Four days after her grandmother’s death, Maya walks slowly alongside her mom and dozens of other people through the Cementerio General in Guatemala City behind the casket of Emilia Ek Basurto. The cemetery is enormous and mazelike, taking up several city blocks, yet feels overcrowded. High, thick walls line the route of the funeral procession, each wall a grid of row upon row upon row of what look like file cabinets to Maya, but which are actually graves. Each cabinet has a body inside, sealed off by a layer of concrete, bearing, in most cases, a placard naming the person contained therein, and the years of their birth and death.
Flowers in all stages of decay adorn the tombs, their colors bright against the gray concrete and dark green moss that crawls over everything. This is the rainy season, the usual afternoon showers on the way, the air thick, and the procession so slow they could be walking underwater. Sweat dampens the long black dress she wears, plasters it to her back, and she breathes through her mouth, trying not to let on how affected she is by the smells filling her nose. First there are the flowers—lilies, roses, daisies, gladiolus—bursting from the buckets of vendors at the cemetery gates, spilling from graves, fallen petals browning every surface. They fail to mask what Maya can only assume is the smell of death. Like bodies turned inside out.
Vultures swirl overhead. Their numbers swell the deeper the funeral winds into the cemetery, and Brenda explains to her daughter, as calmly as possible, that graves here are rented like apartments. Families must pay regular fees to keep their loved ones interred. And if a payment is missed, the body, as if it were a tenant, is evicted and thrown into a mass pit at the edge of the graveyard.
The walls of tombs give way to a field of crumbling mausoleums. Abuela’s plot is deep within the cemetery, beside that of her son. The family mausoleum is about the size of a phone booth, with a rusted metal door and a stone crucifix on top. A vulture perches on the low branch of a nearby tree, preening its creaky black wings. The smell is somehow even worse here at the edge of the cemetery, a chemical smell, burning tires mixed with death and flowers. A smoky haze fills the air.
Maya clutches her mom’s hand.
“The city dump,” her mom whispers. “It starts just over there at the edge of the cemetery. Thousands of people live in it, picking through the trash for whatever they can sell or eat.” Brenda came to Guatemala after college as part of a missionary group even though she didn’t believe in God, still doesn’t, and disagrees with the premise of missionary work. She’d simply thought that she might do some good with the certificate in respiratory care she had earned from Berkshire Community College. Not to mention that she’d never been outside the US.
Her days were spent volunteering at an orphanage not far from the city dump. Her evenings consisted of getting to know the family who’d volunteered to house her for three months. Brenda hadn’t expected to fall in love while she was in Guatemala, but the rest is Maya’s favorite story in the world—the story of her mom and dad. This is the story she tries to remember while she is here, as opposed to the story of her father’s death.
Brenda has seemed on edge ever since they arrived in Guatemala City, losing things at the airport and laughing nervously at nothing. It can’t have been easy, Maya realizes for the first time, for Brenda to build a relationship between her daughter and the Basurtos. All the letters and phone calls and, later, emails that grew less and less frequent over the years. Brenda only knew Jairo and his family for a month before he was killed, and she fled the country immediately afterward. This is the first time she’s been back.
She is the one who taught her daughter most of what Maya knows about Guatemala. Brenda hung Mayan tapestries on the walls and played CDs of marimba music while she and Maya baked together. Brenda taught herself to make tamales wrapped in banana leaves and made them every Christmas. She encouraged Maya to learn Spanish in school.
Yet to convince her to go on this trip, Maya had resorted to threats. She threatened—not that it was a bluff—to buy herself a plane ticket with the money she’d made tutoring middle school students, money she’d been saving for college. She said that if she couldn’t go to her grandmother’s funeral, she would fly to Guatemala—alone—on her eighteenth birthday.
So Brenda caved, and now here they are, clinging to each other among all this death and flowers. Everyone around them dressed in black, veiled in tears. Walking in slow motion. Maya is related to many of the people in this crowd, yet they are strangers to her. But never in her life has she encountered such warmth. She’s been here less than twenty-four hours, but her family treats her and her mom as if they’ve been there all their lives. Brenda’s offer to stay at a hotel wasn’t even entertained. Instead, Maya’s grandfather handed over the bed he’d shared for decades with his wife so that Brenda and Maya could sleep there while he slept on the couch.
