The college visit had gone even better than I’d expected. My parents were taken by the picturesque, quintessentially Californian campus, with its red-tiled roofs and solid sandstone buildings. The student-tour reps were bright and accomplished, but not too intimidating, and the professors we met were the kind of people that show up as experts on the six o’clock news. Even the dining halls were surprisingly impressive: the food was actually quite fresh and delicious. I had a burrito that was a lot tastier than anything I’d ordered at the local Mexican spot back home.
My high SAT scores would put me in the running for at least a partial scholarship; a good thing, too, since the tuition and fees were no joke. I made a stop at the financial-aid office to pick up applications for a host of scholarships and bursaries. My guidance counselor back in Ohio had informed me that there was plenty of money out there, you just needed to know how to find it, and she’d been right: there were funds available for all kinds of different groups, from religious and ethnic to geographical or hobby-based.
Once the campus visit ended, we’d made straight for San Francisco, where Dad had booked us a gorgeous hotel right near the Ferry Terminal. The terminal, to my surprise, was not just a place to catch a boat, but also something of a food paradise. So far, I’d indulged in some of the best Vietnamese and Mexican dishes I’d ever tasted, not to mention the delights I’d sampled at the farmers’ market that set up shop in and around the building twice a week—fresh produce, artisanal cheeses, and a breakfast sandwich made with maple bacon and sourdough bread that I’d fantasize about for months to come.
Now, exploring the touristy, somewhat tacky, area around Fisherman’s Wharf, watching the sea lions sunbathe on the floating docks, my dad happily snaps pictures of us on his new phone. He hasn’t touched a potato chip since we boarded the plane. I don’t think I’d been this blissfully content since a family trip to Walt Disney World, back when I was in fourth grade.
“What should we do now?” Dad asks, whipping out his San Francisco guidebook. My mom and I glance at each other and simultaneously roll our eyes. Dad is literally attached at the hip to his book—he hasn’t taken a step without consulting it first.
“It says the original Ghirardelli’s is nearby,” he announces. “Anyone up for a hot fudge sundae?”
“Does anyone every say ‘no’ to that question?” Mom looks over at me. “How about it? You up for brownies and ice cream?”
I groan and clutch at my waistline. “We just had shrimp! I’m going to need new jeans.”
“Don’t be a spoilsport,” says Mom, elbowing me in the ribs. “We’re on vacation. If we don’t put on a few pounds, how can we claim to have had a good time?”
I follow my parents to the famous ice-cream parlor, where we take a number and get in line. Despite the freezing cold, we’re surrounded by people either eating or waiting to eat ice cream. Everything looks and sounds delicious, but the thought of eating ice cream with the wind whipping at my hair, blowing it in every direction, chills me to my core. I rub my hands together and bob up and down in an effort to warm up.
Mom notices me shivering. “There’s a woman selling hats over there.” She fishes some cash out of her purse. “Go get something.”
“I don’t really need a hat, do I?” I glance over at the hat lady, skeptical.
“Most of your body heat is lost through your head,” Mom replies authoritatively. “Trust me, I know. I was bald. It’s freakin’ freezing.”
I grin. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll meet you back here in five. Don’t go having any hot fudge without me.”
She feigns indignation. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
I stroll over to the vendor, who brightens considerably when she notices my lack of a proper jacket or other cold-weather attire.
“Chilly, isn’t it?” She smiles toothily. “We have lots of nice hats. One for ten, two for fifteen.”
I examine the hats. They’re handknit, and most feature cartoon characters like Hello Kitty or SpongeBob. I pick a funky purple one that looks like an owl. Not my style, but perfect for Tess. I put it aside and comb through the rest of the collection until I find one that isn’t too flashy or quirky, pale pink with a small yellow flower attached to one side.
I’m handing over a twenty-dollar bill when I hear a familiar male voice, shouting. Instinctively, I look over at the ice-cream line. There’s a crowd around the shouting man, who is on his knees. I feel my stomach turn. My father.
