Red Jungle (17 page)

He rushed out of the room and started to run down the corridor. He looked down at his feet; he hadn’t put on shoes. He ran, tucking in his shirt. He didn’t think that he’d closed the door to the room. Carlos was going to surprise her in the garden; he felt it. It was the way Carlos had looked around as he spoke. It was only natural for a man to do that. He flew down the corridor.
God damn it, all the rules and now this
.

He stopped for moment in the lobby. He was breathing hard and sweating. He wiped his face. He looked for Carlos on the terrace and saw him doing exactly what he’d feared. He waited a moment, pulled his shirttails out again and wiped his face off. He told himself that he had to be calm, that he would walk out the side door and intercept the man.

He was lost. His room was on the other side of the hotel.
I was lost. My room is on the other side of the hotel.
He repeated it again and again as he walked across the lobby and out the door to the garden. He saw Carlos coming down the path towards him. He was alone now.

Russell smiled at Beatrice’s husband. Carlos looked at him, nonplussed at first, then smiled back, recognizing him.

“Damn Guatemalans,” Russell said. He didn’t know why he said it. Pure nerves.

“Mr. Price. I was just asking about you.”

“I’m lost. Can you believe it?” he said, and smiled. “I thought my room was this way. But I don’t think it is.”

“I’m so glad you could come,” Carlos said. “Have you seen my wife?”

“Wife? This morning. We had part one of the interview. I’m afraid I was feeling a little under the weather. Damn food here. Your countrymen are always poisoning me. I had to lie down, don’t know where she is. She said you were coming by helicopter. Wish I had.”

He told himself to shut up. It was difficult; he was trying to bury Carlos with bluster.

“Are you all right?” Selva asked.

“Well, if puking your guts out is all right, then I suppose I’m fine,” Russell said.

“I’m so sorry. Can I get you something? I can send one of the men down to the town for you. To the
farmácia.
”

“Would you? God! Yes, I was just trying to buy something here, but there’s nothing,” Russell said.

“Yes. Of course. I can send a doctor too, if you like?” Carlos said.

“Doctor? No. No. Just something that will put a cork in it.”

“Of course. Let me call my wife and tell her.”

Russell held his stomach. “If you don’t mind, I think I could use something right away.”

“Of course. I’m sorry. Sit down . . . or go to your room. What’s the room number?”

“1211,” Russell said.

“1211. I’ll have my wife go up and see what they can bring you. Why don’t you go to the room, and we’ll have some tea sent up.
Yerba Buena
is excellent for the cramps. I’m sure they have it.”

He’d come up and stood by Russell, genuinely concerned. Carlos put his briefcase down. They shook hands, then Russell watched him call Beatrice. He asked her to go to room 1211, and told her the American journalist was with him in the lobby and had fallen ill.

Russell could finally breathe. It had worked. Carlos went out to the hotel’s entrance where he’d stationed his bodyguards.

“He’s coming here,” she said. Russell walked back into the room. The curtain was pulled open. He pulled the bed cover up and looked at her. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I came up here. I was afraid you would leave,” she said. “I need you so much.”

He looked at her. He didn’t understand the last two hours, the way they had both flouted the danger, but he knew they had to get through the next thirty minutes. He looked around the room.

“Do you understand? I’ve had no one to talk to, no one, for three years. Do you know what that’s like, for people like us?” she said.

“Beatrice.
He’s coming up here, right now. Are you ready for that?” he asked.

“Just tell me you love me.”

He looked at her again, in shock. He wanted to open the door to the room, and decided it was best he did. He could see the empty corridor, its brown tile floor gleaming in the sunlight.

“Please tell me you won’t stop seeing me,” she said, standing behind him.

“I won’t stop seeing you. We met and had an interview at the bar. I told him that, just now,” he said. He turned around, went to the bed, and sat down facing the hallway.

They didn’t say anything. Russell just kept glancing up and looking at the corridor. It seemed like hours before he saw the general and one of his men coming towards them.

“Well, old boy, I’ve ordered you some Lomotil. I sent one of the men down to
Pana
for some. It’s wonderful for the cramps,” Carlos said. He crossed the room and kissed his wife.

“What do you think,
Gorda?
Will he live?”

“Amoebas, I suppose,” she said. Beatrice’s voice was a little distant.

“Yes, I suppose so,” Carlos said. “You can take the test. I’ll have a kit brought in to you.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve taken it before, unfortunately,” Russell said.

“You haven’t gone swimming in the lake, have you?” Carlos said, joking. “It’s all the shit that gets in. The water looks beautiful, but I’m afraid they’ve spoilt it for swimming. You’ll get amoebas swimming in the lake.”

Russell turned on the bed and looked at the two of them standing together. He smiled weakly at them both.

“No, I haven’t been swimming,” he said.

“Americans are always getting something,” Beatrice said. She put her arm around her husband’s waist and drew him close to her.

“I’m afraid she’s right. It’s the curse of the United Fruit Company,” the general said.

Beatrice hit Carlos playfully on the shoulder. When she did, Russell knew they’d escaped this time. He looked up at the ceiling, relieved.

They left a short time later. The bodyguard brought him some medicines in a plastic bag. The man seemed suspicious by nature. Russell took the bag, thanking the man profusely, and closed the door. He’d told them that if he felt better later, he would come to their dinner party.

He opened the window. Their little boat was gone. He threw the plastic bag on the bed and went in to shower. He drove back to the capital an hour later.

