Well in Time (44 page)

And also in that context, there are eternal verities that span cultures and centuries, that root humankind to earth in wholesome and loving ways. I think it’s safe to say that almost every person wants to be loved, to raise a family in safety and abundance, to practice their beliefs in freedom and without prejudicial treatment, to experience good health and sound education, and to eat and sleep in peace and plenty. We’re linked to one another and to past and successive generations by these simple and natural things. They’re things that we can seek for ourselves and our loved ones, and can help to provide for those lacking them. In that way, culture is stabilized, and with it, the lives of each one of us.

Javier and Calypso represent two people who love life and one another. They’re willing to struggle to improve not only their own lot in life, but that of others, as well. That’s a simple credo we can all take to heart. If
Well In Time
influences even one person to think and behave more positively and optimistically and generously, I will feel the book is a tremendous success!

What would you consider to be the main theme or themes of
Well In Time
? If you were to recommend this book to someone else, how would you summarize it?

Which character do you prefer, and why? If you could go to lunch with one of these characters, which one would it be? What questions would you ask him or her, while dining? What topic would you most want to discuss with this person?

What did you know about the drug cartels in Mexico, before reading
Well In Time
? What did this book teach you, or how did it change your opinion or impression of that situation?

The narrative moves through both space and time, from present-day Paris to Chihuahua, from Europe to North Africa; from 2014 to prehistory. Which place or time did you find most interesting? Why?

The character of the Huichol shaman, and of Sa Tahuti, introduce an element of the unknown and metaphysical. Do you consider their world to be purely fictional? Have you ever known of or been influenced by unseen powers, or had contact with a shamanic culture?

What does the title,
Well In Time
, mean to you? What is its relation to themes of reality and illusion?

The characters of the Ghosts are based in real lives and activities. What do you think about international events being influenced by such people? Are their activities a brutal necessity, or an abhorrent evil? Are these men redeemable in your opinion? Is their shadow world necessary to our own peace and prosperity?

How do you imagine the lives of the characters, after the novel ends? What decisions will they make, and how have they been altered or transformed by their experiences?

Is there a moral to
Well In Time
? What have you learned about the world and about yourself, from experiencing this plunge into other times and other realities?

§

To understand more about drug violence in Mexico, watch these YouTube videos:

 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpIyaIHsJbc

 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XiSnCt9fDc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Amn4JqM4JEo

§

To reach Suzan Still with questions, or to arrange a personal or telephone visit with your reading group, e-mail her at
[email protected]
. Visit her website at
http://suzanstill.com
, and her blog at SuzanStillCommune.blogspot.com.

Over 30 years ago, I was traveling in Yucatan, in southern Mexico and had hired a guide to take me out to the ancient Mayan site of Uxmal. It was the first day of the rainy season, and I was holding my hand out the window, letting the warm drops run through my fingers. We in the VW van were jubilant that the long dry spell was finally broken, as we trundled along a narrow road that passed under a canopy of low, dusty trees.

Suddenly, we broke into a large, open meadow. Sitting in the grass, perhaps a hundred yards from the road, was a group of people, a hundred or more, all in traditional Mayan dress. Despite the rain, men, women, and children were sitting close together, immobile, all facing in the same direction. I asked my guide who they were, and why they were sitting there, and he told me, “They are from Guatemala. Their village has been destroyed by the government, and they have fled to Mexico. But they have nowhere to go. So they are sitting here.”

I live on the same land where I was born. I’ve never known anything but a stable home and its environs. The enormity of what had befallen these people swept over me. These were an agricultural people, who sustained themselves with their gardens and their coffee crops. Where would they go? How would they survive? My guide shrugged. There was no answer to their dilemma.

In that moment,
Fiesta of Smoke
was born. All my beliefs about and hopes for humanity were triggered. I began to understand how a person’s destiny is shaped by economic, social and political circumstances largely beyond the individual’s control. In a very real sense,
Fiesta of Smoke
is a working-through of my sense of outrage for the broken lives of innocent people, and a search for answers about how their lives might be redeemed, based on the question: how must a people proceed, when the government is unresponsive to their needs. Is revolution, then, the only remedy?

Of course, it didn’t hurt that I had a powerful love story brewing in my head at the same time. In the confluence of the two stories, I knew that I had found the tale that I wanted and needed to tell: fiesta, an important time of celebration, flirtation and togetherness in Mexico, intensifying to include protest and social upheaval, to become a
Fiesta of Smoke
.

