He lit his cigar and tossed the match away.
“It made quite an impression on me,” he said. “Obviously. But the Mayans deserve what they get, don’t you think?”
He was mad. His voice was preposterous, his perfect English lilted with rising Spanish intonations. Why had he not asked to see Mirabelle? Why had he not killed Ethan? At the moment Ethan had no feelings about the Mayans and he was sure that his answer to this question did not matter. He would not be toyed with like a field mouse.
“When I came here, I did not understand the situation,” Ethan said.
Soto blew smoke and waved it away from his face as if he found it unpleasant. He drew his foot from the step, wiped it on the ground, and then replaced it again.
“Originally, the Mayans did not engage in human sacrifice,” he said. “They were a peaceful people of great culture and learning. Of all the people on all the shores of the earth, in those days none were as wise as the Mayans.”
He gestured as he spoke toward the lightless sky.
“They were astrologers who could read the fabric of the heavens beyond any of today’s astronomers. They trafficked in portents and solstices. They were good augurs. And then a people came among them, a warlike race who knew only the way of bones and blood-letting. These people did not learn wisdom or peace or agriculture from the Mayans, but instead taught them human sacrifices. And that was the end of the Mayans. They reveled, then, in bones and false slayings, the ways of their colonizers. How can so knowledgeable a people fall for such cruel and obvious practices? That is why they are punished now. That is why their crops rot and their people are forced to sell trinkets to Anglos.”
Soto paused. He raised the brim of his hat slightly so that Ethan could see his eyes, golden and cold—the eyes of a carved figurine, beautiful in the paraffin halo. He spat onto the stoop. Behind him, thunder rumbled over the sea. He spoke again and as he did his shadow-lengthened features contorted through a series of freakish postures. He was not like the killers in the bars or the bandits on the road. His performance did not move toward any clear effect—it served no purpose beyond its own weirdness.
“I’m telling you all this because you claimed you did not understand the situation. And that is a poor excuse. It is unacceptable to me. Everyone should know and claim their actions. They should know their cause, they should accept their effect.”
Ethan reached down and lifted his glass of rum. He drank from it, long and hard, until he had to wince and close his eyes, and when he opened them again Soto was still there, eyebrows raised in some question. More lightning pulsed behind the clouds, over the sea.
“I met a woman in a bar in Mexico,” Ethan said. “She saved my life, or so I thought. I felt that I owed her. I felt some obligation.”
“Did you know that a Mormon gave his life and the life of his companion for you? You did not? They died in the marsh and in the heat and in the stink of their own waste. I left them in the open for the spider monkeys and the vultures.”
“Monkeys do not eat people,” Ethan said.
Soto shook his head. He stamped his foot, he snarled. For a moment he seemed simply ridiculous, a character out of a fairy tale. Rumpelstiltskin with a machete.
“You don’t know anything,” he said.
“No, it’s a fact. Spider monkeys eat fruit and shrubs, not Mormons. There’s absolutely no precedent for it.”
Ethan finished the rum and pushed himself up against the door, barring Soto from the girl. The knife still stuck in the porch wood and the glass in his hand felt light and useless; he could barely hold it for his trembling. He did not know why he was antagonizing Soto, but the sudden anger felt better than fear.
Soto did not react to his statement. Perhaps he had not heard it.
“You do not know anything,” he said again. “And that is a problem. Tell me, did you know Mirabelle Campo’s friend, the café owner’s daughter, died of cholera?”
Ethan shook his head. The thunder had moved closer inland. Rain fell in sudden sheets on the ocean.
“This is my point,” Soto said. “You’ve been missing it all along, and now I want you to pay attention. It is foolish and selfish and shortsighted of you to believe that you are here for no reason. The world is composed of symmetries. Of signs and wonders. And one is always an agent of those wonders, a product of cause. So why are you here? This you can tell me. Your cause is known. It is written and done. It is your effect that is yet to be determined.”
