Planting began and the men worked barebacked and hunched over the ground, burrowing animals digging in the earth.
Sometimes I saw Julián with them, his all seeing fingers placing the corms just so. Often his lips moved as he planted, he may have been singing or praying.
Time was molasses here, rolling by rich and golden, everyone stuck in it and following its passage.
I watched my dwindling savings nervously, depleting everyday as the men dug irrigation trenches and strung new cables to connect with the old ones. It was a desperate sort of dependence, waiting for something as unpredictable as the ground to provide money and sustenance. I had little belief in God, and no banana faith whatsoever.
Julián came for dinner on Sundays wearing his collar. Matilde made beans and rice, tortillas, stew, and the occasional hamburgers. At least once a month Pierre would show up with unsolicited supplies. He had become my appointed emissary to the world beyond. He brought newspapers and magazines, candy bars and gasoline, and gossip.
On these occasions Matilde made cow’s foot soup with an arrogance in her shoulders, daring me to say anything against it. I had learned to enjoy the broth while avoiding its grisly centerpiece. Pierre would mop up the last dregs in the bowl with fresh bread and smack his lips. “Dat’s de best cows foot soup in all de country,” he always said. “Fu chroo!”
He and Julián often spoke on these occasions of labor unrest and disgruntled peasants in neighboring countries. Julián’s eyes would spark and flash as he knocked his knuckles on the table to make a point. Frequently they spoke in Spanish and I heard the words el pulpo over and over again. I did not understand the words, but I knew the posture and tone of dissatisfaction well.
After the meal Matilda would go home to her sleepy children and Julián would stay behind drinking coffee late into the night. I waited for him to remove his collar, but he left it in place during these midnight discussions, a badge, a talisman to protect himself.
Pierre had brought a bottle of port from town, a gift but also a ticket to spend time with Matilde. I thought I could use the drink for my own purposes and poured a glass full, placing it at Julián’s elbow. “This is what you are missing,” I told him. “A good woman to take care of you.”
He laughed and leaned back in his chair, sipping the smooth port thoughtfully. “But I am not missing it at all.”
I sat down across from him. His face was face touched with lines from work in the sun, softened tonight by food and drink. He knew I was watching him and kept his face open to me. “You understand yourself very well,” I said. “I think I’m jealous.”
“I spend more time looking inward than most people.”
“Do you wish you could see?”
“Does sight make understanding any easier for you?”
I sighed and leaned on my elbows. “You always do that; answer a question with a question.”
“It’s debate. It’s the mark of an educated man.”
“There’s that too…how do you know so much? I mean...here of all places… how did you learn everything you know?”
“The good sisters were very intelligent and pleased to find an eager pupil.” He leaned forward too. The table was small enough that I could smell the sweet sherry on his breath, small fragrant wisps escaping between his lips. Disconcerted by his useless eyes, I often watched his lips while he talked,
“So why didn’t you go somewhere, make something of yourself in the city?”
“That’s what everyone does. I looked for the place that the work needed to be done and God told me to stay.”
“I wish God would tell me what to do.”
“He does. You’re just misinterpreting it for your own initiative, your own inner voice.” He traced the grain of the wood table, feeling with his sensitive finger tip the slight rise from years of sweaty glasses. “People love to give credit to themselves.”
“Well maybe you should take some. He may have given you the capacity, but you filled the vessel.”
“I filled the brain. It is only a tool while I am here on earth; anything really worthy comes through me from God, not from me.”
“Sometimes it’s all a bit humble for me.” I crossed my legs and leaned back undoing the top button of my shirt searching for air. For all he would know I could sit here naked. He was so high and holy that I thought even with eyes he would pay me no attention. “I wonder if you would think I was beautiful?” I had spoken without thinking, a thought that had formed itself on my lips and jumped. I swallowed to recapture it, but it was too late.
One corner of his lip turned up. “I remember that you are. I see your face in my hands, in my mind. I am sure that womanhood has only shaped it more finely. I think your eyes must be brown. I feel your hair brush against me sometimes when we walk or you serve my food so I know it is long and thick. I imagine it is as dark as your father’s. So often that is what happens, the deepest traits are the ones we see.”
“It’s normally dark,” I said, shaken. “I dyed it blond, trying to fit in. Now it’s two colors, between races, like me.” I reached up and touched it, trying to find myself in it. “How do you know about my eyes?”
“I remember brown. It’s the color of people’s eyes here, the color of the earth.”
I wanted to ask him to touch my face again to feel if I had changed. I wanted him to run his hands along the curves of my body, curves he had never felt, hills and valleys he would never know about. I buttoned my shirt again and wondered if I should pray at this point whether I believed or not.
He said, “Don’t you want to know?”
“Know what?”
“About your father. He was a good man Isabei.”
“Did you know him well?”
“Not well enough.” Something in his face unnerved me. “You will hear things in the jungle sometimes, and wonder what to believe.”
In my stomach a small cold shoot unfurled. “I don’t want to know anything. Not now, maybe not ever.”
