A Private Sorcery (32 page)

“You go next to see the minister of police of Zona Cuatro. Señor Perez. You should have no trouble with him. He studied at the Officers' Academy in the States. He is very cooperative with us. The body is in the morgue there. This paper states that you have been designated as custodian of the remains. So it's now between you and Señor Perez as to how they will be released to you. As a courtesy to an American citizen, we can provide transport of the body on a military flight. The private airlines will also do it—for a fee, of course.”

“I plan to have the body cremated,” Rena says.

She sees that Leonard is taken aback, realizes that they have not, in fact, discussed the details beyond claiming the body.

“Well, that makes it easy.” The assistant to the assistant ambassador reaches a clammy hand across the desk, a silly expectant expression on his face as though he is waiting now to be praised.

In the lobby, Leonard asks the guard for directions to the police station.
From her rudimentary Spanish, she makes out that they are being told to take the bus north on La Avenida de la Reforma. On the bus, they stand pressed together in the door well. At each stop, they have to step off to let people descend. In between, Leonard reads from the guidebook. “This is their Upper East Side.” He points toward luxury apartment buildings and well-appointed store windows. On the streets, she sees Ladinos in clothing that looks like what people wore five years ago in the States. “Where those private museums Sonia and Hank talked about are.”

To her surprise, the names slide off her tongue. “The Popol Vuh. And the Ixchel.” Leonard's eyebrows are knit together, and she wonders if he is worrying about Bernardo Domengo's body now less than ten blocks away, remembers how Saul once told her that Leonard had been one of those medical students who pass out the first time they see a cadaver. Like his father's mother, Saul had turned out to have a gut made of iron: “Even the instructor was green when it came to dissecting a penis. But I made it through the testicles without losing my lunch.”

She thinks about the dead bodies she's seen. A banker who'd had a heart attack in the back room at Alil's and whose body they'd all lugged into the alleyway before calling an ambulance. Rebecca, who'd gone to the next world without either of her breasts. Joe, before she made the decision to have the casket closed so Gene could come to the funeral without seeing his father's waxy face. A politician she'd worked for in Ohio who was killed in an airplane crash, after which the state party officials requested her help with the selection of his burial clothes. As though he were still running for office. As though Peter would open or close the pearly gates depending on whether his suit was navy or brown.

“They seemed pretty negative on the city,” Leonard says. “Hank said they were only here because the trips to the Highlands were too hard to manage with the baby. He was amazed that we were planning to stay longer than overnight.” He closes the guidebook. “Still, I wouldn't tell them why you're here.”

He holds the book against his chest, and for a moment Rena has the thought that he is signaling her. She glances around, but if there's someone
tailing them, it's impossible to tell who. She inhales—Ascher's claim that he could always detect the private investigators by their foul breath, all that coffee, all those cigarettes, all that greasy diner food churning around inside.

“We're in Zona Cuatro now. The downtown.” Outside, the traffic has increased and there are Indians again on the streets. They pass the bus station, and then a lot filled with rubble. Children, little children without diapers or underwear, no adults anywhere around, squat in the dust with sticks and pieces of metal in their hands. Skinny legs and swollen bellies. The noon sun baking their heads.

“Two more blocks, and we're there.”

She wants to take Leonard's hand, she wants to say,
Don't worry, you don't have to come inside the morgue, I don't expect you to do that
, but she can think of no way to say this without implying that she fears his knees or stomach won't endure what hers will.

“P
LEASE, PLEASE,” MURMURS
the minister of police's plump and gleaming undersecretary, Señor Padillo, for whose return they have waited nearly two hours while he completed his lunch and afternoon siesta. They follow him into a small room, where he seats himself behind a metal desk bare except for a cup with three sharpened pencils. He motions them to sit in two folding chairs that appear to have been brought in for the occasion.

Señor Padillo smiles and folds his chubby hands. “How like you our city?”

“Very much, thank you,” Rena says slowly.

Señor Padillo beams at her. “My English not good. You pardon me.”

Rena catches Leonard's eye. “I speak Spanish,” he says. “I could translate if you'd like.”

