Mom begins to cry but quickly wipes her tears away and says, keeping her voice low, “We have to stay strong, José, for your brother and sisters.”
Brother? She says this like I only have one brother. Thinking about Dad and Víctor and Ruby again, I ask Mom, “Where are they?”
Mom answers, “I sent them all back to their rooms to try and get more sleep. They’re all exhausted.”
Mom is telling me where the younger kids are, not answering my question. But I let it go. If she knew where they were, she’d tell me. It was stupid of me to ask.
It feels like we all have died. The faces of the people who are gone now keep racing through my head: Mrs. Ramírez and all the times she was there just to talk with me and laugh at my stupid jokes; Allegra Barabon with her hair in pigtails and the gap between her top two front teeth; Raúl Ortega kicking a soccer ball; the entire Hernández and Marpales families; Mr. Baronas, who walked kind of funny (“bowlegged,” Dad called it); and Mrs. Handel, who always smiled about everything, and her two children, Julio and Margarita—all of them … all of them …
I can’t do this … I can’t stand it …
My eyes start to sting with tears again. I force myself to think of other things, stupid things, soccer, carne asada, my school, Berti lying in the sun … but gone now too … I try to think of anything other than my friends, buried in the mud—buried alive....
I sit on the floor in the corner of the living room. My body aches, and my legs and arms feel weak. I don’t want to cry, but I’m so worn out.
Mom asks, “Do you need some water or something to eat?”
But I am not thirsty or hungry. “Not right now,” I say.
Mom says, “José, you’ve done great. Stay strong, son.”
I nod. If I try to talk, my voice will crack.
Before last night, there were twelve houses in La Rupa, and except for going to school in San Pedro Sula, this little pueblo was my whole world. Before last night, there were twelve families living in those houses. This place was home. Now we are gone!
Mom convinces me to go to my room and try and get some rest. I tell her that I’m all right, but to make her feel better I go.
Juan snores in his bed.
I’m asleep before my head even hits my pillow.
When I wake up and walk out into the living room, I am surprised. Nine or ten people sit quietly, listening to María’s radio, which tells us that all over Honduras it’s just like here in La Rupa. People say that misery loves company, but I don’t think that the news about this storm’s damage makes anyone feel better.
Ángela says to Mom, “How can this happen to us?”
María answers Ángela. “It’s happened to everyone, not just us.” Both girls glance at our neighbors. Some are on chairs or the couch, but most of them are on the tile floor. Almost everyone here has lost at least one family member, and most have lost more than one.
“I know.” Ángela begins to speak to María. “But how …?” Her voice breaks and she starts to cry.
María puts her arm over Ángela’s shoulder and hugs her close.
Juan doesn’t say anything, but it’s like he’s glued to Mom. She quietly rocks him on her lap.
No one talks much.
We just listen to the news, and it seems like all of it is bad.
No one talks. What is there for any of us to say?
My friend Alfredo Mendoza suddenly walks into town and up to our front door. Alfredo lives with his family just outside La Rupa. Thinking about all our lost homes and people here, I forgot about the Mendozas because they are not really part of the pueblo. They have a farm about a half mile away, through the trees and over a small hill.
To call Alfredo my friend isn’t really true. Like me, he goes to one of the two private bilingual schools in San Pedro Sula; but his school is the International Sampedrano, my school’s archrival. He plays soccer on his school’s team. He and I are the same age and have competed in soccer ever since we were little. Now, though, none of this matters at all. I am just glad to see him and happy that he is okay.
I ask, “Is the rest of your family all right?”
He nods.
“What …” Alfredo begins to ask. Then he finishes his question. “What happened to all the houses?”
“Mudslide,” I say.
Alfredo is silent for a moment.
Now he speaks to me in English so that our neighbors won’t know that he’s talking about them. “What are you going to do with these too many people?”
I glance at everyone. Some are injured, and some are so tired and sad that we can’t tell if they are hurt or not.
I just shrug and answer back, also in English, “I don’t know, Alfredo. The only other house still standing is the Rodríguez place. It’s very small, but they’ve taken in neighbors too. They have ten people there.”
