10

Stone egg

Five minutes later we were standing in front of a large wooden door with a sign over it, hand-carved, bearing the name La Llorona. Mounted on a post by the door, an ancient-looking buzzer.

The gate swung open. A woman stood there. She wasn’t unfriendly but didn’t smile. She spoke briefly to Walter, handing him a few coins and indicating that his service was now complete.

I had thought I’d ask if she had a room available, and if so what it cost, but no such exchange occurred between us. She looked around for a suitcase but displayed no visible surprise at the absence of one.

“We need to make it down the steps before we lose the light,” she told me.

The steps were stone. A hundred of them, at least.

“I’m Leila,” she said. She was American, evidently.

“Irene,” I told her. For one crazy moment my old name, Joan, had come to me. The one I never spoke.

It was hard to guess Leila’s age. Sixty, possibly. But she might also have been seventy-five. She was very thin. Her hair was dead-white and her hands suggested decades of hard work, but her face, though not unlined, had a kind of glow that made me wonder if some magical plant grew in her garden, the secret ingredient to a serum that reversed the aging process.

Leila displayed no difficulty navigating the long descent to the house, though for me it presented a challenge. The path was thick with vegetation—plants known to me, if at all, only from the pages of some book or a visit to a botanical garden.

Having left my San Francisco apartment with no expectation of a future of any kind, I had not brought my drawing pencils with me. Now it surprised me to realize that I missed them. If I could, I would have wanted to draw this wild, fantastical garden.

Everything seemed to grow on a whole other scale in this place. Vines hung down over our heads, and bananas; orchids clung to the trees. At one point we came to a stand of bamboo; at another, a carving—life-sized—of a monkey. At another: an even larger carving, in stone, of a giant egg. It was a surprising choice for the subject of an artwork.

“There’s a man in this town, Otto, who makes carvings out of the stone here,” she told me. “I’ve bought a lot of his work for my property over the years. One day he showed up at my house carrying this egg. It has to weigh two hundred pounds, at least. He’d carried it all the way from the village.”

“He wanted you to buy it?” I asked.

“He wanted to know if I’d lend him money to take the bus to San Felipe to find someone who might want his creation,” she said. “Thirty garza for the ride to the city and back. Eight hours of travel, total. So I asked him what he hoped to get for the egg. A hundred garza, he said. Roughly ten dollars.”

“So you bought it.”

Leila had a brisk, matter-of-fact air as she spoke, a striking lack of sentimentality or even softness. “I only did it to save him the long trip,” she said.

When we neared the bottom of the long run of steps, the house came into view. The roof anyway; we had not yet fully descended the property, but I could make out an expanse of thatch and the glow of lights through a window, and beyond it, the lake, glittering in the last rays of daylight.

“Maria will have dinner for you,” Leila told me. She was speaking of the cook, evidently. “I hope you like dorado.” A local fisherman, Pablito, had caught it in the lake that morning. With a harpoon.

“Will the other guests be joining us?” I asked her.

“No other guests,” Leila said. “It’s just you.”

We had reached the door to the house now—blue, with birds carved into it and a wooden handle in the shape of a fish.

Leila opened the door.

How can I describe La Llorona, as it looked to me that day—a vision of paradise before me at the darkest time I could ever have imagined?

The hotel was like someplace you’d see in a fairy tale. Wherever I looked my eye landed on some extraordinary detail, no doubt Leila’s creation, or that of the workers of the village here: not just stones transformed into monkeys and jaguars and eggs, but vines trained to form arbors dripping with flowers whose blooms resembled the imaginings of somebody’s wildest LSD trip and little man-made streams winding through the gardens, tumbling over smooth round stones—some of them green, in certain lights anyway, some almost blue. There was a stone bench built into a hillside, and there was also a chaise lounge that appeared to be fashioned from a single tree trunk. An old wooden fishing boat piled with cushions hung from a tree, with a half dozen different varieties of orchids sprouting from its trunk, and a wooden owl carved from a burl.

There was a grove of fruit trees bearing lemons, pomegranate, papaya, and tall, spear-like ginger plants with brilliant red blooms, and bird of paradise flowers, and bougainvillea, and jasmine plants, and gardenia, and bella-de-noche, leaving a perfume in the air so potent you could be blindfolded and know where you must be standing in the garden just from the smell of the blooms in that spot. I had never seen anyplace so beautiful, or one offering greater evidence of love on the part of its creator.

