“You have a son,” her grandfather’s ghost said.

“I do.”

“What will he think of you?”

“I don’t know,” she’d answered. “I don’t know.”

“I had many wives,” he said. “Some I married, some I didn’t. Maybe you got this from me. I’m burning in hell for it. I don’t want you to. . . . You’re as strong as a man, I can see that. God bless you, my daughter.” He rode away.

Isabella started to cry, spurring her horse toward him to ask him if he’d seen her father. But her grandfather was gone, disappearing into the cafetales with their white flowers.

The administrator was looking at her. Later, he told his wife that Dona Isabella was talking to herself, and it had frightened him. Everyone was going crazy, he said; it was the war. He blamed the war. His wife said Isabella was a whore and would burn in hell for all the men she’d sinned with. The administrator said nothing. Three days later, he stepped on a land mine. He heard the click of the thing before he died. He saw a Piui bird in the sky. And then he was gone. Isabella went on without him.

“Olga. I’m leaving for the party.” Isabella had come into the kitchen. She didn’t always come into the kitchen. It was Olga’s place.

The two women, more like sisters than master and servant, looked at each other. Perhaps it was a premonition. “I don’t know what time I’ll be back,” Isabella said.

“Sí, senora.”

“Olga?”

“Sí, señora.” Isabella had stopped by the doorway

“Are you happy?” she asked Olga. It was an odd question. Isabella wasn’t even sure why she’d asked it. Olga had been married now for a year, and the change in her had been pronounced; Isabella was jealous. She’d never thought she would be jealous of Olga. After all, Olga was deformed, and short, and an Indian; and yet Isabella, the day after Olga’s marriage on the plantation, couldn’t look at her exactly the same way. She loved Olga, she knew that. It was a love she couldn’t have explained to anyone; it was profound, like her love for the land her grandfather had left them.

“Sí, señora.” Olga gave her a rare smile. She was normally serious, and had been that way since they were little girls.

“I’m so glad.” Isabella went back and hugged her. “I’m so very glad,” she said.

For some reason, she decided at the last moment to take her father’s pistol out of her purse. Antonio looked at her as she took the old-fashioned heavy revolver out and laid it on the table by the phone. She had carried it everywhere since the war had started.

Then they left. Five minutes later, her son called from his school, saying that he’d just heard that he was going to the military school he’d applied to in Virginia and he wanted his mother to have the good news. He’d missed his mother by five minutes.

Later, as Olga was making tortillas out in the courtyard, squatting alone, she smelled Isabella’s perfume mixing with the smell of the corn and the wood smoke, and felt uneasy.

Isabella had been at embassy parties before; many, in fact. Mostly they were rich Guatemalan boys from all the best families and American women who worked at the embassy, gold diggers in their thirties from Tennessee and New York. Women who, like Isabella, were certainly not innocent, and were of a certain age that called for certain girlish attitudes to be put aside if they wanted a man. Like the other women at the party, Isabella understood that they were alone, as women of the world are alone. It was the first time that she had an inkling of the idea she was now a woman, not a girl or a male adornment. There was something in the intense expression of one woman she met, a redhead from Chicago; the redhead was a little drunk when Jose introduced them. It was clear from the woman’s body language that she “knew” Antonio very well.

“She helped me with my sister’s passport problems,” Antonio said. Like most men, he was a bad liar. Isabella knew then it was over between them, not because of the woman from Chicago, but because she was too old now for this, and she was tired of chasing her youth. It was over. It ended there in that living room, listening to the Rolling Stones on the stereo.

The war had changed her. She was tired of men like Antonio who saw the war as only an inconvenience, and were anyway spending more and more time out of the country. She felt very alone, looking around the rococo-style mansion that belonged to the Minister of Health.

She felt as if she were meeting herself after a long absence, and the Isabella she met was a stranger. She saw herself for the first time that evening. It was bizarre. She’d never had a really clear picture of herself, not since she’d been a child in boarding school in the United States, when a store clerk— hearing her Latin accent, but not seeing her—called her a Mexican. She wasn’t a Mexican, but she understood what it meant. She was different, and would never forget that the United States wasn’t really her home. The only home she had was out there in that strange place of volcanoes and coffee and warfare and Indians and rain and ghosts. She wanted to tell her son to be something, anything but what Antonio and his kind had become—empty rich boys. She wanted to leave the party then, but Antonio begged her to stay. So she did.

It was late, and there were the loud voices of people who had drunk too much. The stereo was playing rock music from the States. It sounded foreign to her. She preferred Latin music.

She didn’t know where Antonio had gone. She sat in the living room, impassive. The Minister of Health, only forty, was going on about horse racing. Men and women sat on the couches around her. There was a great deal of blue cigarette smoke. She was drinking vodka and was slightly drunk now, and wondered how she would get rid of Antonio, because she had no interest in ever sleeping with him again. Oddly, she was thinking of what she would eat in the morning when the American girl from Chicago hit her on the side of the head with a heavy Mayan stone god. It had been sitting on the coffee table; Isabella had even picked it up and looked at it, only minutes before.

She died instantly, as Mick Jagger began to sing. Everyone who was there would remember the terrible sound of her body falling on the glass table.

Her son was asleep. He slept well and rose to the sound of a bugle, as he had for the last eight years of his life.

TWENTY-FOUR

Beatrice had gotten drunk. At times she would look at Russell across the dinner table, from her place next to her husband. He’d deliberately sat far away from her, between his aunt and Rudy Valladolid.

Alone in his room after dinner, he could hear the sound of an electric generator. The generator’s distant whir had been a pleasant sound over their dessert. They had flan and sweet German wines, the weak lights of the pergola dimming at times. The dinner conversation had been about the World Cup, and how well the American team had done, then turned to children away at college and boarding schools. Russell had barely spoken.

After hearing his aunt’s story about his mother’s death, Russell couldn’t help but spend dinner wondering what his life would have been like had she lived. His aunt told him that the guerrillas had wanted to make an example of her because of who she was.

His aunt and uncle hadn’t wanted him to know that his mother had been murdered. They were afraid that it would be too much for him, so they had made up the lie about a traffic accident. Because they had been Cruzes, the story was easy to fix. They’d even had a newspaper article planted with details of the accident, in case Isabella’s ex-husband made inquiries. He never did, of course. The only thing Russell’s father ever said about his mother’s death was that he’d heard the roads in Central America were dangerous and he wasn’t at all surprised, given how fast his mother drove, that something had eventually happened to her. Russell thought his father seemed relieved that she was gone for good.