Saving the World

by Julia Alvarez

“A very special friend,” I explained to her.

  More and more I had to leave the boys in her care. Pastor and Don Pedro Ortega had departed for other islands: Misamis, Zamboanga, Cebu, Mindanao—I loved the sound of their strange and sonorous names. They would be back when they were finished vaccinating and setting up vaccination juntas at the different missionary outposts—six months, a year. Meanwhile, in Manila, Dr. Gutiérrez was left with a reduced staff: Don Ángel Crespo, Don Antonio Pastor, and myself. I could not be spared.

  Don Francisco was now convinced that the only way he would recover his health was to move to a kinder climate. The area around southern China, he had heard, had much more pleasant weather. In addition, the ancient healing arts practiced there might prevail where science had failed. Once his constitution was strong again, he would sail around the cape on a Portuguese vessel for home, vaccinating en route. I could see that this was a way he might fulfill the mission he had set out to accomplish: spreading the vaccine around the world, not just in our Spanish dominions.

  I felt such a confusion of feelings. Don Francisco had brought us here, so he must take us back. But Viceroy Iturrigaray had practically forbidden him to return. I recalled our director’s words in Acapulco; he had not included himself when he had assured me that I would return to New Spain. Had he been hatching this plan back then?

  “Can’t we go on with you, sir?” I wasn’t asking to accompany him as much as I was hoping he would not abandon us.

  “It will be better this way,” he explained. Without a large retinue, he could move at his own pace, with less preoccupation and inconvenience.

  As he spoke, the veins on his thin neck stood out with the effort of speech. His face was gaunt, his bones visible under the loose skin. How distressing to find in the basin by his bed bloody spittle and several teeth! He would not survive if he stayed, I could see that. But I doubted that he would survive even if he went away.

  Don Francisco petitioned the governor—and this time Don Ángel asked that I take the dictation—to grant him a passport and four boy carriers to set sail for Macao. A ship bound for that island was presently at port. He pleaded his poor health and went on to add that glory would rebound to the governor in the court of King Carlos for promoting this extension of our mission which would bring new friends to Spain. Perhaps it was this desire to clear his good name, but for the first time, the governor replied promptly and agreeably to consider the petition granted. I can’t help thinking that the little touches of courtesy and praise I added to Don Francisco’s dictation helped bring about Governor Aguilar’s change of attitude.

  Don Francisco’s impending departure filled me with dread. I felt as shipwrecked parties might feel watching their captain sail off in a small boat with half of the rescued supplies. The smallest things vexed me beyond reason. I don’t know why. A great impediment to our success would soon be removed. For Don Francisco’s belligerence had now become legend in Manila. Our mission in these islands was bound to succeed in Dr. Gutiérrez’s able hands. Still, with our director’s departure, everything would be diminished, like Margarita’s reduction of the world by qualifying everything as “little.” It was a necessary change, but there was nostalgia still in me for that grander measure that had propelled me out of my old life toward America.

  None of the expedition members noticed my mood, busy as we all were with too much work. Margarita was sure it was my menses, gone awry after months of grueling travel. But Kalua seemed to understand it was something of the spirit that was affecting me. She made me teas as Juana had done in Puerto Rico and pinned an amulet on my dress. Sometimes she told stories, of which I understood very little. But just the sound of her voice pronouncing her musical language soothed me.

  In her company, I felt transported. It was a state of mind more than a place, an intuition more than a certainty, a sense that the spark of faith must be kept alive, like our own vaccine through carriers, or we would fall prey to violence and inhumanity.

  It was imagining that future that filled me with apprehension. I could not seem to make those imaginings stop, except when I immersed myself in work or sat back and listened to the servant woman talk.

  • • •

  SEPTEMBER 3, 1805! The day I had been dreading finally arrived, a cloudy Tuesday. I hoped the rain would hold off.

  I dressed my boys in the remnants of their uniforms and asked Captain Martínez if he might round together a band of musicians. I had copied out a list of the boys who had accompanied us thus far on our mission; at the bottom of the list, I added my own name, a declaration of faith in the dream our director had struggled—and never was there a truer verb attached to an enterprise—to carry out.