The man gestures to the ceiling, outside, to himself. His cheeks flush. “La señora, it not sad her if yes?”

They wait while he reads the papers Rena has brought from the embassy. His lips form every word. A day in prison, Saul has told her, is a day spent waiting in lines: lines for the toilet, lines for the cafeteria, lines
for the telephone. “A prescription for violence. All these hotheaded kids set to simmer hour after hour after hour. A way of telling us over and over that we're just lumps of flesh. You never think about it when you have control over your time, but time, even more than money, is the ultimate status symbol. That's what you buy with money—not having to wait.”

“How do you keep from losing it?” she'd asked.

“I'm ruthless about what I'll do to occupy myself. I used to be appalled when I'd see people bend the corner of a page in a book. Now I rip the pages out and clip them into packets I can fold in a pocket. My father sends me foam earplugs, and I keep them in whenever I'm not talking with someone. All day long, I read my way through the lines.”

Señor Padillo scratches his chin. His nails are meticulously manicured. Rena pictures a tiny woman with dark lashes applying a silver file to Señor Padillo's broad white nails. He speaks in Spanish to Leonard. The words move back and forth like a shuttlecock over a net.

Eventually, Leonard and Señor Padillo begin making little nodding gestures. “He says it's out of his jurisdiction to release the body,” Leonard tells Rena. “Only the minister of police, Señor Perez, can do that, and he's at the coast until Monday.”

She sees dark spots before her eyes. The fan overhead pushes the hot air around the room. She cannot imagine spending six more days in this city. She cannot imagine sharing the room at La Posada de las Madres with Leonard for six more nights. “Tell him he has to do something. That we cannot wait that long.”

Leonard and the undersecretary resume their volley of words. From Señor Padillo's excessively polite tone, Rena can tell that any attempt to decrease their ration of waiting will be futile. Leonard turns back to her. “He says that if this were a domestic affair, he might be able to handle it himself but not an international matter.”

She thinks of Saul's definition of a bureaucracy: actions pronounced as possible or impossible as though they were laws of nature rather than arbitrary rules. “Ask him if he could contact his boss by telephone.”

Leonard translates. Señor Padillo laughs and then Leonard smiles.
She has the distinct impression that there is some sort of man-to-man banter that Leonard is leaving untranslated, something along the lines of how the undersecretary does not want to lose his balls and that is what would happen were he to disturb the minister of police on his vacation.

Señor Padillo pushes back his chair. Standing, he shakes Leonard's hand, bows slightly to Rena. “
Lunes, a las nueve.
” Monday, nine o'clock.

I
T'S PAST FOUR
by the time they leave the police station. Leonard takes her arm. “In the morning, we'll go back to the embassy and see what they can do to intervene.”

“Yes,” Rena says, but already she knows that nothing will happen, that they can spend two days going back and forth between the assistant to the assistant ambassador and the undersecretary to the minister of police, and even if they're able to jump this up to the assistant ambassador himself, all that will happen will be more apologies for their having to wait.

The day feels topsy-turvy. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner—that old unsettled feeling from childhood when there'd never been regular meals or regular bedtimes, when Eleanor, having eaten at work, would forget that Rena had not. In the cab back to the hotel, Leonard rubs his eyes.

“Why don't you lie down when we get back? You could take a nap before we go for dinner.”

Leonard covers his mouth as he yawns. “If you don't mind, I think I will.”

While he naps, Rena reads in the courtyard on a wobbly wrought-iron chair under a palm tree. It's a pitiful specimen with withered brown leaves that bring to mind a passage Saul had shown her on the occasion of their trip to St. John, a scalding commentary by a heat-addled nineteenth-century traveler on the depravity of the palm tree: “An overrated atrocity of a weed with revolting leaves and a scaly trunk.”

A baby starts to scream. A hunger scream. Although there are five
other couples here with infants, she knows it's Carlos. The door to Hank and Sonia's room swings opens, and Hank bolts past her on legs that drop clumsily one in front of another. “The bottle. I have to get the bottle from the kitchen.” Sonia follows with the screaming Carlos, his face and neck splotched with red. “All right, all right,” Sonia says. “It's coming. Hold your britches.”

