The younger soldier wiped his face with a battered hand and swore. The shouts of the rest of the men in the bar became deafening.
“It was beginning to get dull in here anyway,” the older soldier said, as the men around him began spitting threats.
He began to walk out of The Pedro Lopez with quick clacking steps. The other soldier took a blood-eyed glance up at Yolanda. He rose to his full, slightly unsteady height, and followed his friend.
Yolanda pulled at her hair in frustration and turned sharply back to her seat. I helped Erik to his feet and led him to the table. A bloody lump was swelling on his cheek, beneath his left eye.
“Are you all right?”
“I am not all right,” he said.
“Oh, Erik.”
“No, don’t look at me like that. I’m fine.”
“Are you all right?” Yolanda said to me.
I said yes. My leg was nothing compared to my nerves.
She looked over at the soldiers leaving, and her mouth jerked. “They get like that sometimes. Doesn’t matter that the Peace Accords got signed. Thirty years of war doesn’t end so neatly.”
“I know,” Erik said.
None of us spoke for a while after that. We sat back down, gingerly, and Yolanda sipped her Coke to control her breathing. We avoided each other’s eyes. General conversation in the bar also halted, and the drinkers glanced over at us, though they indicated no interest in approaching our table.
CHAPTER 15
Yolanda’s face flushed red as she struggled to pull herself together.
“Who were those men?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She squeezed her Coke can, working it into a little piece of foil. “I’ve never seen them before. But that one with the mustache must have spotted me with my father. When I used to help him out during the war.”
“The big one can hit,” Erik said.
Yolanda waved her hand at me. “So. Lola. Glad to see you, thanks for coming by, and all that—but I want you out of here. I’m not talking to people right now.” She tossed the can to the floor. “I’m in mourning,” she said flatly.
“Mom’s lost,” I blurted. “Maybe in the jungle.”
“Manuel told me,” she said, slowly. Her face was thinner and more serious than I remembered. “I am sorry to hear it.”
“What are you talking about, you’re sorry to hear it? My mother’s lost!”
“And my father’s dead. I won’t ever see him again.”
“Yolanda—”
“You cut me out of your life a long time ago. You don’t know what things have been like for me here.”
“I know,” I said. “My father—”
“Your father,” she said. “Don’t bring fathers up to me. Or mothers. Because it was your mother who told you to stop writing me, wasn’t it?”
I rubbed my hands across my eyes.
“That’s what I thought.”
I stayed quiet for a long moment. “I’m so sorry,” I told her, as I took hold of her hand.
Her irises were ebony with an inner star of emerald, and I saw bruise-colored patches under her eyes.
“I don’t want you to touch me, Lola,” she said. “Not you or anyone else.”
But I didn’t let go, and she didn’t pull away, either.
“You look older,” she said then, and sighed.
She did too. I knew she had turned thirty-three last August. I bent down and hugged her tight and hard.
“Stop it,” she said, though she still didn’t smack me off. I felt her press her cheek into my neck, but not enough that it would be obvious to anyone looking on. “Go away!” she said in a fierce voice. She took my shoulders in her hands and moved me away, until she was holding me at arm’s length in too tight a grasp. She was shaking.
“Yes, well, I’m getting that this is very awkward,” Erik said. He cupped his bad eye with his hand. “I for one vote to go back to the hotel. Let’s talk about all this there. I don’t know if anybody can tell that I’m in serious pain.”
“Excuse me, but who in the hell are you?” Yolanda asked him.
“I’m Erik.” His right eyebrow rose slowly. Despite his discomfort, his neurons had begun firing again at the sight of her lovely face.
“You’re what?”
“I’m—I’m—a Guatemalan,” he said.
“He’s Erik,” I said. “Gomara. A friend of mine.”
“A Guatemalan?” She scanned her eyes over him. “Are you quite sure about that?”
“What does that mean?” Erik asked. His right eyebrow went back down.
“You don’t seem very Guatemalan, my good man. You look like her—pure North American—”
“I look better when I don’t have a concussion.”
“Yolanda, my mother went up to the Peten for the Jade,” I cried out.
She just looked at me.
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you fine.”
“She thought it might be up there. The Jade.”
” ‘The Jade’?”
“De la Cueva’s Jade.”
“You mean my father’s Jade?”
“Yes. It looks like he could have been right about it all along. They’ve been finding blue jadeite in the Sierras—”
“I’ve heard all about that,” she said. “Everyone’s yelling about a jade mine. Well, they can take it if they find it, can’t they? They can choke on it.”
“Those reports might prove the old stories,” I said. “About the Stone. If we have to go to the forest to look for Mom, it could—it could—be worth your while.”
“You want me to guide you,” she said, thrusting her thumb toward the bar. “Pick one of the drunks here, they’ll take you.”
“They’re not as good as you.”
“Why should I go? Are you going to pay me? I don’t care about money. What else could you offer—a new car? A plane ticket out of here?” She closed her eyes. “Old times, maybe?” A few more seconds passed, and I didn’t understand exactly what she was asking me. It only occurred to me much later that I had made a bad mistake in not answering this last question.
