by Daniel Mason
A voice boomed. ‘Not too early to start thinking of school! Come to our children’s department for the latest fashions. Make your children the envy of their classmates!’
Isabel pinched her eyes tight.
‘I know,’ said Manuela, taking her hand. ‘Come. Let’s go home.’
Isabel turned to look at her.
‘New Eden,’ said Manuela. ‘Home.’
The next morning, Manuela was gone when Isabel awoke. She left only a note that read, See you Friday, and a small fold of money. Isabel didn’t know what to do, so she waited until Hugo began to stir. She spent the day seated at the edge of the bed, watching him play with a battered plastic doll, feeding him with a bottle when he was hungry. Later, she cleaned the room. She ate the beans and rice her cousin had prepared. She sat at the window and listened to sounds from the street.
The following days were the same. She stayed inside, leaving only to draw water and buy food from a market down the hill. She fed Hugo, cleaned him, played with him and waited while he slept. Watching him, she found herself wondering how he could grow up inside, alone without other children or animals.
Sometimes she listened to the radio, and sometimes she looked at the only book, the illustrated Bible, where Christ preached on a desolate mountain that reminded her of the ragged hills at home. Mostly, she lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, watching the room fill with light and later with darkness. Her eyes followed the geckos and cockroaches, and she strained her ears for distant conversations.
At times, she paced the room, needing to walk and stretch her legs, but she didn’t go outside. She was terrified by Manuela’s warnings, by the noise. She had the impression that each time she opened the door she was crossing into another world, without empty space. She told herself that she would venture out once she became used to so many other people, once Isaias came. She wondered if others thought it was strange for a person to come from so far away only to sit in a little room.
As the week wore on, she found herself increasingly seized by an unfamiliar compulsion to speak. So she spoke to the baby: unconnected, hesitant stories of festivals and family, names of plants, attributes of town dogs, myths, bestiaries, spirit hierarchies, dresses she had seen on television, a garden she would plant near the stream at home, tales of bandits, the Princess of China.
They were good stories, her best stories, but soon she began to wonder if words like drought or cane would mean anything to Hugo. ‘Drought,’ she whispered, once, staring at his face for a reaction. After a long pause, he laughed and reached for her eyes. She said it again, but the word was odd, meaningless, as if she were speaking a foreigner’s tongue.
She lay on the bed and sat him on her belly. He’s just a baby, she told herself, but now she was fascinated by the thought of a person who didn’t know what drought was. She wondered about other words: cane, cactus, thorn. Thorn, she whispered. Buckthorn, Jerusalem thorn, gray thorn, rose thorn, whistling thorn, virgin’s thorn, wet thorn, blood thorn, I know hundreds of kinds of thorn. ‘In the thorn,’ she began, ‘on an overcast day when you can’t see the sun—’ Then she stopped. The words seemed impossible now.
She found a colored sock and dangled it over the baby’s nose. His eyes followed. They were green, like Manuela’s, but darker. They met hers and then the colored sock was forgotten. She tried to distract him, but his gaze wouldn’t leave her. He wasn’t easily tricked, she thought. In the north they would say he was born old, like her. Like his mother, too, but not like her brother. Her brother was born very young; to him, everything was new.
Later, Hugo played with the doll, holding it by the hand and banging it on the bed. When he finally slept, Isabel took the short pile of beauty magazines and brought them to the bed. Back home, on market day in Prince Leopold, she and Isaias used to stop at a store with a shelf of monthlies. The man in the store didn’t let them touch the magazines, but he took them from their plastic covers, set them on the counter and flipped the pages when the children said, ‘Turn!’ Once, as a gift, he had given her a cooking magazine with photos of heart-shaped red fruit on plates of white cream.