“Ten people?” Alfredo asks.
I nod.
Neither Alfredo nor I have to say what we are both thinking: How can ten people even fit into the Rodríguez shack? There is only one room in their whole house for the five of them. It’s a miracle that the wind and rain didn’t tear the place apart and just pure luck that the mudslide didn’t reach them.
A few of the people sitting and lying on the floor listen to Alfredo and me and start to look nervous. They probably wonder why we’re speaking in English, what we’re hiding from them.
I shift our conversation back to Spanish so that everyone will understand. “We will help everyone we can for as long as we can. My father and older brother and sister are …” My voice starts to quiver. I pause a moment and take a deep breath. “They are missing.” I fight as hard as I can to sound calm. “We haven’t heard from them since the storm started.”
“I’m sorry,” Alfredo says quietly.
But I barely hear him, because it hits me that I’ve just said that Dad and Víctor and Ruby are missing. The radio has told us that thousands of people are missing. A sick feeling rises in my stomach.
“Not missing,” I say quickly. “We just haven’t heard from them yet.”
“Sure,” Alfredo says.
There’s a long, awkward silence between us.
Finally I ask, “Can you take some people back to your house?”
Alfredo looks around at everyone packed into our living room. Some of them look up at him and some of them intentionally look away. “I’ll ask my mother,” he says, and then quickly adds, “I’m sure she’ll want to help.”
“Thank you,” I say.
Mom walks over and smiles at Alfredo. She pats his shoulder and says, “Yes, thanks.” Alfredo smiles back at her and nods.
Mom asks Alfredo, “You and José are soccer friends, no?”
He smiles some more, glancing at me, and says, “More like soccer enemies, maybe.”
I smile back and say, “Not anymore.”
Mom says to Alfredo, “Tell your mother that I said hello, that we are all together in this, and that I will visit her in a few days.”
“With pleasure,” Alfredo answers Mom.
As he leaves, Alfredo promises that he’ll be back before dark.
Once Alfredo is gone, everyone falls silent again. It’s eerie because at this time of day La Rupa is usually so noisy. What do you call a place that’s still here but isn’t really, a place that just yesterday was full of neighbors and houses and wild parrots and kids on Big Wheels?
If I close my eyes, I can see the town exactly like it was, all the houses still here and all the people still alive.
And now there are only three real houses: ours, the Rodríguezes’, and, just a little ways away, the Mendoza place, not a part of La Rupa before but a part of us now. I look closer at my friends and neighbors sitting with me: Carlos and Pablo Altunez, wearing filthy, mud-covered pajamas and mud-caked athletic shoes; Mr. Larios, fully dressed but not wearing shoes; and many others barefoot too, and coated or splattered in mud. Everyone sits staring at the floor or into space, silent, like ghosts. La Rupa
isn’t gone, but I don’t know what it is.
When I first started to learn English, I found that there isn’t one word that means both the people of a place and the place itself. In Spanish pueblo means “people” and “village,” and sometimes it even means “country.” There’s just one word for all of that.
La Rupa, our pueblo, has to survive, because if it dies, my dad and brother and sister won’t have any place to come back to.
La Rupa is not gone, not as long as any of us are still here.
FIVE
In our backyard I get my first real look at the hillside. The mud came down right where the trees were clear-cut last year. Like I said before, our house is at the farthest edge of town, like the Rodríguez house, which just happened to be a few feet away from where the mud flowed. Our house was mostly missed by the mudslide too. What destroyed all the other houses would have taken us down too if we hadn’t been lucky. Why were we spared? Why was our house just out of the path of the mudslide? I wish there were a reason, but there isn’t one, nothing except dumb luck.
There is an enormous boulder five or six feet from the back door of our house that was left by the mudslide. It must weigh tons. The bottom half of the boulder is covered in mud, but the top half was cleaned by the rain. It’s almost as tall as I am. It wasn’t there before.
