The Indigo Notebook (11 page)

I glance up, shocked, my pen frozen in midair. “Why him,
señora
?”

She keeps stirring the bubbling soup. “I don’t gossip.”

When we interrogate Taita Silvio outside his house, he looks thoughtful but doesn’t volunteer any information.

“But why would the woman tell us to ask you?” I push.

“Perhaps because my wife and I are considered the parents of the community.” He stares intently at a pecking chicken.

Later, on the way to the bus stop, I say, “We’ve reached a dead end here, Wendell. It’s been five days. Time to try some other villages.”

“But I have this feeling.”

I suck in a breath. “We’re basing this whole fruitless search on a feeling?”

“Please.”

“One more day.”

That afternoon I don’t have any English tutoring lined up, so while Wendell’s at the Internet café, I wander over to Parque Bolívar. Don Celestino is sitting by the fountain in his blue chair, commenting on distant radio music and the feel of the breeze.

“Don Celestino,” I say, opening my indigo notebook. “How do you know I’m me?”

“Because of the birdsongs in your voice.”

“But you know it’s me even before you hear me.”

“There are birdsongs in your walk, too.”

“Do you ever feel lonely with people coming and going all the time?”

“No. I feel happy.”

“Do you ever feel scared not being able to see?”

“No. I have my chair.”

It’s Saturday, and Jeff’s driving his black rental SUV, one hand on the steering wheel and the other wrapped around Layla’s. Observing from the backseat, part of me wants to smile at this new development, but part of me dreads that this is the beginning of the end. When a man starts holding Layla’s hand in that casual yet possessive way, she feels caged in. It’s usually a matter of time before she dumps him. The boyfriends who’ve lasted longer than a few weeks are the ones who grab her hand only to run into the ocean or through a sudden rainstorm or down a hill with childish abandon.

Jeff’s in town for the weekend, and we’re headed to the Museum of Culture, which got two lines in the Ecuador guidebook. As a kid, I always begged Layla to take me to museums. In every country we’ve been to, I’ve longingly watched the happy families of foreigners streaming in and out of museums. Layla always waved her hand and said, “You
want art and culture? Walk down the street with your eyes open. Talk to people. It’s more fun. And it’s free!”

The museum is just on the edge of town, but it takes a while to get there because Jeff drives about five miles an hour as buses and taxis whiz around us. “And I thought driving in D.C. at rush hour was crazy. That’s nothing.” He glances in the rearview mirror. “You’ve got your seat belt on, right, Zeeta?”

“Yep.” I appreciate his concern for safety.

“We’ll get there when we get there,” he says. “I’m carrying precious cargo here.” What a perfect Dad thing to say. Precious cargo. He pulls a crisp white handkerchief from his pocket and pats his forehead. Layla lowers the digital temperature from sixty-eight to sixty-five, then returns her hand to his.

I haven’t seen much of Layla all week. She’s been either at class, on the phone with Jeff, or holed away in her room, up to her elbows in manila folders and crates and ESL books and papers, attempting to file her teaching materials. This is part of Jeff’s plan, an “up-front investment of time to create an efficient system of lesson planning,” so that she won’t be scrambling at the last minute to throw something together.

In the past, she’s spent her hours between classes hanging out with the most eccentric expats or locals she can find, whiling away hours at cafés in conversations about Art and Existence, darting off on hikes to sacred mountains and lakes and caves. Then, a half hour before her next class starts, she whips into a whirlwind of activity, digging into her giant box
of ESL stuff, cutting up flash cards and magazine pictures, jotting down ideas for wild grammar games and vocabulary skits. It’s been strange to see her so calm and orderly.

I crane my head forward, between the front seats. “You’re a superhero, Jeff. Layla’s never been so organized in her life.”

“She’s making progress, isn’t she?” he says. I notice he even has a little cleft in his chin, like Superman’s.

Layla glances back at me. “Hey, Z, you know when I do visualization trips to other worlds? You know my animal spirit guides?”

I can’t believe she’s bringing them up in front of Jeff. “The stag and the puma?” I groan.

“Well, I was telling Jeff he’s like my own personal guide to the regular world. It’s like I lost the map a long time ago, and now Jeff’s showing me around, making me feel at home here.”

