Saving the World

by Julia Alvarez

  “Just that she might have asked him to help her die.” Tera shrugs. Like it wouldn’t be the end of the world. But it would, for Helen.

  “I’m not sure how I feel about that,” Alma admits, surprised in part that her feelings aren’t as cut-and-dry as she would have them. Helping someone to die is murder: murder is bad. But Alma also feels a gleam of relief. It can be quick, painless, and not just for Helen but for those left behind.

  One of their waitresses suddenly descends on their table again. Tera and Alma both jump, startled from their grim thoughts. “Will there be anything else I can get you?”

  The two women look at each other, then back at the waitress, and shake their heads.

  “Just the bill,” Alma tells her.

  AFTER TERA GOES UP to bed, Alma heads downstairs to compose an answer to Lavinia, a brief fax in the telegram style. No saga. Stop. Tell Veevee I messed up. Stop. I’m sorry. Stop. I will pay back the fifty grand.

  That stops her.

  She and Richard don’t have a spare fifty thousand dollars lying around in the bank. But they do own their house; they can refinance it. If worst comes to worst, Alma could ask Mamasita for a loan, though she couldn’t tell Mamasita the truth, what it’s for: book money being no better than blood money, helping finance this way Alma has of disgracing the family. But, actually, this time Alma could tell Mamasita the truth. This is money to pay back an advance for a saga novel Alma is not writing. Mamasita will be delighted. She might even make the loan a gift if Alma agrees never to write it.

  It has crossed Alma’s mind that she could offer Veevee the Balmis story as a substitute for the saga novel. But she keeps backing off from even thinking about this option. She knows what would happen. Lavinia and Veevee and her assistant and their marketing department would soon be climbing aboard the María Pita, wanting more orphan scenes, wondering if Isabel shouldn’t have sex with Balmis. It would ruin everything. And Alma needs this story too much right now to risk it. Besides Veevee wants a saga. She doesn’t want orphans and a woman scarred by smallpox. She wants the dying generations, with a Latin accent.

  When Alma comes into Richard’s study, she finds another of his faxes waiting for her.

  November 13, Saturday night

  TO: Mi amor FAX: 802-388-4344

  FROM: Ricardo FAX: 809-682-0800

  I just this moment tried calling, but the machine came on, so I hung up. I didn’t want to leave a message, afraid that you’d hear the loneliness in my voice and think something’s wrong, especially since I just faxed you this afternoon. Missing you so much tonight! Bienvenido went off to the capital and invited me to go along, but I figure the guy needs time with just his wife and kid. Maybe, if he offers again next weekend, I’ll say yes.

  I cooked myself up a supper of local yuca with fried cheese and a hunk of longaniza. (Sorry, my vegetarian honey.) Dessert was some of the chocolates you stashed away here and there in my luggage—made me miss you all the more. So I wandered into the poblado, an after-dinner, chase-away-the-blues stroll. Everybody came out to greet me, pulled up chairs, invited me to sit down, but I didn’t want to intrude, as I could tell most were in the middle of their supper, if you can call it that, a bowl of boiled roots, yuca, rábano and maybe a plátano, with some rock salt, for a family of eight. Made me ashamed, remembering my own feast. Can’t afford to be a sentimentalist about this. As Emerson says, bleeding hearts are ineffective, end up needing emotional triage, so get a grip. Has he called again?

  On the way back, heard music and laughter in the residential dormitorios of the clinic compound: one for men, one for women patients. They must have a boom box in there. Sounded like a party. Think I saw some locals going in and out. Hope everyone’s being careful. Last thing we need is a case of AIDS among the locals in the community.

  I had the key to the clinic office in my pocket, so I came here to call you. No luck. So, instead, here’s this second fax of the day—my good night kiss to my querida honey, whom I wish were here with me, from your Ricardo.

  Richard must have sent the fax while Alma and Tera were out at the restaurant. Alma tries calling the clinic number on the off chance that Richard might still be around and will pick up. It’s awful how good she felt reading that Richard is sad, that he is missing her so much. It means he won’t forget her, won’t run off with Starr Bell in her pickup to spend the rest of their lives saving the world together. Of course, Alma wants Richard to be happy, just as long as she’s the one drawing the smile on his smiley face. Another small thought to tuck away in that back room full of things Alma doesn’t want to admit about herself.

