Hard Red Spring (53 page)

Upstairs in their room, nothing seemed as if it had been touched in a year. Dust saturated the Mayan blankets on the two twin-sized beds. On the long wall, small squares of Mayan fabric hung, heavily matted and framed in a series of three.

“That woman is creepy. She kept smiling at me like she knows me,” Maya declared, and said nothing else on the matter.

“Do you want to shower?” Jean opened her suitcase for some fresh clothes. “What the hell?” She shoved the contents aside, digging deeper. “This isn't my suitcase!”

“Whoops!” Maya leaned over to look. “I guess that lady was right.”

“Jesus Christ.” She held up a man's suit, a silk nightie. Fucking Telema. Fucking racist guidebook, making her paranoid and now ashamed, for
having heeded its warnings. She glanced at her daughter, who was mercifully oblivious to the implications of the whole situation.

“That's nice,” Maya said, touching the lingerie. “Maybe it'll fit.” She threw herself back on her mattress. “I wonder what Brett's doing right now. He's probably at the beach with everyone. With Maureen.” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Is there a beach here? It would be nice to swim in the same ocean as him.”

“No, Maya. There's no beach. And we lost one of our guidebooks, the one with the best descriptions of Xela.” At least they still had the smaller, racist one in her purse.

Jean called the airline to report the suitcase and found out that the other woman had already reported hers stolen. By Jean. She'd have to return to the capital to get hers back. A seasoned traveler from a previous era of her life, Jean had wisely packed the bare necessities and one clean change of clothes in her carry-on.

“He's been flirting with Maureen for weeks.” Still in bed, Maya twisted the ring on her finger, confirming Jean's worst suspicion. She'd rather Maya had stolen it. Brett. He treated Jean with ironic respect, smiling too big, calling her
Mrs.
Roseneath. A typical fucking football prick. So good-looking, she couldn't even describe him beyond that.

“If you're worried he'll cheat on you with Maureen, then it sounds like he's not worth worrying over, Maya.”

“But it would be my fault. Because I
abandoned
him.”

“Three weeks is not abandonment. If he can't control himself for that long—”

“I'll just
die
,” Maya declared. “If we're gone one day longer. One hour longer than that.”

Jean said nothing. Before the therapist, she would have corrected her language, reminded Maya of real death, of war, whole villages wiped out with armed helicopters. Instead, she counted to ten now, and during those ten seconds, she kept herself busy. The first few times she'd tried this, she just stood doing nothing but counting, and Maya had shrunk back, frightened.

“You look like you're having a stroke!” she'd cried.

They retraced their tour. In the courtyard, the three Mayan women stood against the wall, perfectly spaced and doing nothing. Possibly, Jean thought, they were placed in series of three all over the hotel. Near the entrance, Jean noticed a guest book. There, previous guests had filled in their names, the
date, from where they had traveled. On the far right of the page Jean read,
What does Guatemala mean to me?
typed as a heading in several languages. Not many guests had visited—the past three years fit on the first page. Jean picked up the pen and wrote her name, the date, Los Angeles, then paused over the last question.
What does Guatemala mean to me?
She scanned down the answers of the other guests, reading the ones in English:

Is there a single decent beer in this country?

So sad to kill each other, why not rock paper scissors instead of war?

Your country has the most beautiful children in the world!

Nothing.

Cold War cemetery

An affordable, fascinating paradise! Why hadn't we come sooner?

Jesus Loves You

Colonialism, Imperialism, NAFTA

Good luck with your first-ever democratic election!

One comment had been crossed out violently in pencil, Jean supposed by the proprietor. Jean could make out:
I excavated 37 bodies today
. In the middle of the page, someone named Will, from Buffalo, had drawn a picture as his comment. A cave? An old man's face? Jean had to stare at it for quite a long time to see a crude drawing of a vagina, which the proprietor had not understood enough to cross out.

“I want to get a better look at the pool,” Maya announced. “For a night swim!”

