Hard Red Spring (52 page)

“Austin.”

There it was, a handle, a beginning. “Austin. What a great place to be from—”

“No, no.” The professor dispelled the fledgling conversation with a hurried wave. “I'm not from Austin. I was a distinguished visiting professor there before I came here.”

~~~~~

They came off the bus dried out and dazed, under a healing Xela sky. No one lunged, offering to help with their bags, offering a taxi ride or a box of
Chiclets. The first native faces they saw shared a common pride that refused to be moved at the arrival of two tourists with wheeled luggage. It was clear now that if they needed something, they would have to ask.

Jean had been right to suspect that the Maya in the highlands were more dignified than those in the capital. Many still wore the traditional clothes, though with sandals made from recycled tires. This dignity, however, allowed them to stare boldly at a white woman with her clearly Mayan child.

In her jean shorts, black tube top, and glitter sandals, Maya made a peculiar spectacle. A line of old women squatted on the perimeter of the market and studied them. Jean smiled vaguely in their direction, but did not make eye contact. Maya moved uneasily, snapping the gum in her mouth, as they walked through the busy, landscaped central square. The Maya stared hard at them and only Maya stared back. When people did approach, it was unclear who was selling tourist services and who was begging.

“Quetzals, quetzales?” asked a desiccated, leathery man, holding out the stub where his elbow should have been.

Aged buildings stood reinforced with whitewash. Many of the houses were graffitied with the same political logos they'd seen earlier, which no one bothered to wash away or paint over. They found their hotel, El Gringa Perdida, only a block from the central park. The building, newly whitewashed too thin, showed its cool, dark substance in brushstroke streaks. A regal, crumbling home in a line of equally charming and crumbling two-story colonial homes. Near the entrance, on the house, someone had graffitied the blue hand, like a formal greeting.

They could not check in until after dinner. They had arrived two days early and the Latina proprietor said she needed time.

“Oh, are you full?” Jean asked. “Can you not take us?”

“No, not full.” She studied the guest book, weighing her next comment. “We are empty. But we need to clean your room.”

It seemed rooms weren't cleaned once a guest left, but before the next one arrived. “Could we just sit inside, then, and wait for our room? We're very tired.”

“We are not ready for you, not ready at all,” the woman declared with a shaky, upheld left fist. “But there's a restaurant for tourists near the central park. If you'd like, you can leave your baggage with me.”

Jean and Maya looked at one another.

The proprietor handed Jean an envelope. “If you are going into town,” she said, as if this were only a possibility, as if they might just stand there for
the next three hours, pining at the gates, “take this, please, to the mail, to the government building.” She pointed to a roof in the direction from which they had already come.

They walked the city with difficulty with their luggage, awaiting the preparation of their hotel room. Jean literally dragged both suitcases behind her. They found the government building easily. The letter the woman gave them fit perfectly into the little slotted mouth in the wall.

The restaurant had no name, only a picture of a hamburger with
Vegetarian
written beneath. It lay a safe distance from the park, but still close enough that they could watch and become accustomed to the new city. Jean knew not to force this. Anything with Maya these days had to be slow and careful. She had a few vacation-like activities planned before they went to the orphanage to see the records.

A party of young white men and women in polo shirts of varying colors filled the far half of the small restaurant. NGO workers. The eyes and ears of the famous Historical Clarification Commission.

“So what do you think?” Jean asked Maya, turning her suitcase upside down to register the damage done to the wheels by the cobblestones.

Maya peered at the English menu. “I think I want the California sprout sandwich on whole-wheat bread.”

Jean frowned. “That doesn't sound very Guatemalan.”

“Guatemalans eat puppies, Mom. I'm not going to eat puppies.”

“They do not, Maya. They don't eat puppies. They eat tortillas and fish and rice and beans.” She paused, considering the joke, but it came too late. “They also eat trash-fed free-range beef.”

Maya rolled her eyes, a dark flash of moody weather. “Fish and puppies are the same to me. They're both pets.”

