A Far Country (31 page)

She saw a street fair, a church, a crowd gathered and spilling into the road. She cursed at them. She wanted them to disappear, she wanted a great flood or wind to sweep the street clean of all the people. She ran along the sidewalk, frantically looking under the umbrellas, but she knew it was too late. ‘No,’ she said aloud. More umbrellas, more bundles of blankets streaming toward her. She stumbled and heard a voice behind her.

‘We thought we lost you,’ said the woman from the bus, handing her Hugo, smiling and disappearing into the crowd.

Isabel sought shelter beneath an awning, where for a long time she held the baby against her chest and didn’t move. Then impulsively she lifted him, pressed her nose into his hair, his cheeks, his belly. She opened his blanket and smelled him and squeezed him against her again. He seemed, impossibly, to be sleeping, and he sighed and settled into his old place against her shoulder.

Gradually, the sounds of the street returned. The rain had relented. She looked out at the church. I must thank Saint Jude, she told herself.

She moved slowly, shaking, afraid she would fall.

It took her a long time to make it through the crowd. The church was massive, a complex of dozens of buildings without order. She found her way to the brightly lit blessing room, where she lifted Hugo to catch the sprinkling of holy water.
She put out her tongue when the drops touched her face. The room was packed. Behind her was a wide table where people left broken icons they couldn’t bear to throw away. For a long time, she watched them: an armless Christ; an Our Lady of the Good Birth with a cape of torn crepe; a legless Saint Anthony like a ghost flying away in his robe; a Saint Lucy with a single marble eye on her plate; a Saint Rafael without wings; a Saint John the Baptist with a chipped coat of hairs.

‘You can take one.’ A woman in a worn wool sweater stroked Isabel’s arm. Her skin was gray; her glasses magnified eyes filled with milky cataracts. She had a limp rose pinned to her sweater. She wrapped her fingers in Isabel’s. Around her, other women cradled the saints gently in their hands. They were murmuring, ‘Look at you, my little saint, you are beautiful. You aren’t broken, my saint—how can someone be giving you away? I will help you stand, my little saint. I can take care of you, you are only missing a hand, a foot, a staff—the world is cruel, my love, to throw away a saint that’s broken.’

Isabel turned from the table and closed her eyes. She untangled her fingers from the woman’s and pushed her way outside. In the street, a line wrapped the city block before disappearing inside the church. She walked its length, past young girls with babies, old men and women supported by their children. Reeling, she accosted a woman with a palsied child in a plywood wheelchair, strapped with a pair of seat belts across his chest and legs. She grabbed her arm and said, ‘Please, tell me: How many years have you been praying to Saint Jude?’ ‘Why, since the boy was born, seven years ago,’ the woman answered. ‘But this year I came to pay a promise, because Saint Jude cured him.’ The boy was the size of an infant, his mouth was open, his hands were twisted over a
blanket. ‘No!’ shouted Isabel. ‘He isn’t cured! He is still sick!’ Stumbling, she turned and pushed her way into the chapel, where she crouched at the feet of the saints in their naves. She ran her hands through the piles of invocation cards and scattered notes with handwritten prayers and promises. She pulled out a note with a stapled photograph of a woman and words in a child’s pen. She put it down and reached in again, again she pulled out a folded note, opened it and read,
Please, Our Lady, Please watch over my son
, and then another,
Please make my mother better
, and then in pencil on a little card,
Watch over me, I am alone
, and then
Find him for me, Please find him for me—
a young girl’s handwriting, with a photograph stapled to a lined piece of notebook paper:
Please find him for me Saint Jude Thaddeus, he’s lost and he can’t be found
. She rose and cut the line to pray to Saint Jude, pressing Hugo against the wall beneath his icon, where a soft depression was worn into the marble. She wondered, How many babies will it take before we break through the wall? and a guard said, ‘Young lady, you need to move on.’

A woman took her arm and led her away. ‘There are so many people who want to pray,’ said the woman. ‘There are too many people. The most desperate people come to the city and the most desperate people in the city come to pray to Saint Jude.’ She caressed Isabel’s hand. ‘Why are you here?’ she asked. I took the wrong bus, Isabel thought, but she said, ‘At home there is a drought.’ ‘Was,’ said the woman. ‘Not anymore. You should be grateful. All over the backlands, there is rain.’

