A Far Country (17 page)

O
ver the following weeks, more families arrived in New Eden, marching up the hill beneath bags and battered suitcases, settling in homes or pushing back through the Settlements to the woods. They cleared the brush and felled the cypresses and laurel. Behind the fluttering sheets that hung as window curtains, Isabel could see sleeping bodies crowding the floors.

The city was dry, the days covered in a strange, thick warmth. Without rain, the dust stayed in the air, blurring the distant towers in the haze.

At the edge of the forest, Isabel found a quiet spot in the carmine shade of a coral tree. She began to spend hours there, watching the children play, the women hanging clothes on the branches, the boys slinking into the shadows to capture songbirds. The stumps of the cut trees were moist with sap. Clapboard shanties sprang up in the sweet-smelling arbors.

Then she went down, through the streets where groups of young men sprawled before televisions flickering with images from over the hill. During the first few weekends, Manuela
showed her whom she could trust and whom to avoid, whispering, ‘That one, careful of that one,’ until Isabel learned to recognize the restlessness and the angry stares. At Junior’s store, she began to hear hushed stories about a man named Blue Rat. On a newspaper used to wrap bottles of cane liquor, she read the headline
KILLING IN THE CENTER
. In the photo, a crescent of children stood around a body and stared back at the camera.

At times, her sleep was punctuated by sirens. Once, on the weekend, she and Manuela woke to screaming and then a shot, and in the morning the streets were eerily empty. Strangely, it frightened her less than it did Manuela. The stories seemed somehow to come from a parallel world, whose seething trajectory could be avoided by not asking questions and staying small. This was an old skill, from Saint Michael.

She noticed early that the police never came up the hill.

One day, one of the washerwomen said that her son had come home with a white purse as a gift. ‘I refused to take it,’ she said, close to tears. ‘I said, son, where did you get this? and he just lay on the bed and wrapped the leather strap around his hand so tightly that his fingers were pale.’

On the riverbank, a princess flower began to drop its petals. They shriveled like crepe paper and drifted to the water. At home, Isabel carefully plucked purple stamens from the clothes when they dried.

After her third week in the city, she awoke to a small procession led by an old woman in mourning. Behind her, in a shifting crowd, a man carried a box for a woman’s dress. Isabel followed. Inside the box was a baby, its lips painted and a sparkling crown upon its head. Pale blush powder covered its cheeks. Its eyes were open. The box was painted with clouds and filled with strips of tinfoil fashioned into roses.

…

In her light blue dress, Hugo on her hip, she joined a crowd of children following an itinerant portrait seller.

He appeared one morning by the river, lugging a bag full of picture frames, walking as if he were listening to music. When the women saw him, they rose together, tendrils of soap curling from their feet. He was whistling the melody of ‘White Dove.’ He finished the verse before he greeted them.

He was a little younger than Isaias, with sage green eyes and long lashes like a woman’s. He wore canvas tennis shoes that looked as if they had been scrubbed clean, and a mesh baseball cap with the name of a cement distributor, its clasp repaired with electrical tape. His bag was printed with
PHOTO ALIN
in rainbow-colored capitals. He had a slight underbite, accentuated by his smile, and uneven teeth of which he seemed unconcerned. He had, Isabel thought, a lonely air, like someone at the edges of a dance, or a child who, because of an illness, had once been kept from other children.

As the women crowded on the bank, their hems heavy with water, soapsuds fizzing on their arms, he showed them a portrait. It was the size of his chest, and Isabel recognized an old woman named Rosa who lived several houses up the hill. In the portrait, she wore a beautiful dress and a necklace of swollen pearls; her lips were scarlet, her cheeks mauve. Her hair, which Isabel remembered as streaked with gray, had turned to raven black. Behind her was a ballroom with chandeliers and tiny couples dancing.

‘They are tricks,’ said the washerwomen, but Isabel already knew. Before the cricket men had come, a similar portraitist would visit the market in Prince Leopold. He collected old photos, enlarging them, coloring them, pasting them on
backgrounds cut from magazines. Who wants a photo of what they really look like? he would say with a laugh, decorating them with big houses, cars, teeth, the sea.

