“They are mourning the loss of life,” Julián explained to me under the music. “Even though they understand it is necessary.”
At the end of the dance the villagers and all of the visitors from the surrounding towns began their own dance, fueled by food, and drink, and the freedom of the holiday. They spun and jumped and shook bangles and fingers in the air. Some had homemade instruments made with beans in cans and gourds. They shook these incessantly, creating an antiphonal insect buzz. The children piped shrill screams and giggles into the air. The women’s breasts jostled up and down under their rough blouses to the tempo of the dance, their nipples visible in the sunlight.
My mother, abandoning any western reticence, was dancing barefoot among them, her hair tousled, her face sweaty and bright. She danced with abandon, her eyes closed. Her own breasts were held firm by the thick white bra she always wore, but somehow she gave the impression that she was completely naked, not a native in her natural state, but a wanton, a Mata Hari dancing for no one’s pleasure but her own.
Late that night, just as I was drifting to sleep, she crawled into bed beside me. I remembered my early self curling up against her back, a warm comma protected by her nearness.
“I’ll be leaving soon,” she whispered. “In the next day or two.”
“Why?”
“I don’t belong here.” She lay on her back and stroked her own face. I could see her profile pale and limned with moonlight. “I could have belonged here, but I don’t now. It’s too seductive really...all those bananas and breasts… I would lose myself.”
“I know. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“Of course you do. That’s why I can leave. This place was made for you...and you were made from it.” Her eyes were impossible to fathom in the blue darkness of the moon. I think she saw British Honduras as one big rosebush. “And besides you have Julián.”
“Mother…in case you’ve forgotten he belongs to God.”
“Yes he does, we all do. But you are in love with him.”
“I’m a fool.”
“All women are fools.” She sighed, reached over and tucked my hair behind my ear. “You know…he loves you too. It’s obvious. You both are making it so complicated really. Don’t you think the fact that you’re here demonstrates God’s permission? I remember the way you two were, all young and brown and sneaking off together. I saw him kiss you once. I was so envious. Here I was pulling out all the stops with your father and he just kept saying ‘no… no…no...I can’t…it just isn’t possible’, and there you were, effortlessly seducing the miniature version of him. You were so young. I wanted to stop you but I knew I couldn’t.” She laughed gently, at her own presumptions, her own follies. “He kissed you like a man and you responded like a woman. There was so much passion there; it deserved respect, even if you weren’t ready for it yet.”
She pulled the covers up to her chin and closed her eyes, apparently settling in for the night, cocooned in our new found intimacy. “It’s still there, that same passion…and it’s stronger than God.” She considered this blasphemy for a moment. “I wasn’t able to get what I wanted…you’re right. But for you it might be different.”
She turned over and after a few minutes her breathing was deeper. I was sure she was sleeping, until she spoke again. “Just be careful,” she mumbled slipping away. “There are always consequences…no matter how it ends up.”
PART THREE
DANTE
Chapter Six
PROMISED LAND
There was poison on the morning breeze. The banana mothers were ready to drop their burdens and die.
The stalks were church bells, swinging over the heads of the men walking between the rows spraying Nemagon. The kerchiefs covering the lower half of the worker’s faces made them look from the veranda like miniature bandits in the field, children playing both Indian and cowboy at once.
I loved these people, silky, and shy, gentle as colts. It would be easy to discount them, as one naturally did anything wide eyed and innocent, but in them lurked a tensile endurance, a flicking whip of intelligence and calculation. They each carried a volume of medicinal plants and remedies in their heads, but they knew how to brew death as well. They still retained the integrity and the duplicity of a great nation deep in their cells.
The land office had sent me a letter evasively informing me that there was a problem with my request to bequeath a portion of my land to the Maya. They did not bother to add what the problem was and I had made no headway. Three times I had driven the Southern Highway and sat hot and itching with dust in the Land Bureau for several hours waiting to be seen by an officially that was officially never in.
“Must be out looking for land,” I told the beefy British bureaucrat without humor.
“Would you like to go out for a drink?” He had asked to deflect me.
“No thank you but you can bring me one if you’d like.”
The third time I had been trapped on the way into the city, stuck between two flooded stretches of road overnight, until a group of Garifuna, toting chickens and barrels of rot gut, had come along in a pickup. While I sampled their wares in the early dawn, they trundled rocks into the river until we could drive over the narrow crumbling temporary bridge to the other side. I arrived at the Land Bureau with my clothes dried and starched with river mud, a sunburned nose, a spinning head, and a very short fuse.
Without a word, the same beefy bureaucrat brought me a martini from some place and politely explained that once again my mission was for nothing. “Let it be,” he said. “It will sort itself out. They know about you.”
I wondered who they were, but was disinclined to ask. It was obvious that he had said all he was going to, his thin lips were pressed firmly together, their edges gone purpley- gray.
“Her Majesty must be very proud,” I told him. The martini and the Garifuna hooch had gone to my head. I had to walk around the wharf for an hour to let the sea breeze wash me sober enough to drive home on the long empty road.
