NOTHING TO DECLARE

by Mary Morris

  Then I asked Lupe if she'd like to work for me. I had not wanted to ask her this, but now I did. I told her I could pay her two hundred pesos a week and we could help each other out. She said, "As long as we stay friends." I told her we would stay friends.

  As I was leaving, Lupe told me not to worry. "Someone is watching out for you," she said.

  That night as I sat at dinner with my window open I heard a voice call to me. I listened and thought I heard it say, "I love you." Lupe came in a few moments later and she heard it, too. Then Globo came and sat on my windowsill and stared at me. I gave her a piece of chicken which she ate slowly, methodically. I gave her another. She was a beautiful gray cat with big green eyes. "I think Globo is a bruja," Lupe said. "A witch. A white witch, a good witch." My nahual, the Aztecs would say, the animal god come to protect me. I thought of my dream about the cat but said nothing more.

  I settled into loneliness once again. The rhythm of my days and nights, the absence of real friends in San Miguel, all of this made me miss Alejandro more. Days passed and he did not return. I was beside myself with worry and with the tremendous sense that I had been abandoned. I did not know how to reach him. He had no phone. I called his school once and was told he was on sick days.

  One morning as I was sitting down to work, I heard a loud banging at my door and a thick Virginian accent calling my name. "Hello, Mary, are you there? I know you are. Open up. I can hear you working."

  Since there were no telephones and the only way to contact someone was to pay a visit, I had to open the door and let Derek in. "Boy," he said, "I had a tough time tracking you down." Sweat dripped from his thick blond hair. His face was red. "Nobody lives all the way over here in San Antonio. You should move into the center of town, where the action is."

  I told him I liked the quiet and asked if there was something I could do for him. He said I could invite him in and give him a cup of coffee, which I did. "I wrote some short stories." He held out a pile of papers. "I thought I'd get your impression of them. Would you take a look?"

  "Sure, I'll stop by your place after I've read them."

  He hesitated, as if somehow I hadn't gotten the point. "Well, I'm sort of anxious to send them out. I thought you'd be a good person."

  "Sure, why don't I stop by tonight?" But it dawned on me that he wanted me to read them right then and there. "You want me to read them now? With you sitting here?" He said that's what he wanted. "Well," I said, "I was sort of working."

  "It won't take that long," he said, making himself comfortable on the couch.

  I read the stories, which were competent but uninspired, without the flare of his late-night tequila-induced tales of bullfights and suicidal dogs. I gave him some perfunctory advice and told him where to send them. He seemed satisfied because after about an hour or so, he got up. "Oh, by the way, your neighbor, what's her name, Laura," he said as he was leaving. "She was out on her balcony when I came by—"

  "Rosalind," I corrected him.

  "Yeah, she asked me to come and get you." I told him she was very sick. "Yeah, she didn't look so good."

  "You've been here over an hour. You didn't think to tell me this before?"

  He shrugged. "She just said to tell you to come over."

  I rushed over to Rosalind's and found her in her bed, trembling, covered with sweat. "What is it?" I asked her. "What's wrong?"

  "Oh, it's nothing," she said. "It's just the flies." She swatted at the air. "Could you kill the flies? They keep bothering me. There's so many of them."

  I looked around the room and didn't see a single fly. "Sure, Rosalind," I said, "I'll kill them. Anything else?"

  "Yes," she said. "Look at this. Do you think something is wrong?" She raised her nightgown, displaying for me her sturdy, massive road-crew body with one of its organs, which I recognized as the spleen, protruding like a giant grapefruit from her side. I am not an expert on tropical diseases but I did know enough to know that an enlarged spleen, fever, and delirium were symptoms of malaria, not the paratyphoid that the five hundred thousand dollar bloodseparating machine in Queretaro told us to treat her for.

  "Rosalind," I said, "you sit tight. I'm going to get some help."

