“Were we?”
“Yes, so come on.”
“Erik.”
“Concentrate.”
“All right.”
While we waited for the concierge, we flattened out the paperback on the table and examined the translation my parents had written.
“This really is a beautiful edition,” Erik was saying.
I looked down and touched the glossy paper of the Translations new printing, then studied a fragment of the Flores Stelae’s first panel:
The of story the Jade once was I king Jade
You without lost I’m too lost I’m too lost
Fierce king true a jade under born noble and jade
I’m you lost I you lost I warm stay will
The of sign the jade possessed I serpent feathered Jade
“This is so strange,” I said. “You do feel as if you might be able to read it … wouldn’t it be interesting if it were a code, like you were talking about?”
“Sorry? I wasn’t paying attention.”
“That the Stelae really were written in code. You said the Olmec and Maya didn’t use them. Puzzles and ciphers.”
He turned another page. “That’s right. The Greeks and Romans did. In alphabet languages.”
“Wouldn’t it be amazing if the reason no one could read the Stelae was that they were ciphered?”
Now he glanced up at me. “What?”
I repeated what I said.
He looked back down at the book and blinked.
“But I told you already. The Maya didn’t use ciphers.”
“I’m just saying, what if they did? Wouldn’t it be amazing?”
He blinked again, still staring at the book.
Yes,” he said after a few seconds.
“Hello? Madam? Sir?”
Suddenly the silky-haired concierge had come into the room. She said that she had a free moment and could speak to us.
We rose to follow her. As I hastened out of the bar, I could tell by the way that Erik rolled his eyes that he was still pondering something. But my focus grew clear and narrow. I became so consumed with the possible news about my mother that the Stelae and their translation were immediately removed from my thoughts.
CHAPTER 20
Marisela, the attractive concierge, told us that not only had my mother stayed at the Casa Santo Domingo the week before, but she had also left a small duffel bag behind. Should we be able to prove our relation to her, through documents or some other source, then we would be able, she said, to take this bag and give it back to Professor Juana Sanchez, as she had given the hotel no indication of where it should be sent.
“You see, we are not a storage facility,” Marisela said. “The bag is very safe here, in our storage room, but we will have to mail it back soon if it is not reclaimed. Or throw it away.”
Marisela smiled as she said this, so as to remove any possible hostile interpretation that her words might be given. And indeed, I think that they were not so interpreted by the soul to whom they were directed. Though this person did not happen to be me, even as I was the person who promptly offered up handfuls of papers and wallet-sized photographs that would verify my familial link to Professor Juana Sanchez. Marisela, because of the fact that Erik and I had arranged to take two separate, though communicating, rooms at the Casa Santo Domingo, had come to the conclusion that I was some sort of spinsterish sister or cousin. She thus felt quite free to flirt with Erik in a very subtle and professional fashion, mostly through her eyes and her puckered lip and the exquisitely suggestive modulations in her voice. After some minutes of this she also, through a quick maneuver, slipped a piece of paper that I saw bore her own personal telephone number into his pants pocket. My reaction to this was not to be threatened—as I explained to myself, of course I would not be threatened, as Erik Gomara could never in this lifetime be a firefighter and would never be any kind of policeman. I told myself that my only real problem with this scene (besides the fact that I was itching to get hold of that bag) was that I had been resigned to the spinsterish-sister role, and so was beginning to feel something like the Mexican-American version of the governesses and secretaries the actress Maggie Smith occasionally plays in Agatha Christie book-to-film masterpieces.
Erik did not respond to the comely and aggressive Marisela much. Rather, all of his previous vulnerability, his gentleness when he spoke about his father, his bafflement over the Stelae, his boyish vulnerability and chattiness, all of this vanished when he now turned to me, saw the expression on my face, and began to smile in this very wicked and happy way at what he apparently mistakenly regarded as my jealousy.
“Ha!” he said.
But I just frowned at him, took a good firm hold of Marisela, and said that he could look after the rooms while we two girls frisked down below and got hold of my mother’s bag.
I liked Marisela much better after she had led me down to the storage room of the Casa Santo Domingo, adjacent to the preserved catacombs and the ossarium. We walked down cold steps toward hallways carved of stone that glowed copper and gold as it took on the color of the candlelight billowing from the brass votives strung along the corridors. The lower sanctums of the monastery were no ordinary administrative area. They still have their medieval bones, both architectural and human, with beautiful low stone doors and chilled flag floors, and the shadows that moved across the walls evoked the ghosts of the monks buried here five hundred years before.
Marisela unlocked a door with a set of iron keys; it opened into a room filled with cardboard boxes and sacks of stuff, items lost and found, and a supply of candles and canned food. The space was lit by fluorescent cylinders running across the curved ceiling. She stood in the door and waited patiently while I searched through the bags until I found the one belonging to my mother. It was the buff-colored vinyl Hartmann duffel bag that I had watched a driver throw into her taxi cab’s trunk only a week and a half before.
