“He’s a hell of a guy. I can’t begin to tell you how impressed I am by him.” Bruce took a few steps forward, put his hands squarely on Monica’s shoulders. “But don’t you go setting him up with Paige. Will is married, after all.”
“I wasn’t going to set them up. Paige is a handful.”
Bruce turned to scoop up his UConn baseball hat. He put it on, checked his reflection in the mirror above the fireplace, and rubbed his morning stubble. “Ready?”
Monica nodded, willing to let the conversation go for a minute while she allowed her mind to race. She went into the kitchen to grab the thermos of coffee and an old sweatshirt, then walked down to the water. Long Island Sound was still, making the water look thick and metallic, like liquid mercury. Bruce had already pulled the rowboat out of the garage, and it rested on the tangle of seaweed and rocks beyond the seawall. They loaded bait, rods, and a tackle box. Bruce rowed the boat across the silent, ethereal surface of the water. The morning fog concealed the low, flat arm of Long Island across the water.
When they settled on a spot, Monica said, in a hushed voice so as not to scare away the fish, “I feel really bad if my comment triggered more tension between Sylvia and Will. God, it was just an offhand comment. Will was the one who noticed the cone collection on my office shelf and asked me about them.”
Bruce shook his head and tossed his line. “You shouldn’t feel responsible, you didn’t know. But I think those two are in for a battle if Sylvia decides to pursue it.”
Monica’s shoulders slumped and she stared out at the water. Bruce glanced at her and said, “Oh, hell. I doubt she has that kind of cash anyway. We’re talking big bucks to transport Yvette.”
“Who has more of a right to make these types of decisions, a spouse or a parent?” Monica asked.
“In their case he does. Yvette would have had to have signed a legal document assigning Sylvia.”
“Do you think there’s a chance the venom treatment is a hoax?” Monica said, crinkling her nose as she wrapped a night crawler onto a fishhook. She held her hook out to Bruce for inspection. He nodded, and she cast her line.
“A hoax? Maybe. But not necessarily. An impulsive, irresponsible, unmonitored experiment is more like it,” Bruce said. “But you might call me a pessimist or a skeptic for saying that. Who knows, Monica, maybe it’s something brilliant and fantastic and we’re all going to be surprised. But I doubt it.” Something disturbed the glassy surface and he gave Monica the thumbs-up.
Monica thought, what if Alma’s beloved sea snails could turn out to be medicinal after all? And what a joyous miracle if their venom could help Yvette. Monica thought about the day she had massaged her, remembering the weird sensation that someone was in there.
Out of the blue, Bruce declared, “The thing I admired about your mother, in retrospect, was her devotion to nature. She was an environmentalist in a country that as a whole was ruthlessly ambitious. It wasn’t a popular point of view.”
Monica didn’t answer, and they were silent for a while. Perhaps suspecting what Monica was thinking, Bruce raised one eyebrow and switched the conversation back to where he was comfortable. “What’s weird is that I haven’t found any other information published on the furiosus. You’d think this would be big news even if its success was documented on rats. I need to dig deeper, I guess.”
“Paige can help. You know she has access to all those expensive academic Web sites through work.”
Bruce nodded and tugged on his line.
“So who’s paying for the cost of your research, Dad?”
“There’s a budget for this kind of thing.”
Monica got her first nibble, then a pull, and she began to reel in whatever was on the end of her line. Bruce whooped as she pulled up a striped bass. He unhooked it for her and threw it in the cooler.
As usual, they had succeeded in circumventing mention of Alma’s partner in the quest for the Conus. Years ago, even the most casual mention of Maximiliano Campos could bring on a silence and melancholy that lasted for days. But the morning’s talk of El Salvador naturally made her thoughts return to the man who had ruined life as they knew it, and the idea of her father reentering that world made her a bit uneasy, as if Maximiliano were still alive and waiting to wreak more destruction. But Max was dead, after all, and as she herself had said, the twelve-year civil war was over, the peace accords signed back in 1992. If anything, a trip down memory lane might make the past appear less overbearing, as a house appears smaller when a child returns to it as an adult.
