“I’m his daughter.”
“I know, but you’re not him. That’s why they sent me.”
“Who sent you?”
“The village,” she said.
This was getting nowhere. I felt foreign and stupid. I studied her tiny little frame, the silver ankle bracelet flashing on her antelope ankle. I thought perhaps I would have to help her.
She pointed to her basket. “I brought cow’s foot soup,” she said.
I looked at Pierre who was nodding, licking his lips. I wondered when I had begun to consider him the local expert.
Matilde said, “It makes you strong. I feed it to my children.”
I couldn’t imagine how hips as narrow as a bread pan could emit a child. “You have children?”
“Three. And they all grow big, strong on cow’s foot soup.”
I couldn’t very well send her away when she had a family to support. “Alright. Well, good. I’ll have to think of what you can do.”
“I know what to do,” she interrupted. Her eyes were downcast. She was a strange mixture of bluster and shyness.
I nodded and she reached into her basket and disappeared with bottles and rags. I peered inside the clay pot. It smelled delicious, but even so, maybe these people had immunities I didn’t. I replaced the lid and turned to Pierre who was staring at the pot and practically salivating. “I’ll need a car.”
“Deh’s noh roads but de one outta here,” Pierre told me. “Ju plan ju get awai an alreddy?”
“No,” I said. “I’m planting myself here.”
Matilde lyed and limed and buffed the house, rinsing it clean of the past with sweet sappy soaps until the tiles were slick and waxy and the cushions were vibrant again. A vase of bougainvillea glowed on the table humming with scarlet. Sunshine spilled through the open windows in big bright squares. If I were a cat I could have stretched out in one of them and spent the day.
“Matilde, this is wonderful.”
She shrugged one little ball bearing of a shoulder up and down, a ruffling of feathers.
On the veranda the porch swings were oiled and cushioned. In front of me frowsy green hills undulated and dipped, birds cherried the tops of the trees. The bananas marched away as far as I could see to the jungle, held firm by the dense chocolate earth, their yellow hands wagging back and forth in the breeze, beckoning. I wanted to plant my feet in the earth next to them, to grow roots and never leave.
That night I taught Matilde to make hamburgers. It was the best use of a cow I told her, no feet required. She wrinkled her beetle nose and nibbled on fruit while I ate two hamburgers and washed them down with Coca Colas.
“I suppose the banana workers are gone too?”
“Estevan gone, job gone,” she reminded me. “They can’t afford to sit still. They all went logging up north. Knocking down mahogany.”
“How do I know when the bananas are done?”
“They done.”
‘How can you tell?”
“They get heavy and bend over, try to go back into the ground, they done.”
“So what happens next?”
She smiled a toothy pink-gummed smile full of patience. The way she must have looked when she tried to explain things slowly to her children. “Then you pick them, then you sell them, then they ripen.”
“Where can I find men to help?”
“You ask Father.”
“Father?”
A dreamy softness misted her face, she looked as young as she was. “Sure, Father takes care of everything for the villagers in town. He sent me to you.”
“Well, how do I meet him?”
“Oh…you just wait. He’ll be coming soon anyhow. He knows you’re here.”
Everyone here had time to wait. I hoped the bananas would be patient.
The next day I was back in the field studying the bananas, almost all of which hung many feet above the ground, although they did appear to be reaching down. I kicked off my shoes and began to try to climb one of the trees in an effort to bend it over or reach the fruit. I discovered to my dismay that they did not have trunks, but stalks made of layers of tightly stacked leaves.
“Good morning,” he said.
Startled, I did not recognize him at first. It was almost disappointing; he had not become as I expected him to be. There was nothing of the warrior about him. His small muscled body had stretched into something lithe and lean. His face had thinned out making his cheekbones more prominent, his lips fuller, his eyes deeper.
“Julián.”
“Isabei.” He reached out his hand straight in front of him and shook mine. “I hoped you would come.”
I patted my blond hair, suddenly ashamed to be hiding from myself.
He did not seem to notice.
“I was trying to climb a banana tree.”
His laughter was deep and soft, distant thunder. He said, “They aren’t trees. They’re plants.”
“Oh. I think I’m in trouble. I need help.”
“That’s why I came.”
“You want to work on the plantation?”
“I came to help you find men. I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner, but I had some people that needed my help even more.”
The door banged open upstairs and Matilde’s feet came tamp tamping down to us. “Father!” she shouted running over. “I told you the Father would come.”
I began to understand. Julián had become a priest.
I looked for the tell-tale collar; saw only his weathered blue jeans and chambray shirt. I pulled my eyes upward to his face, which appeared to be concentrating on the sky. “Oh,” I said again. The vocabulary I had developed since I came here. “Would you like a coke? Can priests have coke?”
“I can have anything I want, except on Fridays and at Lent.” he told me.
I had a vague idea of what my mother must have felt when my father had made it clear to her that there was no future for them. I hadn’t even realized that I had been waiting for Julián. And now God owned him.
I had forgotten what I had asked him.
Matilde said, “I’ll get the kolas.” She was at least old enough to know when to get out of the way.
