Alma returned the turtle to its upright position and looked up, first at the faces of the people standing in front, then beyond them. Monica instinctively darted sideways and hid behind the tall man. Her heart punched at her rib cage.
A hand went up. “Excuse me, Dr. Borrero,” a familiar voice said, loud and booming like the voice of a stage actor. “If cats have nine lives, how many do sea creatures have?” Everyone turned to look. In sudden horror, Monica realized that it was her father speaking. Alma was motionless—a stunned fish playing dead, trying to blend into the environment. Slowly, she looked down and began dropping the turtles into the pan of water, one by one, each making a soft splashing noise.
”Sólo una,” she said simply. Just one.
“Well, it appears that you, Dr. Borrero, have more than one,” he said. “Like a cat.”
The crowd was silent, not because they understood what was going on, but rather, because a tall, green-eyed man had just shouted something in a foreign language. They gawked unashamedly. Alma stood up and took a step forward, toward Bruce.
“Bruce Winters,” Alma said. “You found me.”
A little girl ran into Alma’s arms, butted her head right into Alma’s abdomen like a football player. Alma teetered and put her hands over the little, dark, curly head. Monica, still hiding, saw herself at seven, back when her mother’s body was a trampoline that would always catch her and bounce her back to the world unharmed. Monica imagined that she was that child. Alma must have sensed it, because when she looked up from the curly head, it was to look directly at Monica, still peeking from behind a tall man.
“Monica?” she asked.
Monica bit her lip and stepped out from behind the man. They stood there, mother and daughter, looking at each other, blinking, each waiting to see what the other would do. The crowd lost interest and resumed its chatter. Finally, Alma said, “Come closer.” Without answering, Monica stepped forward and dove into her mother’s arms, hating herself even as she breathed deep and squeezed, gulping the scent that made tears spring up in her eyes, made her close them against the pain that flooded through her and filled her with rage.
Alma let go first. “I’m so happy to see you,” she said delicately, fearfully, as if she were speaking to a three-hundred-pound Bengal tiger. She took a deep breath and looked up at Bruce. The line of eye contact between them spit and zapped with dangerous electricity. Correctly assuming their intention, she said, “Let’s go someplace where we can talk.”
ALMA TOOK THEM to a small park area, a mini-zoo nearby where someone was rehabilitating tropical animals in large, fenced pens. There was a sitting area, and she sat down first, taking off her diving mask and daintily placing it in her lap like a pillbox hat. The long, dark coils of her youth had been sheared to a pixie cut and were streaked with gray. Her eyes were lightly marked by years spent in the sun, and Monica noticed that her accent had thickened—but otherwise she looked the same. Monica sat next to her and Bruce sat across from them. Monica made a steeple with her index fingers and pressed them against her mouth as she stared down at the ground.
“Well,” Bruce said brusquely, pulling up his pants at the knee. “We’re here to confirm with our own eyes that you are indeed alive and well and living without us by your own free will.”
Alma said, “You sound like an old-time sheriff.”
“Dead or alive, Alma,” he said, pointing at Monica’s shoulder, his voice icy. “You have no idea what you put her through. No idea.”
Suddenly, Monica felt a wave of panic: she was afraid that he would antagonize Alma before they had their answer, or worse, that in her reply, she would break his heart all over again.
Alma squinted at him, looked down for a moment, apparently planning her words. She took a deep breath. “Where would you like me to begin?” Alma said, her tone matching his. “There’s so much to tell.”
“Wherever you think it began, Mom,” Monica piped in. “I’m twenty-seven now. Whatever it is, I can handle it. I promise you both I can handle it.” She looked from one parent to the other. “Let’s get it all out on the table. All of it.” She calmed herself down by breathing deeply, then gave her mother an abbreviated version of what had led them from Yvette Lucero’s hospital room to El Salvador, then to Francisca and ultimately to meet Alma’s ship.
After she heard the story, Alma bit her lip and folded her hands before her. She closed her eyes for a second. “This is difficult to talk about,” she said. Behind her, a spider monkey banged on the fencing of his pen, grimacing and crying out, exposing his perversely pink gums and white, white teeth. He reminded Monica of Leticia. A tear of perspiration streaked down Bruce’s temple, and he sat rigid, his eyes obscured behind dark sunglasses.