“Don’t you want to know what you are?”
“I am Isabel Cordova and that is good enough.” I hesitated. “There is one thing...I’ve wondered if Estevan was mestizo, like you?”
He shook his head, ran his fingers over his own face. “No, your bones are finer, your skin probably a softer shade, your hair more shadowed. You are Kriol. You’re father was. His parents were mostly Spanish, but on his mother’s side he was African. A long time ago slave ships ended up here and their European masters fell in love with their dark skin and lithe bodies. They had children and mingled together over and over again until today there are people such as yourself.”
“But Pierre is Kriol and he’s …well…he’s very black.”
“Some are very dark with more African, some, such as you, are almost entirely disguised as Europeans.”
I listened to my own blood, imagined it laden with jungle drums and warrior’s cries. This at least might explain my savage lustful tendencies. I tried to feel my skin, to find my long buried history deep in my bones trying to rise to the surface. Julián was still talking but he realized I was not listening and fell silent. I could not talk. I felt different somehow, heavier, weighted with knowledge.
Somewhere inside I was emerging.
The rain came and washed the wasted fields until they were the grayish-green of old copper. Sometimes the heavens boomed, and clanged, and flashed, and other times they just opened without a word and dumped buckets over us. I did not drink enough, not wanting to put anything else wet into my throat. We slogged and sloshed our way everywhere. The air was a large hot cloth laid over the land; it steamed and suffocated us under its weight.
Matilde was ironing, a useless endeavor in this wet vapor. She was a creature that thrived on routine. I smelled onions, and coconuts, and tomatoes bubbling on the stove. “What’s in the storage room downstairs?” I asked her.
“Junk.” She passed her iron back and forth, a heron skimming the lagoons.
“Good junk?”
&
nbsp; “What junk is good? White people want to save everything. If it’s junk it’s junk...look for yourself, the key is hanging on a nail next to the broom.”
I had to use the back stairs to get down to the doorway of the storage area. Even with a raincoat the bottoms of my pants and my feet were soaked by the time I got the door open. The bare bulb cast weak spidery light. All the boxes were dusty, full of farm implements- and just what Matilde had said-junk. The walls were hung with rakes, and hoes, and shovels, infant tools to use among the ancient vines and trees.
A crate in the back corner caught my attention. It had an official looking stamp in Spanish, shiny nails, and strapping. I couldn’t imagine what could be in it but was sufficiently curious to brave the murky shadows to find out. I found a screw driver and pried off the lid with a creaky screech that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Outside, the generator coughed briefly, needing gasoline. The light bulb flickered and a nearby thunderclap made me jump. It felt like a warning.
I put the lid down and pushed aside the straw. Lying inside, stone figures stared up at me with an eerie sentience , Their primitive faces, somewhat human somewhat animal, twisted and snarled contorting in various positions, with arms that reached all the way around their bodies, cradling themselves.
There must have been ten in the crate, the largest only four inches tall. They looked ancient. I could see no reason for their presence in my father’s storeroom. I slipped a couple of them into my raincoat, not wanting to feel them on my hands.
Something prevented me from asking Matilde about the figures. I put them in my nightstand wrapped in a clean white handkerchief and waited for Sunday dinner to ask Julián.
I wasn’t thinking of them as we ate, intrigued by the men’s conversation about Guatemala. Apparently the United States was staging a coup to overthrow President Albrez under the auspices of communism.
I found it unlikely that any small Central American country posed much of a threat to Democracy, in the jungle we were too busy filling generators, growing beans, and washing our clothes in the river to be insidious.
“It is la fruterra,” Pierre said.
“The fruit?”
“El pulpo.”
That word again. “What is it?”
Julián speared a piece of meat while staring over my shoulder. “It means the octopus. It refers to a company, the United Fruit Company.”
“A communist fruit company?” Sometimes I think they made things up to test me.
“How come noh one tell de girl bout la fruterra? Her gon grow bananas for nottin’.”
Julián looked uncomfortable. “They aren’t communist, they’re American actually, and they own almost all the railroads and communication lines.”
“And de own de ports too and de plantations,” interrupted Pierre.
“Well they don’t own mine.”
“De gon too, ju want sell any banana, chroo.”
“Julián?”
“You’ll have to deal with them eventually I suppose. Maybe things in Guatemala will spread here. Maybe it will be different by the time your harvest is ready.”
“Labor strikes?”
“That, and maybe just a new way of doing things.”
“But this is a British colony.”
Pierre said, “El pulpo own de too. De own ever ting, even de people, even the guvnent. Fu chroo de even own God here…sorry Fadder.”
“When were you going to tell me this?”
Julián pushed his plate away. “Everything here lives by chance. If your harvest comes in successfully then we’ll deal with selling it.”
Waiting…it was always about waiting. “I don’t want to wait. How do I find someone from this fruit company?”
“Don’ worry.” Pierre reached his fork over to Julián’s plate taking the last bite of fish. I think he thought Julián wouldn’t know. “Ju grow bananas, la fruterra find ju.”
