“You’ll forget me,” she said. It was obvious in that instant what he was trying to get at, the fallibility of a god’s memory, and he stood still at last.
“No, not forget…but it won’t be me remembering and I won’t…it’s a heart here, inside this body,” he said, pressing a hand against his chest “But this is not my body, Casiopea. It’s this suit I wear, for a moment, and the moment will cease. And when that happens…”
“You will be like a stranger to me,” she concluded, and her heart, troublesome thing that it was, stuttered.
“Yes.”
“There is no ‘after,’ ” she whispered.
It wasn’t fair. But there wasn’t an “after” in stories, was there? The curtain simply fell. She was not in a fairy tale, in any case. What “after” could there be? He, sending her a postcard from the Land of the Dead? They would become pen pals? Maybe in the end what would happen is she’d hitch a ride back to her town and spend her days sweeping the floors of her grandfather’s house, nothing to show for all her efforts. Back to the first square on the board. If she didn’t end up keeling over in the next few hours, if buzzards didn’t rip her flesh.
“You’ll have your black pearls. Your heart’s desire,” he said. He sounded charitable and for once she despised his politeness. Better that he had offered her nothing.
She laughed at his words. She had never desired pearls. He didn’t know her, she thought. He didn’t know her one bit.
She woke to an ache so deep in her bones and such copious sorrow that she thought she would not be able to rise from bed. The world outside seemed muted and gray, which she thought fitting. Had it not been gray for her since birth? The burst of colors she had experienced during the past few days was the anomaly.
The mirror revealed the face of a sickly girl, her eyes heavy.
A dying girl, Casiopea thought. She inspected her left hand, trying to find the point where the splinter lodged.
There came a knock on the bathroom door. Hun-Kamé said something about leaving soon.
Casiopea jutted her chin up and put on a short-sleeved yellow dress with a small flower corsage pinned to the waist.
When they stepped out of the hotel, Martín was waiting for them. Casiopea was so surprised she almost dropped her suitcase. Hun-Kamé did not seem bothered by the unexpected appearance of her cousin, who leaned against a sleek, black automobile. Next to Martín stood a chauffeur in a neat white uniform.
“Good morning. We’ve been sent to pick you up. Lord Vucub-Kamé wants to speak to you,” Martín said, folding the newspaper he had been reading.
“How gracious of him,” Hun-Kamé replied. “We could have made our way on our own.”
“No need. Please get in.”
The chauffeur held the door open for them.
“Should we?” Casiopea asked, grasping the crook of Hun-Kamé’s arm.
“It will make no difference,” he replied.
They sat in the back, Martín riding in the front. They did not talk. Casiopea’s cousin fanned himself with the newspaper as the car rolled out of the city and continued down south. Even this early in the day it was already warm.
The sun bleached the land around them and leached the life out of Casiopea, who lay listless in the back of the automobile, once in a while running her hands through her hair.
She was so tired now, and she did not want to think what this meant. She tried not to pay attention to her throbbing hand, which she pressed against the window.
There came into view a white building surrounded by a lush greenness that defied the desert heat, twin rows of palm trees leading toward its front steps. An oasis, if she’d ever seen one. Casiopea blinked, blinded by the building’s whiteness.
It was a precise, powerful structure. They’d been in nice, fancy hotels, but this was beyond fancy. It seemed…it seemed almost like a temple, a palace like the ancient ones in Yucatán, although there was nothing in it that fully imitated the Mayan buildings she was familiar with. Not quite. The resemblance was in the boldness of the three-story building or the whiteness of the walls, which made her think of limestone, of salt. As the automobile stopped before the front entrance, she was able to make out the carvings decorating the exterior. Fish, sea stars, sea turtles, aquatic plants. The double door, which a porter held open for them, was made of metal, a lattice of water lilies.
The lobby had a similar marine theme. The ceilings were extremely tall, as if giants, rather than men, were supposed to walk the halls. The floor was tiled blue-and-white, with powerful Art Deco accents here and there: in the chandeliers, the lines of the furniture, the painting behind the front desk. The elevators, she noticed, were flanked by stylized stone caimans. There were floor-length mirrors spanning the lobby, duplicating the entrance, magnifying it, and milky-blue windows that changed the light filtering in, as if they were gazing up from the bottom of a waterhole up to the heavens.
There were frescoes, the walls painted in the brilliant shade of blue they called Mayan blue, the truest blue you’ve ever seen. Oceans filled with marine creatures appeared on those walls, the flora and fauna painted in rich reds and intense yellows, fringed with geometric shapes. Above them, the ceiling was silver and gold, with the glyphs for earth and water repeated over and over again.
It was like tumbling into another world, the textures on display—stone, glass, wood—coming together in a mixture so heady it was impossible not to stop and gawk.
“Come along,” Martín said. “No need to check in, it’s all been arranged.”
“What has been arranged?” Casiopea asked, regaining the capacity for speech.
“Your stay.”
They went into the elevator, all gleaming metal—the glyphs there again—and got out on the third floor. The porter had attached himself to them and carried their bags. When they reached the end of a hallway, Martín unlocked the doors and motioned for them to step in.
They stood in a vestibule, the sofas yellow, the walls blue. A table in the center with lilies on display. At each side a door. Martín opened one, then the other.
“Your rooms,” he said.
Casiopea took a tentative step into one of the bedrooms. The yellow and blue scheme also reigned here. The windows were huge and led toward a balcony. If she stood out there she might smell the ocean, its salt. They’d come so far! She had not even realized the magnitude of the trip until now, all the states they’d crossed, the cities that had gone past their window, to reach this point at the edge of the sea.
She felt such joy then. This was one of the things she’d dreamed about. An ocean offering itself to her. It was the postcard in the old cookie tin, it was that breathless feeling she’d carried hidden in her heart. She stepped out, onto the balcony, and gripped the railing with both hands. She could hear them talking from where she was standing.