Maya's Notebook: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

beautiful ship’s clock, its bronze dial set in mahogany, that looks like it was salvaged from the Titanic . Outside Manuel has improvised a primitive jacuzzi with a huge wooden barrel. The tools, firewood, charcoal, and drums of gasoline for the motorboat and the generator are kept in the shed out back.
    My room is simple, like the rest of the house; there’s one narrow bed covered with a blanket similar to the washroom curtain, a chair, a dresser with three drawers, and a few nails in the wall to hang clothes on. More than enough for my possessions, which fit easily into my backpack. I like this austere and masculine atmosphere. The only worrying thing is Manuel Arias’s obsessive tidiness; I’m more relaxed.
    The men put the refrigerator in its place, hooked it up to the gas, and then settled down to share a couple of bottles of wine and a salmon that Manuel had smoked the previous week in a metal drum with apple wood. Looking out at the sea from the window, they ate and drank in silence, speaking only to give an elaborate and ceremonious series of toasts: “Salud! Good health!” “May this drink bring you good health.” “And the same I wish to you.” “May you live many more years.” “May you attend my funeral.” Manuelgave me uncomfortable sidelong glances until I took him aside to tell him to calm down, I wasn’t planning on making a grab for the bottles. My grandmother had surely warned him, and he’d been planning to hide the liquor, but that would be absurd; the problem isn’t alcohol, it’s me.
    Meanwhile Fahkeen and the cats were sizing each other up cautiously, dividing up the territory. The tabby is called Dumb-Cat, because the poor animal is stupid, and the ginger one is the Literati-Cat, because his favorite spot is on top of the computer; Manuel says he knows how to read.
    The men finished the salmon and the wine, said good-bye, and left. I noticed that Manuel never even hinted at paying them, as he hadn’t either with the others who’d helped move the refrigerator before, but it would have been indiscreet of me to ask him about it.
    I looked over Manuel’s office, composed of two desks, a filing cabinet, bookshelves, a modern computer with a double monitor, a fax, and a printer. There was an Internet connection, but he reminded me—as if I could forget—that I’m incommunicado. He added, defensively, that he has all his work on that computer and prefers that no one touch it.
    “What do you do?” I asked him.
    “I’m an anthropologist.”
    “Anthropophagus?”
    “I study people, I don’t eat them,” he told me.
    “It was a joke, man. Anthropologists don’t have any raw material anymore; even the most savage tribesman has a cell phone and a television these days.”
    “I don’t specialize in savages. I’m writing a book about the mythology of Chiloé.”
    “They pay you for that?”
    “Barely,” he admitted.
    “It looks like you must be pretty poor.”
    “Yes, but I live cheaply.”
    “I wouldn’t want to be a burden on you,” I told him.
    “You’re going to work to cover your expenses, Maya, that’s what your grandmother and I agreed. You can help me with the book, and in March you’ll work with Blanca at the school.”
    “I should warn you: I’m very ignorant. I don’t know anything about anything.”
    “What do you know how to do?”
    “Bake cookies and bread, swim, play soccer, and write Samurai poems. You should see my vocabulary! I’m a human dictionary, but in English. I don’t think that’ll be much use to you.”
    “We’ll see. The cookies sound promising.” And I think he hid a smile.
    “Have you written other books?” I asked, yawning; the tiredness of the long trip and the five-hour time difference between California and Chile was weighing on me like a ton of bricks.
    “Nothing that might make me famous,” he said pointing to several books on his desk: Dream Worlds of the Australian Aborigines , Initiation Rites Among the Tribes of the