I remember the sun catching my eye, reflected from the sideview mirror as we turn the corner and head out of town. I remember it is bright. But not blindingly so. And as I stare at the little bouncing bubble that rolls along the wrinkles of the old silver-painted plastic that transforms that piece of glass into a mirror, I forget the words to the song and my sister laughs and punches me in the shoulder. And when I finally look away from it and I look into the rearview mirror, my father’s eyes are there and the pupils and irises have disappeared and they are just two large, black spots, like a demon’s, staring back at us. It is an illusion of staring into the sun, though at the time, I may not have realized it.
I find my way to the hotel and go to the counter. As I reach for my wallet, the woman looks up from her computer and apologizes because there are no vacancies. It comes as a surprise, because the town itself is practically vacant. Though I suppose the faceless men and women, the ghosts of all those who lived here before and who are still to live here in the years to come, need someplace to wait. She tells me a school bus heading for the coast came in just the day before, full of young men waiting to listen to the Reverend preach about General Anselmo’s work and all of the selfless things he’s trying to accomplish out there. On top of that, she tells me there is a small medical convention being held right now at the hospital. I ask her if she knows of any other place in town where I might be able to stay the night. She shrugs and I start to walk away. Before I leave again, she calls me back and says, “Actually, there’s a woman, Elizabeth Hesse, she sometimes rents out her spare room.”
There’s a brief moment when I consider ignoring her and continuing on my way out. But I really do need a place to stay. At least a place to nap and wash myself off after the long and unpleasant train ride I’ve just rid myself of. I return to the woman and let her write an address down on a card and hand it to me. I don’t need the address, but I take it anyway. As though seeing it in writing, seeing it come from another person’s hand, solidifies that the house actually exists. That Elizabeth Hesse actually exists, and exists here, nevertheless.
When I arrive at the house, I knock and hope that nobody’s home. That hope dies as soon as I hear the flurry of hurried footsteps stampeding down a staircase. A moment later, she is standing there. I realize that I am sweating. I wipe my forehead and smile and wonder if she can see the way my lips are trembling. She looks at me for a moment and then over my shoulder as though she’s expecting someone else, as though there must be someone behind me and all she has to do is spot him to make him materialize there.
She looks a mess. Her hair is a nest, her eyes are sunken little balls nestled in tired sacks of puffed dark skin. Her lips are dry and cracking. The house releases a puff of heated air, but she is hunched over and burdened with the weight of a heavy coat. There appears to be something unnatural about the way it lays on her back but I can’t quite determine what it is. At least, I think to myself, I have found the subtle difference I had been looking to find. The Elizabeth Hesse I knew was a young and vibrant woman. Not this aging wretch.
When she finally looks at me again she asks, “Can I help you?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” I say. I run a hand through my hair and she watches it with all the intent of a child seeing the world for the first time. “I need a place to stay for the afternoon. Possibly overnight. The girl at the hotel sent me here. They’re full.” She says nothing for a moment, only continues to inspect the motion of my lips and the muscles twitching beneath my face. I pull out my wallet and a small fold of bills. “I can pay in cash, of course.” I add.
She takes the soft fold of money, counts some out and hands me the rest. I tuck it into my pocket. “Come on in,” she says. She steps aside and holds onto the door as though it is the only crutch holding her up. I notice that she takes another long look out into the desert before closing the door.
The lights are off. I push through the dust that floats in the stripes of sunlight sneaking in from between the shades of the windows as though I’m God and they are my futile little planets. As she leads me toward the staircase, I look at the pictures hanging on the walls, pictures of a smiling family huddled together in front of a hung sheet of cheap canvas. I glance down a long antechamber that leads into a garage. There is a light on down there, hanging from the ceiling, but the doorway only remains in my field of vision for a matter of a few degrees and then we are past it.
I go up the staircase before she tells me to. It doesn’t occur to me that she might ask me how I know where the spare room is at, but before I reach the second floor I realize that she is far too preoccupied to notice me. I lead her past the first room and pause. There is a little girl sitting on the edge of the bed in there with a doll in her lap. She is separating out the long strands of plastic hair so that she can braid it. I feel confused, disoriented. I have to check behind me to make sure that it actually is Elizabeth Hesse standing there. “Is—she yours?” I ask.
The woman urges me forward with a hand on my back. “No,” she whispers. “Her parents just—” She considers her words carefully. “Passed away. I’m watching her until we can figure out where she belongs. Her name is Ingot.”
I nod. We come to the second room on the side of the hallway and I let myself in. Behind us, on the other side of the stairway, there is the master bedroom and a bathroom. Mrs. Hesse points the bathroom out to me before we go into the room. It’s a small plain room. Pale blue wallpaper, a single window with white curtains trimmed with blue ribbon. A twin-sized bed with a comforter to match the walls. A small closet without a door and a small bureau against the wall.
“Here you are,” she says. “Let me know if you need anything.” She walks away and closes the door behind her. As soon as she is gone, I let myself fall to the edge of the bed. It seems a stronger feat to have come up those stairs with her and keep my composure than I thought myself capable. I empty my pockets onto the bed table. My wallet, a watch, a few bills. It’s all I have left to my name.
