Saving the World

by Julia Alvarez

  “We never gave these orders. I want you to know that, Mrs. Huebner.”

  “I don’t care.” She turns on him. “I told you those guys were going to bomb. You didn’t believe me.” The more she says, the angrier she is. “I don’t want you with me,” she cries. “I want to see Richard alone! Please!” Her furious command becomes a plea.

  He lets her go. In the days to come, which might be years, or hours, minutes, who knows, Alma will discover that her terrible grief scares people. They will give her whatever she says she wants. Mostly, to be left alone, and not be left alone. For everything, she will have a yes and no. It’s not that she doesn’t know what she wants. Alma knows precisely what she wants, but no one in the world can give her that.

  INSIDE THE CLINIC, men in oily-looking, black gear—they look like divers—are sorting out the dead. It is an eerie scene, a gray, rainy light filtering in through the windows. Some accessory lights have been set up on tripods, as if this scene is being filmed. Alma hears a motor going, the generator.

  The dead are laid out like kindergarten children on mats for their nap. When Alma enters, the crew is tagging the bodies for transport. Most of the men are wearing masks, which strikes Alma as strange. The dead are newly dead. They can’t smell yet. Maybe these men are masked in solidarity. Inside their body bags, the dead have just been divested of their ski masks and bandannas.

  Or perhaps these men, like the dead boys, are afraid of AIDS. They are packing up bodies that might be contaminated. There is blood everywhere, a dark spill so resembling the reddish mud on her shoes that Alma at first thinks the death crew’s boots are muddy. But this is blood, precious blood—the boys’, Richard’s—which they are afraid might infect them.

  The guardia who is her guide gives out his order. La señora wants to see the americano. Nobody here thinks this is strange, she notes, not the way Emerson and Jim reacted as if Alma had voiced some crazed, grief-stricken request. It makes perfect sense. The wife wants to see her husband. Maybe she wants to remove a ring or some other personal effect that might get “lost” in the transit.

  One of the men lifts his mask. He summons her, raising his hand, palm up, the fingers scooping her toward him. As Alma follows down the hall, she is filled with a terrible nostalgia. Just hours ago, which might be minutes or days or years, she walked down this very hall to the back patio. Just hours ago, she saw Richard enter the dark tunnel to the john. If only she had called him back in time, he would now be with her, riding down to the capital in the embassy van.

  She will drive herself crazy if she does this! She has to get it through her head that this is not a story. She cannot revise the past; she cannot make a deal with Helen’s or anybody else’s God.

  Alma enters an examining room—maybe the same one in which she lay just hours ago. It’s hard to tell, one examining room is probably so much like another. The overflow of the dead have been laid out on the floor, except for one, lying on the examining table in meaningless hierarchy. The cleanup guy works the zipper down on this bag and pulls back the flap. Alma’s whole body begins to shake with grief, a huge wave that will surely carry her away. As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow— / First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

  When she looks down, she is so ready for Richard’s face that she wonders if maybe in death people become someone else. Stony and pale beneath the hand she has automatically extended to stroke Richard’s face is the black-kerchief poet, except he is no longer wearing his kerchief. His thick hair looks matted down, wet, as if the rain beating on the zinc roof has somehow leaked through. But, no, it’s blood, still liquid, still running! Alma pulls her hand back. “This is not my husband,” she wails. “This is not Richard.”

  The guardia in charge is full of apologies to Alma and furious at his underling for making such a mistake to further upset the grieving señora.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Alma stops him. “It doesn’t matter. I just want to see my husband.” Tears come to her eyes. Her husband. He was wearing a pinkish windbreaker, she wants to say. Alma looks around the room, as if she will be able to spot him inside one of those dark, ominous bags.

  Meanwhile, the underling has begun unzipping and zipping body bags, looking for the señora’s husband. A wild, joyous thought enters Alma’s head. Maybe the reports were wrong! Maybe Richard is alive, maybe he crouched behind the door of the john, under the poster of the lovers, waiting out the shoot-out. Maybe they will go home, sit down to leftover turkey with his three sons, and Richard will regale them all with his lucky story.