Jean left her comment blank and sorted through the pamphlets the proprietor had given them. Among these brochures, Jean found what she was looking for—climbing tours of the Santa María volcano:

Eco-Tours of Volcán Santa María! Take in the breathing beauty of an ancient volcano, sample the Mayan culture, and give back to Guatemala. Most tours molest the landscape, but Eco-Tours improves the land. Join us Tuesday mornings for a trash-collection sunrise hike up the most sexy summit in Guatemala. All tours led by traditional Mayan guides.

“It's only four feet deep, Mom! It's a kids' pool.”

Maya, sullen, walked back into the courtyard from the pool patio and threw herself into the hammock. Jean noticed someone's shadow lingering around a corner, listening. With this, Jean turned on the television to give them some privacy. After a deodorant and a shaving cream ad, a political one came on. A candidate meeting with Mayan leaders, touring the market. The female voice-over sounded compassionate, convincing. An aging Latino man of slightly deflated rotundity met a Mayan man on a grassy plain. They shook hands as the sun rose up from red in the background. “Gilberto Ahumada Lobos,” said the voice, accompanied by the logo of the blue hand.

“Does the fable book have the quetzal story in it?” Maya asked, rocking herself.

“Which story? There were a bunch with quetzals in them.”

“The scary one. There was a scary story. I hated it, remember?”

Jean had forgotten about this one, had forgotten her daughter had ever been afraid of anything, other than getting fat. She nodded. “The one that explains how the bird got its red breast. You had nightmares about it.” After these nightmares, Maya had insisted on sleeping with Jean every night. They continued to sleep that way for years, until Maya ended the practice at the age of eleven, claiming, suddenly, that Jean snored.

“Really? What's the story? I don't remember.”

The book was in their room, thankfully packed in Jean's carry-on. Jean knew this curiosity was fragile enough that going to get it would ruin the moment. She closed her eyes, thinking. “It's a story about a famous Mayan warrior. I can't remember his name. The day he fought the conquistador Alvarado, a quetzal flew overhead. When the conquistador killed the warrior, the quetzal flew down and dipped his chest in his blood, which is why the bird has a red breast.”

Maya made a face. “That's not scary. It's just gross. Will we see quetzals here?”

“There used to be a lot of them. The Spanish name for Xela is Quetzaltenango, the place of the quetzals. But the guidebook says now they're mostly gone. Much of their habitat has been cleared by plantations, or burned in the 1980s scorched-earth operations. And they can't be bred in captivity.”

“Why can't they be bred in captivity?”

“They kill themselves when they're captured and confined. That's why they're a symbol of freedom.”

“That's crazy, Mom.”

“It is. It's crazy, but it's also kind of beautiful.”

Where, Jean wondered, was Telema at that moment? She could be anywhere: meeting with the President, distributing clean water in a slum, crossing the border into Mexico with cocaine hidden in her hair, or sitting at a long table in a library, poring over hundred-year-old books.

“What do you want to do tomorrow, Maya? Do you want to see the guidebook?”

“Shopping!”

“C'mon.”

Maya shrugged. “Why do you ask me what I want to do, if you don't care?”

“We're here to learn, Maya. We can shop, but we can't
only
shop. Is there anything in particular you want to find out? Anything you've always wanted to know?”

“Not really.”

“I find that hard to believe. We come all the way here and there's not one thing you want to learn about your heritage? About the food or religion or the forest? Or the clothes? The Mayan fashions are certainly interesting, aren't they?
Cosmo
could do a whole issue on this place.” It sounded lame, even to her.

“This is a vacation. You're not supposed to learn on vacations, you're supposed to relax and have a good time.”

“Then I'll need to make sure there isn't any learning on this volcano hike. If there is, we can't go.”

“Volcano hike?” It was as easy as that, reeling her daughter in. She was not a difficult girl to please. Walking the mall, lying at the beach, watching TV were the easiest things in the world. But Jean refused to give herself, and especially her daughter, such easy delights.

“Will we see lava? Will it explode when we're at the top?”

“It's possible, Maya. It's an active volcano. There's a disclaimer, saying a tourist was hit in the face with flying lava at the crater a year ago. We must go at our own risk.”