As the washerwomen purred around the photo, Isabel saw that the young man was missing two fingers on his right hand. The ends of the missing fingers were burnished with scars like pink centipedes. Cane, she thought immediately: once, he didn’t move fast enough. He caught her staring and smiled. Hugo grabbed the collar of her dress.
Stop
, she whispered through her teeth, pushing back his hand. She avoided the young man’s eyes.

The young man left the women and Isabel followed at a distance. Curious children gathered as he stopped by each house and clapped. In her doorway, Dona Rosa wiped her hands on a faded gingham dress. When she saw the portrait, she laughed and threw her arms over the young man, covering his face with kisses. He described the details: ‘This necklace comes from Italy. I found it in a magazine for
madames
—it’s called
True Romance;
the dress is from France, it’s pure silk; the hairstyle is from
Beautiful Bride
, it’s special for springtime and roses.
Not for everyone
, said the article, but I knew it was for you.’

‘And the ballroom?’

‘Vienna, in Europe—it’s Carnival. I didn’t believe it, either, but that’s what the magazine said. The music is a waltz. Like this …’ He danced her a few steps. Rosa cradled the frame against her breast. ‘There, there,’ said the young man.

He turned back at the top of the hill. The children drifted away, but Isabel continued to follow. To her surprise, he stopped at Manuela’s house and called outside the door. She took a hesitant step forward. When no one answered, he
shrugged and hefted his bag over his shoulder. ‘Wait,’ said Isabel.

‘You live here?’

She nodded. He looked at a folded sheet of paper. ‘There’s an Isaias, right?’ ‘Isaias is my brother. He’s gone now. Working.’ She paused and shifted Hugo up on her hip. ‘You have a portrait of him?’ she asked. The young man nodded and pulled out a frame scarcely larger than his hand. ‘I’ve been carrying it around for almost a month. No one’s been home.’

Isabel recognized the portrait immediately from a document photograph Isaias had taken in Prince Leopold. His mouth was set and serious, his brow faintly wrinkled. Now the photo was enlarged and colored: her brother’s cheeks were pink, his eyes a bruise blue. His lips were salmon, as if he were wearing lipstick. In the photo, he wore a jacket and a crimson tie, but she knew he never owned one. There was a cutout of a violin, and the background showed an orchestra: not a backlands band, but a concert hall orchestra, with musicians in black-and-white suits. She was so close that she could see that the images were pasted, but from a distance, it looked as if he were in the concert hall himself.

Her hand began to shake.

‘You okay?’ asked the young man. She nodded. ‘Is something wrong? I didn’t mean to upset you.’

She shook her head. In her arms, Hugo reached for the photo. She held it away, and pushed her hair back with her shoulder. The baby began to cry.

The young man reached out and stroked Hugo’s head, ‘When you’re old enough, I’ll make you one, too,’ he said, and chuckled, alone. Hugo buried his face into Isabel’s breast.

‘I’m Alin.’ The young man extended his hand, but Isabel’s
arms were full. She nodded shyly. The sun felt very warm on her cheekbones. He let his hand drop. ‘Do you have a name?’

‘Yes,’ she said awkwardly, and then, ‘It’s Isabel.’ Hugo twisted again.

‘Is he yours?’

‘Mine?’

‘The baby—is he your baby?’

‘This baby? No! He’s my cousin’s!’ Her face grew hot. ‘I don’t have a baby.’ Her fingers fidgeted with the frame. It occurred to her that she had spoken very loudly.

Alin regarded her curiously. ‘You know, you remind me of a niece I have in the north,’ he said. ‘You just arrived, didn’t you?’

Isabel paused. ‘No,’ she said.

‘No? You don’t have to be ashamed. I’m from there, too. Not that you would know where I’m from. Just a little village with a saint’s name. Hot as sun on a black cow’s back.’

