“He was a sort of pervert.”
“What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“If you saved my life, I should know who you saved it from.”
She reached out and touched his hand. Her fingers were rough, and whatever effect she had intended with her touch did not occur. He pulled his hand away.
“You must be very tired,” she said.
He knew then that he was. The morning in the plaza came to him like splinters of remembered dream. She stood and took his hand again.
“Follow me,” she said. “You should sleep. When you wake we will have breakfast.”
He followed her through the curtain and heard the rattle and hiss of the beads behind them. She pulled him down a low hallway that opened into a doorless room. He saw a bed shadowed in the blue morning cool.
“Take off those clothes and lie down,” she said.
He sat on the bed and pulled off his shoes without untying them and dropped them on the floor, where the caked mud of the alley crumbled to the rug. He stripped himself of his ruined clothes.
“I’m fucking disgusting,” he said.
She pushed him back on the bed and leaned over him and her scar looked like a purple vine twining down into her shirt.
“I’m sorry,” Ethan said.
“For what?”
He closed his eyes.
“Are you going to tell me your name?” she asked.
“Ethan,” he said, though he did not open his eyes. Already the room was spinning behind his eyelids in a sweeping drunken vertigo. First, Samantha would read in bed as he slept, then later, after it all, he’d sit and watch as she sweat and shivered into stupor.
Yolanda lay down beside him. He could feel the dent of her in the mattress, her breath on the back of his neck.
“Sleep, Ethan. We will speak in the morning.”
“It’s already morning,” he said.
“Then we still have a long time until night.”
Somewhere, the wind blew and strange noises carried on its gusts. He heard the fountain and a chattering as of frantic children. There seemed to be a hundred trees cracking in the gale. The wind blew. He turned, almost naked, in the bed. The rain he had smelled on his march toward the house did not come.
In the first hours of the night, the woman set the bowl before Soto where he sat on the palm stump in the dust beyond her outdoor kitchen. She nodded at the soup.
“That was my last hen,” she said. “The rest are roosters.”
Soto looked up at her and smiled in such a way as men did not smile. His mouth turned upward and hung there, unmoving, affixed in a wide, rubbery caste. In the purple light that fell over the mountains, his golden eyes appeared wide and sorrowful so that he seemed for that long moment a carved specimen of anguish. Every few years, when the American priests came through the jungles on their missions to the Indians, they’d leave their extra picture books and pamphlets for her and her children. To her, Soto looked like the pictures of St. Sebastian, flayed and tortured, reveling in his torment. She stepped back toward the house and he stopped her with his voice.
“Are times as bad as that?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “There are still plenty of lizards and I have eaten lizards before.”
“So have I,” Soto said. “When I worked on the railroad between the mines and the coast. Sometimes all I had to eat were these track iguanas. They were full of dirt and glass. They were disgusting.”
He stopped and frowned and his frown seemed no different than his smile. A simple reversal of direction, but not of emotion.
“But when I was in America, you should have seen the things I ate. The great gluttony of it. Here, niños—” He held the bowl of soup out to the two children playing along the razor-wire ditch that bordered the road. “—come have some delicious soup.”
The children halted where they stood in the street and turned toward him. They did not move, each stood still on opposite sides of the wire-strung ditch. The pale northern boy Soto had brought with him sat separate from them under the last long shadows of the tin-roofed kitchen.
“Please,” the woman said. “Eat the soup yourself. There is enough for them.”
Soto seemed not to hear her. He threw back his head like a wolf about to howl and whistled his weird low whistle. When he looked back down the children were making their way over and around the razor wire, coming toward him.
“Have some soup,” he said. “It is made of chickens.”
THE WOMAN SAT with him as the children ate. The sun was falling behind the mountains and the clay roads heading that way looked dark and blue, a vein of ice in a northern landscape. She touched his thigh.
“I was told that you were coming,” she said. “And I was frightened.”
“I heard about the bats,” he said.
She gazed up at the empty sky, then looked back to Soto and then down. She left her hand on his leg.
“Ten people have died so far from the bites,” she said. “All summer the bats come out of the jungle. At night it is not even safe to walk.”
Soto nodded up at the looping twists of electric wires strung up against the darkening sky.
“Does your telephone work?” he said. When she nodded, he drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to her. “There is a number written there. If you or anyone you know is bitten, you call that number. A man will come. He will give you the rabies shots.”
She unfolded the handkerchief slowly and read the number and then once she had done that continued to stare into the cloth. The new night was silent but for the sound of her children playing. Lights flared, distant and wavering, in the high reaches of the far mountains.
“There are campfires in the jungle again,” she said.
“It is the same everywhere,” Soto said, and as he did so he reached out with both hands and touched the corners of her eyes. He trailed his fingers downward over her face and her tears followed his fingers. When he spoke to her his voice was like a sound out of the dark hollow of her dreams.
“People are ruined by the simplest things. The cattle die, so we are attacked by bats. The bats are not dangerous but we have no medicine. There are many children and little food. We have obligations. There are strangers in the mountains in the night.”
