Body of Truth (54 page)

“I have friends in Belize.” He looked at his watch. “They should already have flown in to the Cobán airstrip. They’ll wait there for me until daylight.”

Dr. Grajeda nodded thoughtfully. “I hope they have very good equipment on their plane. Cobán’s rain and fog require good equipment.”

“They live in Belize. They’re used to flying into Guatemala,” Haydon said.

“And you will be flying out to…?”

“Belize.”

Dr. Grajeda nodded again but did not respond immediately. He sat in his chair, his shoulders slumped, his whole demeanor that of exhaustion and dashed hopes. Janet was looking at the two men from across the room. The woman who had cleaned Janet’s feet had finished and was now the only person in the room besides the two of them and Dr. Grajeda. She was sitting alone near the doorway, her rifle lying across her lap. Janet’s feet had been bandaged, and she wore a new pair of sturdy Indian sandals and an expression of dazed resignation. She still kept her filthy and soggy sweater wrapped tightly around her, holding it in place with her folded arms.

“Then it’s all over?” Haydon asked.

“You will be stopped twice, at least,” Dr. Grajeda said, rousing himself from wandering thoughts, straightening up in his chair with a sigh. “By Cage’s people and by army intelligence directed by Pittner. Azcona will never show his face in this operation. He is probably making himself very visible somewhere far away. The searches will be thorough. You couldn’t sneak a toothbrush out.” Dr. Grajeda shook his head. “It was a good try.”

“What about Lena?” Haydon asked. “Is she going to leave with me?”

“Yes, my friend. After all of this, she is going with you.”

“I actually thought she might stay.”

“No one is staying. Once you leave, once Azcona learns he has not recovered the documents, he will throw a tantrum. What Pittner has managed to keep him from doing up to now, Pittner will no longer be able to prevent. Azcona is going to come. The people in this compound will leave when you leave tonight, but we will go north, into the Petén. Azcona will find only these few empty buildings on which to vent his fury.” He looked at Haydon. “Our little piece of the truth will have to wait to be assembled at some finer day in the future. We did our best.”

He stood up and dropped his own cigarette, which had long ago died in his fingers, onto the dirt floor. He turned to Janet.

“Mrs. Pittner,” he said. “If you want to talk to Lena…” He turned sideways and held his arm out toward the covered doorway.

Janet, surprised, looked at him with anticipation. She stood, a little stiffly, and she and Haydon followed Dr. Grajeda, who threw aside the burlap curtain. Within four steps they had entered the brilliantly lighted room.

Lena’s body lay on two
lepa
boards that had been placed across the seats of two wooden chairs set facing each other, and which themselves had been placed on cinder blocks, raising her body to just a little above waist high, the backs of the chairs forming bierlike brackets at her feet and head. Her hair had been combed out, clean and shiny, unlike the twig-tangled hair of that other Lena whom Haydon had seen so long ago in the morgue of the Cementerio General. She was wrapped in a white, gauzelike material, the kind the guerrillas must have bought by the dozens of yards for bandages, and which was pulled up under her chin as though she were wrapped tightly against the everlasting chill of death. White wads of the same material had been wedged into her nostrils and ears to keep out the insects. The room glittered with candles placed on every available surface, in every nook, on every small ledge, on sticks that had been wedged into the countless cracks of the cinder-block walls. The room was heavy with the odor of melting wax.

Janet staggered, and Haydon reached out and held her. Dr. Grajeda walked around to the other side of Lena’s crude bier and bent down and kissed her forehead. He straightened up and looked across at them.

“Go ahead and talk to her,” he said calmly. He seemed oddly serene, the way a man is serene about a tragedy after he has had time to give it much thought, to assimilate the shock of it into his theory of the universe and insulate himself from its hard truth with a myth of philosophy to make it bearable.

Haydon stood in the crude jungle shrine to Lena Muller, holding Janet’s shirking body and wondering if he ought to believe his eyes. This gray corpse could be a phantasm, a specter in the shimmering light of a hundred candles, which, if all the candles were extinguished in an instant by some eerie jungle gust, would vanish on the spiraling curls of smoke from a hundred wicks. He would stand in the dark heat and only imagine her; she would be elsewhere as she had been elsewhere from the first moment he had heard her name and seen her photograph and imagined her, no closer to her reality now than then.