Jeff’s eyes in the rearview mirror look earnest and surprisingly unfazed by the stag and puma comparison. “And Layla’s my guide to the world of travel and adventure. Just at the time I needed it most.”

This extreme sappiness is hard to swallow, but it’s my dream come true, so I plant a big smile on my face and say, “Serendipity.”

It takes us a while to locate the museum, which is hidden down a maze of unlabeled streets off the highway. Inside, it’s musty and tiny and empty of people, only three dark rooms with a sixth-grade social studies-project feel. Homemade
posters and little dioramas about local traditions are lined up behind locked glass cases. I can’t imagine anyone trying to steal them.

Jeff stands gaping in front of a hand-drawn map of Ecuador. “It just hits me every once in a while. I’m on a whole different continent. The adventure of a lifetime! I wish my daughters were here.”

It’s touching that he considers a trip to a school-project-caliber museum the adventure of a lifetime. And it’s sweet that he misses his daughters so much. I wonder if my father has other daughters and if he misses them the way Jeff misses his. I wonder if my father ever has some inexplicable primordial longing to see me, even though he has no reason to think I exist.

“Your daughters are lucky,” I say.

“I’m the lucky one. And on my next trip, I’ll take one of them along. You and Layla inspire me. All this parent-daughter globe-trotting. What a great bonding experience!”

I’ve always considered it more a burdening experience than a bonding one. I don’t correct him. Instead, I say, “Tell me about your daughters.”

He talks and talks, and Layla pipes in here and there—it’s clear he’s told her plenty about his daughters already. After an hour, I know about everything, from Chloe’s first steps to Camille’s volleyball team’s championship. This is a man who adores the slightest flutter of his daughters’ eyelashes. It’s almost dizzying.

Finally, he turns his attention to the clay dioramas on display. “So, ladies, tell me, what have we here?” By now I’m hungry and ready to leave this place, but Layla translates each and every one of the informational signs into English for Jeff. He listens, captivated. She lingers on Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun, celebrated at the end of June, around the summer solstice. “We were supposed to be here for the procession to the waterfall, but I came down with the flu in Thailand.” She sighs. “We didn’t make it here till a few weeks later.”

I remember this well. It was a big, traumatic thing for her, missing the summer solstice celebration. That’s her all-time favorite part of the year, anywhere in the world.

“Good thing,” Jeff murmurs. “Then we might not have met.” He puts his arm around her shoulders, a careful, protective gesture. I expect to see Layla’s shoulders stiffen in response, but no, they soften under his arm.

Layla translates more signs, about harvesting crops and exchanging food. Jeff’s utterly fascinated, making ohs and ahs here and there.

I find myself yawning. It’s uncontrollable, this yawning. I desperately want a nap. I never feel tired in Agua Santa, even in the middle of heavy labor. Maybe because in Agua Santa, I’m actually doing the harvesting of crops, not reading about it. I’m actually exchanging food with people, not just looking at a diorama of little dolls trading sacks of potatoes and corn.

I watch Layla carefully. She finishes reading a section on
the Yamor Festival, and then Jeff starts talking about Otavaleño wedding rituals. I find myself waiting for a slight parting of her mouth, the tiniest watering of her eyes, a hint of a suppressed yawn. But no, she seems inexplicably content.

Over the weekend, Jeff and Layla dine together each night at the Restaurante Americano, so I spend the evenings with Wendell. On Saturday, we cook together in the apartment—quinoa soup with heaps of cilantro. He’s very good at dicing vegetables—he chops fast, creating tiny pieces. He cleans the dishes as we go along, too. I want to light candles for our dinners like Layla and I always do—it really does make the food taste better—but I worry he might get the wrong idea. So we eat on the balcony, under the light of an electric bulb.

Giovanni the surfer clown joins us, offering bits of Taoist wisdom in return for food. He talks about The Way, the flow of the universe, action without action, effortless doing. It sounds like yet another excuse not to wash the dishes, if you ask me. When I try to pin him down on the details, he twists three balloons into a rose, presents it to me, and says, “The Way that can be described is not the true Way.”

Wendell and I smile at each other. After Giovanni leaves, Wendell says, “He’s cool. I’ve never met anyone like him.” A tiny part of me wishes he could have known the prewaterfall Layla.

