by Daniel Mason
‘So,’ said the women one afternoon. ‘He came by yesterday.’
Isabel froze. ‘My brother.’
‘No, your brother, no, my love. The young man who makes the portraits. Alin … you remember him, don’t you? He has been by at least three times now. He asks about you every time. What is it, have you forgotten him already?’
For a moment, Isabel’s rocking slowed. She watched the ripples scallop her wrists and then began washing again.
A week later, in mid-September, the portrait seller appeared again in New Eden. He sang and swung his bag of portraits on his thigh as he climbed the hill, stopping before the houses and clapping. Laughing, he growled at the children who followed. Isabel watched him from behind the curtain. He stopped before her house and called for her, but she didn’t move. As he walked away, she resisted the impulse to run after him. She put the base of her thumbs against the cold, soft soles of Hugo’s feet. She kissed him on the forehead.
The next night, on the soap opera, a woman said of Cindy: She is waiting for Alexandre to rescue her from her situation. Alexandre was the heir to a coffee fortune who had fallen in love with her when he came to dinner at her boss’s house.
Outside Junior’s store, Isabel watched quietly. That night, she didn’t sleep until the small hours. Situation was one of her father’s words, and one whose childhood definition she could never fully escape. It’s the situation that is against us, he would say, both in moments of sobriety and desperation, and she had grown up thinking it meant a special kind of enemy, a landowner or a drought. Cindy’s mother was still in the hospital, and their family was deep in debt. But I do not need rescue now, she told herself, her thoughts of Cindy melting confusingly into those of the portraitist, home and her brother. She wished Hugo would wake to stop the circling of her mind.
On the soap opera, Alexandre became a regular visitor. Cindy grew even more beautiful. Her cheeks glowed, and her eyes glistened with tears of joy. Her generous boss understood her love and bought her a satin shirt.
Isabel was mesmerized by the maid’s transformation. In Manuela’s cabinet she found lipstick and painted her mouth tentatively. She combed and tied her hair with a turquoise ribbon she had found beneath a seat on the bus. Then she wiped the lipstick off. Another time, she wore it to Junior’s store. ‘Young girls who wear lipstick look like whores,’ said Junior’s cousin, and handed her a napkin. She began to wish that the washerwomen would mention the portraitist again.
One morning she met him coming up the hill. He swung his bag from his shoulder and stopped. ‘Isabel. Finally, I found you.’ He smiled broadly. He wore a T-shirt with a snowcapped peak and howling wolf, tucked neatly into his pants. ‘I’ve been away,’ she said, and added, ‘My brother’s not here yet.’ She hoisted Hugo and busied herself wiping his cheeks.
Across the street, in an open doorway, an old woman watched them from a rocking chair.
Isabel saw he was out of breath. ‘I have water,’ she offered.
They sat on the step. Carefully, Isabel smoothed her dress over her knees and sat Hugo on her feet, against her shins. The young man asked for the baby’s name. ‘A good dignified name,’ he said. ‘You remember my name, right?’ ‘It’s Alin.’ She paused. ‘Photo Alin.’ She felt like giggling at her joke.
When he finished drinking, she thought he would leave. Instead, he began to tell her about his home in the north. He was the seventh of ten children. They lived near a river; his father was a fisherman, with a wooden head carved on the bow of his boat to scare off water spirits. When they went fishing, they tossed pinches of tobacco into the water as offerings. Plum-colored snails prowled the little creek where they swam.
‘We used to go to the coast for Saint John’s festival,’ he said. ‘They had a fair that went all night, with a rodeo and a mermaid played by the beauty queen from the agronomists’ council. We used to throw stones at her tail. You should have heard her curse.’ Isabel turned and smiled at him. ‘It was the only time I left my village,’ he said, and added, ‘Until I came here.’
At her feet, Hugo lunged for something in the street. She pulled him back. ‘Alone?’
‘Alone. I had an uncle waiting, but I took that horrible ride down alone.’
Alin took a silver-colored wristwatch from his pocket. ‘I’d better hurry,’ he said. He kissed her once on each cheek.
