Читать книгу A Land Without Sin - Paula Huston - Страница 7

Jan and Rikki and I had come upon something that looked like a small hill covered in shrubs and tree roots but that turned out to be a temple in disguise and the apparent object of our soggy hike. Rikki and I set up camp while our leader went somewhere with his high-powered battery lantern and didn’t come back for nearly an hour. “What’s he doing?” I asked Rikki, who said, “He’s checking things out inside the temple.”

“So we’ll be at it tonight already?”

He nodded. “My dad has been planning this for a long time.”

“What’s he up to? Do you know?”

He started to say something, then stopped. He didn’t shake his head, didn’t lie, just stopped.

“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot it was a big secret.”

“Not really a big secret,” he said. “But he can’t take a chance of it getting out there. He’s got his reputation to protect.”

That sounded like a direct quote. In fact, Jan had been quite adamant about the conditions of my employment. I was hired for three months, no more, and this was a private project, paid for out of his own pocket. I must agree not to discuss our work with anyone, nor could I sell any of my photographs or drawings afterward. My glum boss was up to something potentially ludicrous, it sounded like, or maybe even illegal. And I was making almost nothing in the way of quetzales for the privilege of sharing this adventure. “Are there snakes in that temple?”

“Víboras. Si. Maybe.”

I saw a porter get bitten once, by some kind of viper. We had been in a place where there were no doctors for two hundred miles and only one functioning jeep. I don’t like snakes.

Pretty soon Jan came back, silent as ever but with a hot little glow behind his glasses, and I could tell that whatever he was hoping to get on film was still there exactly as he remembered it, and tonight I would find out what it was. But first there was dinner to cook—a pot of beans and rice—and some fluffing up of the nest (I like a cozy tent) and then sitting by the cook fire for a bit while the sun started its long slide into the trees.

An hour later, Rikki and I were standing in front of the passageway, loaded up like pack mules with my equipment, waiting for Jan to set up a light inside the chamber. This was not one of those strange steep Tikal pyramids like the ones in the rainforest savior’s guidebook, but something much smaller and flatter that we were able to enter near ground level through a stone doorway that looked like an open mouth. “It is a mouth,” Rikki explained when I asked. “The mouth of a Witz monster. It takes you into what they called Xibalba, the Underworld.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“The land of the dead,” he added helpfully.

“Why is the temple so small? Aren’t they usually much bigger?” Straight out of the guidebook, but Rikki didn’t know the difference.

“This is an older section of the city,” he said. “It was probably built around 50 B.C., seven hundred years or so before the big pyramids were put up. Lots of times, they just built right over the old ones, but this one must have been in the wrong spot.”

Just then Jan called out that we should come in, and we shuffle-crouched down a long passageway filled with rubble, a perfect hideout for víboras, to a tiny room with a low stone bench at the back. Beneath the bench was an open shallow pit. Even in the dubious light from the big battery-powered lanterns, traces of red on the walls made it clear that this room had once been plastered and painted.

Jan seemed to know exactly what he wanted to do, though I could not figure out what he thought was worth photographing. The room seemed entirely empty except for the bench. He spent some time arranging the two lights in different ways, then beckoned. I went and stood beside him. He pointed to the faintest traces of something black on the wall behind the bench. If this keeps up, I thought, we might actually get through the entire three months in sign language. I moved closer, squinting, and made out what looked like a hieroglyph, the merest squiggle.

“Can you photograph this?” he asked me.

“I don’t know if I can pick anything up.” I hated saying that—photographers never admit defeat—but it was true. The lines of the glyph were so faded I could hardly see them with my eyes.

“Try,” he said. “Take as many photographs as you need. Try everything you can think of.” He was leaning in close to the wall beside me and his arm brushed mine. I remembered that sensation—someone’s tensed muscles coming into sudden contact with my skin—from sitting on the couch beside Bruno, aka my father, watching boxing when I was a kid. Bruno looked upon boxing as a blood sport, especially when it pitted a noble white guy—i.e., Rocky Marciano, Ingemar Johansson—against one of those “black kopiles,” as he called them, sad that I’d been born too late to witness Marciano’s glory days. My father was not exactly with the times, especially when it came to race relations in our fair city of Chicago. Back then, he had the massive forearms of the steelworker he was, and when, at six, seven, eight years old, I felt one of them brush up against mine, I always got a disorienting jolt.

No jolt this time, however, or at least not a nasty one. Jan’s forearm was tense but radiated a pleasant warmth, the likes of which I had not experienced since abandoning co-ed tent life after Cambodia. Well, well, I thought, glancing down at the corded muscles, the bone-deep jungle tan under its gray pelt. Then I went back to squinting at my hieroglyphic quarry. Without actually touching the wall, I ran my fingers lightly above the painted area. Sure enough, there was a slight bulge in the plaster, just enough to bring out the glyph a little, which meant a light held to one side would cast a bit of a shadow, which we didn’t need.

