A Far Country (14 page)

At the top, Isabel watched the shanties continue over the hills to the edge of a green forest. A group of boys chased a deflated ball over a clearing. Manuela said, ‘This used to be woods. When I arrived, none of this was here.’ She took Isabel’s arm and turned her. Isabel could see Junior’s store, the distant road she had arrived on, a passing bus. Beyond the road, houses rose up another slope like haphazardly stacked boxes. Beyond them, a crest of towers shimmered in the far distance. ‘It keeps going,’ said her cousin. ‘On the other side of those towers, too. I work on the other side of those towers. Even then it doesn’t stop.’

They walked down to the main road. Manuela showed her a river, a water pump, the power lines where the settlement pulled its electricity. The river came from the mountains, she said, ‘So it’s clean. Not to drink—don’t even think of drinking—but you can use it for washing clothes.’ At the well,
water spurted from the faucet in uncertain hiccups, but it was clear. The power lines were a tangle of wires. On some nights, she said, the power companies came and cut them down.

At an empty lot filled with garbage, she said, ‘Look at this filth. Some people want to be poor forever. Go to the rich neighborhoods and you won’t see them throw their garbage where they live.’

‘Yes,’ said Isabel, her eyes drifting along the scattered mounds of trash, no longer listening.

‘Of course,
yes,’
said Manuela. ‘Except your brother—who thinks he’s smart—said, “No, the rich only throw their garbage where we live.” That kind of thinking isn’t smart at all. That kind of thinking will get you nowhere.’

‘Yes,’ said Isabel again, now overwhelmed by the abundance of the place, by the fragments of colored glass, the sprigs of mint growing up between the weeds, the tires, the discarded metal. There was a car door, stripped of most of its paint but otherwise untouched. Her thoughts crystallized around the door. At home, she thought, they would have fashioned it into knives and toys, nails, grave markers, oil lamps, wind chimes, costumes, saints.

At her foot glittered a doll’s wand. She bent to take it, but Manuela grabbed her shoulder. ‘That’s filth. You are not a scavenger.’

She waved to an old woman dressed in mourning. ‘God bless you, Luisa,’ she said, and the old woman nodded. She had a morning glory in her hair and stopped every few feet to catch her breath.

Later, they called Saint Michael from the phone outside Junior’s store. It took four tries for the line to connect. Manuela spoke until they needed a second token. She asked
Isabel’s mother to call back. Isabel answered. Loud music was playing on the hill, and she pressed her palm to her ear. ‘It’s me, it’s Isabel!’ ‘What is it like?’ asked her mother. ‘Manuela has a house. The baby is beautiful. His eyes are so bright, his hair is soft. He eats all the time. He has such a strong cry. He is so strong.’

There was a break in the music. She thought she could hear wind whistling over the receiver in Saint Michael. Isabel wanted to say
Isaias isn’t here yet
, but she knew that her mother understood this already in her silence. She imagined her standing in the square in her dark dress, holding the phone with both of her hands. She turned away from Manuela. ‘How long will I stay here?’ she whispered.

‘Is something wrong?’

Isabel pinched her lips and shook her head. ‘Isabel?’ asked her mother, and Isabel could hear her trying to steady her voice. I should tell her not to worry, she thought. She wanted to say: There is no space, there are crowds everywhere, it is filled with people, a different kind of people, who use words that I can’t understand.

‘Isabel?’ Her mother’s voice caught on her name.

Manuela was watching her. She tucked a blanket around the baby. ‘I have to go,’ said Isabel. She waited to hear her mother hang up. After a long time, she said, ‘Hello?’

‘Hello,’ said her mother.

‘I have to go,’ said Isabel again.

At home, they listened to the radio until it grew dark. For dinner, they boiled beans and thickened them with ground manioc. Manuela told her about her arrival: how she began as a maid in a factory, found a job with a family, advanced from assistant maid to head maid, how she built her house. She
seemed happy as she spoke. ‘I was the first in New Eden to have a concrete roof,’ she said. ‘You should tell that to people back home.’ When she asked about Saint Michael, Isabel told her about the new road from the coast. She didn’t mention the men, and it sounded as if the highway had unfurled alone in a path of black tar. When Manuela asked who was left, she told her, adding the names of the new babies who had survived. She lied and said they had celebrated Saint John’s Day before she departed. Manuela asked the price of rice and considered the numbers carefully.

