The Dragon Griaule (36 page)

THE SKULL

I

This much is known:

Following the death of the dragon Griaule, after his scales had been removed, his blood drained and stored in canisters, his flesh and organs variously preserved, his bones pulverized and sold as a remedy for cancer, incontinence, arthritis, indigestion, eczema, and much else . . . after all of this, Griaule’s skull (nearly six hundred feet in length) was maneuvered onto a many-wheeled platform and hauled across eleven hundred miles of jungle to the court of Temalagua. The history of this journey, which lasted two decades and featured dozens of pitched battles, a brief and nearly disastrous passage by sea, and cost many thousands of lives, would require several volumes to recount. Perhaps someday that history will be told, but for the purposes of our story suffice it to say that by the time the skull reached its destination, a tract of land outlying the palace grounds, King Carlos VIII, who had purchased it from the city fathers of Teocinte, was dead and buried, and his son Adilberto the First had ascended to the Onyx Throne.

Adilberto’s obsessions were not those of his father. He spent the bulk of his reign pursuing wars of aggression against neighboring states and the skull became a roosting place for birds, home to monkeys, snakes, and palm rats, and was overgrown by vines and fungus. His son, a second and lesser Adilberto, restored the skull to a relatively pristine condition, transformed the land around it into an exotic garden, bronzed the enormous fangs and limned its eye sockets and jaw with brass, jade and
copper filigrees that accentuated its sinister aspects and inspired the creation of tin masks that years later came to be sold in the tourist markets. He adorned the interior with teak and ebony furnishings, with gold, silk and precious stones, and therein held bacchanals that established new standards for debauchery (murder, torture, and rape were commonplace at these revels) and contributed greatly toward bankrupting an economy already decimated by the excesses of Adilberto I and Carlos VIII.

Upon his death (under circumstances that even a lenient observer would term suspicious), a third Adilberto known as
El Frio
(the Cold One) seized power following a protracted and bloody struggle with his elder brother Gonsalvo.
El Frio
, a religious zealot and occultist, intended to destroy the skull, but received warnings from his fortunetellers that such an act of desecration would not have a felicitous result. Instead, he devoted his energies to the systematic slaughter of his enemies, whom he apparently saw under every rock, for during his reign he put to death over two hundred thousand of his countrymen. His heir, a fourth Adilberto, was so ashamed of his father’s legacy that he changed his name to Juan Miel, a name whose proletarian flavor embodied his proto-Marxist view of the world, and abolished the monarchy, thereby ushering in a period of tumult unparalleled in the tumultuous history of Temalagua. Forty-four days after initiating this radical reform, he was hacked limb from limb by a crowd of cane workers whom he had been addressing – they were inspired to take action by his chief rival in the nascent presidential campaign, a wealthy plantation owner who had suggested that were they to act otherwise, they might lose their jobs. Thenceforth the country was governed by a succession of generals and politicians who had all they could do to combat innumerable revolutions and the economic incursions of more powerful nations to the north. The palace burned to the ground during the early years of the twentieth century and by the 1940s the gardens built by Adilberto II had merged with the surrounding jungle and the skull was hidden by dense vegetation, though it maintained a significant place in the public consciousness and was considered to have been the root cause of Temalagua’s fall from grace . . . if, indeed, grace had ever prevailed in the region.

Travelers occasionally visited the skull – many would pose for photographs inside the jaws, standing next to one of the brass-covered fangs, sheathed now in verdigris, and then they would hurry away, oppressed by the atmosphere of foreboding generated by the huge bony snout with its barbarous decorations protruding from epiphytes and tree ferns and the shadow of the thick canopy. Those who camped overnight at the site reported disquieting dreams, and several adventurers and scientists who had undertaken longer stays went missing, their number inclusive of a herpetologist who was discovered years later living with coastal Indians and had no memory of his former life. In the 1960s the city (Ciudad Temalagua) mushroomed, growing out and away from the jungle that enclosed the skull in much the same fashion that Teocinte had spread in relation to Griaule, as if obeying some arcane and relativistic regulation. No attempt was made to clear the land or destroy the skull, and the area was accorded the status of an historical site, one deemed essential to an understanding of contemporary Temalagua, yet was neglected by historians who preferred to ignore it rather than to risk their lives by studying its central relic (a tactic frequently employed in places whose history is dominated by villains and villainy). Slums sprang up along the western edge of the jungle, creating a buffer zone between the city and the skull, and producing a steady stream of abandoned and abused children who wandered off in one direction or another, into the urban sprawl or the vegetable, there to meet a fate that, although it could be guessed, was rarely verifiable. Over the next forty years, as the country declined toward the millennium, impoverished by corporate greed and narco-business, the slums became a breeding ground for fierce criminal gangs that contended for control of the streets with death squads composed of extreme right-wing factions within the army; yet even they were reluctant to enter the jungle and confront the strange cult purported to flourish there.