Monica was twelve when her father put her on a Pan Am flight destined for Hartford. Shell-shocked and motherless, she sank into a silent depression during that first, long, rainy spring at Grandma Winters’s house. It wasn’t until the season warmed into summer that the nightmares began. Perhaps it was the silence of the forest with its trees as tall as cathedrals that invited the confessions of her soul. It was the safety of a nowhere New England town that finally allowed her mind to unburden itself in the darkness of her bedroom.
She dreamed of children running and shouting as they were hunted by unseen shooters; people in ski masks, armored trucks flying by, shouting warnings, telling everyone to run. Always there were black dogs in the background, and the recurring image of a village procession, painted faces floating by, a wooden Virgin Mary as big as a department store mannequin, with bright pink cheeks, carried on a makeshift float. In the dream Alma’s hand is slippery as a wet fish, and Monica loses her grip on her mother and is lost in the crowd. Alma disappears, but the hem of her yellow dress is still visible, a handful of it pinched between two bodies. Monica reaches for it, but in a moment, it too slips away. Monica wanders through the crowd, crying and calling for her mother. She passes street vendors selling ribbons of green mango soaking in salt and lime juice. She smiles when she comes upon a man peddling live chicks dyed green, pink, and sky blue. Alma is standing before the vendor, scolding him for cruelty to the chicks, many of which will absorb the coloring through their skin, poisoning them to death. The wind picks up and Alma evaporates; like the sawdust art on the sidewalks, she blows away, bright and colorful and fragmented into too many pieces to catch.
In the morning, the only evidence of Monica’s nightmares was fatigue and sweat stains on the sheets.
“What was that sound?” Monica asked her father, wrenched from the memory of the dream.
“What was what?” Bruce said without turning away from his fishing.
“I thought I just heard the sound of tinfoil crinkling.” She looked around her, at the water of Long Island Sound, and realized that she had imagined it. It must have been in the lap of the water against the little boat, the smell of raw fish that she associated with the sound of someone ripping and balling tinfoil, someone getting ready to cook over a campfire.
“How could you hear something onshore from this far away?” Bruce asked.
Monica shook her head. “It was just my imagination. I was daydreaming.”
Bruce opened the cooler again and released the smell of raw fish. She wrinkled her nose. No, it wasn’t the sound of tinfoil she heard. It was the crackle of a fire. It was another memory emerging from the farthest corners of her brain, prompted by the smell of fish and the ruminations about her mother. Then it came back to her, suddenly, like a short movie. One night, she and her mother had cleaned and gutted barracudas for guerrilla rebels.
MAXIMILIANO CAMPOS was nourishing a pack of students, faculty, and others associated with the Salvadoran revolution on a boatload of fish, and so everyone was calling him Jesus. “Fish for strength, fish for stealth,” Max said, as he passed around plates of grilled barracuda and hot tortillas with lime and rock salt on the side.
Almost one hundred people were at this beach property, ten minutes by car down the coast from Negrarena. The property didn’t exactly belong to Max; in fact, no one but Max knew the owner, but he had identified it to be a safe place, a remote and lonely stretch of land where the intellectual nucleus of the
revolution could meet to fill their bellies, laugh, sing, and play guitar without danger. Since it was on the coast, they couldn’t be cornered because there was always the option of escape by sea. El Trovador, as the property was named, had several acres of beachfront, with rustic outhouses and open-sided huts with roofs made of dried palm fronds. The entire kitchen consisted of a grill and a wide, flat griddle made of burned clay. On the beach, rowboats appeared, slow moving in the darkness of the approaching midnight. They were coming from Nicaragua and Honduras, through El Golfo de Fonseca, an inlet of water that fanned across all three countries.
“Tomorrow they are going to attack one of the foreign embassies downtown,” Alma had casually said to Monica. “But most of these people aren’t going to be directly involved. These are the thinkers, the political side. They don’t do the dirty work.”
“So are they good or bad?” Monica asked.
