bustling about and drinking beers at the lakeside taverns as the sun began to set.
Then a tanned and handsome Conrad showed up in an elegant reed boat, like some Tiahuanacan visage come to life. The boat came from the lake’s island of Suriqi. It was a fifteen-footer made from bundled totora rushes, wide amidships and narrow at either end with a high curving prow and stern. Tight cords held the bundles of reeds in place.
“Look familiar?” he asked as he beckoned her aboard. “Just like the boats made from papyrus reeds that the pharaohs used to sail the Nile during the Age of the Pyramids.”
“And I suppose, Doctor Yeats, that you can explain how these strikingly similar designs could arise in two such widely separated places?” she asked, playing along.
It was just one of the many mysteries of Lake Titicaca, he said in his best tour guide twang and offered to take her to the middle of the lake to show her his “revelation.”
She had a pretty good idea what that revelation was and smiled. “There’s nothing you can show me in the middle of the lake that you can’t show me here.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he told her.
She shouldn’t have gone with him. The sisters had a policy of traveling in pairs and never being alone with a man in a room with the door closed. It wasn’t out of fear or paranoia but for appearances’ sake. There must not be a hint of impropriety that would harm the cause of Christ.
But Conrad, as usual, was too persuasive to resist.
He paddled with long, powerful strokes and they glided across the silvery surface. At 12,500 feet above sea level, Lake Titicaca was the highest lake in the world, and it felt like it. Serena thought she could almost touch the heavens.
“Now the odd thing about this lake is that it’s located hundreds of miles from the Pacific, yet it contains ocean-variety fish, seahorses, crustacea, and marine fauna,” Conrad lectured with a wink.
“And you think it’s seawater from the Genesis flood?” Serena asked.
Conrad shrugged. “When the waters receded, some got dammed up here in the Andes.”
“I guess that explains the docks in Tiahuanaco.”
Conrad smiled. “Right. Why else would the ruins of a city twelve miles away have docks?”
“Unless it was once a port and the south end of this lake extended twelve miles and more than a hundred feet higher,” Serena concluded. “Which means civilization flourished here before the flood and Tiahuanaco is at least fifteen thousand years old.”
“Imagine that.”
She could. She wanted to. A world before the dawn of recorded history. What was it like? Were people really that much different from us today? she wondered. There must have been women like me back then, she thought, and men like Conrad. He had dropped his skeptical pose and opened up so beautifully out here. So different from his posture before the academics.
The night air was chilly, and Serena was huddled in the bow. Conrad paddled slowly. The twilight sky above was a magnificent turquoise blue, and the lake stretched on like glass for eternity.
For the longest time they were silent, gliding along the reeds with only the dip of Conrad’s paddle making soft lapping sounds like an ancient metronome. Then, when they were in the middle of the glistening waters, he pulled up his paddle and let them drift beneath the stars.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He produced a basket of food and wine. “Absolutely nothing at all.”
“Conrad,” she began, “I really should be getting back. The sisters will worry.”
“As well they should.”
He sat beside her and kissed her, then pushed her gently backward until she was lying down. He stroked her face and kissed her on the lips, and she shivered.
“Conrad, please.”
Their eyes locked, and she thought of his childhood pain, their connection, thought that if there was ever any man to do this with, any time of her life and any place on the planet, this was it.
“Tomorrow I go back to Arizona and you go back to Rome,” he whispered in her ear. “And we can remember our last night in Bolivia as the night that never happened.”
“You got that right,” she said, and pushed him overboard to a satisfying splash.
Inside his compartment, as he packed his gear for the impending descent to P4, Conrad, too, was thinking about that night with Serena on the reed boat.
He had always been in awe of her determination and courage. And her beauty was unmatched. Yet she wore it so effortlessly, as if she didn’t care whether she was seventeen or seventy. She was charming and self-effacing, even funny. But that night it had been her glimmering eyes, almost glowing under the dark hair that draped down onto his chest, that had mesmerized him.
She told him she had always admired his purity and single-mindedness. He was what he was, she said, and not like herself-someone able to pretend to be what she was not. He wondered what dark secret she was about to confess but soon realized she had none. Her only sin was being an unwanted child.
It was then, for a fleeting moment, that he came closest to knowing her. For the first time he grasped her holy death wish and understood her drive to be a martyr, a saint, a woman who counted. If anything, he realized, her works of compassion were her way of avoiding intimacy. She feared being “found out” and thus not measuring up to her standards, much less God’s. She would do anything to avoid those feelings of not being needed, of feeling worthless, a “mistake” like her birth. But she didn’t fear that rejection from him. She knew he loved her.
And that’s how he knew she truly loved him.
He felt he had come to the end of his lifelong quest, had found the Temple of God. That he was a thief in the sacred shrine, taking what did not belong to him, only made the experience more exciting, dangerous, and satisfying than any relic or ancient artifact he had ever taken, before or since.
But he knew it was over when she pushed him off the reed boat and into the freezing waters of Lake Titicaca. When he climbed back on board, she wasn’t laughing. It hadn’t been a prank. Instead the fear had returned to her eyes.
Suddenly Conrad realized she was the one who had stolen something from him. “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“Back to Tiahuanaco,” she said, “before anybody realizes I’m missing at breakfast.”
“Be a risk taker. Let’s enjoy what time we have.”
“I’m disappointed in you, Doctor Yeats,” she said, handing him the paddle. “I didn’t think you were the kind of man who took advantage of nuns.”
Conrad, a man with no small ego, was disappointed that she had spurned his advances. Worse, she was denying her own complicity. “And I didn’t think you were the kind of nun who cares what other people think.”
“I’m not,” she shot back.
She was right, of course. That much was obvious to anybody. But Conrad also sensed that what she was truly afraid of was her feelings for him, of losing control. And if Serena Serghetti could be defined as any kind of nun, she was most definitely the kind who made damn well sure she was always in control.
Their parting was not happy. She acted as if she had made a huge mistake and had potentially blown her whole future with their night together. In truth, however, she didn’t regret it for a minute. At least that’s what Conrad eventually concluded. What Serena feared was further intimacy. Like she had something to hide. Then he understood. It was herself. She had disappointed herself and as a result felt unworthy of him.
She was wrong, he knew, and he vowed to prove to her that she was worth something without the title of Sister and that he was worth the price of her sacrifice. But she would have none of it.
The last memory he had of her was standing at the shore, trying to kiss her good-bye, and watching her run to hail a cab. He waved to her, but she never looked back. He tried to reach her in Rome by phone a week later, and after months of unreturned calls, he even showed up at one of her conferences unannounced. Now she had become famous, throwing herself so fully into her work that he wondered if it was the unwanted child in her she wanted to forget, or him.
In any case, a private audience with Mother Earth, he soon discovered, was about as probable as he discovering his beloved lost Mother Culture.
Until now.
