Maya spends most of her five-day trip within these walls, a home of about 1,200 square feet, surrounded by a wall too high to see over. She had thought she would see more of Guatemala, or at least of the city, than she does. Even with the somber occasion, she’d assumed that she and her mom would visit a few landmarks, snap some pictures, try a few restaurants. But instead, the two of them spend their entire trip, aside from the funeral, within the high cinder block wall that surrounds the house on all sides.
It’s hard to gauge from these walls if Guatemala City is really so dangerous, but her mom assures her that it is. The civil war ended in 1996, but its bloody spirit lives on in the gangs that took in some of its orphans who had fled to the US. The Reagan administration might have denied them refugee status, but the gangs of LA welcomed these traumatized kids with open arms, and it was only when the US began deporting them that MS-13 and other maras, as they’re called, took root in Guatemala’s war-cracked system and grew into the strangling vines they are today.
Carolina nods her head in agreement. She rarely goes out either, other than to work. She doesn’t speak much English but seems to understand perfectly, as do a lot of people here. She lights a cigarette, sitting across from Maya and her mom at the glass-topped patio table, her head just inches beneath the flaming red and yellow bloom of the heliconia plant at her back. The wall is a warm cantaloupe color, studded with decorative tiles and ceramic planters overflowing with ferns and bougainvillea. The night is cool, rinsed clear by the day’s rain, and the novena prayers have ended, which means it’s time for Carolina’s nightly cigarette.
Maya knows this now that she’s on her last night here: her aunt smokes exactly one each night and tends to wink at whoever’s nearby as she lights it, as if she’s just kidding about being a smoker. Carolina, a second grade schoolteacher, doesn’t have kids but babies the hell out of her plants, many of whom she has named. Yesterday she introduced Maya to a ficus tree named Ursula and the music of Mano Negra, which is now Maya’s favorite band; Carolina may be the coolest adult she’s ever met.
And she grew up with Maya’s father. Over the last few days, Carolina has told Maya how she’d looked up to her big brother. He’d made her laugh like no one else, and he was clever, always reading something—comics, novels, then later newspapers and poetry. He’d confided to his sister that he dreamed of being a writer one day.
He’d been studying history and literature at the Universidad de San Carlos, with a focus, Carolina says, on the magical realists. Something about the way they wove magic into the lives of ordinary people as if refusing to abide by the colonizers’ obsessively realist literary style.
Jairo could have explained it better than I have, Carolina had said in Spanish.
But part of the problem was Maya’s limited ability to understand. The accent here is different from what she’d learned in school, so she’d needed to ask her aunt to slow down many times over the past few days, to repeat herself. And even then, Maya wasn’t always sure she understood.
Carolina’s cigarette burns low. Soon she’ll go to bed, and there is still so much Maya wants to ask her, so much she wants to say. Running out of time, she settles on a question that she’s had for years. “El libro de mi papá . . .” she says. My father’s book. She knows that her father began to write a book before he died, but her mother didn’t know much about it. It was a mystery was all Brenda could say.
“？Qué fue el . . . ?” Maya says—but now she can’t remember the Spanish word for title. She searches her brain, and as she does, detects an unusual smell on the patio, an ethereal floral note beneath her aunt’s cigarette smoke. At first, she thinks she must be imagining it. “？Qué era el nombre,” she tries again, embarrassed by her bad Spanish, “del libro de mi papá?”
“Ah, el título . . .” Carolina says. She narrows her eyes, tries to remember the title of Jairo’s unfinished book. Then she shakes her head in frustration. Explains that she can’t recall at the moment—it’s been a long while since she thought of her brother’s writing. All she remembers is that the title was long, the entire line of a very old poem he had loved.
The smell grows stronger as Carolina says this, heady and sweet.
Maya’s sense of smell is stronger than most—she once detected a gas leak in the kitchen hours before her mom noticed anything amiss—and now she’s pretty sure she’s not imagining it. There is something otherworldly about this smell blossoming beneath her aunt’s smoke, as if it were wafting in from another realm. A paradise. Some timeless place where flowers bloom at night—a place Maya shouldn’t be able to smell from here, but she can and it’s the exact opposite, she thinks, of the smell at the cemetery. And every bit as real. “Mom?” she says.
“Yeah, Muffin?”
“Do you smell that?”
Maya’s question prompts both Brenda and Carolina to sniff the air.
Carolina smushes out her cigarette in an ashtray. A look of wonder comes over her face as the smoke clears and the mesmerizing smell fills her nose. “No puede ser . . .” She rises from the table and walks around the corner of the house. Maya and her mom follow.
There they see that an ordinary-looking cactus stationed in a plain plastic pot has erupted with a single dinner-plate-sized flower. The long white petals yawn into the most dramatic bloom Maya has ever seen, like the gaping eye of some god or a firework frozen in time. It gives off the strongest smell of any flower she’s ever come across.
“？Qué es?” she asks her aunt.
“La Reina de la Noche,” Carolina says.
“？Qué?” Brenda asks.
Carolina explains that each bud of this type of cactus only blooms for one night. This particular plant hadn’t flowered in years, and she had thought it was dead. “No lo puedo creer,” Carolina says, shaking her head in near disbelief as tears fill her eyes. The Queen of the Night, she says in Spanish, was my mother’s favorite flower.
* * *
—
Maya is folding her black dress back into her suitcase when she hears a light rap on the open door and looks up to see her grandfather.
“Hola!” she says.
“Hi, mija.” His voice is small but warm. They’ve sat in rooms together over the past five days, but their exchanges have been brief.
“Por favor, entra,” she says, realizing that he is waiting for her to invite him into his own room.
He’s in his late sixties but seems older because of his creaky gait and all-white hair. He opens the wooden cabinet in the corner, takes out a cardboard box the size of a wine crate, and sets it on the bed beside Maya’s suitcase. He takes out a photo album. “Look,” he says in heavily accented English. “Your grandmother made this.” He opens the cover to reveal a photo of Maya when she was a baby, sitting on her mom’s lap, then a few more baby pictures, the turning pages revealing Maya growing up before their eyes. There she is at her fifth birthday. There she is jumping on a trampoline with Kayla, her best friend in second grade. Grimacing into a camera for school picture day. Smiling at the top of Mount Greylock. Her mother, it seems, has been sending Abuela photos all of Maya’s life.