  Alma lets the phone ring and ring, though by now Richard would have picked up if he were within hearing distance. But even if she can’t talk to him, Alma wants to hear the phone ringing, to be able to at least cause a sound in the world in which Richard is probably brushing his teeth this very moment, maybe peeing in the dark with a glowing ring to help him hit the bull’s-eye of the bowl. And so she lets it ring and ring, thinking oh my God, this is just like Mamasita, and the more it rings, the more it does sound like a baby bawling, wanting someone, anyone to pick up the other end and ask, Is everything all right?

  Isn’t that why Richard tried to call? He’d taken a stroll into the dark and dirty village, and heard it loud and clear, the song of the losers, that plaintive cry that sent him to the phone, hoping to hear Alma tell him, Everything is going to be all right. Isn’t that what Helen wanted to hear from Alma, that Mickey was going to be all right. That they are all, every one of them, going to be all right?

  Alma hangs up, takes a deep breath, and tries to compose a fax to Lavinia. Before she knows it, she has written a half-dozen drafts of a one-page fax. No wonder she can’t get through a whole saga novel.

  She gives up and heads upstairs, past Sam and Ben’s old bedroom where Tera is fast asleep already. For someone with her dark vision, Tera is amazingly light on her psychic feet, sleeps well, eats and drinks well, and knows how to have a hearty good time even in the midst of the many horrors she does not fail to see.

  And seeing those horrors, one might be driven to do something noble for the world, Alma thinks, pulled yet again by Isabel and Balmis into her study, just as the María Pita departs the waters off Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The sailors are aloft, letting out sail as orders are shouted through a trumpet between the booms of the far-off cannons.

  That first night out at sea, Isabel is too excited to sleep. After putting the boys to bed, she comes back on deck, staying close to the mate and the pilot manning the wheel, wary of encountering the steward or the rougher type of man who forms the crew—the mate has warned her. The seas are calm, the wind is light from the northeast, the pilot calls out these observations in a chanting voice that Isabel finds comforting.

  Alma stays up late, as if to keep company with this lone woman, sitting on a stoop the mate has dried off for her, wondering what the next forty days at sea will hold, whether her seasickness will return—already her stomach feels a bit queasy, whether the boys will fare well. Don Francisco has forgiven her over the Benito matter; the boy will be saved as a carrier until they reach Puerto Rico. Isabel can feel something changing between her and the director. A new closeness she must be careful not to overstep. She has no secrets now from him, or rather only one secret. The secret she must never tell.

  She has learned that the director has a wife. Not that Don Francisco has mentioned her; the director seldom speaks of his own private life. But his nephew and namesake, Don Francisco Pastor, is open and talkative and has alluded to his uncle’s wife, Doña Josefa Mataseco, who has stayed behind in their house in Madrid. How can a woman let a man she loves go on a journey that will last for years? Had Isabel such a love, she would grapple him to her with hoops of steel! She would follow him, as she is doing now, for much less recompense. For love of a dream he has shared with her. Nothing more.

  Josefa Mataseco. The ship now seems to rock to those three syllables: Josefa, Josefa, Josefa.
The name will become a constant irritation, a grain of sand inside the oyster of her mind. What pearl will she make of her disappointment?

  They are still close enough to shore that Isabel can see the far-off lights of Tenerife, nothing so sad as a retreating view, as Lot’s wife well knew. Above, the stars arrange themselves in shapes the mate points out: the Great Bear, the Chained Lady, the Twins. Perhaps because it is late, her eyes begin playing tricks on her, undoing their shapes and connecting them into her own creation, an ark, plowing through the dark sky full of little boys made of stars. Finally, eyes drooping, she tires of her game, bids the pilot and mate good night and descends to her own quarters.

