A Far Country (16 page)

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 sadness 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.

The girls in the short dresses saw the girls in their factory clothes and remembered the first time they heard of the grinding monotony of the plants. They thought, I won’t do that, I won’t slave for a month for what I make in a week, and they thought of their faces pushed into the rotten carpets of cheap motels and minutes that seemed like hours. They told themselves, I would die of the boredom, and thought of the same foul words from the same men, the same musty smell below the same bellies, the same haggling, the same damp beds, the same sharp edges of broken floor tiles, the same mildewed ceilings. Then they told themselves, Poverty is worse, Minimum wage is worse, and they thought of the cost of lipstick and stockings that the stupid men tore in fits of false passion, and the price of contraception and injections of penicillin. Then they thought in the end, But I am beautiful and shouldn’t work in a factory, and stared at their reflections in the vibrations of the glass.

They joined buses from other corners of the periphery as they descended on the Center. Now it was the cleaners of the industrial plants who got out first, on the corners of empty blocks with graffitied walls and barbed wire. They watched for shadows as they walked to the gates, waiting as the guards fumbled with the locks. In the black and echo of empty corridors they mopped and sang childhood songs from the north, thought of home and watched the rectangles of sky for dawn to come.

Then the night-shifters got off and took up spots on the factory lines and turned and clamped and cut and twisted and dipped and sprayed until the end-of-shift bell rang, stopping
only for midnight lunches on the cold aluminum tables of company cafeterias.

Next were the guards, who left meal tins in supply closets and checked the chambers of their guns. They waited in the empty lobbies of the black-marble banks and watched the entrances. They imagined figures moving through the dark. They learned that if you stare long enough, you see men where there aren’t men, that in the darkness of the empty lobbies of black-marble banks, the night-men emerge from the artificial palms, the swirls in the marble, the reflections in the floor. They knew that some guards never learned to tell the difference between real men and the night-men who appeared and disappeared and would never rob anything. They laughed at stories of friends who broke the glass on alarms or fired rounds into the marble, who, trembling, tried to explain what they had seen. They said they would never do this, and fantasized at night of gallant rescues, newspaper headlines and thankful executives who emptied coffers of gratitude into their hands.

The last to get off were the girls, who walked until they were beyond the lights and then stopped, to tug their skirts above the white triangle of their underpants and pace the shadows of the overpasses, to smoke anxiously as they walked toward cars idling at the edges of the dark sidewalks, where in the morning they caught the buses once again for home.