22

Bankers come knocking

By my second week at La Llorona I realized two things. First, that this was a place of extraordinary beauty—heartbreaking beauty, you might say. Heartbreaking, because it was falling apart. Wherever I looked there was something magical. And something broken. It was the broken part that allowed me to feel at home in this place. Without the sense I had that painful events occurred here, and that things were far from easy, I could not have seen myself as belonging here.

Though I never spoke of my losses, I knew from my conversations with Leila—and, as my Spanish allowed, with Maria—that it was a rare parent here who had not lost a child at some point, or a partner. Every one of them grieved as much as I did, but differently. Here in La Esperanza, death was a part of life. When hotel guests said goodbye to Maria or Luis by saying “I’ll see you next time,” they always responded with the same words. “Si Dios me concede un otro ano de vida.” If God grants me another year of life. A baby might be healthy one day and dead from an infection a week later. A boulder might fall down the mountain and crush you. A gust of wind might tip a fisherman’s cayuco boat and send him to the bottom of the lake. Even the youngest among the people of the village took nothing for granted.

The second realization that came to me over the course of those early days after my arrival at La Llorona was the harder one. For all her seemingly abundant energy—the way she went up and down those crumbling stone steps without breaking stride, her careful selections of just the right fish at the market, her perfect arrangements of flowers, stones, wind-chimes, candles—Leila was tired. Quite apart from the money required to keep up a property like this one—money Leila lacked—the task required vast stores of energy, strength, and devotion, and though the devotion of my hostess to this place was evident, her energy and strength were not what they had been.

“Luis and Maria are getting older too,” she told me. “And Elmer and Mirabel are still so young. We can’t keep up with everything anymore.”

Once, coming into the kitchen, I’d spotted Leila leaning on the counter, her head slumped down, one hand over her eyes, as if the prospect of listening to one more guest asking her about the volcano hike or whether it was safe to eat the tomatoes here was more than she could take in. Sometimes, when she wasn’t aware of this, I’d catch a glimpse of Leila leaning back in her chair, her eyes closed, her jaw slack—and suddenly she looked like an old woman.

Then there was the problem of money. The week I arrived I was the only guest at the hotel, same as I was the following week, and from all I could determine, this was standard occupancy for La Llorona. Mirabel endlessly washed and rewashed sheets and hung them up to dry, but nobody besides myself ever slept on them. Luis might keep the fire lit in the gallery, and Maria still served her beautiful meals at a table perfectly set by Mirabel—the candles always lit—but we were the only ones around to consume them.

One time, when I was alone on the patio, I could hear Maria and Luis speaking in the kitchen. “The man from the bank came to the gate again,” Maria said. “The third time this week. I told him the señora was not home.”

“He’ll be back,” Luis said.

“When he returns,” Maria said, “we’ll send him away again.”