Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  Janet staggered, and Haydon reached out and held her. Dr. Grajeda walked around to the other side of Lena’s crude bier and bent down and kissed her forehead. He straightened up and looked across at them.

  “Go ahead and talk to her,” he said calmly. He seemed oddly serene, the way a man is serene about a tragedy after he has had time to give it much thought, to assimilate the shock of it into his theory of the universe and insulate himself from its hard truth with a myth of philosophy to make it bearable.

  Haydon stood in the crude jungle shrine to Lena Muller, holding Janet’s shirking body and wondering if he ought to believe his eyes. This gray corpse could be a phantasm, a specter in the shimmering light of a hundred candles, which, if all the candles were extinguished in an instant by some eerie jungle gust, would vanish on the spiraling curls of smoke from a hundred wicks. He would stand in the dark heat and only imagine her; she would be elsewhere as she had been elsewhere from the first moment he had heard her name and seen her photograph and imagined her, no closer to her reality now than then.

  This time Haydon had no problem identifying her. Her face was unblemished; there were no distorting wounds to interpret, no discolorations to decipher. Lena Muller was dead at last.

  He was suddenly profoundly sad, even, irrationally, nostalgic for an irrevocable time that never had been. He wanted to talk to her, felt almost desperate to do so, and fought a swelling frustration at having been cheated of what he had anticipated for so long. By virtue of time’s trickery, the search for Lena Muller seemed to have taken a good portion of Haydon’s life. He would have felt no more deprived if he had known her a lifetime, so compressed by unreality had been his days and nights in Guatemala, so imbued with imagination had been his knowledge of this girl who always had existed just beyond his reach like a rumor of angels.

  “I can assure you she will respond,” Grajeda said rationally. “She will speak in the most eloquent of all languages—silence—the silence of a life lost for reasons that only people who have something to lose will perceive as futile.” He looked at Haydon. “You may think me cruel, maybe cynical? Not so. You see, I envy her because her peculiar language possesses an integrity that ours can never achieve. That’s the way it is with such things. The only real moral integrity is living selflessly…only…we find it so painfully difficult to do…and, of course, it often comes to this.”

  Dr. Grajeda looked down at her again. “And the rest of us? Well, the rest of us are left to go on compromising, to go on accommodating, to go on negotiating and ‘settling,’ until we finally hear ourselves speaking a language so different from hers, and from what our own ideals once had been, that we hardly can recognize our own voices. The way we eventually end up living our lives becomes so distorted from our dreams that we no longer speak the same language that we once imagined, and one day we wake up to find that we have become aliens to our own hearts.”

  Dr. Grajeda’s eyes were dry as he stood beside Lena’s body and looked down at her.

  “What happened?” Haydon asked.

  Looking up. Dr. Grajeda fixed his eyes squarely on Haydon, and he shook his head in disbelief. “It was a banal death. An absurdity,” he said. “She died in a car crash, up there in Calvario, not five hours ago.”

  “Oh, Christ!” Janet said. She pulled away from Haydon and stepped over to Lena as Dr. Grajeda moved back out of her way. She stood with her arms folded a moment, looking at Lena as though she were trying to remember, and then she reached down and put a hand on Lena’s forehead as if she were feeling for a fever. “She’s dead,” Janet said. “My God.”

  Taking off his wire-rimmed glasses. Dr. Grajeda rubbed the bridge of his nose, and then he put them on again. He ran his hand through his thick, graying hair. When Janet started crying, quietly at first, then sobbing, standing beside Lena with her hands on the dead girl’s arm. Dr. Grajeda looked across Lena’s body and caught Haydon’s eye and tilted his head toward the door. Haydon followed him through.

  “We have to talk about what happens now,” Grajeda said, pulling the burlap across the opening once again and moving away from the doorway. “For you, this is still an extremely critical situation.” He stroked his beard as he walked toward the center of the room. The woman with the rifle still sat alone near the door that led outside, and the gas lanterns still hissed overhead in the rafters. “Is the plane large enough to take her to Belize?”