After dinner when the rain stopped Pierre went for a walk with Matilde.
“She’s married,” I said sourly, mostly just envious of their nighttime stroll.
“Her husband is fifty years old and he has been away logging for almost a year. He may never come back. She is young and deserves some happiness.”
I loved his formal text book English taught by the Sisters of Mercy. “You certainly don’t hold other people to your own standards.”
“That’s part of my calling. I set the example in the hopes that others will follow me.”
I lingered at the table not wanting to get up for coffee, enjoying just the two of us and the illusion it created.
“Why don’t you come to church on Sunday? Perhaps you will understand better.”
I did not want to tell him that I did not want to see him in his professional capacity. That as long as I did not have to face that he really was what he said he was I could pretend that he was still that small brown boy who had grown up to be mine, that I was the heaven he yearned for.
“Maybe some time…how do you know so much about the fruit company?”
“Everyone knows about bananas here. We live for them, because of them. The United Fruit Company controls our economy, our livelihood, our destiny as a country. It is just a lesser god.”
This reminded me, “I’ll be right back, I want to show you something.” For Julián to see, you showed it to his hands. I came back with the figures and placed them in his upturned palm.
He took one, then the other, and felt all around them, then placed the end of each gently in his mouth, tasted them with his moist pink tongue. “This one is jade,” he said. “and this is obsidian. They’re very old, Mayan probably. They represent the jaguar god. These are rare and precious, where did you get them?”
I brought him downstairs to the crate. We stood shoulder to shoulder in the dusky light as he dug the rest of the treasures out of the box. He studied each one carefully. “They are definitely Mayan, from the late classic period, I think. They are more refined than the earlier work.”
“What was my father doing with them?”
Julián shook his head. “I have no idea, but he shouldn’t have had them.” He put all the figures back including the ones I had kept upstairs. He put another box on top of the crate. “Don’t tell any one about these. I’ll figure out what to do.”
We were close together, hemmed in by boxes and now bound to each other by more secrets, the scent of mangoes, and the loot of the ancients in my father’s house.
Chapter Three
HISTORY
Three days later the rain stopped, the water sucked back up into the sky and hurried off in get-away clouds going over the speed limit. Julián appeared collarless with a bag slung over his shoulder and a sturdy pair of boots in his hand to take me for a walk around the distant perimeters of my father’s land.
He was eager and hurried, much as I had remembered him from my youth. The storm had carried away his responsibilities.
He stopped me a short way into the forest. “I want to do something.” He reached into his back pack and pulled out a strip of cloth. “Turn around.” He placed it over my eyes and tied it tightly enough that no light entered. I was blind.
Julián said, “I want to teach you to see as I do.”
We began walking slowly, my arm through his. I paid attention to the subtle shifts of his body so that I knew where to step. I stumbled over and over again gripping his arm fiercely, undone by my closeness to him and the darkness. There is an intimacy in blindness. It is always night.
He stopped and unwound my arm, taking my hand instead. “You have to trust the world around you to walk through it,” he told me. “Even if you can see. You are too busy thinking of everything in relation to yourself. You must think of yourself in relation to everything.” He took a couple of steps, pulling me along with him. “Just listen…feel the world around you. Place your feet with trust.”
The jungle dripped around us as we walked and the steady screech and patter of birds filled my ears, knocked me off bal
ance. The darkness slowed time, I walked in limbo, around, and up, and over, and then we were climbing.
He removed my blindfold and I blinked dazzled and disoriented at the monuments reared up before me, dripping with juicy tangles of moss, tumble down jungle-clad ruins made more impressive by my sudden return of sight.
“These temples and arenas were Mayan,” Julián explained taking my awed silence to mean I was looking at them.
“And all this has been right here all the time, so close to my father’s land.”
“It’s on your father’s land…your land.”
I shook my head, not wanting more responsibility. “I don’t want this. How could anyone own this?”
“Well you shouldn’t really. Only the Maya should. Those figures in the crate for instance; they belong to history. Someone else’s.”
“It’s your history.”
“To some extent. My people came here to escape from the caste war a long, long time ago. These Maya weren’t necessarily my people.”
“And the men that work for me…the people in the village?”
“The Mopan were displaced by the British in the last century. They’ve only recently returned to this area. Most of them don’t know their history. They have become nomads, always moving to escape persecution or find work. These ancient Maya were settled educated people. They would be sad to see what they had been whittled down to. I hope that one day someone can revive them, teach them what they have forgotten.” He took my hand and pulled me toward the ruin. “I wanted to bring you here when we were young, but you left sooner than I expected. Let me show you now.”
The city in its prime would have been impressive, meant to inspire respect or fear. The spaces between buildings were purposeful, planned. There was a strict symmetry to the layout. Julián encouraged me to touch everything. The lines between the huge bricks still fitted tight together after two thousand years without mortar, the strange carvings of grimacing animal faces and squat straight-shouldered men in fantastical hats.
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