Inside, she sat on the edge of the bed and rolled her toes. She touched her cheek where he had kissed her. It’s just a goodbye! she cautioned herself. She tried to think of what Isaias would counsel. In Saint Michael and Prince Leopold, he’d watched over her at the dances. In Saint Michael she was a child.
Alin returned two days later. He clapped outside and called. She went to the door, then doubled back to the mirror. She put water on her hands and pressed her hair back, like a style she had seen in the magazines. She combed down the baby’s cowlick.
At the door, her collar was wet. ‘If you need to, I can wait for you to dry your hair,’ Alin offered.
She walked beside him to the crest of the hill. They watched a boy run his kite on a half-finished roof, laughing as he hurdled tufts of bare rebars. The city stretched behind him. ‘I bet he doesn’t even notice the city,’ said Alin. ‘My cousin, who was born here, thinks that the world looks like the city.’ He squinted.
‘You forget,’ he said.
You mean home, she thought, but he said, ‘You forget how there’s no end.’
She swung Hugo out of the way of a man pushing a wheelbarrow. A smaller boy climbed onto the rooftop and unfurled a second kite. It fluttered alongside the first. ‘You know, they coat their kite strings with broken glass,’ said Alin. ‘Wood glue and broken glass, and they try to cut each other’s strings. If I could write a song it would be about that, like a riddle, about which kite wins, the one that stays or the one that flies away.’
Isabel waited, expecting him to give her the answer. In the road, a group of children piled onto a bicycle, wobbling as they picked up speed.
He began to visit regularly. Slowly, she noticed changes in him, that after several visits he wore cleaner, ironed shirts, that he slipped into a northern accent. She settled easily into his presence. She found it calmed her, like movement calmed her. He asked many questions about Saint Michael, what the mountains were like and which festivals they celebrated. She waited for him to ask her about her brother, but he didn’t. For the first time, when she talked about home, it was a joyous, beautiful place free of the desolation she remembered from the days before her departure.
He showed her his portraits. She could only look at them for a short time before they overwhelmed her. In the wooden frames, an old man in a cowboy hat stood before a photograph of steep mountains; a woman carried her baby before a vast marble square filled with statues; a man in a soccer uniform held the hand of a beautiful girl. At her side, Alin said: ‘This old man scrapes wax from the altars at the cathedral. Once he was a miner—the best, he told me—he could find gold anywhere. The baby is a young man now, but he is so sick, he hears voices, he lives in the park, where his mother goes in the mornings to bring him food. I made this couple young again.’ Isabel looked through them slowly. She began to feel that if she stared long enough she could know not only what had happened in their lives, but what would happen. Frightened, she put them away.
She began to borrow dresses from Manuela. Her favorite was lavender rayon, with bows on the cuffs of the short sleeves. It was loose and made her look very thin again, but she liked how it turned her eyes almost violet. At the beauty store, she looked at the magazine cutouts until the beautician wobbled to the door. She slunk shyly away. She studied the older girls and how they walked and laughed. In Manuela’s room, she dragged the chair before the mirror and practiced sashaying. She stared at the magazines again. She wished for someone to explain whether there was anything wrong with putting so much hope in a single person.
She returned to the article she’d read when she first came: Do you feel empty
when he is gone? She read it all. In one of the magazines, for younger girls, was a sweepstakes survey. She didn’t have the stamp, but she filled it out anyway. Best friend: Josiane. Favorite color: pink. Favorite television star: Cindy. She left blank favorite beach, favorite restaurant, teacher’s name, favorite shampoo, favorite article in Teen Style, favorite department store. Then, favorite animal: dog + cat. Brothers and sisters: Isaias, Daniel, Hector (dead), Flora. Boyfriend: Alin, she wrote, in recklessly flowering letters, and then tore the card to tiny pieces.
She thought of telling Josiane. On the bus, she stood on the tips of her toes and cupped her hand to her friend’s ear. But the motor was too loud, and instead of repeating herself, she dropped back on her heels. She asked for the Thyago Firestorm book. Josiane said she wasn’t finished, and Isabel didn’t pursue it further.