This time Haydon had no problem identifying her. Her face was unblemished; there were no distorting wounds to interpret, no discolorations to decipher. Lena Muller was dead at last.

He was suddenly profoundly sad, even, irrationally, nostalgic for an irrevocable time that never had been. He wanted to talk to her, felt almost desperate to do so, and fought a swelling frustration at having been cheated of what he had anticipated for so long. By virtue of time’s trickery, the search for Lena Muller seemed to have taken a good portion of Haydon’s life. He would have felt no more deprived if he had known her a lifetime, so compressed by unreality had been his days and nights in Guatemala, so imbued with imagination had been his knowledge of this girl who always had existed just beyond his reach like a rumor of angels.

“I can assure you she will respond,” Grajeda said rationally. “She will speak in the most eloquent of all languages—silence—the silence of a life lost for reasons that only people who have something to lose will perceive as futile.” He looked at Haydon. “You may think me cruel, maybe cynical? Not so. You see, I envy her because her peculiar language possesses an integrity that ours can never achieve. That’s the way it is with such things. The only real moral integrity is living selflessly…only…we find it so painfully difficult to do…and, of course, it often comes to this.”

Dr. Grajeda looked down at her again. “And the rest of us? Well, the rest of us are left to go on compromising, to go on accommodating, to go on negotiating and ‘settling,’ until we finally hear ourselves speaking a language so different from hers, and from what our own ideals once had been, that we hardly can recognize our own voices. The way we eventually end up living our lives becomes so distorted from our dreams that we no longer speak the same language that we once imagined, and one day we wake up to find that we have become aliens to our own hearts.”

Dr. Grajeda’s eyes were dry as he stood beside Lena’s body and looked down at her.

“What happened?” Haydon asked.

Looking up. Dr. Grajeda fixed his eyes squarely on Haydon, and he shook his head in disbelief. “It was a banal death. An absurdity,” he said. “She died in a car crash, up there in Calvario, not five hours ago.”

“Oh, Christ!” Janet said. She pulled away from Haydon and stepped over to Lena as Dr. Grajeda moved back out of her way. She stood with her arms folded a moment, looking at Lena as though she were trying to remember, and then she reached down and put a hand on Lena’s forehead as if she were feeling for a fever. “She’s dead,” Janet said. “My God.”

Taking off his wire-rimmed glasses. Dr. Grajeda rubbed the bridge of his nose, and then he put them on again. He ran his hand through his thick, graying hair. When Janet started crying, quietly at first, then sobbing, standing beside Lena with her hands on the dead girl’s arm. Dr. Grajeda looked across Lena’s body and caught Haydon’s eye and tilted his head toward the door. Haydon followed him through.

“We have to talk about what happens now,” Grajeda said, pulling the burlap across the opening once again and moving away from the doorway. “For you, this is still an extremely critical situation.” He stroked his beard as he walked toward the center of the room. The woman with the rifle still sat alone near the door that led outside, and the gas lanterns still hissed overhead in the rafters. “Is the plane large enough to take her to Belize?”

“Yeah,” Haydon nodded. “It is.” He was irritated by the question. It was too soon for the prosaic and the ordinary. Lena was still there in his mind, floating in a night sky of candles.

“Good. Now, we have made a simple coffin of
lepa
, and I have four men who have volunteered to carry her back through the jungle. Even that is risky for them, because Cage, or even the G-2, may have changed their minds and followed you into Calvario. They could be at the truck. In any case, these men will load the body into the truck for you, wedge the coffin among the coffee sacks so that it will be secure. But you will have to drive the truck back to Cobán alone.”

“Christ, Grajeda. I was in the back of the truck the whole trip,” Haydon protested. “I don’t have the remotest idea where I am.”

Dr. Grajeda was shaking his head. “No, it’s not a problem. From Calvario there is only one paved road to the Cobán highway, the same highway that you drove on from Guatemala City. Anyone in Cobán can give you directions to the airstrip.”

Haydon looked at him. It didn’t matter. This was all madness, all of it. One more impossibility couldn’t make it any more insane than it already was.

“I am sorry,” Dr. Grajeda read Haydon’s face. “But none of my people would survive a roadblock.”

“No, it’s okay. I understand,” Haydon said. “But one thing, earlier you remarked that you thought Cage was our only ‘real’ problem. Maybe there’s something else I need to know.”