  It was the one time I can really say Trevor came through. I ran home and told him I thought Rosalind had malaria and that it looked as if her spleen could rupture if we didn't do something about it. Trevor said his friend T.C.—the man who'd been branded—had a truck, and in less than an hour Trevor and T.C. arrived with the truck. I had gone into town to phone the American-British Hospital in Mexico City to warn them that Rosalind was being brought in.

  While Anna, who'd rushed home from school, got Rosalind comfortable in the truck, I talked with T.C. about where he should take her, but mainly I looked at the brand. It was a deep, burnt cavern in his flesh with his own initials, TC. As they were ready to pull out, I said to him, "I heard somebody did that to you."

  He shook his head. "Somebody did it for me. I paid someone to put that on my arm."

  "You paid someone to brand you?"

  "I had something to prove." He smiled. They drove off with Rosalind to Mexico City. Two days later they were back. Rosalind did have malaria; they'd put her on quinine, and she would be fine.

  I ran into Derek in town a few nights later. "You know that woman, Rosalind, she almost died. I can't believe you didn't think to tell me right away."

  "You know what your problem is?" Derek replied. "You need to lighten up. You take life too seriously." He patted me on the cheek, then walked away.

  LUPE CAME OVER ONE MORNING AND FOUND ME crying upstairs. She said it was no good to cry over a man. "Cry over something important," she said. I told her I was crying over my work, but she shook her head. "Women only cry over men."

  I went downstairs a little while later and she was doing the dishes. I asked her how many men she had had. She blushed and pretended she did not know what I was talking about. "I don't understand your accent," she said. So I asked her again how many men she had had and again she laughed. She said two, then she said twenty. Then she said, "I've lost count. And you, Maria?"

  I said I had also lost count, but that I only wanted one.

  "José Luis, you know, he has many women. He has three other women, but he lives with me. He has ten children with one, six with another. I think he has twenty-two in all, but he cannot remember how many children he has. But now there are more on the way. With women, you know," she said, "it is different. I was with one man for fifteen years. Then he left me with the three oldest and went to the border. I haven't seen him since."

  "I hate it when men abandon me," I told her.

  She laughed. "That is the way men are. Men are wanderers. Maybe you are a little like a man, Maria. You seem to be a wanderer as well."

  I thought about what she had just said. "No, I want to be with one person in one place."

  "We all want that," Lupe said. "Every woman wants that. But still you are a wanderer."

  When Alejandro still did not appear, I decided to go to Mexico City to try to find him. I knew it was stupid for me to do this, but I could stand it no longer. I got the six A.M. bus and reached the Terminal Central del Norte by eleven. I took a taxi and pounded on his door. There was no one home and his top lock, for which I had no key, was locked. His landlord came out and asked what I wanted. I told him that Alejandro had disappeared, and he looked at me mockingly and laughed, giving me the feeling that he'd seen women doing this before. I wrote a note, which I slipped under the door, begging him to come to San Miguel or cable me with a message.

  I went to Denny's, where I had an orange juice, listened to Muzak, and felt sorry for myself. I ran through my mind all that had happened in the past few months. I seemed compelled to search, even though I had the sense—a slight, gnawing sense—that somehow I already had what I was looking for. I just couldn't recognize it. It was there in front of me, like when you search the house for your keys or your comb, which are on the dresser all along. Suddenl
y I felt almost driven, and I had to go back to San Miguel.

  At the terminal, a man with cut-off legs moved on a kind of shoe that held his stumps. He sold crucifixes. Other people sold Kleenex, Chiclets, postcards. Everyone was trying to sell something just to get by. If you go under in Mexico, you go under. I couldn't imagine how a man with stumps could sell crucifixes and live, but life went on somehow in this place.

  The bus was filled with Venezuelan firemen who were on their way to a convention in Guanajuato. The firemen were chain-smoking and they wouldn't let me open a window to get some air. It was terribly hot on the bus and I grew irritable. After about an hour and a half the bus driver and ticket taker pulled over and got off the bus. There was a restaurant at the side of the road and they went inside. I sat in the bus and waited. Soon the firemen grew irritable also. They honked the horn. They got off the bus and found the driver and ticket taker eating a leisurely lunch. We asked them what they thought they were doing and they pointed to their watches, indicating it was their hour for comida. We screamed at them, but they didn't care.

