Red Jungle (3 page)

“Olga. Olga…” Isabella said.

“Manda?
” the Indian girl answered.

Olga Montes De Oro stepped out of the bedroom and looked at Isabella. The two young women had known each other since they could remember. They were born two days apart, there on the plantation. If they weren’t sisters, they were—in Guatemalan terms—something very close. (Isabella’s American husband would never understand these mysterious relationships.) The sight of Olga made Isabella feel a little better. A little reassured. Like the day that Olga’s brother found them lost in the
cafetales
when they were children, terrified by the red ants they’d found crawling up their naked feet and legs.

“The child?” Isabella asked.

“Sleeping now,
Doña
Isabella,” Olga said. Isabella was ten when Isabella’s father insisted that Olga begin using the
doña
when she addressed her friend. The two girls laughed about it; it was as if Isabella had suddenly grown up. Olga was jealous, but never said anything to her friend. She wanted to be
Doña
Olga. Olga told her father. He said that she would be a
doña
when Olga saw pigs fly over their house, and laughed, rolling a cigarette with one hand. When Olga asked her father why her friend Isabella was a
doña
and she wasn’t, her father, a worker who smelled of sweat and cheap alcohol, and who’d never had more than three quetzales in his pocket at any one time in his life, said it was because they were poor and Isabella was rich. He told her it would be that way until the sea dried up and God came back to earth to take them all to heaven, rich and poor alike.

“I may drive us. Drive us to Quetzaltenango,” Isabella said. The two young women looked at each other in a way they didn’t normally. Each had a role to play—each had to give meaning to her society, master and servant. But this morning everything seemed to be different: the air itself seemed charged, dangerous, electric, like the afternoon when they had been lost together. They could hear the rain hitting the roof, and Isabella wasn’t sure that Olga had heard her. She wanted to reach for Olga’s hand and hold it, as she had when they had been children. She wanted to say she was frightened, but she didn’t.

“Did you hear me, Olga?” Isabella said instead.

“Yes, madam.” Olga’s eyes betrayed the obvious—that she was frightened, too. She had heard gunshots, and the radio said the war had started in earnest and that someone called Jimmy Carter was going to help them. In Olga’s mind, she saw Jimmy Carter dressed like a Catholic saint, with a stigmata on his naked side from a Roman lance. He wore a crown of dollar bills.

“I’ve called Don Roberto in the capital, but he’s not answering,” Isabella said. “I’ll try again later.”

The cook came running out of the kitchen, across the wet patio. Also a young girl, the cook was heavy-set, with thick legs. Her stomach pressed against the cheap fabric of her cotton dress, which had cost her exactly two weeks’ wages. She stopped under the awning, her hair shiny and very black. If there was a war, she knew nothing about it. The cook would die in a government ambush, her brain pierced by a bullet made in Indiana in a small factory with no sign. Ironically, the bullet was made by a woman, and fired by a woman who was fighting “in the name of the fatherland.”

Isabella watched the cook hesitate, pull open the screen door, and then walk in. The young woman, who’d also grown up on the plantation, smelled of wood smoke. They used wood in the kitchen to cook tortillas long after they could have used propane.

“Madam, I have the pork for lunch. Will there be anyone else today?”

“No,” Isabella said. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Don Antonio?” the cook asked. “Will he be coming to lunch?”

They heard more shots then, and there was no mistaking them; they were shots and they were coming from the south near the town, less than five kilometers away. The women could hear them over the rain and the rolling thunder, which had broken twice over the house since Isabella had come to use the phone.

Isabella instinctively told herself not to show fear; that if she did, that somehow it would be the beginning of something bad, something she couldn’t control, and the people around her would lose their courage too and they would all be lost. She felt, at this moment, as if she were the center of all their universes. She was the heart and soul of the plantation that her grandfather had left them. After all, she was a Cruz, and had her grandfather’s lion heart. She had the boy in the other room. He was sick. He was too small to be sick here on the plantation, with a war starting. He was fragile.
What kind of Yankee was fragile?
she wondered.

“I want you to turn on the radio in the living room,” Isabella said to the cook, instead of saying:
“God help us. They’re here. The communists are here, and will kill us.”

Her father had died of throat cancer a year before in London. She had loved him very very much.

At that moment Isabella, only twenty-one, felt very young, too young for the shooting and too young for the child. Her father had said he would not die in this wretched country full of communists, and Isabella had cried. He had gone to London and died surrounded by English nurses. He had spoken to them in Spanish, and they had not understood a word of his confession. Whatever he told them went to the grave with him.

He had been close to many presidents of the republic, especially Araña. Perhaps it was about that—the things her father had done to keep people in power. He had helped with the Bay of Pigs invasion. He had died wondering why Castro had won the battle. He blamed Kennedy, but was very sorry when he’d heard he’d been assassinated, because Kennedy was a good Catholic.

“Did you hear me?” Isabella said.

“Sí, señora.”

“Not the records, Maria …
the radio
. I want to hear the radio. It’s noon, and they play the marimba at noon time. I want to hear it the way papa used to. Do you remember, Maria? With a gin and lemonade before lunch.”

“Sí, señora,
” the cook, Maria, said. She passed Isabella, moving into the dark hallway with its yellow wallpaper from Belgium, past the room with the infant and Olga. Maria walked on towards the living room, all of them ignoring the sound of the gunfire. She walked to where the big old-fashioned wooden radio sat in the living room.