“It began when Mateo Jesus was a fisherman at the port of La Libertad.” Alma pointed toward the station where they had seen the half-blind fisherman. “It was that last weekend before … everything got out of control. That last day, he sent word that he had pulled up a variety of cone shell that he had never seen before.”
DOÑA MAGNOLIA MÁRMOL DE BORRERO paced the floor of her bedroom, throwing handfuls of her dirty laundry at her daughter as she shouted. “I hear people whispering behind our backs, Alma. ‘Can you believe Magnolia’s daughter is involved with that dirty comunista?’ Oh, what a delicious tidbit.”
“We’re partners in a humanitarian project,” Alma replied, catching a stiff, nude-colored girdle and letting it drop to the marble floor. “And besides, none of the gossips at your ‘society’ tea parties contribute a damn thing that’s worth the oxygen they consume.”
“The hell with what they do. You’re involved with Maximiliano and I know it, and you know it, and everyone knows it, including the government. It’s obscene, Alma Marina. It’s morally wrong and it’s dangerous.”
Alma picked up her mother’s silky slips, conical brassieres, underwear, and dirty washcloths and tossed them on the mattress of the four-post bed. “When we find the furiosus, I won’t have reason to find myself alone with Max anymore. When I decide to cut off contact, it will be for me.” She cupped a spot above her heart. “Not for Monica, not for you, or Bruce or your criminal friends in the high military or any of those hypocrites you care so much about.” She shouted the word hypocrites, then resumed her calm tone. “I hate it here, you know that? I hate my life in El Salvador. I hate my boring marriage, I hate the shallowness, the fixation on materialism, the greed, and all the while, the campesinos have nothing to eat.”
“Maximiliano has turned you into someone I don’t know,” Magnolia said, her hands on her hips. “Did you know that those filthy communists slaughtered one hundred and sixty head of prime cattle and twelve calves at Hacienda del Bosque last night? The Montenegros lost seven million colones.”
Alma could see a blue vein had plumped up in her mother’s throat. “Maximiliano is a doctor, Mother. He heals humans, he doesn’t kill cows, so don’t blame it on him.”
Magnolia pointed her finger at her daughter. “Don’t you dare tell me that you agree with his politics. If this country falls to communism, we’re all going to burn in hell, because that’s what communism is, Alma, it’s a prison with no windows. Our warden will be some, some demonio peludo, some hairy beast who doesn’t shower or believe in God.”
“I haven’t showered in two days, come to think of it,” Alma said, raising her elbow over her head and sniffing loudly. “I must be communist.”
“Do you enjoy mortifying me?”
“Do you enjoy yoking me like a beast?” Alma shouted back.
“Forget about the cone shell. Go home. Be a mother. Be a wife. Be a decent woman for God’s sake.”
Alma turned her back to her mother. “Mateo Jesus said this one is special. I’m going to see it.”
“Fine, I’ll go with you tomorrow morning. I know more about local mollusks than anyone else in this entire country besides you. We’ll be back in San Salvador by afternoon.”
“I’m not fifteen, Mother.”
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Magnolia pointed at Alma’s face again. “Because you’re going to meet Maximiliano, aren’t you? You godless little whore.” She spat a bit as she said it.
Something inside Alma snapped. Some basic outrage that had nothing to do with Maximiliano, or the country’s war, but rather, was part of a lifelong war fought with words, needles of varying size that provoked them both into a constant state of inflammation. Alma grabbed the bundle of laundry off the bed and threw it at her mother. She groaned with the force she put behind it. Then she turned and ran, leaving Magnolia hurling obscenities and insults from the center of a pile of laundry stinking of stale French perfume.
