Invisible Country

by Annamaria Alfieri

  She took his hand and drew him to one of the chairs away from the fire. She sat opposite him. “Ricardo Yotté has been murdered.”

  Instinctively, he jumped up. He could do nothing but stare at her. Suddenly he remembered the boy had been loose. He must not let any of the questions that assaulted his brain issue from his mouth.

  “The padre found him in the belfry after mass. His head was bashed and his chest was stabbed six times.”

  “He was murdered twice?”

  Her lips turned up in a wry smile. “The blow to the head killed him. The stab wounds came after his heart had stopped. Whoever killed him was eaten up with anger.”

  His scalp turned cold. “In church, this happened?” He found himself pacing back and forth between his chair and the fire.

  “Not in church. There was no blood. His body was taken there after he died. He was wearing that kind of French-style clothing he liked, made of smooth, elegant cloth that must have come from Argentina, if not from Europe. His collar had blood on the back, and there was mud and grass streaked on the tail of his jacket. I was thinking on the way home that his body was dragged across a damp grassy area. It looked as if it was dragged by the shoulders, the way the mud stains were. But there was no mud on the back of his pants. It is all very strange.”

  Salvador was afraid to even think about what might have happened. The boy in the cabin had raged against everyone, but against Yotté more than anyone else. Could he ask him if he had done it? Could he expect a boy who never spoke a coherent sentence to answer such a question? “Why do you think the murderer took him to the church?”

  She shrugged.

  He hid the suspicion trembling in his brain. “This is bad for the whole village,” he said. “It will mean retaliation, and the wrong people are likely to be the ones to suffer.”

  “More sorrow, more death,” she said, as if she were predicting another rainy day in a wet week. She got up and went to stir the bubbling pot of wild greens.

  “Who could have done this?” he asked, though he feared he already knew. He had to protect the boy, who certainly would have wanted to kill Yotté. War had taught even the gentlest men to kill, and anyone with a Paraguayan sense of justice would want to kill a man who profited when others suffered and died. But if the boy did do it, no one must ever know.

  “Who would have had the nerve to kill him?’ she said distractedly. “Many people might have wanted to. Yotté betrayed so many to gain his position with President López and Señora Lynch. He reported Saturnino Fermín’s daughter as a traitor even though all she did was express her grief when her husband died in the battle of Tuyutí. They arrested her, and Saturnino has never seen her again.” She looked around as if there might be someone to hear and lowered her voice. “I could have killed him for taking away my Mariano.”

  “He took away Pablo too,” Salvador said. Ricardo had spotted Josefina’s grandson, with his cousin Jorge, sitting on the branches, high up in an acacia tree at the back of the campo behind his grandmother’s house. Everyone in the village knew no boy would be safe if Yotté had the nerve to take the grandson of the woman who had wet-nursed his mother and changed his dirty diapers.

  Salvador tried to find comfort in the thought that the boy in the cabin was not the only suspect, but fear prickled insistently under the skin of his back. He could not shrug it off. “Hard to believe,” he said, “that anyone had the nerve.”

  “Nevertheless, someone did.”

  “Remember when he brought Señora Lynch to our church to take the jewels from the Virgin?” The statue of Our Lady in the village church had been revered as miraculous for more than a hundred years. People adorned it with emeralds, diamonds, and rubies set in gold to honor God’s mother for the favors she bestowed. Salvador bit his lip. “They replaced the Madonna’s precious jewels with dross.”

  Alivia smiled. “They would say they took them for the war effort.”

  “They took them long before the war.”

  “And who would listen to our protests? Where would one go for justice these days? There are no tribunals, no judges to decide what is right and what is wrong. Besides, Our Lady does not need jewels on earth. She reigns with her son in heaven. Why should we care?”

  “I care,” Salvador said. “Yotté helped La Lynch rob our church.”