Against a backdrop of rebellion and intrigue, love between Javier Carteña, commander of insurgent Mexican forces, and Calypso Searcy, an American novelist at the pinnacle of her career, sizzles with passion across a broad sweep of history. Encompassing time from the Conquest of the 1500s to the present, the story races across space as well, from the forests of Chiapas to the city of Paris. There, an international investigative reporter named Hill picks up the swiftly vanishing trail of Calypso’s disappearance, and unwittingly becomes involved in one of the great dramas of the twentieth century and one of the great love stories of any age.

The story I am about to tell you is true, as I myself was a participant. Some parts come from the accounts of my contemporaries, as alive and vivid as a basket of eels. The rest, rising from the dust of centuries, is open to conjecture only to those who lack a certain kind of faith that we, who made this story by our doing, held as our deepest fiber. To participate with us, you must consider that illusion is the veriest truth and reality can play you false in a heartbeat. There is nothing more you need to know, except that in matters of this world–and no doubt the next–the only real thing is love.

. . . .

In a house ringed with guns, the couple is dancing. Courtyard walls condense fragrances flying on night wind sighing down the Sierra. Nectar and smoke lace with the smell of tortillas on the comal. From the open kitchen door a trapezoid of yellow light illumines, on a tilted chair, a blind guitarist whose gypsy rumba entwines the soft splatter of the fountain. White moths circle the musician’s head like spirits of inspired music.

The dancers scarcely move. He holds her close, his forearm across her back, her hand curled into his crooked wrist, the other warm on the back of his neck. He scoops her into himself, their hips pressing, slowly rotating to rhythm as one. He submerges himself in her hair, its scent of apples and sandalwood, brushes his cheek against its softness, and gazes into the darkness, alert for signs.

She rubs her cheek against the rough hand-woven cloth of his white shirt, breathes his essence–rich as newly-churned butter, sweet as vanilla, feral as a jaguar. It rises into her brain like a drug. Her head against his chest, she feels his heart pulsing powerfully, tuned like a guitar string to its own primal note. His whole being vibrates with what he senses: the closeness and surrender of her body, the sultry beat of the music, the luscious fragrances of the night, the invisible ambling of the guards on the walls, the inevitable approach of ruin.

Concentration kept down the fear. She focused on the tattoo of her orange snake pumps, the heel striking minutely before the tap of the sole, a rhythm difficult to maintain on the uneven cobbles of the quai. The full skirt of her yellow dress wrapped into her legs and flowed out behind her as she faced into the afternoon river wind. Walking quickly and confidently, it was her intention to look both purposeful and carefree.

She turned away from the bustle of rue Jacob into the tiny alleyway that cut through toward the Seine. It was her habit when leaving the library at the Sorbonne to pass that way, coming out near Pont Neuf. She enjoyed standing in one of the rounded bays, mid-span, leaning on the ornate railing after so many hours of reading, seeing nothing but the glossy water flowing silently down toward the sea.

She became aware of the follower when she hesitated, half-turned, before a shop window: dark hair, features hidden under a fedora, medium build, gray, nondescript suit. Because of him she had deviated from her accustomed route. She turned instead onto Quai des Augustins, with the Île de la Cité across the river channel, where there were always police around the Palais de Justice, even this late in the day. She could cross by Pont St.-Michel . . . but she did not. Instead, she continued down the river quays, hyper-alert to the presence behind her but wearing an instinctive veneer of calm. Her yellow skirt billowing around her calves in the autumnal wind, she arrived at Pont Saint-Louis having formulated a plan.

She slowed her stride as she stepped onto Pont Saint-Louis, that homely old pedestrian bridge so startlingly banal in the luscious heart of Paris, and strolled out to mid-span. Casually, she lowered her bag onto the pavement by the railing, slipped off her fox jacket, its pelts afire in the late afternoon sun, and dropped it onto her bag. Then, with studied calm and elegance born of many hours at the ballet barre, she turned to the railing and performed a perfect developpé. Raising her arm in a port au bras, she proceeded with the familiar routine of ballet stretches, humming a Bach cantata for rhythm. Behind her, a tattered stream of weary tourists straggled by, and a gray figure melted into the deepening shadows of the Left Bank dusk.

. . . .

Culturally, so much depends on the placement of the body in space. For the French, there are three reasons why one might sit alone at a café table: one is waiting for a friend, or is an intellectual, solitary and brooding, or one is a tourist. Of them, the first is most acceptable, the second, merely suspect, and the last, contemptible.