I look at our backyard and see the spot where Víctor and I stacked all the bricks the day he took down the old barbecue. Now those bricks are all over the yard, thrown around by the mud and knocked aside by this huge rock as if they were just tiny pebbles.
I walk over to the corner of our backyard, mud up to my ankles. I stare out at what used to be La Rupa.
For the first time since this all started, because no one is nearby, and especially because my brother Víctor is not here, I cry. I cry hard, letting everything out. My chest hurts and my ribs ache. My nose runs. I cry and cry, and as bad as it feels, it also feels good. It feels right to cry like this. Weird thoughts race through my brain: All my life I’ve been afraid of being weak, afraid even to let myself cry. As I weep now, though, I feel different. I’m not ashamed, not embarrassed. Tears stream down my cheeks and find their way into my mouth. These tears have a gritty taste to them. Crunchy tears, I think. In another moment I am laughing and crying at the same time. Finally I can’t cry anymore. I wipe my arm across my nose and rub my eyes with the heels of my hands to get rid of the last of my tears.
I’ve spent my whole life looking up to Víctor and my dad, but they aren’t here. Dad and Víctor can’t help us. It’s up to me now. I know what I have to do and I can—I will—somehow do it.
SIX
The radio announcer says, “The storm is over.”
Over?
Ha!
Just the fact that the winds and rains have stopped doesn’t mean that anything is over. And here in La Rupa nothing is over. Everything is just starting. We have no drinking water at all, and no running water. We have no working toilets, no telephones and no electricity, and we are all alone.
The battery-operated radio says that all across Honduras, and in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, parts of Guatemala, and even all the way to El Salvador, thousands of people are dead.
But he also says that tens of thousands are missing.
Missing.
Like Dad and Víctor and Ruby.
The radio tells us:
The airport at San Pedro Sula is under three feet of water....
Out in Xalopa some people have been sitting on their roofs for more than thirty hours without water, food, or help, trapped....
The beaches of Tela and Sula, where Dad used to take us to swim and hunt lobster and play in the sand, are completely destroyed....
The Bay Islands, Honduras’s greatest and most beautiful place, have been wiped clean. Not a single building still stands....
What will happen now to our country and our people? Will we ever recover from this? Will we ever be happy again? We are almost gone now. As I think about my dad and Víctor and Ruby, and even about poor Berti, my mouth gets dry and I feel sick. There is something worse than gone, and that is not knowing, maybe never knowing, where your loved ones are.
What could be worse than gone?
Never knowing....
SEVEN
“I know this sounds terrible and I’m so sorry to have to say it, but we must leave the rest of the bodies where they are,” Mr. Cortez says, tears choking off his words.
For two days now the men of La Rupa and we older boys—Pablo, Carlos, Enrique Larios, Jorge Álvarez, Alberto, and I—have dug and scraped at the earth, searching for survivors. Using shovels and rakes, sticks, and our bare hands, we’ve clawed our way into the mud, hoping and praying that we will find more of our neighbors, family, and friends. Our hands are bloody with blisters, cuts, and scratches. My back aches from so much digging. But we’ve found no one alive and only the dead bodies of one child, Edgar Barabon, and one adult, Rosa Handel.
In our living room, a dozen people sit crammed together, deciding what to do about the people who are still buried. Everybody agrees that by now, two days and nights after the mudslide, no one is still alive down there.
Suddenly Mr. Ramírez mumbles, “I pulled my Vera out, and now she is wrapped in plastic, under stones in the yard.” He pauses, staring off into space. Dirt still covers his body. His fingers are cut and torn from using his bare hands to dig. He seems so different now, not like the same man who only a week ago gave our soccer ball back to us with a two-handed, over-the-head toss like a sideline throw, or who, a few months ago, teased Víctor about tearing down our barbecue jailhouse.
Mr. Cortez looks at Mr. Ramírez sadly, and then he looks around the room at all of us. “Perhaps later we will be able to bring everyone up from the mud—maybe when we get help. But right now we have no coffins, we have no place to put the bodies—and we can’t help those who are already gone.”