  But this is a story that is not a story. A moment later, when the relieved worker pulls back the zippered flap, it is Richard.

  ALMA EXPLAINS TO THE guardia who is her guide that she is not going to leave her husband’s side. She will ride down to the capital with Richard and the other dead in the back of the military truck, if need be. The guardia summons Mr. Larsen, but no one can talk Alma out of her peevish grief. Richard is carried by two of the cleanup crew toward the waiting van. Jim and Alma step inside the mayor’s house to say their good-byes.

  But Starr has just come back from her phone calling with some bad news. “We’re going to have to stay here in quarantine till we get the okay.” She shoots Alma a dark look, eyes narrowed. “Why didn’t you tell us you might be infected with monkey pox?”

  This can’t be happening, Alma thinks. Was it only a couple of months ago, or years, that she got that AIDS phone call from Hannah, the same day she saw that trespasser on their property who turned out to be Mickey? Alma had thought she had gone crazy, entered a strange twilight zone of the bruised and broken. But it’s not her; it’s the world that has gone mad. This story that is not a story in whose craziness she is trapped.

  As best she can, Alma explains what happened back in Vermont. It wasn’t till the flight down when she read the short news piece in Emerson’s paper that she even knew about Mickey’s suspicious denial. Then someone called the clinic yesterday afternoon—was it only yesterday? Richard had been the one to take it, so Alma can’t even say if it was Claudine, the sheriff, maybe even Tera.

  “I called the embassy to let them know so they should start getting stuff in order.” Starr is avoiding Alma’s eyes. Probably, she’s referring to some death certificate paperwork she doesn’t want to mention in front of Alma. “They’d gotten this strange call from a sheriff in Vermont. And one from Daddy, too.” Now she does look at Alma. “Did you take my cell phone with you? Daddy says somebody answered and there was all this whispering and shouting and then the line went dead.”

  Alma explains, though the more she talks, the more she thinks she sounds like she’s stark raving mad.

  “Well, poor Daddy, you can imagine, he called everybody.”

  Alma can imagine who all everybody is. People with connections and money. VIPs who will save his golden child, airlift her out, if necessary. A cherished life, protected by the bubble of power. Hers around Richard was only a bubble of love, not good enough.

  “Anyhow, we’re all going to have to be quarantined here in the village until we get the word.” Thanks a lot, her tone says.

  “How long is this going to go on for?” Jim asks, looking at his watch. Days? Weeks? He is a busy man.

  “They’ve sealed off the old woman’s house and they should know soon. Some disease-control specialists have been flown in. Meanwhile, the embassy’s going to send up some cell phones we can use, cots, supplies. A forensic guy is coming up.” Again she avoids Alma’s eyes. “We’re to sit tight.”

  “We’ve been a lot of places,” Emerson reminds Starr. “The airplane, all those people.”

  “Tell me about it,” Starr says. Her tone, if not her look, implicates Alma. “It’s going to be a real mess tracking down this virus if the guy’s wife’s telling the truth.”

  “She’s not,” Alma finds herself saying. How can she be so sure? She saw the syringe in Mickey’s hand. What was it filled with? “I can’t be 100 percent sure,” she adds,
since everyone is looking at her now with true suspicion. “It’s just that this guy and his wife are not all there.” She tells them how Mickey’s wife, Hannah, claimed to have AIDS and called up a whole bunch of people, saying she’d slept with their husbands. When she was taken into custody and tested, it turned out she did not have AIDS, she wasn’t even HIV-positive. “They’re talking in metaphors. They call themselves ethical terrorists.”

  “Ethical terrorists?” Starr makes a face as if she has just tasted the words and they are putrid. “Unethical, if you ask me!”

  “Most terrorists claim they’re being ethical,” Walter or Frank observes. This could be a book-club discussion in Vermont. Some nonfiction book on current events they are all reading in order to indulge the one or two men in the group who are tired of novels. “But I agree with you.” Walter or Frank nods at Starr. “Inexcusable.”

  “People get desperate,” Alma offers. Since when has she turned into Mickey and Hannah’s defender? “And if you want to know what’s inexcusable it’s what the army did here.” She looks from one to the other, her eyes fierce, daring them to contradict her.