  Until I was writing them all down, I had not realized how many children had come through our hands! And these names were only a small part of the thousands who had carried the vaccine to far off regions beyond where we had stopped. I could not help thinking of Dr. Salvany and Dr. Grajales, Don Rafael Lozano, the gruff Don Basilio Bolaños still proceeding down the length of South America toward the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata with boys on loan from village to village. Salvation carried on the arms of so many children and in the imagination of a handful of individuals!

  We lined up at the docks. From the roof of the Customs House, our lookout called down that Don Francisco’s carriage was approaching. The band was ready to play and the boys to sing a hymn for the safe journey of our director. Just as we were poised to begin, we heard a rumble as if the rains we had been awaiting for weeks were finally coming. But no, it was the sound of carriage wheels, more and more of them descending from the walled city, hundreds of citizens showing up to say farewell to Don Francisco!

  The governor now had several kind words to say about our mission. The bishop gave his blessing. The band played, we sang, the cannons boomed farewell. Three boys went ahead aboard the Diligencia—I wondered what had happened to the fourth carrier, since our director had requested that number. I was still worrying over the details of how it would go for Don Francisco.

  He looked cadaverous: his clothes hung on him and his mouth seemed to have sunk into his face, for he had lost most of his teeth. This was not the elegant stranger who had appeared at the orphanage two years ago in La Coruña. I felt a wave of emotion sweep over me as our own Josef Dolores read out the long list of names and handed the document to our director, who bowed his head, overcome by this unexpected homage.

  Now it was time for good-byes. He stooped down and spoke to the boys, reminding them to mind me. When he was done, he had to be helped back on his feet by Don Ángel.

  He spoke some last-minute instructions and then embraced his faithful colleagues who had been by his side since he set out from Madrid. He lifted a feeble hand in salute to the crowd. I half hoped I would be included in this general farewell. Should he address me personally, I could not vouch for the weakening dam of my self-control.

  “Doña Isabel.” He was before me. His hand was bony in my own. “We have come a long way. I would not feel at ease leaving these boys behind if it were not that they are in your care. And the others,” he said, waving his arm in the air. Did he mean the three members of our expedition standing with our boys? Don Pedro Ortega and his nephew had not yet returned from their journey to the islands. Or perhaps he meant the boys left behind in the Royal Hospicio in Mexico City. “You will take care of all them?”

  I could not trust my voice. I nodded. To the best of my ability, I thought. But I would not qualify his hope. He would need every bit of it to carry him home.

  “And you will take care of yourself,” he added. His voice was tremulous, an old man’s voice. I lifted my eyes to him and the look that passed between us bound us forever in that place I had imagined as the servant woman told her stories. We are not alone. We are here together.

  I watched the frail figure proceed down the length of the wharf and board the Diligencia. I will never see him again, I thought, as the boys and I waved our kerchiefs, though mostly,
I used mine to catch my tears.

  That night after the boys were in bed, that sense of dread returned. I suppose I had indulged my tears at the dock, and now my fears were getting the best of me. I paced the room, recalling Don Francisco’s worries about our delayed return. Without our director fighting our battles would we ever get back to New Spain? The governor had yet to guarantee our passage or release the funds so I could begin preparing our equipage. When would I see my Benito again? What if we found ourselves in the hands of another dishonest captain? What if our throats were cut at sea and our bodies thrown to the deep that tells no tales?

  “Faith!” I told my flagging spirits, as I had once advised Don Francisco. There was a knock on the door. The servant woman had seen my light and, thinking I was ill, had come to check on me. “No, no, I am fine,” I assured her. But she read the weariness in my eyes and stayed under the guise of turning down my bed.

  We could not converse much in the small vocabulary we shared. But she helped me off with my dress and insisted I sit down while she combed my hair. In the mirror, we looked at each other, two scarred faces glad for the other’s company. Outside the rain that had threatened all day began to fall. Thinking of Don Francisco, I hoped it was a local squall.

