It shouldn’t take me too long. Two, three weeks, like I said before.
And then I’ll come back home to you, my Lola.
Maybe I’ll even return with something really remarkable. Proof of ruins of the Maze of Deceit? A fragment of a lost blue city? A jade, perhaps?
Don’t think that the old Moms has gone bananas, dear; all us archaeologists have these fantasies—where would we be now if nutty old Sir Arthur Evans hadn’t dug around Greece?
As I write this (I’m at your father’s, e-mailing you on his computer), the rain really is slashing down the windows, and there are some light squalls, and everyone outside is running about like decapitated fowl. Manuel and I heard a rumor that blue jade stones were discovered in a landslide around the central mountains. Whether it’s true or not, I don’t know yet. It only spurs me on. I can’t worry about getting wet and muddy, especially when I consider what could be waiting for me out there.
I’ll call you in a few days. Do you have your dad’s number handy? 502-255-5544 is his cell.
I love you,
Mom
“She didn’t tell me the truth,” I whispered out loud.
“What?” Erik asked. When I looked up, I saw he was standing above me and packing his bag.
A gong from an unseen grandfather clock in the Huntington rang through the building. Five P.M. The librarians floated through the Reading Room, murmuring that closing time was not far away.
“Nothing. Gabbling to myself.” I lowered the lid of my computer.
“A little schizophrenia never hurt anyone, but it’s time to go, Sybil. Come on, I’ll drive you home.”
“No, thanks. Just—there’s a bus stop by the university, you can drop me off there.”
“I’m not going to have you bus all the way back to Long Beach. And if I’m driving you, I will need some dinner. So I think you’re committed.”
I still had my hands over my computer and its bothersome e-mail.
“Well,” I said, unsure.
“Yes?”
I glanced up and saw the hair fanning out in awkward little kinks on one side of his head, and realized that my decision regarding dinner had nothing to do with my mother’s confounding letter—which I still had no idea how to respond to. I shrugged and said, “Look, I didn’t read even one page from Von Humboldt this afternoon. If you drive me home and tell me a little more about his connection with de la Cueva, I’ll feed you something. How’s coffee and snacks? That’s all I have back home, I think.”
Erik looked at me for a second, then smiled cheerily.
“Is this a proposition?”
“No. Seriously. So very much, no.”
“Oh. How unambiguous.” He looked down at my lace-trimmed skirt and my boots. “But you know what?” He pointed at me. “That’s okay. I don’t really think—the two of us? Would get along in that particular—”
I shook my head. “I agree. The truth is, I only like firefighters and lovely policemen.”
“Firefighters?” he asked me.
“Yes. Firefighters with very large muscles. Who don’t talk a lot.”
Erik, with his belly and hair and pocket of mints, was so very much not conforming to my type at the moment.
Not that he seemed very sorry about it.
“I have to say I’m making some very unpleasant Freudian connections with that”—he did something bizarre with his fingers here, indicating a firehose. Then he reached down and picked up the strap of my computer, and I very nearly thought of asking him to give it back. He picked up his own bag in his other hand.
“Still,” he went on, “now that we have all that cleared up, I also have to tell you that I’ve never been able to refuse offers of food or an audience. Even when there’s no chance of sex.”
And with that, off we went.
CHAPTER 7
Erik sat at my kitchen table under the light of a chandelier, and as soon as I began to rummage around the kitchen to see what I might be able to whip up for a snack, he dug through his briefcase and pulled out a long, spicy-scented cylinder wrapped in butchers’ paper.
“No need to fix anything,” he said. “Brought along my own. And you’ll have to taste some of it, too. It’s incredible.”
I looked at him. “You just happen to have a giant sandwich stuffed in your briefcase?”
“I like to cook. And I like to eat. And I always like to be prepared for anything. So make us that coffee, get a knife, and sit down.”
