Red Jungle Read Free Page A

rooms after their parents died. He’d sold off some of the old-world furniture. Her brother loved everything new and everything American. He wanted, more than anything, to be a modern American swinger. Isabella loved the heavy antique furniture her grandmother had brought with her from France. It was said that her grandmother had been born and died in the same bed. Her brother had sold the bed and bought something out of a catalog from the United States, with an upholstered headboard and a built-in TV set. The advertisement had claimed that this style bed was used by the stars in Hollywood. The TV set had never worked.
    She missed the heavy purple curtains that had hung in her grandmother’s bedroom. The dark curtains seemed in keeping with the somber visits she remembered from an ancient Spanish priest, who had fought alongside Franco and against the Spanish Republic. The priest came every day while Isabella’s grandmother was dying. He would hold Isabella’s hand and tell her that Christ loved her very much. She was glad that Christ loved her. It made her feel good. She knelt by her grandmother’s bed, her skates on, and prayed to Christ, asking him not to take her grandmother away.
    Her grandmother died the month they sent Isabella to the United States to go to school. Her grandmother had said something to her in French the morning they brought Isabella in to say goodbye. Isabella never understood what her grandmother had said. She had simply told her granddaughter: “Enjoy life, dear. It is very short.”
    Isabella wished she and her baby were in the capital, safe. But they weren’t. There was going to be a war. The air was different now. Even the rain was different now, the way it fell against the coffee patios in unforgiving thunderous moments.
    She looked down the hallway of the plantation house towards the bedroom where her infant son, Russell, was sleeping. She wondered if he would always love her. Her son had the blood of two countries: Guatemala, the poor coffee country, and The United States, the great top hat country of Henry Ford and Broadway and jet planes and smoking factories. She called him her little Yankee when she fed him, and would laugh while stroking his white skin. She had bathed her son in the same bathtub she’d been bathed in, a bathtub her grandfather had bought and had carried from Puerto Barrios in 1899, through the jungle, to rest here in the plantation house that hadn’t changed in more than a hundred years. Indians who saw the porcelain bathtub coming up the narrow jungle track —like some porcelain god— would bow, her father had told her, laughing. The Indians, the story went, would run from their houses just to touch its white sides with the magical words “American Standard.”
    “Olga. Olga…” Isabella said.
    “Manda? ” the Indian girl answered.
    Olga Montes De Oro stepped out of the bedroom and looked at Isabella. The two young women had known each other since they could remember. They were born two days apart, there on the plantation. If they weren’t sisters, they were—in Guatemalan terms—something very close. (Isabella’s American husband would never understand these mysterious relationships.) The sight of Olga made Isabella feel a little better. A little reassured. Like the day that Olga’s brother found them lost in the cafetales when they were children, terrified by the red ants they’d found crawling up their naked feet and legs.
    “The child?” Isabella asked.
    “Sleeping now, Doña Isabella,” Olga said. Isabella was ten when Isabella’s father insisted that Olga begin using the doña when she addressed her friend. The two girls laughed about it; it was as if Isabella had suddenly grown up. Olga was jealous, but never said anything to her friend. She wanted to be Doña Olga. Olga told her father. He said that she would be a doña when Olga saw pigs fly over their house, and laughed, rolling a cigarette with one hand. When Olga asked her father why