  “Kaluluwa.” She uttered the strange name I had heard the other native servants call her, a name her Spanish masters and mistresses found difficult to remember and had shortened to Kalua. “It means—” She touched her breast above where her heart should be.

  “Heart?” I asked, and then imitated the thumping organ.

  She shook her head and made a gesture of something further, beyond the heart.

  “Kaluluwa,” I repeated as if saying the name over would enlighten me as to its meaning. Behind me, she smiled in the mirror. There was anticipation in her eyes. And then I remembered the story we had been told about natives exchanging names as a sign of friendship. “Isabel,” I offered.

  “Isabel?” she repeated, perplexed. She had thought my true name was Nati.

  I laughed, realizing the earlier misunderstanding. “I’m Isabel,” I said. Except that now I was also Kaluluwa, a name I later learned meant soul in Tagalog.

  When she left, I lay in the dark, listening to the rain. Each time a fearsome thought entered my feverish brain, I felt that soothing touch on my forehead again. Faith! Perhaps, by year’s end, I would be reunited with my Benito, wed to my lieutenant, sitting down to dinner together in the city of the angels.

  8

  For days, or is it hours, maybe years, Alma enters a strange time she cannot measure on a clock. It is the time grief keeps, which everybody wants to speed up for her, for themselves. But neither they, nor she, have any control of those hands that move at their own lugubrious pace, A Wooden way / Regardless grown.

  Those lines by Emily Dickinson are ones that memory sends up, from a poem that Alma had to memorize in seventh grade. Her English teacher had assigned each student a poem to learn by heart, and this one fell to Alma. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes …” Great pain in seventh grade was a toothache, the taunts of bullies, harsh punishment by Mamasita, Papote’s silences.

  A formal feeling? The Hour of Lead?

  “What is your poem about?” the teacher asked after each recitation.

  “‘After Great Pain’ was written by Emily Dickinson, who was a great American poet, who was born …” Alma rattled on, hoping biography might supplant meaning.

  “Very good, Alma. But can you tell us what the poem is about?”

  Alma shook her head. She had no idea what this poem was about. Now she knows.

  THE MINUTES AFTER THE siege are interminable, gun blasts shake the thin walls of Don Jacobo’s house, knock his solar panel off the roof. Darkness descends upon them, though almost immediately, as if she had been waiting in the wings like an actress, Don Jacobo’s wife walks in with a gas lamp. By its light Alma sees the worried look on Emerson’s face as he reenters the room for the umpteenth time. He has been outside again, conferring with Jim Larsen, Walter, and Frank, who are all trying to get hold of Camacho on his radio. What the hell is going on? A rescue mission is not a massacre!

  Nobody, it seems, can answer Alma’s one question and its endless variations: Where is Richard? Has he been found? Is he all right? Alma looks around for Starr. Starr would know, Starr would tell her. But la americana has gone down the mountain to the Codetel phone trailer to make some phone calls. Probably Starr is calling Daddy after discovering her cell phone disappeared. Disappeared is right! Smashed to smithereens. Alma begins to shake with the terrible knowledge of what a bullet can do to a cell phone, much less a human being.

  Where is Richard?

  She can’t sit still. Instead, she paces, limping back and forth across the narrow room. It’s making her leg ache more, which is the point, except her old trick isn’t working, of making something else hurt to keep her heart from breaking.

  Where is Richard?

  “That leg is going to get infected,” Mariana worries. Why isn’t she outside covering this story? Even if they were all ordered to stay indoors, isn’t she a journalist?

  “I don’t care.” Alma’s voice is breathless, edged with panic. So what if her leg gets infected, takes longer to heal. She’ll give it up if she can have Richard back. Please, God, please, let him be all right, Alma bargains, wringing her hands.

  Mariana must think Alma is praying because she digs out a rosary from her ready overnight bag and drapes it over Alma’s clenched hands. Later, all Alma will remember of the horrible moment when she hears the news is pulling the rosary apart and sending beads flying all over Don Jacobo’s floor.

