“Hardly anyone speaks English in those hills,” he says then. “You’ll have to learn some Spanish and some Mam.”
He gets up just before dawn, the bright beacon of Sirius over the hills. There are seven or eight men and women sleeping on the landing, dark shapes under blankets, in bags. A cough, the rustle of fabric, the low cry of a dreamer. A single transport passes below, the rapid patter of a jack brake.
He folds the blanket that the woman lent him, places it outside her door. Walks down to the highway in the dim, grey light, wisps of fog on the trail, dew on the sage.
Michael Guzzo arrived in Xela in the winter of 1970. He enrolled in a language school just off the Parque Central. After his first two hour lesson, with a few simple exercises and a list of words to memorize, he went to study in a restaurant near the square, at an upstairs table. He was working under street windows grimy with diesel fumes and dust. He looked like a child learning to speak, shaping his lips to make sounds that reminded him of the Italian he used to hear at his grandmother’s kitchen table. The woman at the next table smiled, was watching him over her salad.
She said she was a nurse down from a village called Chapel. She was in the city for medical supplies. He couldn’t place her accent till she said she was Australian. Her forehead was beaded with sweat and there were shadows under her eyes.
He had decided on the bus ride down to stay away from English-speaking people, to wander on his own till the city began to open out for him, word by word. He’d remembered listening to the Québécois French and the Portuguese of the orchard workers back home, words that drifted out of the trees in the still light of the evening, spread out of the branches. The voices of the workers hidden in the leaf shadows sounded like bird song and even at five he’d wanted to understand what they were saying, eager to enter their laughter, the music of their voices and longing that said where they were from.
The Australian nurse was wearing a shawl of woven cotton, dull browns and greys; she shivered under it, her eyes glazed. She toyed with the salad, chewed on a leaf.
“A touch of the flu,” she said, pushed the salad away.
“I’ll just sit here awhile,” she said, sipped some water, touched her forehead.
She was listening to his whispered pronunciation and laughed. When she stood she flattened her hand on the table to steady herself.
There was a strong glare of light in the street where he walked with her. They kept to the shadows of a store that sold electronics, then a grocery store with a wide stone terrace. A cough rattled deep in her chest and waves of nausea passed across her face.
At the intersection of 12 avenida and 7a calle, she stopped to let a car pass. Up the calle he could see an old stone arch that people walk over when the street floods during spring storms. He was carrying her bag of groceries and a duffel bag of medical supplies.
She had the distant, concentrated look of someone just trying to make it back to bed. She was from the same region that he wanted to travel to, maybe he’d ask her about that when she felt better, but just now he had to see her out of the glare of the streets, and he wondered how old she was then, 25? 26? The pale, hurried way she walked made her seem so young.
They went through a door in a heavy black enamel door that could be swung open to let cars park overnight in the hotel courtyard. He followed her up worn, orange-carpeted stairs to her room on the second floor. She unlocked the door, the key shivering in her hand.
“Thanks,” she said, turning to take the bags from him and placing them inside the room. “I’m okay now.”
“I’ve enough meds in that bag to treat a whole village,” she smiled.
She looked thin and tired when she closed the door on him. He stood in the hallway, wanting to knock then turned and went away.
She had chatted fluently in Spanish with the patron while paying for her salad, and she’d told him in the street that she often went to that restaurant for the elaborate salads and pizza when she came down from Chapel.
“It’s the only decent place to eat,” she’d said, “if you don’t eat meat.”
He stood at the balcony railing over cars parked in the courtyard below: a couple of Mercedes and a Jeep. The sky over the open courtyard had turned a pale grey. From across the street he could hear the whine of a skill-saw, the clatter of boards, but nothing from her room.
She had closed and locked the door behind her.
In the courtyard below, the concierge, a thin-faced man with a small mustache and a shock of black hair, was watching him from behind a desk near the street doors.
When he went by, the concierge asked, “La muher esta bien?”
He shook his head; he’d only understood one word: bien, bene in Italian. Not understanding the question made him feel ashamed, though the concierge’s tone was friendly. A strange feeling of not understanding, like in school when you’re asked a question you don’t know the answer to and everybody’s looking at you, smirking at your silence.
But this you notice: the fewer times you have the right answer, the less you are called on, and soon it’s like you’re no longer there, which is a way out into the open.
He went into the street, the door in the door pulled shut on a heavy spring behind him.
He walked half a block to the city square. Now that it was late afternoon, couples were strolling by arm in arm, the men in business suits, the women in long, flowing dresses. School girls in red and black uniforms lined the concrete seats in the rotunda. They were eating slices of watermelon sold from the back of a cart near the taxi stand. Soldiers moved through the crowd, past a woman who was selling painted wooden flutes that she’d laid out on a cloth spread on flagstones. The soldiers looked like boys with rifles slung on their backs, they looked that young. No one seemed to be paying them any attention, and they flowed along with the crowd, their faces composed and distant.
4
The next morning he brought her some bottled water and dry crackers. When she met him at the door, she was wearing a loose T-shirt and baggy sweatpants and her feet were bare. The walls of the room were yellow plaster, the ceiling and floor planks painted a dark brown. There was a lamp fixed to the wall above a bedside table with a paperback on it, opened face down.