“They’re good,” Alma said, but tentatively. “At least, they have good intentions.”
“Then why are they hiding?”
“Because they’re communists, honey. If the National Guard finds out they’re here, they’ll come in and kill everyone.”
Monica swallowed hard and dug her fingers into her mother’s arm. “These people are all communists? As in guerrilleros?”
“Shh. Don’t say that so loud.”
“Are they going to kill us?” Monica pressed, switching into English.
“Shhh.” Alma put her fingers over Monica’s mouth and whispered. “Speak in Spanish. Don’t ever let them know you speak English.”
When she took her hand off Monica’s mouth, Alma relaxed and said, in Spanish, “Of course not. They’re Max’s friends. … It’s exciting just to be here, to see history unfold. But remember, our names are …” She pointed to herself and nodded her head, prompting Monica.
“You’re Leticia Ramos. And I’m your daughter, Fernanda.”
“And you go to the public school …”
“At Cantón El Farolito.”
“Don’t ever mention that you go to private school, okay? Or that your dad’s an American or that he’s a journalist. Put your arm around Max every once in a while. Pretend he’s your father.”
Repulsed at the thought, Monica turned and surveyed the group behind her. “Why are we here?”
“It’s our civic duty.”
“We already helped make the tortilla dough and cleaned all that disgusting fish. Can’t we go now?”
Alma smiled and cupped Monica’s face with her hands. “Not just yet. We have to help Max with one more thing. A wonderful, incredibly special thing. …” Alma put her arm around Monica’s neck and pulled her toward the shadows, away from the crowd. They walked across a dark, sandy field full of the smoky smell of fish cooking. Monica wondered if someone would smell the fish and call the National Guard. She shivered. Why had her mother dragged her here? She had heard about these people from her grandmother, her father, their friends, kids from school. It seemed everyone she knew was against them except her mother. Monica tried hard to shake off her nerves and just trust her mother.
They came upon a tiny thatched-roof hut. Monica could hear someone sobbing inside, a wretched, painful sound, as if a girl were being tortured. She froze, but Alma pulled her along. “C’mon, it’s okay.”
A man was standing in the shadows. He took off his hat and pressed it against his chest as they passed. They stepped over a sleeping dog lying across the entrance and entered the hut. There was no furniture except for a hammock hanging empty across the room, a transistor radio on the floor, and a dirty blue-and-white Salvadoran flag, which hung on a crude pole nailed into one of the rafters. The room smelled of sweat and rubbing alcohol.
Maximiliano was kneeling on the packed-dirt floor, and the parts of his face that were not bearded gleamed with sweat. He was wearing khaki pants and a dirty, bloodstained white guayabera that reached down to his thighs like a lab coat. An old woman who was normally his cook was at his side. When he saw them come in, he looked up and smiled. “Are you sure la princesa can handle this?” he asked with not just a bit of sarcasm.
Alma nodded. “Monica has seen every type of animal birth at Negrarena. She’s ready to graduate to humans.”
Max said, “Come,” and signaled with his finger to Monica. No one asked the patient.
Monica stood next to where Max was kneeling. On a straw mat lay a girl, two or three years older than Monica, at the most fifteen. Her black, straight hair was splayed all around her head like a fan. She was lying on her back, legs parted, an enormous belly weighing down her small frame.
“This is how life begins, Monica,” Max said, pointing to the head that was beginning to crown. Monica craned her head and looked. She blinked, took in the wonder of that little, hairy head emerging. It wasn’t so different from the livestock births, except the girl’s cries were far more unnerving. The whole scene made Monica grit her teeth. Maximiliano pressed his fingers around the little head. Monica watched, fascinated but growing woozy. Alma stood over her shoulder for a moment, but was soon helping Max to shift and reposition the girl’s hips and to soak up some of the blood.
The room began to spin a little, so Monica crawled to the girl’s side. She talked to her, dabbed at the sweat on her forehead and neck with the hem of her skirt. The girl gave Monica her hand, which was hot and moist with sweat, and Monica took it, but turned her head away from the scene. She was trying to gain her footing over the swimmy feeling, all the while feeling some kind of elation in the look of gratitude in the girl’s face. The girl continued squeezing Monica’s hand, harder, until Monica wanted to cry out herself, but then the baby was out and the adults clapped and laughed and announced its male sex in unison: ”!Es varón!”