“Yes, that would be stupid,” she said then, in such an acid voice that I was sure she hated me; I should have never, never stopped writing her.
But I was also certain that I’d only have one chance at getting Yolanda to come along.
“I can give you a shot at finishing your father’s work.” I hesitated. And then I began to lie to her. “I haven’t told you everything. My mother found something—a secret map, in some Spanish archives. And it’s just come to light.”
“So?”
“It gives the exact location of that Jade. And I have a copy of it, which I’ll show you. If you come with me.”
“You’re trying to fool me,” she hissed. “There’s no secret map.”
“We’re going up there to find her—and the Stone, if you want,” I said, clasping my hands together. But in the next second I felt my desperation kick loose for the first time since I’d heard my mother had vanished.
“You have to help me!” I nearly shrieked at her. “Not because you like me. Not because you care about her. Because I’ll give you whatever you want—I have a map. And I’ll help you find that rock. I swear it.”’
She leaned forward and took hold of my right hand in hers. She touched it to her cheek with a brutal pressure.
“My father was probably—no, he was insane. At the end. Can’t you see how it hurts me? There was nothing to find.”
As she said this, I could hear the chatter of the customers, and beneath that, the constant uneven droning hum of the old grandfather at the bar.
“No—you always believed in your dad,” I said.
“I’m too tired for that stupid dream now, Lola.” She put my hand down. “Just leave.”
She turned away from me. The party swirled around us, and beer steins floated overhead. Patrons swung in and out of The Pedro Lopez, and the line at the bar grew thicker, until a crow
d formed.
“I just had my lights punched out,” Erik said to no one in particular.
“A song,” someone said then, over him.
“A song! A song!”
“Give us one there, Felipe,” one of the barflies said. “Help us shake the blues off now that those bastards are gone.”
In the backsplash mirror I could see the grandfather smile.
“No,” he said. “You young buggers leave me alone.”
Eventually they did get him to turn around on his stool, and a few men whistled and swore, and told him to start up.
The old man began murmuring in that same off-key voice, though in my daze I could barely hear what he was saying. The crowd surrounding us grew quieter. Yolanda drew her hat down over her head.
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
“I’ve never been hit like that before in my life.” Erik opened one eye. “Did I hold up all right?”
“Yes.”
“Did you get hurt?”
“I already told you I did. Listen, is that man singing?”
“Who?”
“The old man.”
Erik peered at the bar with his good eye. “Yes.”
“What? I can barely make it out.”
“Agh, it’s a song,” Erik said. “Maybe it’s our musical cue to leave.”
“What song? Have I heard that?”
“It’s an old song.”
“It’s one of the oldest, around here,” Yolanda said, and then she began moving her lips to the words.
The grandfather closed his eyes and continued to talk-sing. It took me a while before I could understand the lyrics; it took me even longer to realize that this tune was one that my mother knew. The last time I’d heard her hum it was on the evening of her trip.
While I applied more ice to Erik’s cheek, I listened to the old man’s grumbling, fractured voice as he sang to the familiar melody:
My queen, my beauty
What have I done?
Why have you left me?
To live in this world
So cold and so empty
I lost you, I lost you, my darling.
My treasure, my charm
Do you forgive me?
Stay safe in my arms
Where I can kiss you
Where you will stay warm
I lost you I lost you
I’m lost, too
I’m lost, too
I’m lost
without you
My darling
The ice rested in my hand; my leg no longer hurt, absorbed as I was in the old man’s awful singing. The song made something terrible inside me begin to expand. I could hear my mother’s voice in my ear, and I felt a cracking, a breaking.
Yolanda did not appear much better. Her jaw remained clenched, but the muscles in it trembled. She wouldn’t look at me at all now. I remained invisible to her even when the ballad ended and the men at the bar applauded their friend. He nodded and turned back to the counter so that he could resume downing his beer.
“Good-bye,”she said, when I tried to slip my hand inside hers again.
“We should get moving,” Erik said, after another minute. He touched his face with his fingers. “All I want to do right now is go back to the hotel. This has all been supremely interesting, but I would really like to never come here again for as long as I live.” He stood up and took hold of my elbow and moved me toward the front door. “Come on. Let’s go.”
I took one more look at Yolanda, but she turned away from me. There was nothing else that I could say to her tonight.
“All right,” I said. I touched the sore spot on my leg and nodded. “We’re out of here.”
On our way back across the bar, though, I glanced back. And even if she jerked her eyes away from me, I gathered that Yolanda was sufficiently interested in what I’d had to say to watch me carefully from under the brim of her hat as I walked out.
But I would have known that anyway.
CHAPTER 16
We’d reached our lodgings at the Westin Hotel, in Zone Three, by ten o’clock. The Westin towers over Guatemala City’s palm trees and black mesh of power lines is a particularly complex example of modern architecture, as its facade is composed of hundreds of white triangles suspended in the air, like a colossal white web spun by a pretentious spider. All allusions to the twentieth century end, however, once you’re inside. Erik and I limped into a rococo foyer groaning with bronze sculptures of boys in Shakespearean dress, white marble, erupting flower arrangements, and murals of sylphs and Greek goddesses. We staggered up to our separate rooms. I bathed, then changed into jeans and the T-shirt of the Stelae that my father had given me. I made my way up to Erik’s suite, bringing my bag of books and maps so that we might plan our search in Antigua and possibly Flores.