“Evera,” Grajeda said, ticking his head toward the back room. The girl stood and moved to its burlap-covered doorway as Grajeda and Haydon walked out into the compound. Fires were burning all around in the darkness, orange glimmers here and there around which small clutches of people lingered in the smoky haze. “There’s always a lot of cooking at night,” Grajeda said. “Because the last fires have to be out by four-thirty so the smoke will dissipate before daylight. The helicopters can see the smoke in the trees.”

They walked over to one fire and Grajeda asked for “
Dos cafecitos, por favor
,” and in a moment they were sipping a sweetened brew that didn’t taste exactly like coffee.

“It’s only half coffee,” Dr. Grajeda explained. “The rest is ground com with a sprinkling of cardamom. Ironically, here in the coffee regions, the indigenous people cannot afford pure coffee. It’s too expensive. And then what they do get is of an inferior quality. The good beans are saved for the stores where only the wealthy can afford to shop, or it is exported.”

He motioned for Haydon to sit on one of several logs that were cut knee high and sat on their ends around the fire.

“About Cage,” Grajeda said. “I know nothing specific, nothing to tell you to fear, but this Mrs. Pittner has gone to some risk to make sure he has made it to Cobán. Something is not right about this. Cage, as you know, is a man with no conscience. This has helped to keep him alive, of course. But it also has earned him many enemies.” Grajeda looked into his cup, trying to choose his words carefully. “The problem is, I am not so sure that Cage can distinguish anymore between his friends and his enemies. He is like a stick of dynamite that has been hidden in the jungle and allowed to deteriorate: the nitroglycerin has begun to separate, which makes it very unstable.”

Haydon and Dr. Grajeda sat a little apart from the others at the fire. The few Indians who had been around the fire where Dr. Grajeda had made himself at home seemed comfortable that the two men had joined them. They neither moved away in deference nor ceased their conversation, but continued talking softly among themselves, their lilting voices gliding through the strange syllables of their dialect. Haydon turned his feet a little to the fire, surprising himself that he was finding it pleasurable, that he was even enjoying the tangy ropes of smoke that whorled up from the small flames.

“You will have to leave within the hour,” Dr. Grajeda said, breaking the silence that both men would have preferred to continue a little longer. “You will have to make good time to reach the airstrip by dawn.”

“I’m surprised,” Haydon said, “that you seem to be taking her death…so well.”

Dr. Grajeda nodded. “I understand what you mean. Grief, where is this man’s grief, if he loved her so much?” Grajeda raised his head and looked up at the canopy of the jungle. “Do you hear those cicadas? They never stop in the jungle. Never. They are among my earliest memories of life in Guatemala.” He paused, looking up into the dark, listening with a vague smile. “I have a theory,” he said, lowering his eyes to Haydon and seeming, perhaps, to be a little wary of going on. “I have a theory that from the first day God made this country, millennia before it came to be known as Guatemala, he made a starving child to live here, a creature, as it were, who would be the visible conscience of his people. As long as lies and cruelty prevailed in the people’s hearts, the child would starve. That was his fate, to be a silent symbol, an ‘outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual corruption,’ proof of the people’s will to evil. And I also believe that on the same day that God made this child, he made the cicada to be his voice. Starving is a silent activity and a hungry child is easy to forget, so God made the cicada to cry for him. God knew even from the beginning that man had a secret weakness for, almost a love of, forgetting. So the cicada’s voice became the voice of remembrance, reminding man that the great cruelties of his heart do not always come from something as grandiose as his evil imaginings, but just as often, perhaps more often, they come from something as simple as forgetting. And from that day to this, the voice of the cicada has never ceased in Guatemala.”

Dr. Grajeda had finished his coffee, and the little bit left in his cup had gotten cold. He turned and tossed it out into the darkness. He paused again before going on, looking into the fire. He sighed.

“One day—I can’t even remember exactly how it was—I decided that God was cruel. I could look around me and see his cruelty everywhere. I decided to devote my life to helping the people he had turned his back on. So I have done that. I haven’t had a long life; I am still a young man, relatively speaking. But I did not anticipate the staggering cost of living such a spiritual arrogance. From the very beginning I encountered exhaustion, and I have been tired every moment of my life since. So deep is my weariness that I am tired even of my future. And so it is with the cicada. He is weary of his future too, because by now, after all these generations, he knows that man will never change.”