For months Ethan had felt the urge to confess, to kneel before Samantha in her white room and explain himself. For months he spoke to her as he walked the streets; he woke, when he slept at all, with her name like a rough-cut stone on his lips. If he could not take back his words, that moment at the kitchen table, then at least he could explain them. There is a reason for everything, he had thought, and if he could only explain it to her, if he could only bear his hurt before her so she could see that his damage approached her own, that they had damaged each other together, then somehow they could find some grace, could step back, word by word, into a world bereft of madness. He could hold her to him, he could rock her, like a child, into morning.
Of course, this was delusion, vanity, fever. Their lives would not be cobbled into what they had never been and Samantha would grant no absolution. And neither, he knew, would Soto.
“I don’t owe you an explanation,” he said.
“Maybe not,” said Soto. “You are American, after all. If your destiny is manifest you need never explain yourself to anybody. But perhaps you should offer it as a gift, because it is the only thing preventing me from killing you here on this porch and delivering that girl into the hands of men who slaver for her.”
The rain came, as it did in the tropics, in moving sheets. Ethan heard it make landfall over the beach, then sweep into the palmbreak before the road. It sounded in the lane and on the street dust and in the mangoes before it hit the cane roof overhead. Soto stepped fully onto the porch and shook the water from the brim of his hat. There was less than four feet between them now, and the world beyond Soto was invisible beneath the haze and steam of sudden rain.
“As I told you,” Ethan said, “I was not aware of the situation when I arrived here. But from what I know now, I promise you—that girl is useless. She’s deranged. No one will ransom her.”
“Wrong again. Already two Mormons ransomed their lives for her. They were eaten by spider monkeys.”
Soto stood too close. Ethan could smell the cigar smoke on his jacket, and all around the ripe heat of the earth steaming into the air. Above them, something stirred in the cane.
“For Christ’s sake, have some mercy,” Ethan said. “It’s as easy as not having it.”
“I asked you to explain your motives, not mine. I am always merciful, but I don’t think you could begin to comprehend the nature or consequences of mercy.”
“I understand the consequences of not getting macheted. I understand those very clearly.”
“There’s no evidence of that,” Soto said. “Everything you’ve done, every single choice you’ve made since you arrived in Copal, since before that even, all point toward you getting chopped into monkey food on this porch. It would seem that it was your singular goal.”
“Why would I do that?”
“That’s what I’m asking you. Explain the situation to me. Let me see what other symmetries are in place. Why are you here?”
Wind rose now with the rain and the water came in torrents. It whipped under the porch awning on gusts and leaked through the roof. Whatever lived in the cane continued to scramble.
“I was married,” Ethan said over the sound of the wind. “I lived in New York with my wife. She drank too much and I think she cheated on me. I was very jealous.”
“And did she? Did she cheat on you?”
“I don’t know. Probably. It hardly matters. You have to understand I was angry. I mean, I was hurt. You can imagine.”
“No, I cannot,” Soto said.
>
“I had an affair. For a while. My wife refused to get help. She let our lives fall apart and I thought she was reveling in the loss. She demeaned me. She ruined every beautiful thing.”
Ethan did not like the tone of his voice. In the hundred nights where he whispered his confession to the empty dark, to Samantha asleep or spectral, it did not ever go like this.
“So I told her about the affair. I had already ended it. I had recommitted. There was no reason to tell her.”
“No, there is always a reason,” Soto said.
Ethan had stood at the window in the room that reeked of gin and sweat. It’s the middle of December, Samantha had said. Outside, the world moved on in shards of broken light.
“I chose to hurt her,” Ethan said, and raised the empty glass to his lips. When he brought it away he looked up to the cane ceiling. “She went out that night. She went to a bar. A bar she frequented. She met a man there and something terrible happened to her.”
“She was seeking vengeance?”
