“What is that?” Under her shirt I saw the jade pendant that only minutes before had been draped around the neck of the buried queen.
“This?” she asked. “Oh, just a little something I picked up. Relax. I’ll give it back. I’m only safekeeping it for a while. My father would have wanted me to keep a very close eye on treasures like this.”
“We’ll discuss that—later,” Manuel said, looking at her sideways.
“Exactly. Now, what was I talking about? Oh—right—the future. The future. As I was saying, there’s going to be a lot of work to do if I’m ever going to make you into a proper sister, but if we’re very lucky, and things don’t go to hell like they usually do, maybe you will turn out all right. …”
As she continued to describe the tremendous moral makeover I would have to accomplish before I could even hope to be recognized as a de la Rosa sibling, I watched as within the heart of the campfire the flames began to catch on the leaves and the twigs and the flowers, shedding a greater circle of light that flickered over the cave and its ancient girl, and then the ferns, the large smashed trees, the marshes and monkeys, and the birds. Quetzals flashed their green wings among the gold-and-soot branches of the mahoganies, and we could see the ocher mists twirl up through the fens. Deer ran through the bush; we thought we could hear the snuffling and truffling of unseen wild pigs and the footfall of possible massive cats. Yolanda stood up and dodged the monsters while gathering more bromeliad petals and wood before sitting back down next to me and taking my hand. And then the rest of our party curled up around the flames, too, while the gold light rose through the forest like a spirit and showed us its behemoths and its red-eyed amazing beasts, not the least amazing of which was my still-living mother, who looked like a beneficent witch with her streaming silver hair and wrong-way leg, and who fixed her eyes on mine from across the campfire.
I stared right back at her, stunned by thankfulness.
Neither of us smiled; our love was too fierce and raging for that.
CHAPTER 62
Long Beach, present day
At The Red Lion (which I still own, here in Long Beach), I now have at least six shelves devoted to pure history. The freaks and the gamers and the bibliophiles wander by, plucking a volume, paging through it, and frowning at the claims about knights and monsters and Amazons that the authors have written there. I sit behind my counter wrapping octavos, repairing bindings, and watch them argue and role-play. Or, more equivocally, I observe them as they sit cross-legged in the aisles and read my books whole, certainly deriving much edification from that literature, although not really buying much of it.
Occasionally a silver-haired and grumpy woman will enter, clanging the bells hanging from the door and scattering the customers in her wake. My mother, who healed nicely from her fall in the jungle, is back to work and business as usual. She and Erik are lately engaged in the pitiless struggle to gain dominance over Harvard professors, who have been making several trips up to the Queen Jade site that we found in the Peten. Not only was the queen recovered there, but slowly the scientists are excavating a small nearby city, half buried, with magnificent carved palaces and domed courts, some of which have sculptured friezes made of blue jadeite. Moreover, the search for relics, particularly jade, has become much more energetic since the day in 2002 when we looked in the local paper and found there news of the jade strike that the Peabody scientists began working on after the storm. “A U.S. team says that it has now found the fabled jade supply,” the article reads, “in a Rhode Island-sized area of central Guatemala centered on the Motagua River.” I thought that poor Tomas de la Rosa—one of my fathers—was certain to be disturbed in his grave. The mine uncovered in the Sierra de las Minas by Mitch is said to be huge and unprecedented, and so Guatemala is rich today in foreign geologists and archaeologists who periodically get a little homicidal with each other over the terrain—though battles like those usually put my mother in a fairly good mood.
Still, it’s on both her buoyant and surly days that she visits me here at The Red Lion to check out my books and stare at me in her crabby way until I give her a kiss. I like to watch her frowning at my inventory, and hassling the RuneQuest and Dracula aficionados as they dawdle, in costume, in the aisles. I love it when she leans against my counter and plays with my hair while we talk about books, gossip, films, archaeology, the recovery efforts that still continue in Central America, where the effects of Hurricane Mitch are still being felt—and, much more rarely, of how I came to be born. But we do not often get into other related subjects, such as the reasons why she dissuaded me from writing to Yolanda.