Isabella heard the sound of the radio suddenly. A BBC reporter’s earnest voice filled the hallway. Isabella had been listening last night, alone, drinking, waiting for her lover, trying to get some news. She had had many lovers since her divorce, but this one was important because he was the first she felt anything for. She was a modern woman and a failed Catholic. Antonio De La Madrid had called this morning and said that he couldn’t come to lunch as planned. There was no reason to ask why. It was the guerrillas; they were everywhere, he told her. He’d seen them on the road below his own plantation house. He didn’t dare leave his mother alone. He was only nineteen, but was the head of the house because his father lived most of the time in New York, where he raced horses. They had hired some American mercenaries and were hoping for the best, he told her.

“No. Not that,” she said loudly. She didn’t want to hear the BBC or talk of war. She walked towards the living room and stopped by her father’s office door. The door was closed. “Please, Maria, not that. I want to hear
Marimba,
” Isabella said, holding the doorknob to her father’s study. The music suddenly filled the hallway.
Luna De Xelaju
. The sound of the marimba, romantic and haunting, filled the house.

“Thank you, Maria,” Isabella said. She took her hand from the doorknob, then touched it again and opened the door to the office. For a moment she saw her dead father standing over his desk, the way he had been when she was a child. He turned and smiled, holding his lemonade and gin, his shirt sweat-stained from having been out all morning walking with the plantation’s administrator, his khaki pants muddy at the cuffs. He wore his never-really-care smile. “Dear, I know you can be brave. You were always brave when you were a girl. The bravest,” her father’s ghost said, and winked at her.

“I don’t know, Papa,” she said aloud. “I really can’t be, not really, I’m a woman. And you know how we are, pretty and all, but not for this sound of guns. Where is Roberto? Where is my brother? We need him; I have a child. A boy.”

“I told you not to marry that American. He was much too dry for you,” her father said, touching his blond mustache. He turned his back to her and looked at something on his desk. “He should be here with you. He should have lived here with us.”

“Could we dance, father? The way we used to. Remember?” she said. He turned around, smiling again, and she saw her father as she had seen him for the last time, and she closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see him like that. She wanted to see her father of 1955. She opened her eyes again and he was there in a tuxedo, looking very fit and handsome and young.

“How’s this? The Italians call this monkey suit a ‘tight.’ Is your mother ready?”

“Yes,” Isabella said.

“Would you like to dance? I’ll tell you all about the party tomorrow when we get back,” her father said.

“And will everyone be there?” Isabella asked.

“Everyone that should be,” her father said, holding out his arms. She stepped into the room and she felt her father’s arms around her shoulders and she was dancing, and he was talking about how they were going to go to the beach at Tilapa when she came back from school in the States for the Easter holiday.

“I want to go to the party, Papa. Please!”

He held her away from him for a moment. “Look, Gloria! See your daughter.”

Isabella turned around, and her mother’s ghost was standing in the doorway in a party dress. Her hair, blonde, was done in the style of her day. Her mother had died in a car crash in Fresno, California, when she’d gone to visit her sister in 1962. She was hit by a traveling salesman from Chicago, who managed to walk away from his brand new Cadillac and ask her if she was all right. She said she thought so, but she died anyway in the ambulance. She spoke to everyone in perfect English until the very end. She had been educated at Columbia University, and she had always prided herself on her English. The last thing she thought about was that she’d left her handbag in the car, and that it was such a silly way to die.

“You have a child now. A child of your own,” her mother said. That was all she said.

The room went still; her parents abandoned her. There was nothing but her father’s empty desk. She went to it and took his revolver from the top drawer; for some reason, he’d always called it “the bottle opener.” She opened the action and saw the bullets neatly seated in their chambers. She snapped the action closed and walked out of the room with it in her right hand, the hand she’d used to play tennis at her school in the United States, where girls didn’t learn to shoot. She’d learned to shoot here, on the plantation. She was different from those blonde girls she’d lived with so long, the Helen Albrights and Madeline Thompsons of the Yankee world. Helen Albright had asked her incredulously if Isabella’s father rode a donkey, like she’d seen in the movies. She said no.

Because Isabella was so beautiful, the other girls respected her. But they were never her friends, not really. She made friends with another Latin girl from Chile, whose parents owned a bank, and who ironically had blonde hair just like the Americans. Once, on a train trip to San Francisco, the two friends listed a hundred things that made them different from the other girls. They never admitted that they were both in love with Jesus Christ, the way young American girls were in love with the Beatles.

I’ll kill anyone that harms my child,
Isabella said, and closed the door. She never saw her father’s ghost again, no matter how hard she tried.

She could hear the rain falling as she walked back to the porch, and thought she would have to speak up if her brother called. But he didn’t call that day. He was sleeping with one of his maids, and he couldn’t be bothered to answer the phone. (The maid had heard the phone ringing.) Isabella rang him again anyway, hoping he would answer.

The patio outside was drenched in a warm torrent; the yellow trumpet flowers planted near the kitchen house bent over slowly as they were pelted. Isabella finally gave up trying to reach her brother and walked to the screened-in windows to stand and think of what to do.

Why?
she asked herself.
Why.
Everything when she was a girl had been so good. Her father was here, and her mother, and there was happiness and no war. And if her brother was a tall, irresponsible, charming boy, it made no difference whatsoever. But today it did matter, very much, and she felt so alone.

She had wanted to tell her brother that the guerrillas were seen on the section of the plantation that looked down on the little town of Colomba. She wanted to tell him to come home and help her, because she had the child here and there was no one willing to drive them out to the capital because of what happened to the Asturias family. The Asturiases had all been murdered by the Communists on the lawn of their house, and the bodies were still lying there stiff—first in the sun, later in the rain. No one, not one Indian, no one, would dare drive them out to safety now.