“I suppose you do have some weed. That would help. Evelyn is dead on her feet, and I’m dying of cold.”
Richard decided this was not the moment to be a prig and brought a tin of weed brownies out of the fridge. A couple of years earlier, due to his ulcer and headaches, he had been given a prescription that allowed him to buy marijuana for medicinal purposes. After splitting one of the brownies in three, Richard and Lucia each took a piece and gave one to Evelyn Ortega to lift her spirits. Lucia thought it best to explain what was in the brownie, but the girl ate it on trust, without any questions.
“You must be hungry, Evelyn. I’m sure that with all this confusion you haven’t eaten. We need something hot,” Lucia decided, opening the fridge. “There’s nothing here, Richard!”
“I buy what I need for the week on Saturdays, but today I couldn’t go because of the snow and the cat.”
Lucia remembered the soup, the remains of which were still in her basement apartment, but did not have the heart to go outside again, descend to the catacombs, and return balancing a heavy pot on the icy stairs. Scraping together what little she could find in Richard’s kitchen, she prepared toast with gluten-free bread and served it with mugs of lactose-free milk, while Richard strode up and down the kitchen muttering to himself, and Evelyn compulsively stroked Marcelo’s back.
Forty-five minutes later, the three of them were relaxing in a pleasant daze in front of the lit fire. Richard was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, and Lucia lay down on a blanket, her head across his legs. This familiarity would normally never have happened, since Richard did not encourage physical contact, least of all on his thighs. For Lucia, this was the first time in months she had smelled a man and felt his warmth, the rough texture of a pair of jeans on her cheek, and the softness of an old cashmere cardigan within reach. She would have preferred to be in bed with him but blocked out that image with a sigh, resigned to enjoying him fully dressed while she imagined the remote possibility of embarking down the winding path of sensuality with him. I’m a bit dizzy, it must be the brownie, she decided.
Evelyn was slumped on the only big cushion, with Marcelo on her lap, and looked as diminutive as a jockey. The piece of brownie she had eaten had had the opposite effect on her as it had on Richard and Lucia. While they relaxed with their eyes half-closed, struggling to stay awake, Evelyn began to pour out her tragic life story in stammering speech. It turned out she knew more English than it had at first seemed but hadn’t managed to get the words out because she had been too nervous. Now calmer, she was able to make herself understood with surprising eloquence in Spanglish, that mixture of Spanish and English that is the official language of many Latinos in the United States.
Outside, the snow settled gently on the white Lexus as Evelyn told them of her past. Over the next three days, as the storm wearied of punishing the land and dissolved far out to sea, the lives of Lucia Maraz, Richard Bowmaster, and Evelyn Ortega would become inextricably linked.
Evelyn
Guatemala, 1992–2008
Green, an entire world of green, the buzzing of mosquitoes, the screeching of cockatoos, a murmur of reeds in the breeze, sticky fragrant ripe fruit, wood smoke and roasted coffee beans, constant heat, and moisture on her skin and in her dreams. This was how Evelyn Ortega remembered her small village, Monja Blanca del Valle. Brightly painted walls, textile looms, flowers and birds, color piled on color, a rainbow of hues. And everywhere, at all times, her grandmother, Concepcion Montoya, the most decent and hardworking Catholic woman, according to Father Benito, who knew everything because he was not only a Jesuit but a Basque, and proud of it, as he used to say with the irony typical of his homeland but that no one there seemed to appreciate. Father Benito had seen a lot of the world, and all of Guatemala. He knew the life the peasants led, because he was so deeply rooted in it. He would not have changed his own life for anything. He loved his community, his great clan, as he called it. Guatemala was the most beautiful country in the world, he used to say, the Garden of Eden blessed by God but mistreated by humanity, and he would add that his favorite village was Monja Blanca del Valle, which owed its name to the national flower, the whitest and purest of orchids.
The priest had witnessed the massacre of indigenous peoples in the eighties, with its systematic torture, mass burials, villages reduced to ashes where not even domestic animals survived. He saw how the soldiers, their faces blackened to avoid being recognized, crushed all attempts at revolt, every spark of hope in other human beings as poor as they themselves, just to keep things as they had always been. Far from hardening him, this experience softened his heart. He overlaid the atrocious images of that past with the fantastic spectacle of the country he loved, with its infinite variety of flowers and birds, its landscapes of lakes, forests, and mountains, its cloudless skies. The villagers accepted him as one of their own, because he truly was. They said he was still alive thanks to the miraculous Virgin of the Assumption, Guatemala’s patron saint. What other explanation could there be, when it was rumored that he had hidden guerrilla fighters and they had heard him mention agrarian reform from the pulpit? For far less than that, others had had their tongues cut out and their eyes gouged from their sockets. The ever-present skeptics muttered that the Virgin had nothing to do with it: the priest must have been sent by the CIA, or protected by the narcos, or was simply an army informer. They never dared suggest any of this within his hearing, because the Basque Jesuit, despite having a fakir’s body, would have been able to break their nose with a single blow. No one had greater moral authority than this priest with the harsh foreign accent. If he respected Concepcion Montoya as a saint, it must have been for a reason, thought Evelyn, although she had lived, worked, and slept for so long beside her grandmother that to her she seemed a lot more human than divine.