Some subjects can be too difficult to broach.
My heart still sings like a bell when I see Mom walking across the threshold of my Lion, though since I’ve learned the truth about our family story, and of the distance that I should not have kept from my sister, I have felt a small change pinching my life. Sometimes I have to listen more carefully to hear that clear high soft ring, and occasionally I worry that it might just be the chimes on my door. But then it comes. It almost always comes.
There are days when I’m happy to know the real reason that I do not look so much like Manuel Alvarez. And there are days, too, when I think it’s heartening that I’m so much like him because it’s his bookish spirit, and not something as ordinary and predictable as blood, that runs through me.
But on other days I’m not so glad.
I often wish that I’d never read those passages in my mother’s journal.
I know now that some secrets are better kept.
Nevertheless. I continue to stock the Lion with books of fantasy and mystery, and the hair-raisers filled with scarabs and puzzles. And sometimes, tinkering about in the “Great Colonial Villains in History” aisle, I might find a younger woman with a black hat, a set expression, and eyes and cheekbones that I now see look like mine. My only sister. And probably the strangest and greatest person I know. She’s got scars on her arms now, from our trek through the jungle, and she hugs me with a crushing force. On every occasion that I’ve seen her since our adventure in the jungle, she’s been wearing a large blue necklace that bears a hieroglyphic carving. I think that it’s probably very expensive.
Manuel keeps asking for it back for the museum, but Yolanda says she’s going to hold on to that pendant until she’s sure he’ll take proper care of it.
Just like her father, he always replies.
When he brings that name up, though, I think he’d like to stuff it back into his head again, as if he’d never enunciated it in the first place. It lifts the corner on a whole host of other problems—such as the strange circumstances of de la Rosa’s death, the mystery of what killed him, as well as the issue of his unknown burial site. What did that poor man go through at the end? we all wonder. Privately we ask ourselves the more difficult and disturbing question of what could have happened to his body. It does not seem natural that such a gigantic personality could have vanished from the forest without one trace, track, or sign.
We’ve heard certain theories, of course, about assassinations in Belize and kidnapings in Italy and Elvis-like sightings in Lima. But we do not torture ourselves with these delusions, instead trying to remember Tomas in better ways. Concerning his patrimony, the Sanchez, Alvarez, and de la Rosa clan is doing its best to pursue some other of his archaeological projects, which means that my passport has not gathered much dust as of late. There’s the question of the location of King Montezuma’s gold, for one, and then there’s the story of Excalibur hidden in the pampas of South America, both being other historical enigmas that the old archaeologist thought he’d be able to solve. …
But I won’t get into that now, as this is the story of the Queen Jade, and it’s nearly finished.
So I’ll describe instead how Manuel comes into The Red Lion too on his trips to Los Angeles. My father slips in through the door, comes over to the counter, and kisses my hand. Things are almost exactly the same between us. We haven’t stop
ped looking at each other with big burning eyes. And sometimes he writes me a check.
I still never have any money.
At night, after my long day, I close up shop, and sit for a while, writing (and I sit more than I used to, as I still feel a stiffness and a twinge in my left hip from that old wound). While I wait for Erik to come around, I handwrite my drafts of the book that I’m working on for my Red Lion Press. Even though I found I have more of a talent for questing than I’d thought, I still love my cozy, cake-fed, book-bristling world. Though that’s not to say a life in bookselling is so much more secure than one spent racing through the forest with its pumas and peeing monkeys. In a store that stocks Adventure books, a reader can never quite tell what will happen. Or what to believe. For example, I have one volume here—very rare, and in excellent condition, though reasonably priced—which purports to recount the tale of the Queen of all Jades, and it tells the old false story of some talismanic stone that will make men so powerful they can win any war.
But a person is so easily seduced by such fantasies.
