Hard Red Spring (69 page)

Outside, someone lowered himself into the shallow hole, just a few feet deep. The others gathered around the rim expectantly.

The girl reappeared with a folder three inches thick. The size and weight of it had terrified her more, and she handed it over with fear brimming in her eyes. “Please,” she said, pointing to the reading room.

The file, dropped on the table with a thud, frightened Jean as well. How could there be so much for such a common story?
Gave up her baby because of poverty. Gang rape, village massacre.
At least, common enough for Guatemala. What else could there be? She pulled out a photograph of a lovely young woman, a Mayan teenager, wincing slightly as if she wasn't sure what the camera pointed at her was. Cruzita Sola Durante.

Though beautiful, she looked nothing like Maya. Everything seemed wrong, down to the chin. Maya must be her father's daughter.

No hometown listed for Cruzita in these records, no address. Under contact information, she read the name General Gilberto Ahumada Lobos. The name was vaguely familiar to Jean, but she did not linger on it. She flipped through the file, which contained nothing but the pictures and records of children. Files combined accidentally, shoved in so the paper-clipped pages became entangled. Just a filing mistake. She paged through the children with urgency and found Maya's picture and file, with Cruzita's name listed at the bottom. But then, looking at the other babies' files, she noticed Cruzita's name on those, too. In a kind of shocked daze, she went through every one, counted them, noted the dates. In the span of a year, Cruzita Sola Durante had given ninety-six children up for adoption.

Jean shoved the glass doors open and tried to breathe, to think. In the soccer field, the crowd hoisted one of the polo shirts out of the hole. Jean felt the ground move beneath her, pulling her in their direction.

“How many?” someone asked.

“I see three,” he said. “But it's old. Much older than the war. I could be wrong, but look at their shoes.” He held what looked like a small, shriveled foot in his hand. Everyone stared at it. An old-fashioned child's leather shoe—a tiny shoe, caked with black volcanic soil. He turned it in his hands, to point out a corroded, barely visible heart-shaped buckle.

“Well, shit. Where else can we put the goalpost?”

Jean needed to get in touch with Lenore. Six hours until sundown. She returned to the taxi waiting in the parking lot. The man, uninterested in the scene on the field, listened instead to some vile preacher on the radio.
¡Jesús!
Through the static and Mayan language, his tone was clear: fire, damnation, redemption, hope.

“Nueva Aldea de la Vida,” she told the driver. “And turn that the fuck off.”

—

For once, she wished a Guatemalan taxi could go faster. She dropped two hundred quetzales on the driver's lap and told him so. As they raced even farther from Xela, the roads deteriorated into rough paths, nearly into jungle. Civilization fell away and Jean felt nothing, not even anxiety. Despite all the information, the numbers and dates, the facts refused to cohere in her mind. Ninety-six children in a year. All she could think of was some kind of computer error. But records of the children had been handwritten.

In ninety minutes, the taxi hit a main road, then passed the sprawling modern clothing factory Lenore had mentioned. Past this, they descended into the valley below, into a shantytown made of sticks, plastic, leaves, and corrugated tin. It looked, from high up, like a garbage dump.

Everywhere in the town, some step of the factory process showed. Mayan men loaded trucks with the assistance of boys; women and girls walked to or away from the factory glinting atop the hill. The taxi dropped Jean at a stand selling clothes too warped for the outlet stores in the States. Grotesquely uneven arms, one-legged pants hung on display. The Mayan woman who sold them did not look Jean in the eye as she chanted, “Polo, Gap, Kathy Ireland. Polo, Gap, Kathy Ireland,” like an incantation.

The rest of the small, inadequate market sold packaged food: potato chips, packaged bread, snack cakes, and Coke. An ancient-looking woman engaged in the only traditional activity Jean could see. Stooped in a stall, she dipped strings of wool in buckets of dye. Blue, black, red, purple. She
scooped handfuls of cochineal powder, added them to a boiling bucket, and stirred the thickening dye. Her hands, stained red, trembled with purpose. Behind her, a girl wove these dried threads together into the rough, traditional blankets with her backstrap loom.