It is at this point that our story becomes the story of the woman who came to be called La Endriaga, and veers away from historical fact, entering the realm of supposition, anecdotal evidence, and the purely fictive, which are, after all, the
most reliable forms of human codification. Her birth name was Xiomara Garza (though she was more widely known as Yara) and she was born in Barrio Zanja, a desolation of shacks and streets without names situated on a hillside overlooking the jungle. During the rainy season, mudslides intermittently cut wide swaths through the barrio, killing dozens of people and leaving hundreds more homeless; but since the shacks were flimsily constructed of plywood, cardboard, and so forth, and because moving to another location was not an option for the majority of the survivors, within a week or two a new and equally fragile settlement would be established. By many accounts Yara was a happy child, yet this might be doubted – Barrio Zanja was not an environment conducive to happiness and other accounts testify to her sullen temperament and stoicism. In sum, far more people claim to have been familiar with her as a young girl than lived in the barrio at the time, so it is probably safest to say that her early childhood is cloaked in mystery.

Images of an eleven-year-old Yara were among those discovered in a digital camera belonging to an Austrian pedophile, Anton Scheve, whose body was found lying in a pool of blood on the floor of his hotel room, his chest punctured by multiple stab wounds. In the pictures Yara, a lovely dark-haired girl with a pellucid complexion, can be seen supine on a bed (the same beside which Scheve breathed his last) in various stages of undress, her eyes heavily lidded, this somnolence attributable to the glue-soaked paper sack crumpled on the mattress next to her. As these images were the last recorded by Scheve, the police put forth a sincere effort to locate Yara – sex tourism, while officially discouraged, constituted a sizable portion of Temalagua’s tottering economy. Yara, however, was nowhere to be found and so, prevented by her absence from demonstrating their egalitarian approach toward the prosecution of murder, no matter the despicable character of the victim, the government printed Scheve’s images (with black bars obscuring her genitalia) in the capital’s largest newspaper alongside an article decrying the moral contagion that had been visited upon the country.

The next we hear of Yara comes in the form of a partial
memoir published in
An Obscure Literary Journal
(both a description and the actual name of the publication) by George Craig Snow, a strikingly handsome young expatriate with dirty blond hair and weary-looking blue eyes and a wry manner who lived in Ciudad Temalagua between the years 2002 and 2008. As a child he never thought of himself as ‘George,’ a name he associated with dweebs, wimps, and insurance adjustors, and so he went by his mother’s maiden name, Craig. During the first years of his stay in Temalagua, he worked for a fraudulent charitable interest called Aurora House as a correspondent – his job was to write letters in clumsy English, in a childlike scrawl, that pretended to be the grateful, semi-literate messages of the children supported by Aurora House. These were mailed to gullible contributors in the United States who donated twenty dollars each per month in order to sponsor a Pilar or an Esteban or a Marisol. Included with the letters were pleas for more money and photographs that Snow snapped at random of happy, healthy children in school uniforms, proofs of the good effect that the contributions had on the malnourished children shown in photographs previously sent. To be clear, no child so depicted ever received a dime of charity from Aurora House, nor did any child whatsoever benefit from the enterprise. The majority of the monies collected went into the pocket of Pepe Salido, a lean, gray-haired man who put Snow in mind of a skeletal breed of dog with a narrow skull and prominent snout. The remainder of the funds were doled out in minuscule salaries to the Aurora House staff, among them several gringos like Snow, slackers who were cynical enough to find the swindle bleakly amusing, understanding that even if the money had been donated to the cause, twenty dollars a month paid by however many well-meaning housewives and idealistic students and guilty alcoholics was insufficient to counter the forces arrayed against the children of Temalagua.