She watched the fires burn. She withdrew her hand from his thigh. She knew, she had always known, what price he would exact for his friendship. The distant flames wavered, almost green, not like fire at all. They seemed sure and peaceful, they glimmered with the constancy of stars. She told herself: if there are fires, there is food being cooked around them.
He nodded at the children where they laughed and ate.
“You carry a great burden, sister. I can help.”
“I knew you would ask that.”
He stood.
“Wait,” she said as he turned, an action unstoppable, once it commenced. “Pablito,” she said. “He is afraid of the Duende.”
Soto was moving now, pulling his hat back down over his face, angling already toward the children and the silent pulse of the night beyond them.
“In this country,” he said, “there is no Duende but me.”
AT DAWN SOTO BROKE through the undergrowth and came to the logging road. From there, still halfway up the slope, he could look down across the valley of green pine mountains pocked with intermittent hillsides logged bare. The roads out of the mountains ran down toward the village in winding red rivulets like the dry beds of rivers. From above, the village shimmered where the newly risen sun broke on the corrugated tin roofs of the shantytown. In the distance, the whitewashed colonial clock tower struck six times. Soto turned and began to walk again—behind him, the new train of children followed. Five boys and one girl, all filthy and limping in their ill-fitting shoes. They followed in silence as the road turned pitted and steep and distant coyotes called some confused howl, as if they had misunderstood dawn as the coming of a new dusk. Soto stoppe
d once in the imperfect lee of crooked pines, where he passed around chunks of last night’s meat to the children. He watched them eat it and then went on toward the town, where from his vantage he could see the glint of sun on machetes as people made their way to the purple cane fields that swayed under the wind of a coming storm.
Ethan wakes to heat and the whisk of an overhead fan cutting air. For a moment the grace of waking without memory or knowledge of where he is—a warm room, the cut of the fan, white walls—and then realization, the drop in his stomach and sweat on his forehead and his thighs, the sheet sticking to his chest like a bandage to a gangrenous wound. Dread and morning and parching thirst. In the kitchen down the hall, the hiss and smell of frying oil. He sits up and peels off the sheet and lets the fan whisk air across his skin. It’s little use, like diving into a heated pool on a summer day. Next to him, on the bed, are a pile of clean, folded clothes. A t-shirt, boxers, socks, blue jeans. He wipes his sweat from his forehead with the shirt and then puts it on. He’s standing now and thirsty and wishing he were anywhere else. He finds that he’s dry swallowing again and again. He pulls on the pants, finds his shoes in the corner, puts them on and sees that the rug is crusted with mud where he dropped his old clothes. Few cocks still crow, though his watch reads eleven thirty. It’s broken, he remembers, but it must be almost midday. He closes his eyes; he opens them; he walks down the hall to the kitchen.
“AND YOU CALL Mexicans lazy?” Yolanda said as he ate. “I thought maybe you had died.”
“If only,” Ethan said. “And I never said anything about Mexicans one way or the other.”
“Well, it’s true. Mexican men are lazy. But so are all men. Everywhere.”
Ethan reached for his glass from last night, filled it with water, drank it, and then poured another from the jug. Yolanda stood at the counter frying chicken and eggs on a hot plate. She had her back to him and wore a cream cotton dress with lavender embroidery along the straps and the bottom hem. Ethan had an eye for women’s clothing from his years as a photographer and as Samantha’s husband, and he saw that the dress was handmade and saw that in its cut it was shapeless, except that it was tight where she was wide and wide where she seemed narrow, which meant that it tautened and creased against Yolanda’s hips and then slackened into loose folds of fabric like a sail without wind about her back and bony shoulders. The muscles stood out in Yolanda’s right arm as she tossed the sizzling meat in the pan. Across the room his clothes hung on a makeshift line. Despite the fresh clothes, he must look terrible, though he hadn’t looked in a mirror for at least a day, not since the previous morning in the motel in Texas when he stood and stared into the bathroom mirror as his complimentary coffee leeched the wax from the paper cup. He’d tossed the coffee down the sink, put on his sunglasses, and turned away from the mirror, grabbed one bag and left the others still packed on his bed. He’d walked out into the morning and toward the border where, between flashes of moving cars, the brackish river hung hot and yellow and motionless beneath the concrete border ditches.
Now, sitting at this strange woman’s table, he thought that he must smell, but he couldn’t smell himself. He felt liberated by his sudden lack of vanity. He reached down and took a bite of his food—chicken and egg and mealy avocado wrapped in a seared tortilla. His stomach roiled at the grease, at the fat of the chicken and the egg’s gamy rubber, and he took another bite and then another. He watched her cook and watched the trembling of his own hands in the night’s chemical aftermath. She wants me for something, he told himself. It wasn’t money, that much seemed clear—she had seen him empty his wallet and she had no idea how much more he had access to.
He watched her cook. In the morning light, her hair that last night seemed black, unquestionably, tonelessly black, now glinted red and auburn and almost gold where the light touched it most directly. Beyond this, beyond some sense of her physical presence, her body, the way she smelled, the strange mix of mockery and tenderness in her voice, he knew nothing about her. With Samantha, always, he was too sensitive, too able to discern her moods. He viewed her, he realized, as a puzzle. He imagined that with intimacy and patience would come understanding, with understanding would come salvation. If he could understand why she did what she did, her drinking and infidelity and everything that followed, he could forgive it. But with his forgiveness flourished his contempt, and now he was struck, as he had been last night at the sink, by the strangeness of his detachment.