On Sunday, Wendell and I make shrimp seviche from a recipe Gaby gave us. Giovanni’s out, and Wendell and I are
alone on the balcony. Even though no candles are lit, there’s a certain feeling of intimacy in the pool of light beneath the bare lightbulb, the shadowy flowers and trees in the courtyard below us. From my back pocket, I pull out the next letter I’ve translated. “This one’s my favorite so far,” I say, and proceed to read it out loud.

“There’s no exact translation for
butt ugly,”
I say.

He smiles and sucks on a piece of lime-soaked shrimp. “I thought about throwing that letter away.”

“Whoever your birth parents are, they’ll get a kick out of it.”

We eat some more shrimp and popcorn and then he says, in a deliberately casual voice, “Hey, Z, you know how Taita Silvio looks like me?”

“It’s uncanny,” I admit.

“You think he’s my birth dad? You think he had an affair with that mystery woman?”

I pick through my popcorn for an unburnt kernel, stalling. “It’s possible. But he seems so devoted to his wife. Do you really want to go there? It could ruin his marriage. Is it worth it?”

Wendell’s eyes harden. “I have a right to know.” He finishes his last swig of papaya juice. “And if he won’t tell us, we’ll have to find the truth ourselves. Let’s look around for clues.”

“Snoop?”

“Snoop.”

“That doesn’t seem … devious?”

“What’s devious is him hiding things from us.” Wendell seems to be a generally mellow guy, the type who doesn’t get angry easily. But spending all this time with him, I can see it. The coldness that’s crept into his voice, the rigid set of his jaw.

“Okay, Wendell. Let’s snoop.”

I
blink, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, damp and cool as a cave’s shadows. There’s no electric light. The clay walls are blackened with smoke stains and hold the scent of candles and incense and earth. Candelabra encircle the room on a wooden ledge. Behind me, Wendell holds open the heavy wooden door to let in a sliver of light while I search for matches.

Here we are, in the curing room. Snooping. I feel terribly guilty about it. This morning we were helping Luz and Silvio in the fields, when, as planned, Wendell said he didn’t feel well. He actually did look sick, probably his own angst over what we were about to do. I offered to come back with him while he rested. Unexpectedly, the house was locked, and we almost turned back, relieved. Then, on impulse,
Wendell suggested we try this room. I’m doubtful we’ll find anything. It doesn’t exactly seem like the place you’d store birth certificates or even illicit love letters.

Once I find matches and light a few candles, Wendell lets the door fall closed. My heart’s pounding as I take in the room. In the corner, on the far end of the dirt floor, is a table that appears to be the altar. The entire wall behind it is a burst of color. Hung from the adobe are colorful plastic tablecloths with prints of yellow roses and sunflowers and bowls of honey and a blue teapot and cups—kind of an English garden pattern. Dozens of pictures of saints and Virgins and crosses and ribbons hang on the adjacent wall, along with fresh bundles of leaves and strings of Christmas lights and the Ecuadorian flag. Pushed against the side wall is a long bench that looks like it was painted blue years ago. Now, only a hint of blue remains.

An odd medley of objects covers the altar: plastic water bottles filled with colored liquids; roses; stones of all shapes and sizes, some as small as plums, others as heavy and big as melons; a shiny golden laughing Buddha with babies crawling on him, all of them bald with large round bellies. Next to the Buddha family sit scissors, a candle, a bundle of leaves, a glass goblet of water, and two worn pink towels.

“Look, Z.” Wendell points to a neat row of crystals, four of them, by the Buddha babies. He holds his crystal next to them. They look similar, but I’m no geologist.

Then I see it, something that makes me break out in a shivery sweat.

Propped against a plastic bottle is an old photo, curled at the edges. It’s in color, but faded and a little out of focus. A hugely pregnant woman stands in front of an adobe house, with muted green hills beyond. She has an early nineties hairstyle—bangs curled and hair sprayed high, hair glossed back in a ponytail. She’s wearing the clothes of an Otavaleña woman, but with a red fleece jacket instead of a wool shawl. She looks about twenty years old, and stares into the camera with a reluctant, sad hint of a smile. A familiar half-smile.