  But Alma goes on, filling in the blue black of the night sky with its zillion stars like those Indian molas, a panel of black fabric with cutouts showing the bright yellow beneath, the soft brown of Isabel’s serge dress, which matches the boys’ onboard tunics, the pink of her whimsy, the dark red of her passionate soul, Don Francisco’s deepening, pale lavender conscience.

  Alma writes and writes, and then she prints out her handful of pages and goes downstairs to the fax machine, and first she faxes Lavinia a handwritten note, full of sorrys, and then she faxes Richard the pages she has printed out with a cover sheet that only later she realizes Starr Bell might read.

  TO: Richard Huebner FAX: 809-682-0800

  FROM: Alma FAX: 802-388-4344

  My love, I’ve trashed the saga novel. This is what I’m really working on. Trying to save the world on paper, I guess. Starr Bell with a pickup full of words, instead of goodies from the capital. Please forgive me for not being there with you to hold your hand and swat away the blues. I’ll come if you tell me to.

  Alma is too worked up to go to sleep, so she prowls the house in the dark. It’s after midnight and lights are still on over at Helen’s house. Alma wonders if Mickey is an insomniac, or maybe it’s poor Helen, who can’t sleep, alone with her mortal thoughts. If Mickey weren’t there, Alma would call and offer to come over, make Helen a nice fire, stay up, eating the rest of the flan together. But Alma doesn’t call. Instead she continues her wanderings, liking the feel of rooms at rest without the hype of activity, forlorn spaces with their trinkets and hopefulness. Finally, what she has been wanting to do but hasn’t because she worries that she’ll wake Tera and have to explain herself, she pushes open the door to Tera’s room and finds her way to the bed and crawls in.

  “You having a bad dream or something?” Tera mumbles, making room.

  “Yeah,” Alma tells her.

  IV

  JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1804

  I, ISABEL SENDALES Y GóMEZ mean to keep this record of our crossing. Perhaps in a future I cannot yet imagine for myself, I will have it to look back upon and recollect these nightmare days at sea in the sunny light of memory.

  Sunday, January 8, stormy day, on board the María Pita

  We have been two days at sea, and stormy as it has been we have kept mostly below. And so again, bouts of seasickness have afflicted me, but in a milder form, thanks to the mate’s prescription of a half cup of salt water each morning upon waking and then again at night before retiring.

  I dare not breathe that I am being treated by a lieutenant when there are so many skilled physicians on board. But in science, as we know, we must be ruled by observation, and the bite of salt in my stomach seems to have abated the mal de mar a lot better than Don Francisco’s wine of ipecac and deck exercise, albeit the latter has been difficult owing to the heavy seas we are encountering.

  It seems a common opinion among the crew that this is one of the stormiest Januarys they have seen in the north Atlantic, and the month just over a week old! Our cook, an irascible old salt with one good arm and a hook for a left hand—which intrigues our boys to no end—claims that we’re in for a bad crossing as we left Tenerife on a Friday. “The day of Our Lord’s crucifixion bodes ill for setting out on a journey.”

  “But it was Epiphany,” Orlando, the cabin boy who is not much older than our oldest carriers, spoke up. “And the three kings were traveling.”

  The cook glared at him. No doubt the young apprentice would soon learn not to contradict the shipmate in charge of feeding him. “You just wait and see,” Cook warned, jabbing his hooked arm in the boy’s direction, nearly cuffing the steward in the jaw as the ship heaved to one side. Cook should know better than to wield that thing about so freely on a heavy sea. “If you live to see it, that is,” the cook growled as he stirred the greasy stew, which was to be the crew’s supper.

  The poor boy blinked, fighting back tears. As he lifted his bowl for his ladleful, the buttons on his sleeve caught the gleam of the galley fire. The mate had told me these buttons were purposely sewn on the sleeves of young apprentices to prevent them from wiping their noses when they sniffle with homesickness. I doubt that a few mere buttons would prevent my own boys from wailing at will when they want.

  And they have been whiny and bored with being confined below. I join them in the galley for meals to help with feeding the youngest. Afterward, depending on the cook’s mood, we stay sitting at the tables, playing games and telling stories rather than withdrawing to their darker, smellier quarters below.