I abandon the hats and the money and run toward him, oblivious to the protests of the vendor, waving my hats and a five in the air.
“Dad!” I cry. “Dad!”
“Oh, Cat,” he says, seeing me, his voice breaking. “Cat.”
Mom is on the ground, unconscious and shaking.
Chapter 14
After
“You fix clothing?” Anna makes the hand motions of a needle and thread as a group of guys rushes past carrying a comrade howling in pain. He has a large gash to his upper arm that’s quickly soaking the dirty towel wrapped around it with blood.
“Sewing, you mean?” I ask, confused. Then I realize what she’s really asking.
“Oh—no,” I say hastily, stepping backwards. “No, no. I can’t sew a person. No.”
Anna shrugs and gestures for me to follow. “Get the alcohol,” she says simply.
I grab the alcohol, along with some cotton strips I’d just finished sterilizing. Praying Anna is a decent seamstress, I rush to the back of the tent where she is instructing the boys to lay the patient out on our makeshift gurney.
“What’s his name?” I ask, forgetting to use my Spanish.
“Pedro.” For the first time, I notice Rafael is among the group. Our eyes meet. “He was cut.”
“Apparently.” My eyes linger on the gaping wound as Anna yanks off the filthy towels, muttering to herself. She instructs me to clean the area. Gently, I dab at Pedro’s arm with some damp cloths before swabbing the area with alcohol. I watch as Anna prepares a needle and thread, dipping the needle in the alcohol before turning to grimly face the patient.
“This is going to hurt,” she warns him in Spanish.
Pedro says nothing, but he closes his eyes. I take his other hand and, thinking of old movies, grab a wooden ruler and place it in his mouth.
“Um, mordisco si necesario,” I say lamely. My Spanish is improving, but it’s still pretty rudimentary. Pedro’s eyes fly open and he stares at me, uncomprehending, until Rafael mutters something to him. He nods, relaxes, and bites down on the stick as I thought I had suggested.
“Did I just tell him his sister married a cocker spaniel or something?” I ask, as Anna begins to stitch up the wound. I feel Pedro stiffen, so I squeeze his hand tightly. He squeezes back, trembling.
“No.” Rafael tries not to laugh, given the gravity of the situation, but his eyes twinkle. “It was almost understandable. It’s the grammar that presents issues.”
“Si,” I say.
“You must show patience,” he says, not for the first time. “You are still a new student.”
I have been studying Spanish with Rafael for about two weeks now—since that night by the river.
“You will learn from your work, too,” he tells me. “Try to use your Spanish more.”
I should, but I’ve been spoiled in the Infirmary. Anna speaks enough English that I’m able to be lazy about practicing. And she wants to improve her English, so when I do try to use my limited Spanish, more often than not she answers me in English anyway.
The village is grateful for our day-to-day help, but what I’ve learned is that they’re mostly grateful for our trailer full of Western medications and first-aid supplies. Before we came, Anna told me, all they had was alcohol, distilled and produced right here at the camp, and a couple of bottles of expired Aspirin. That’s what the raids and attacks on the base are usually about, Rafael expl
ained. The rebel groups know we have supplies. Advil and Polysporin and antibiotics. Little miracles in little bottles.
“Aaaaah!” Pedro’s legs kick reflexively as Anna pokes at his arm the way you might if mending a sock.
“Shhh,” I whisper soothingly. I reach for a damp cloth and press it against his forehead. “It’s almost over.”
Pedro stifles a sob and bites down harder on the ruler. I guess the Victorians knew what they were doing with the wooden stick.
It’s over within a few minutes. I hand Pedro some Aspirin and a small cup of water.
“You need to rest,” I say. “Necesitas descansar.”
Pedro stares at me, gaze flicking back and forth between my eyes, and I wonder again if I’ve told him something ridiculous instead of reassuring. Then he swallows the Aspirin and, without a word, swings his legs off the table and stalks out.
