Follow the Sun Underground
by David Brookes
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
When he complained of a headache to his driver in the morning, the driver said, ‘A worm? Tequila doesn’t really come with a worm anymore, Señor. Only if it comes from an unclean place. The worm is really a moth. It means the liquor is contaminated.’
‘Are you telling me it’s no wonder I have a headache?’
‘What was the brand?’
‘Casablanca? Casino?’
‘Casa Nova?’ The driver laughed. He was a phlegmy, scruffy-looking man, but Ix liked him. He had slept in the hostel across the street, waiting for Ix to get up and continue his journey. ‘No surprise, Señor. Around here Casa Nova is made 170 proof. That’s about 80, 85 percent pure alcohol, my friend.’
‘So that’s why I feel like my head got stamped on. How long until we reach the ruins?’
‘I can take you down to the rainforest, then it’s walking. You do that by yourself. Ten, twenty minutes, along the jungle path. Then you reach the ruins.’
The driver dropped him off on a long stretch of road occupied by small stores and bars on one side, many of which looked ready to fall down. The other side was bare red earth, and a few yards back, the forest.
Alone now, Ix unbuttoned his shirt and adjusted his satchel. He had bought himself some premium walking boots that would apparently save his ankles whilst trekking through the dense undergrowth. His hat, which had so far protected him from the sun — he recalled a picture of the angular Sun God in his impressive headdress — would now shelter him from the dripping canopy. He had fitted his big wooden box to a luggage trolley and, though the box was far too heavy for that sort of apparatus, he managed to get it onto the jungle path and drag it behind him on dented metal wheels.
Much of the rainforest had been cut back from the road. Stumps four or five feet across rose up from the ground like pointed staves. He had heard the locals call them ‘jaguar teeth’, and apparently the spirits of the jungle were angered by them. They were a sign of the destruction of their verdant ancestral homeland.
He checked his watch. It was powered by the kinetic energy of his body’s movement. If that was true, he thought, then this series of hikes would probably keep it powered for about forty years. It was ten o’clock. He’d have brunch, and then follow the trail from the first set of temple ruins to those deepest in the jungle. It would be closer there, more humid, and more like the world of the ancient Mayas. If he was to get closer to the spirits, then he would have to go deep.
A truck parked by the first temple had been modified for permanent station at the tourist spot. Its canvas side had been cut open and rolled back to reveal a modest kitchen, where a local family made their living serving hot bean dishes and poor imitations of Western food.
Ix sat on one of the flatter tree stumps and watched the tourists climb up and down the pyramidal temple. The terraced stone was a special sort of grey, sometimes green-looking, sometimes silver or black. He couldn’t remember from his research what stone it was, but it felt rich with history, as though made of concentrated memories.
Someone took his picture and gave him their condolences. He had kept Julieta’s death from the press for as long as he could, but now it was making the rounds. Ix tried not to cry as they shook his hand and asked if he really was hosting the next series of The Apprentice.
* * *
‘Don’t you miss it even a little?’
‘You can’t miss a country you’ve never been to,’ he said.
‘When your mama was carrying you, she was still in Mexico?’
‘No. My mother and father met in California. She’d moved to find work, and he met her at the hotel where she was employed. Then he brought her back to England.’
Ix lay on a brown leather sofa the length of the bay windows in his Mayfair apartment. The sofa had been designed by one of the big car companies and cost more than his actual car. It was so comfortable that he would take out his laptop and work from it instead of the desk with the early afternoon sunlight slanting above him, but not on him. He never liked to feel sun on his skin. He was one of the wealthiest men in the country, but he couldn’t buy his way out of a terminal melanoma.
Julieta had pulled an armchair to the head of the sofa and was curled up in it. There were three large hardbacks on architecture she was meant to be reading but, so far, she’d only looked out the window and, occasionally, at Ix. He felt her eyes on him as he would have felt the sun. Like the sun, he sometimes wished he could have expunged them.
‘If you had been raised in your mother’s country, you would want a Catholic wedding.’
‘If I’d been raised in my mother’s country, I wouldn’t be able to afford this apartment now. I’m not spiritual. You knew that when you met me, when I proposed. You said yes.’
And besides, he didn’t say, there was nothing in Mexico that he wanted, nothing he couldn’t buy in London or New York or Milan. But she was right: if he had been his mother’s son instead of his father’s son, then he would be a completely different person. And he didn’t know if that would be a good thing or not.
‘I don’t want to get married in Hyde Park,’ Julieta was saying. ‘I mean, I don’t care where we get married. I just want a priest to be there.’
‘Your brother is a priest. He’ll be there.’
Julieta slowly closed the coffee-table volume with a barely audible puff of air, as if she was taking special care not to slam it shut with a bang. She put it down on the hand-knotted bamboo-silk rug that looked more like a work of modern art than something to drip civit coffee onto.
‘My mother will want to know why you have no family at the wedding.’
‘My grandfather died last year,’ he said.
‘I know that! But what about...’
And there it was. The thing they hadn’t talked about in the two years since they met, brought up finally with he on the cusp of forty, and she only 28 and a just a child. He would blame his inability to talk on his parents, except that he didn’t have any, and had never wanted to talk about how they had burned alive, not then nor during the twelve years he and Julieta were to be married.
He called her a child, but she never pouted. She threw one leg onto the sofa beside his and lay on her hip with her face next to his face.
It was something she’d done on the single bed in which they’d first had sex, because it was too small for them to lie side by side on their backs. They’d had to sleep facing one another. The tiny room in the budget hotel was a mistake made by his assistant. The following day, Ix was to join his junior manager, Will, in Leeds for a client presentation. Will had been surprised to find himself in an executive suite. The hotel had no spare rooms and Ix planned to slum it for a night. He hadn’t expected to leave a tapas bar for a cigarette to see a swarthy brunette crying outside the church opposite.