When I knocked on the door, he opened it dressed in sweats and giant fuzzy socks.
“I thought I’d send up for a treat,” he said, holding a glass of wine. The mark beneath his eye had spread a little, though the color appeared slightly less raw. His hair was a wet mass of curls combating for turf all over his head. His bad eye winked; the wine swirled in its glass high in the air. “This is to commemorate my first terrifying and extremely painful fistfight, which I’ve decided will also be my very, very last.”
“Great idea.”
“Have a wine.” He thrust the glass into my hand.
“Even better idea.”
“Time for food, too. You see I’ve ordered.”
“Yes—yes—smells great.”
In the green-and-pink sitting room of his suite stood a chintz-covered sofa, and in front of that a cherry wood table. On this table rested a silver platter crowded with four covered dishes and a bottle of Spanish Rioja.
“I’m hoping that if I drink enough of this I can forget what happened tonight,” he said.
I sat down on the sofa as he uncovered the dishes. Surrounded by the velvets and flowers, we dipped our huge spoons into a risotto, pink and white with butter and crayfish, while Erik talked about sixteenth-century Italian sea captains who had sailed to the Americas in search of gold and mermaids, but found instead only these tiny dragons crawling on the shores, which proved such a savory addition to the rice dishes beloved by the Medici. On the heels of this indulgence, we ate half a cake frosted with burned caramel sugar. This pastry was molded into a small mountain, crested with apricots, and out of its center oozed dark chocolate. The menu called the confection “Hot Burning Love.”
“You would order that,” I said, getting the last of it from my spoon.
“And you would eat it—stop gobbling all of it. The more I eat, the better I feel.”
“Does it still hurt?”
“My eye? It’s deadly. Though I remember that you—helped me.”
“Yes. I helped you.”
“I saw you when I came to.”
“You did faint.”
“I didn’t faint. I did not faint. I was registering my surprise. And when I chose to get back on my feet, I swear I heard you babbling something outrageous to that Yolanda. You said your mother had found a map, and that she could use it. Or hopefully I was hallucinating?”
“You were not hallucinating.”
“Do you have a top-secret map that you didn’t tell me about?”
“No.”
“So why did you tell her that?”
“So that she’d come with us. I know she won’t otherwise.”
“If she does, she’ll probably strangle you when she finds out you lied. Frightening woman.” The chintz upholstery appeared to surround Erik with a garden of roses and blue lilacs and irises. He leaned back and began comparing Yolanda’s charms to those of the executioners in ancient Istanbul, but then, after some minutes, became distracted.
His eyes had traveled down to my shirt, and stayed there.
“Erik?”
“What?” He glanced back up at my face, then looked back down.
“You didn’t seem too put of
f when you first laid eyes on her.”
“She’s attractive. Very, very, very attractive, when you first look at her. Though something tells me that she and I might not get along so well. And contrary to apparently everyone’s expectations, I don’t always run wild after every difficult woman I faint in front of.”
“Don’t you?”
“Well, at least I’m considering amending my habits. Being attacked by a sociopath has changed my perspective on things. I think. Besides, even if it didn’t, I still wouldn’t be interested in a person like her.”
“Why?”
“Not my type.”
“No? So what’s your type like, then?”
“What?” he asked softly, still looking down at me.
“Your type?”
“Oh,” he said. He edged closer. Involuntarily thrilling and ill-advised chills began to radiate through my chest, and I could feel my pulse thud in a weird quick way. He moved forward on the sofa again. He edged toward me closer still. Then he said, “Blondes.”
He peered up again at me and smiled; back down went his gaze.
I realized that Erik wasn’t really staring at my figure, as I’d thought, but instead at the icons on my shirt.
“Look at this dwarf,” he said.
“What?”
“Look at this dwarf.”
“Excuse me?”
“On this T-shirt. There’s a very clear image of a dwarf. Very finely cut. Beautifully done. It’s embedded in a text that, as far as I can read, is completely jumbled—but we already knew that.”
I looked down at the picture of the blue images of the Flores Stelae displayed across my shirt. I had some training in the reading of Maya hieroglyphs, though I couldn’t read them upside down.
“It’s right here,” he said. Erik reached out and touched one of the icons, on the spot right over my collarbone. “Let me see if I can read this passage.” He examined the string of hieroglyphs, then shook his head. “No, I can’t. It looks like it should mean something. As if it’s all scrambled up.”
I got hold of myself. “That’s why Mom said it was just ancient wallpaper.”
He nodded. “Meaningless.”
“Right.”
“That just doesn’t convince me—like I said before. I don’t believe the Maya thought that way. They were too pious. It’s like Gothic architecture—have you ever looked at it? Every symbol on Notre Dame signifies something. Something religious. It’s the same way with Maya architecture, Maya books. The temples are all carved with hieroglyph prayers—everything we’ve ever excavated has a coherent text carved into it. Meaninglessness is just a bone to throw to the theorists.”
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