“Look at the stelae—the stone stelae,” Erik said as we moved into another room, this one opening into a garden space and stocked with the tall basalt pillars carved by the Olmec and the Maya. These stood up to twelve feet and were incised with the delicate curving images of kings and scribes and slaves. “Most of the picture stones we’ve found have been made purely of basalt, in some cases granite. The majority of these are from Tikal. The Flores stones are the only ones known to be carved entirely out of jade, and blue jade at that.”
“I haven’t seen them in person in a long time,” I said. “Just in books.”
We entered La Sala de Jades, the one chamber of the museum devoted to the jade relics that have been discovered and retained in Guatemala. In the center of the room, displayed on lucite stands, stood the pièce de résistance.
The Flores Stelae consist of four different panels of carved blue jadeite, each approximately one and a half feet tall, one foot wide, and half a foot thick. Illuminated by small spotlights fixed to their bases, the stones shimmered like extraordinary stained glass. Each of the panels had been chiseled with hieroglyphs crafted in the shapes of dragons, maidens, jaguars, and dwarves, detailed with intricate cross-hatchings, geometric flowers, and obscure medallions. Fierce grotesques also stared out from the panels—hunched hissing vipers and gargoyles with wild eyes and bared teeth, mixed in apparently random order among other abstract signs, such as circles and rectangles, slashes and diacritical dots. The marks, however haphazard, were arrayed in a series of lines, an arrangement that had led all Mayanists to believe the stones could be read like any other book, until Tomas de la Rosa’s 1967 talk at the El Salvador conference successfully destroyed that theory.
Standing there, I could see the attraction of the meaninglessness thesis. There was something relaxing about this incoherence. The ineffable hunchbacks and women and serpents floated within the rich iris color, which transmuted into different shades and opalescent depths according to the angle of the windows’ light. The sun pouring through the stone fell upon us while we stared at the carvings. When I looked over at Erik, I saw that his face and white shirt were covered by a thin blue veil.
“My mother really wanted credit for interpreting these panels,” I said. “I wonder if she’d published her article before de la Rosa, she wouldn’t have felt like she always had to go running out into the jungle to find things. And then maybe …”
“She wouldn’t be lost now.”
“Right.”
“Probably not,” Erik said. “Look at de la Rosa. He was always getting into trouble—with the army, first. They say he bombed that colonel’s house in the mid-seventies, after slipping past the military guards dressed as an old peasant woman. He killed an accountant working inside, maybe even on purpose. And he injured a lieutenant, too. I’ve forgot his name, but the colonel—Moreno, that’s what he was called— punished the kid for not guarding his home well enough by training him in the interrogation methods they used on the Marxists. The boy wound up becoming one of the worst butchers in the war—”
“Not exactly the effect de la Rosa would have been after.”
“Which may be one of the reasons he had that breakdown,” Erik said. “But I really think he went crazy because his friends were killed by those guerrillas. That’s when he got out of the resistance. Started to focus on foreigners in the jungle—then he was looking for the Queen Jade, and everybody thought he’d lost his mind because he was scaring the competition to death. Like your father, right? With the quicksand pit.”
I nodded. “That happened on an expedition. De la Rosa dressed himself up as a sherpa, and my dad didn’t even recognize him. He led Dad’s team off-trail, and when they were completely lost, he just slipped off into the forest. Dad went chasing after him and fell into a pit. Right about when the quicksand reached his chin, de la Rosa showed up on the edge of the swamp, called him a couple of filthy names, and pulled him out.”
“That’s some story.”
“It’s why we cut off contact with their family. I had to stop writing to Yolanda a few years after she moved out of our house. We used to be best friends, though she wasn’t anything like me. Her father taught her to climb, track, hunt, fight, even disguise herself—when she lived with us, she liked to put me in this choke hold and play around with punching me a lot, and then sometimes she’d dress up in these costumes, like Magua, the villain from The Last of the Mohicans. She’d come running at me, yelling these Indian curses. Just to keep my wits sharp, she said.”
“The Last of the Mohicans?”
“She’s kind of unique.”
“I’d guess.”
“But then Tomas hurt my dad. It was my mother’s idea that I distance myself. It was very important to her. My father’s had kind of a psychological problem with the jungle ever since the quicksand. It was a question of loyalty, she said.” I felt a smile waver across my face. “But I know now it was a mistake, my not writing to Yolanda. She kept writing me until the late eighties. And in the last years, the letters weren’t so nice. She let me know pretty clearly that I’d betrayed her, and that she hated me. I hadn’t spoken or written to her for twelve years until two weeks ago. I sent her a note when I heard Tomas had died. You know—something abbreviated and totally inadequate. ‘I’m so sorry to hear about your father. All condolences. Lola.’ But she hasn’t answered, and I can’t say that I blame her.”
We both grew quiet after my confession. The stones shimmered before us like water. Erik reached up and touched the hieroglyphs.
“De la Rosa,” he said. “In my business, you almost can’t get away from hearing that guy’s name in every conversation. He’s our sacred monster. But for me, he was always the least interesting part about the Stelae. When I was a boy, I didn’t care what they meant. I just wanted to know all about the adventures of the person who found them. That is, Tapia. He was on the scene fifty years before Tomas de la Rosa. Oscar Angel Tapia—”
“You talked about him at the house. And I’ve heard my mother say his name.”