  Even when they meet her gaze, after a moment, they look down at their muddy shoes. Have any of them noticed how much the red mud they’ve tracked into the mayor’s house looks like blood?

  Only Starr holds her gaze. “Those guys were armed, you know,” she begins. But Emerson shoots her a glance, stopping her. Be kind to the widow who just lost her husband to this mess. Go along with everything she says.

  “I tried to talk to them,” Starr says a moment later. “I thought they understood.” She dissolves into tears. “I’m sorry, Alma.”

  “So am I,” Alma returns angrily, but soon, she, too, is crying. She lets herself be held in the young woman’s arms, thinking they will never be Richard’s arms. There is no solace here. Still, she rests for the moment, as if catching her breath for the long climb out of hell that will go on for months, days, years.

  A moment later, she feels Starr stiffening, and then tactfully but decidedly pulling away. That’s right, Alma thinks. She might have monkey pox. And even if Hannah is bluffing again, even if Alma is totally clean of any and all deadly viruses, she has been infected with a sorrow that will leave her scarred and changed. But she is also carrying a living story inside her, an antibody to the destruction she has seen, an intuition, like the poet said, which must survive beyond her grief.

  UNTIL THE CRAZY QUARANTINE is lifted, they are trapped, living and dead, in this village.

  As a possible carrier, Alma is given a mask to wear. It is the same hospital-blue color as those of the cleanup crew, probably where it came from. Of course, if she is indeed infected, the harm has already been done. Still, these are the recommendations sent up by the Departamento de Salud, Oficina de Emergencia. Alma complies—it seems somehow fitting that she, too, wear this grim disguise.

  Alma hears Starr and Jim Larsen and the embassy guys in Don Jacobo’s front room, discussing how best to approach the sensitive issue of having Alma sleep alone in one of the little houses in the Centro. “She shouldn’t be left alone,” Emerson weighs in.

  “Don’t sweat it,” she tells him, surprising the group with her backdoor entrance. Her voice sounds weird, muffled by a mask, sent back into her own lungs, as if she were speaking to herself. How could the boys stand wearing ski masks made of wool in the heat of the day, for hours on end?

  Alma would just as soon sleep alone in the two-room casita Richard shared with Bienvenido. Her utensils, her bowl and cup, are also kept separate. When she gets too close, she can feel her fellow Americans tense in self-defense. But Don Jacobo and his family either don’t understand or don’t care if Alma is carrying germs. They think of her as one more AIDS patient. Besides, what more can be done to their devastated corner of the world?

  Every household is mourning a son or a nephew or godson or novio. The cowlick boy whose mother was the persona de confianza with whom la doctora Heidi sent her instructions for a siege in which no one would get hurt, the Killington ski-mask boy who wanted to support his family, the black-kerchief poet whose novia loved to hear him talk his fiery talk—there will not be enough room in the little village cemetery to hold so many dead, not enough room in the heart to mourn this inhuman loss.

  All through the day, Alma hears wailing coming from one or another house. An angry crowd shows up at Don Jacobo’s door, ready to burn it down. Why? Why? they cry out, echoing and amplifying Alma’s grief, like a Greek chorus. Why did the autoridades not give these boys a chance? They were mere muchachos. Boys who had let their mothers go free even before they got their cigarettes and food, boys who would have been satisfied with a pool table, a training program that might lead to a job that might lead to some money in their pockets, the keys to a pasola, una ropita decente to throw on their backs for a parranda on a Saturday night. It was only when pressed against the wall that they started acting tough, asking for crazy things, visas and such.

  “I told them all of this,” Don Jacobo puts in.

  But the villagers don’t want his excuses. Their grief is huge and furious. Beside it, Alma’s individual grief feels manageable. Maybe she will move here and finish the work Richard set out to do. Maybe if she changes everything in her life, it won’t feel so weird that Richard isn’t around. In the months to come, Alma will catch herself at this game of trying to dodge her grief, to lose it, to diminish it. But nothing works, except for minutes at a time, when she leaves herself behind and joins Isabel as she recrosses the wide Pacific, returning with her boys to Mexico after two years away, her health compromised, her faith diminishing. Maybe it is a trick, but who cares, it works, this story that becomes Alma’s lifeline, this thread of hope she picks up in a dark time. Something important in that story, which can’t be left behind.

