Hard Red Spring (67 page)

The woman glanced down at the YWCA logo on Jean's shirt and frowned. “Who are you with?” she asked in a sweet Midwestern accent, tainted with a boozy sourness.

“I'm not with anybody,” Jean said.

In a place where everyone was interviewing survivors, counting the dead, and writing accounts of it, this seemed to be the right answer.

The woman downed her coffee in several quick gulps and brought a bottle out of her bag. From it, she filled her empty mug with a thick yellow liquid that looked like eggnog. Grateful for the opportunity to stave off her intensifying hangover, Jean dumped her coffee out and accepted a generous pour as well. An unexpected calmness, patience, overcame her as she enjoyed these last moments with her imagination. After this, she'd know the real story. She found comfort in the fact that she couldn't imagine things getting any worse than that cab ride a few hours before.

“Cruzita's never said anything about giving up any children to me,” the woman said, opening a battered notebook with a spiral spine. “After you told me on the phone, I went through all my notes, years of them. I can't think—” She stopped herself, shook her head. A gamy scent wafted Jean's way. She sat back, away from it.

Jean pointed to a Polaroid that had slipped onto the table. “What's that?”

The woman held it up. A house. A painted, cheerful two-story house with a balcony. “That's Cruzita's house.”

Cruzita not only wasn't dead; in fact, she had emerged from the war a success.

“Does she have a job? How did she get such a nice house?”

“I don't know. There's a factory in town, a sweatshop. Almost everyone works there, making clothes. Some Ladinos have higher positions.”

Jean took the photo. Cruzita had pulled herself up by her bootstraps, worked hard in the factory, been promoted. An American Dream girl made in Guatemala. This certainly was not the ending Jean had ever expected.

“But can you tell me? Was Cruzita impoverished during the war? In 1983?”

“Impoverished?”

“Did she have the resources to take care of herself? To feed a family?”

“Hell, no. Everything she had was destroyed.” And there it was, reprieve. Jean wanted this woman to write that down, sign and stamp it with a Truth Commission seal. She wanted now to know everything she could about Cruzita. She no longer felt afraid. “What have you talked to Cruzita about?”

“Her family,” she replied. “Her old village.” Her eyes narrowed. “Her grandmother Emelda Tuq.” She set her gaze on her drink, tilted the mug.

“What about her?” Jean felt herself a part of a large, unexpected family. A family she cared deeply about. “Is she still alive?”

The woman threw her egg liquor back with violence, so the thick remainder hit the back of her throat. The action deemed that line of questioning done. She was off, Jean decided. The woman was definitely not all there. And yes, she smelled. Each time Jean leaned in with interest, she had to pull back for air.

“Is Cruzita trying to find her family?”

“No.” Despite drinking hard liquor before lunch, this woman clearly took her job with the Truth Commission very seriously. Too seriously to bother with a shower, or to comb her hair.

“Cruzita has no one?” Jean considered the idea of a family in Guatemala. Since Jean had disowned her parents six months ago, she had no one as well. She and Cruzita needed each other. She envisioned Christmases spent in Guatemala, Thanksgivings in California. Cruzita with a passport.

The NGO refilled her cup from the bottle. “She's the only survivor of the Valle Lejos massacre. She lost everyone there. At least that's what she's always told me.”

“When was that?”

“In 1982.”

Jean raised her cup and took a sip. The taste was heavy, sweet, pleasant. But then she swallowed and it took her by the throat. She coughed, felt the burn descending. “Maya was born in 1983. Has she not even mentioned a baby?”

“The only baby she's ever mentioned is her baby boy. He disappeared
during the massacre. I can't imagine, I don't even know how this could be.” The woman flipped through her notebook, looking for something specific.

“And where did she go after the massacre?”

“Wherever she could go. She ran to the mountains and wandered alone for months, hiding from the helicopters. She was lost.”

“Was the military looking for her? Did they know she was a witness?”

“No. They were just looking for anyone. They wouldn't think anyone had survived the fire.”

“They burned Valle Lejos?”