  Alivia put down her big wooden spoon and came close. “You thought her attractive when she first came to this country. We all did—her elegance, her beauty, her sophistication. That golden hair, like that of the Virgin in a holy picture.”

  “Not that there is anything holy about her.”

  A smile flickered on Alivia’s lips. “Still, in spite of her past, she seemed otherworldly—something between a woman and an angel.”

  “You traveled four hours to Asunción when she called on you to help her sick child.”

  Alivia clasped her hands together as if she were praying or confessing. “I would help any woman with a sick child,” she said and turned away toward the cooking. “That child of hers died. I could not help her. That baby was their only daughter. Whatever else Eliza Lynch is, she is a mother. I know what it means to lose a child.”

  He gripped the back of the chair he had been sitting in. His wife, trained by her mother and grandmother in the old medicines of the forest, followed their dictum that a healer must heal without regard to the worthiness of the sufferer who came for help. “La Lynch will want to see the murderer punished, and her word will be law.”

  “Someone will pay, whether he is guilty or not,” Alivia said. She took a few grains of precious salt from the crock on the mantel and dropped them into the stewed vegetables. “I want to talk to you about something else. Padre Gregorio is right. There is not much of an army left to take our food. The few surviving soldiers are way up north. If we get to keep our harvest this year, the village women will want babies.”

  “So?”

  She took some plates and forks from a shelf where they had dried after washing. “What about Xandra?”

  “Xandra? What about her?” His mind was still distracted by the suspicion the boy had murdered Yotté.

  “I cannot bear to think of her having babies without a father, but look at her choices in this village. Saturnino Fermín is still too shy to talk to a woman even though he must be seventy. Gaspár Otazú is very willing, but he goes around sporting that silly imitation of the comandante’s uniform that would endear him to no one, especially not Xandra. Besides, he cannot even look at a woman with both eyes at the same time. Hector Mompó? Do you want that practically naked old reprobate to have your virgin daughter?”

  He knew she was serious, that the idea should outrage him, but he could not help but laugh. “I am sorry, but the very thought of it is absurd. Besides, if Hector convinces even two of the many women he was soliciting this morning, he will be dead of exhaustion by sunset.”

  She did not smile. “Yotté is dead, so she has nothing to fear from him, but there is another man in the village.” She looked at Salvador, waiting.

  She could not mean poor, injured Pablo. “The padre?” He could not believe she meant the priest.

  She blew out a breath of exasperation. “Certainly not.” She continued to set the table. “Your sister’s husband.”

  He slumped back in his chair. Dios! The comandante, as he insisted on calling himself, would want Xandra, as he wanted to possess everything that was beautiful and precious.

  Salvador slapped his hand along the side of his face. He had allowed his sister to bring that man into the family. When his father died, leaving his second wife a widow with the three-year-old Gilda, he had felt responsible for the girl, and even for her mother, though he could not like the woman and never understood how his father had married such a self-indulgent, silly person. Gilda had grown up to be more like her mother than like their father. It seemed, no matter what he advised, she did the opposite, especially after her mother died and Luis Menenez, not yet comandante, came sniffing around. Alivia said Luis
was after the land, but that made no sense. The estancia belonged to Salvador, not to Gilda, and he and Alivia had three strong sons to inherit it.

  Perhaps if Salvador had liked his skinny, willful sister more, he might have refused her permission to marry the man who, though smart and ambitious, came from an ambiguous background and had a reputation for cruelty. But Gilda was stubborn and insisted she would marry Menenez. Salvador knew what it meant to be denied his heart’s desire, though he could not imagine his sister’s passion for Luis was anything like his for Alivia. Against his heart, he had said yes.

  Alivia wiped her hands on a cloth. “I will not have that bastard near my daughter.” She said it like a vow before God Almighty.

  “Xandra would not want him,” he said. “She has always disliked him. I myself have scolded her for being impolite to him.”

  “A woman’s scorn can fan a man’s desire. And men can force women.” She held a cloth over her fingers and moved the pan of pastels to the stone-topped table.