Later, as they idled at a light, a girl passed carrying a baby. She stopped at a trash can and began to burrow through the garbage. Isabel leaned over to watch her as they drove away. ‘Do I look like that girl?’ she blurted out, and her friend eyed her strangely but didn’t answer.
Alone, she recalled a story from Saint Michael. A boy from the sea was traveling in the backlands when he met a girl sleeping beneath a drinking-tree. That night, they fell in love, but in the morning, she had to leave him. He pleaded, How will I find you again? and she whispered, Meet me beneath this tree. Then they parted. He stayed by the tree, where he planted a little farm. He went hungry because the earth was so poor, but he could only think of his love for the girl. Each night he slept beneath the tree. In times of hunger, he lived on its fruit and leaves, and drank the water from its roots. He grew old, but still he waited. Then one night, his milk goat ran away. He thought, I have waited so long, one night won’t matter. He went after his goat. That night the girl, now an old woman, visited. She found the tree empty and the farm abandoned. Weeping, she wandered away.
Often, in Saint Michael, when Isabel was alone in the white forest, she would hear crying like an old woman’s voice. Now the story acquired the power of a fable. It is the punishment for abandoning someone, she knew. When Alin invited her to the municipal park south of the Center, she shook her head. She didn’t explain.
The next week he asked again. She told herself it was only a children’s story. Still she refused. The third time he asked, she wrote a note: Isaias I am at the Park I will come back not too late. She left it on the pillow. She hoped, secretly, that the washerwomen would be at the river to see them pass together, but the banks were empty.
In the park, there was a large pond with dozens of white birds. When she squinted, they looked like slowly swaying S’s. She told Alin. ‘Swans,’ he said. ‘And those ones on the banks are egrets.’ The egrets troubled her: their long threaded veils seemed too vain for an animal.
Alin offered to carry Hugo, but she shook her head. She wanted him to hold her hand. She let it swing, empty, near his left side, and for a long time she thought of nothing else.
He spoke as they walked. She liked how he didn’t expect her to say much, that he didn’t treat her silence as simplicity. He told her of home, of coming to the city, of selling candies on city buses and shining shoes. He told her about a library in the Center, where he met an old man who showed him a book in which the poor fled a great city and encamped in the hills, because to remain there meant only to be slain. ‘The man was crazy, I think,’ he said. ‘He spent his days there, and would talk to anybody. But I wrote those words down.’ When he saw that this frightened her, he said, ‘There was another book—maybe one day I will show you. It was about this city, when it was all forest. It made me wonder if it is still the same beneath. Sometimes I imagine tearing the buildings off. It would be like tearing bark from a log that’s lain a long time without being touched. With everything scurrying out: the animals, the old ghosts, everyone that was here before.’
She smiled.
‘You think I am crazy, too,’ he said, but she shook her head.
They sat on a bench beneath a jacaranda, and she removed her shoes and rested her feet on its roots. She took the blanket away from the baby’s face so he could see the trees, but he seemed more interested in the bows on her dress. She plucked some of the flowers from a low branch and absentmindedly slipped them over his fingers. She watched out of the corner of her eye to see if Alin was looking at her.
In the distance, they watched a pair of dueling singers performing for a crowd. Alin began a new story, about his great-uncle, a poem singer in the north. He was senile now, an aunt took care of him. ‘The strange thing,’ he said, ‘is that even though he makes no sense, he still rhymes. You should hear him: he still remembers all the rhyme schemes, duets, simple couplets, six-lines, roundabouts, even the harder ones, like the seven-line rhymes with the six-line melodies, when the words and the music drift apart. The words make no sense at all, but the rhyme’s still there.’
The story unsettled her. It made her think of the old people in Saint Michael who refused to leave when their families migrated away. They could forget everything, even their own names, but they never seemed to forget which wells were still alive or where to find food. She imagined their minds like evaporating water retreating around the deepest part of a pond. She wondered, What will be left of me when the rest of me has gone?
By the pond, she saw a man wearing a checkered shirt similar to one Isaias owned back home, but it was new and brightly colored. Her eyes followed him until he was far away.