“I don’t know what she was thinking. Does it matter? Something terrible happened to her. Something she could not recover from. I tried to help her. You cannot know what it is like to hold a woman you love through that. Through the nights where she wakes clawing at your face. Through the shaking in the night and the fever. Through the nights that will not end. Through the cough syrup and the vomiting and the police. Finally she committed herself. I think I was relieved. I left New York. I traveled here on her money.”
Soto turned and looked behind him, out to the rain and the invisible sea. He followed Ethan’s gaze into the scrambling rafters. Water dripped and pooled on the porch. He waved toward him with elaborate flourish—a fool announcing a king.
“So here you are?”
“I told you that I did not understand the situation,” Ethan said. “I have no interest in politics or revolution. I knew only that there was nothing I could do to remedy what happened to Samantha.”
“Samantha,” Soto said. He drawled the syllables, drew them out over the sound of the rain. Ethan did not like her name on his tongue.
“That girl in there is sick. She’s unstable.”
“Yes, well, are you hydrating her?”
Ethan nodded, his voice now rank and soiled, impossible beneath the rain.
“Then she will live,” Soto said. “Keep her hydrated. Watch her fever. Give her carbohydrates.”
Soto tapped the machete against the porch. As if Ethan were not already aware of it. It thunked and thunked into the soft porchwood and it was the only sound in the world but the rain.
“You are self-indulgent,” Soto said. “And you deserve to die. About this I am serious. In a world without mercy you do not deserve to live. You say to me that I cannot imagine the pain of some raped puta? Or not even that. You did not ask me to imagine that. You said I could not comprehend your pain, your pain at her violation.”
He spat onto the porch and his saliva strung in his sheared beard.
“Do you know what I have seen in the jungles? On the islands? The dead children under the banana trees after a Sandinista raid? You walk through a glade and the glade is buzzing, there are mounds covered in flies, mounds so thick with flies and spiders and moving insects that you cannot tell what is under them but for the smell. You approach one and you kick it and the world riots with flies and insects like you are the Lord of Hosts, and then you look down and it is a child, a boy with a rotten face and no eyes and beetles where his eyes should be and his tongue pulled through a slit in his throat and maggots chewing on his tongue. You can hear them, everywhere in the glade—you can hear them chewing the tongues like gypsy moths in pine woods.”
A scorpion fell out of the cane and Soto crushed it with his boot. He scraped the blue skeletal husk on the step as another landed on the brim of his hat. He shook off the hat and kicked the scorpion into the weeds. With his hat off and the paraffin light flickering on his face, his mouth drooped into an elongated frown.
“Once I was in a jungle drinking coffee and a woman fell out of the sky. She splattered before me. I was sitting in a makeshift infirmary and there was a woman in a crater at my feet. Do you know where she came from?”
Ethan nodded. He knew about the Indians thrown from planes.
Soto said, “That too made quite an impression on me. That too was instructive. Because she was pregnant, see? And her fetus burst into the flowers and the vines and I wrapped it in a blanket and I held it to my chest and I ate a banana flecked with blood. I do not think there are any more children.
“But there is mercy. There are symmetries and causes and the wills of men who have held the world’s last children to their chests. You can be an agent of that. You can be an agent of something other than fuck-up.”
Another scorpion fell to the porch. He crushed it, he waved inside.
“You have a way to contact Yolanda Campo?”
Ethan nodded.
“Then you will do so after the girl recovers. You will ask her to meet you in Tlaxcultepec. You will tell her that her sister needs her, that she is ill and has a message to deliver. An important package to deliver. Then you will bring Yolanda Campo to the Jesus of the Poor statue outside of Barrio Gómez. Do you know this statue?”
The statue perched on the rocky hillside overlooking the western barrios. At night it was illuminated by green lights and Ethan had seen it many times from the roof deck of the Hotel Guadelupe.
“What will happen to her?” he said.
“The same thing that was going to happen anyway. Her destiny is set. The difference is that maybe this way you and the girl survive.”