“Rikki, come here,” I said. “Try holding your light this way.” Rikki trotted over and I stood him behind me and made him hold the light square on the glyph in a line directly above my head. Since height-wise he had me by at least six inches, the plan worked out nicely. “Okay,” I said. “Can you steady that without the light stand? If you can, I’m going to use the stand for an off-camera flash.”

Jan said, “Rikki can balance the lantern against my shoulder.” So that was how we did it: the tripod up as high as it would go, me on tiptoe sighting, Jan breathing down my neck, and Rikki pressed up against his father, stabilizing the light.

After a while, I switched over to pencil and sketchbook and attempted to draw what I could hardly see, though once I began, the shape unfolded fairly naturally. It was a single glyph, quite simple, that looked like a four-petaled flower inside of a squarish double oval. At the bottom, below the oval, was a group of painted streamers, blown sideways. I made four different drawings, a close-up of the glyph on its own and then in context, holding them up silently for Jan’s approval and getting a thumbs-up each time.

It was clear that this particular tomb had already been stripped, either by robbers or archeologists. My boss himself was the most likely candidate—how else would he know about the glyph? Then I felt someone watching me and turned to meet Jan’s blue stare. He’d noticed me speculating away, exactly what he’d hired me not to do. “Quite a place,” I said. “Never been in one of these before.” I shook my head like an admiring tourist and added a heartfelt “wow.” He narrowed his gaze, then turned abruptly toward the passageway. Rikki and I fell in line like two ducks behind him.

Night in the jungle is like nothing else on earth. The darkness is absolute and has an underwater texture to it, as though you are flutter-kicking through it in a wetsuit, with limited air. The forest sways—a moving kelp bed of trees, insects, nocturnal creatures hunting for food—and the ground swells and sinks, an oceanic illusion of tides and the rising backs of whales. I lay awake in my sleeping bag, listening to the sea-surge of the jungle, and thought about Stefan.

Before I got on the plane to Guatemala, Jonah gave me all his letters, hoping they would help me contact the people I needed to find in Chiapas. It was strange to read the words my brother had written to someone else, someone who not only understood his singular worldview but shared it. I knew the child version of Stefan well, better than I’ve ever known another living being. We were best friends back then, true compadres, the only people either of us could trust. But since we’d grown up and became who we were, we had found ourselves on totally different roads, and I could no longer predict what he would do or why.

In the morning, after café and scrambled huevos, Rikki and I were told we had the day off. After all the hustling, this was a surprise. “I need some time to plan,” Jan explained. These were the first words of the day for him, except for whatever he had muttered when the spatula turned up missing. The repressed intensity he’d revealed inside the tomb was gone; once again, he was sunk in contemplation.

“When do you want us back?” asked Rikki.

“Four,” he said. “We’ll be hiking in to the North Acropolis after dark.”

“I didn’t know. . .” Rikki began, then snapped shut. They certainly weren’t very subtle about hiding things. He gave me an apologetic look and said, “Would you like to see the park?”

An hour later, Rikki and I were standing in the Great Plaza of Tikal. I’d seen pictures, but nothing one-dimensional could come close. The limestone pyramids, black with mold and scraped-off jungle, were so steep their faces looked vertical. Their crumbled roof combs, like broken molars, jutted into the sky high above the trees. Straight up the front of each were wide stairways made of slick and dangerous-looking steps. Rikki gestured toward the only one not swarming with people. “That’s Temple I,” he said. “The tomb of Ah-Cacaw. They’ve had it blocked off since the early eighties when a tourist fell a hundred fifty feet and killed himself.”

“Who was Ah-Cacaw?”

“You’ve never heard of Ah-Cacaw?” He sounded amazed.

“Obviously not.”

“Sorry.” He really was sorry, his face flushed with pity for my ignorance. “He was the king who brought the city back to life when it had been under the thumb of Caracol for over six k’atuns.” He checked my face, and added humbly, “That’s a hundred and twenty years. Caracol was a rival lowland kingdom like Uaxactún. You do know about the Maya wars?”

“Not really. I knew they were good at math. And I vaguely remember from fourth grade that they were supposed to be the peaceful ones as opposed to the bloody Aztecs.”

“That’s what everybody thought for a long time, until they started translating the inscriptions. Now we know they were a major warrior society and fought each other all the time, at first to get sacrifice victims, and then to build empires.” He pointed at a complex of smaller pyramids, some of them encased in scaffolding. “That’s the North Acropolis, where we’ll be working tonight. It’s got layers of older stuff under it. Along with building these two big central pyramids, Ah-Cacaw reworked the whole Acropolis after it had been damaged by Lord Water, the king of Caracol, in the siege of the 500s.”

Just then the sun, which had been hiding most of the morning behind a cottony sky made up of jungle steam and carbon dioxide, broke through, and the grass that stretched between the facing pyramids of the Great Plaza came to green life. I could imagine the view from up top. “Hey,” I said. “I want to climb one of those.”