I’ve now written my own modern translation of The Legende of the Queen Jade. It is full of the deceptions of Balaj K’waill, and the cunning of de la Cueva, and treachery, and romance. Which is to say, I’ve been seduced myself.
You’ve just read it, now.
In the dark night, by the light of my lamp, and in the company of my books, I write out my refinements to the tale. I polish a phrase here, an adjective there. The task often does baffle me, but lately I’ve become convinced that bafflement might be the most normal state of mind a person can have—particularly when she devotes herself to deciphering a piece of literature like The Queen Jade.
Still, I do know now that when de la Cueva writes that sentence
When the mask fell from her eyes and she gazed at her cage, the Witch saw she could never read all the labyrinth’s dangers and escape.
the word read should be translated literally.
Moreover, should I ever take an interest in translating the governor’s letters, I’ll know that in the passage that she writes to her sister Agata in 1541, the one that reads:
I will admit that I find this curious Maze a difficult bugger to scan
that the word scan is not used in its Latin sense, to describe leaping and climbing, but rather is employed in old Samuel Johnson’s mode, so as to mean “examining nicely.”
So I sit in my store, thinking these things, scribbling them down, until it’s Erik who comes through my door.
He enters the bookstore; I smile and turn off the light. And when he approaches me through the shadows I’m not always sure what to do—make love or read to each other? Kiss or tell stories?
All of these at once.
When he’s very lucky, I show him a bit of what I’m writing myself. One or the other person will read it out loud. It’s not really a translation at all, but an original piece. It’s a faithful rendition of the story. It’s a factual telling of what happened, and what that story really meant, and where the maps honestly lead. I’m trying to tell the truth.
“Impossible, my love,” he says, grinning. “But go on—I like it.”
So I give him another kiss, then pick up my looseleaf pages. They are filled with my large looped handwriting, dotted with ink blots and scratches, exclamation marks and blue pencil—slightly crumpled so the foolscap looks like an old treasure map, or a manuscript found at the bottom of an old sea chest, or the work of a lost poet.
And as to the tale itself, I believe it could be real. Real, just on the edge of false.
Perhaps some of the meaning we found was the meaning we made.
Here lies the true story of the Queen Jade.
CHAPTER 63
… After the King had put away his jade knife, and his crime had been committed, his wife’s dying curse fell on his head and the souls of his kin. Only then did he comprehend what he had lost. In his mad grief, he escaped with her through the jungle, past the high river and the marshes, and to the place where she might travel in peace to the land of the dead.
Years before, when he first knew her as his father’s ward, and then his brother’s bride, he coveted her. He was sure that in her, his rival owned the highest prize in the country, worth more than oceans, fields, and all the world’s blue jewels.
He had resolved to possess her.
And so he vanquished his brother and his brother’s people and took the Queen Jade to live by him in his green and fertile country. But he could not yet be satisfied. The King remained so jealous of her beauty, he ordered his architects and servants to wrest the blue stone from the mountains and build for him a labyrinth out of which she could never escape.
And she was trapped: by words, by jade, by the winding forest. For years, she could not find her way out of that dark wood and flee back to the sea.
But such malign plans are always destined to fail. Like all lovers, he would have done better to woo her with gentle words, or better still, with freedom. For she had tricks and traps of her own.
His lieutenant, the Dwarf, discovered her treachery; she had lured the Priest to his corruption, and his doom.
After this, none of them could be saved.
The King buried the woman known as Jade; he dressed her in her queen’s robes; he composed a lay and inscribed it on the walls as a last love letter.
And as the wind outside began to howl, and his kingdom was crushed and scattered to the clouds, he understood his error. He resolved then to walk one last time the path of the good man.