He began to unwrap what he said was a rebellious Latino version of the proper Englishman’s “shooter’s sandwich.” He’d fashioned it out of a soft hollowed loaf filled with meats and pâtés and little marinated tomatoes, and studded it with pickled habañero chiles and splashes of mole.
He sniffed it. “Doesn’t it smell delicious? I’m a great advocate of all sorts of tasty miscegenations, culinary and otherwise.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
I made a pot of coffee on the stove, and also brought down from the cupboard a small bottle of brandy that my mother liked to tipple from on Sundays. For dessert, I snagged a half bar of dark chocolate that Erik dunked whole into his coffee after he devoured the rest. While we ate (and indeed, the sandwich was delectable), he sprawled low in his seat, describing in encyclopedic terms the nineteenth-century scientific explorations of the “dark continents.” He spoke of how rhapsodic Darwinism replaced the more dour and doubly calamitous evangelism of the cinquecento conquerors, who invaded the Americas with an eye for stealing slaves and jade and gold to fill European coffers. The scientific Victorians had certainly been interested in discovering precious metals, if any were to be had, but their real passions were for the secrets of the jungle, whose bizarre flora and bright beasts they might inspect, label, analyze, and dissect.
Along with Von Humboldt, there had also been the antiquarian and cryptographer Oscar Angel Tapia, who discovered the Flores Stelae in 1924, and explorers like Lewis and Clark, who’d mapped the Columbia River. There was the intrepid German Johann David Schöpf, too, who scoured the Americas in search of medicinal plant specimens he might include in his Materia Medica Americana.
“But there was no one like Von Humboldt,” Erik went on. He’d lightly dusted his shirt with bread crumbs and a smudge of pâté. “He was a friend of Goethe, a fan of Rousseau. He observed things, not like we do now. It was all wide open for him then—obviously we can’t perceive Mexico or Guatemala today without his influence. Without his eye. He thought it could all be understood! With scientific explanations! Linnaeus’s methods, the categories of kingdom, phylum, species. He read everything—Pliny, Copernicus, Herodotus, de la Cueva. And he made his studies of waterways, of natural wells, plant life.”
But my mind wasn’t on waterways or plant life.
“Didn’t he write about Beatriz de la Cueva’s trail?” I asked. “And didn’t he record something about a jade or … a maze?”
“Yes, he followed her route after reading that fable of hers … whatever it’s called.”
“The Legende of the Queen Jade.”
“That’s it. He thought the Jade was a magnet. He was an expert in the field. Magnetism, I mean. He had this idea that the Queen—you know, the Jade—could be this very large lodestone. He actually did make some discoveries of serpentine and blue jade relics, and he tried to find the source for the blue stone, the actual mine, but couldn’t. He wrote about some sort of maze, too, some kind of architectural ruin. A labyrinth. Hard to believe—most people think he was a liar, or maybe that he was hallucinating. He said he’d just stumbled across it in the jungle. In my book, I made out the case that he probably did find something of importance. It’s one of my claims that’s drawn the most fire—spurred on lots of angry criticism and yelling at conferences and things like that. But his other discoveries have been verified—rare types of plants, geological specimens. And it’s not as if mazes haven’t been found before.”
“There’s the mention of those mazes in Herodo
tus,” I said.
“Right—right. And also, there are theories about the Glastonbury tor—there’s an old ruined castle in England, associated with Arthurian myth, with a kind of circular pattern in the foundation. And then there are the turf mazes in the countryside of England, too.”
I played with the lace on my skirt. “And there’s Knossos.”
“And Knossos, exactly. The Greek labyrinth, home of the Minotaur. In legend at least. So—nothing like proof positive, and there’s no other record of mazes in pre-Columbian America. But it’s not impossible either.”
Erik’s hands gestured rapidly in the air. He knew so much about all this, I almost wanted to tell him about my mother’s letter. Except that she would kill me.
“And so you wrote a book about him,” I said. “Von Humboldt.”