The woman left her in the street.

A procession began, and she joined, falling in behind three hooded members of a brotherhood. Saint Jude wobbled on
the back of a pickup. The crowds passed the flashing lights of bingo parlors, alcohol rehabilitation centers, evangelical churches, apartments filled with distant faces. They walked through rich neighborhoods, with high walls and electric fences. They sang hymns to Saint Jude and recited Hail Marys. They carried lit candles in the cut halves of bottles. The rims of the bottles puckered; the air smelled of incense and melting plastic. At times they merged onto larger roads, sharing them with buses that lumbered toward the shrouded light of downtown.

She felt carried along by the procession, which had swollen to impossible numbers, filling the road and overflowing into the side streets. As they walked, a vertigo seized her and the singing seemed to get louder until it filled her ears like a siren screeching. She wanted to go back and take a bus home, but each time she stopped the vertigo worsened, so she kept walking. What is this noise? she wondered, grimacing, putting her free hand to her ear. They turned up a long street, and she stared around her into the sea of bobbing candles. Is anyone else hearing this? She walked faster, and then suddenly it was quiet.

It was then that she saw Isaias. He was far ahead, where the procession climbed a soft rise in the road. She recognized his silhouette first, then the sway in his step. Frantically, she tried to push her way to him, but the procession had stopped, the truck carrying Saint Jude had stalled. ‘Patience,’ came the whispers, ‘Don’t push, Soon we will be moving again, we all will get there soon.’ She called out, but another hymn had begun. Ahead the truck started again, the crowd surged, her brother disappeared behind the high cinder-block walls of a corner house. ‘No!’ she cried aloud, trying to push her way
through the crowd. ‘Stop!’ She shoved between a couple holding hands. ‘Let me through!’ she said. ‘I will lose him again!’ She was blocked by a wall of shoulders. She tugged at their arms. ‘Let me through! I will lose him!’ A woman with a candle in her bare fist turned: ‘You won’t lose him. Your time will come. He can’t go anywhere, he’s only plaster.’

She rounded the corner. This time she saw Isaias walking at the edge of the crowd, singing. When he lifted his head, she saw he was thin, with dark sunken spaces around his eyes. She tried to shout again, but his name fell as a whisper. He walked on. He shouldn’t be thin like that, she thought, and for a long time it was the only thought she had.

So she followed. Or, she let herself be carried along with him, and when at last the statue of Saint Jude returned to the altar, she watched Isaias cross himself, descend the steps of the church and head up the long road, his body red in the brake lights of the inching traffic. She waited. A siren wailed, a little boy pushed past her, an old woman limped up the steps. She expected a sign to tell her to follow: a light, a ripple in the air, a wind, a keening. None came. The red lights inched forward. Crossing herself, she descended.

On the steps, the wind ruffled piles of invocation cards, matted together like wet leaves.

The crowd fell away quickly. At the threshold of a dark stretch of broken lamps, she told herself to go back. ‘It isn’t him,’ she said aloud. ‘It’s my mind, I’m imagining like I imagined I was following him before.’ She pinched her hand and inhaled Hugo’s faint scent of soap and talcum. She felt her arm burn with his weight. She thought of calling to Isaias, but the words eluded her. They passed an open canteen, where two old men played an accordion and a triangle. She breathed
in the sudden warmth and heard a fragment of a melody. Then the street was cold again. There was a light mist, but she knew it wouldn’t rain.

Isaias turned down an empty side street. She followed. She wanted to run to him, but something in his walk told her to wait until she understood what had happened and why he was there. So she remained a block behind and in the shadows. After a long time, she looked back. The lights of the church lit a distant halo in the mist. It seemed very small and very far away.

In her arms, Hugo cried.

Isaias stopped. Behind him, she waited. He didn’t turn. Then he walked on.

She knew then that he knew she was following. No one from the backlands would allow themselves to be followed by a stranger.