I did just what I am sure they meant for me to do. I decided the temples weren’t going anywhere just yet and I could wait the system out a bit longer.
My agenda for the first month of harvest was to go to the docks in Monkey River and arrange for transport for my soon to be ready bananas. I wanted to ask Julián to go with me, but in the long months after my mother had left he had kept his distance. On the occasions when we did speak he was polite and distant, his hands lay still at his sides, as though they had been reprimanded.
On the morning I decided to go myself, Matilde was trying to make beaten biscuits, a recipe she had learned from my mother and had been unable to master. I think it was the name of the recipe that thwarted her, the implication of rough handling. She abused the dough into tough, hostile little lumps of hardtack every time she tried, good only for soaking up soup in the bottom of the bowl.
She was thumping the dough with her fist and then slapping it on the counter. In her frustration she was making the situation worse. Her husband was still lingering in their house. I thought she imagined the dough was his unresponsive head. Slap thump slap thump slap slap slap.
“You’re treating the dough too roughly,” I reminded her for the hundredth time. “You need to handle it with just the lightest of touches.”
Slap slap. “Yes, it’s just like me today.” thump thump thump . “You just stick to making hamburgers.” slap.
I wanted to comfort her but didn’t know how. Instead I took the battered dough and dropped it onto the counter where it landed heavily and held its shape like a stone.
Matilde sighed and looked out the window. “Father Julián is in the field this morning,” she told me. “Just so that you know.”
I could see him out the window, taller than the rest.
Matilde took the dough and dropped it with a thud into the garbage can. “I’m tired of soup,” she said. “Why don’t you go out and see what he wants.”
“He can come up here
if he needs me.”
She raised an impatient eyebrow. “Maybe your country is different from mine…maybe where you come from wisdom is given to the young and wasted on the adults.”
Walking out to the fields I reflected on her ability to bully me with distaste. I had no idea how any culture had been able to subdue this one. They just laughed at your suggestions, continued doing things the way they always had when you weren’t looking, and looked you right in the eye with silent reproach when you crossed the line.
Julián was working with the other men, barebacked and kerchiefed he sprayed the chemicals around the bases of the plants. Perhaps my scent was masked by the toxins in the air because I startled him when I spoke. Neither of us had known of each other’s presence this morning. Perhaps the spell was finally wearing off.
“Why are you here working?”
“You should not be here while we do this, it is dangerous,” he told me, setting down his sprayer.
“I’m developing immunities,” I said. “Why are you here?”
He took me by the elbow and led me away from the center of the work. He pulled down his handkerchief which had left marks on either side of his face from being tied so tight. His skin was beautiful, satiny and smooth and hairless, stretched over lean muscles that shifted and floated underneath. I wanted to touch him, to leave red handprints all over him.
“I am here to encourage the men to work-they are afraid they might not get paid.”
I cleared my throat, focused. “I always pay them.”
“There is a problem.”
“I have heard that a few times lately...is it because I haven’t been able to give them the land yet?”
He ran his eyes sightlessly over the men, an unintentional gesture left from force of habit. It always unnerved me. “There’s that…but I have already explained it is not your fault…no…the problem is with the bananas.”
I glanced at the fields, the strong green stalks, the green and yellow fruit beginning to lose its angular shape, ready to be plucked. “They look fine to me.”
“They are fine, and they will be ready for harvest within the next two weeks. I went to the docks yesterday to arrange for a barge and to see what ships might be going out with room for a shipment. They won’t take it.”
“Why the hell not?”
He flinched, and I was irritated by his piousness. He stood there, sweaty and half naked in a body that should never be given to a man of the cloth and he balked at the word hell. “They say your bananas are diseased and no one wants them.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Of course it is… but it is to be expected. It is la fruterra.”
“Damn, damn, damn!” I interjected, mostly just to bother him, but also to rile myself up for battle. “You said things would be different when the harvest was ready...that Guatemala had already made the sacrifice and that change would come here.”
“I said that we could hope. Do you think that because I speak to God I am given guarantees?”
“You of all people should know when to keep your mouth shut!”
The men had slowed their work and were ambling around, heads cocked trying to catch snatches of our discussion.
I wondered how much of this was really an argument about banana shipments, and if they knew that.
I kicked the dirt, wished I had something to throw. “It’s about bribes isn’t it? They just need a payoff to take my shipment…I bet that’s what it is… damnit! Well I need to talk to la fruterra…the Head Fruit Master or whatever he is. “
“I told them you would say that…I suppose they will send a message.”
“You suppose a lot of things.”
He smiled at me, totally throwing me off. He took my hand in his, ran his thumb over the ragged nails. It was risky to touch me, but it was the only way to quiet me. “None of this is my fault Isabei, things just happen.”
I let out my breath, clasped his fingers. “I know…I’m sorry…I just feel so…thwarted.”
“Give it all to God. You just need to trust.”
I pulled my hand from his, gently but surely. “I am done trusting in anyone but myself, Father.”
