One large room was filled with Olmec statuary much like she remembered from the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. She had always been impressed by the great brooding heads with their infinite gazes. Another room had Toltec pieces and another was cluttered with Mayan artifacts, many crumbling with age-stone serpents and jaguars and great blackened blocks that must have come from pyramids or temples or one of the big sporting arenas like she’d seen in Chichen Itza. Armenta stopped and spoke softly into one of the cell phones as he waited for her.
They took the elevator up one floor to the ground-level zoo. It included two tigers, two lions, two leopards, two jaguars, two pumas and two ocelots. Armenta said they were mated pairs. Their separate enclosures spanned outward like the spokes of a half-wheel from the common hub of the Castle’s ground floor, then continued out into the jungle behind the structure in widening angles. The runs were separated by metal spike fences that Armenta said were too high even for the leopards to jump. The viewing area took up approximately the rear half of the ground floor of the Castle, and had a cobblestone floor and a low limestone ceiling that, to Erin, gave it the look and feel of a dungeon.
Here in the viewing area the cages converged, each of the enclosures ending at a large rust-eaten barred door that might have come from a prison. Monkeys sat on the cobblestones just out of claw range or walked with tails waving as they contemplated and jeered the captives. A giant sloth slept in a leather chair. A group of coatimundis came wobbling in from an opening on one side of the enclosures, crossed in front of Erin and Armenta, and continued out another. Parrots and macaws in reds and greens sat atop the prison doors. Peacocks and hens came and went. In the shade near the courtyard stood a large aviary filled with what looked like pigeons.
“I brought the cats in so you could see them.”
Erin studied the animals. They looked healthy. Their coats shone even in the dim light except for the lions, pale and tawny, the color of the hillsides where she lived. All of the animals were calm except the leopards. They paced opposite sides of their cage in opposite directions, six steps from the bars to the raised grates that kept them from their runs, six steps back, again and again as if counterbalanced. The tigers seemed curious about her though the lions did not. She recognized the black jaguar from the third-floor landing and it beheld her again with its pale green eyes. Eyes like the moon, she thought, eyes like the stone heads that stare forever. A piece of a song she had been hearing came to her now and she added to it: Come to me by moonlight, sugar/Let the moon be your guide/Be a jaguar in the jungle/Be a cat with Olmec eyes. She sensed Armenta looking not at the cats, but at her.
“I give them to friends. I sell them occasionally. They are splendidly cared for and indulged and yet this changes their natures none. They are not dogs and can never be as dogs. This is what I respect in them.”
Armenta walked to the last barred door and pushed a red button on the wall. Erin saw the enclosure grates withdraw into their respective concrete floors and the animals, some running and others walking, travel back into their dark slices of jungle.
Again they took the elevator up, though Armenta pushed one of the lower buttons. It was a good-sized car, paneled with Honduran mahogany, which Erin recognized from the precious bookshelves in her father’s Austin library. She counted six unnumbered control buttons. She and Armenta looked self-consciously straight ahead as strangers in elevators do. She could smell his cologne and the leather of his belt and sandals.
“How many levels?” she asked.
“Four or five.”
“Which?”
“This is level two.”
“Why is there no third-floor landing?”
He shrugged and they walked down a marble-floored hallway and came to another armed man, seated outside a door. Erin recognized him from the van. He rose and opened the door for them and Erin stepped into a large, well lit office. There was a counter with a sink and a coffeemaker and a refrigerator in one corner. The office was carpeted and three of the walls were lined with CD racks. Hundreds and hundreds of recordings, she saw. Some she recognized by their cover art and many she did not. The racks were so high there were wheeled ladders to reach the upper discs.
“From all over the world,” said Armenta.
“I thought I had a lot.”
Armenta led her past a desk with a sleek new computer on it and little else. He held a door open for her and as she stepped in, Erin recognized the wonderful aural hush of a recording studio.
The control room was large and filled with state-of-the-art equipment-a vintage Trident mixing board, Genelec loudspeakers suspended from the ceiling, a pair of NS-10 near-field speakers and Auratones on the board. She saw the two Studer twenty-four-track tape machines, and the racks with the Neve compressor, a near-holy Pultec EQP equalizer, FX, reverb mainframes dat machines, CD players and tape decks, a dedicated Mac. It was cold as control rooms are. As she moved slowly through it, looking at the expensive equipment, she felt no warm spots in the room, and she thought of her first recording sessions in an Austin garage when she was so young her brothers insisted on being there with her: the heat and the terrible acoustics and the troubled wannabe record producer who swilled warm beers and smoked joints and finally fell asleep on the floor mumbling sweet nothings to the cover of an Emmylou Harris long-play.
“Forty-eight tracks of analog,” said Erin. “And a Mac to store the digital. You have all the good toys,” she said.
“I like the warmer sound of the analog.”
“I always have too.”
He nodded. “However the digital has no hissing, and duplication is very convenient. I do the recording. I am a good engineer. I play accordion, but not well. I sing poorly.”
He held open the heavy door and they stepped into the tracking room. The ceilings were high and the rafters exposed and the woodwork and finish were handsome.
“This is more Honduran mahogany,” said Armenta.
Here in the tracking room his voice was flat and clear, as if stripped of nonessential vibration. Erin could tell that the baffles and sound-proofing were excellent, though hidden within the gorgeous woodwork. The air here was lively in a shimmery way-a tuned tracking room, she thought. Beautiful. There was a big drum booth, a piano booth in which a Yamaha grand piano held court, a vocal booth caked with foam from ceiling to floor. She turned and looked at Armenta.
“Los Jaguars de Veracruz have recorded here. And Mara Graco. Do you know Mara Graco?”
“I love Mara Graco. La Cumbia de Rosas.”
“And La Casa du tus Suenos.”
“The House of Your Dreams.”
“Her voice is almost that of a man. It is smoking and rich and hides something sharpened. She plays the piano very well but this talent is not featured on her recordings. Until here. Here Mara Graco played the Yamaha. It was…extraordinary. I want Flaco Jimenez to come here. So robusto, his accordion. I have seen him perform many times.”
Erin looked briefly at Armenta. His gray-black hair sprang randomly but his hangdog eyes were intensely focused on her. He seemed flushed by the memory of Mara Graco playing the Yamaha. For a moment his face held a ruddy glow and the hint of a smile. Then these faded and Erin saw the haunted face she had seen before, a man with losses he could not recover and regrets he would not outlive.
“And the Brazilians?” asked Armenta with a small twinkle in his eyes. “Nora Ney? Marisa Monte?”
“Hipnotico,” said Erin. “I love the Brazilians. They absorb so much and make it all work. I miss the old sambas.”