She had lost a blue enamel necklace, her grandmother’s crucifix. At first he had been confused that she wouldn’t let him buy her a replacement. He could get something better, in real turquoise, even. It was an argument that lasted for three hours while they searched. He thought that she hated him, that she was what he called God-stupid, a traditional girl, brainwashed from birth, naïve, mindless.
But she told him, after they’d shared a bottle of wine and gone to his little bed and he’d been shocked into a premature ejaculation by the fierceness of her unexpected foreplay, that she only shared her family’s beliefs to a point. She just loved her grandmother and couldn’t replace the necklace. When he cancelled the presentation and took her to a thousand-pound deluxe room at The Connaught at Hyde Park the following night, she seemed disappointed.
On the sofa, the glow from his laptop making his hands look old, Ix turned to Julieta and closed the laptop and wondered if he could compromise on a priest provided he could write his own vows. He would suggest it, but he knew that eventually he would concede to her on every point.
Before he could make the suggestion out loud, she whispered, ‘I’m grateful for everything you give me’, and he felt the warmth of her lips like something just off the stove, a searing kind of love he didn’t understand and hadn’t ever expected.
* * *
One group of tourists were going as far as the fifth temple. This would take a number of hours’ hiking to reach, which was fine by Ix. He needed it to be dark for what he intended; he needed the World of the Living to be gone with the sun, and the moonlit World of the Spirits to come into being.
A few of the tourists were quite respectable. He told himself not to be surprised. You’re a tourist, too. Remember? They spoke to him like a person, not a celebrity. They didn’t view him as important, and he wasn’t just someone to beg something off, or a potential employer. They recognised him, of course, but they talked to him as they would anyone else: Isn’t the jungle hotter than you expected? Don’t the ruins have a feel to them? And what are those scurrying raccoon-like things called, with the long stiff tails?
Most of the group stopped at the second temple, to turn back. Almost all of the others decided that they’d seen enough by the third. At the fourth, the tour guide and the last few people — half of them location scouts for movie companies — told him that this was as far as they needed to go.
‘I would not go by yourself,’ the guide warned. ‘I can’t recommend that strongly enough. If you get turned around out here... There are wild animals, even big cats.’
‘Jaguars.’
‘And black panthers.’
He didn’t tell the man that black panthers were really jaguars with a pigment disorder. The tequila bottle, stowed away in his satchel, was now half-empty, and he knew he was capable of offending people when he was steamed. He just said that he’d come on purpose to see the jaguars, and he wasn’t leaving until he spotted one.
The tour guide gave him his cellphone number. ‘Won’t work too good here, but you ring if anything happen. No, you ring anyway once you’re back on the jungle path. No matter the time, okay?’
‘Thank you,’ said Ix, and looked up through the trees at the sun, which was well on its way down.
It wouldn’t be long.
* * *
Ix stood with Julieta’s mother in the City of London Cemetery under a silvery elm. It was cold enough that evening for Ix to wish he had brought a jacket. Her mother wrapped a coat around herself and clutched her round body tightly as though the setting sun were a galaxy away.
A small JCB shuddered with each hydraulic jerk, a diesel engine chugging at a pitch below the twittering birds and their evening chorus.
‘This is wrong,’ said Julieta’s mother.
‘There’s no more space, Mama. You can’t get a plot here unless you reuse a grave. That’s just how it is. I want her to be at rest in a beautiful space that she would have liked.’
‘What beauty? You know she wouldn’t like this.’
‘This grave is a hundred years old, Mama. You can’t even read the name on the tombstone anymore. They put a notice on the stone six months ago and placed a few ads and no one came forward to object.’
‘Putting two people in the same grave is wrong, mi hijo.’
She called him mi hijo when she wanted to persuade him of something. The rest of the time he was Ix, or The Husband. Ix loved the sun-weathered old woman; at least he thought he did. He found her entertaining and wondered if he loved her in the way that a person loves their dog or something else that was sometimes irritating but in a harmless way. Yet a dog receives warm love from its owner. Ix didn’t know what he felt for Julieta’s mother.
‘Don’t think of it like that,’ he said. The digger was loud even when it was idle. He didn’t know what the operator had been thinking when he stopped the machine. Was he listening to the birds? Or enjoying the sunset? ‘Think of it as two graves, just one deeper than the other.’
‘You said she doesn’t even get her own headstone? They carve it on the back of the old one?’
‘And turn it around, yes. Mama, no-one knows who this body is. It’s gone, cleaned away. If only everything could be burned away so absolutely.’
‘It’s wrong, mi hijo. God would not like this.’
‘You’re always telling me to get in touch with my spiritual side, and all this arguing is only hurting you. I’m the one burying my wife, and you’re the one who’s pulling hair out.’
‘Dios mio, people change. I always hoped you would change, for your own sake. I hoped she would change you.’
‘Yeah, well, your grandfather spoke Nahuatl, and now you watch soap operas after church. Sometimes we change too much.’
‘You know she wouldn’t like this.’
‘It’s not about her. She’s dead, she’s not going to know.’
He could hear the woman scowling. He just knew it without having to look at her. ‘Or she’s looking down on us, like she always believed, and she can’t believe you’re desecrating this poor person’s grave,’ she said.
He craned his neck to look directly upward to the small leaves of the elm that were translucent against the onion-white sky. Sometimes he hated the sound of her voice. But it reminded him of his own mother, whom he barely remembered, and that in turn reminded him of his grandfather, the kindest man he’d ever known. He wouldn’t have cared, either.
* * *
Copyright © 2019 by David Brookes