In less than five seconds, Alma was flying down the grand staircase of her parents’ home, heading toward her car. The affair was going to have to cool off, Alma knew, at least until she and Max each decided once and for all either to cut things off with their spouses or say good-bye. She loved Max with all her heart, but the quest for the furiosus had deteriorated into a sad excuse for adultery, and for now, they both felt a sense of duty and obligation to their families. Besides, Max’s wife, Leticia, was stalking her, slashing the tires on her car and following her and Monica around from store to store at Metrocentro. Just a week ago, Leticia had thrown a sack of cebada flour at her in the supermarket, showering her with pink dust, a spectacle for all to see. No, her mother didn’t know the half of it. And now Leticia was after the cone shell too, trying to beat her to the finish line, thinking that the slimy little trophy would win her Max’s love. It was sick, she knew. But it was just her life, and what a small sacrifice it was if she could find the cone, copy the venom, mass-produce it, and offer it to anyone who was in chronic pain. They had also talked about selling it at a premium on the world market, then using the profit to create schools or housing or orphanages or to buy up farmland and parcel it out to the humblest peasants. If their unlikely alliance could culminate in the realization of a single dream, then perhaps the princess and the pauper could snap the social codes like paper shackles and make some good things happen in El Salvador. And then what could anyone say? Max and Alma. Making love. Making medicine. Making their lives count.
Alma and Maximiliano had agreed to meet at the fishermen’s wharf at La Libertad to take a look at the new cone. She had made up a story to appease Bruce, who was caught up in reporting the Zona Rosa killings. She and Max had quarreled about this when Alma complained that the violence at Zona Rosa, perpetrated by a communist sect similar to Max’s, had been shameful and pointless. Max had argued that the “imperialist gringos” needed to “lose a few appendages” before they would understand that it was time to back off and go home.
Normally, Alma would grant Monica the opportunity to be present at every sighting of a suspected Conus furiosus. But the situation with Leticia was getting explosive. As Alma packed her overnight bag, she tried to push away her anger and focused on the possibility that this cone might be the right one. She had a cleaned, polished furiosus shell in her collection, but a live one would look very different, with the outside still hooded with the protective skin of the periostracum. Mateo Jesus was a sharp and reliable fisherman who knew his sea creatures. Since he didn’t have access to a telephone, he had sent word to Alma via an employee of his local Borr-Lac distributor.
THE WHARF AT LA LIBERTAD was extremely busy on a Saturday morning, lined with crudely built fishing boats tied up to the sides of the pier. Alma looked around but didn’t see Max, so she strolled along the pier, drinking in the pungent scent of the sea. The array of marine produce was dazzling: flattened, dried, and salted stingrays strung on a rope like freshly washed laundry, nurse sharks stacked on top of each other in barrels, barracuda laid out like French baguettes, baring sinister teeth. She scolded the vendors who were selling soft-boiled sea turtle eggs, a popular snack at the seaside bars and resorts. Some of the stands offered raw, inky shellfish marinated in lime juice, red onion, and cilantro, and of course, cold Pilseners.
At a trinket booth, Alma bought a necklace with a shark tooth hooked on string for Monica, exactly like the one Alma always wore around her neck. It infuriated Magnolia to see her daughter sport a shark tooth the size of an arrowhead from a gold choker that had been intended to display a sapphire-and-diamond-encrusted cross. It’s who I am, Alma thought.
Alma asked around for Mateo Jesus and found him at the end of the pier, selling shrimp and octopus. He nodded at her, then pulled up a cracked, red dishpan and dropped it on top of his iced-shrimp display. Inside, a three-inch-long cone shell sat half-submerged in dark gray sand and water. He handed her a set of metal tongs and she used them to turn the creature over. The frilly foot of the gastropod swirled like live, angry dough, and a harpoon shot out so quickly she had to look up at Mateo Jesus to confirm that she had indeed seen something.
”Cuidado,” Mateo Jesus warned. “I know you respect these creatures, but be very careful with this one. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I will be” Alma said. “This little guy looks lethal. It’s very similar to the furiosus, Mateo Jesus, but it’s completely solid. The furiosus invariably has at least a sprinkle of red toward the top. But it could be an abnormality, so I’ll take him anyway. I’ll send him over to the university. We can extract his venom for testing and keep him alive in a tank.” She reached into her bag and handed Mateo Jesus fifty colones. He shrugged at her in a way that made her reach into her purse and pull out another ten.
“I’ll keep looking, Niña Alma.”