“Was it something I said?” I stare after him.
Rafael puts his hand on my shoulder. “He’s just ashamed he was weak in front of a girl,” he explains. “You should take no offense.”
“None taken.” I grab a clean sponge and begin mopping up the mess. There’s a fair bit of blood on the ground and the gurney. “What happened to him?”
“He slipped,” Rafael says simply. “Near the river. Cut his arm on the rock. We were on a trading mission.”
“Trading mission?” I ask curiously. I know the village interacts with others, but the politics remain fuzzy to me. Anna’s tried explaining some of it, but a lot of it is confusing.
“With one of the native tribes,” he says, and I perk up, interested.
“Native tribes? Really?” I picture a row of men clutching handmade spears, clad only in loincloths fashioned from leaves and feathers. “Is that dangerous?”
He laughs. “No. They are not isolated. They have contact with the outside. They just maintain a more traditional lifestyle.”
“Oh.” I wring the sponge out. A mix of blood and water trickles into the sink. “So more like Native Americans on a reservation.” I modify my mental image, swapping loincloths for shorts and Nike T-shirts.
“I would imagine so.” Rafael grabs a cloth and bends to help me. “It is not like National Geographic, with spears.” He grins slyly, as if he knows what I was thinking.
“Of course not,” I say quickly, looking away.
“There are more isolated tribes, but not in this area of the jungle.” He tosses the rag in the sink. “Not so close to San Pedro. There have been settlers here for years, on and off.”
This much I know. Anna has managed to convey some details during our downtime together here. Between patients, she tells me what she knows, and in turn I tell her about America, and my mother. The village was built up around an old camp that was abandoned years ago, after the rubber trade collapsed. Initially cleared and built by European explorers and entrepreneurs, it was later used as the headquarters for a now-defunct Amazon tour operator. Since the war, it has operated as a village mainly for refugees from San Pedro and other nearby towns devastated during the civil war.
Rafael straightens. “I will see you later? I’m going to go after him,” he says, gesturing in the direction Pedro had taken.
“Yes, sure,” I say. “The usual time?”
“Si.” He smiles at me. “Hasta luego.”
Anna tears the red-stained sheets from the bed and smirks at me as Rafael disappears through the tent flap. “He is liking you,” she says, winking at me.
“Oh, no,” I say, blushing. “He’s just trying to be nice. He’s happy we’re here to help.”
Anna waves her hand dismissively and snorts. “It is romance,” she declares. She grabs a mop and clutches it to her in a passionate embrace.
My cheeks burn as I turn away, busying myself with fitting the bed with new sheets. Behind me, Anna chuckles. She’s only two years older than me, but it feels like a lot more. Her mother was a nurse and midwife, and Anna often went with her for deliveries and house calls. She’s a wealth of both regular and traditional medical knowledge; when she learned of my IBS, she mixed me some kind of minty tea made from a local plant that works wonders on my nervous stomach. I’ve barely had an episode since I started drinking it regularly. She was studying to be a doctor when the war broke out. When I ask if she’s sorry she couldn’t finish school, she shrugs.
“I’m more useful here than I would be in school,” she says, and it’s true. The camp couldn’t function without her. I wonder if things will ever improve to the point where she can return to her studies—and if she would even want to. It might be difficult to accept the inertia of the lecture hall once you’ve been out in the field getting your hands dirty for so long.
Anna has explained to me that many in the village were in the middle and upper classes before the war, including teenagers like her, who had been studying at university or in apprenticeships before their lives were abruptly changed forever. “Probably not so different from you,” she said in Spanish one afternoon as we rolled bandages together, taking turns with a small battery-operated fan to counter the stifling heat of the small hut. I listened closely, struggling to understand. “Only our neighborhoods had private policía to keep us safe.”
