42

A folder of letters

There had been one drawer in Leila’s desk I’d never ventured to explore. The first time I’d opened it, I’d been discouraged by the enormous pile of papers stuffed inside, in no particular order from the looks of them. There were envelopes addressed to the hotel but never opened, letters that appeared to have been read, but discarded. Then finally one day I took a closer look.

One folder contained nothing but love letters—with postmarks from Venezuela, Australia, Italy. A man named Jasper appeared to have been corresponding with Leila over the course of over a decade, his letters filled with reminiscences of their times together in Panama, Roatan, Oaxaca. He wrote about a time they’d swum with dolphins, a night they’d slept in the jungle and encountered a jaguar.

“Every night I dream about you,” he had written, in a letter Leila had evidently never opened.

Then came the correspondence from potential guests—more than twenty years’ worth of inquiries from travelers interested in offbeat vacation destinations, travel agents, even, who’d heard about the hotel and expressed interest in sending clients. From what I could tell, Leila had neglected virtually all of these.

A woman had written to Leila, back in the eighties, to say she conducted an annual conference in Mayan textiles, with participants from all over the world. Would Leila consider hosting a group of them at her hotel? A man wrote from a university archaeology department to say he wanted to bring down a group of students to explore the recently discovered ruins nearby. Like the others, the envelope containing that letter had never been opened.

It became clear, as I sifted through the contents of the drawer, why the hotel had not done well over the years. Leila was an artist in every sense—creator of spaces and meals, gardens, waterfalls, stained glass windows, mosaics. But as a businessperson, she was a disaster.

There was one ancient-looking folder. I found it in the bottom of the drawer. These letters had been opened before—opened and, from the looks of the paper, read more than once. Studied carefully many times over the years, perhaps. They concerned Leila’s lost daughter, Charlotte.

The first couple of letters offered terse descriptions of a child’s development. “She can walk now. She spoke her first word. She loves dogs. She appears to have a talent for dancing.”

For a while there it appeared that Javier was sending updates a few times a year. Then every few years. Then no more. The last piece of correspondence in the folder contained a black-and-white photograph of a good-looking couple in their thirties standing alongside two very beautiful children—a boy who looked around ten years old and a girl around twelve. The single piece of paper contained in the envelope offered only two sentences. “Sofia and I have no intention of showing your letters to our daughter. Please don’t waste your time writing to her.”

Maybe she continued to write. If so, no further responses arrived from Spain.

The date on the final letter, February, 1979. Then nothing.