  “Yeah,” Haydon nodded. “It is.” He was irritated by the question. It was too soon for the prosaic and the ordinary. Lena was still there in his mind, floating in a night sky of candles.

  “Good. Now, we have made a simple coffin of lepa, and I have four men who have volunteered to carry her back through the jungle. Even that is risky for them, because Cage, or even the G-2, may have changed their minds and followed you into Calvario. They could be at the truck. In any case, these men will load the body into the truck for you, wedge the coffin among the coffee sacks so that it will be secure. But you will have to drive the truck back to Cobán alone.”

  “Christ, Grajeda. I was in the back of the truck the whole trip,” Haydon protested. “I don’t have the remotest idea where I am.”

  Dr. Grajeda was shaking his head. “No, it’s not a problem. From Calvario there is only one paved road to the Cobán highway, the same highway that you drove on from Guatemala City. Anyone in Cobán can give you directions to the airstrip.”

  Haydon looked at him. It didn’t matter. This was all madness, all of it. One more impossibility couldn’t make it any more insane than it already was.

  “I am sorry,” Dr. Grajeda read Haydon’s face. “But none of my people would survive a roadblock.”

  “No, it’s okay. I understand,” Haydon said. “But one thing, earlier you remarked that you thought Cage was our only ‘real’ problem. Maybe there’s something else I need to know.”

  “Evera,” Grajeda said, ticking his head toward the back room. The girl stood and moved to its burlap-covered doorway as Grajeda and Haydon walked out into the compound. Fires were burning all around in the darkness, orange glimmers here and there around which small clutches of people lingered in the smoky haze. “There’s always a lot of cooking at night,” Grajeda said. “Because the last fires have to be out by four-thirty so the smoke will dissipate before daylight. The helicopters can see the smoke in the trees.”

  They walked over to one fire and Grajeda asked for “Dos cafecitos, por favor,” and in a moment they were sipping a sweetened brew that didn’t taste exactly like coffee.

  “It’s only half coffee,” Dr. Grajeda explained. “The rest is ground com with a sprinkling of cardamom. Ironically, here in the coffee regions, the indigenous people cannot afford pure coffee. It’s too expensive. And then what they do get is of an inferior quality. The good beans are saved for the stores where only the wealthy can afford to shop, or it is exported.”

  He motioned for Haydon to sit on one of several logs that were cut knee high and sat on their ends around the fire.

  “About Cage,” Grajeda said. “I know nothing specific, nothing to tell you to fear, but this Mrs. Pittner has gone to some risk to make sure he has made it to Cobán. Something is not right about this. Cage, as you know, is a man with no conscience. This has helped to keep him alive, of course. But it also has earned him many enemies.” Grajeda looked into his cup, trying to choose his words carefully. “The problem is, I am not so sure that Cage can distinguish anymore between his friends and his enemies. He is like a stick of dynamite that has been hidden in the jungle and allowed to deteriorate: the nitroglycerin has begun to separate, which makes it very unstable.”

  Haydon and Dr. Grajeda sat a little apart from the others at the fire. The few Indians who had been around the fire where Dr. Grajeda had made himself at home seemed comfortable that the two men had joined them. They neither moved away in deference nor ceased their conversation, but continued talking softly among themselves, their lilting voices gliding through the strange syllables of their diale
ct. Haydon turned his feet a little to the fire, surprising himself that he was finding it pleasurable, that he was even enjoying the tangy ropes of smoke that whorled up from the small flames.

  “You will have to leave within the hour,” Dr. Grajeda said, breaking the silence that both men would have preferred to continue a little longer. “You will have to make good time to reach the airstrip by dawn.”

  “I’m surprised,” Haydon said, “that you seem to be taking her death…so well.”