“Just remember, don’t show anything to anyone else unless you call me first.”
“Understood.”
Alma walked down the pier with the pan held between both hands, water sloshing from side to side. She saw Max in the parking lot and he helped her put the pan in her Land Rover, on the floor of the front passenger side, half-tucked underneath the seat, with rags snaked around it to keep it from sliding around. He kissed her and said, “I’m needed at El Trovador again. I can use your help for an hour or two.”
Alma remembered Magnolia’s rage, and worried what her mother might do. Still, she was sure her mother would not tell Bruce, nor would she know where to find her after they left the wharf. “I’ll call home and leave instructions with the maid. I’ll tell Monica what to tell Bruce, and where I really am, in case of an emergency.”
“I still don’t think it’s such a good idea to trust a kid with that kind of information. In fact, I feel sorry for her. Why do you have to be so open with her? It makes me uncomfortable. She knows exactly what’s going on.”
“She can handle it, Max. Besides, I don’t want my daughter to grow up thinking that everyone else lives like a Borrero. Because of the exposure, she has developed empathy, sensitivity, wisdom, maturity. She’s not a brat like I was at her age. You saw how she wanted to adopt that baby, how she accused me of being an insensitive rich hypocrite. I had to discipline her because of the disrespectful way she spoke to me, but all the while I was thinking, ‘Bravo, Monica. You’re standing up for what you believe.’ ”
Alma found a public phone and told her daughter that she was heading to El Trovador to help Max tend to some peasants. She instructed Monica to tell her father that she had decided to make an unexpected trip to Guatemala, and that she’d be back Monday morning. She felt guilty about teaching Monica to lie, so instead, she focused her thoughts on the finish line. The furiosus was still out there.
LATER THAT DAY, when they arrived at Hacienda El Trovador, there was no one, which was strange, because normally a couple of people guarded the entrance. “Who are we expecting?” Alma asked, wondering what, if anything, she could do to help Max prepare for his patients. She had helped him many times before, and so she knew what to expect. Soon, the bleeding and the sick would arrive smelling faintly of fruit, from the truckload of fresh sugarcane, oranges, or lemons they had hidden beneath to slip by a military checkpoint.
An hour passed before they heard a truck in the distance, saw the boiling cloud of dust as it pass
ed through the open gate and sped toward the beach house. Max and Alma waved and ran to meet the truck.
When the truck was a little more than a hundred yards away, Maximiliano suddenly slammed his hand across Alma’s chest, almost knocking her down. “Run,” he shouted, his voice filled with terror. ”Militares.”
She spun around and followed him, sprinting and sinking in the soft ground that was half-dirt, half-sand, her body flooding with adrenaline. She ran until her lungs felt as if they were going to explode and her legs were wood, in a sheer, blind panic, with the truck gaining ground behind them. To be caught here would mean she was a sympathizer, an aider and abettor, and the military didn’t take this kindly.
Slightly ahead of her, Max continued running toward the sea, and when she looked up, she suddenly understood what he had in mind. She saw a small motorboat, remembering that it had been used to smuggle in arms from Nicaragua the night before. Escape by sea, she thought. Perfect.
And that’s when Max broke away and ran ahead. She thought him clever to push ahead to get the engine started, and he did. Alma rejoiced at the sound of the engine roaring to life. Thank God, she thought.
Then, the boat spit up white water and tore away.
And he left her.
Alma jumped up and down on the shore, screaming his name. She might have jumped in after him, but he was crouched down, not looking back, which paralyzed her with shock. She looked behind her. The soldiers stopped the truck and jumped out.
She couldn’t believe he’d left her. Did he think she’d be all right on shore because, like it or not, she was really one of them? Or was he ultimately just another coward trying to save his own skin?
She raised her arms when she saw that she was cornered. One of the men grabbed her while the others ran into the water and shot at the boat with a weapon that looked like a portable rocket launcher. The sound rocked her, and she fell to her knees. An explosion followed, fiery pieces glowing on top of the water, dark smoke rising like a volcanic eruption. Only a flat, main section of the hull remained on the surface of the water, a smoking raft floating away.
The Heiress of Water: A Novel Page 22