I slip off my shoes and socks and then I leave the room and go down the hall to the bathroom. I take a glance in at the little girl. She looks up at me and gives a half-hearted wave. I smile and wave back and she looks back down at her doll.
There is a guest towel hanging on the back of the door. I strip off my clothes and fold them up along the crack beneath the door so that the steam won’t escape into the hall. I turn on the water, as hot as it will go, and slide the shower curtain closed over the pale pink tiles of the tub. I stand in front of the mirror for a long time and inspect myself. It occurs to me that anyone looking into a mirror must see only what they don’t want to see. I can’t find anything I don’t want to see, but at the same time, there’s nothing there that I do want to see, and that equates to just about the same.
A cloud rises over the shower curtain and collapses down onto the floor and around my feet. The humidity reminds me of home. A small tropical basin near the western coast of South America, where a self-sufficient community of native shepherds and American excavators was slowly developed. Rather, the native shepherds created the village and the American excavators came later to live on the outskirts and share in the economy. I arrive there when I am eight or nine, just before age stops being something of importance to me, hand-in-hand with the only person I would ever really trust. A trust that, after nearly a decade passes, I will discover one morning has been a mocking farce. The morning I wake up and look across our hut to his cot and see that he has gone. It isn’t unusual for him, for Father, to leave early to catch fish or small animals in the traps we have set up around the basin. An early start on skinning and de-boning our day’s meals. And so I go about my business. I go out to the field where our sheep are waiting, where I open the gate and watch them graze for an hour until the sun rises.
In the mornings, you can see the humidity form in great clouds from small pools of dew collected on the ground. Cupped ferns as huge as I, that collect rain and condensation ov
ernight, will suddenly transform into great steaming geysers. Those that exist in the deepest pits of shade are let to keep their treasures, and small, sustained ecosystems grow in those. Hopping toads, fish, a plethora of protozoa and larger water bugs create thriving civilizations within the leaves, each presided over by a hawk or kingfisher who serves as god, to dole out death or mercy as it sees fit, perched high above in the canopy where, Father tells me, the souls of those frogs and insects and fish will go after the bird, inevitably, decides to devour them.
He hasn’t returned by the time I come back from the fields. I wait a bit and then go to the schoolhouse. It is a small hut, longer than those that house us, and it serves as daycare for the youngest children, as school for the ones old enough and smart enough to realize the importance of knowledge, and where the few older children (as I was nearly twenty years by the time Father left) can go to study from the outdated books stolen from university libraries and somehow survived to find themselves in the middle of the jungle.
It is only the next morning, when he still hasn’t returned, that I seek out the village elder, a wise old man with a smooth bald head and skin that clings to his bones in the same manner that an elephant wears its leather. He doesn’t seem surprised when I tell him that Father has been gone since yesterday, he only smiles complacently and reaches into his tattered vest to pull out a sealed envelope. It has my name printed on it. I thank him and leave with it wrinkled in my anxious grip. When I get home, I open it eagerly and pluck out the piece of dull yellow parchment. It is from Father, and it reads only one line, “I need to leave. I’m sorry.”
I climb into the shower and watch the dirt and sweat create amorphous trails from the soles of my feet. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a proper shower. It takes a minute for the hot water to soak through the dust that plugs each of my pores, to clear them out, and finally touch my body. It is a rejuvenating feel, one that I relish. I raise my head to the ceiling but keep my eyes closed and let the water hit my throat and cascade down my chest. I realize at some point that I’m also crying. I don’t know why. Not in particular, at least, though I imagine it has something to do with being back in this house.
I stand there until the hot water runs cold, then I step out and dry myself and wrap my waist with the towel and I return to my room. I lock my door, drop the towel and I lay down on the bed. I try to remember whether it has been longer since I’ve taken a shower or since I’ve slept in a bed, and I fall asleep amidst the calculations.
As I sleep, I dream the same dream I have most nights. Though, it is not a dream so much as it is a memory. A memory of a woman who lived in our village in South America. Her name is Doña Gabriella Garcià. She is an older woman whom I had found instantly captivating upon our arrival, though I am just a boy and unable to articulate the attraction in any way, even to myself, because of her flawless and lightly tanned skin, the long black hair that she wears wild around her often-bare shoulders, and the small breasts that bounce, unbound beneath the loose, silky shirts that she wears and that look to point skyward when she walks through the village. I am fascinated with her, and being too young at this time to work, I sit for hours in our hut, sometimes while Father is there and sometimes while he is out trying to figure out what to do with ourselves because we have just come to live in the village and he doesn’t yet have a job and isn’t quite sure whether we will be able to stay for any length of time or if we’ll need to leave.