“What if she doesn’t come?”
Soto shrugged. “I doubt she is as far away as you think.”
More scorpions fell now as the rain flushed them from the cane. They dropped to the ground and skittered and snapped, they caught on the walls and the windowsill, one perched on the brim of Soto’s Panama.
“Do you think that Campo cares for the people of this country?” Soto said. “For any people? He is not a Copalan and he does not ponder symmetry or mercy. He lives with his guerrillas in the jungles with the Indians, and he is destroying them, the Indians, village by village. The younger ones growing up in his midst do not follow the ways of their elders. They do not listen to the chiefs. They go off with Campo. They want the pretty and golden things. And do you think he loves these Indians? He steals their children. He burns their crops. He burns their fields and closes the mines so that the corporations cannot do business in the interior. When the traficantes want to pass through their villages, he does not protect them. Does that help anybody?”
He held out his hands, he skewed his head, he seemed to wait for an answer as scorpions fell around them.
“Did you know,” he said, “that Sandino believed his battlefield would be attended by demons and angels? Such men think their actions beyond the judgments of the world, and I promise that Camillo Campo will not escape my hounding.”
And then the scorpions were upon them. Fifty, a hundred, flushing at the storm, falling from the ceiling, landing on the porch and on the ground and on the men. The scorpions hissed and scrambled across the floorboards and Soto danced and hooted and pounded them down in a freakish hopping two-step. He whooped and stomped the scorpions and danced and danced in the paraffin light, the frail wavering light, as the storm came, kept beat, raged, and passed on.
“Ill,” says the Mother by her bed in the night.
Mirabelle trembles and turns her head away, but the Mother has moved—She sits now by Mirabelle’s feet.
“Ill,” She sings. “All will be ill and all will be ill and all manner of things will be ill.”
Mirabelle wipes her face and reaches for her thermos. She drinks and gags and drinks again. She will not die, she thinks, the way Rosa did.
She sleeps and wakes as a storm breaks over the water. She watches the lightning striking wide and diffuse behind the clouds. The men’s voices burr and tremble fr
om the porch.
Yolanda wipes her brow and touches her throat and kisses her forehead. Yolanda changes her bucket.
“I’m sorry,” Mirabelle says.
Yolanda waves the words away as she does. She laughs and pulls her hair back.
“This is nonsense,” she says. “It’s not so bad as when you tried to eat that lizard.”
She’s walking then with Yolanda through the dry red roads of Rio de Caña. It’s dawn but the streets remain empty. No one lurches toward the fields. Ahead of them, a dog crosses the boulevard. Vultures sleep and flutter on the roof of Mr. Bernal’s café.
“Look over there,” Yolanda says.
The sky beyond the pine mountains swells into a ripe purple. Mirabelle thinks of coral jewelry, the Mother’s rosary, which she hears clicking not far behind her.
“Do you know what that means?” Yolanda asks.
Because Mirabelle suddenly stands only to Yolanda’s hip, she nestles her face into the fabric of her skirt. She kisses her leg and she reaches up toward where Yolanda’s hand must be. The skirt feels wet, warm, and she thinks that maybe she is crying. She reaches again for Yolanda’s hand and finds that it is in her hair. She does not want to look back at the sky, but does. It darkens as with smoke.
Mirabelle shakes her head as the dog lumbers back into the street and trots toward them. There is a dead horse in the road. She will hold Yolanda, and this time she will not let her go.
“Mirabelle, you’re gnashing your teeth again,” Yolanda says.
MIRABELLE WOKE TO LIGHT and fresh sea wind through the open window, a figure sitting by the bed. She closed and opened her eyes as the room and the figure unsmoked from the blur of fevered sleep. It was not the Mother or Yolanda but Ethan who sat there wiping her brow with a wet rag.
“You were gnashing your teeth again,” he said. “I was afraid you would break them.”
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