There’s silence in the room, but we all nod. It’s not just Mr. Ramírez who has changed. I barely recognize these people, my neighbors whom I’ve seen every day for my whole life. How long will it be until help arrives? If all of Honduras is as bad as La Rupa, what if no help ever comes?
Even though the hurricane is over, a steady rain falls all afternoon. But the worst of the storm has passed. What more can happen to us now anyway? How could things be worse? As I think this, I remember Dad, and Víctor and Ruby. Things could be much worse. My stomach aches and churns.
Mom brings in two large pots, one of beans and one of rice, cooked in boiled rain water, and sets them on the table in the kitchen. There’s no tap water to wash the dishes, but nobody complains about having to use a slightly greasy plate or fork or spoon. Everyone comes to the table to dish up. The kids go first, and even the younger ones know not to take too much food. Nobody pushes or shoves. Nobody asks for more than their share or argues or complains about the portions they’re served. Everyone just says, “Thanks.”
Looking at my neighbors and friends, I feel proud of us all.
As I’m finishing my meal, Mom says, “José,” and signals with a tilt of her head for me to follow her.
I set my plate down and go. As we walk out the back door, I look at the huge boulder, thinking again how lucky we were that it stopped rolling when it did. I’ve set up Mom’s small barbecue near the big boulder. Our stack of firewood is wet, but with enough newspaper we easily got a fire going.
Mom shuts the door behind us. I see the worry in her eyes. I’m surprised to see Mom like this. She’s been so strong. I think about the way she’s held Juan, the way she spoke to Alfredo, and how she has made all our neighbors feel so comforted and welcome. To see her scared now makes me afraid too.
“Look,” Mom says, opening the black plastic garbage bags that hold our supplies of beans and rice.
I’m shocked by how little is left. I ask, “How can there be so little food?”
Mom answers, “There are just so many of us.”
She’s right. She’s cooked
servings for ten people for two days now.
Mom’s next words jar me. “We have to find more food, fast!”
I say, “But all the houses are buried.”
Mom nods and stares at the ground for a moment.
I say, “Maybe I could walk to San Pedro Sula and bring back what we need.”
Even as I say this, I know it’s a stupid plan. San Pedro Sula might as well be a million miles away with all this mud and the flooding we’ve heard about on María’s radio.
Mom says, “San Pedro is too far.”
“I know. Maybe help will come. Maybe …” I feel so stupid. If Dad and Víctor were here, what would they do? I can’t think of any good ideas at all!
Trying to keep the worry out of my voice, I ask, “Where will we find food?”
“Maybe the Arroyos’?” Mom says gently and a little bit guiltily.
Of course! The Arroyos’ little grocery! Their trucha had lots of canned goods—milk, beans, baby food, fruit, vegetables, meat, tuna—lots of stuff.
I ask, “How can we get it?”
Mom says, “You’ll have to dig. The Arroyos would have been the first to help us if …” She hesitates.
I know that she is right, and I agree with her. “I’ll dig.”
EIGHT
The first thing this morning, the third day after the mudslide, Mr. Larios, Mr. Barabon, and Jorge Álvarez come with me to dig in the mud where the Arroyos’ place used to be. Because it stopped raining an hour or so ago, the mud has begun to dry. By taking soft steps, we can actually walk without sinking down very far. It doesn’t take us long to reach the Arroyos’.
For a long time we just stand there, staring at the dark muck. Finally I say to the others, “I think I know about where the store was.” I hesitate for a second and point to the ground. “The store was here, but the mud has moved everything back. Look at their roof.” The broken, splintered lumber and metal roofing is scattered on the ground, twenty-five to thirty feet back from the street, as if the storm simply grabbed it and flicked it away. I feel a small rush in my stomach and throat, like I might throw up, but I try to sound calm and sensible. “Maybe the mud pushed everything back. Maybe we should start digging about there,” I say, pointing to a spot ten feet or so from where we’re standing; this is where I guess the little trucha part of the house might be now. My workmates nod, and we begin digging.
Hurricane Page 4