They were both vegetarians, but for different reasons. Jean could not bring herself to support the toxic and cruel meat industry, while Maya dwelled on the cuteness and innocence of animals. If Jean did not live in Los Angeles, if she owned a gun and had the time and a truck, she would hunt one deer every year and make the meat last. A lifestyle she could see herself getting around to once Maya started college. Telema would've fit perfectly into this plan. Jean would shoot the deer, and Telema would gut it.

The open-air dining room turned pleasant with fry oil and the familiar buzz of the English language. Nearby, the patrons in matching polo shirts gesticulated over nachos. They were weary, but reviving themselves with beer. Americans.

“How many?” one asked another.

“Three.”

“Well, I just finished six.”

Competitive drinking? Jean made the effort to block them out. Twenty years ago, she would not have been eating at a restaurant like this, comforted by the presence of Americans. She'd spied a shack nearby, which served the local population. Jean set herself the goal of convincing Maya to eat there by the end of the week.

“So what do you think of Xela, Maya?”

Maya squinted out the glassless window, as if it were smudged. “Am I supposed to think something?”

“This is your homeland. During colonial times and during the civil war, it was a city of resistance. This is the home of Mayan warriors and guerrillas.”

“I thought you disapproved of violence, Mom.”

“I disapprove of violence, but not of self-defense. And don't think all the struggle was violent. It was much more sophisticated. Repression became so ingrained that, after a while, their enemies didn't need violence to control them.”

“What did they do? Brainwash them?”

“Sometimes just theater was enough. The Santa María volcano is a good example. In 1902 it blew up, but the government denied it. They sent a band here to play over the noise. The sky turned black and it was raining ash, but the government insisted to the townspeople it wasn't happening.”

Maya's face pitched from dejection to delight. “There's a volcano here?”

“Yes, Maya, but you're missing the point. The band was a threat. The band was an implication of violence. Big metal instruments, pointed to the sky—”

“Is it an active volcano?”

“I think so. But don't you want to know why the band threatened the town?”

“Not really,” she said, twirling something invisible through her fingers with a determined incuriosity meant to test Jean. Until a couple of years ago, Maya asked the why of things all the time. Jean never tired of providing the answers. These days, Jean had to supply both questions and answers. A lonely enterprise, talking to herself all day. Since Maya had hit puberty, Jean had felt the emptiness of her thirties returning. She felt the need to drink,
the need for a romantic relationship, more keenly than ever. She'd been driven into Telema's eager, octopus arms. Yes.

“So what do you think of Xela?” Jean tried again, nudging Maya playfully.

Maya concentrated on the park, a deep furrow showing between her eyes. “I think the women are fat and ugly,” she said finally. “Does that mean I'm going to turn out fat and ugly?” Her hair in her mouth again, her hand clutching the sill as if they were in a car going too fast.

Anger was not a feeling Jean felt she was entitled to, but the accumulation of disappointments, she suspected, might be worse for both of them. She wanted a beer more than anything, but this vacation was for Maya. Jean had promised herself that she wouldn't drink on this trip before five o'clock. It was four-fifteen.

She turned to where Maya had been staring, at the line of women squatting on their heels, passing secrets. At that moment, the waitress appeared with a beer Jean hadn't even ordered. The bottle's mouth smoked from recent opening. Jean accepted the bottle, not wanting to complain. She took her watch off and laid it on the glass. Four-sixteen.

“They aren't fat, Maya. They're stout. They have a different body type. These are strong women who haul and plant and walk all day.”

“Am I going to be stout, then?” Maya looked genuinely worried. Jean's daughter, who marched in glittering tights, hoisting a jaguar flag for crowds of football fans, worried about her figure. Flag line had become her most serious endeavor.

“These women are not obese, they are not lazy. They eat fresh food from markets and work all day. They are not fat like people who sit and watch television all day. Their body types are of strong, capable women. Don't you want to be strong?”

“They do everything right, and they're still fat.” Maya sighed.