She went to sit cross-legged on the bed and placed a bowl between her knees. He sat at the foot of the bed, gazing at her.
“I have to go back to Chapel this afternoon,” she said, “It’s four hours northwest by bus. Can you help me get to the station?”
Her forearms were pale and mottled, and under her broad dry forehead her cheeks had hollowed, the skin taunt, and her lips were puffy and dry. Waves of nausea passed across her face. She bent over the plastic bowl between her knees, patted her lips with a facecloth and her stomach heaved.
“I have nothing left to throw up,” she said.
She agreed to take some Cipro from the supply bag, “They’re expensive!” and he brought her water and tinned juices. The next day, when she could begin to eat, a thin tomato soup and dry bread from the restaurant where they had met.
She slept most of the time.
Once, when she was in the shower, he took the sour-smelling sheets and pillow case from her bed down to the concierge for laundering.
When he returned, he opened a window to air the room. The window looked out over a flat concrete roof with re-bar sticking out of it. Clothing hung from a line cinched between two of the iron bars. A dog sniffed through a heap of tin cans, its ribs showing. The grey cloud-cover had broken, and clear daylight had settled over the city, over a pine-covered hill to the east with tall white letters that read Christo Viene on it.
The concierge brought in fresh sheets that he used to remake the bed.
The first night, before the Cipro began to take effect, because it looked like she was getting worse, a hopeless, glazed look in her eyes that wouldn’t look at him directly, her hair damp on the pillow, the quick rise and fall of her breath under the sheet like the struggle of a bird caught in vi
ne nets, he got the concierge to help him drag in a mattress and he made up his bed by the door. When he woke up around two AM the bedside lamp was on and she was gazing at him.
“I have to change the dressings,” she said.
At first he didn’t understand, not sure whether he was awake or dreaming.
“His foot is infected,” she said.
She went on gazing at him, her head on the pillow, her face in shadow, the sheet drawn to her chin. A strand of damp hair lay across her forehead.
“I showed his daughter how to change the dressings, but I’m not sure she’ll remember.
The aunt!” she added, grimacing.
He sat up, the blanket around his shoulders. She was gazing at him and thinking of her patient. The lamplight showed the ridge of her shoulder under the sheet, the dropped hollow of her belly, the gentle rise of her hip.
“The aunt takes off the dressings and puts epazote on the wound. She’s a curandera.
He’s a diabetic,” she said, closing her eyes.
Within minutes she was asleep. Her breathing was shallow and quick and when he went to turn off the bedside lamp her saw that her forehead was creased in a frown, her mouth sad and bitter.
5
To return to Chapel, the village where she ran a nursing clinic, they took an early bus from Minerva station, heading north through the city shrouded in a fog that she said would burn off by midmorning. By the time they’d left the old town with its cobblestone streets and tall wooden doors, she’d fallen asleep, her head nodding against the window glass. The bus ground to a halt at the stoplights, the metal floor curving under his boots as they climbed Avenida de los Americas, past the tarp and tarpaper stalls of the Maya market.
A little wiry man in a jean jacket and broad stetson got on, his bundle of firewood tossed on the roof. He went to sit and talk with two others crowded onto one seat, perched on the edge with his legs in the aisle. They went by cinder-block works, tire shops and weavers’ stalls and shops that sold wicker furniture, till they came into vegetable fields. Again the bus slowed to a halt, hissing air brakes, and out of the mist under some pines, across ground littered with torn plastic and corn husks, a woman got on. She had a sleeping child tied to her back in a broad cloth. When she settled in the seat across the aisle, she brought the child across her lap and spoke to it softly in a language he couldn’t understand.
She looked across the aisle at him, startled, then her face went blank and she stroked her child’s forehead, its mouth streaked with milk. She was wearing a traditional dress of woven cloth and her loose, short-sleeved blouse was embroidered with flowers and birds, a rope sack of melons at her side.
The only acknowledgment he’d seen in the woman’s face was a look of momentary surprise.
She spoke again to her child in a language that was not Spanish. Her tone reminded him of his grandmother’s voice when the Calabrianne, an orchard worker that his family often employed, used to come to visit. He’d be out on the porch or in the garden because there was no use sitting in the kitchen when those two got together, he could understand little of what they were saying, both from southern Italy, and through the screen door he’d hear her talking with the Calabrianne, talking in her childhood language. There’d be snatches of it through the day, pane instead of bread, going back to the place where she was born.
And you could hear it in her voice, like an animal that has come from a long way to rest, back and safe, how her tone softened, it was the music of the place she was from and he could feel that place, the place of her young girlhood. And he wondered, where did his land, his birthplace, rest in his voice? His grandmother used to go back to her own in words and it was like she was a young girl again, in her voice and laughter.
Alana stirred then, looking straight ahead and rubbing her lips. When she reached to pull a shawl through the metal bars of the overhead rack, he felt the heat of her arm on his cheek. She wrapped herself in the shawl, shivering, and rested her head against the glass.