After many blocks, she sensed him slowing. She walked closer until finally she was at his side. She waited for him to say something, fighting the need to touch him, to jump on him, to push him, to grab his hand. She wrapped her arms tighter around the baby. Once or twice, Isaias turned to her, but when she looked up at him, he turned away. So they walked in silence, like they had walked in silence before.

She ceased to be tired. The pain in her feet disappeared. The baby grew light, floating on her like a scrap of warmth.

Now, as she waited for an explanation, her mind wandered. She found herself remembering the first retreat, the darkness of the shelters, the charqui and the yellow dog. She felt the soft wind of the collapsing tents and heard the rain on the fallen canvas. She remembered, for the first time in her life, the trip home, the tired people waiting for a car and then setting out on the trail. She remembered clinging to her mother,
and then, farther down the road, her father, then being passed from hand to hand until she reached her brother, where she became weightless and slept. She remembered this perfectly, the smell, the taste of dust and sweat on his shirt, his hand around her back, the trembling in his arm as the road stretched on.

It was then, in the midst of these memories, that the explanation came and once it came, she felt as if she had always known. By then the street seemed to have disappeared. There were no blackened lights, no shuttered houses with their barbed wire. It was like being in the cane when the cane was only emptiness: there was only a source and something that pulled her toward it. A gravity, she thought, she would spend the rest of her life trying to explain this, and the words would never be there. Just as he could never say: There is no music, there is no band, there is no beautiful girl in the square. There are no bars by the sea. There are no restaurants, no compliments from men who say that I have true talent. Those are words that I invented. In the world I must live in, I am just like everyone else, caught in the movement of those who have nothing. It has been this way since the beginning, since the day I saw you coming up the hill, since I saw you waving your flag in that valley of towers, when the streets were full but there was no one else there but you. I saw you looking for me, I saw you stop and break the crowds and drive the whole city to a halt, stop the flows of people through its streets, stop the fleets of perches hurtling south, stop the retreat of the clouds and send them swarming back into the backlands. I came to your door, but I did not have the courage to go in.

Is there any other answer? Any other explanation than my awe of you: a slope of cursive in a church register, a crackling of twigs beside me, a silent companion who cast me into the
world by your belief that I was anything other than what I really am, a cane cutter like my father, wrapped in the same rags as the other cane cutters, beating the same burnt and crumbling path through an endless field that belongs to someone else. That you are the single person in the world who makes me more than what everyone else sees: that you created me, that in your mind lives the person I wish to be.

He could not say: There is no fiddle, I tried for a month and then I pawned it and sent the money home. The rest was a lie. That’s all.

She could see the end of the road, where there was a bridge and the glint of train rails. She followed him down a crumbling stairwell, to the edge of the track, dark and littered with broken glass.

They walked for a long time along the rails. Then he entered a narrow alley that curled through the planked walls of a shantytown. He led her over a low rise, and they entered a field. There was a highway, empty save a rare car that appeared and disappeared like a fleeting thought.

He descended a short slope to a culvert and a corrugated drainage tunnel beneath the highway. She stayed back and watched him disappear inside. When he emerged, he was carrying something in his arms. He handed it to her. There was a blanket, a plastic bottle of water and an orange. She mixed the water with the little bit of formula that remained from the long day that had begun watching the egrets’ veils and thinking of wasps. She wrapped the blanket around herself and the baby.

There was a wide stone on the bank. They crouched together and stared into the darkness. She peeled the orange with her teeth and split it in two. She offered it to him, but he shook his head.

Perhaps she slept, because dawn came soon. He rose. Still wearing the blanket, she followed him up the bank and to the edge of the road. The verge was narrow, and she walked behind him. He was a dark spot against the sun, and it hurt her eyes to look there.

In the distance, she could see the rise of the hill, the vultures circling in the air. Cars passed, the drivers leaning on their horns, but she didn’t care. Her brother left the road and descended the embankment, hopped the thin stream that ran through the culvert and took long steps toward a cluster of ramshackle houses. It was then that she was aware of the other figures marching behind her on the highway, emerging from the shanties and climbing the slope toward the dump.