by Daniel Mason
When Isabel took the receiver from him, Isaias said, ‘You wouldn’t believe it, there are buildings as far as you can see.’ He spoke breathlessly about the city and its crowds. At last he stopped. ‘I have to go, my token’s going to run out.’ ‘I’ll call you back,’ she said. ‘It’s free.’ He paused. ‘I’ll write to you,’ he said. She could hear the echo of his voice, like a ghost in the line.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked finally. Then: ‘Isa, you there? You all right? Is everything there all right?’ ‘Yes,’ she managed, but her voice began to break. ‘You sure?’ he said, quieter now. ‘I’m sure,’ she said, turning to watch a cousin leap from the doorstep of a house, run across the square and disappear laughing into the brush.
Saint Lucy’s salt was off by one month that year: it rained in January, in the mountains. So the spring ran and the cane fields bloomed.
Isaias wrote after a month, a long letter in a bounding hand, his words clipping the lines. He described the buildings, the maze of highways, how he took buses without stopping just to watch the city from the window. I began to perform in the city park, he wrote. There are other performers too, street magicians and rhyme singers, and they are all from the north, although from other villages far away. It’s like everyone is fleeing the drought and bringing home here. A city built of drought, he wrote. He said he was staying with their cousin Manuela. Most of the time, she lives at her employer’s and comes home only on the weekend. She is well, she works very hard. He said little else about her. Isabel imagined her as one of the soap opera maids on the market television, in a mansion like a marble palace, with a pressed apron and her hair in beautiful curls. She carried the letter with her and read it over until the words came easily.
Since her uncle was killed, they hadn’t seen the cricket men. They returned to the hillside, to graze the goats and zebu cows. But they no longer stayed overnight, and as they walked, they squinted constantly into the horizon to look for new trucks.
Despite the rain, Isabel felt a new, vise-like fear grip the village. In the market in Prince Leopold, they saw the cost of goods rise each week. Her relatives who crushed their own cane found fewer buyers for their sugar because the merchants argued that the new roads made it cheaper to buy from the coast. The money her father earned from the harvest disappeared. Someone stole one of their chickens. They wrote relatives in the state capital and asked for help, ‘to tide things over.’
As the bean and manioc stores dwindled, they began to hunt, to lay traps for turtles and armadillos. They loaded shotguns with gravel and rose at dawn to kill the antwrens that came to pry insects from the tree bark. In the market, they haggled fiercely. Hunger’s returning, they said. Isabel listened suspiciously. Hadn’t the government promised that this wouldn’t happen? Hadn’t it rained? Hunger was a beast from years ago, when the houses were built of wattle and thatch, not now, not with brick houses and cobbled streets, a telephone in the square.
They began to cut down the forest, burning the white wood to make charcoal to sell in the market. On the hillside above the village, the land became bare, quiet, sick. The zebu walked over the empty fields, loosening clods. Dust curled off like smoke from something burning slowly.
In the day, Isabel led the goats to graze. The slope was hot, the air stale; she often needed to stop to rest. Each week, she had to walk farther. The animals grew so skinny that she could see the arteries pulsating in their necks. When the rain did come, coffee rivulets wound down the hill and fouled the stream.
Once, one of the charcoal burnings flamed out of control. The fire crackled in long waves over the hillside. They beat at it with spades and doused it in sand. It licked up the hill until it was contained by a high rock seam that ran through the white forest like a wall of defense. Angry accusations broke out. They blamed an uncle named Ulises, and he blamed it on his three-year-old son. Under her breath, Isabel cursed him as a coward.
Her mother cooked a little less with each passing night. A week went by with no meat, and her parents debated in low voices about whether to kill a goat. There were four of them, and then one became sick. It was small and ringstraked and once her best climber, but now it walked in circles and fell on its left side, kicking its legs and lurching its neck as it tried to rise. They killed it and flayed the dark red carcass of its skin. The lidless eyes bulged from their sockets and watched her wherever she walked. They ate the meat, boiled the hoof for broth and chopped up the innards. When the second goat fell sick, her father killed it, and then killed the two that remained. He salted the meat to dry in the sun, where Isabel whisked a rag at the bottle flies. They found their guts full of sand, scraped them clean and dried them on the thorn.