  If anything will get us across this ocean, it will be the telling of stories. I have devised a game the boys seem to enjoy, a variation of the one I used to play in my head to relieve the tedium and hopelessness of my days back at La Coruña. I take each one in turn and imagine a lovely future ahead for him, describing in great detail the house he will live in, the color and character of the horse he will ride, the important post he will fill, the gatherings he will attend, the foods he will eat. I set before them trays filled with exquisite cakes and little candies in colors that tease the eye. And for an hour at a time, the boys are mesmerized, having forgotten the rocking ship, their confinement below, their queasy stomachs, their homesickness, seasickness, weariness of travel. “Are we almost there?” they keep asking.

  “Soon,” I reply—with a month or more to go!

  Yesterday, I waxed on about the future of our little Francisco: “You will be a respected merchant in a satin waistcoat with buttons of gold and ride in a carriage to the viceroy’s palace pulled by two black stallions with bells at their bridles that ring wherever you go.” I looked up and saw I had a larger audience than just the cook and the steward, sitting nearby, picking his teeth, drinking his noon ration of rum. Don Francisco had come forward to see after us, and he stood by, listening. When I stopped in embarrassment, he urged me to go on.

  Later, when I went back to my quarters in the aft part of the ship, he complimented me on my skill in invention. “Or can you actually foretell the future?” He cocked one brow. I knew better than to tell a man of science that I believe in fortune-telling.

  “They are just stories I tell the boys,” I explained. “To give them something to hope for.”

  He seemed almost disappointed with my answer. As if he would have preferred I claim special powers that I might tell him what lay ahead for our risky expedition.

  And who knows, perhaps my stories do have special powers? Little filaments of hope thrown out into the unknown, which might carry a boy somewhere he would not otherwise go. For my own part, I cannot imagine any future for myself beyond this watery waste that seems to have no end. Perhaps the common lore of seamen is correct and our women constitutions are not made for the sea. Were it solely up to me, I would not choose to travel by ship again.

  Yet how can I complain? My accommodations are among the best. The mate would not hear of letting me move out of his quarters. I have a small but pleasant cabin all to myself, with two hooks for a hammock, a tiny desk that pulls down, and a small hatch from whence blows in a lovely, revitalizing breeze—though in these heavy seas, I have mostly kept it closed.

  Slowly, I am learning everyone’s name. Thank goodness many are called by what they do: Cook, Steward, Boatswain (“Bosun,” I’ve been instructed to say). We are all told sixty souls on this ship. B
esides the twenty-two boys, there are eleven members of our expedition (including myself) and twenty-seven in the crew. According to the mate, this is a small number, purposely so, to accommodate the rest of us. I see now why our director thought of sending six boys back and why Captain del Barco felt compelled to have his own cabin boy double as a carrier. It is amazing to think we are all to live in a space only slightly bigger than our orphanage for the next month or so!

  Don Francisco brought along six blank books. He is writing in one, keeping a second in reserve. He has given one to Dr. Salvany, another to Dr. Gutiérrez, and a fifth to Don Ángel, who is to be secretary of the expedition. Don Francisco asked if I would like one, which I was pleased to accept. (The second book he has given me! This one, a blank, which I have already begun to fill.)

  It seems everyone is writing a book: Dr. Gutiérrez writes in his blank book, as does Dr. Salvany, who has also brought along a small book with gold leaf on the cover, which he is filling with poetry he sometimes reads to the wardroom at night; Don Ángel writes what he is told; and Don Francisco keeps a record of his vaccinations as well as other experiments he is conducting. Then the captain and pilot write a daily log of our weather, which they read out at supper to the officers: “rainy with heavy seas; cloudy with fresh gales and squally; the same uncomfortable weather with a long westerly swell.” They are also constantly taking measurements with all manner of complex instruments among which I recognize only the compass, kept in a binnacle, which measurements they then use to chart our way across the ocean. These they keep secret, because, as the mate, Lieutenant Pozo, who has warmed to the point of being quite chatty with me, confesses, it is a danger to let the crew of a ship know exactly where they are; it encourages mutiny. It makes my heart sink to hear such talk. As if I didn’t have enough fears already to worry my mind about!