Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [23]
Esperanza remains silent while I take another bite of the steak. When I’ve swallowed and chased it down with a few sips of water, she gives me a curious eyebrow.
“You’re not buying this, are you?”
“The part about the bones having some kind of power? No. But could there be ancient remains that have been passed through millennia?” I shrug. “Stranger things have happened. Who’s to say that in a thousand years people won’t be wondering if Oliver Cromwell’s head is hidden someplace? Or Mother Teresa’s index finger?”
“Don’t poke fun of a nun.”
“Wouldn’t think of it. But you can see what I’m saying.
There are countless cultures that preserved the bodies of their holy men.”
“Not the Israelites.”
“That depends on the period. You’re talking about thousands of years of history, two major captivities, a dozen occupations, and generations of ignorance about Levitical law. They would have handled their dead in lots of different ways, and there only needed to be a small window of time during which the Israelites had to preserve the bones. And it’s possible they lost possession of them within a few years of removing them from the tomb.”
“Your conspiracy.”
“Not mine.”
“It almost sounds as though you don’t want to find anything.”
I shake my head. “It’s not that. I’m just not buying into the conspiracy—especially one like this. What would have been the point? Preserve sacred artifacts for thousands of years? Why? If you don’t want the world to have them, just destroy them.”
“Maybe they tried.”
I hadn’t thought of that, but then I don’t believe in them to begin with, so there’s no foul.
“So not only are they holy bones, they’re also indestructible? Like Superman’s?”
“You are so going to get hit by lightning.”
“All I’m saying is that a list of family and organizational names isn’t enough. Unless we find something of real substance, I’ll have to go back and tell my employer there’s nothing to be found.”
Esperanza is silent as I finish the rest of my lunch. It takes two bites and then, almost before the fork is back on the table, quiet young men come to clear our plates and set steaming cups of strong coffee in front of us. Once the seamless interruption is over, she says, “I don’t know what you expect to accomplish in three weeks. It’s just three weeks, right? Then you have to be back in the classroom? Even if you forget about everything prior to the mention of Fraternidad de la Tierra, this is the kind of thing that would require months, if not years, of research.” She sips at the coffee. “What do you want from me?”
I hate a direct question, which is defined as any kind that resists a muddled response, or my immeasurable charm. And more of them than I can remember seem to be aimed at me since my chat with Reese. They are forcing me to learn that I am a man sorely lacking in real answers.
“I’m assuming you want me to skip the obvious?”
“You mean that I’m the smartest Latin woman for five hundred miles in any direction? That I know more about Venezuelan history than anyone? That I speak more than a dozen languages? All true. But you had to have known coming out here that this is an extended research project—the kind you get a grant for so you can spend a lot of time in libraries, or making trips across the continent that will reveal nothing but that will give you the chance to write an update with a lot of big words justifying why you needed to make the trip and why you thought it was profitable, even if you didn’t actually learn anything.”
I remember that when I first met Esperanza, sharing the same study group in our first year Social Anthropology class, I thought her directness was one of her most endearing characteristics. Even when we went our separate ways, the excision