Hard Red Spring (60 page)

She flipped further.

“Article II of this instrument defines the crime of genocide and its requirements in the following terms: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as: Killing members of the group; causing serious bodily harm or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Jean closed her copy.

“In consequence, the CEH concludes that agents of the state of Guatemala, within the framework of counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan
people which lived in the four regions analyzed.”
Back to the beginning now, no one tried to find the page as she read.

“The CEH recognizes that the movement of Guatemala towards polarization, militarization and civil war was not just the result of national history. The cold war also played an important role. Whilst anti-communism, promoted by the United States within the framework of its foreign policy, received firm support from right-wing political parties and from various other powerful actors in Guatemala, the United States demonstrated that it was willing to provide support for strong military regimes in its strategic backyard. In the case of Guatemala, military assistance was directed towards reinforcing the national intelligence apparatus and for training the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques, key factors which had significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation.”

She dismissed the stupefied class, to “take full advantage of the day.” She added, quite emotionally, uncharacteristically, at their backs, “And one last thing.”

Jean, still seated, looked at Telema's purse on the lectern. This is it, she thought. She's going to shoot someone to make her point. She knew exactly who it would be, too. It was a completely ridiculous but plausible thought. Jean found the unfortunate freshman, the willowy boy who insisted on using abstract terms, like freedom, when arguing with Telema. Who insisted that sweatshops gave jobs to previously jobless people. Whose sole criteria for a country's health was its GDP. They had nicknamed him the Quiet American. Jean watched him walk between the chairs, alone, a perfect target.

But she did not go for her purse. Instead, Telema put her head on the lectern and cried.

—

After class let out two hours and twenty minutes early, Jean had nowhere to go. She had hoped to catch Telema in the empty auditorium, as she stuffed her papers back into her black purse, literally stuffing the report in handfuls. She threw Jean a look of absolute contempt, as if Jean herself had orchestrated those Guatemalan deaths from her private beach. Jean sat, her sole audience, as Telema made a dramatic exit.

She went, then, to the bar Telema had introduced her to, hoping to run into her.

Jean ordered an Irish coffee, to maintain the semblance of normalcy and to push her hangover back a few more hours. There was no reason, she told herself, for Telema to be angry with her. It was the first day of the
relationship, the first hours, really, and Jean hadn't even had time yet to screw it up. Nothing had changed since the night before, nothing but Jean's understanding of it. She flipped through her copy of the report, which she set on the bar in front of her, finding again the definitions of genocide.

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

“She acts like our country's some great evil, stomping around destroying everything, but she still lives and works here,” one of the boys at the bar said. “She seems to be quite comfortable with the privilege of being here.”

No one in the group was familiar to Jean, but that didn't mean anything.

“If she has a problem with how we do things, she should leave.”

It sounded, for a moment, like a rally, people working themselves up with beer and indignation, to run someone out of town. But these kids didn't have it in them. The comment was met with embarrassed silence. The girl who'd just spoken stared into her beer.

“Did you see her crying? She would've been the perfect subject for the panel discussion.”

“That was the best! How long did she sit there waiting for it to start?”

“Twenty-five minutes!”

They all laughed and finished their beers, ordered more.

“Is self-hatred the only way we can be saved?” another boy asked seriously. “Because that's all I've learned in that class. Self-hatred. If I wrote my final paper on everything I hated about myself, I'd get an A.”

“‘Lost Little Girls.'” One of the boys giggled. “‘The Myth of White Innocence in Everything Bad That Has Ever Happened to Everybody.'”

“No, no,” a girl corrected him, “‘Lost Little Girls: America's White College Coeds and My Goal to Seduce All of Them.'”

The students laughed, their eyes popping out at one another. Jean, in her head, argued with Telema, with the United Nations. Define forcible. War, she supposed, qualified as forcible, but so did poverty. So did death and illness. All these horrible things, forced on baby Maya, and Jean was wrong to help? Doing nothing, it seemed, was the new humanitarianism. In another twenty years, it'd flip again, and the people who did nothing would be implicated. The perfect business model for these peddlers of guilt.