  Dr. Grajeda nodded. “I understand what you mean. Grief, where is this man’s grief, if he loved her so much?” Grajeda raised his head and looked up at the canopy of the jungle. “Do you hear those cicadas? They never stop in the jungle. Never. They are among my earliest memories of life in Guatemala.” He paused, looking up into the dark, listening with a vague smile. “I have a theory,” he said, lowering his eyes to Haydon and seeming, perhaps, to be a little wary of going on. “I have a theory that from the first day God made this country, millennia before it came to be known as Guatemala, he made a starving child to live here, a creature, as it were, who would be the visible conscience of his people. As long as lies and cruelty prevailed in the people’s hearts, the child would starve. That was his fate, to be a silent symbol, an ‘outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual corruption,’ proof of the people’s will to evil. And I also believe that on the same day that God made this child, he made the cicada to be his voice. Starving is a silent activity and a hungry child is easy to forget, so God made the cicada to cry for him. God knew even from the beginning that man had a secret weakness for, almost a love of, forgetting. So the cicada’s voice became the voice of remembrance, reminding man that the great cruelties of his heart do not always come from something as grandiose as his evil imaginings, but just as often, perhaps more often, they come from something as simple as forgetting. And from that day to this, the voice of the cicada has never ceased in Guatemala.”

  Dr. Grajeda had finished his coffee, and the little bit left in his cup had gotten cold. He turned and tossed it out into the darkness. He paused again before going on, looking into the fire. He sighed.

  “One day—I can’t even remember exactly how it was—I decided that God was cruel. I could look around me and see his cruelty everywhere. I decided to devote my life to helping the people he had turned his back on. So I have done that. I haven’t had a long life; I am still a young man, relatively speaking. But I did not anticipate the staggering cost of living such a spiritual arrogance. From the very beginning I encountered exhaustion, and I have been tired every moment of my life since. So deep is my weariness that I am tired even of my future. And so it is with the cicada. He is weary of his future too, because by now, after all these generations, he knows that man will never change.”

  Dr. Grajeda’s eyes dreamed on the fire. “Grief is a luxury, Mr. Haydon, and God has taken all such comforts out of my life. He allows me nothing in that way anymore. Perhaps, I don’t know, but perhaps death is arranged in such a way that the dead are allowed to forgive the living for their stupidities, I think it must be that the moment you die you receive wisdom and you can do this; you can forgive. I hope this is so, because I love the idea of forgiveness. But as for me, in my ignorance, I cannot do it. Not in this life,”

  CHAPTER 52

  The walk out of the rain forest with Lena’s crude coffin was a gruesome journey that took half an hour longer than the two-hour trip coming in, and this time there was no stopping to smoke. Aside from the four men who volunteered to carry the coffin, there was the nameless woman who had brought them from Cobán and who took the lead on the trail, and there was Dr. Grajeda himself, who brought up the rear. All of them carried Uzi’s, the compact little weapons hanging over the bearers’ shoulders and banging against the lepa coffin as they struggled and maneuvered the box through the dense forest, over the swift streams, down slippery slopes, and up slippery slopes. Three times during the trip the woman in the lead stopped them, and the coffin was lowered to the jungle floor while she waited to reassure her senses. Each time the coffin was lowered the bearers grunted under the strain and then panted like hounds in the darkness as they knelt against the box in the mud. Each time they raised it, they grunted again and then plowed ahead into the undergrowth. Janet once again followed Haydon and occasionally gripped the belted waist of his trousers for support as she had done on the trip in. She had spent the rest of the time they were in the compound with Lena’s body, insisting on helping the Indian women transfer the body off the chairs and into the narrow box, and she was the one to cover Lena’s face with a layer of folded cloth just before the lid was nailed into place.

  In no time at all Haydon’s clothes were completely soaked through once again; his street shoes quickly accumulated three times their weight in heavy jungle gumbo, and once again the butt of the automatic he had kept wedged into his waistband, rubbed an enormous blister just below his last rib on his left side. But none of these distractions was enough to take his mind off the leg of the trip from Calvario to the Cobán highway. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen there, somewhere between those two points, during the hour it would take them to get from one to the other. The uncertainty of that coming hour was enough to have taken Haydon’s mind off a great deal of personal discomfort.