  Two contending thoughts gripped at Salvador: that not even Luis would do such a thing, and that Xandra was in danger. “We must send her to the convent in Bólen. There, at least, she can live her life in peace.” Away from the world, she would be safe from the lust of that grasping bastard. “That is final. We will send her to the convent.”

  Alivia turned to him with fury in her eyes. “What are you talking about? She is our only child now. How can we send her away?” Her tired, beautiful face was full of disbelief.

  “I am only trying to protect her.”

  “I will not be without her. Do you never want to a have a grandchild?”

  “You would rather have her defiled?” he shouted. He had not shouted at his wife since the war began.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” Xandra was screaming and sobbing behind him.

  He spun around. She was gripping her red sash as if she were going to strangle someone with it. She turned her head from one parent to the other so vehemently that her thick black hair flew out. Alivia reached out her hand to the girl, who looked at it with scorn.

  “Why are you fighting about my life? Yes, she should go to the convent. No, she should submit to some stinking old man. Who are you talking about? This is my life. What about me?” Tears welled up in her eyes. Her mother dropped the cloth she was holding and hurried toward her, tried to take her in her arms. Xandra struggled free and ran from the house.

  Alivia looked at him, this time with a glance full of blame. He held up his hand and shook his head. “I will go to her,” he said.

  5

  Maria Claudia finished her Sunday meal: a thin gruel of boiled cornmeal. She sucked on the wooden spoon as if it could nourish her with faint flavors of Sunday dinners of the past: chicken pucheros and sopas that she had stirred with the only spoon she had left. The metal cutlery had all been taken—to make bullets. Bullets for men who inexplicably wanted to kill other men they did not even know, just because their leaders said they must. She looked up at the crucifix on her wall. “Even you. They killed even you.”

  She wrapped the last of her palm nuts to take to the padre. He would be seeing to Ricardo’s funeral with no time to forage. He could not be allowed to go hungry. They all needed their priest. She pressed aside how much she needed him. He belonged to all the village.

  She went to the mirror Fidel Robles had so proudly given her as a gift for their wedding. As always, she did not know what to think of the woman who looked back. She was not plain, nor very pretty. Her hair was not dark, not light. Her gaze was steady, but her heart was as empty as her stomach. She took the packet of palm nuts and walked to the priest’s house, using the rosary in her pocket to count Pater Nosters and Ave Marias, trying to cover the loneliness in her chest.

  The plaza lay silent at siesta time. She crossed quietly, not wanting to encounter the other women who had leered at her expectantly after the padre’s disruptive sermon, as if she would immediately run to lay with any man available. She tried to feel herself invisible and then realized that much of the time that was exactly how she felt. She had read stories about people making themselves invisible in order to spy unseen. The invisible people in stories felt powerful, but she just felt devastated with solitude.

  As she passed under the thick orange trees and started across the stone-paved road in front of the church, a rider on a large gray horse sped into her path. The horse reared. The hand she raised to protect herself from its hooves still held her rosary. She heard a scream and jumped aside, her heart pounding, and realized the scream had been her own.

  The rider cursed as the horse bucked, but then the man got control of the beast and trotted on. She backed against the trunk of a jacaranda tree and tried to catch her breath. Then, just as suddenly as the horse had appeared, the padre was there, looking into her face and saying her name. “Maria Claudia, are you all right?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “I heard you scream.”

  She clasped her hands over her heart. Invisible. If only she were. “There was a horse. I must have been distracted. I did not hear it. A messenger from the government.”

  “He must have been going to the comandancia. Come. Let me make you a maté.” He gestured toward his house.

  She walked in front of him through the archway to his patio.

  “Please sit down. You are pale. You have taken a scare.” He went inside.