I crouched in front of the bag and zipped the duffel open. My heart began galloping in my chest. In the bag, wrapped in clear plastic, I found clothes, a hairbrush, toiletries. And underneath all that I also discovered a small salmon-colored book, hinged with a shiny brass lock, which I recognized immediately as the diary I’d seen my mother pack just before she’d left. As long as I’d remembered, my mother had always bought the same kind of journal, with this pinkish binding, and when work put her in a bad temper she’d ram her pen into its pages as if she were assassinating some torpid and loathsome animal. Then she’d lock it with its tin key.
I rummaged around, but there was no key in the bag.
“Yes, that’s it,” I said to Marisela. “Thank you.”
“Anything else I can help you with?”
“No.”
“Should I lead you out?”
“I can find my way. Though it would be nice if you could tell my friend I’ll be up soon.”
“Your—friend?”
“Yes. My friend. My very very good friend.”
Her eyes widened slightly as her cerebral cortex painfully expanded with the idea that I was not quite the virginal sister she had imagined, and then she whisked off and left me down below. Standing there with the bag clutched to my body, I heard a smattering sound, a scattering wet noise, which meant that it had just begun to rain again.
I began to walk around, hoping that a little ramble through the catacombs would help calm me down.
The catacombs of the Dominicans were composed of small hollow cells, where archaeologists years back had excavated the bones of the monks who once lived in this monastery. It is one of the most astonishing features of the Casa Santo Domingo that a person may simply wander about the lower regions of the hotel, enter the excavated rooms, and see these ancient graves and bones. The rooms are lit with subtle electric lights and miniature torches. Some of the biers are marked with bilingual explanatory plates, and many are not. These uncovered graves are so small, and wedged into such tiny cavelike hollows, that they bring to mind the cave b
urial sites of the ancient Maya, who buried their dead in similar holy caverns. Many of these, like the tombs of the monks, have not proven extraordinarily hard to excavate in the rare cases they have been found at all. Some solitary archaeologists, or those working in twos and threes, have come across such tombs in the jungle, though the monks are buried with crosses and the Maya with their heads pointed east.
I wandered back into the darkling corridor. The torches’ golds and opals burnished the monastery walls.
A murky figure emerged from the shadows, passing into the firelight.
I heard a rustle, the stamping of heels. She appeared from one of the cells. Her Stetson was tilted back on her head, and her dark hair fell against her shoulders.
I began to shiver with the same old delicious panic I felt when I was a girl and she’d jumped at me, dressed like a monster, then put me in one of her choke holds.
“Hello, Lola,” Yolanda said, in a conversational tone, then in two swift steps she stood behind me and wrapped her arms around my neck and shoulders. “Let’s see if I’ve still got the touch.” She squeezed me. “Yes, it all comes back now.” She squeezed again.
I struggled once to try to wrench those arms off, but I couldn’t.
“You’re being ridiculous,” I said in Spanish, and pulled on her roughly. Then I stopped. “You’re scaring the life out of me. What are you doing?”
“Paying you a visit.”
“You didn’t seem much interested in that before. In the city.”
“You said something very intriguing right before you left. So I decided to drop in on you.”
“I thought you might.”
“I’ll bet you did.”
“Why have you been slinking around the hotel, then?”
“I preferred to see you before you saw me. I wasn’t even sure that I could stand the thought of listening to your babbling—but then I realized that I had no other choice.”
“Don’t lie. You’re here because you want to talk to me.”
“You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you? The truth is, I don’t care if I ever see you again.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Why should I? You’re not my family.”
She labored to cover up the emotion in her voice; her arms twined around my chest a little harder.
“From the looks of things, I’m the closest thing you have,” I said.
“That’s just an insult to my father—and you know I can’t have that. He’d never have left me dangling the way you and your mother did, all these years.”
“That’s not—”
“And that’s because you forgot me, Lola. You forgot me. Though then you conveniently remembered.”
“Your father—” I started.
She squeezed me again. “What about him?”
“Okay—for one thing? He almost killed my dad. He hurt him! Which is why we haven’t talked in fifteen years. And for another, he wanted you to live with us. It wasn’t him taking care of you when you were a kid—that was Mom. And I know there was a part of you that liked it.”
I heard her swallow. “Why talk about ancient history, anyway? I’m not here for that. Where is it?”
“The map?”
“Don’t play with me.”
“Hidden.”
She began to jostle me. “Well then, why don’t you just take it out of its hiding place and show it to me, because you know I need to see it.”
“Come with us, and I will.”
“Come with you and help you look for your mother, you mean.”
“She went up to Flores—that’s where we’re going tomorrow. You help me, and I’ll give you that map Mom was using.” I stuttered, only for a second. “I swear.”
“Lying to me would be such the mistake,” she said in English.
I thought to myself that even if I didn’t have any sort of specific detailed map to give her, I did have de la Cueva’s sketched chart. But the fewer details I gave her, the better. I mumbled something incoherent and made a gesture with my hand.
“And as for your mother,” Yolanda went on, “I already know she’s not here. All I had to do was look around for half an hour to figure that out.”
As she talked, Yolanda maintained her old choke hold on me, which was just as much an embrace as it was any kind of attack. She put her chin on my shoulder.