FIFTEEN

Don Russell?” the woman said. She seemed to know him. An Indian woman was standing at his front door. She was crippled, something terribly wrong with her hip. Her name was Olga Monte de Oro, she told him. She’d grown up with his mother, she said. She had been born on their family’s plantation.

He didn’t know how she’d heard about him, or gotten his address. He’d come to the door, ready to go to the office, and she’d appeared. She was very dark-skinned, her hair gray. Her shoes were cheap-looking and dirty with mud. He’d noticed her shoes right away.

He didn’t know what the woman could possibly want with him. He hadn’t recognized his nanny.

“Sí,
” he said. She had that Mayan face, the thrusting jaw. She was ugly, he supposed, looking at her. He felt immediately bad for thinking it. The shoulder a little frightening, the way it sloped to compensate for her bad hip.

The porter had called from below and asked if he could let in a
muchacha
. The word
muchacha
here meant a domestic. He thought one of his colleagues from work, who happened to live nearby, had sent him a message via his maid.

“I’m from
Las Flores,
” the woman said. “I knew you when you were a little boy.” She thrust a photograph into his hand. He looked at the old photo; it was a picture of his mother as a young girl and an Indian girl, their arms around one another.

He took the photograph, not knowing what he should do. He invited the old woman into the apartment. She was carrying a small cardboard box wrapped with dirty-looking twine.

“Don Russell, no tengo donde irme
.” I don’t have anywhere to go, she said. She said it evenly, without emotion, as if all her emotions had been used up and there was nothing left.

“I’m sorry,
señora,
but I—” For some reason, with his mother’s photo in his hand, he couldn’t lie to her. He’d lied and he’d lied about his family, but he couldn’t lie to this woman.

“I breast feed you,” she said. “When your mother was sick.” She was looking at him hopefully.

He moved away from her. She stepped towards him and knelt down on the floor at his knees.

“I want to go back to the plantation, but your aunt says I can’t go,” she said, pleading. “Please,
Don
Russell, please take me back. I was born there. I gave you the milk.” She held one of her breasts.

He was shocked by her kneeling. He turned the light on in the hallway; his finger had been on the switch. The foyer lit up. He saw the top of her head, the part of her black hair.

“Señora,
please get up. Please,” he said. He bent down and made her get up off the floor. He would never forget her on the floor, in that position. He remembered so well, in the church at Colomba when he was a child. The Indians would sometimes prostrate themselves in front of the altar. It frightened him as a child, and she’d brought it all back. She’d brought back the afternoons coming onto the plantation with his mother. The way the old men would stop, their machetes in their hands, the way they’d doff their caps, the way the children would stop playing as he and his mother rode by, the way the Indian women would bow silently as they carried enormous loads of firewood on their heads, and all of this as they sailed by, he not realizing his mother was a little drunk, and her automatically giving the nod. The nod that said conquest and tradition. The nod that said: This is my land and you will be my people, we are never to touch, but I am the princess and you the subjects. We have a
social and historical contract
. He had understood it all, and he had buried it so deep that he didn’t know where it had been until now.

It was the afternoon, with the shadows of clouds and no rain coming, and him thinking only about seeing Beatrice again, when he opened the door to confront this woman and his past, and he didn’t want any of it. Nothing.

He wanted to tell her to leave. But he couldn’t, because suddenly he realized that the woman and he were connected; that he had a place here, a responsibility to her, whether he liked it or not. He couldn’t run away from that. It was his duty to do something for her. He embraced her, and heard her start to sob.

“Olga. Yes, of course I remember. Of course,” he said again, holding her. “Of course you can go back.”

For a moment he stood looking at her, at her poverty, and her dirty plastic shoes and her helplessness, at her raggedy ignorance and her inability to read, at the ten children she’d had, at the war that had killed half of them, at the husband who had beaten her, at the warm rain that had soaked her as she’d wandered the streets of the capital looking for jobs as a maid, and the rejections she’d gotten because she was crippled. All of it sickened him, making him look at his briefcase by the door and then the phone and the door again as he closed it and led her to the kitchen, her cardboard box in his hand as she talked about his mother. She was home; he could tell it in her voice. This was where she belonged, with him, her voice said.

He turned and wanted to tell her to please stop crying. Instead, he told her that she needed to rest. She looked at him and said, “
Sí, patron
.” The contract that had been lost was found again: the contract that had been written the day his great grandfather and some
pistoleros
cleaned the land and said, “We are the whites, you are the conquered, and we will take care of you.” It was a filthy contract, written in Indian blood, and it had been honored for a hundred years—only interrupted by the war. Now this woman had come with her torn end, asking for her meager rights. That the contract had been unfair wasn’t the point, he realized. It had been signed, and he had to live up to it for better or worse, because she had nothing else.

He walked silently towards the maid’s quarters that he’d never wanted filled. He could have hired a maid, but none had come like this, with the contract and his mother’s photo.

He glanced at the photo again. His mother in the photo was maybe ten years old. She had her arm around an Indian girl of the same age. His mother was well-dressed, the other girl was in dirty clothes.

Russell threw Olga’s cardboard box on the little bunk bed and looked around the room. Some other maid had left a picture of Jesus Christ on the wall. He’d never taken it down, as he thought it quaint and ridiculous: The bleeding heart of Jesus Christ. He’d come in drunk with friends and shown it to them, and they’d laughed about the saccharine quality of it, with its pretense of authority. He looked at it now, ashamed for laughing, and thought about all the women who had lived in this room and been the conquered. He thought about all the times their names had been called with no love, only with the cold hard reality of their position. How lonely had this room been at midnight for those wretched women?