Jean knew she would never succeed in making this point. Maya lagged behind her friends developmentally, so she still had her svelte girl's frame, bolstered by her padded bra. With her creamy coffee skin and large black eyes and narrow hips, Maya was the exotic beauty, the ringleader of her pack. Now she felt her empire slipping.

“You are going to be whatever you make of yourself,” Jean replied automatically. She realized too late it was something her mother always said, one of her very few reasonable mantras. Her mother said lots of things. On their
last visit to Iowa, she had begged Jean to cancel this trip.
God gave me a sign,
she had claimed,
told me you shouldn't go!
Jean watched more of the painted buses disgorge passengers onto the square: several locals, a few NGOs, a white man in a suit. Jean watched closely with a feeling of dread she couldn't shake.

Maya did not eat her California sprout sandwich when it arrived, staked on two tall toothpicks. Instead, she chugged down her virgin colada. Jean ate her avocado melt despite the fact that she no longer felt hungry. The dirt from the journey had filled her hair, her clothes, and her lungs. Every few breaths, she coughed, feeling a rattle. She sipped her Guatemalan beer when it turned 5:01. But she found no relief in the local beer. It had turned warm, rank, and completely undrinkable. She ordered her own piña colada instead, which was weak and tooth-piercingly sweet. When she blew her nose on her napkin, it came away black.

She decided, after three drinks, it would be good for Maya to lose her looks a little bit. Maybe if she did grow stout, she'd make more meaningful friends and focus on her schoolwork. She was proudly, defiantly a C student at an alternative private school where everyone else did well. (There were no grades at the school, but Jean knew what a 3 meant.) And the worst of it was that her teachers loved her for it, thinking this defiance something nobler than laziness. The art teacher reported recently that Maya had a great interest in abstract expressionism—an unconvincing explanation for the random splashes displayed with the still lifes, landscapes, and portraits of her classmates. The therapist, too, wrote off Maya's shoplifting as a mere symptom of Jean's shortcomings. Jean was beginning to suspect her daughter was a shape-shifter, a pleaser. Except, of course, with her.

“Are we going to see Telema here? Is she meeting us in Xela?” Maya asked, testing new waters. She drew out one of the tall toothpicks, which came out clean. “She has a good body and she's Mayan, isn't she?” She propped it between her thumb and forefinger, pressed the sharp point into her fingertip and held it there.

Jean coughed, sucked at her drink. Another bus unloaded and Jean studied every passenger.

“No.”

Maya sighed, pressing the toothpick even harder, smiling at the possibility of blood and waiting for Jean to intervene.

—

“Hello, hello, Americans! We are ready for your authentic Guatemalan experience! Welcome to the Land of Eternal Spring!”

The Latina proprietor greeted them as if she had not met them a few hours before, and also as if she had not moved in those few hours. She did not look twice at the mismatched mother and daughter. She took up her pencil dramatically to make some mark in the book to signify their arrival.

After stuffing their hands with various tourist pamphlets—
Guatemala: The Land of Eternal Spring
;
Tikal: Stories of the Past, Predictions of the Future
; and
Rainforest Secrets of the Maya
—the proprietor opened the gate. The newly arrived indigenous staff—three women in Mayan dress—stood barefoot on the black-and-white tiles, paralyzed by the sight of Maya. Jean and Maya carried their own suitcases past them. The woman led the way down the hall, past a beautifully planted courtyard with a hammock. Jean noticed the shabbiness of her dress, which looked more like a nightgown. The fabric pilled, yellow under the arms and dingy at the wrists with smudged lead.

There was no sign of any other guests.

“This,” the proprietor said, opening a door, “is the meditation garden.”

Behind the house, beige pebbles encircled the painted shore of a blue, kidney-shaped pool. This whole patio was protected by a high concrete wall topped with barbed wire.

“A pool!” Maya clapped, then strained forward. “But there's no diving board.”

“You speak English very well,” Jean remarked to the woman.

“It's the universal language,” she declared, as if Jean might disagree. “Anyone who goes into tourism must learn English. If they want to succeed.”