Manuela’s magazines were filled with colored photos of thin women. Isabel stopped at a page with a wrinkled dog that licked a girl’s chin, and another with a baby and a smiling mother. She read slowly, Nutribébé infant formula–Why deny your loved ones the health they deserve? On another page, there was a photo of a girl and boy kissing. She stared at it for a long time. The girl’s hand was on his shoulder, and his was on her belly. The article’s title was WHAT IS LOVE? Beneath were smaller words: You feel empty when he’s gone. You want to share everything with him. Does he feel the same? But the article was mostly about movies, kissing and holding hands, none of which seemed to answer the question it first proposed.
She looked through an old news magazine, with men in suits and soccer stars. She stopped at a photo of a black woman and a skinny baby in the desert. There were flies around its eyes, and its lips were chapped and swollen. Its ankles were thin like her fingers, and veins fretted its head. The headline read THE END OF HUNGER? She tried to read it but her hands began to shake and then she couldn’t read any more. She hid the magazine beneath the others. Then she thought of her mother for a long time.
At the window, the view was of the Settlements, the corrugated patchwork of tin and cement rooftops. She heard music from one of the houses, and from the wires, the legions of broken kites fluttered like flags.
Manuela came home on the weekend. ‘This isn’t a prison,’ she said. ‘I said be careful. I didn’t say you should curl up like an animal alone in its hole, doing nothing.’
‘I’m not an animal in a hole,’ said Isabel. ‘I’m not—’ She paused. She had almost said ‘lonely’ instead of ‘alone.’ ‘I’m waiting,’ she said. ‘Not doing nothing.’ But when her cousin left again for work, she took Hugo to the top of the road, where the view opened onto the forest, and dogs trotted gracefully through the weeds. She began to return to that spot. She spent hours watching the dogs, envious of the simplicity of their lives. She told herself that it should not trouble her that she had no friends, because Isaias would come soon. She left Hugo’s sling at home, and held him close against her body.
At night, she listened to the radio. Again she read the pamphlet she had bought with Manuela, secretly hoping that somehow the ending might have changed. She stayed away from the magazine and its photo of the starving woman.
Once, she ventured as far as the soccer pitch. There she watched the boys play, firing the ball off the concrete walls, dodging gracefully through bricks and tufts of grass.
From the soccer pitch, the ball bounced into her memory of evenings in Saint Michael, when the cane workers came home, soot-covered and smelling of dust, their sweat-stained hats slung low over their eyes. It was her favorite hour of the day, gilded in lengthening shadows, the wind whistling over the windows. The villagers would gather at the field, setting out chairs or squatting on the sidelines. The players wore uniforms made of shirts donated by opposing political candidates, numbers inked in bold pen on the backs. They did battle between goalposts made of a cactus and the trunk of an old jacaranda. Isaias was a midfielder, and left-footed.
In the summer, the field was littered with little violet flowers that stirred as the players ran past.
The ball skidded over the ground, through the flowers and into the field in the city, where a foot stopped it and sent it streaking past a crowd of girls. The boys played shirtless, their backs tattooed with images of guardian saints. They dribbled over the rutted dirt and shot at a goal marked by two empty bottles.
Isabel sat at a distance and moved away when the ball rolled past. Once a boy stopped before her. He wore a threadbare shirt with a foreign word she didn’t understand. He tossed the ball into the air and leaped up. His foot met it at the top of his arc, rocketing it toward the game. His body windmilled, sweat spun from his hair, his feet thudded down. He landed inches away. He was small, with
fuzz on his cheeks. He turned and caught a pass, and fired it back into the empty field at home.
Slowly, faces became familiar. From a bent metal chair outside his store, Junior greeted her whenever she passed. He called her my princess and Hugo my king, and slowly her suspicion softened. She began to look forward to seeing him, finding herself disappointed if he wasn’t outside. She would stand near the shop until he invited her to sit. Between customers, he told her about his home in the north, even farther away than yours. He had a daughter there, he said, Isabel’s age. He showed her a photo of a smiling girl with long black hair. ‘You two would be friends,’ he said. She liked dancing and her name was Angelica, which Isabel had always thought was a beautiful name, the name she would give her daughter one day. ‘She goes to school,’ he said, ‘in the capital. She’s a star at math. That’s what this store is for, to pay for her school.’ A woman behind him slapped his arm. ‘For her school and your girlfriends!’ she said, and Junior’s belly shook as he laughed.