Julián walked though the plants, his fingers grazing each one in passing in the manner I remembered. “Are you going to continue to grow bananas here?”
“I think I have to if I want to live.”
“So you are going to stay?” He sounded almost sad about this. Perhaps he was disappointed. I was probably a big sin reminder to him.
“I want to. There isn’t much else for me.”
“The life you’ve been living.”
“I was waiting for life to start.”
“It seems to me that life is what you are in the middle of.” He smiled at this, recognized a platitude. “I’m much better in the pulpit,” he assured me. He took my hand and rubbed the fingers. It was a friendly gesture that, try as I may, I could not read anything suggestive into. “You aren’t married.”
I did not tell him that no one had ripened me or made me feel like a mango on the ground.
Julián smoothed his palm up and down the stalk of a slender banana whose fruits were low enough to harvest from the ground. “Each plant only makes one hand of bananas before it dies. It only gets one chance.”
I wanted to tell him that unlike people, the bananas probably didn’t miss theirs. “Why did you become a priest?” I asked before I could tell myself not to. “I mean you didn’t seem…inclined...that way.”
“God made each of us for different purposes. He gave me a taste of life as an ordinary man and then He called me from the life I was living. Love is always stronger the greater the sacrifice. Whatever He asks for He gives that much more in return.”
“So you’ve put on a collar to atone for your sins?”
Matilde was coming with the sodas, having given us a decent time to get reacquainted. Julián turned at the sound of her step. “I am fulfilled Isabei. Now it is my job to help others find that, no matter t
heir path.”
He took the coke and sipped. “That’s good. I haven’t had one of these in a long time. Sometimes real life is better than memory,” he said. “I’ll find the men you need and send them over. And I promise I will see you soon.” He strolled away through the bananas touching each one good bye.
“I knew him when he was a boy,” I told Matilde. “He’s always done that. You’d think he could walk this place with his eyes closed, he must have it memorized.”
“Why would he close his eyes?”
“It’s just an expression.”
“It wouldn’t make a difference to him,” she said. “I wonder if he misses it.”
For a moment I thought she meant sex. She waggled her fingers over her eyes. “God gave him such a gift for words and prayer; He must have exchanged it for his eyesight.”
“Are you saying he’s blind?”
“Of course,” she said. “You didn’t know?”
“When did it happen?”
“Everybody says when he was a child. There was an accident.”
I felt ridiculous and stupid. I had grown up swaddled in cotton wool and failed to notice anything of real importance. I had protected myself so well; I had completely diverted myself from the truth. I had waited my whole life for a blind Indian priest.
Matilde patted my back as though she could force out all my blunders like burps from her babies. “I think maybe you are the one that has trouble seeing,” she said.
PART TWO
GARDEN OF EDEN
Chapter Two
MY FATHER’S HOUSE
I found a dozen or so men clustered around the banana plants in the lemony dawn light. Julián stood in the middle of them, a tall plant they had gathered around to harvest. They were all shaking their heads and growling at each other in a guttural and totally unfamiliar language. When I walked up my presence ate their words.
Julián tilted his head and smiled. I wanted to make faces at him, jump up and down and wave my arms in the air, to see if he would react. His eyes focused just above my eye line as always. They were black to the core, no milky blue to lend a clue to his infirmity. I felt cheated, lied to. “It’s me, Isabei,” I said to him, to the silence.
“Of course it is. Only you smell that way,” he said.
I didn’t know how to respond to this.
He said, “Your plants are sick.”
I had noticed that they appeared to be wilting. “They look like they need water.”
“It’s too late for water. They have Panama disease. They are like sick old men. Their veins are clogged and gummy.”
The men were nodding. So they spoke English too.
I looked at the plants, saw that the hanging promises of bananas were actually splitting and beginning to rot. They dragged the tired gum-filled branches down.
“How did they get it?”
“The men here say your father was already concerned with the disease. He had had a few losses already.”
“So he left me a dying plantation.” I rubbed my eyes, thinking that perhaps there was a bit of comfort in not having to see.
Julián took my chin in his warm fingers and tilted it up so that it appeared he was really looking at me.“In endings there are always beginnings too,” he said.
“That’s just something a priest would say.” I was trying to decide whether or not I wanted him to hold my chin forever. “God pays you to say things like that.”
He laughed again. He was always laughing with the street urchin’s easy amusement. The men showed strong white teeth all around me, a white washed fence.
“God exacts a price too,” he reminded me. He let go of my face. “The men say your father had intended to replant with a new breed...the Valery. It’s not as sweet or large as the Gros Michel but its more disease resistant.”
“It all seems like a lot of fuss for a fruit. A feeble fruit apparently.”
He raised his arms out wide, as if he were in the pulpit. The banana preacher. “These plants you see, and all the fruit they bear are ten thousand years old. They haven’t changed; they are just imitations of each other. Sexless copies.”
“Right. Not like mangoes.”
“Oh good. So you remember.”
I remembered alright. I wondered if he did. “I was always good at lessons,” I said under my breath. But he could hear as well as he could smell too.