“A small monograph. Like I told you, I ran into a little hard luck on my digs—I could have spent years hacking around the area where I’d found the ax heads, but I just didn’t see anything to indicate further relics. So I guess I got discouraged. I did a paper on Oscar Tapia, on his discovery of the Stelae—he was this eccentric who wrote his journal in a kind of cipher, something like Leonardo da Vinci. Which is why I became drawn to him in the first place. I have a hobbyist’s interest in codes and things—”
“And Von Humboldt?” I said, getting him back on subject.
“Yes—well, Tapia’s the one who led me to him. That’s how I became interested in these colonial scientists. So I wrote a few chapters in a book about the German. Then I started my own, examining his Jade trek—which your mother helped edit, I’ll have you know. The manuscript would come back to me bleeding with red ink exclamation marks and occasionally profane observations on my writing style, particularly where I claimed that Von Humboldt might actually have found the Maze of Deceit. … Anyway, he’s an important figure. He was one of the first Europeans to condemn slavery. He was sort of a harbinger of Thoreau. And he tracked a lot of Guatemala with his companion Aimé Bonpland—whom he was probably in love with. If you have a map, I can show you the places they studied. Some day I’ll have the whole route memorized, I’ve studied him so much. He interests me.”
“Because of the Jade?”
“Not initially.” Erik shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I thought he was a person I would have liked to know.”
“Why?”
“I just identify with him a little. Or—I don’t know. Maybe I’d just like to. He was a serious sort of man. He was a committed scientist. And friend.”
“A committed friend,” I said. I thought again about Yolanda de la Rosa. “That’s a hard thing to be, sometimes.”
“You’re right. It is.”
We paused.
“That’s what I want to be,” I eventually said. “When it comes down to it.”
It surprised me, actually, that I was telling him this.
He looked at me and lowered his eyebrows. For a moment, he wasn’t so rambunctious or playful; he seemed different all at once. I could tell that he might be revising his opinion of this evening. Or even of me.
“Me too,” he said. “Though I worry it’ll take a little bit of work on my part.”
I smiled at him. “Are you talking about Gloria the librarian?”
“Something like that,” he laughed, though still fixing his eyes on mine. “And I’ll admit I don’t often find myself confessing these kinds of things to people I’ve just met.” He was silent for another few seconds; I could have sworn that he almost looked bashful. “Well—before I start gasping at you about my childhood—let’s get back to Von Humboldt.”
“Yes. Back to Von Humboldt.”
“You were going to get me an atlas? I’ll show you his route.”
I stood up. “You go to the living room and wait there while I go and get it. There’s a television—black and white, nothing special. But you might check on the weather, if that’s okay. My mother wrote something to me about the rainstorm down south. I’d like to make sure it’s let up. And then we can look at the route.”
“No problem.”
I showed him the way down the hall and walked back to my room, where I hunted through my shelves. Under my editions of Haggard, Conan Doyle, Verne, Melville, and Burroughs, I found a decent plot of Guatemala: an 1882 Encyclopaedia Britannica illustration, reproduced in a little nineteenth-century travel book on the region called The Intriguing People and Places of Central America, which I’d bought in a church book sale eight years ago from a coven of charming old ladies.
From the living room, I could hear the purring sound a television makes when it’s first turned on, and then the racket of reporters’ voices. I turned the pages of my book as I moved from my bedroom into the hall. The map of Guatemala, between pages twelve and thirteen, was tinted in sepia and mauve. It showed the heart-shaped country’s rivers, mountains, jungles, and cities, marked by the cartographer in lacy black calligraphy. Difficult names like Totonleapan and Tasisco were tamed in Victorian italics; the artist indicated craggy mounts with delicate wavering strokes of ink. Mauve, blue, pink, and yellow tints designated the divisions between the departments. The word Guatemala was branded, bold, in the center of the country.