“
Estoy buscando Lenore
,” Jean told the woman, who dipped a strand of wool and brought it out dripping red, like entrails.

Jean moved on. A man appeared, mercilessly whipping a donkey over the flat road. He stared hard at her with one good eye, the other askew, lifted up to the sky.

“Estoy buscando Lenore.”

The man did not stop whipping, but used his free hand to point her in the other direction, from which she had come.

The village center was flat and crowded with fading, cracked plastic shacks erected on a grid. Bulwarks of plastic wrappers, cans, and bottles reinforced the flooded paths between from erosion. A Mayan girl—maybe eight years old—wearing a tiny replica of the traditional costume, finally took mercy on Jean, after much searching and asking that startled the villagers. Children were scooped up from bucket baths, from games. The streets emptied as the girl pulled her along.

“Ixchel!”
a woman called, from some unseen location.

When the girl pointed to a leaning shack made of an old Coca-Cola sign, Jean shook her head. But she confirmed, pointing and saying,
Yanqui.
Supposedly, Lenore lived in a shack like all the other shacks, but for the painted graffiti, which did not look political. No symbols, just words:
¡Váyase Yanqui! ¡Niño Ladrón!

No one answered her knock, and the door looked as if it had been kicked in at one point. The hinges screamed with rust.

Lenore wasn't there. By the light of the open door, Jean made out one chair, one table, a sleeping mat on the beaten earth floor, which sloped severely to one corner. Notebooks everywhere. Some stacked, some gutted, some damaged by water, and others preserved in clear plastic bags. Yes, unbelievably, this must be Lenore's home. Jean found a notebook open on the table, the spine folded over to a single page:

In their testimony, the soldiers confessed that they dropped Emelda alive in the Pacific with four others. They cut her breasts off, so she'd bleed in the water. Then they hovered in the helicopter
and watched the sharks rip them all apart. They took bets on who would be the first and last to be eaten.

As she stepped back, her foot slid over a puddle of vomit. Coffee and banana from their meeting, and the yellow egg liquor, looking no different than it had in the bottle.

“
Ixchel!
” a woman called from somewhere. Then a man.
“Ixchel!”

The town spread out with better and better houses toward the mountains. Jean found the little girl again, licking a piece of plastic packaging she'd found. She knew where Cruzita lived as well and she pulled Jean in another direction.

“
¿Cómo se llama?
” she asked her.

“Ixchel.”

The shadows of people shrank before her in the street. Doors closed. The old woman at the market, who still refused to acknowledge her presence, continued dipping and hanging, dipping and hanging.

The political graffiti looked the same as Xela's: orange squares, a cornstalk. Along walls, on rocks and trees, the blue hand waved its bloody salute. Telema had been here. The suit said Telema was following her. Jean imagined Telema just a few yards ahead, painting as she went. She turned abruptly, confronted alleys and shadows, preparing to see her. She checked her back repeatedly for the Guatemalan parade. Telema, the suit, an armed robber, angry peasants, and the last to join: ninety-six children trying their best to keep up. No, ninety-seven.

“Ixchel!”
But the girl just grinned at Jean and skipped on.

Cruzita's house stood on a street that curved up the surrounding mountain range. Molded of smooth white stucco and huge for the area, it looked even nicer than in the photo, with a yard and a flower garden. It was nicer than the hotel in Xela.

She thanked Ixchel, who demanded payment.
Five
, she showed her, with her tiny, grimy hand. She gave her twenty. The girl scuttled away with the money, hooting at what she believed to be Jean's mistake, leaving her at the gate. Lenore must be inside. She would know what the file meant, or at least she could find out. If only Jean could walk to the front door and knock. If only she could leave it alone.

Jean found shade a small distance away from Cruzita's gate. A massive tangled vine heaved itself over the wall and into the street, allowing her to
watch the gate while remaining somewhat hidden. The minuscule flowers weighted the air with an impossibly sweet fragrance.

“Ixchel! Ixchel!”
The girl ran down an alley giggling, flouting her summons.

Standing there, waiting for Lenore or Cruzita, for something, Jean remembered the letter Telema had dropped. She reached into her purse, felt the paper, and brought it out. No, it was the proprietor's letter, given to her to mail. Jean, amused to see Bill Clinton as the addressee, opened the envelope, thinking she would readdress it when she returned to Xela.