“They burned the church.” She isolated a page in her hands but did not read from it. “They filed everyone into the church, sprayed the crowd with bullets, locked the door, and set it on fire.” The paper trembled. “Cruzita played dead, hiding under the pile of bodies: her husband, her parents. She dipped her skirt in the blood and held it to her mouth to breathe through the smoke. The church collapsed before she could be incinerated, but she was afraid to come out. She hid under the bodies of her friends and family for over a day before she got the courage to come out.”

Jean watched the woman turn the page, accidentally ripping it.

“I'm sorry.” The woman seemed to gain confidence with her third mug of liquor, just the weight of it in her hand. “It still gets me, after all these years, all these interviews.”

“Why did they do that? I know about the broader genocide, but why Valle Lejos specifically?”

“Guerrillas had ambushed the army a few miles away. The soldiers were convinced the village had to be selling them food. Over a hundred people burned in the church. No one knew there were any Valle Lejos survivors. I still don't think anyone knows. She's too afraid for any kind of attention.” She paused, nailing Jean down with a look of suspicion. “So why are you here, looking for her?”

“Like I said, she's Maya's mother.”

“No, she's not. You are.”

Jean finished her drink with the same hard motion the woman had.

“So why? Why did you bring your daughter all the way down here to a dangerous country to meet a stranger that didn't want her in the first place?”

“Now, I don't think that's fair to assume,” Jean said. “The records say she gave her up because of poverty.”

“Poverty doesn't exist for these people. It exists for us, to explain things we can't understand. Why,” she repeated, “are you here?”

Jean stared at her empty, yolk-coated cup and understood it would give her no relief. The heavy liquid sloshed behind her eyes, deepening her agony.

“We didn't come to see her mother. I didn't even think she would have survived the war. Finding Cruzita was never my intention, but now my feelings on the whole trip have changed. I think maybe . . . I think I came here for the wrong reasons. I said this was all for Maya, and it started out that way, but then I read about all these horrible adoption stories. The trip became about me, about clearing my conscience. And about making Maya grateful to me after seeing this place.”

“And is it clear?” the woman asked with smiling mockery.

“Yes, but it's a moot point now, with all this misery, the mass graves. My daughter never wanted to come here. I've helped no one but myself. But now I want to help Cruzita. You said she has no one? She lives by herself in that nice house?”

“Yes.”

“Where does she get her money? Her adoption papers said she gave up Maya because of poverty. You said she had nothing. How has she pulled herself up from that, by herself, an indigenous woman in this country? Does she work at the garment factory?”

“I have no idea where she got, or gets, her money. She doesn't have a job now. There's a gap in her story”—she pointed to her notes—“I can't pin down. She avoids it whenever I ask. I noticed a while ago that the time line was off. But I didn't press it, I didn't want to make her relive the trauma.”

“The burning of the church?”

“No, not that.” She drilled her palms into her wet eyes as she spoke. “She was gang-raped by soldiers, over the course of several days, when she was fifteen.”

It was now clear to Jean why the woman drank, why the NGOs drank mass quantities of vile beer in the vegetarian restaurant. The American Dream Girl story was descending into origins darker than Jean could imagine. She could not have anticipated this nightmarish beginning, any more than she could have guessed Cruzita's prosperous end.

“What year?” she heard herself ask.

Bringing her hands away, she blinked at Jean, trying to regain her sight through her tears. “The magic year: 1983. After she surrendered for amnesty.”

Jean accepted the logical conclusion immediately. Maya, a product of
such violence. Part soldier, part victim. A little bomb. With this, Jean felt herself descending into deeper unknowns, pondering the stories that eluded her, but to which she remained surely tied. The girl Cruzita, running from helicopters. Gang rape. Giving birth, by herself. Jean wished, for the first time, she knew what birth felt like. This Cruzita gave birth to a soldier's baby, to a hundred soldiers' baby, then slipped down into Xela in the middle of the night, to give baby Maya to the nuns. The woman was right. Poverty was not the word for it. Jean pressed forward, no longer caring about the smell.