I walked out into the living room, which is decorated with Edwardian furniture and Turkish rugs and an illuminated fish tank, and hosts my one small TV. Erik sat beside the fish tank. He watched the television with his hands over his face. And on the screen I saw a picture of Guatemala that bore no resemblance to the neat markings on the map I carried. A dark and violent wind blew palm trees so that they bent nearly horizontal to the ground. I saw footage of shacks heaved by the blasts, their roofs splintered by the storm, large chunks of wood and rushes spinning wildly into the air. Frothing water flooded the streets and whipped up against storefronts, smashing windows, drowning dogs, washing away cars and tree trunks and scattered clothing. The news station also showed some quick images of the dead. The bodies looked wet and huddled and motionless against mud banks. Under these pictures flashed harsh yellow letters: GUATEMALA CITY, COPAN, ANTIGUA. And there was also an aerial shot of the rain forests, which appeared ripped and glistening, as if they had been torn through by giant claws.
“Lola,” Erik said. “It’s a hurricane.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Don’t panic. The news is selective. Apparently most haven’t died in Guatemala. The worst of it was in Honduras. It was terrible in Honduras. But I’m sure your mother’s fine.”
“Look at those bodies.”
“The people who didn’t make it couldn’t find shelter. But wasn’t she still in the city?”
I gripped the book and continued watching the blue-black sky and the shaking palms and the smashed houses on the television. I stared at pictures of the gnarled and stripped rain forests. I’ll make my way up to Flores, she’d written me, nearly four days ago. Then I’ll drive and hike to the Peten, to a part of the forest cut through by the river Sacluc. After that, I’ll stake my way farther up, and see if I might be able to excavate anything.
“I don’t think she was in the city,” I answered. “She wrote me an e-mail and said she was heading north—”
“I’m sure she’s fine.”
“Oh, Mom,” I said, snapping my head away from the television.
CHAPTER 8
Ten minutes later, I tried the phones. “Your father will know where she is,” Erik said. “He wouldn’t let her get too far away in that weather. I’ll bet right now they’re in the basement of the museum, drinking whiskey and happily arguing over the provenance of some stela or potsherd.”
“I hope so.” I picked up the receiver of our phone. I dialed the number I had retrieved from my mother’s e-mail and waited.
Erik sat stiffly on the sofa, glancing at the fish.
“Is there anything?”
The ring sounded over and over, like an alarm.
I let out a breath. “No, not yet. But I’m worried that she’s not with him. Her e-mail was days old.”
“Where else would she be? The television said the roads were washed out today. She couldn’t have gotten very far one way or the other. And most of the damage was in the east, with some in the north. The forest, which she probably didn’t reach. You said she was going on vacation. I’m sure she turned around once it started raining hard.”
I hesitated. “No, you were right before.”
“What do you mean?”
“She didn’t go for a vacation.”
Erik opened his mouth, then closed it; he didn’t say anything.
“In the e-mail she sent me,” I went on, “she said that—that she hadn’t told me the complete truth about her trip. She said she thought she could find the Maze of Deceit.”
He looked at me in a very steady and concentrated way. “What do you mean?”
“She wasn’t that clear, but she said that she figured something out about it. She said she thought she knew where it was.”
“The Maze of Deceit. The ruin that Von Humboldt writes about.”
“If it’s the same one that de la Cueva writes about, yes.”
“No … I don’t believe it.”
“You just said it was possible—that Von Humboldt found a ruin, or something.”
“What did she find?”
“She didn’t say. She hasn’t even told my father any of this. And all she wrote me was that she was heading up to Flores, and into the jungle. Past the—a river, the Sacluc—”
“Yes, the Sacluc. I know it. That is, I know about it. But she wouldn’t go alone. Excavating in the Peten—that’s a huge job.”
I shook my head. “I have no idea what she’s doing—but she’d asked me to make a copy of the Legende before she left. And I Xeroxed de la Cueva’s letters for her, too. Do you know them?”
“No, not really. I’m more of a Von Humboldt man. I haven’t looked at de la Cueva’s materials in years.”
The Queen Jade Page 4