I spend these hours peering out our window at her apartment, which is on the second floor of a small brick building just across the dirt road from us. I watch for her to come home, and when she does, I watch the loose swaying hem of her skirt pulse around her knees. I watch the breeze blow it back behind her like a tail as she climbs the rickety wooden stairs and catwalk to her front door on the higher of the two-tiered bungalows. I watch her disappear into the darkness of her home. And I fantasize about what goes on in there. Doña Garcià is a fortuneteller, and though she is eons younger than Father, she is obviously unobtainable to a boy who is still seasons from the frontier edge of puberty. I am desperately in love with her, though, and I spend sleepless nights watching the stain of moonlight glide across the second floor of that building just waiting for it to illuminate the strings of hay that curtain her window, the thin plank of door crested with a rusted bolt discovered at the edge of a Chilean bay and used now as a knob. It is only after the moon passes, or on nights dark with starlessness, that I can find rest. Nights when I can see her shadow walking about behind the strings of hay I nearly leap out of bed to squint and try to interpret the actions by those vague shiftings of light.
Still ignorant of the pleasures one can find in a woman’s body, my greatest desire is to sit at her table with my arm outstretched, and to let her take my hand and trace the dimples of the rough skin there, to feel the quickened pulse of my lust for her, and to tell me my future. To watch her baby blue-ringed eyes scan my body and take me in so that she will remember me for eternity. She has a young son, a few years younger than me, though she is unmarried and, as far as I can tell, never has any male visitors at her apartment. After a year of admiring her from my bedroom window, from which I gather her brief images like a collection I might later assemble into a reasonable facsimile of her whole self, this son suddenly disappears.
Rumors abound as to what has happened to the boy. He was carried off by panthers who will raise him as one of their own. His father has come late one night to steal him back, though I know that one is untrue on account of keeping her under near-constant surveillance. Half a dozen others that spread quietly through town, particularly amongst the children, along with the explicit instructions not to ask her about it. Doña Garcià has always had the distinct disadvantage of, having been born, raised, and giving birth to her son in another country before coming here to a village full of natives, being an outsider. But after the disappearance of her son, she becomes bitter and withdrawn entirely. What little interaction she had with the villagers before now becomes purely professional, and even then, tinted with the unfriendliness of grief. For me, her withdrawal only makes her more fascinating.
Unfortunately, as it so happens, Doña Garcià is only a fortuneteller by day. By night, she is a prostitute, serving herself to the American excavators who are set up at the edge of the village in their canvas tents, many of which are better equipped than our stick-built huts. I am too young to understand this and why Father has strictly forbidden me from going anywhere near Doña Garcià, and it only makes me want her to feel my palm all the more. Soon, the yearly Carnivàle is upon us, and the village transforms itself into a varicolored celebration. Booths are set up in the streets, with games and merchandise and activities, for the villagers and the Americans to entertain themselves while they drink. Doña Garcià has a booth where she will read palms, and for the entire week before the festival, I am sleepless with the anticipation of finally being able to sit with her. When the day comes, I dress in my best suit and Father takes me out to explore the booths. He takes me to play the games, we eat all the sweet corn and fried dough and candied cockroaches we can, but when I ask to have my future read, he simply refuses, leads me away from that booth by the collar and preaches to me about disease and impropriety.
We go home after that and I pout as the musicians wander up and down the streets and the drunken crowds laugh in raucous clouds. But I had seen the lines formed outside Doña Garcià’s booth and I have a new determination to fulfill my dream of having my palms read and my future told. I watch her apartment from my window as I always do, though tonight I am waiting for Father to fall asleep rather than for Doña Garcià to return. It is my good fortune that he has taken more to drink than he is used to and passes out before the moon even touches her door. When he does, I pull a blanket over his body to keep it warm and comfortable and I sneak out the front door. I have never climbed the wooden stairway that I’ve spent so many hours observing, though I have come to know every step that will creak and
every position from which I will be visible from the windows of our hut. I creep up to the second floor and into Doña Garcià’s apartment where I wait for her to return from the festival.
The reek of her home is overwhelming from the very moment I close her door behind me. It is a thick and sour fog that rises up off the furniture and the walls. I can imagine thin streams of it rising up with my hand as it leaves the doorknob. On top of that, I am blind in the darkness until the moon hits her front window and dips her apartment in ephemeral titanium. It is a small and quaint place. One room, plus a small bathroom that doesn’t have a door, off to the side. An old round table is set up in the center of the room, with several piles of cards lain out in what appears to be a specific order, though I can’t determine what that order is. I go to it and draw a card. There is a picture of a moth hovering above a hornet’s nest that hangs from a thin, bony branch. Another card has the picture of a faceless uniformed soldier. One has a lion tamer. One shows a vagabond in rags, traveling through a wide desert. A witchdoctor. A hooded executioner with an axe slung over one shoulder. A priest with a burning cross hanging on the wall behind him. A woman with feathered arms outstretched and falling from the peak of a mountain.
It is then that I notice the odd geography of the rest of her apartment. I place the cards back down in the order I had drawn them. There is a small steel bed frame in the corner of the room, topped with a straw mattress that is covered with a pile of blankets placed like rolling hills or the dunes. The sour smell of her home grows as I approach that bed. And when I pull the blanket off with a deft swipe, I see the body of a young boy, his stomach has caved in and his face is dripping off his bones. Wet strings of muscle and tissue connect him to the blanket and snap with wet splatters that dot my face. I don’t have time to react because from behind me comes a shrill and vulgar Portuguese curse.
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