Jean took two copies of the Historical Clarification report home. That evening, she overnighted her extra copy to her parents without a note, just highlights on the rule of Ríos Montt. She wanted them to see what their hundred-dollar donation had bought. The package would arrive two days before she did, for their Spring Break visit.

~~~~~

By late morning the volcano hike was over and Maya offered no protest when Jean suggested they try the shack for lunch. They showered first at the hotel in the tiny, flaking bathroom without hot water. Jean watched the water run black, then gray, then clear, off her body. In thirty seconds, she was clean. Then Maya took her turn.

The proprietor was fussing in their room when Jean returned. More red paint had appeared on the outside wall sometime during the night and Jean suspected she did not yet know. With zest, she ripped the sheets off the bed for washing, while Jean clutched her towel, making a puddle on the floor. Maya's sheets and the mattress beneath showed a large urine stain.

“I'm sorry,” Jean managed. Bed-wetting, at fifteen? A small, creeping devastation took root in her mind. She knew it would only grow over the course of the day, the week. “She's had so many of those banana drinks. I guess too many, too late in the day.”

“It's okay. I know children. I have two,” she reported, bunching the sheets. “Two boys her age.”

“Oh?” Jean knew she sounded surprised, relieved. Whatever her failures as a mother, Jean knew they probably paled in comparison to this strange woman's. How big was this hotel, that she'd missed two teenage boys? Possibly the proprietor kept them locked in a room. Jean felt slightly better, feeling sorry for those two kids. “Are they around? I think Maya would enjoy some other kids to keep her company.”

“Wonderful!” The proprietor's creased face lit up like an old paper lantern. “They're good boys. They would love to meet your daughter. They get lonely in the hotel.”

Then the proprietor handed Jean another letter to mail.

Jean politely put the envelope in her bag without looking at it. If these boys were handsome, Jean thought, maybe Maya would forget about Brett for a while. And the man in the suit.

At the end of the hall, the shower stopped. Jean leaned through the doorway to see this man waiting outside the bathroom.

“I see there's another guest in the hotel,” she tried. “The man in the suit. Do you know him?” Jean kept one eye on the hall, ready to confront him if he touched Maya.

“He is an important guest. You must not disturb him.”

“Are we disturbing him?”

“Your daughter. She follows him, upstairs, downstairs.” She frowned at Jean. “She makes him uncomfortable.”

“How is he important?”

“You see his suit? He is an American here on business.”

“Business in Xela?”

“Of course.” She sighed, hugging the dirty sheets. “There is too much business here now with the Americans. This business of truth.”

The bathroom door opened. Jean watched the suit slide in and push Maya out. “Over an hour, it's been!” The dead bolt slammed and Maya stood at the door, listening, making a face. Jean checked her watch, knowing he was right. She and Maya had been monopolizing the bathroom for some time.

“Poor guy,” Maya said, dripping a trail back to Jean. “I told him not to have so many of those banana drinks. He drank, like, five yesterday.”

—

The restaurant was made completely of corrugated tin sheets, apparently balanced like a house of cards. No floor, no windows, no menus, no waitresses. Maya collapsed into a flimsy plastic chair with an air of determined remoteness, wanting nothing to do with this class of people. She opened the Spanish translation book and briefly focused her attention there. Jean cast a long look around, wondering if to wet the bed at the age of fifteen was less fucked up than openly stalking a grown man around an empty hotel.

“Why does that lady keep giving you letters?” Maya asked, pointing to the envelope in Jean's purse.

“I don't know. Maybe she's too busy to mail them herself.”

“She's not busy. She was sitting in the courtyard at four in the morning. Sitting there like a dead person. We passed her when we left for the hike and you didn't even see. I almost screamed. Who's she writing letters to?”

Jean took the envelope out of her bag. “This one's to Kofi Annan.”

Maya laughed at the name. “Who's that?”

“
Yanqui
,” someone hissed from across the room. “Hey,
¡yanqui!
”

Women without men and men without women filled the restaurant quickly. The women silently distributed plates with one eye, it seemed, on Jean and Maya. All customers would eat what was given, and Jean felt the success of the volcano summit draining away a bit more.

“
¡Yanqui!”

Jean opened the guidebook and turned deliberately from her purse:
The natives are generally polite. Any rudeness toward Americans usually comes from a basic jealousy of their bigger, wealthier northern neighbor. Be polite,
never lose your temper, and if all else fails, smile and merely pretend you do not understand
.

Jealousy! Of course, the lost guidebook was much better, written later. Nevertheless, Jean sat back, practicing a smile of good-natured confusion. She aimed it at the women, hoping for some sympathy.

“Mom, I just remembered we forgot our bags.”

“What?”

“The trash bags. We all slid down the volcano so fast, we forgot to pick up the trash bags.”

“Oh my. I guess we did.” She began fanning at her face, spreading herself out in her chair. The cold morning turning rapidly hot. A hot flash?

“Pssst.
¡Yanqui!
”

Jean smiled and smiled. A Mayan woman appeared with two full paper plates.

“
Hola
.” Jean smiled at the woman. “
¿Tienen comida vegetariana?
”

The woman set the plates down and left, walking stiffly away in her patterned skirt.

“Should we go back, Mom? Do you think the guide would take us to get them?”

“We'd have to wait until the next tour next week, and we'll be gone by then, to the ruins at Tikal.”

“Can you call the guide and tell him, at least? Maybe he can go get them.”

“I'll do that, yes.” But there was no number. There had been no reservations, no contact information on the flyer. They had just shown up at the designated crossroads and paid one hundred quetzales each. Nothing to do about it now. Possibly the next group would collect the bags on their way down. She had more important things to worry about. Jean took a map from her purse and opened it. Nueva Aldea de la Vida lay less than a hundred miles outside the city. She looked up the English translation, New Life Village.

“Mom, what's jaundice?”

“It means your skin's turned yellow because of unfiltered bile in your blood.”

Jean sat, calculating the hours and mileage. Two hours by bus. But what would she do once she got there? Even if this Cruzita had survived the war, she most certainly wouldn't be able to converse—Jean doubted she knew English, or even Spanish.

“¡Yanqui, yanqui!”

“What's that guy's problem?” Maya lifted her face above the Spanish translation dictionary to give the man a withering, adolescent look of contempt.

“Just ignore him, Maya.” Jean paged through the guidebook:
Outside of major towns, armed robbery of tourists is not uncommon. If anyone approaches you with a weapon, give whatever they ask for without hesitation. They will shoot. Avoid empty roads and towns without tourist services, but also be alert on well-worn routes. Packed tourist buses are also targets for recently disbanded guerrilla groups. Armed guerrillas have stopped buses to Tikal, checked passports, robbed only the Americans, then lectured the traumatized tourists on imperialism.

“What's a cranial laceration?”

Jean looked up. “Maya, what are you reading?” She reached across the table. The medical records from the orphanage. “You stole this?”

“They're
my
records.
They've
been stolen from
me.
”

Jean studied the paper, saw where Maya had made careful notes with the help of the dictionary. “Maya.”

“What? Isn't this why we came here in the first place? To see these dumb papers? You didn't even read this one! So I ask you again, what is a cranial laceration?”