  She sat under the vine-covered pergola where she had seen the padre writing his sermons. Here is where he thought up that idea about the babies. The church wall loomed on the other side of the small patio. Its only windows on this side were high and like almost all the windows in the town unglazed, covered only with beautiful wrought iron to keep out the parrots. In Buenos Aires, where the padre was born, he had once told her, all the windows had glass, even in the houses of ordinary people.

  He came back and handed her a maté gourd. “Drink this.” It was a command.

  She put the bombillia between her lips and pretended to sip, but she knew the tea would be too hot to drink. “The rider was not going toward the comandante’s house. He was speeding right though the square.”

  The priest shook his head as if he did not believe her and said nothing. His eyes followed the skim of a hawk flying over the peaked roof of the church.

  “I spoke to the Yotté sisters,” she said.

  He took a chair opposite her. “I have asked Saturnino to dig the grave. Manuela has managed to make enough nails for a coffin. We will bury him on Tuesday to give his sisters time to get used to the idea.”

  “Where is his body now?”

  “Josefina and Saturnino moved it into the vestry. It will stay in the church where it is cool and the ants won’t get to it.”

  “Who do you think killed him?”

  “I could not say.” His voice was flat, as if he meant that he would not tell her even if he knew.

  “Suppose it was the comandante,” she asked, not knowing where that idea came from. It just fell into her head, like an orange falling from a tree.

  “That is highly unlikely. He and Yotté were allies.”

  She did not tell him that with the war going so badly, old allies could quarrel. She did not even suggest that the comandante might see Yotté’s success befriending Señora Lynch as a threat to his own power. Nor did she press him, since he thought so little of her theory, to offer his own. He usually ignored or rejected her ideas, and she always backed right down. It made her chest feel even emptier. “This is so dangerous,” she said. “What did the comandante say when you told him?”

  “He went white and then red and said nothing. He did not even come to look at the body. He immediately took his pen and wrote to Señora Lynch. When I tried to discuss what I knew, he waved me off, saying he would make his own investigation.”

  That sent a chill through her heart. “Then perhaps he did it himself.”

  “No matter who did it, Menenez will find someone to blame, most likely an innocent person.”

 
; “Yes, but who?”

  When she got no answer, she told him what else she knew. “Martita and Estella expect to starve. I saw them trying to plant a garden, as if they knew the first thing about growing food. All Josefina does is fill their minds with superstition.”

  “Alivia will help them,” he said, as if Alivia were some kind of food magician.

  She could not stop herself. “Alivia cannot feed everyone. She has herself and her family to think of.”

  He twisted his mouth, as if he thought her impertinent or stupid. He pushed his chair back with a jolt and stood up.

  She stood too and put the packet of palm nuts on the table. “I brought these for you.”

  “I do not want you to give me your food.” His voice was harsh.

  “I found a big tree full of them deep in the forest,” she said. “I had too many. These are extra.”

  He looked into her eyes. “Are you going to confess that lie next Saturday?”

  * * *

  Xandra ran weeping through the forest. “I hate my parents,” she said to a bright toucan that flew up as she approached and the yellow green lizards that scurried out of her path. “They never listen. They always think they know what is best for me.” But she was not a helpless baby they could pick up and move at will from mother’s shoulder to cradle. Girls were not what they had been before the war—like her father’s spoiled sister Gilda, who had been fawned over and overprotected, never allowed to lift a finger. Since the war, Xandra had worked alongside her mother, literally like a mule, pulling the plow. She had figured out how to hide the animals. She had built the corral for César and the coop for the chickens. Hardly any women were old-fashioned ladies anymore. Even her once careful and compliant mother, having taken charge for all the years of the war, now clung to her own opinion and no longer always gave in to her husband, who should have been the head of the family.

  When Xandra arrived at the clearing with tears drying on her cheeks, she found it too quiet. Even the little animals were still. Then suddenly, César neighed loudly and raised himself up on his hind legs. The chickens! They started putting up a ruckus: the hens squawking and the rooster screeching.