He watched Yolanda as if from a great and clinical distance. It’s a question of debt, he thought. Of obligation and, as it always seemed with him—of guilt. She had saved him and now he would have to repay that debt. He knew with something like certainty that he could not help her. Whatever she needed, he would not be able to give. He felt, already, the melancholy of his eventual failure, of her disappointment and his guilt. Or no, perhaps it wasn’t that. Perhaps she was simply scamming him, a gringo in a world in which he had no place.
He smelled coffee. She must have put it on without him noticing. He hoped the coffee was good; he hoped he was being used.
AND THEN LATER—when she turned from the hotplate, handed him a teacup and poured him coffee that was so hot he could not taste it, and sat across from him with her own breakfast—he watched her eat as if in slow motion, her mouth opening around her food, closing; he watched the strange gentility with which she lifted her cup to her mouth by the saucer with her back straight and her eyes forward, watched as she tilted it toward her lips, as a cockroach skittered across the floor and the sound of trucks and music blared in the distance, watched as she lowered her cup and dabbed her lips with her woven napkin, and then as the idiotic discordance of the moment shattered with the cool lilt of her voice.
“I would like to tell you a story,” she said. “But first we must decide whether or not you owe me.”
“Yes, I owe you,” Ethan answered.
“Good. Then the question is, what do you owe me?”
“My life, apparently. And breakfast.”
She smiled and her voice changed, the accent thinning out. A voice devoid of coyness.
“The next thing to decide, then, is how to repay that debt.”
“I’ll make lunch,” he said.
“First,” she said, and smiled, and did not change her tone, “you will shut the fuck up and listen.”
Yolanda was born on Santa Maria, an island off the Copalan coast in the Caribbean Sea. To the north there was nothing but the island-flecked ocean stretching on toward America, far beyond thought or comprehension; to the east lay more islands, Hispaniola, Cuba, the British and French territories; and to the west, past the wreck reefs and island cayes, hung the Copalan mainland, the mainland and her father’s adopted country, a country to which he hoped never to return.
“Why wouldn’t he go back?” Ethan asked.
Yolanda raised and lowered her glass, wiped her lips with her wrist, and again forked stray hair from her face. “Can’t you just listen?”
YOLANDA’S FATHER APPEARED on the island one day in a motorboat. He had no possessions and his shirt was shredded. When Marietta, her mother, saw him first—she was on her way to gather coconuts on the shore—she thought him some kind of wild man, a bootlegger or smuggler. His hair flared out in a black mane, his beard was overgrown and tangled. He didn’t anchor his boat. It washed toward the shallows, scraped over the reef, and when it was close enough to shore, past the coral shoal and the rock breaks, he dove overboard and swam to the beach.
She stood on the shore and watched him. Her mother had warned her about such men, had told her stories of pirates and guerrillas, mad men living in the mountains. The island was safe, her mother had always told her, but the mainland was different. On the mainland there was war and famine and pestilence. People were desperate. She watched him swim over the waves. At first he moved in a dark shadow through the water, like a shark. But he didn’t swim as well as an islander, and he was gasping and churning up froth with his feet by the time
he reached the shallows. The surface of the sea glinted under the hard afternoon light. There was no wind and the birds stopped their calling, it seemed, as he rose from the water. Yolanda’s mother remembered this, this was how she always told it. The world went silent and still and he climbed up onto the beach and approached her. He approached her and she did not run. She was almost twenty; she held an armful of coconuts against her breasts; she stood staring. Several times before, when she was a little girl, her mother had brought her to the mainland, and she remembered parrots and old cars, loud music, the smell of food frying in outdoor kitchens. She did not remember dangerous men. He stumbled up the shore and stood before her. He ran his hand—this part Ethan thinks he might have imagined—through his drenched hair.
“Please, miss. May I have some water?”
She continued to stare. Oyster shells flecked like fragments of purple ceramics through his beard. He was younger than he looked and his eyes were the deep brown of the cocoa nut. On his right side his wasted shirt stuck slicked to his skin with blood.
Again, he asked for water.
She nodded down at her armful of coconuts.
“This is all I have with me.”
“You must live near here. You could not walk so far with those cocos.”
His voice came little louder than a whisper, raspy and dry like an old man’s. Her machete lay sticky with coco juice at her feet and her arms were full, but he looked weak and tired. His side still seeped blood.
“You should not have swum leaking blood,” she said. “The sea is full of sharks.”
“We are not so afraid of sharks where I come from.”
“The way you swim, you should be.”
He laughed then, or smiled and opened his mouth and tried to laugh but could not for the dryness in his throat.
“If I carry those cocos for you, will that buy me some water?”
“We will see,” she said, and let the coconuts fall to the sand and turned her back and put her hands on her cocked hips like the mothers in the market always did. “It depends on whether you can walk better than you can swim.”
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