When he saw Isabel staring at the television, he said, ‘You can come and watch anytime, love—you don’t have to buy anything.’ On a newscast, she watched a report on the pilgrimage at the shrine of Good Jesus of the Springs. Pilgrims walked through the dirt roads in the thorn, on their knees, with stones on their heads. They showed a map of the backlands and its geography of biblical names.
For hours in the afternoon, there was a broadcast of a preacher in a light green suit, pacing the stage of a very big church. When he put his hand on people’s heads, he cured them of limps and blindness. They fell on the floor and shook like fish out of water. He liked to say, ‘Everyone has a purpose! You must find your purpose! Everyone has a gift! You must find your gift!’
She stopped watching the television. The sound and noise intruded on her thoughts, hurrying them or cutting off the long paths that they took when she lay alone in the room.
One day she met a group of older women coming up the hill beneath baskets of clothes, and she began to descend with them to the stream.
They all had the same thick hips, sloping shoulders and muscular forearms. They wore layered muslin skirts, faded to brown shades of once-different colors. Their hair was tied in printed fabric; when they bent their heads together, they touched like the squares of a quilt. In the water, they gossiped and teased each other as they twisted the clothing, beat it against the rocks and squeezed soapy clouds into the river. They sang songs from the north. In the little lakes cast by the folds of their skirts, the water shimmered. It smelled dirty to Isabel, but the women didn’t appear to care.
In her mind she compared them to her mother, who would stay in the shallows long after the washing was done, just sitting, letting the water wick up her clothes and into the dry air. Now, when she imagined her mother joining the women in their chore, she seemed thin and very small.
The women laughed alike, and wagged their fingers every time they said no. They spoke without breaking the rhythm of their washing.
‘Where are you from, daughter?’ they asked, stirring up the water as they scrubbed the clothes. ‘Saint Michael,’ answered Isabel. ‘Saint Michael,’ they whispered to one another. ‘We don’t know Saint Michael, no.’ ‘It’s in the interior, in the mountains, near Prince Leopold.’ ‘Lord, that’s hard land. They don’t make land and people hard like that, no. We’re also from the north,’ they said. ‘We also passed hunger.
‘How did you get here?’ they asked, twisting the shirts into heavy corkscrews. ‘A perch,’ said Isabel. ‘A perch,’ they whispered to one another. ‘We came that way, too. It’s been twenty years. For me, twenty-six. Me, I’ve lost count. You had it easy,’ they said. ‘We ran out of water, we ran out of fuel, we spent our nights on the side of the road.
‘How long will you stay here?’ they asked, squeezing out plumes of detergent. ‘I don’t know. I am waiting for my brother—I’ll let him decide. Until it gets better in the north, I think.’ ‘It’s never getting better in the north,’ they said. ‘If you think it will get better, you’re wrong.’ ‘I’ve spent the last thirty years wanting to return to my village,’ said one. ‘I’m going to return, if only to die. I want to be buried in that warm dry dust, not this rotten soil.’
‘And what work will you do here?’ they asked, pounding the clothes on a wide flat stone. ‘And do you have a man?’ Shaking the clothes, snapping them in the air in little bursts of mist.
They brought a new batch of clothes into the river. The conversation moved on. They spoke about the price of cooking gas and news from the north. They complained about their families. ‘They call every week and ask me to send money. They think that chickens fly through the air here, already plucked and roasted, and we only have to reach up and pull one down. They want to send my niece here to work, because she has troubles with men. Imagine! Sending a girl here who has troubles with men!’