They finished the goat meat. The zebus’ humps thinned and hung limp. They began to flavor the rice and cornmeal with stringy meat from birds and armadillos. Isabel was ashamed when she saw how little meat came from a hummingbird, but for the first time she could remember, she was hungry all the time. With her front teeth, she scraped the meat from the gleaming breastbones and crushed the wings with her molars. They caught lizards and bull toads fleeing the dry creek beds in search of water.
Two months after he left, Isaias sent money through a family member in Prince Leopold. It was enough to last them several weeks. In his letter, he said it came from performing at restaurants. They bought beans that very day because the prices were rising. Her father got drunk and said, ‘To my son the musician!’ Isabel told everyone of his success. They waited for him to send more.
Later her father went to Prince Leopold to look for work, but the flatbeds that passed were already full.
They began to search for tubers and cactus fruit in the hills. They sharpened their knives on stones, held one end of the cactus with their teeth and the other with their fingers. They slit them open as though they were animals’ bellies and ate the white meat inside. She helped pull spines from the palm cactus flesh, swiftly plucking them until her thumbnail splintered and she had to use the knife. They ate the leaves of the hogplums. They followed woodcreepers to leaf-cutter-ant columns, the ant columns to the colonies, broke open the colonies and collected the swollen abdomens of the queens. The smell of the roasted ants was sweet and made them hungrier. When there was enough to drink, they oversalted the food so they would fill their bellies with water. They got drunk, dizzy on the water. She tried to think of her brother in the city, but hunger dominated her, followed her everywhere like a thin dog. Alone in the thorn, she fantasized that she could smell meat cooking. The world separated into categories of things that could and could not be eaten.
She began to have a recurring dream of eating a sweet melon. She could taste the melon and feel the juice run over her cheeks as she laughed. In her dream, she was ravenous, not even scraping the peel but biting the honey centers from an endless supply of identical melons. She awoke crying. She began to kneel by her hammock before sleeping, to pray that the dream wouldn’t come, It is making me sick, I don’t want it anymore, just let me go hungry but don’t drive me crazy like this. One night she awoke in the kitchen, coughing on uncooked beans. She wondered if she should wake her mother. She wanted a prayer or a candle to stop the dream, but she was ashamed to ask. Who ever heard of that? she thought, A prayer against dreams of eating a melon?
She awoke with headaches that wouldn’t go away. One of her infant cousins became sick from eating a dead carrion bird he found in the scrub. Her grandfather began to complain of night blindness and grew too weak to leave his hammock. She had to help him turn, and wiped his legs of sparse, pungent urine. On his back they found an ulcer like the yolk of an egg. Her first impression was not disgust or sadness, but disbelief that there was enough meat for the disease to take hold.
Even the youngest children grew quiet and listless, and their skin grew soft lanugo hair. A baby developed pale marks like lichen on the skin of his groin. When Isabel held him, his swollen legs pitted in the shape of a hand. Plump, translucent lids covered his eyes. When the families pool
ed together to feed him, he didn’t grow fat, but withered until his face was the face of a little old man.
Her mother began to cry, without warning or provocation. They waited for Isaias to send more money. When none came, they began to mix earth into the beans. It was the first time she came to see earth as food, and her mother had to teach her how to recognize the right kind. She found it satisfied an unfamiliar hunger, and soon she was craving it. On one of her walks, she fell asleep in the sun and woke up lost and disoriented, her skin burned and peeling. She had never fallen asleep in the noon sun before. In the market, they bought scraps of skin and zebu nose, haggled harder. She cut herself trying to dig up a bromeliad, and the wound wouldn’t heal.