Snow lived with a woman of Mayan heritage, a leftist teaching assistant at San Carlos University by the name of Expectación (his memoir was entitled
He Lives With Expectation
), who made her home in Barrio Villareal, a working class neighborhood in process of decaying into a slum. When not on the job, his two
preferred activities were having sex with Ex (his lover’s nickname) and smoking heroin, the latter serving to cut into the frequency of the former. Evenings he would sit on his stoop, high, shirtless, and shoeless, scuffing up dirt with his toes, studying the stars that emerged from a pall of pollution above the low tile roofs, and taking in the pedestrian parade: shop girls scurrying home with their eyes lowered and bundles clutched to their breasts; short, wiry workmen who carried machetes and nodded politely in passing; dwarfish, raggedy street kids holding paper sacks with soggy bottoms drifting along in small, disheveled packs – on occasion, sensing a kindred spirit, they would hover beside Snow’s stoop, gazing up toward the rooftops and tracking things he could not see. One evening as he sat there, joined on his watch by a wizened-looking kid who could have been ten but was likely fifteen and, except for stringy, dark hair, resembled a tiny old man in grungy shorts and a faded Disneyworld T-shirt . . . one evening, then, he spotted a teenage girl approaching through the purpling air. Slender, leggy, pale. Black curls cascaded down over her shoulders, an opulent architecture of hair at odds with her overall Goth-punk aesthetic: black jeans, black kicks, and a long-sleeved black turtleneck. Black fingernails, too. Heavy make-up. She walked with an unhurried step, yet her movements were crisp and purposeful, and she had about her such an aura of energy, it seemed to Snow that he was watching the approach of a small storm. He pictured a funnel cloud of dirt and masonry chunks flying up in her wake, an image that prompted him to grin goofily at her as she came alongside them. She did not seek to avoid his scrutiny, but stopped in front of the stoop and gave an upward jerk of her head that spoke to him, saying, You got something on your mind? Spit it out.

‘
Buenas noches
,’ said Snow.

The kid stuck his face into his paper sack and huffed furiously, and the girl asked him in Spanish, ‘Who is this asshole?’

‘He lives here,’ said the kid groggily.

‘I speak Spanish,’ Snow said. ‘You can talk to me.’

The girl ignored him and asked the kid why he hung out with this
pichicatero
. The kid shrugged.

‘
Pichicatero
? What’s that?’ Snow asked the kid.

‘A fucking drug addict,’ said the girl in lightly accented English.

‘He’s the addict.’ Snow gestured at the kid. ‘For me it’s just a hobby.’

With its mask of mascara and bloody lip gloss, her face was trashy, beautified not beautiful, yet once he had wiped away the make-up with a mental cloth, he realized the basic materials were quality. A casual observer would perhaps have judged the face too bland, too standard in its perfection, like a schoolboy’s rendering of his favorite teenage angel vampire slut, but to Snow, a connoisseur, it was exuberantly and idiosyncratically feminine, a raptor’s purity of purpose implied by the way her lips curved above a slight overbite, the delicate molding of the tiny, tapered chin, and beside the nose flare of a nostril, the necessary flaw, a pink irregularity, a scar that, had it been treated properly, would have required but a stitch or two to close. Her skin seemed to carry a faint luminosity. Her irises and eyebrows were such a negative color they might have been cutaways in her flesh that permitted a lightless background to show through. She was, Snow decided, scary beautiful.

‘Dirty feet,’ she said to him. ‘Dirty fingernails. Dirty hair.’ She gave him a quick once-over. ‘Dirty heart.’

Though too stoned to be offended, Snow felt that he should offer an objection and said mildly, ‘Hey. Watch your mouth.’

She switched to Spanish and addressed the kid. ‘Be careful! You don’t want to wind up a shriveled soul like him.’