When the park closed, they filed along a thin sidewalk back to the bus. Alin asked, ‘Now what will you do?’
‘Cook for Hugo,’ she said absently.
‘No,’ said Alin, ‘not now. I mean, now—this month, this year.’
She shrugged.
‘You haven’t thought about it?’
I’m waiting, she thought. When he comes, I’ll decide.
‘You have to consider it,’ he said. ‘Or you will be stuck in the same place forever. I’m going to get a store, then expand, then maybe get two stores. Then I’ll go to school. A technical school, so I can learn to repair cameras, electronics. My mother believed that wrapping a baby in newspaper would make him grow up to be a doctor. But everyone knows you can’t just wait.’
‘Maybe I will go back to school,’ she said. ‘My father never went to school. My mother went.’
‘I don’t mean school, like a school in the backlands, just for reading. Anyone can read. I could read a book a day if I wanted. But you need a skill. You have to want to be something, or you will end up a maid like your cousin.’
As he began to describe a famous technical school in the Center, her thoughts drifted again. She had never considered one could do better than Manuela. Is this the way it is? she wondered. All the way along: a world full of people who want to know what you will be, what is your skill and what is your purpose. In the north, if a man had come and said, What will you be? What will you do? I would have laughed at this kind of person that lives all the time in the future.
‘You don’t have enough ambition,’ said Alin.
The wind was cool, and the park smelled strongly of fresh-cut grass. On a street corner, a little girl with wild yellow hair stretched out her arms and spun. Again Isabel was certain that most of her problems would be solved if Alin held her hand. It seemed as if it would rain, and she worried about getting home in time.
He came again. He took her on a train ride through the eastern settlements, to watch the shanties unwind over the hills; to the Center; to a skyscraper with views of the city.
She left the baby with one of the washerwomen, who promised not to tell Manuela, and Alin took her to a cinema, where there was a free screening sponsored by a bank. She had never seen a movie before. She was so overwhelmed by the seats, the high ceilings and the screen that when it started she began to laugh. ‘Shhh,’ said Alin. She was the only one laughing.
The movie was about a family of drought refugees in the backlands. The father worked a small plot of land o
n an abandoned homestead. The mother took care of the home; the children had never seen a town.
Halfway through the movie, the father was arrested and beaten. He had done nothing wrong, but he could not explain himself. The soldiers treated him as if he were a simpleton. ‘Speak up!’ they shouted, but he babbled incoherently. Watching, Isabel had two thoughts. The first was that he was hungry. The second unfurled slowly: It is not that he doesn’t know how to explain, it is that they don’t know how to understand his explanation. They are not watching his hands or his shoulders, they are not looking at his hat and where it’s worn and where it’s broken. They are not smelling, because if they smelled his breath, they would know he is starving. They do not notice how he keeps his water gourd close to him, and protects it before he protects his face. He doesn’t have words because he has never needed words: his wife understands him without being told. At night, when they are silent, it is not because they are simple, but because he says what he needs to say in his posture, in how fast he eats, if he licks his fingers, if he sleeps early, if he cries. His wife knows just by watching his walk if he is proud or shamed. He can tell her everything by his walk. He in turn knows by how much broth she serves him what she thinks the days will bring. By the smell of her clothes, he knows if she is too exhausted to bathe. By the way she holds a child, he knows if the child is sick. Like him, her language, the language that has served since she was a little girl, is a language of gestures, postures and smells, and then speech, if speech is necessary.
The soldiers beat him with the flat edges of their knives. He moaned like an animal. Then one day he was released and began his walk home.
The lights came up. ‘It’s over?’ she asked.
Following the free screening, there was a lecture and a discussion also sponsored by the bank. A poster read TELLING TRAGEDY: DROUGHT, MYTH AND REALITY IN THE BACKLANDS. A panel of well-dressed men and women settled around a podium lined with glasses of water. ‘It is about the abuse of power,’ they said. ‘The domination of the strong over the weak. It is about a simple person in a world that is too complex for him.’ For a long time, they argued with one another.