Isabel felt herself smile, a little. ‘My village is Saint Michael in the Cane. Do you know it?’

He shook his head. ‘Not that Saint Michael, but I’ve heard of other towns with that name. Every state must have a Saint Michael. Saint Michael of the Mountain, Saint Michael of the Riverside, now Saint Michael in the Cane. My cousin’s husband is from a Saint Michael. He used to curse that name. It was bad luck, he said. If you name your village after the saint that fights the devil, then you’d better be prepared to join him. That’s what he said.’

When Isabel saw that he was waiting for her to respond, she said, ‘I think it’s just another name. He watches over us. We aren’t unlucky. There is a stream, sometimes, and sugarcane. Many places don’t even have a stream.’

‘Maybe,’ said Alin. ‘But if he really watched over you, you would be home, not here.’

Isabel didn’t know how to answer. She saw the washerwomen trudging up the hill under their loads, and she excused herself and went to help them carry.

For the rest of the week, she remained inside.

Now, with the portrait staring into the room, her brother’s absence became acute; the hours no longer disappeared into long stretches of dreaming and waiting. She paced and wrung her hands. She told herself: Be patient! He’s always been like this, walking off into the thorn, disappearing to the coast, making fantastic plans in that house with its anthills and crumbling walls. She tried to imagine him before big crowds, with his own band and clean white boots. Maybe he went somewhere far away: the docks, the jungle, even to sea. Maybe the phones didn’t work. Maybe he’d sent a letter, the envelope overstuffed with pages, lost somewhere in a dark post office.

Then, at night, she yielded to different possibilities. He had been shot or robbed, hit by a car, killed by police; he had fallen sick with a disease of the city, from poisoned water, poisoned air, from visions, spirits, nerves, nostalgia, possession. The thoughts seized her like a fever; she had to recite invocations against her imagination. As she waited for sleep, she tried to imagine him moving through the mass of buildings, the two of them circling somewhere in its great dark spaces.

In Saint Michael, when she was a child, a little boy had been found wandering the white forest north of Prince Leopold.
A family had taken him in, waiting for him to tell them the name of his village. At first they thought he was scared, but then his silence lengthened into weeks. When they asked, Where do you live? he said only, With my mother, and when they asked, Where does she live? he said, With my father. He’s simple, said some. Others argued, Why does he need to know the name of his father? Why does he need to know the name of his village if he has never seen another village?

The story had terrified Isabel’s mother. She made Isabel practice her family name and the name of their town.
The cane
, said Isabel, and her mother corrected her worriedly: No! Say all of it, say
Saint Michael in the Cane
. If you say you are from
the cane
, they will not understand you. A
little girl from the cane
could be any little girl, from anywhere. To be safe, her mother took a string and tied a piece of cloth to her wrist. On it was written her family name, village and then
I am Isabel
. She imagined other Isabels from other villages wandering through the white forest. She wore it until the string grew thin and snapped.

When Manuela came home at the end of the week, Isabel showed her the portrait. Manuela carried it to the light and peered at it for a long time. ‘These are very expensive,’ she said at last.

‘It’s elegant,’ said Isabel.

‘It’s not elegant at all. Poor people paying so much to pretend they’re something that they’re not is pathetic, not elegant.’ She handed it back.

‘Manuela,’ Isabel asked. ‘Why isn’t he here?’

‘I told you,’ said her cousin. ‘He’s working.’ But later that night, she said suddenly, as if to herself, ‘Leo is coming soon. Once or twice he helped Isaias find a place to stay when he was working on the coast. Maybe he’ll know.’

‘Every day, the women at the river talk about their sons,’ said Isabel. ‘One of the washerwomen said her boy hurt a woman and took her purse—’

Manuela interrupted, ‘That’s different. Isaias isn’t stupid like those boys. Hopeful, maybe, which is the best friend of stupid, but not stupid.’

Later Manuela said, ‘I worked with a girl whose brother disappeared once. He went to the city to work because he wanted to buy a record player. He thought it would take two months. It was before they had phones. It took four years, and then he came home.’