“Yes! Oh my god!” Her skinny silhouette swung wildly in the hammock.

Jean hoped the expectation of such a spectacular end (the teenage death wish: Was Maya hoping for Jean's death or her own at the mouth of the crater?) would be enough to appease her daughter for the next few days, through the more serious business, the revelations, awaiting them.

~~~~~

“So, Guatemala,” Telema said, peering through the clear curve of her tipped bourbon glass. “What is your personal stake in Guatemala?”

They were at a bar of Telema's choosing that catered to graduate students and serious undergraduates. Foreign, expensive beer consumed in dark, roomy booths, although Telema did not drink beer. On a wall over her shoulder, Jean saw again the campus flyer, slightly different from the one outside Telema's office.

Is Our Social Conscience Destroying Our Happiness? Join us for a panel discussion in Daggett Lounge.

Instead of answering Telema's question, Jean talked about her paper. The subject of Maya was too raw tonight, after another fight. Maya's words, just hours before, had been sharp, well aimed. More than anything right now, Jean needed escape. The professor, dressed darkly, became elusive in the dim bar light. This was their third student-teacher conference. The class had moved on from proposals to first drafts.

“Like I said, I'm interested in aspects of American intervention. The CIA-orchestrated coup in 1954. That was their first successful covert operation, wasn't it?”

Telema nodded, sensing evasion. “Their first to go more according to plan rather than less.” She swirled her drink. “But I'm not talking about your paper. I mean, why, personally, are you interested in Guatemala?”

Jean panicked, wondering if to tell her about Maya would mean she'd been lying before. She felt this going somewhere, and could not sustain the fiction of childlessness for long. But in her last lecture, Telema had touched upon international adoptions.
Assimilation
, she'd decreed,
is violent. A violence upon the psyche
.

Plus, if she talked about Maya now, after several drinks, she feared she'd cry.

“A writer with two graduate degrees doesn't pay to take an undergraduate class. You're educated. You know how to learn. Why didn't you just use your library card?”

“I'm not that self-motivated,” Jean said, feeling unmoored. They both had drunk way too much for a simple student-teacher conference. And Telema kept insisting she didn't care about Jean's paper. Jean felt, more and
more, that this was a date. The idea thrilled her. She'd only been on a handful of dates in fifteen years, since Maya.

“For a fiction-teller, you aren't a very good liar.” Yes, flirtation.

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“You're writing a book.” It was clear that the idea of it thrilled Telema. “You're writing a fiction book about Guatemala.”

“Yes,” Jean lied, wanting to please her, not wanting to ruin her chances by introducing a sullen teenager to their date. Jean did have two MFAs in fiction, although she was no longer a writer. She was an editor. With no desire to write a book, she knew she'd never write one about anything, let alone Guatemala.

“I've always thought that fiction was the best way to approach Guatemala. You see, there are more lies than truth in the history of that little country.” Telema held up two fingers spaced slightly, to demonstrate how small the country was. Then she brought them to her teeth to work on a hangnail she'd been mercilessly pursuing all evening. “Are you writing about Guatemalan women?” Back in teacher mode now, Telema wrote something in her notebook.

“In a way. Maids and nannies.” Jean had no idea what she was saying, but those were the only Mayan women she'd ever seen in Los Angeles.

“Little bombs,” Telema proclaimed.

“Excuse me?”

“Little bombs,” she enunciated, as if Jean just hadn't understood the words. “A long time ago, the profession was a tool of strategic warfare. The Maya were so desperate for land that sometimes they'd send their teenage daughters to white and Hispanic landowners as maids. Their job, of course, was not to clean and cook. It was to seduce the patriarch, to get pregnant.”

“Seriously? How do you know?”

“It was my doctoral thesis. A little girl of fourteen, dressed up and educated in the ways of seduction,” Telema mused, jostling the melting ice cubes in her glass. “The hope, of course, was to blackmail the man into giving her a bit of land, to just go away and keep quiet. And if that didn't work, when the man died and his family went back to Europe or the States, he might leave some of his Guatemalan land to his half-Indian children.”