Anna told me how her parents, along with most here, were professionals or merchants, and found themselves denounced and imprisoned—or killed, along with the government and its officials, when the president fell.
“That seems unfair,” I said in a mix of English and halting Spanish. “They were just regular people. The government was corrupt.”
Anna looked around and leaned forward, holding the fan between us. “The government was corrupt,” she repeated slowly in English. Her voice was low. “And—how do you say? Nos hemos beneficiado de la corrupción.” We benefited from the corruption.
“There’s corruption everywhere,” I said, thinking of the newspapers back home. Daily headlines about insider trading, sleazy campaign financing, bankers getting rich off phony mortgages. “Is it that different, really?”
After that, though, she clammed up. “Do not say anything I told you here,” she said quietly, grabbing my arm with her roughened hand, her eyes full of fear and guilt. “Please.” I nodded and promised, wondering what would happen to her if someone overheard. Who was she afraid of? Eduardo? Rafael?
Now, I grin good-naturedly at Anna’s love dance with the mop and lean into the sink to wash my hands. Anna goes to dump the bucket out back, where mosquitoes will lay eggs in the resulting pool. In this humidity, the water never fully evaporates. Unlike the others here, I don’t have to live in fear that the fever will snare me. By an accident of birth, I have both access to and the funds for highly effective preventative medication. Many of our patients in the Enfermería are malaria sufferers, writhing and delirious, bellowing with fever. Once the parasite infects you, it can recur for life, stalking you like Captain Hook’s alarm-clock-swallowing crocodile.
I glance outside. It will be time for dinner soon; I no longer have a watch or phone to rely on, but I’ve become much more adept at judging the hour by the position of the sun’s shadows beneath the endless canopy, together with the day’s increasingly predictable routine. Dinner in the village is often a communal event, served up in a grassy area near the canvas tents where many sleep. The Enfermería and other common areas are slightly farther along the clearing. Sometimes, Margo and Taylor and I stay for dinner.
The village is well run, and from what I’ve seen, Rafael plays a large part in that. It helps that many here are young, and united by a common cause. As Anna explained, most are war orphans, either literally or figuratively. Rafael’s parents are alive, but they’re in jail. His mother was a vocal human-rights advocate who criticized the new regime; his father was guilty by association. Anna’s father was killed in the fighting; her mother remains missing. Anna’s sure she’s dead, but her brother Julio refuses to believe it. Jul
io is one of those entrusted with village security, patrolling the perimeter. Anna says she can’t believe anyone would trust him with a gun, and that he used to be a mamma’s boy who cried in the dark. It’s hard to believe her, since Julio is well over six feet and two hundred pounds.
I’ve tried asking questions about what, exactly, Rafael’s politics are, but it’s tough getting a clear answer. From my conversations with Rafael, I can see that he sees the village not simply as a refugee camp, but as fertile ground for teaching the others political philosophy, the virtues of liberal democracy, and social welfare. However, many of the other young men here just seem angry, ready to storm buildings in the capital and shoot off rounds of ammunition. Anna’s mentioned that the village is in talks with other, similar, groups across the country about forming a sort of network of opposition, but so far no one can agree on a unified message. I can imagine. Our student government back home had trouble uniting the student body, and all they had to do was get a bunch of privileged middle-class kids to show up at Homecoming.
That evening, Anna convinces me to stay for dinner, and I in turn pressure Margo and Taylor.
“I’m starting to think you guys like it here,” Taylor grumbles at dinner that night. We’re having chicken in some kind of spicy marinade made from locally grown peppers and herbs. It tastes like something you’d eat at a trendy restaurant back home, if you can genuinely call any restaurants in Ohio trendy.
Margo ignores him. “Do you like the chicken?” she asks. “I helped prepare it.”
“Did you make this sauce?” I ask, using my flatbread to soak up some of the extra. “It’s amazing.”
“No,” says Margo. “I killed the chicken.”
Undiscovered Country Page 13