to my nose, and riffle the pages to inhale that nutty mustiness possessed by any book steeped in a Guatemalan rainy season. Tío Memo used to come into Pastelería Jensen from the store every afternoon at five on the dot for his coffee and oatmeal cookies, always accompanied by at least one of my younger girl cousins. Usually I’d leave my table to go downstairs and sit with them for a bit.
Penny Moore strode into my bedroom holding a gardening hand rake and said, You should have this. But we didn’t have a garden or anything like one. Her rake had five iron prongs, each filed or lathed to a sharp point. Someone had recently given it to her. She’d been keeping it by her bed, ready to use it as a weapon in an emergency. I’m trying to remember exactly what color its wooden handle was; a grayish shade, I think.
It was one of those times when Guatemalan G-2 Military Intelligence and the death squads seemed to be launching another of their sporadic killing frenzies. The dreaded intelligence unit known as the Archivo was then headed by Tito Cara de Culo, still just a colonel. What seemed different now was that they weren’t only targeting Guatemalans. A junior diplomat from one of the Scandinavian countries had apparently spent several days in a guerrilla camp, not necessarily inconsistent with her information-gathering duties; in the middle of the night, intruders stealthily scaled the wall outside her rented home, climbed in through her bedroom window, repeatedly raped and stabbed her, and left her body for dead as a message that the people it was intended for would not misconstrue. Miraculously, she survived and was immediately evacuated by military air ambulance. There was a lot of nervous whispering going around about who was getting threats, who’d already fled, who might be next. Embassies and international aid organizations were all freaking, ordering staff living in apartments and homes conceivably vulnerable to wall-climbing agents of freedom to move into gated, multistory condominium complexes with good security.
Penny Moore, nonpareil information gatherer, also had a lot of contacts among the guerrillas. She’d received probably many more threats than she’d let on to me. It wouldn’t be so hard for people with the required skills to reach our windows from the sidewalk or the roof. We knew that the “bad guys”—Military Intelligence, other Guat officials, the US embassy—must suspect that Penny wasn’t just a magazine stringer, even if they didn’t know for sure. Maybe they didn’t think one person could be behind those voluminous human rights reports that were causing the Guatemalan military government and the Bonzo administration in Washington so many headaches. They didn’t think one boyishly skinny, long-legged girl whose ears stuck out through her thin black hair, who had a laugh like a neighing donkey, who’d first come to Guatemala as a Fulbright scholar and college student to study bats in Mayan mythology could be doing all that by herself. One day she told me that until she let me know otherwise, we both had to stay away from every Guatemalan we knew; a deep source had told her that Military Intelligence had put a tail on us.
Our alarm system was beer and soda bottles stacked on the seats of chairs underneath all our windows, so that if they came in, bottles would fall to the floor and shatter. I’d developed a strange tic inside my cheek that twitched constantly. From that time on and even to this day, if I’m walking on the sidewalk and the door of a parked car suddenly opens just in front of me or a little way ahead, I jump out of my skin. Penny was in her black “Vietcong” jumpsuit that I liked to tease her about, a necklace of scarlet beads around her neck. Her extraordinary character amplified her awkward beauty, electrifyingly vital, with that touch of dark Azrael energy. I was trying to absorb that we were saying goodbye, for a long time at least, and would never be roommates again. She laid the garden rake down on my bed, her bequeathed going-away present. It was, indeed, a deadly weapon. She was flying to London, where she’d spend a week huddled with “Aunt Irene,” as we were supposed to refer to Amnesty International whenever speaking of it over the phone, going over and preparing their next human rights report. She’d be briefing a parliamentary committee, flying to Geneva for secret meetings with UNHRC officials. Danielle Mitterrand had invited Penny to stay with her in Paris for a week or so, who knows what else. When she came back, she wasn’t going to be my roommate in Tía Nano’s old apartment anymore. We both understood it really was time for her to live somewhere more secure, people in London