Rena stands to give Sonia her shaded chair. Sonia flops down. She's barefoot, and one strap of her sundress has fallen off her shoulder. She leans back so her neck rests on the top of the chair and her short freckled legs stretch in front. In the one piece of frivolity Rena can detect about her, her toenails are painted gold.

“Here, I'll take him for you,” Rena says, reaching for Carlos.

“Be my guest. It's like holding a car alarm.”

Rena presses the baby's abdomen against her chest. She bounces him up and down as she walks back and forth. “Your baba's coming,” she whispers. “Yes, yes, you'll get your baba.”

Hank returns, face and neck wet with sweat. “I can't get this thing screwed in right.”

Sonia examines the nipple and bottle. “This nipple isn't ours. Ours are the clear ones in the Ziploc on the shelf.”

“Shit.” Hank races back toward the kitchen. Sonia rolls her eyes.

“I can't blame it on his sex. He's equally useless with a car. And don't even think about tools. Thank God he can do theoretical physics. Otherwise, he'd have to be on welfare.”

Rena can feel Carlos trying to suck on her neck. As a baby, Gene would make sucking motions while he slept. What are you dreaming about, she'd murmur into his crib. Warm milk going down your gullet?

When the bottle arrives, Sonia takes Carlos. He drinks avidly, his hands lovingly fingering the plastic. As he relaxes, so does Sonia. “Imagine what he'd be like with a boob.” She kisses the top of his head. “A little lady-killer.”

T
HE FOUR OF THEM
, five including Carlos asleep in the baby
carrier, go to a Chinese restaurant Sonia and Hank were told about by the social worker from the adoption agency.

“What a stitch!” Sonia exclaims as they're seated. The room is decorated with red and green Christmas tree lights and yellow paper lanterns, and the menu features
chop sue
and
eg rol
. Sonia orders bottles of the local beer for everyone. “No teetotalers,” she announces. As expected, the food is ghastly, with everything sunk in an orange sweet and sour sauce. Sonia, on her third beer, twirls a pineapple chunk on the tip of a chopstick, close, Rena fears, to degenerating to child's food play.

Neither Hank nor Sonia is particularly curious about Leonard and her, or why they are here. They ask no questions beyond where they each live. When Rena says Manhattan, Sonia commences a story about her years at Barnard and the apartment she shared with four other girls above the Chock Full O' Nuts coffee shop. Only on the subject of Leonard and Rena's travel plans do Sonia and Hank seem interested. “You absolutely cannot stay here,” Sonia declares. “That would be like coming to the U.S. and visiting only Pittsburgh.”

Sonia's voice shifts to a podium register. “This is a land of waterfalls and conifers and wildflowers in lavenders and crimsons you've only seen on silks. There are seventeen languages spoken in the Highlands. The people, despite the massacres they have endured from their government, maintain a way of life that centers on the earth, on what they create with their hands. If there is a God and he respires, the mists that cross the peaks in the early mornings are his breath. Antigua, Atitlán, the ruins at Tikal: these are sites of wonder. This place”—Sonia sweeps a hand over the vinyl booth and the plastic packets of soy sauce—“is a shit hole.”

• • •

A
FTER DINNER
, H
ANK
escorts Leonard to the Guatel office so Leonard can telephone Klara. Rena, carrying Carlos (Hank has transferred the baby carrier to her due to Sonia's delicate back), walks with Sonia back to the
posada
. The air has cooled with the setting sun. Rena
drapes her cotton sweater over the carrier. Sonia tucks the sweater around Carlos' feet.

“It's like being on a roller coaster,” Sonia says. “There are moments of bliss. Then there are times, in the heat of the day, when he cries and cries and I think this is a living hell.”

“It gets better. It's all about the digestive system. Once that matures, they settle down.”

“I know—the proverbial settled baby. Only I think that assumes a different kind of mother.”

Rena feels Carlos stirring from sleep.