  When they finally reached the truck, Haydon was not surprised to find that the driver they had left behind was gone. No time was wasted. The bearers walked straight to the back of the truck with the coffin and set it on the ground. Still keeping their Uzi’s strapped to their shoulders, they climbed into the truck and began moving the large burlap bags of coffee until they had cleared a space large enough for the coffin to rest on the flatbed. The coffin was then loaded and wedged into place with sacks of coffee, with two final sacks stacked on top of it. The tailgate of the truck was chained closed, and the tarpaulin flap was laced tightly over the rear opening.

  It was all done with a minimum of conversation, with Dr. Grajeda watching every move and instructing them to make adjustments here and there until everything met with his satisfaction. When they were through the bearers moved away from the truck with the woman and waited under the black canopy of a giant amate tree that stood near the trail that would take them back into the rain forest. Without speaking to anyone, Janet crawled into the truck on the passenger side and closed the door.

  Dr. Grajeda took Haydon by the arm and casually walked with him a few paces away from the truck.

  “It has been my privilege to meet you, Mr. Haydon,” Grajeda said. “Give us a thought now and then, the people you have met here in Guatemala.”

  Haydon could barely see the doctor’s face in the darkness. He had no way of knowing what emotions the man’s features might have betrayed.

  “I’ll do that,” Haydon said lamely, and he reached out and shook Grajeda’s hand. But the doctor surprised him.

  “In Belize,” Dr. Grajeda said, holding the grip, not letting Haydon go, his voice calm and concentrated, “the authorities will require an autopsy and embalming before they will release her body to be returned home.” He paused. “Do not feel badly for her. Remember what I told you about death in Guatemala? Each one is a message, a letter to the living. Even Lena’s.”

  Then Grajeda clasped Haydon’s hand in both of his and squeezed it tightly. Though they were close enough in the thick night for Haydon to feel the doctor’s penetrating eyes, he could not actually see Grajeda’s face, rather only a hint of a visage in the narrow gulf between them. Then Haydon caught a dull, gray light, a ghostly glint of the two discal surfaces of Grajeda’s glasses, and the doctor let go of Haydon’s hand. Grajeda turned away, and in a matter of a few steps the darkness and the cicadas had swallowed him.

  Haydon waited without moving in the humid jungle heat until even Grajeda’s footsteps had faded, feeling an inexplicable affinity with the erudite doctor-rebel. It was an unlikely alliance that Haydon could explain only in the context of this particular time and place an
d circumstance, as though he had lived the last few days in a dream that, like all dreams, was a world unto itself.

  At the end of his thoughts, he turned back to the truck and climbed into the cab. Janet was crying, her head leaning against the glass. For a brief moment Haydon thought of Germaine Muller, leaning her head against the car window spattered with winter rain, and he felt an odd sense of loss himself, for never having actually met the girl who had been the source of so much emotion in others.

  He started the truck—the keys were still in the ignition, a sure sign that the guerrillas commanded respect in Calvario—and flipped on the lights. Immediately he checked the gas tank: it was three-quarters full. Good. He backed around, making several efforts at it to avoid the boggy ditches where he knew he would spend the rest of the night if he wasn’t careful, and finally got the truck headed back up the long sloping stretch toward Calvario, several hundred meters distant. Though the town was not far away, the lights of its houses could not be seen clearly because a fog had moved in and the amber lights that dotted the hillside came and went with the shifting strata of the low-hanging cloud.

  The worst part of the long, upward-sloping road was the first three or four hundred meters. Here, at the end of the line, great eroded gashes ate away at the roadbed as the rain forest persisted in its ceaseless efforts to reclaim the hill where men had built Calvario. Haydon never shifted out of low gear as he let the truck ease down into the rifts and then creep out of them again, as though he were painfully scaling a wall, hand over hand. Then there were a few meters to the next hole and then ten meters and twenty, until they were moving at a fair pace, though still in the lower gears because they were continually climbing. Finally the gashes became potholes, and then the potholes were shallower, until Haydon could actually say they were on a street of sorts, with houses rising up steeply on either side, their lights hovering above the truck in the floating mist.