“How are you?” he asked, but she didn’t reply, keeping herself still and looking inwardly, licking her dry lips.
Now they were climbing in the hills through cornfields and pine groves.
Here, the bus pulled over and two soldiers got on. One stood near the driver; the second walked the aisle, showing a grainy photo.
When he came to the woman with the child asleep in her lap, he didn’t even look at the two gringos across the aisle: this was not their concern. He held the photo up before the woman while she held her child. Alana half-stood to glance at it, an eager look in her eyes.
The woman with the child only shook her head, and the soldier moved on.
The boy could feel her held breath: if you say nothing, keep yourself small, people like these soldiers don’t notice you, go away. Except in his valley they’d driven everyone out, and he felt a surge of anger then, went to stand before he knew what he was doing, as if to shake off the burning in his chest, but Alana put her hand on his shoulder, held him down.
After the soldiers had got off and the bus was crawling up to speed, Alana said, “I know the guy in the photo.”
Outside he saw a cinder-block church in the mist, blue-painted doors and a cross fixed to the metal roof. The yard was swept bare and there were oleander wreaths fastened to the metal fence.
“He’s the patient I was telling you about, the one with the infected foot.”
The ayudante crouched beside their seat to collect the fare. She handed him crumpled bills and they whispered for a long time in Spanish. Then he walked to the next seat, folding the bills onto a thick wad.
“The man in the photo, my patient, he’s a deserter,” she said, “from a civil patrol. Someone is dynamiting the electrical towers that bring power to a mine in Huehue. The army has set up civil patrols to protect the mine. If you don’t join, it’s assumed that you support the people who are destroying the towers. Or that you’re one of them.”
“Why are they doing this?”
“Sabotage.” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe rival gangs. I don’t know what’ll happen. These security patrols are a new army invention, and no one knows whether to take them seriously. Anyhow, they’re looking in the wrong place for him, he’s gone to stay with his daughter,” she said smiling, “in my village.”
They were on a dirt road bladed under a cliff. The bus passed a car-sized boulder pushed to the side. She said it had fallen from the cliff last week, holding up traffic for hours till a D7 cat could be brought to shoulder it out of the way. He saw a man perched on the boulder, leaning low, searching for fissures with a hammer and a chisel, a scarf wrapped around his mouth.
“I’m already feeling better,” she said as they came into the country of her village. She seemed more alert now, looking around with a familiar interest. She said that she always found the trips to the city for supplies exhausting, but that it was good to get away from the daily routine of the clinic. “I don’t have a life of my own,” she admitted. “There is always something or someone who needs looking after.”
Below he could see a village on a plateau wreathed in wood smoke. The surrounding hills were planted over to cornfields and pine groves. A muddy, boulder-filled river went through the valley.
“Maybe you could stay awhile,” she said then. “And help out.” She looked lonely shivering in her shawl, and he could see that she didn’t ask for help easily. He nodded, yes he’d stay for awhile, but he didn’t know what he could do here.
The bridge to the village was two hundred yards down the road, and soon they were in a street of one storey cinder-block buildings, all the wooden doors painted faded green or brown. Alana squeezed by him to talk to the driver, and he pulled over by a church. Its doors were flung open and someone inside was playing an electric piano, a tinny voice echoing over the music.
“You can stay here,” she said.
Outside, the ayudante was already lifting his pack from the bus roof-rack to the street. A woman le
d him across a courtyard into a small bare room.
“The driver’s sister,” Alana said, “their family owns this poseda. You settle in and I’ll come find you later.”
He stood in the doorway to watch her climb back on the bus as it pulled away.
She hadn’t looked back or waved, and when she’d spoken to the woman, her voice was hurried and distracted. She had quickly looked around the room they were shown and nodded, as though she were choosing for him.
She had chosen for him; the ayudante had brought his pack in, set it in a corner. He took a thin sheet from the bed to hang in a window that overlooked the courtyard. He spread a sheet from his pack on the bed. Through the wall he could hear someone sloshing water over the bathroom floor and the electric piano from across the street.
A vine was in bloom outside the window, flower shadows on the sheet. The walls were painted a muddy yellow, and the floor was made of rough-cut planks. There was a double bed on cinder blocks near the far wall.
He folded the clothes from his pack on the shelf above the bed, hanging his jacket on a corner. The plank ceiling vibrated when a truck went by. He heard the sharp report of an explosion that reminded him of fireworks.
Looking around the room, at the makeshift bed, at the one rough wood shelf, the faded sheet hung in the window, he felt that nothing in memory could hold him steady, give bearings, as though a darkness was passing over his eyes. A passing sense of vertigo, almost like terror: in a moment it was gone, but it shook him.
He understood then what had killed a number of old people who had been evicted from the valley: all that had supported them — the orchards, the house, the land, the village, the mountain, had been torn away. In their heart, they were starved to death; then the body followed.
He unfolded the photo of a lake that he’d torn from a book and it hung on a nail in the wall. He could unpack in five minutes and he could pack in five minutes. So this was home, then. He could vanish from here, too, without a trace, unseen. He felt like a ghost here, and except for Alana there was no reason to stay.
The Orchard Keepers Page 21