Once, she came across a hogplum with low-hanging leaves. She ate one, and then another, and then she began to stuff her mouth with them, faster than she could swallow, the sweet taste making her salivate and quenching her thirst. Her mouth filled with leaves but still she stuffed herself. She ate until she vomited a heavy mass of fiber, and then heaved again and again until her stomach was empty. She understood that it was punishment for her greed.
Now each week there was news of someone else leaving. The teacher stopped coming. There were rumors that she had fallen sick and stayed in the city. Others said the landowners were angry that she was teaching poems about the retreat and backlands prophets. Others said she had just grown tired of the place.
Two months after the end of the harvest, someone heard there were foreigners distributing free rice in Prince Leopold. Isabel rushed home when she heard the news. As she told her father, she began to laugh uncontrollably. Her father listened quietly and said, ‘I’m not taking anyone’s charity, especially foreigner charity,’ but three days later he led them along the long road to the city. There, where the streets ended, they found a crowd from the villages. They looked for the food, but a man told them the foreigners had come to first build a church, and there would be a dinner when they were finished. He said, ‘If we feed you now, you’ll go away.’
While her father worked, Isabel stayed with the other children. She watched a tall pink teenager with a crew cut hand out toys from a cardboard box. He had a mechanical toy car with a long wire and a lever that made it move. He stood in the center of a crowd of children with swollen bellies and chased them with the car. A woman handed out shirts with many colors. Isabel chose a green one with a picture of an orange-haired man in a fighting stance and words she didn’t understand. It had beautiful green letters, and she wore it over her dress.
There was a toy truck with a ladder on its flatbed and a doll whose eyes opened as they lifted her. Another doll could be filled with water, and when the boy squeezed its belly, a stream of urine arced out. The children watched first in amusement, and then in nervousness and silence as the water made a muddy puddle on the ground.
It took three days to build the church, and they spent the nights with a cousin. She slept with two other children on a stretch of leather hammered onto a frame with old black nails. It was age-burnished and tan in the stretches around the nails. During the night, the children slid toward one another in the center and awoke in a tangle.
On the second day, her mother asked a man in a tie, ‘Where is the rice?’ ‘Soon,’ he said. When the church was finished they stood and listened to a sermon on living water and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well, and then a truck came and gave out bags of rice and sugar, which they carried home as night was falling.
After a month, her father found a job building a police station north of Prince Leopold. She was still always hungry, but they were able to afford beans. With money from an aunt, they bought a pair of goats. Now when Isabel grazed them in the hills, she was usually alone. She no longer passed other goatherds, or old men leading mules laden with handwoven baskets, or the children who used to run alongside her. The houses where she used to stop for a glass of water were empty.
Once, as she balanced her way along a rock outcropping, she came across a pair of black high-heeled shoes. Around her, the gray expanse of the forest spread up the hillslope, unbroken but for the cacti and the rare umbrella of a drinking-tree. She had just turned fourteen. She thought how she had never worn shoes with high heels. They lay wedged in a crack; she had to lie on her belly to reach them. The rock was sharp and dug into her breasts. When she couldn’t reach them, she broke a branch from a buckthorn. Then she hesitated. There were forest spirits who dressed as women when they came down into the villages. She withdrew her hand and whispered an invocation against ghosts, along with three Hail Marys and an Our Father. She could hear the tlingaling of goat bells somewhere in the brush.
She ran off as the day was ending. Her legs were warm with the radiating heat of the ground, but her shoulders were cold. She found the goats and ran them home.
Another day, she passed a small cross. They were common in the backlands; she didn’t know why she had stopped. The cross had been painted, but the paint had worn away. Before it, someone had placed a pair of heat-wilted candles and the bottom half of a green plastic bottle, shredded along its length, with the end of each strip painted with a dash of nail polish, like a little bouquet of flowers. On the cross was carved a single word, IZABEL, with no dates. Perhaps it was a baby, she thought, or an old woman whose last name was forgotten. The thought of the marker bothered her for a long time, as if below was not one Isabel but many, perhaps every Isabel in the world one day found her way to this spot. Later, she avoided the cross and the path that led there.