  It was dark when I reached San Miguel. After trudging up the long alleyway home, I found my house redolent with the smell of coriander, beans, and sweet fish. From the light of the kitchen, I saw Alejandro chopping vegetables with a sharp knife. "Where have you been?" I said.

  He told me that the previous week his father, who lived in San Luis Potosí, had had an accident with some arsenic at work. Alejandro had gone to help him out. He had asked Ruben to cable me, but his brother had forgotten. Alejandro said it was a falta de comunicación. And besides, he said, "I did not think it mattered to you, really, whether I came back or not."

  "Well, it did matter. It does," I said.

  "So, I am here."

  Later we sat down to the dinner he had made. A special fish stew, rice, and beans. The fish took hours to prepare and is usually served only on special occasions like Christmas. While we were eating, the windows were open. It was a beautiful, cool night and Globo sat on the window ledge—her kittens whining for her on the ground below—watching over us.

  Along the Coast

  I GREW RESTLESS AGAIN AS THE WEEKS WENT BY, and it wasn't long before I found myself en route back to Honduras to the Bay Islands off the coast, where the Carib people were black and everyone spoke English. It was the first English I'd heard spoken in many months and the change amazed me. I spent a day resting in San Pedro Sula, having traveled from Tegucigalpa by bus, and was setting out for La Ceiba and the ferryboat to Roatán.

  At the bus station a child with a clubfoot dragging behind her came begging, barefoot, and I was sure her parents had sent her out to beg, but I couldn't refuse. I gave her money and bought her some cakes and fruit. Everywhere people sold contraband. Wrist watches, radios, Jockey shorts. A black woman stood with two children. One was crying, and the black woman kept beating her with her purse. An enormous black woman with a bandanna around her head walked by and began beating the woman who was beating the child. A small riot broke out.

  Finally the doors of the bus opened and the black women in their red-checkered turbans pushed and shoved. I managed to get a seat on this bus, having failed to get one on the seventhirty bus. I could not bear the thought of standing up for three hours in this heat which, even in the early morning hours, was already completely unbearable, and I felt I'd faint if the bus did not move.

  At last it pulled out and a breeze blew in. People in the back of the bus were singing. We drove through miles and miles of banana plantations and fruit farms, mostly, I am certain, owned by United Fruit. Honduras is a true Banana Republic, and most of its agriculture is owned by American economic interests. I recalled lines from Neruda: "Among the bloodthirsty flies, the Fruit Company lands its ships, taking off the coffee and the fruit." I stared out the window as we drove by. The trees that lined the road were filled with buzzards.

  At one o'clock, hot and hungry, we reached La Ceiba, and the bus driver let a few passengers disembark at the dock. With my South American guidebook open to the page that said, "Ferries leave regularly from the dock at La Ceiba to Roatán and the other islands," I walked slowly toward the lapping water along the rotting wood pier, the lifeless wharf, the absence of anything resembling a ferryboat.

  A young couple, the same guidebook opened to the same page, stared forlornly at the same deserted dock, where we were the only signs of life. "This doesn't look very promising," the man said. We introduced ourselves. Andrew was a tall, very attractive attorney from San Francisco, and his girlfriend, Becky, was a biologist. "We've come a long way," he said.

  "So have I." They were also trying to get to the Bay Islands and said they'd be glad to go with me to Roatán if we could find a way.

  It was clear that there had been no regular-service ferry in years, and we were contemplating the prospect of turning around and traveling overland back across Honduras when a little man in a white linen suit, drenched in sweat, seemed to materialize out of nowhere. "Hello, I'm Charlton Jenks." He held out his hand. "Glad to meet you. I'm from Los Angeles. Researching a screenplay." He saw us, fingers pressed into our guidebooks. I had a feeling immediately that he stood at this dock all day, waiting for the misdirected like us. "No boats for the islas from here," he said. "Somebody ought to write those guys in England. Tell them there aren't any ferries. Everyone who comes overland and wants to get to the islands has the same problem. Hasn't been a regular ferry in a decade. If you don't mind waiting around until Sunday, you might find a boat to take you." Sunday was three days away and La Ceiba didn't look like the kind of place where you'd want to spend three days.