“He was the one snatching the stones under the Indians’ noses. He’s what piqued my interest in turn-of-the-century antiquarians. And led me to Von Humboldt.”
“What’s his story, exactly?”
“Oscar? Poor old man. He thought he’d made it when he came across the Stelae. In ‘twenty-four. He was a coffee magnate, lived in a mansion on the island—Flores—and once he’d made his fortune, he decided he’d spend it collecting antiquities. He kept an encrypted journal of his adventures. In his diary, he writes that he liked to use his servants as guides, to help him collect from the surrounding areas. And he made a few good finds—amphora, flints, little idols—all of them are in the museum now. But he wasn’t too happy just digging up scraps and bits. He asked his servants if there wasn’t something really big to be found in the jungle. And you see, there was.” Erik gestured at the Stelae. “The locals kept the panels very secret. The legend was that they were cursed. So none of his maids or lackeys said a word about the things because they thought if they did, they’d drop dead. Except his cook turned out not to be so superstitious.
“This cook, under the presumption that a nice handful of change could be forthcoming if she so divulged, told him about these panels just sitting up in the southern part of the Peten. ‘I have heard the greatest rumor today from my chef d’cuisine. She speaks of a blue stone folio, of delicate proportions and craft, which is simply moldering in the forest.’ He wrote that in one of his journal entries, backward. As I was saying before, he fancied himself a follower of Leonardo.”
“You’ve memorized his writings?”
“I was interested in him for a long time—because of his cryptographer’s bent. Anyhow, Tapia had a difficult time getting his servants to help him on the expedition, at least at first, but then he paid them so much money that the whole curse problem didn’t really seem so bad anymore. The cook, however, was not paid, as the story goes. So up Señor Tapia and his serfs scrambled
into the forest in the southern Peten. Tapia crosses a waterway and loses two men. Then he finds the panels on the banks. He has his servants rip them from the ground and somehow gets them back to his mansion, after which they were inaccurately named the Flores Stelae. And then the curse hit. Or so they say.”
“What happened?”
“Nasty disease. Every single one died within the year of the same symptoms—turned blue, rolled around the floor screaming in agony. All the locals fled the island for fear of catching it themselves.” He shrugged. “But something tells me it wasn’t because of any curse.”
I smiled. “The cook.”
“She must have put a nice drop of poison in their lunches one day, then collected what she believed to be her fair share of pay—or more—and run like the wind.”
“No wonder you were so fascinated.”
“It was years before I even began to think about the stones themselves. It wasn’t until I was nearly twenty that I read de la Rosa’s Meaninglessness in Maya Iconography.”
“The hieroglyphs are all that my mother was interested in.”
Erik squinted up at the carvings. “I’ve got to tell you something, though. I’ve never been a fan of the theory that they don’t mean anything.”
“I didn’t know there were any dissenters left.”
“Well, I’ve always had a fantasy of proving your mother wrong.”
“Any ideas how?”
He shook his head and smiled. “Not a one—but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t still do it.”
“Dream on—”
As I said this, I felt small wiry arms wrap themselves around my shoulders, and whiskers brushing my cheek.
I turned around and saw the burning gaze, the luxuriant mustache, the impeccable tweed suit with the Windsor tie, and the brave smile of Manuel Alvarez, my father. From his collar to his wing tips, he looked strong and collected. No one would be able to discern any sign of the troubles he’d seen in the past days unless they knew him very well and could read his eyes.
“Lola,” my father said, then hugged me again, pressing his face to mine and murmuring my name several more times. “Thank God you’re here.”
CHAPTER 12
Neither the police nor the army have enough men to look for her in the jungle, which is where I am afraid she might be,” Dad told us in his office fifteen minutes later. “Why she would go up there, I don’t know. Vacation, is what she told me, though I’ll confess I didn’t have a very good feeling about it. … As for the police, I’ve called them thirty times, but whole villages have been swept away out by the Rio Dulce, and people are starving. Not that you would know that by looking around here, but in the northeast, the suffering’s terrible. And she said that she was going up into the forest six days ago now. I’ve been sitting here ever since, just waiting and waiting for her to call.”
While I listened to him, I wondered if I should say anything about my mother’s e-mail, but I didn’t see how it would help yet, and she had asked me not to. Erik also appeared to have remembered my mother’s secrecy, because he didn’t disclose anything as my father continued to talk and pace about the room.
Erik and I sat on two Victorian slipper chairs arranged in front of my father’s desk, and he busied himself by making coffee from a little plastic percolator he kept in a corner. I could see that he labored to hold up under the horrors of the last days, yet I still knew how frightened he was even before I felt his cold fingers when he handed me my mug.
“I’m sure she’s just in Flores, Dad,” I said.
“She’s not in Antigua,” he said. A vein stood out in his forehead. “I drove around there two days after the storm hit, and I couldn’t find her. I looked in all her regular hotels. And then I couldn’t get to Flores. The roads are blocked.”