“Can you ask her about Maya? When do you meet her next?”

“This afternoon. But my talks don't go like that. I've been here for years, on and off, and some people are just getting the courage to report missing relatives. They might talk at you, but once you ask a question, they freak out. And they freak out if you write anything down. I have to try to remember everything and write it all down afterwards.”

“But she trusts you. She's told you this much already.”

“She tells me because she has no one else to tell. She tells me because I'm the only one who knew she had anything to say. Believe me, it's against her best judgment.”

“Can I go back with you, to Nueva Aldea de la Vida? Just to see it?”

“No. No, no, no.” She closed her notebook. “You can't go there. It isn't safe. The Maya are very suspicious of a white woman traveling alone.”

“Suspicious? How about you?”

“I live there, it's my home. At least, it's the best home I can come up with. I've been back to the States, I've tried, but I always end up back in Guatemala. It's never easy. I receive threats. A lot of them don't want me there.”

“What kind of threats?”

“Painted on my door, people yelling from alleys, sometimes they break into my room and steal my notebooks.”

“Of all the things to be suspicious of, after all this war, a white American woman? What do they think we'll do?”

The woman laughed, a thick, egg-coated laugh. “There are lots of scary stories about Americans going around, lesbian witchcraft—”

“What! Lesbians?”

“Kidnapping kids because they can't have their own. Others believe Mayan children are being stolen for their organs. To harvest for surgeries in the United States.”

“They'd think I was prowling around their town to do
that
?”

“Who knows what they'd think of you? All I know is that they'll decide on a story very quickly. Maybe good, maybe bad. You shouldn't take the chance, though. It's crazy out there, away from the bigger towns—fear's taken over. Some people, it's all they can feel anymore.” As the woman said this, it became clear to Jean that she was speaking for herself as well. Who was this pitiful, drunk woman sitting across from her? Embarrassed, she realized she hadn't even asked.

“What's your name? I'm sorry, I'm so rude and self-absorbed with my own inquiries. I forgot your name from our phone conversation.”

She shrugged and gave her name as if it weren't even her own. “Lenore.”

“And what are you researching, specifically, in Nueva Aldea de la Vida?”

“Just interviews. Cruzita's my main subject, always has been, but I only recently convinced her to talk to me.”

“How did you convince her?”

“She needed help with some paperwork. She was trying to get a road named after her grandmother who was disappeared. The Calle Emelda Lupe Tuq, just outside of town. I helped her with the application to the memorials committee. The stone went up last week. That's why I'm here in Xela, to make sure it did.”

“Honoring her ancestor. That's very important to them, I heard.”

“I'm only just starting to understand now how important these things are to them. It's incredible. What principles do we have that we'd die for?” Her tremulous gaze wandered over Jean's shoulder. “Nothing. Plenty we'd kill for, but nothing to die for.”

“Can I ask you something?”

Lenore barely responded, her head tilting to the side in assent.

“You said Cruzita was gang-raped by soldiers. I just can't get it out of my head, I just can't help but think that Maya was the result.”

She held up her notebook, a shield. “There's no way. What they did was way too violent—broken bottles, bayonets . . .” Her fingers grasped an end of the spiral spine and pulled it straight, into a lance. “You wouldn't know it to look at her, but she's completely disfigured from it on the inside. She's sterile.”

Jean felt a little better as the horror piled up between them on the table. Thank God, she thought to herself, thank God for that, at least. The proprietor entered the courtyard, set down two bowls, then left. “So do you think Maya was born in the mountains, on the run?”

“It's possible. Maybe Cruzita was pregnant during the massacre, she
wasn't pregnant in the camp. She certainly does pick and choose what she tells me.”

“So why is the Truth Commission so interested in her? Why is she your subject?”

“Actually,” Lenore confessed, “I'm not with the Truth Commission. I'm not with anybody. I got this shirt”—she plucked at the logo over her heart—“from a friend in the Truth Commission. It makes things easier. At least, it used to.”