He left the cave and walked straight into the storm.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was written with the aid, friendship, and love of many people. Thanks to my husband, Andrew Brown; my valiant editor, Rene Alegria; Virginia Barber, Andrea Montejo, Shana Kelly, Renée Vogel, Sarah Preisler, Fred MacMurray, Thelma Diaz Quinn, Maggie MacMurray, Maria and Walter Adastik, Elizabeth Baldwin, Ryan Botev, Mona Sedky Spivack, Erik Nemeth, Dr. Aila Skinner, Victoria Steele, Katy McCaffrey, Jorge Luis Borges, David Burcham, Katie Pratt, Victor Gold, Georgene Vairo, Allan Ides, David Tunick, and the rest of my colleagues at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. I’d also like to thank the owners and employees of the Iliad Bookstore in Los Angeles, the Poisoned Pen in Phoenix, Cultura Latina in Long Beach, and Tia Chucha’s in Los Angeles, for nourishing my imagination and giving me inspiration for The Red Lion.
THE HISTORY BEHIND THE STORY
A CONVERSATION WITH YXTA MAYA MURRAY
The Queen Jade deals with categories traditionally associated with men (adventure, history, the quest for power, etc.) and the authors who write for them (Dan Brown, Clive Cussler, etc.) What does it feel like to be a literary tomboy?
I love that—to be called a literary tomboy; it feels accurate! Writing in the adventure genre is one the most exhilarating experiences I’ve ever had. It seems to have opened a new door onto my life.
In my first years of writing novels, I felt something like a monk, reading and writing in solitude. I was very happy studying Tolstoy or Borges for hours on end, escaping frequently into the old-fashioned pulp novels written by Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, not seeing or speaking to another soul for whole working days. But eventually there came a point when I started to feel as if some big burgeoning life was passing by me, outside. I think that a lot of writers contend with competing desires to dive into art and society, as well as the old (probably false) chestnut that an artist either devotes her genius to her work or to her life.
A few years ago, though, I went through a rather rigorous illness, and it started to become clear to me that I’d better start putting some of that good stuff into the old life as well as the work. What was this Emily Dickinson act? I asked myself. I looked up at my shelves, where I keep my adventure novels, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and my Clive Cusslers and Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and all of a sudden I had a burning desire to be more like that bad old colonialist Haggard, who stampeded around the glo
be writing outlandish shilling shockers, instead of turning into a cross-eyed poet.
And so, even though I am small, female, and Latin, and I don’t drive, have had to repeatedly deal with medical issues, barely know how to read a map, and am basically afraid of everything, I did just that. I’m bringing my perspectives to the old-fashioned adventure tale, buying plane tickets and hopping around the globe to do my research (Guatemala, but also now Italy, England, Peru, Japan). It allows me the fantasy that I am an adventure heroine, something like the creatures in my novels.
The Queen Jade deals with both the Spanish Empire’s conquest of the New World and the Mayan Empire’s lost cities, legends, and curses. What about the history of ancient empires most appeals to you?
I want to know where I come from! There is a repeated motif in literature, that of the lost golden age—I think that one of the first citations of it comes in the Book of Daniel, but the Medici of the Italian Renaissance also struggled to return to it, with their fostering of Michelangelo’s heroic classical sculptures and their humanism. We all know that the golden age is a myth, that it never really existed—but the dream is still important: What’s different for people of color, is that their mythological golden age isn’t just (or at all) composed of the great Greek heroes, but of the Atlantis that was drowned by the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his followers.
By Atlantis, I mean lost worlds like Tenochtitlan, the kingdom ruled by Montezuma, and the great cities of Peru, whose crumbling and fantastic ruins molder in the jungles. According to the scraps of histories that come down to us from the Spanish conquerors, and the archaeological evidence that remains, we know that a bevy of geniuses peopled the worlds of the ancient Maya and the Olmec: These prodigies were innovators in poetry, art, architecture, astronomy, and mathematics, but most of their work has been lost—burned, more like, by the book-holocausts of the sixteenth century, when Spanish priests ordered the destruction of hundreds or thousands of sacred Maya texts in gigantic and horrible bonfires of the vanities.
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