Red Jungle

He’d sought out his aunt, a tall, elegant woman who had lived most of her life in Miami. He sat next to her on the veranda, both of them looking out at the sea. They talked about the family plantation. She’d already forgiven him for not going to see her. She seemed to understand that it was too difficult for him.

“I’m glad you came,” his aunt said. She was wearing pedal pushers, despite her age, and an expensive-looking blouse. He imagined that his mother would look like her if she lived now, an attractive older woman. In his memory, his mother was always young. She would be, God, what—in her fifties? What would she think of her son? He would never know.

A few young teenagers played in the surf below the house. One of them had dragged out a large i

He reached over and put his hand on his aunt’s knee. She smiled at him. They had been talking about the Empire Room at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, how it had been his mother’s favorite place when she came to visit.

“I want to know what happened,” Russell said, suddenly interrupting her. “The whole story. Please. Uncle Pedro wouldn’t tell me the whole story.” His aunt turned to look at him. Russell saw the teenage boy, out in the surf, lifted up on a wave and then disappearing behind it. His aunt glanced at him, then picked up her drink.

“It was the Communists. It was an afternoon like this,” she said. “It happened on the road to Las Flores. We wanted you to believe it was a car crash. Your uncle lied to you. I’m not sorry. How could a little boy understand war?”

“What happened?”

“They left her by the side of the road like an animal.” His aunt reached for his hand. He didn’t really want to know the rest of it.

•••

Spring 1988

Even Isabella’s brother hadn’t had the heart to change their grandfather’s bedroom in the apartment in the capital. It looked exactly the same as the day in 1939 when her grandfather had died, asking for reports about his empire in the jungle. They said he was on the phone with General Somoza in Nicaragua when he died. Sometimes, in the dim light of a rainy afternoon, Isabella could see herself and her brother as children ru

It would be, Isabella hoped, the same apartment her son would someday inherit, an apartment that said so much about their family and yet told little about the individual men and women who had passed through it. Like all the Cruz homes, it was redolent with the country’s very smell and the family history, which was one man’s fear of poverty, and the achievement of great wealth. Conversations that had changed the history of the country seemed to linger in the dining room, a room that had absorbed all the blood and lust of an entire century.

“Are you my love?” Antonio asked her. Antonio was in love with Isabella, but he was in love with a lot of girls, and she knew that. He was younger; his parents would never, ever, let him marry a divorced woman who was ten years older and had a child, even if she was a Cruz and owned the biggest coffee plantation in Central America.

Isabella looked at him for a moment. They were listening to “Ojala que te vaya bonito” on the stereo. Isabella had bought the record in Mexico, and it was her favorite right now.

There had been a lull in the fighting. The roads were a little bit safer, everyone seemed tired of the fighting, even the communists. She’d driven up to the capital from the plantation, just she and her driver and Olga, her father’s pistol in the glove compartment, the one she’d used to save them nine years before. She’d still been a girl then; now she was a woman. Ru

She was wearing a white sleeveless dress and white shoes. At 32 she was still girlish, slender and tall. The years of trying to be young were almost over, and the years of ru

Her son was coming in a week to spend his Easter vacation, and she was pla

Isabella listened to the melancholy strains of the song as Antonio followed her into her bedroom in the capital. The room smelled of perfume and the old waxed floors. She looked up at the photo of her grandfather and grandmother on horseback. Sometimes her grandfather would come to her like that, on horseback, while she was out with the administrator, the sounds of gunfire coming from further down, towards Mexico. She and her administrator would go out by horseback in the early morning light when it was still cool, riding out to a distant part of the plantation, not knowing who or what was waiting for them.

From where she rode she could see miles and miles of blue green hills, and here and there the red roof of a plantation house in the distance. She’d been called a whore by the men of the country club and the city. People she’d grown up with, all married, couldn’t respect her because she wasn’t married, and because she used men, they said, like a man. It was on one of those mornings, the administrator sliding from his horse and going to talk to one of the shirtless workers clearing the bush, when she turned and saw her grandfather coming up the road on horseback in his frock coat, with his high Spanish forehead and his stern look.

“Mija ven aca,” her grandfather said to her as he rode up into the cafetal. “Is it true you’re sleeping with men in my house?” He slapped her in the face and demanded an explanation. He said she wasn’t a good Catholic. She held her face and told her grandfather that she was holding onto the plantation he’d given them, but she needed men to be happy. She was a woman. She couldn’t stand always being alone. I’m no different than you were, she told him.