The sign for Casa Montana Mojoca could not have been more discreet. Small plain-white block letters on a dark green background on a sign that couldn’t have been larger than a foot square stood humbly beside a blacktop road on the right, giving only the name of the hotel. An even more discreet rectangular sign in the same color scheme, nailed to a tree, said PRIVADO.
Arturo took this road, and we angled down toward the Siapa. So, I thought, a riverside resort hoteclass="underline" not bad.
Except it wasn’t. The blacktop road, barely two lanes wide, with nothing but forest on both sides, descended the slope, and there at the bottom was the river, and on the river a ferry. In fact, two ferries; I saw one on the farther shore, just pulling out. These ferries were small and open and could carry possibly three cars. They were mostly dark green, with white highlights, the same colors as the two signs back at the main road, and they were very shiny and clean.
A wooden barrier was down across the road, just this side of the ferry slip, with a shingled guard shack next to it. A man in a dark green uniform with white piping and a tan clipboard came out and spoke with Arturo and checked something off on his list: Keith Emory, I supposed. A display of security to calm the timorous North American.
We were the only passengers on our ferry, with its polite two-man crew in dark green and white. We got out of the Impala to enjoy the ride, leaning on the gleaming white wood railing that ran down the side of the boat.
The ferry coming the other way carried only a beer truck, and as we passed each other in the middle of the sparkling river I read the brand names on its side: Corona, Heineken, Budweiser. I was willing to bet they put away a lot of Bud Light over there.
As we neared the opposite bank, Arturo and I got into the Impala again, front seat and back. The ferry bumped into position, the wooden pole barrier was lifted, and we drove past a waiting taxi with a white-haired couple in the back and up the curving blacktop road into more forest.
Somehow, this forest seemed groomed, as though it had a regular appointment at the hairdresser. The shrubbery along the road had clearly been shaped and maintained, and the trees farther back were less encumbered with vines than I was used to in Guerrera. Some distance away, at one point, I saw a group of people on horseback, riding slowly in single file. They were mostly in pastels.
The first sight of the hotel was out of a children’s book. We came around a curve, and there was a medieval castle combined with a wedding cake, four stories high with setbacks, gleaming white in the middle of its own manicured lawns. To its left, extending away, I could see the beginning of the golf course.
The high porte-cochere entrance tried to suggest that this hotel had been here since its guests arrived in horse-drawn carriages, but in fact the building was surely less than ten years old. A doorman and two bellboys, all in the same dark green and white, one of the bellboys holding onto a wheeled luggage cart, came out to greet us, but then looked blank-faced as Arturo drove on by.
Gary Brine was a special case. Arturo steered the Impala off the curving blacktop onto an AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY gravel drive, and we sailed around the corner of the wedding cake, seeing more of the golf course, now out ahead of us. Arturo came to a stop next to a part of the side of the building where a white door stood in a little white clapboard separate section of its own, with square double-hung windows flanking the door on both sides. A brass plate identified the door, but I was feeling a little too tense to read it.
“Okay, Mr. Brine, you’re on,” Arturo said.
I took a deep breath. I’m on. That’s right, it’s a performance, a show. I grasped my bag and, as Arturo got out at the left front, I got out at the rear right. Would Garry Brine wait for the cabby to lead and introduce him? I thought not; I opened the white door and stepped inside and said to the three women at desks in there, “Hi. Who’s Dulce?”
They giggled. It was a sunny air-conditioned room, painted light yellow, with light green industrial carpeting. Five desks, each with its own computer terminal, two of them unoccupied, were spaced almost at random around the room. Large blown-up photos of other hotels were mounted on the walls.
One of the three women — they were all thirtyish and attractive, in an overblown yet muted way, like Luz dressed for the office — rose, still giggling, and said, “We all are. But you want Mrs. de Paula.”
“That’s right,” I said, and Arturo came around me to do a quick explanation in Spanish. The woman who’d told me they were all sweet — yes, of course — replied and then looked at me with new interest. “This way, please,” she said.
I followed her, and Arturo followed me, through the room to a closed door on the opposite wall. The woman knocked, a female voice spoke from within, and my guide opened the door, leaned in, and said something. Then she stepped back, smiled a bit shyly at me, and gestured for me to go inside. Movie producers, apparently, carried a bit of clout.
The office I stepped into was as large as the one outside but had only one occupant, one desk, and no computer terminals. The woman now rising from that desk, coming around it, hand out, face smiling, must have been more or less my contemporary, if she’d been Arturo’s first love, but she seemed somehow older, more maternal. She was a large big-boned woman, probably five foot ten, with shortish pepper-and-salt hair in neat waves, neither fussy nor flyaway. She wore a white frilled high-neck blouse and full black slacks. Both wrists were adorned with gold bracelets that made small tinkling sounds when she moved.
“How are you?” she said, and her voice was a rich contralto.
“Much better now, Señora de Paula,” I told her, and shook her firm hand. “Thanks to you and Arturo here.”
“Oh, Arturo,” she said, with an indulgent laugh, as though we were talking about some scamp of a boy. I saw then that maternalism was her strategy for dealing with the entire world, which of course made her perfect to run this hotel.
“I’m Gary Brine, by the way,” I said. “I don’t know if Arturo told you.”
“Mr. Brine,” she acknowledged. “But not while you’re here.”
“No, I understand I’m Keith Emory for a while.”
“Until your problems are solved,” she said.
I laughed. “Oh, Señora,” I said, “if it were only that easy!”
Arturo now came around from behind me, a kind of sheepish grin on his face. “Dulce,” he said, exactly like that scamp of a boy bringing an apple to teacher. Or a mango here, I suppose.
“How are you, Artie?” she said, making it clear she enjoyed him and saw no reason to take him seriously.
“Feelin’ fine,” he said, and took her hand, and kissed it.
Arturo’s usual greeting for a woman was a bear hug, but I could see where Dulce de Paula wouldn’t get much of that sort of treatment. Still with the same indulgent smile, she said, “How’s Ifigenia?”
“Not yet gone to her reward,” Arturo said.
She laughed, delighted with her scamp. “Artie, that’s a terrible thing to say.”
“Ifigenia is a terrible thing to say,” he told her. “Why’d you ever let me go, Dulce? If I’d stuck with you, I’d be a doctor today and Fernando would drive my cab.”
“You’d both probably like that,” she commented, and turned back to me. “And I think you’d probably like to get settled.”
“Yes, please.”
“Would you like someone to show you to the room? I see you don’t have much luggage.”
“I’ve been moving fast and light,” I explained. “Is it complicated to get to the room? If not, I’ll just go there.” Because, of course, I had no cash for a tip.
“It’s very easy,” she promised me. “Come look.”