Perhaps his patina of world-weariness led the woman who served Hill his café au lait, carottes râspées and hard, butterless bread to believe he was the suspect of the three. In a neat dark skirt and white apron, she whisked to his table on the basic black de rigueur pumps of the Parisian working woman and deposited his food without the familiar buoyancy offered natives, but also minus the blank reserve that walled out the taint of the étranger. He was a creature apart, her actions told him. Having been so on every continent for the last thirty years, he accepted her appraisal without surprise or resistance. He was in fact vaguely pleased to find his psychological camouflage intact.

This café on Île St.-Louis was a favorite of his, although the prices were high and the food poor, fit only for the clientele of footsore tourists who managed to limp over that plainest, most utilitarian of Parisian bridges, Pont St.-Louis. The problem lay less in their feet, he always suspected, than in the daunting effect of that first tour of Notre Dame.

From his vantage on Quai d’Orleans, the cathedral rose majestically across the intervening channel of the Seine, dominating the tail of the Île de la Cité, startling and grand as a newly-erupted volcano. He watched the intermittent stream on the bridge. They came to sit over their coffees with the stunned look of survivors of cataclysm. Perhaps the fifth whirlwind day since Brussels had undone them. More likely, Hill suspected, it was the ecstasy of the thirteenth-century cathedral. Notre Dame smells of mold and smoke, but steps like a stone foot on contemporary notions of aesthetics.

Paris always put Hill in this mood. Bangkok, Tokyo, Montreal, D.C., Santiago, Baghdad–they had their charms, of course, but he could remain detached, do his job. But Paris! He approached her like a lover. Thirty years as a foreign correspondent dropped away and he was a besotted adolescent, or mendicant monk, finally come home to the City of Light.

He ordered another café au lait and sank his upper lip into its bitter foam. Across the river, the brilliant November light picked out the cathedral’s bones, and the great arching buttresses seemed to exist simply to exhort its immense walls upward. White flecks of pigeons sailed through the stone lacework of arcs and spires like liberated souls. It was this back view, with all her props and braces, that Hill loved. The facade always seemed too austere, too foursquare, with its truncated spires. No, Notre Dame revealed her true grandeur to those who flanked her from the Quai aux Fleurs and came with amazement on those arcing arrows of stone.

Here he was like an old lech, slobbering in his coffee over the Virgin, again. Time for a good war somewhere before his brain rotted out completely. He fished some ten-franc pieces from his pocket and began to push back his chair when his eye lit again on Pont St.-Louis. A woman stood there, mid-span, facing the cathedral. She was wearing a yellow dress and the afternoon sun slanting through it gave hints of a long and lithe body. But more remarkably, she had one leg stretched out on the railing and was rhythmically lowering and raising her torso to her extended knee, in long, balletic stretches. Intrigued, Hill left a five-franc tip to propitiate the gods and threaded out through the metal chairs.

When he reached the bridge, she had taken her leg from the railing and was doing a dainty little series of steps–a pas de bourrée?–her hands resting on the rail for support, apparently absorbed in the wonder of Our Lady’s derrière.

Hill was now close enough to ascertain three things: her dress was of a light-weight, open-weave wool of the most sumptuous Naples yellow; a red fox coat, heaped on a big oxblood-colored leather bag, glowed like a fire at her feet; and she was humming the strains of Zum reinen Wasser: “Where streams of living water flow, He to green meadows leadeth. And where the pastures verdant grow with food celestial feedeth.”

Leaning casually against the railing about four feet away, a distance he deemed friendly but not overpowering, Hill ventured: “I love Bach, myself.”

She stopped humming but was slow to tear her eyes from the view. When she did, it was not to face him but only with a slight turn of the head, the eyes sliding into the corners, regarding him warily, the color suddenly blanched from her cheeks.

After a moment, the tension left her shoulders and her eyes crinkled wryly. “Truly,” she said. It was not a question and it rolled between them like a ball of butter spiked with carpet tacks. The accent was American, like his own. Thirty years of savoir-faire melted and Hill was a fuzz-faced lout from Denver again, all elbows and size-16 shoes.

“One of his loveliest . . . ” he managed to stammer, “his finest cantatas. I heard it performed there . . .,” he nodded across the water to the cathedral, “the second Sunday after Easter. Two years ago.”

“Such a memory!” She wasn’t going to give him an inch. A cold wind came up-river, wrapping her skirt around her calves. She had beautiful ankles above a pair of expensive-looking pumpkin-colored snakeskin heels. He raised his eyes and found her grinning.

“Well? Do you have me all sorted out yet?” she asked pleasantly.

Time for pure out-West charm–ingenuous, all-man, no-horseshit.

“Listen,” he said, “I know just from looking that you and I are as different as hogwire and harpstring. But if you’re not otherwise engaged, I’d be honored to take you to an early supper.”