  And the poem, Alma will remember the poem. She will not remember the time. This is the Hour of Lead. She will remember asking over and over, Why?

  WHY A SIEGE? Why did sixty-plus members of a special security squad need to storm a little clinic in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere? Swan didn’t order this. The U.S. embassy sent up two of its best negotiators to broker a peaceful release of hostages. Lord knows, HI wants to cut loose from the negative publicity. And the villagers—they never imagined this would happen. Originally, they were all behind the kids—well, all but Don Jacobo and a few of his cronies. They, too, wanted a clinic for their sick; they, too, wanted water they could drink, jobs that paid a decent wage; they did not want a clinic full of prostitutes and pimps spreading AIDS germs all over their village.

  But they saw that the way to get these things, according to el americano and la señorita Starr, was to be patient, to work through the new Centro, to learn how to take care of the hens that lay golden eggs. The science of AIDS was explained to them. There was no harm with this clinic. In fact, this clinic’s programs would do good things for the villagers and the surrounding area.

  It was the young people who were not convinced, the young people who began holding meetings with radical elements from other villages, who in turn brought in weapons, drugs, money, bitterness. The young people took over the clinic and Centro to speed up the golden process, to hold Swan and the americanos to their promises.

  But never in a thousand years did anyone expect this showdown. Those boys would have walked out of the clinic with their hands in the air if they’d known this bloodbath was coming.

  But somebody somewhere, maybe Camacho, maybe the general who is not a general, is poised on the edge of a promotion, on the eve of announcing his candidacy for presidency. A career is made out of the right moves at such critical moments, setting an example of what must be done with terrorists, sending the world a signal. No matter that these kids were kids, like kids everywhere with an axe to grind, incited by desperation and misinformation, led by a bully, who is ironically the only captive to survive the siege unharmed. Everyone else is wounded or dead or has fled into the rain that begins to fall steadily at dawn.

  HOURS LATER, OR MAYBE minutes that feel like hours, Emerson puts his arm around Alma’s waist. “We’re going to head out now,” he says quietly. His
face is somber, his voice hushed. “Van’s waiting,” he adds, probably because Alma is looking at him as if he has just said something crazy.

  She lets herself be led as far as the front door, as if she has to see what Emerson’s talking about to make any sense of what he is saying. The van has been pulled up to the door, wipers going. Now Alma will get to ride with the top dogs, Jim Larsen and crew, the noble widow who so loved her husband she jumped over a barricade to spend his last hours with him. Her crazy deed now spun into a romantic, tragic story.

  Alma balks at the sight of the van. She is not ready to go, not just yet. “I want to see him.”

  “Richard is being transported out, Alma.” Emerson’s voice has taken on a creepy, intoned quality, like that of an undertaker. “You’ll get to see him first thing in the capital. The funeral home—”

  “No!” Alma cries out. “I want to see him now!” She feels like a two-year-old, throwing a tantrum in the mayor’s house. “I’m not going till I see him.” She is sobbing, but not the kind of female sobbing that means she is breaking down, ready to be helped to the next moment of her life without Richard. She is serious. Let them arrange another siege, if they want to, storm Don Jacobo’s house, shoot her down, one more casualty to add to their body count.

  “Alma, please, I know you’re upset.”

  “I am not upset!” Alma cries out. Then, in a calmer voice, so they can’t dismiss her, the bereft wife who needs a sedative, she adds, “I’m not leaving till I see him.”

  Emerson glances over at Jim, who steps outside. A moment later, he returns, nods. “Out back.”

  Out the back door under an umbrella that suddenly blooms above her, Alma follows the guardia who seems in charge of the after-siege operations. Emerson’s arm is again around her waist, or so she thinks, but a moment later when the arm releases her so that they can each go single file past the sandbags that have been heaped to either side of the narrow gate, Alma is surprised to look up and find that it’s Jim Larsen by her side.