“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, Toño, 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.
“¿Qué fue el . . . ?” Maya says—but now she can’t remember the Spanish word for title. She searches her brain, and as she does, detects an unusual smell on the patio, an ethereal floral note beneath her aunt’s cigarette smoke. At first, she thinks she must be imagining it. “¿Qué era el nombre,” she tries again, embarrassed by her bad Spanish, “del libro de mi papá?”
“Ah, el título . . .” Carolina says. She narrows her eyes, tries to remember the title of Jairo’s unfinished book. Then she shakes her head in frustration. Explains that she can’t recall at the moment—it’s been a long while since she thought of her brother’s writing. All she remembers is that the title was long, the entire line of a very old poem he had loved.
The smell grows stronger as Carolina says this, heady and sweet.
Maya’s sense of smell is stronger than most—she once detected a gas leak in the kitchen hours before her mom noticed anything amiss—and now she’s pretty sure she’s not imagining it. There is something otherworldly about this smell blossoming beneath her aunt’s smoke, as if it were wafting in from another realm. A paradise. Some timeless place where flowers bloom at night—a place Maya shouldn’t be able to smell from here, but she can and it’s the exact opposite, she thinks, of the smell at the cemetery. And every bit as real. “Mom?” she says.
“Yeah, Muffin?”
“Do you smell that?”
Maya’s question prompts both Brenda and Carolina to sniff the air.
Carolina smushes out her cigarette in an ashtray. A look of wonder comes over her face as the smoke clears and the mesmerizing smell fills her nose. “No puede ser . . .” She rises from the table and walks around the corner of the house. Maya and her mom follow.
There they see that an ordinary-looking cactus stationed in a plain plastic pot has erupted with a single dinner-plate-sized flower. The long white petals yawn into the most dramatic bloom Maya has ever seen, like the gaping eye of some god or a firework frozen in time. It gives off the strongest smell of any flower she’s ever come across.
“¿Qué es?” she asks her aunt.
“La Reina de la Noche,” Carolina says.
“¿Qué?” Brenda asks.
Carolina explains that each bud of this type of cactus only blooms for one night. This particular plant hadn’t flowered in years, and she had thought it was dead. “No lo puedo creer,” Carolina says, shaking her head in near disbelief as tears fill her eyes. The Queen of the Night, she says in Spanish, was my mother’s favorite flower.
Maya is folding her black dress back into her suitcase when she hears a light rap on the open door and looks up to see her grandfather.
“Hola!” she says.
“Hi, mija.” His voice is small but warm. They’ve sat in rooms together over the past five days, but their exchanges have been brief.
“Por favor, entra,” she says, realizing that he is waiting for her to invite him into his own room.
He’s in his late sixties but seems older because of his creaky gait and all-white hair. He opens the wooden cabinet in the corner, takes out a cardboard box the size of a wine crate, and sets it on the bed beside Maya’s suitcase. He takes out a photo album. “Look,” he says in heavily accented English. “Your grandmother made this.” He opens the cover to reveal a photo of Maya when she was a baby, sitting on her mom’s lap, then a few more baby pictures, the turning pages revealing Maya growing up before their eyes. There she is at her fifth birthday. There she is jumping on a trampoline with Kayla, her best friend in second grade. Grimacing into a camera for school picture day. Smiling at the top of Mount Greylock. Her mother, it seems, has been sending Abuela photos all of Maya’s life.
“Your grandmother loved you,” Abuelo says. “And I do too.”
“Oh . . .” Maya says, momentarily stunned. Then the words rush from her. “I love you too, Abuelo. Te quiero también. Gracias para—para todo.”
He nods. Closes the photo album, pats it with his hand. “I keep this,” he says. “But I have something for you.”
He reaches back into the cardboard box and takes out a thick manila envelope. He unwinds the thin piece of twine holding it closed. Opens the flap and pulls out a stack of yellowed pages. Maya’s eyes go wide. She knows at once what this is. Her father’s name is on the title page, spelled out in yellowing typewriter ink. And above his name, the title of the book, the mystery, he’d been writing before he died: Olvidé que era hijo de reyes.