Red Jungle (31 page)

Perhaps it was that cold message in a dead brain that Olga heard as she left the police station and looked towards the south, distraught and frightened, rudderless as she would be now for the rest of her life.

TWENTY-SIX

Russell rang the bell on the landing. He remembered it from his childhood, a brass lion’s paw with a large motherof-pearl button. It was considered very modern when his great-grandfather had had it installed. He rang it twice.

He remembered very well coming up the stairs to the apartment with his mother. Sometimes they raced up the white marble steps together, more like brother and sister than mother and son. He realized, waiting for the door to open, that his mother had been just a girl then. He moved his finger off the button.

Olga answered the door. His aunt had sent Olga to take care of the family’s apartment, agreeing to take her back.

“Buenas tardes, Don
Russell,” Olga said. She touched his arm as a sign of her affection for him, and her gratitude for what he’d done for her. She knew it was his doing that the family had taken her back and allowed her to resume her old duties.

He was shocked, but he didn’t pull his arm away. Instead, without knowing exactly why, he embraced her, then patted her on her shoulder, the one that scared people, the one that had been smashed under the tires of the truck on the road to the Cruz plantation. She had foolishly run after a cheap plastic ball; the truck driver had been drunk.

“The streets are dangerous now,” Olga said. “You have to be careful,
Don
Russell.” She smiled at him, showing her bad teeth.

“I hope my aunt called, Olga, and warned you I was coming?”

“Yes,
Don
Russell. I’ve cleaned your mother’s room, and everything is ready.”

He didn’t know what to say. No one but Olga seemed to mention his mother to him.

“Or you could have your uncle’s room, if you prefer?” she said.

“No. . . My mother’s room. Yes. That would be fine.” He’d told his aunt that he wanted to use the family’s apartment, without explaining why. He hadn’t intended to stay there, but wanted only to use it to meet Beatrice. He’d thought of the family’s apartment as safe — at least, safer than the Camino Real, or the Hilton where they’d been meeting.

Olga led him to his mother’s bedroom. The ceilings were high. The wallpaper hadn’t been changed since she’d died. It was yellow, with fleurs-de-lis. The room had big, beautiful French doors that opened out on to a narrow wrought iron balcony with a view of a statue of Ubico on a white marble horse.

Olga threw open the heavy curtains. The room smelled of wax and decay. He put his briefcase on the bed. Across the room was a blond bird’s-eye maple chest of drawers, with glass top and hair brushes.

He heard the bedroom door close behind him. He’d meant to tell Olga that he was going to meet a friend here, but she’d left. He turned back and walked to the chest of drawers, and looked at what were probably his mother’s hair brushes.

•••

“Do you see, Mother, why I had to do it? I mean the Greek,” he said.

It was the last time he ever saw his mother. They were having lunch in Palo Alto. He had told her the whole story very calmly. He’d gone and put the pistol back with the others, and afterwards, when questioned about the incident, had denied everything. Even the police had come to the school, since the Greek’s father had insisted that they investigate.

But all the boys had backed Russell. No one—not one boy, not even the boy who had shared the Greek’s room—had said anything to the police. Russell had lied, telling the police he was asleep and hadn’t heard or seen anything.

But he told his mother everything that day at lunch. He wore his dress uniform, sky blue with a gold cord he’d gotten for academic achievement. His father had come to the lunch too, and he was sitting open-mouthed, not knowing what to say or do. His father thought that Russell was a criminal and probably insane, and that it was all Isabella’s fault. Now what would they do with him? (Later, he concluded it was the result of bad blood—those savages and outlaws Isabella was descended from.)

When they were walking back to his father’s car—his father still inside the restaurant, paying—Russell’s mother put her arm around him. They walked down the sidewalk alone together. The trees were shedding their leaves; the big wet golden leaves, with their dark spines, looked like etchings pressed into the sidewalk.

“You did the right thing, my love,” his mother said. “I know you’re a man now, and that’s all I ever wanted for you, to be a man. Someone who wasn’t afraid. Your great-grandfather was never afraid. That’s why he was a great man, and why we have what we have.” She said this last part proudly. “And my father was that way too. You have to be brave in this world.”

“Well, I’m not afraid, mother,” he said. “Not at all.” And he wasn’t, it was the truth. Later, though, he would have to go back and constantly redefine himself as fearless—pushing himself to risk everything, money or life, just to double-check, never satisfied with what he found. No proof of courage would ever be quite good enough.

“Well, it’s all settled then. Nothing to worry about,” she said.

“I love you,” he said. He didn’t get to say that like other kids did, but he said it now, holding her around the waist, because he considered himself a man now. At school, he never said it because he had no one to say it to. He never said it to his father, and his father never said it to him. It was true: they had, in the end, different blood. But he and his mother shared the same blood. Russell knew his father thought he was too much like his mother, too Latin, too “hot-blooded.” His father was a fool. Russell had known it from the moment he laid eyes on him.

“Mother, will we ever get a house here in the States? Maybe here in Palo Alto, and I could walk to school,” he said. But then his father caught up with them, and his mother never answered. His father was worried that she’d overtipped. He was always scolding her when she was spending her own money, as if he had the right to simply because he was a man.

•••

Russell touched the edge of one of his mother’s hairbrushes. He heard the doorbell ring, and turned away from the chest. He stopped for a moment and felt something odd pass over him, something that came to him in the sound of the bell, a loneliness finely defined, a longing that he’d pushed away until now. It was the feeling he had always considered a malaise, but now he finally realized what it was: it was the loneliness he had felt as a child. Was that what it had been all these years? Was it that sense of loss that had come to him so strongly when he came back here? Was it simply missing her? Was it just that this country reminded him of his true psychological circumstance, which had been so papered over back there in the States?