He stood without words in the heat and poison, studied my vibrations in the air, before he pulled up his kerchief again and hid the severe line of his mouth, the plump lips pressed flat in disapproval. “I will pray for you then…but first I have work to do...so that you are ready when the answers come.”
The answer came uninvited. I returned home from the village to find a man seated at my dining room table playing poker with three black men in garish shirts. Matilde nervously hovered by the kitchen door with a bottle opener.
She caught me as I walked in. “He came right in, said he was a business associate of your father’s and that you were expecting him.”
“I think I was,” I reassured her, “But be ready to run get Father Julián if you have to.”
The man made me think of a side of beef; fleshy, veiny, and skinned. He had a wide face, and sickle-sharp narrow eyes. He was stuffed into white trousers, a florid Hawaiian shirt, and black cowboy boots from which a rather obvious bowie knife protruded. The tight fit of the boots likely inhibited his ability to draw, still, the weapon made me nervous. He did not stand when I entered the room but glanced up at me with a wink and threw his cards down on the table. “Full house.”
“It appears that way,” I said. It had been a long week.
The man laughed, waggled his fingers over the pot of coins, a strangely effeminate gesture. “Gather this up men and take it to the car, I have business with the lady of the house.”
His accent was American, rumbly and slothful, a mouth full of cotton. The men, tall and furtive and more than a little drunk gathered the coins into the torn pockets of their blue jeans and sidled out with one eye on the door and another on me.
He crossed his arms uncomfortably on his chest and leaned back with a pained creak, waiting, it appeared, for me to sit down. He plugged a tumescent cigar into his mouth. His forehead was slick and he chewed his lips, but oddly, cushioned in all that smarminess was a strange attractive allure, an oily sexuality and charm. It was repulsive not to be repulsed.
In the kitchen Matilde had began cooking, I could smell beans and onions in the pot, believing comfort food could drive him away.
“You’re from the fruit company aren’t you?”
“I’m from New Orleans,” he corrected me. “I work for United Fruit after a fashion, but mostly I am in business for myself.” He gestured to the chair across from him. “Please don’t stand, it makes me nervous.”
I sat because I couldn’t find a decent excuse not to. Up close he had baby skin, unmarred and pellucid. His thin hair lay across his head like it was exhausted from a long and tiring day.
“Your harvest is coming in rather nicely.” His nasal twang diluted what would have otherwise been a seductive accent. So far it was his worst flaw.
“My diseased harvest.”
His laugh took a while to find its way out of his belly and past his lips. “Just a misunderstanding...that I’m sure we can work out.” He reached out; his nails were perfectly manicured and clean. “I am Dante.”
His grip was cold and moist.
“So you are here looking for a bribe right…you want a share of my profits?”
“You have been so quickly infected by the native pessimism against your own people,” he said with a wry smile. “I have come here to give, not to take. I have something to offer you…more than a martini.”
He got to his feet faster than I would have expected, and moved about the room with the odd fluid grace of a small silvery fish, and not the leviathan he was. “Your father was a good man- simple- limited in scope and wisdom perhaps, but it served him well. It allowed him to have this plantation. He ran it well, considering his mental state. I kept him supplied in his needs and he, in turn, served me.”
I knew he was baiting me, and though I was dying to understand what he m
eant, I kept my mouth shut.
Dante turned around, almost pirouetted to face me. “You aren’t like him at all.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“No, you wouldn’t would you? You only know what that priest tells you. From God’s lips to your ears hmmm?” He was looking at the cross at my throat.
Without thinking I raised my hand and covered it. “What is it you want Dante…or rather what is it you want to give me…besides puzzles?”
He clapped, two sharp smacks, and slid back into his chair, trained his eyes on my face, strapped on a large grin made of small even teeth. “This is fun,” he said. His behavior would have almost discredited him if he didn’t have so much weight, so much presence, like a sucking hole.
“I’m tired, and I don’t want to stay up late and play your games. Just tell me what you want and get out of my house.”
“Ah that’s the crux of the matter Isabel.” He spoke warmly and I realized that the flaw in his voice was also the mesmerizing part of it, the magnet. “You see…this isn’t your house…it was not your father’s to give you, it is not your property to give away.”
I felt my world unzip, knew the answer before I spoke. “Then whose is it?”
He stretched out his arms like Julián did in the pulpit, looked me straight in the eye. “It belongs to me with the blessing of the great God of the UFCO…and there but for the grace of I, go you.”
I felt the chair under me, solid, still warm from the last occupant. “And what does this mean for me?”
“Well Isabel…that really is for you to determine isn’t it? I can tell you what it means for me.” He snapped his fingers and I heard a cessation of movement in the kitchen. I could feel Matilde deliberating whether or not to respond, now that I was here.
“Matilde…” I called. “Could you come here please?”
She walked into the room, her back completely straight, her eyes not meeting anyone’s. The scrubwater dripped from her fingertips onto the tile, making small domes.
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