The House in the Pines(22)
“Mija,” says a voice directly at her back. “Toma estas flores.”
Maya turns to see her father’s sister, Carolina, standing behind her. Carolina looks like how Maya will look in a few decades. They’re exactly the same height. Carolina’s skin is darker, but she shares her niece’s high cheekbones and mahogany eyes. Meeting her for the first time, Maya felt a pang of familiarity, as if she’d suddenly caught her own reflection in a mirror she hadn’t known was there. Carolina hands her a spray of yellowed roses, gestures for Maya to hold them to her nose to block out the smell.
“Gracias,” Maya says.
She buries her face in the flowers and closes her eyes as the pallbearers begin to lower her grandmother’s casket from their shoulders. When the priest begins to speak, the vulture spreads its wings with a snapping of air.
* * *
—
A chorus of whispered prayers fills the small living room and dining area of Maya’s grandfather’s house: “Santa Maria, madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amen . . .” Sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, cousins, and neighbors crowd onto the couch and love seat, and stand along the walls. They hold rosaries in their hands, rotating them slowly, every bead a prayer.
Sandwiched between her mom and Tía Carolina on the couch, Maya finds herself praying along, the repetition taking hold. Easing her into the language. Carolina serves Nescafé, black beans, tortillas, and fried plantains after the novena, the first of nine nights of prayer following the funeral.
Carolina and her husband, To?o, moved into the extra bedroom last year to help take care of Abuela, who, as it turned out, had been sick for a while.
Maya will always wonder why no one told her this.
Her grandfather Mario Hernández Basurto is a man of few words. He has thick, wavy hair, eyebrows like caterpillars. His wife had been the talkative one, handing him the phone to wish his granddaughter a happy birthday or to congratulate her on a good report card. Emilia’s death has left him silent with grief. In this small house, with family, friends, and neighbors streaming through to honor his wife, Mario, in his living room recliner, is never alone yet rarely talks to anyone.
Maya spends most of her five-day trip within these walls, a home of about 1,200 square feet, surrounded by a wall too high to see over. She had thought she would see more of Guatemala, or at least of the city, than she does. Even with the somber occasion, she’d assumed that she and her mom would visit a few landmarks, snap some pictures, try a few restaurants. But instead, the two of them spend their entire trip, aside from the funeral, within the high cinder block wall that surrounds the house on all sides.
It’s hard to gauge from these walls if Guatemala City is really so dangerous, but her mom assures her that it is. The civil war ended in 1996, but its bloody spirit lives on in the gangs that took in some of its orphans who had fled to the US. The Reagan administration might have denied them refugee status, but the gangs of LA welcomed these traumatized kids with open arms, and it was only when the US began deporting them that MS-13 and other maras, as they’re called, took root in Guatemala’s war-cracked system and grew into the strangling vines they are today.
Carolina nods her head in agreement. She rarely goes out either, other than to work. She doesn’t speak much English but seems to understand perfectly, as do a lot of people here. She lights a cigarette, sitting across from Maya and her mom at the glass-topped patio table, her head just inches beneath the flaming red and yellow bloom of the heliconia plant at her back. The wall is a warm cantaloupe color, studded with decorative tiles and ceramic planters overflowing with ferns and bougainvillea. The night is cool, rinsed clear by the day’s rain, and the novena prayers have ended, which means it’s time for Carolina’s nightly cigarette.
Maya knows this now that she’s on her last night here: her aunt smokes exactly one each night and tends to wink at whoever’s nearby as she lights it, as if she’s just kidding about being a smoker. Carolina, a second grade schoolteacher, doesn’t have kids but babies the hell out of her plants, many of whom she has named. Yesterday she introduced Maya to a ficus tree named Ursula and the music of Mano Negra, which is now Maya’s favorite band; Carolina may be the coolest adult she’s ever met.
And she grew up with Maya’s father. Over the last few days, Carolina has told Maya how she’d looked up to her big brother. He’d made her laugh like no one else, and he was clever, always reading something—comics, novels, then later newspapers and poetry. He’d confided to his sister that he dreamed of being a writer one day.
He’d been studying history and literature at the Universidad de San Carlos, with a focus, Carolina says, on the magical realists. Something about the way they wove magic into the lives of ordinary people as if refusing to abide by the colonizers’ obsessively realist literary style.
Jairo could have explained it better than I have, Carolina had said in Spanish.
But part of the problem was Maya’s limited ability to understand. The accent here is different from what she’d learned in school, so she’d needed to ask her aunt to slow down many times over the past few days, to repeat herself. And even then, Maya wasn’t always sure she understood.
Carolina’s cigarette burns low. Soon she’ll go to bed, and there is still so much Maya wants to ask her, so much she wants to say. Running out of time, she settles on a question that she’s had for years. “El libro de mi papá . . .” she says. My father’s book. She knows that her father began to write a book before he died, but her mother didn’t know much about it. It was a mystery was all Brenda could say.