Isabel sat Hugo on the bank, where he chewed on the hand of the doll. There were anthills in the slope of the riverbed, and Isabel watched the ants carrying little boulders of dirt into the holes. Their antennae beat at the ground like tiny drummers. She put sticks in their way and watched them struggle over.
The days passed, and she waited.
In the morning, sitting on the doorstep with Hugo on her lap, she watched the people descend from the Settlements and crowd the buses to the city. They were day maids and factory day-shifters and construction men. At night, others came down: the cleaners of factory plants and girls who said they were waitresses, the night-shifters and night guards.
The buses were full in the morning. There were long lines, and the fare collectors packed the aisles as tight as possible. The buses lurched through the city, rumbled forward in traffic, swung tight curves, dove into tunnels, shook until they seemed ready to fall apart. Sometimes they broke down, abandoning their fares in worried crowds that set off walking for the nearest stop.
In the industrial neighborhoods, the factory day-shifters got off first, filing into looming steel amphitheaters. They donned light blue bonnets and face masks, and took up their places on the factory lines, where they welded in showers of sparks, turned, clamped, cut, twisted, dipped, sprayed, bolted, hammered, lathed, until the end-of-shift bell rang, stopping only for lunch on the cold aluminum tables of company cafeterias.
The construction workers got off at crowded street corners, boarding unmarked vans trawling for day labor. On the tops of skeletal towers, they touched talismans of Saint Barbara and wrapped shirts around their heads to protect themselves against the sun.
The maids rode all the way to the Center, where they changed for buses to leafy districts with electrified fences. They stood before cameras and let the guards buzz them in. The guards were their brothers or their cousins or neighbors in the city or from the towns they had fled during the droughts. They rode service elevators up terraced apartments called Villa Italia, Le Beaumont and Edificio Cézanne, and learned to shadow the movements of gilded women in dark sunglasses. They mopped the same floors they had mopped the day before, and washed lipstick from Danish crystal. At lunch, they carried silver trays and smiled politely, and listened from the kitchen door to stories of Parisian parfumeries and tans in Miami. When their bosses left in chauffeured cars, they went to the balcony and watched the distant airplanes, smoked and flicked the ash with secret pleasure toward the sapphire blue of the swimming pools below.
Then the maids folded their aprons and took the elevators back down. The construction men lay down their tools, and the factory workers shook out their hair from the light blue bonnets, removed their gloves and masks, and filed out of the great buildings, where they caught the buses back to the periphery, shouldering their way out through the night workers waiting to get on.
The buses went back. Now the watchmen crowded in with the cleaning women, factory night-shifters and girls who said they were waitresses. The women who were old and free from the tyranny of once being beautiful watched the girls tug on their short skirts with a mixture of sadne
ss and anger. The night guards also watched the waitresses, inhaling their heavy perfume as the bus swayed. They also felt sadness and anger, but they felt desire, too, which made the sadness and anger stronger. The girls who were shift workers in the factories and still not freed from beauty’s tyranny watched the waitresses and saw the necklaces, nail polish, pumps and the men’s eyes travel to the edges of their skirts.
The girls who were shift workers in the factories remembered the first time a friend whispered, They aren’t waitresses, and learned how much they made. Time and again, they considered the possibilities but said No, which they told themselves was a final No, but each night they reconsidered as they rode into the Center. They told themselves with pride, I would never do that, They make more by suffering more, and they rubbed their elbows and wrists swollen from turning and clamping and cutting and twisting, and their rashes from dipping and spraying, and they wondered if this was true. Then they told themselves, It is a different suffering, a soul suffering, and they thought of the great cold rooms and the whir of motors that made all conversation impossible, the masks that kept the dust out but also kept them from smiling to one another or mouthing words. They told themselves, But it is dangerous, and they thought of the gears and belts and flying metal shards, and friends who lost eyes and hands to mechanical things that couldn’t hear them scream.