Rikki seemed pleased. The best one, he informed me, sounding more like an adolescent tour guide every minute, was the 230-foot-high Temple IV, the tallest pyramid in the Petén, “except of course for the one at El Mirador.” I nodded sagely. Of course. I knew that. Didn’t everyone? “But,” he added, “only if you’re willing to hike some more to get there.”

A group of Italians in expensive leather hiking boots must have had the same idea. Clogging the Temple IV trail entirely, they looked like a family reunion where everyone had actually shown up, even the grandmother in her widow’s weeds. She was steadying herself on the arm of a magnetic, blue-jawed Romeo somewhat older than Rikki but definitely younger than thirty-four, which is code for “younger than me.” This did not matter; the sight of that glossy black hair combed back along the sides of his sleek head put me in mind of my first love, Peter, the stormy, self-absorbed film student I lived with during photography school, or maybe even of Robert, though neither of them, as far as I knew, had a drop of Italian blood. But they shared with him that restless, seeking quality that women, like stampeding buffalo, rush toward headlong. I like to think of myself as immune to the buffalo syndrome, but maybe not. Somehow, I’m always getting involved with guys who make me even more cynical than I already am.

After a minute, as though he could feel my eyes on him, he turned and gave me a long-lashed Italian stare over his shoulder. Now, I’m no great beauty—I’ve got the deep-set brown eyes, thick wren-brown braid, and long runner’s legs of a million other people from my ancestors’ part of the globe—but I’m slender and makeup free and come across as calm and non-neurotic, and I think that men, or a certain kind of man, must be drawn to that. This one seemed to be. I sent him back enough of a glance to let him know that if he could manage to park Grandma somewhere, I might be interested, and it was the old thing all over again. He began to slow, pointing out interesting shrubbery to the dour little widow and keeping an eye on me. This was my cue—and then I remembered Rikki. It was a damn shame, but there it was. “We’d better get in the passing lane,” I said, “or we’ll never make it to your precious temple.” His cheeks heated up—he’d apparently seen the whole pregnant interchange—but he took me by the upper arm and towed me around the group of chattering relatives. I felt the Italian shrug as we passed him on the left.

Temple IV was a slog indeed, most of it on a steep trail through cleared but unleveled earth with a number of immense tree roots acting as foot and handholds. The highest section of the climb involved a vertical ladder that seemed to lean out backward over the jungle below. At the top of the ladder, there was a bit of a scramble to get safely parked on the flat limestone slabs at the summit of the pyramid, and then we were sitting together, our backs against what was left of the roof comb, staring out over one of the last real rainforests in the world.

“People sneak sleeping bags up here sometimes,” Rikki said. “That’s the thing—to watch the sun come up from the top of Temple IV. The guards usually chase them out, though.”

“Have you done it?”

“My mom and I, when I was eight. Totally cool.”

It crossed my mind, then, that there was no woman in the picture, no wife of Jan or mother of Rikki. Now Rikki spoke of her as though eulogizing a dear departed. Poor kid. I knew enough not to ask, I wasn’t going to ask, and then he said, almost offhandedly, “When we’re done here, we’re heading up to Palenque for a while, so you’ll get to meet her.”

“I will?”

“You’ll like her. She’s great.”

I turned back toward the panoramic jungle scene and said, carefully, “Will your dad be with us?” which was code for “So they’re still married?” and he winced and said, “Of course.”

“Rikki,” I said, deliberately changing the subject after an appropriately long pause. “What’s up tonight? What am I shooting?”

“A tomb in North Acropolis. He doesn’t want to do it until all the tourists are out.”

“Is it going to be as exciting as last night?”

That got a smile out of him. “Better,” he said.

“Something to do with the famous Ah-Cacaw?”

He turned to look me in the face. We were sitting two feet apart in the shade of the roof comb, with the sun, just behind the massive blocks, backlighting his head. One of his ears, the one closest to the sunlight, looked translucent, like a baby’s ear or the ear of a very young animal. His lashes were thick as fronds. But he’d be grown up soon enough, out in the world like all the beautiful ones, playing the same game as the Italian on the trail. “You really don’t care about this stuff, do you?” he said.

“You mean about your precious Mayas?”

Silently, in the way his father might have done it, he put his arm out flat, palm down, and ran it over the scene below us.

I pushed him harder, payback for them keeping me in the dark. “This is all life and death to you two, right? Figuring out what happened here, why they abandoned their big cities? But hey, they’re all dead and gone now, so what’s the big deal?”

“I know,” he said. “I know.” But for a moment he looked startled, as though this were the first time the thought had ever crossed his mind. And I thought, poor kid. Sixteen, and still totally enslaved to his parents. For all our differences, Stefan and I were completely on the same page with the whole filial devotion thing. We’d both blown the family nest at the soonest possible opportunity.