  "Is there any other way to get there?" Andrew asked.

  "Oh, there are ways. I know a place we can go for lunch. Why don't we relax and discuss it at our leisure over a nice plate of rice and beans."

  Charlton took my bag and we followed him, shrugging at each other, not sure what else to do. Over lunch Charlton Jenks—former band leader, TV and radio director, real estate developer, novelist whose Mayan Magic was made into a film by MGM—said that he was working on a screenplay of his last novel, which would be the first movie set in Honduras. He had been doing research in La Ceiba for the past five years. Andrew, Becky, and I glanced at one another with looks that formed our friendship, each of us trying to imagine spending half a decade of our lives in La Ceiba. "I've got a friend," he said. "A pilot. He'll get you to Guanaja. Owns half the island. You should go to the airport. I'll go with you. See if we can't get him to fly us to Guanaja."

  We finished our lunch and Charlton dug around in his pockets for money. "Damn it," he said. "I've gotta go to the bank and cash a check." So he suggested we follow him to the bank and he'd cash a check, but when we got to his bank he had left his checkbook on Guanaja. "Must have left it in my hotel room there." He said he'd pay us back if we'd just front him the money to the island. We were beginning to get suspicious of him and we had already gotten out of him the crucial piece of information—the existence of an airport—and so we got into a taxi, leaving Charlton Jenks behind, and headed for the airport.

  In the early evening we managed to get a flight, and for thirty dollars we flew to Roatán. As the plane soared over the Caribbean, we felt peaceful and relaxed, as if the worst part of our journey were done. When we got to the island, we checked into a place in downtown Roatán, a rather unappealing town. Andrew and Becky wanted to stay in town, but Walter Weinstein in Panajachel had given me a tip on a place to stay called Roberts' Hill. Walter had said it was a peaceful, small guest house on an isolated tip of the island, run by two island people, Ruby and Robert Roberts, and I wanted to get there as soon as I could.

  The town of Roatán is built on stilts for hurricanes and mud. We trudged through and checked into the Corral, a dump near a spot of sea that smelled like a sewer. The Corral had no bath or running water. I got a room near the toilet which stank all night long. Andrew and Becky took a room near mine, also adjacent to the toilets. But for the night it would
do.

  The Corral was three floors high with a wrap-around porch in rather shabby condition on each floor. Our rooms were off to the side, but three men and a woman sat on the porch out front. The men wore army fatigues, drank beer, and piled the bottles into a kind of fortress. They were completely soused and falling out of their chairs while the woman pranced back and forth.

  We sat down on the porch near them. "So," one of the men said to me, "where you from?"

  When I said we were North Americans, they all smiled. They said they were Somocistas, Nicaraguans from Somoza's National Guard. Andrew rolled his eyes and Becky looked dismayed.

  That night as we were asleep someone came in my room and suddenly turned on the light. I screamed and shot out of bed. It was the woman who had been with the Nicaraguans, and she was bumbling around in my room. "I'm lost," she muttered, "I'm lost," and she staggered out again. I got up to go to the toilet. When I stepped outside, I tripped over the body of one of the drunk Nicaraguans who had collapsed earlier that evening and had been rolling around on the porch all night. I screamed, but no one came.

  In the morning on our way back from breakfast, the Nicaraguans stopped us and offered to show us their boat. It was down by the water and we walked that way. The boat was small, with an outboard. One of them pulled back a tarp and revealed a pile of guns. When we returned to the Corral, the other Nicaraguans were displaying rifles. They were very drunk and very macho as they held up their pieces. "Good U.S. rifles," one of them said. He offered to let me hold it, but I declined.