Dear Mr. President Bill Clinton,

I listened to your apology to Guatemala on the radio and was happy to hear your hopes that our country could be turned into “a marketplace of ideas.” Many of us in Guatemala believe this, too, and have tried to overcome our sad history by establishing businesses that will build Guatemala's future. But I am distressed to hear that you support this truth commission that is plowing through our country, digging up bodies and claiming that it is in the interest of truth and its healing powers. The truth is terrible and the truth does nothing to help the widows and orphans. What would help us recover is to be able to run successful businesses. Tourism is Guatemala's great hope, but your truth workers are destroying that hope. They make the world afraid to come here and instead of helping us to heal, they only make more victims.

Last year, eight men were interviewed by this truth commission, five soldiers and three guerrillas, who confessed to murdering my family. I watched my family die, and then these men confess and they are promised they will not be punished because they told the truth. I'm telling the truth and what do I get? Why is it that killers who tell the truth are free, when everyone else is imprisoned by fear? These eight killers live still in my town. They go to market, they go to church, one lives next door to me and there is nothing I can do. I can either live my life and see these men every day, or I can cease to live. I have chosen the second. Many women in the town are in the same position as me. They are afraid to leave their homes, afraid to run into the murderers. This truth commission forces people to hear the truth, but there is no reconciliation. It
turns our neighbors into murderers. It makes me afraid to leave my house, afraid to turn off my lights at night because I know who lives next door to me. I know I would be better off if I never knew who killed my family. Peace in Guatemala will not come by degrading the families of victims with such injustice, forcing them to hear confessions then to watch these murderers raise families and run things and be criminals only in more secret ways. I do not want a road named after my sons. I want to be able to live and run my business without being afraid that the next election will set them all killing again.

My older son, forced into the army, deserted and was executed for it. I didn't know why he deserted, he could not speak when he came home to me. But two years ago, I learned why. His friend survived the war and came to see me and to tell me that he helped plan my son's escape. They were in the army together, he said, they fought together. The training had been hard, but he said it was harder if you did not complete it. Because the Americans were there telling them they were being trained for war. So they completed their training and lived through a few battles against the guerrillas. But they did not always fight guerrillas and something happened that made my son decide to fake his own death. This is what happened: One day, my son and the other soldiers were ordered to attack a village called Lorotenango. Half the soldiers set the huts on fire, while the other half gathered the people at the edge of a ditch—mothers, children, old people. My son and his friend did their best to look busy and to hang back, but their commander saw that they were shy and not doing their jobs. The villagers were lined up and shot and put in the hole, while the commander chose a girl from the line and brought her out into the road. The girl was very pregnant and the commander threw her on the ground and called my son and his friend to assist him. They are terrified to disobey this commander, who inflicts on his soldiers whatever they refuse to inflict on their victims. My son had already been burned badly on the bottom of his feet for refusing to burn someone else. So they follow the commander and hold the woman down as they are told, while the commander strips the girl naked, takes his machete, and cuts her belly open all the way across. The girl is still alive and screaming and thrashing, but it is easy to hold her down because she is so small and young.
He said it was like holding down a mouse. They hold her down and the commander brings out the baby. The mother is still alive. She is lying there with her arms out and everyone can see inside her. Blood and muscle and intestines. The soldiers are kicking up dirt that settles inside of her. The commander cuts the cord and cleans the baby's mouth so it can breathe. It looked like a skinned kitten, covered in blood and a few patches of fur, he said. The commander handed the baby, a little girl, to my son. Told him that his job was to take the baby down to the base at Nueva Aldea de la Vida, fifteen miles away. My son carried that baby over the mountains for fifteen miles on burned feet. He bathed her in a stream and wrapped her in his coat while he shivered at night. He dressed a cut on her shoulder, because the commander had not been too careful and cut her, too, with his machete. He carried the baby because he could do nothing else. It was the best thing he could do for her. The baby was given to a woman there, who would take her to the orphanage in Xela as her own. Two weeks later, he faked his own death in battle and walked one hundred miles home to me.