and elsewhere who knew her situation were pressuring her about it. I didn’t pay any rent and had never charged Penny; we’d just split utilities. Besides her morning cup of yogurt, a banana, and coffee, she hardly ever ate there. I helped her carry her luggage down the long, narrow stairs to the metal door leading to the street. The drive to the airport was notoriously dangerous. If they didn’t want people to leave the country but hadn’t found a way to make them disappear beforehand, they’d sometimes ambush them there. A simple hatchback car with polarized windows, electrical tape over the cracks in one, was waiting for her, and a couple of sturdy muchachos got out, one to open the trunk, the other casting his eyes up and down the street, his hand thrust into the clearly weighed-down pocket of his baggy nylon windbreaker. Afterward, I went back up the stairs and could feel tears starting in my eyes. I almost never cried. When had I last cried? I had a terrible feeling of gloom, of foreboding, like my spirit was going away, too, another passenger on a long shadow train of the ghosts of the murdered or soon-to-be murdered, a train with shadow wheels on shadow tracks, its silent clacking echoing through blood and nerves, the rhythm of the flinching tremor in my cheek. When I went back into my bedroom, the sun was coming through the windows in a way I’d never noticed before, directly hitting the roughly surfaced, painted yellow wall over my bed, suffusing it with the deep golden yellows of ripe papaya skin, which contrasted with the large minty emerald squares rimmed in blue of the Momostenango wool blanket laid over my bed. Penny’s hand rake propped atop the blanket somehow possessed the gravity of a compact heavy anchor plummeting into ocean depths despite being motionless, its glinting prongs like prehistoric fangs, with its painted whorled wood handle, the wet slurry seal color of just-laid sidewalk or maybe more a periwinkle gray, but that combination of colors and light, that unexpected tableau, as if inside a mysterious door opening in the air, suddenly struck me as unbearably beautiful and melancholy, and with a sob that came out of me like a punch, I fell to my knees, face against the scratchy wool of the blanket, hand clutching the rake by the handle, and wept like I never had before as an adult.
New London, the Thames harbor, docks, berthed sailboats, nothing out there today on the choppy grayish waters. The next stop, a short stretch of seascape away, is Mystic. Bert once brought us somewhere around here to see the submarine base, and to the seaport in Mystic to tour some of the old three-masted sailing vessels. I remember standing on the balcony of a motel early in the morning and looking down into the pool where Mamita was swimming laps in a light-blue bathing suit, her hair tucked under a bathing cap, how beautifully and swiftly she swam with her long, graceful crawl through the limpid water. Was that motel around here, in Mystic? Falmouth? Woods Hole? Wait, I think it was Boothbay Harbor.
I was on a quick book tour that I’d come up from Mexico for when Penny turned up by surprise at a reading I was giving at Politics and Prose and took me out for drinks and burgers afterward at the same bar good ol’ Tip O’Neill and some of the Kennedys used to drink at, where she said she remembered the color of the killer rake’s handle as fire-engine red. No, Penny, you’re wrong. It was slurry seal, I said emphatically. Though I wasn’t as sure as I’d sounded. Penny had spent years on the lecture circuit, traveling the country, talking about Guatemala, showing her slides, speaking in church and synagogue basements and public libraries, visiting colleges and universities. She wasn’t making any money but was invited to sit with do-gooder fat cats on the boards of various human rights and foreign policy organizations; then she suddenly enrolled in the Wharton School of Business. Five years later, by 9/11, she’d made an immense fortune in big-time finance. Of course anything Penny turned her obsessive attention to she was going to excel at. That night in the bar, she confided after her third martini that she utterly loved being ruthless in her business dealings but only so long as she believed she was competing against the sorts of bastards who for decades had been dictating all the ways that Guatemala and the other Central American countries were to be fucked over. Not long after, Penny had some kind of breakdown, was diagnosed with severe PTSD and what they called “addiction to perfectionism,” and spent two months in a treatment center in the Berkshires; then she went to live in Bali with her lover for a