He realized, going to the door, inhaling the smells of the Cruz apartment, that he’d had an essential nature, and it had something to do with this country. Maybe his father had been right, always accusing him of being too much like his mother. As he walked down the hall and stopped in front of Olga, he knew that he would do whatever he could to help his mother’s country out of this crisis—it was what his mother would have wanted of him. All of his loneliness, his training and his education had been for a purpose.
Finally,
he saw his purpose and his destiny. He was a Cruz, and his mother’s son.

They sat in the living room. Russell watched Olga open the room’s curtains, filling the living room with a slanted pulverized light. Beatrice, not sure how to act around Olga, smiled, and Olga smiled back at her.

“My friend Beatrice Selva, Olga,” he said. Beatrice nodded. “Olga was my mother’s friend,” Russell said in Spanish. Olga smiled in a pleased way.

“Can I get you something,
Don
Russell,
Doña
Beatrice?” Olga asked.

“Coffee. Please,” Beatrice said. She’d come from playing tennis, and was wearing a brown velour track suit. Her hair was down. She looked like a college girl, not a wife and mother.

The wood floor creaked as Olga went towards the kitchen. As soon as they were alone, Beatrice fell into his arms and they kissed, going to the couch. It had been a week since they’d seen each other, and they let the kiss go on.

“Will she say anything?” Beatrice said finally.

“No. I don’t think so. She’s loyal to me. To our family. She was devoted to my mother,” he said. “I’ll ask her not to.”

“Good, then we can be as we really are.” Beatrice smiled and cuddled up in his arms. It was surprising, how small she felt. When they were making love, she felt bigger.

“I’m going to join the government,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I think I can help,” he said.

“But you’re an American.”

“Technically. Antonio is getting me my Guatemalan passport. They say I’m entitled to it, because of my mother. Then he’s announcing my joining the party. What’s so strange about that?
You
have two passports.”

She looked at him, her cheeks rosy from the tennis. She put her hand on his chest.

“I’m glad then, if it means you will stay here with me,” she said. “I worry that one day you’ll leave and not even tell me.” She smiled. “Would you leave me? Could you?”

“No. That’s what I want to talk to you about.” He heard Olga coming back. Beatrice moved slightly in his arms, but not much, so when Olga put the coffee tray in front of them, it was obvious to her what was going on.

Beatrice smiled at her and took a cup from the tray. Olga left them without saying anything.

“Was she shocked?” Beatrice asked when they heard the door close, holding the cup and saucer on her lap.

“I think so. She’s seen you on TV, I’m sure. She knows who you are.

“I want to marry you,” he said. “I want you to leave Carlos and come with me.” He’d been planning to tell her, and now he knew he had to, before the crisis got any worse. “I had to tell you now . . . there’s going to be a fight. I don’t think the crisis can be resolved peacefully.” He noticed the zipper of her running jacket was pulled down to where he could see the white of her bra.

“I don’t understand?” she said.

“There’s nothing to understand. I want you to leave Carlos. I don’t want to sneak around anymore. I want us to get married. This can’t go on the way it has been. Anyway, he’ll find out soon. People are already talking. It’s only a matter of time now.”

“He’ll kill you,” she said. She sat up straight, moving away from him.

“I don’t think so. Why? I’m not that important.”

“You don’t know him. He’s liable to kill us both.” She put her cup down.

“He’s not going to kill the mother of his children,” Russell said.

“He’s a monster,” she said.

“I love you. I know living here is out of the question. We’ll leave. I thought, New York. . . . I’ve planned it all. I’ll have money, too, if that’s what you’re worried about. I
understand,
if you are. I know what you expect. I mean, I’ll be able to take care of you. And the children, too . . . of course,” he said. “I promise you.” She looked at him. “I wouldn’t expect you to live . . . I mean, to leave this for something
small
.”

“I don’t care about money,” she said. “Is that what you think of me? That I married Carlos for his money?”

“Well . . . I do care. It’s important. Money, I mean. I don’t care why you married him. I could care less.”

“I could never take the children from him,” she said.

“They aren’t his property.”

“You’re a fool,” she said angrily, and got up and went to the window.

He knew it was going to be a shock, but he couldn’t go on the way things had been. He was in love with her, and he wanted a family. He wanted to have children with her,
their
children. He wanted to have a home, and he wanted to be her husband, not her lover. He wanted to take care of her.

The clouds broke. Bits of late afternoon sunlight hit her velour jacket and her hair that was so blonde.

“Look. I know it’s a shock, what I’m saying. But we haven’t exactly been discreet, not really. And you know . . . sometimes you don’t seem to care if he knows or not. It’s better my way,” he said.

“I’m not well,” she said. She turned from the window and looked at him.

“What do you mean?”

“Something’s wrong with me. My brain, the doctor says.” She came back from the window and sat down, her knees pressed together at the far end of the couch. “The doctor says that it’s the drugs I took. The ecstasy, when I was dancing. In London. There’s something that makes me impulsive. He says that there’s some kind of scarring, or something. I don’t know. I’m scared. I wanted to tell you. I went to someone in Miami, Carlos insisted. He said that there had to be something wrong with me . . . that I’d been acting strange.” She turned to look at him. “It’s true . . . I have been. I know that.”