  What does it mean not to lose faith with what is grand?

  But these are thoughts that will accost her later. In the early-morning hours in the empty bed. Nights when she comes home and the house is dark. Times when she picks up the ringing phone and it is not Richard.

  The crowd moves on from the mayor’s house to the clinic. Alma joins them. They are mostly women, many of them mothers of the dead boys. At first, they were told that their sons were criminal elements. They did not have any rights even in death. But now that the dead are quarantined with the living, the bodies have to be cleaned up and buried quickly, before they become another health hazard. This is the tropics, after all. Richard, too, will have to be buried for now, the remains exhumed later and taken back to the States.

  Remains, exhumed. Alma can’t bear to hear Richard spoken of in this way! Briefly, Richard will be buried in her birth land, a last embrace from a country he loved. He would have liked that, she thinks, though almost immediately she rejects the pat, posthumous thought. Richard would want to be alive, as would the dozen dead boys. No getting around that simple fact.

  The guards let the women through the Centro gates, up the walk, into the clinic. Each one finds her dead. Richard has been returned to the examining room, placed on the table, the poet transferred to the floor. A young woman kneels beside him—a lover, a sister?—wiping his face with a cloth. When the women begin saying a rosary, Alma cannot pray with them. She cannot save Richard, she cannot save anyone. Compassion flows from this terrible knowledge.

  She finds her way out to the back patio where hours ago … Gently, she pulls herself back from that edge. She has to outlive these terrible moments, step by hopeless step. She cannot let loss have the last word. Was it Richard who said, in one of his rare moments of grand philosophizing, or it could be Alma read it in one of those photocopied articles Tera loves to send her, annoyingly highlighted and commented upon in the margins: something about how you can’t live entirely for your own time, how you have to imagine a story bigger than your own story, than the sum of your parts?

  The rain has let up. A wind is blowing. The night will turn cold. Just ahead, there are lights on in the dormit
orios, which shouldn’t surprise Alma. Of course, like everyone else, the patients are under quarantine. Inside the women’s dormitorio, la doctora Heidi is checking blood pressures, dispensing medicines.

  La doctora stops her work when she catches sight of Alma just outside the door. She would like to express her sentimientos to the wife of the dead americano. Her hand is at her heart, her eyes fill. She is in pain over the violence that was never a part of the original plan. “The soldiers are saying the boys opened fire. They had to defend themselves by firing back.”

  Alma shakes her head. She doesn’t want to hear their excuses, the stories that will be used to explain the deaths of a dozen boys and her husband. She doesn’t want vengeance, but she won’t shut up either. Swan, Camacho, whoever gave the orders, whoever helped create this desperate situation, must be held to account. We will infect them with our questions, as the black-kerchief poet said. Tera, dear Tera, will know where to begin, who to call.

  “Will you come in, please?” La doctora has noticed Alma is holding her arms, shivering.

  “I shouldn’t.” Alma points to her mask. The patients are vulnerable. The last thing they need is exposure to monkey pox.

  The doctora has heard about the scare, but it is beyond her realm of comprehension. Why would anyone willingly spread an illness and cause more suffering in the world?

  Why would anyone take a simple plan of rescue and turn it into a bloodbath? Alma could ask her. But la doctora has enough grief on her hands right now.

  “I have to continue,” she excuses herself. Her patients have been many days without any treatment. They cannot be abandoned. In the men’s dormitorio, Dr. Cheché is attending to the men.

  But instead of moving back inside, la doctora waits at the door as if for Alma’s permission to go on with her lucky life, helping unlucky people.

  Over her shoulder, Alma can see the thin, worried faces of women and girls. They look back at her with a cleaving look that reminds her of the hostages, the look they all gave each other, a look of fear, a look of hope. A look that aches for a look back. I am with you. We are here together. It makes her feel uncomfortable, this naked need. She turns to go. But the look will follow her from now on, eyes that will peer out at her in the dark, Richard’s eyes, the poet’s eyes, infecting her with their questions, needing her hope.