The adults were busy cleaning up the girl and the new baby, which had already found its lungs, when the girl turned to Monica and whispered in a hoarse, exhausted voice, “Do you want it?”
“Want what?” Monica asked.
”Mi angelito.”
“You’re giving your baby away?” Monica asked, stunned.
“My father said I have to get rid of it. We already have eleven kids in our house.”
Monica looked into the girl’s face, round and short, with the characteristic thick, straight eyelashes of El Salvador’s indigenous people.
“You can feed him breast milk, can’t you?” Monica said, thinking she had resolved the issue.
The girl smiled sadly. “For a while. And in six months he’ll begin to need some real food.”
“What about the baby’s father?”
The girl looked away. ”No tiene.”
“No father? How could he have no father?”
“You know how it goes.”
Monica didn’t have the foggiest idea of “how it goes,” but she nodded anyway, trying to understand something so beyond her. The girl raised her head and asked Alma and Maximiliano if either of them wanted the baby. “I can’t take him,” Alma said, “but don’t worry, we’ll help you find a good home for him.”
Monica spoke in English this time so the others wouldn’t understand. “Mom, I want the baby. I’ll take care of it.”
“This is a child, not a puppy,” Alma said. The matron returned with a dishpan of water, and they cleaned the baby to screams that made them all pull in their heads like turtles.
Monica insisted that she could take care of him: she’d bathe him, feed him, teach him to read and write. But Alma shook her head no again and again. She and Max left the hut together with instructions for the matron to finish up. Max was going to clean up and get back to his guests. They let Monica stay with the girl. The girl’s father was waiting outside to take the girl and her unwanted baby home.
Monica watched, cross-legged on the floor, as the matron showed the girl how to nurse the baby. Monica thought of the cattle, horses, pigs, and chickens at Negrarena, eating bushels of feed every day. Was it possible that anyone could be so poor that they couldn’t afford to feed a little creatur
e that weighed less than seven pounds?
“I’m Maria del Carmen. What’s your name?” the girl asked.
Monica hesitated, not knowing if this girl was one of the communists on the beach. Outside, the girl’s father called to her, and the girl replied that she needed just a moment more.
“!Sos comunista?” Monica asked outright.
“I don’t bother with that stuff,” the girl answered.
Confident that the girl could be trusted, she whispered, ”Me llamo Mónica.”
“!Mónica qué?” The girl insisted on a last name.
Suddenly understanding the girl’s boldness, she answered, “Winters Borrero.”
“Oh, you’re very rich then,” Maria del Carmen said, brightening. She rocked the baby in her arms and smiled broadly at Monica. “God sent you to us.”
When the matron went to fetch some aspirin, Maria del Carmen called her father over and whispered in his ear. The old man mumbled something to Monica that she didn’t understand because he was toothless. He carried his exhausted daughter in his arms, and the two disappeared into the darkness of the fields beyond the beach.
When the matron returned, Monica was curled up on the straw mat where the girl had been. The matron knelt beside the figure she thought was Maria del Carmen. Instead, she found Monica whispering to the infant. Monica had wrapped him in the Salvadoran flag for lack of a swaddling cloth, and the baby’s little fingers curled around her index finger. She had unbuttoned her cotton shirt, and the baby happily suckled on the unopened buds of her tiny, pubescent breasts.
“YOU KNOW we can’t keep that baby,” Alma said. “It has to go to the orphanage.”
”He,” Monica corrected. She sat at the kitchen table at Caracol, watching Francisca feed the baby powdered milk from a Raggedy Ann baby bottle that had been Monica’s.
“Why not?” Monica insisted. “Everybody else has a brother or a sister. Why can’t I?”
“Because, Monica Marina, we can’t take care of him.”
The Heiress of Water: A Novel Page 8