“And by the way, I did see that you’re still with that chatty big-boned boy.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry to say I’m not surprised your tastes have run to paunchy teachers.”
“Paunch can have its charm,” I said, shocking myself.
“Yes,” she laughed, pretending to give me the Heimlich but actually more smash-hugging me. “It is very charming on you.”
She smashed me some more, and for a second neither of us said anything.
Then I said: “Yolanda, I didn’t forget you.”
“Oh, no?”
I put my cheek on her bicep. “How could I?”
She knocked our heads together with a gentle cloc. “Actually, I’ll bet you didn’t. I’ll bet you still have the odd nightmare about how I used to beat the feathers out of you. Because I really did let you have it—didn’t I? Remember that time—remember that time when I dressed up—”
“Like some crazy Indian, and you talked in that scary voice—”
“And you screamed—you just lifted your hands up and shrieked so I nearly went deaf, and all I had to do was push you with my little finger and down you went tumbling. Something like this.”
She slipped off her shoes.
“What are you doing?”
“I wonder if I’m too old for this now,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I wonder if I can still give you a good whipping,” she said.
She began to wrestle me.
In the gold and black of that corridor, now busy with our antic shadows, Yolanda’s quick hard arms clung and slipped and twisted me into all sorts of shapes whose one constant was that they ensured I was at her mercy. Half-guffawing and half-swearing, with one or two sobs breaking into our din, we cursed and sweated as we began grappling with each other. I bent down quickly and heard her hack out a breath, then I tossed my mother’s bag on the floor so I could tear myself away from her. But her forearms only squeezed tighter against my chest and slid up toward my throat.
With one big heave the two of us fell onto the floor, feet kicking. She wangled her arms around my waist and brought me down, sitting on me. She let me wrench about until I scrabbled out from under her.
“Get—off—me!” I blathered.
“Come on, that’s not wrestling. You’re not trying hard enough.”
Some multisyllabic profanities were exchanged here as she insulted my posterior, my clothes, my taste in men, my brain capacity, so that we were laughing and weeping as we simultaneously tried to bash at each other.
Yolanda lifted me up by the waist and began jumping up and down before her eyes caught the bag I had tossed on the floor. She let me go and stooped to pick it up. But I grabbed my mother’s duffel and pushed her, roughly.
She fell, hard, onto her side. When she looked at me through her hair, I saw that her lips were quivering. She gripped her left wrist, which was scraped somewhat badly.
I had never hurt Yolanda before.
“Yes, I’m too old for that now,” she said after a few seconds. Even her voice sounded scratched and damaged.
“Yolanda—”
“Don’t.”
“I just—”
“There’s just nothing that you can say,” she said, still looking at me from under that curtain of hair. “Though—you’re right. He wasn’t the best father. And I did like living with you. Though none of that matters to me now that I can’t see him again. I didn’t even get to go to his funeral. I don’t even know where he’s buried!” She rubbed the injured part of her arm. “And even if you are not my friend anymore, I hope that you do find your mother.
Because I don’t want anyone to feel like I feel. Even you—I don’t want you to know what it feels like to really be alone.”
In that light Yolanda’s face was starved, terrible. Her lips continued shaking, and a vein streaked her forehead. I thought about telling her again to stay with us, and come to Flores.
But she stood up, picked up her shoes, and walked back down the corridor until I couldn’t see her anymore, though I could hear the echoes of her hard breathing for a few seconds after she’d disappeared.
I stayed on the ground and rubbed the sore spot on my leg as the rain began to dash harder against the shell of the monastery.
I put my hand to my eyes. I had heard in that splitting voice of hers how angry she was. And even though I wanted to shake her for being a stubborn ass, I knew well enough that she had a good reason for it, too.
The light ebbed in the hall, the candles disturbed by a wind that had sneaked inside.
It took some time before I was able to get back up.
CHAPTER 21
Once back in my suite at the Casa Santo Domingo, I called my father to tell him where Erik and I were, and also explained that we were probably going to have to venture up to Flores in the morning. After he gave the name of a hotel there, we hung up. Then I staggered to Erik’s room. His quarters, like mine—visible through the open and communicating doors—were in a gorgeous cavernlike space, spare as cloisters are, with antique brass fittings on the walls. There was an upholstered sofa, as well, and in the hallway a small oak bureau.
So as not to completely bias him against Yolanda (should she yet agree to guide us), I gave him a severely redacted description of our encounter, which was still sufficiently stimulating that he became quite upset. I also surprised myself by not describing the full contents of my mother’s precious bag. This duffel was the only physical and textual link I had to her, and so I had filled it earlier with everything I had brought with me that was fragile and crucial, like my de la Cueva materials and my Fodor’s maps. Now it sat next to the oak bureau, where I could keep my eye on it. If I had explained to Erik what I’d found in the Hartmann, I worried that he’d recommend we read Mom’s diary together, so as to learn where exactly she had gone. But a secreted diary usually doesn’t get rifled through by the likes of Yolanda or Erik or me until its writer dies. And I wasn’t prepared to deal with that possibility. So I wound up, in the end, telling him very little of what had just happened.
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