Later Isabel asked, ‘And Leo?’

‘He’s a good man. Not handsome and trouble like the last one. We didn’t marry properly, but you have to pay just to get married. You have to pay even to be buried here. He visits once a month, or whenever he can. He works on the coast, you know, on huge ships that go out to sea.’

At night, before they fell asleep, Manuela said, ‘I know it looks easy, with the electricity and the shops and the wells, but in many ways it’s harder than Saint Michael. At least in Saint Michael you know which way your trouble’s coming from. And if something goes wrong, someone will help you out. In Saint Michael most of the killing’s done by God.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean what I mean,’ said her cousin. ‘Now quiet.’

In the street, loud music played into the night.

Isabel couldn’t sleep. She turned quietly to watch her cousin. She is still the same person I knew in Saint Michael, she told herself again, but now she was less certain. There was something new, a vigilance, or anger, different from the quiet responsibility of the young woman she had known in the north.

She had been the flower girl at Manuela’s first wedding, and she clung to the memory now. She was five. Her dress was white muslin, and her hair was laced with ribbons. It was the height of summer, and a warm wind carried the clang of goat bells into the church. Manuela wore a long gown with embroidered cloth roses; Isabel’s mother’s lips were painted crimson; Isaias wore a hand-sewn tie and brilliantine in his hair. Because Manuela’s father had died when she was a baby, Isabel’s father led her to the altar. She played nervously with her ring, stopping only to touch her hair as if strands had come loose. Then she covered her nails; they were chipped and split and had been almost impossible to paint.

Isabel borrowed shoes from a cousin of the groom. She sat in the front pew, where dragonflies droned through the scent of rose water. On the seat backs, wreaths of plastic flowers entangled her curls. Her hem was torn from catching on the thorn when they filed down a narrow trail.

From the wedding, Isabel also remembered: Manuela’s trembling voice as she repeated the oath, a drunk uncle, the clean-swept square where they danced quadrilles. At the edge of the plaza, a photographer from Prince Leopold lit the air in dusty explosions. For the feast, they ate goat’s rumen stuffed with lime, black pepper, tomato and chopped heart, liver and lungs. They boiled tendons and added the broth to manioc flour. In the kitchen, glistening tripe hung from the counter like an exquisite velvet curtain.

After the wedding, Manuela moved with her husband to Prince Leopold, where they built a brick house on the outskirts of the city. In the months that followed, Isabel saw little of her cousin. When a year had passed, the old women began to whisper that Manuela couldn’t conceive. They made her
teas and poultices; when these failed, she traveled to a distant shrine, where she joined a line of young women, lifted her skirts and lowered herself against a blessed stone.

She returned to find her home empty save the groom’s mother, who sat in a single remaining chair and knitted. Her son had left for the coast, she said, with another woman. ‘It’s better you learned his type now,’ she added, not without kindness, and gave Manuela back her trousseau.

Manuela returned to Saint Michael. She spent long days at a neighbor’s sugar mill. By then, she realized she was already pregnant. She made a pilgrimage to pray for the baby’s health. Isabel was there when her cousin came home, her face bruised and her arm in a sling. She set her small bag down before a gaggle of women. ‘The flatbed turned over …,’ she began, standing in the pale light, her voice breaking. ‘You lost the child,’ said her mother, and Isabel told no one that she had dreamed this two nights before.

The following year she went to the city. She was the first woman to go alone. Isabel’s father had always called her Simple Manuela, and when she left, he said he didn’t think she could make it a week there. But by then Isabel thought of her differently, as someone who moved through life the way she turned cane paste, steady, without stopping, head down and muscles tensed.

Isabel was seven. She saw Manuela again when she was ten, still the same woman, quiet and persistent, settling easily into washing and caring for the children. She stayed for a month and then returned to the south.

On that single visit home, she told stories about the city with words that somehow reduced it to something familiar. It was
big
and life there was
hard
but
good
if you found work.
It wasn’t the city of the crime programs or the television dramas about the rich, but a place of dogged calculations: salary less rent, less water, less food, less the bus, less devotion candles, less clothes, less phone calls home. A city made of numbers, and the children were disappointed. Isaias had pursued her breathlessly. What about the street gangs, the trains, the museums, the parks, the giant markets? he asked, until Manuela turned on him with sudden viciousness, Those things are not for me, Those are for other people, That is not the city I know.