He smiled, a bit pained, perhaps impatient, and then continued on, slogging through another fruit lecture without the promise of a kiss at the end. “That’s why they get sick. They have never changed; they don’t have any way to fight off illness. They don’t develop immunities.”
He lowered his arms, looked at me. “They are like some people.”
“So…okay change is good. We plant something else, a different banana. And what do we do with these?”
He and the men rumbled back and forth. “We burn it. It is the only way.”
“And where do we get the new bananas?” Why did I, the one who did not have any answers, think I could be in charge of a banana farm?
“You already have them. I will show you.”
He walked away toward the back of the fields, where the canopy spread itself and looked inviting and forbidding all at once. “There is a large building back here I think. A packing shed. Can you lead me to it?”
Already the men were striking at the dying plants with their machetes, beheading them, toppling them and their children. I walked beside Julián, unsure what leading him entailed. I was afraid to touch him. “Just keep going this way.”
Overhead the cables that carried the bananas to the packing shed crisscrossed our path. We followed them like trolleys.
“I didn’t know you were blind,” I admitted.
“I didn’t know you were,” he said. He walked two more steps. “I am trying to be funny.”
I blew air through my nose, a laugh of concession. “I feel very stupid.”
“It’s an admirable trait, not noticing people’s flaws.”
“Not noticing anything you mean.” I pulled on his sleeve. “This way a bit.” I heard birds in the distance, flitting through their brief empty lives, gathering worms and sticks. “So you can tell it’s me by my smell?” I asked.
“That and your walk. You take small, delicate, raindrop footsteps.”
For some reason I thought of my mother click clacking back and forth on the tile in her high heels.
“You smell like the rain too,” he said. “fresh and sweet.” The heat ratcheted up a notch, the air became thicker. I did not know if it was the density of the surrounding forest, or his words.
The packing shed was shadowed and cavernous; its corrugated sides and tin roof held the heat in. I searched the walls for a light switch scaring several spiders and lizards. Overhead rows of bare bulbs cast shadows and yellow light on the dry empty washing troughs and stacks of deflated burlap bags.
Julián called me over to the back of the shed, indicated a locked door. “Do you have any keys?”
“No.” I wished my father had left me keys and an instruction booklet. His will had simply read “To my daughter Isabel Cordova, I leave my plantation ‘Feast of Angels’, and all my earthly possessions.” I did not think earthly possessions would do me much good in this place of the gods.
He wiggled the handle again, pushed against it. The door gave a bit under his gentle pressure.
“Break it in,” I told him. “Today seems to be a day for destruction.”
“I’ll fix it tomorrow,” he promised and kicked with one solid booted foot. The door banged open. He ran his fingers along the wall and flipped on the light. It was a large storage room. On shelves lay the talons of curved knives, cans stamped with skulls and crossbones. Piled on the cement floor among the stacking were bulgy bags festooned with tags.
Julián reached into a bag, pulled out a musty root. They resembled purplish potatoes or lumpy organs. “These are corms. New bananas will be grown from the cuttings.”
“They’re awfully suggestive aren’t they…these bananas?”
Julián tossed the corm from hand to hand. “That’s what made them such a hard sell to the Europeans originally. They traveled from Asia to Africa in the caravans of Muslim traders and were eventually brought west by the Portuguese. They stayed put for the next three hundred years until the steamships with refrigeration came, but no one wanted to eat them, especially women. They were too evocative. There are old etiquette books that tell what to do when a banana ends up on your plate. ‘You must use a knife and fork, never, never peel and eat one with your hands in polite society.’” He tossed the corm back into the bag behind him, a perfect shot. “It’s ironic isn’t it…this stigma? The banana hasn’t made love in ten thousand years. They are all priests.”
For three days the men slashed and burned the fields. At night we stood on the veranda and watched the unearthly glow bleed along the horizon. Matilde asked Julián to tell the story of Lot’s wife who had looked back when she shouldn’t have and turned to salt. Considering the banana’s reputation I thought the comparison to Sodom and Gomorrah was appropriate. The fields at the bottom of the property were a blackened wasteland left to lay fallow until the following year.
My work force multiplied by the score as the men moved into the surrounding forest to make way for new fields. I watched in despair as the beautiful old trees and all their secrets burned, flames licked and leaped in forks of red lightening.
Animals fleeing the destruction often ran helter skelter across our land until they could find their way to shelter. Birds occasionally broke their necks against the glass, confused by the smoke and flame.
The men widened their desecration, clearing the fields that my father had left uncultivated close to the packing shed. I could tell by their bent backs and silent grim faces that burning the forest was a travesty to them. At the end of every night Julián took my money and paid each man as he left for home. They traded livelihood for life.
The acrid tang of smoke permeated everything and when all the burning was done Matilde pulled down all the curtains and nets and unmade the beds. She washed it all with soap and limes, beating the featherbeds into submission in a huge tub she unearthed from somewhere and filled with lye. They lay drying on the veranda, unrisen lumps of dough.
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