And what was he talking about, the family secret I didn’t know? Had Djed been murdered after all? It was not beyond the realm of possibility.
I swallowed, then looked up. Jan was still frowning at his journal, Rikki still asleep. I pulled out Letter #2, written April 1, 1991.
Dear Jonah,
Hello, and hope you are well. Life goes on at Iglesia de Guadalupe. Every morning I get up for Vigil with Jorge and Martin. We don’t hold it in the church, but in a small back room of our house. It’s a good time: dawn just breaking, a chill in the air, the town still asleep. I started it; they’d never done it before, but when I described our schedule at the Hermitage, both of them thought it would be good. Sometimes we have to wait ten minutes for Martin. He seems to have lost a lot of sleep over the years.
At 7:00 I celebrate Mass in the church, and there’s usually a crowd. You would like our altar. It would appeal to the snob in you that secretly prefers Florentine architecture to the 1950s stucco at the Hermitage. Guadalupe is your standard old Mexican iglesia, complete with fully decked-out statues and a murky oil of Our Lady on the wall. Tourists love it, but little do they know. This place—really, most of the San Cristóbal diocese—is up to its eyeballs in controversy, which is exactly (I know this will surprise you) why I requested placement here.
Basically, it’s the old story: a few rich latifundistas (large landholders) hoarding all the wealth, while the peasants (mostly Maya subsistence farmers clustered in small villages throughout the mountains) live in crushing poverty. It’s feudal, and the colonial mind-set that still reigns here requires that the power remain in the hands of the landholders. Any protest on the part of the indigenas is automatically labeled Marxist and brutally suppressed. But it’s not just the official cops and army at work. Many of the latifundistas fund their own private police (they call them the Guardia Blanca here) who specialize in terror tactics—kidnappings, torture, beheadings, massacres.
Our bishop, Samuel Ruiz García, is the bane of their existence. He’s a powerful force here, and not afraid to mix it up with the PRI-istas who run the country. His friends call him one of the best advertisements for liberation theology in Central America. His enemies, including Televisa, the media network that dominates Mexico, refer to him as the “Red Bishop.” Two years ago he established a non-denominational, ecumenical human rights center here in San Cristóbal called Frayba, after Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, a sixteenth-century friar who became the first bishop of Chiapas. There’s a lot of similarity between Ruiz and de las Casas, who spent fifty years trying to overthrow the colonial encomienda system that kept the Mayas and other indigenous people enslaved.
But the Church is in a very tricky situation here. Political developments over the past few years have been devastating for the subsistence farmers. The twentieth-century reestablishment of their right to commonly owned village land (the ejido system) is currently under attack, and everyone’s convinced that soon there will be a constitutional amendment in favor of the big private landholders and/or foreign investors. Plus the forces arrayed against small farmers are not just local but international—the new NAFTA treaty spearheaded by the U.S., if and when it goes into effect, will flood the Mexican market with cheap corn, essentially wiping them out.
So as you would expect, guerrilla movements are afoot. There’s one located in the Lacandon Selva nearby that everybody seems to know about and nobody’s mentioning. From the perspective of the powers that be, anything that looks like it’s raising the political consciousness of the indigenas, including the Christian base communities (small family or village Bible studies and worship groups) that have any ties to our diocese, should be scrutinized with great suspicion. Over and over, the bishop and even the Vatican are having to emphasize the firm dividing lines between these small Christian communities and de facto political organizations, especially armed groups. But the situation is volatile.
So what am I, a would-be monk, a lover of the desert fathers and contemplative prayer, doing in the middle of this hotbed? Good question. But once again I’m out of time. Just know that it’s got to do with the same old issue and my inability to let it go till I work it out.
Stefan
A rabble-rousing bishop. A guerrilla group parked in a nearby jungle. Private police forces roving around looking to behead people. None of this sounded promising concerning Stefan’s disappearance. He could have run afoul of any variety of thugs, including the Catholic ones, though I had to admit that this Ruiz character did not sound like your typical episcopal spin doctor. And my sense was that if Ruiz even remotely suspected Stefan had been kidnapped by the bad guys, he’d be raising all kinds of hell about it. Yet the diocese had been almost totally silent on the subject of Stefan’s vanishing and professed to have no idea whatsoever where he might be.
That seemed extremely weird to me. Stefan worked for them. He had a superior. Somebody must be reporting to somebody on this, or at the very least the Church rumor mill had to be operating overtime. Nothing, however, was leaking out. The official word was that they did not consider him to be a missing person, though they did not know his whereabouts at the present time. This part had Jonah truly rattled, because according to him, it could only mean one thing: Stefan had gone off on his own. For whatever reason, whether to protect the hierarchy or to defy it, he’d cut himself out of the group and headed off on his own personal mission. And Jonah and I both knew that nothing in Stefan’s personality would give him one ounce of real help if he had launched out on some such heroic, harebrained venture.
Musing hard, I cast another fierce glance out the tent flap, only to meet the cold blue stare of my boss, who’d clearly been watching me for a while. Quietly, without dropping my eyes, I folded up the letters and slipped them under my sleeping sheet. But I could tell by the look on his face that his naturally suspicious nature, at least when it came to me, had been stirred back to life.
Chapter Six
A week later we were done in Tikal, and Jan gave us a couple of days of R and R in Flores before we started the next leg of the journey. Though I’d only spent half a day on the island before heading out to the field, I was happy to return to the sinking town in the middle of Lake Petén Itzá. The house, which was not their house, Rikki explained, but a kind of way station for traveling archeologists and anthropologists, was on the high side of one of the flooded streets. My upstairs bedroom with its woven bedspread and green-shuttered window looked out across the shifting silver water, dotted with small wooden cayucos, toward San Benito.
It wasn’t just the view that made me happy. I like living in tents, but after ten days in the jungle, I was covered with bites and needed to wash my clothes in something besides cold water and camp suds. At least here we could heat well water on the stove.
We could also cook. And I was a pretty good cook. Peter, my first official boyfriend, passed on some culinary skills during the couple of years we lived together. Peter was in film school, I was in photography school, and what kind of creative geniuses would we have been without knowing how to braise, sauté, and whisk? Plus, he informed me early on, he liked to be surprised by food, and he couldn’t very well surprise himself, could he? So I learned, though I rarely demonstrated my talents these days because it was the kind of thing men were tempted to manipulate for their own ends. Now, however, with access to an oven for twenty-four more hours before we headed out, I decided to cook for the three of us, a real dinner that would take half a day to prepare.
I unhooked the two woven bags from the kitchen wall, stuffed a handful of quetzales in my skirt pocket, and went out into the street. The houses across from us sat in at least a foot of lake water, so the electricity had long ago been shut off, but there were still families in them, using candles, I suppose, and cooking over fires. A group of schoolgirls with tight, patent-leather braids skipped along, holding hands, and I watched as a cloud of white butterflies coming the other way dipped down toward their black heads. Christmas was only two weeks away, and Flores was ready for it.