“Erik and I are going to look again. We’ll go south from here to Antigua, and if she’s not there, we’ll head up north to Flores. We’ll find some way to get up there. And … you remember how she gets. This is nothing new.”
“Yes, sometimes she does run off on her expeditions and never leaves us a word—”
“Actually, on the subject of jade expeditions, Señor Alvarez,” Erik said, “I would like to ask you about what’s going on in the mountains.”
My father held on to my hand; he did not appear to have heard Erik. He brought himself up to his full height and touched my cheek.
“But this isn’t like the other times, dear,” he said. “And I’m afraid you know that.” He chucked my chin and then looked back up. “And yes, Erik—it looks like there has been a jade strike. Farmers up in the Sierras discovered scads of it. Speculators are already running up to the mountains, along with innumerable university men. In the midst of this hurricane there’s some hysteria over a possible jade mine. Nothing’s certain yet, understand. But one of the scientists over at the school has sent me some samples, and they seem genuine enough.”My father moved over to his desk and picked up the specimen box, which he opened. “It’s all a very big occasion, if you haven’t lost your—your—wife. Which is how I think of her, though we’re not married. So now I don’t give a damn about any of this. Though you can see for yourself that it’s the real thing.”
He handed Erik the box. I banged my chair as I slid it close to his and looked inside.
The plastic container had several small compartments, each with its own sliding cover. Erik pressed a slide and opened one of the cubbyholes, which contained a rough flint of nearly perfect indigo jade. The rest of the cubbies held piles of chips, rough hunks, or small uneven marbles of the same material. Erik picked up the flint and held it against the beam of the mica lamp. It glowed cerulean, and was riven with threads of peacock and near-purple.
“It’s the real thing,” Erik said. “The blue. I didn’t believe it, really. Not until this minute.”
“Yes, yes, it’s all real,” my father said. “But never mind that now. Lola. You’re going to have to get yourself a guide, especially if you have to head up north. But they’re not very easy to come by now, as they all seem to have gone running up to the Sierras.”
“A guide?” Erik asked.
“Well, you aren’t thinking of going up there alone, the two of you?”
“If you aren’t going with us …”
“Who, Dad?” I asked. “Oh, no, he’s not going.”
“As she says, that’s impossible,” my father said. “Or—doesn’t he know? About me?”
Erik cleared his throat. “I heard you had an accident once, in the jungle.”
“An accident? It was no accident. It was de la Rosa!” My father’s ears grew pink at the tips. “And I’ve had something of a … hesitation about going back into the jungle ever since. Actually, it’s more than a hesitation, I’m afraid. I tend to have something of a collapse when I even smell a swamp. So thanks to Tomas, I might hurt the search more than help it.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” I lied.
“That sounds very hard, Señor Alvarez,” Erik said, after a pause.
“Yes, it is, my boy. Yes, it is. Yet one must accept certain facts about oneself. It would be better that I feel ashamed here in this office than go barreling out north and make a mess of things. So. We need not linger on it.” My father let go of my hand. “But it will be difficult traveling. You may have to get up to the Peten—far north, which is woolly country, now. And as I was saying, you’ll need a guide, as I don’t think it’s necessarily the best idea that you two go by yourselves.”
“Why?”Erik asked.
“Why? Because of your reputation, sir.”
“Dad.”
My father fanned out his fingers. “My good man. I haven’t been living under a rock, you know. Whereas you’ve heard these embarrassing stories about me, of course I’ve heard so many bad things about you. For years Juana has been telling me the most shocking stories about your conduct—I expected some sort of blundering Priapus. Though I must admit that looking at you, you’re not quite what I expected. You’re very huma
n. You don’t have a tail. But I can’t imagine letting you run off with my daughter into the jungle by yourselves.”
“Dad, I think I’m a little too old for you to worry about me running off with boys—”
My father trained his burning gaze on Erik’s, doing an excellent job of ignoring me. “I know your tendencies with women—problems keeping your belt buckled. And then how, when you’re finished with them, you simply race away as if you were in Pamplona. But I know you’ll behave yourself with her. For if you don’t, then—well. I may be of a delicate constitution, but these things can be overcome. If they have to be. My daughter’s happiness, you see, I cherish it. I’m sure you understand.”
Erik looked down at his coffee cup, and then up again.
“Yes, I think I do,” he said, unhappily.
“Don’t get excited, Dad,” I said.
“I’m not excited,” he said. “I’m not excited yet. Later, maybe. Now, no.”
My father stared at Erik. Erik stared back. Here passed an uncomfortable silence.
“So what do you have to say, son?” my father asked. “Speak up.”
“I just want to make sure you’re not going to—challenge me to a duel or anything first.”
“Oh. Well. You have nothing to worry about now.”
“That’s good.”
“I’ll make it very clear if anything of that nature becomes necessary. Yes?”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Erik was holding up under my father fairly well.
“Getting back to the business about guides,” I said. “I’m assuming Yolanda is still in town.”
“Who?” Erik asked, looking back and forth between us. “What did you just say?”
My father nodded. “She is—though I’ve been thinking. You should consider getting someone else—”
The Queen Jade Page 6