, I wasn’t yet particularly worried about Stefan, I didn’t like their attitude, and told Jonah I’d make the trip if I could set it up.

Now I was here, or at least in the country next door, and it came to mind that there was a fairly major difference between my brother and me that might be important to consider. This was Stefan’s rather weak attachment to earthly life. He liked it well enough, but didn’t cling, not enough to make him a fighter, anyway. He was much more passive in that way than I was, which used to drive me crazy when we were kids and probably explains why, for his own good, I was always trying to boss him around even though he was four years older than me.

For passive, I am not. Soon after the Thai temple project, when Robert and I still liked each other well enough to sign on for another joint adventure, he convinced me to go to Cambodia to help him snoop around the former killing fields. Something he needed for a new book project, he said, and I, with all my vaccinations up to date and realizing I’d grown a lot fonder of him than I’d been of anybody in a long time, said sure. We had the teamwork thing down cold. We understood each other’s vision, which meant we could help each other take better pictures. And he was bright and sexy and made me laugh. So Cambodia felt like an investment, the kind I’d never been willing to make before.

Not for long, though. We spent a couple of nights in town prior to heading for the refugee camps, just to plan things out, and somewhere in the middle of that, Robert showed his cards. Our hotel was your typical tiny equatorial affair, heavily reliant on bamboo. I remember there was an enormous spider plastered to the outside of the window screen. Robert, wearing nothing but his boxers and his handsome skin, was propped up in bed on one elbow observing me with his connoisseur’s eye, which had put me into full basking mode. And then he said, apropos of nothing, “If you had a knife and you woke up and some guy was in your sleeping bag with you, would you stick him?”

“This person isn’t you?” I asked, still clueless.

He shook his head. “Some guy. You don’t know him.”

“Well, sure,” I said. “Of course.”

He shook his head and gave me his famous wry smile. “Wow.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“No guy’s going to crawl in with me, baby. How about this? You’ve got a gun and you’re out in the boonies and some guy is stealing your pack with all your food and chances are good you won’t get out alive without it. But you know he’s hungry and he’s got a family to feed.”

“But I’ll die if he takes my food?”

“Right.”

“I’d shoot him.”

He stared at me admiringly and shook his head again. “If he’s begging for mercy?”

“If he gives the food back, okay. Otherwise, it’s him or me.”

“This is so wild. This is exactly what I thought you’d say.”

“Really.” I was beginning to pick up the tone here, one I recognized through hard experience, though this was the first time I’d ever heard it coming out of Robert.

“How about if the guy who’s taking your food is me? We’ve been lost for three weeks and we’re out of everything except toothpaste and four crackers and suddenly I snap and grab for the pack and you’ve got a gun . . .”

“What’s going on here?”

“Just wondering, is all.”

“What do you think I’d do?”

“I hate to say, really.” He peered into my face. He was still grinning, but I was not. “Oh, come on now, Eva, lighten up. This is just a . . . what do you call it? Party game? Something to pass the time.”

I stared back at him. “I wasn’t bored. Were you? Is this relationship starting to bore you?”

His eyes shifted then, and he reeled in the little cruel streak I hadn’t known was there. Until, of course, we got safely out of the country and then it was, as I already figured it would be, goodbye dear Eva and best of luck and it’s been truly grand and I’ll never forget you, which naturally he did the second the next decent-looking female dove into view. But I’d told him the truth. I’d shoot. Because obviously—he’d just proved it—if I didn’t take care of myself, who would?

I could not, however, say what Stefan would do if his life were similarly threatened, and that made everything more uncertain. If he were being held captive, for example, would he even try to make a break for it? Or, good Catholic boy that he was, would he be unable to resist the call to martyrdom?