But the property was falling apart. Wherever you looked, alongside the beauty lay evidence of decay. The stone walls were crumbling, the steps we’d descended to get to the house precarious, the railing rotted in a dozen different places. The rose plants were stunted from encroaching weeds, the fish pool dark with algae, and when the wind blew, a stink of rotting fruit rose from the compost pile. A mountain of old wine bottles lay under a lean-to behind the house, and beside them, a pile of broken dishes, tools, chairs missing rungs that someone must have set aside at some point to repair, but never got around to. The paint on the door was flaking off, and the door itself, when Leila pushed it open, made a creaking sound. The lamp mounted alongside it to welcome guests had been fashioned from pieces of colored glass—from old wine bottles and beer bottles, probably, with stones and shells and beads and pieces of broken plates mixed in. It would have made wonderful, rainbow-colored patterns on the doorstep if it worked. But the bulb was burned out, and my best guess was that this had been so for a long time.

“We’re a little behind on repairs at the moment,” Leila said as she led me into the gallery. “When I was younger I did a better job of keeping up with things.”

The ceiling was high, the windows covering most of the wall looking out to the lake—but in need of cleaning, like everything else—and from the center of the room, a giant wagon wheel had been suspended, lit with a dozen small lights, filaments glowing, like something from Thomas Edison’s day. Some functioning, most not.

Along the back wall, facing the view, there was a couch made from a single massive tree trunk, hollowed out—hard to imagine how they’d got it in the door—with cushions piled over it of a fabric that appeared to have been woven by hand a long time ago. It reminded me of the embroidered pillow in the Chagall postcard I’d tacked up on my wall back in San Francisco. The rugs were handwoven too—covered in images of birds again, and jungle animals, with bare spots where the floor showed through.

There was a long slab of a table whose legs were formed out of thick, twisted vines—piles of books in every direction, a fire glowing in a fireplace built into the far wall. (As warm as the day had been, the evening air offered a certain chill.) On every wall were paintings—of women and calla lilies and birds. One very large canvas that seemed to depict every conceivable variety of disaster. When I moved closer to study it, I could make out, in one corner, a group of characters partially submerged in roiling waters from what appeared to be a flood; elsewhere, an erupting volcano with glowing lava pouring down over a huddle of desperate villagers wearing the kinds of embroidered indigenous clothing I’d seen that afternoon on the boat ride across the lake. Another corner of the canvas featured what appeared to be an earthquake—the ground giving way, women and children falling into a bottomless crevasse, and a swarm of bees, a pack of rabid-looking dogs, a tuk tuk crash, a church steeple toppling in a deluge, a drowning fisherman ejected from his boat, a horse galloping off the edge of a cliff, his rider in free-fall.

I could have studied the painting a long time, but Leila was gesturing me to move on down a long corridor lined with doors, each one carved with a different Mayan symbol.

Mine was the last door at the end of the hall.

“You’ll stay here,” she told me. I placed my hand on the knob—not a doorknob at all, but a carved jaguar made of some very smooth, dark wood that must have known many hands before mine. Touching it, the memory came to me of Daniel, whittling outside our tent.

It wasn’t easy opening this door. There was a weight to the wood. It creaked as it opened, as if a long time might have passed since the last occasion anyone ventured past this point.

Inside was a small bed covered in a woven white cloth. Like everything else in the place, these showed the signs of wear. There were places in the bedspread where I could see the blanket beneath it.

Here, too, a fire had been lit in the fireplace. (How did my host know I was coming?) A row of candles burned on the mantel. The nearly overpowering smell of some flower I’d never encountered hung in the air, that made me want to breathe deep and turn away, both at the same time. A large curtainless window stood open to the outdoors, so I could hear the sound of the lake water. It lapped against the stone foundation of a long, broad patio, covered by a vine-festooned lattice from which hung a wall of brilliant, jade-colored blossoms—thick as a curtain, nearly fluorescent in the darkness that enveloped us now.

“You probably want to change your clothes before dinner,” Leila said. Maybe she figured out from my lack of luggage that this would pose a problem. “Wait just a minute,” she told me, disappearing down the dark hallway.

When she returned there was a dress draped over her arm, full length, in the shade of blue I favored back when I cared about those kinds of things, with a matching shawl.

“I’ll see you at dinner,” she said and disappeared down the long hallway.

I slipped off my jeans and T-shirt, took my hair out of its clip, and stood in front of the mirror. Memorize this, I told myself. Before this is over—but who knew what “over” would look like?—you may not be the same person you were anymore.

This was not bad news.

I turned on the shower then and stood under the water for a long time, washing off the dirt.