Isaias wrote again. The city was hot and crowded, he said. He sometimes found work playing alongside an accordion and a drummer at an open-air restaurant. He couldn’t send money this time. It was more difficult to find jobs, he was earning only enough to get by, but that would change. He used city expressions, such as ‘things are on the up-and-up.’ He promised to send money soon. When his letters came, she first scanned them slowly for some mention of when he would come home, and then returned to ‘Dear Isabel,’ and read them word by word.
In his third letter, he wrote of seeing a beautiful girl. He was playing in the Cathedral Square, and she stopped and listened to him play. He didn’t know her name. He filled both sides of the page, and in a thin blank space at the bottom he drew little buildings like the skyline of a city.
Isabel read the letter twice, folded it and took it with her on her walks. She broke the rattling pods angrily and kicked at the loose stones. It was a week before Carnival. When the festivals began, her family walked to Prince Leopold to watch the processions. She said she was sick. She stayed home and pushed herself back and forth in her hammock with her foot.
Her family came home late at night, their hair crisp with starch that children tossed at passersby in tiny wax balls. They laughed and recalled the processions, the girl who was the princess, the costumes of glitter and ribbon. The high point, they said, was a fight that broke out between the Procession of the Three Kings from Prince Leopold and the Great Lion of God, a marching orchestra that had come all the way from the coast. An angel punched the king, a drunk in a priest’s cassock smashed a bottle over a Fierce Indian, a man on a cardboard horse purloined a kiss from the princess.
The story cheered her. She went with them the next day. Her cousin wore wings made of real feathers. The street flashed with sequins. She marveled at the wondrous costumes, but it was different from the years before: quieter, emptier, and the drunks were angry. Because so many men had left for the south, the girls danced mostly with one another. I live in a world of women, she thought. She whirled, her hands in her mother’s.
Only once, a man in a woman’s stockings came close to her. His chest was bare and he wore lipstick and tinted glasses. He spun around her, his hips moving faster and faster, until they were a blur. She turned and he was gone.
In late March, not long after Carnival, they spotted a file of dust plumes on the horizon. Word came that they were building a highway from the coast. A representative of the governor came and erected a sig
n that said PROGRESS INTO THE BACKLANDS IS PROGRESS FORWARD.
Over the following weeks, the highway came closer. When the wind shifted, they could hear the roar of the machines. Clouds of dust swept through town, coating the windows and the uncovered food, tinting the white walls a light orange that the children blew away with puffed cheeks. It formed soft slopes in the corners of doorways and settled in films in the water jars.
In the afternoons, Isabel went with the other girls to a hillside overlooking the highway. They watched huge vehicles drive through the white forest with a scouring chain slung between them, tearing through the trees as if they were nothing but dry twigs. In places, the crew followed the old road that wove its way around the thickest copses; in others, they pushed straight over them, the bulldozers crushing the brush, the backhoes clanging against the stones.
Isabel could see men below, tiny against the machines. They shoved sticks of dynamite beneath the largest rocks and exploded them, or drilled them, screeching, until they shattered apart. The children stared with amazement and chased one another, repeating the noises. There were soldiers, too, with helmets and rifles, pacing the road and watching the hills. At night in town, her family talked about the soldiers, and why the government thought the roads needed to be protected, and from whom.
At first, the children watched warily from the bluff, but each day they made their way closer. The construction men were friendly. They showed them the machines and let them play on them during their noon breaks. The children asked where the asphalt was, and the men said that it was coming later, that they were just clearing a path, ‘We go first, It’s a harder job with the stones and thorn.’ Isabel stood uneasily at the edge of it all, watching a little cousin as he clambered over the seats and slid down the dusty concavity of the bulldozer’s scoop, whistling with surprise at the heat of the metal in the sun. She noticed that some of the girls began to wear lipstick and their best clothes, and hold their shoes in their hands as they made their way barefoot down the hillside. They sat in the shade with the men, laughed with them and took short drinks from label-less bottles.