Later Isabel cornered her out by the clotheslines. Yes, love? said Manuela. What about the sea and the beautiful people there? asked Isabel. Manuela paused for a moment before continuing to hang the clothes. The sea is still far away, she said, and what would I do with the sea?

In the morning, Manuela woke Isabel for church. ‘It’s late,’ she said. ‘I was afraid you’d sleep forever.’ She wore a suit of brown nylon, burnished over the elbows and shoulders. Isabel put on her dress from the trip south. It was her best, yellow with patterned blue daisies the width of her finger. It was still moist around the hem and in the shadows of the clothespins, but it was the dress she wore to church at home. Manuela gave her a sweater. She brushed her hair and tied it with a ribbon. Curls sprang loose. She wet her hands and pressed them back. Her feet were raw where the shoe straps rubbed.

At the base of the hill Manuela said, ‘On Sunday, there aren’t many buses.’ So they took off their shoes and walked. Manuela carried Hugo in a sling. It was early and the zinc roofs of the shanties glinted with dew. Finally, a bus passed.
Manuela waved and shouted. They ran after it as it slowed, the door accordioning open with a hiss.

They changed buses at a tall sculpture that looked like a bird or a giant C. The second bus took them across a river and toward a rise of towers before diving into a tunnel. This time, Isabel stood by a young girl with blond hair. The girl’s hand gripped the bar below hers. It was white and smooth, with long fingers and violet traces of veins. Isabel had never seen such a delicate hand, and at a bump in the road, she let her palm scoot against the girl’s thumb. Without looking, the girl slid her hand away.

From the next bus they got off before the steps of a maize-colored church with white cornices like the icing on a cake. Inside, the church stirred with women in wool sweaters and suits like her cousin’s. Isabel wondered if her parents had ever seen such lush saints, in shawls of purple velvet, real tulle dresses and nacre crowns. There was a Jesus with lustrous enamel skin and a puckered wound like the scarlet mouth of a fish. A large statue of Saint Lucy carried her eyes on a platter and turned her face to the ceiling, where painted angel heads floated on peeling strips of cerulean. Isabel looked for salt at the saint’s feet, but there was none. Women came and ran their fingers over the eyes as if reading braille, then touched their own lashes.

Manuela stopped beside her and whispered from an invocation card.

Mass began. A gray priest’s hand trembled on the psalter, his sermon blurring with the murmur from the street. Isabel slid her shoes back and forth and wondered if anyone had noticed them. In front, an old man in worn wool trousers balanced his hat on his lap. He kept nodding to sleep and seemed ready to topple into a woman beside him. Isabel turned with a
smile to tell Manuela, but her cousin’s eyes were glassy and her lips moved with the words of the hymns.

The songs were of forgiveness and everlasting love. Isabel reached over and took Hugo, who slept.

After the service, Manuela led her to a crowded shopping street with a narrow sky. Isabel had never seen such stores. She handed the baby back to Manuela and watched her reflection pass over window displays of typewriters and bridal gowns, cartoon-covered notebooks and glazed carmine cookies with candy pearl collars. But her reflection intrigued her most; it was the first time she had seen her full body since the mirror with Isaias. Behind, she watched the passing crowds.

I am a small person, she thought.

Manuela pulled her away.

They stopped on a long bridge with wrought-iron rails. Manuela bought her ice cream from a passing cart, and she licked the sweet milk as it spiraled down her wrist. When she finished, she asked for another. ‘No,’ said her cousin. ‘You will think it’s normal, that in the city people eat ice cream every day.’ At a produce stand, she bought her an unfamiliar fruit. ‘It’s an apple,’ she said. ‘I had never seen one, either.’ Isabel held it until Manuela said, ‘Have it now or you will drop it and ruin it.’ She ate it in small, cautious bites.

They walked on.

From the bridge, they descended into a market. ‘The knife that cuts steel!’ shouted vendors. ‘The famous pencil that never breaks!’ ‘Best tomatoes in the world!’ In a far corner, a crowd had gathered around a man in a plaid suit and a feather in his hat. His face was wrinkled; when he wasn’t smiling, his mouth folded upon itself like a clenched fist. His little mustache wiggled as he spoke. As if reading her thoughts, Manuela whispered, ‘Just like the north. I know. They left,
too. Would you stay if there was no one left to listen to you sing?’