A Far Country (20 page)

Josiane paused. ‘It doesn’t matter, though. It doesn’t make me sad. One day everyone will have to come. People weren’t meant to live in such a place, my uncle says. It’s not natural.’

‘We’ve always lived there,’ said Isabel.

‘Not always,’ said her friend. ‘You had to come from somewhere. Your people were from somewhere before your village. Do you think you just appeared out of nowhere, grew up out
of the ground? You think you’re made of dust?’ ‘I didn’t say that.’ ‘Then where did you come from?’ ‘I told you.’ Josiane shook her head. ‘You’re not listening. Think, where did your grandfather come from?’ ‘Same village as me.’ ‘And his father?’ ‘Him, too, I think.’ ‘And his father, what about him?’ Isabel frowned. ‘I don’t know. I think he was born there, too.’ ‘You don’t know anything about him?’ Isabel paused. ‘No. Only that he was the grandfather of my grandfather. And he must have had a grandfather, too.’ Josiane waved her hands in frustration. ‘But if you go back far enough, there was a place without people. That’s the point. That’s what I’m saying. That’s why it’s not natural. It’s well-known.’

She grew quiet. A cat rooted in a pile of husk left by a cane-juice vendor. A paper scavenger ran past, pulling a cart stacked with cardboard. A little boy was perched on top. The man swerved through the traffic, took bounding steps and let the cart glide.

Across the street, a girl in a bright pink shirt called.

‘Hey!’ Josiane’s smile returned. She ran and embraced her. When Isabel approached, she said, ‘This is Isabel. I told you about her. My newest friend, from way back in the middle of nowhere.’

The girl’s stare made Isabel feel small again. ‘Hey, Miss Nowhere,’ she said, and laughed.

Isabel sat next to them and listened as they talked. The girl said that she’d found a toad with its eyelids sewn shut with green silk thread. ‘It’s a spell to cuckold a man, of course,’ said Josiane. ‘My sister knows it.’

The girl nodded thoughtfully. ‘Do you know spells for men?’ she asked Isabel.

‘Look at her,’ Josiane interrupted. ‘She’s a kid. She just got here.’

Isabel shrugged. ‘I’ve heard of people doing that, but they didn’t in my village. We only have bull toads, and I would never touch them. Only really hungry people would touch them.’ She added, ‘They belong to the devil.’

‘We’re talking about spells for men,’ said Josiane. She turned to the girl. ‘She doesn’t know. She’s very innocent.’

‘Why are you protecting her?’ asked the girl. ‘I knew all about men when I got here.’

They stayed with the girl until dark. Sometimes Isabel listened. Other times she watched the street, staring at the faces in the crowds that passed. After a while, the girls began to talk about the soap operas. Isabel found herself transfixed by a description of a beautiful maid called Cindy. ‘She’s really a maid?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘She’s from the interior like you. But she’s tall, and her skin is fair. She combs her hair in the curly way. She is so lovely.’ Isabel didn’t know what to say. She stretched her legs so the girl could see her shoes, but the girl said nothing. The girl left.

On the bus to the Settlements, Josiane asked, ‘Who do you live with?’

‘My cousin,’ Isabel said. Then she added, carefully, ‘And my brother, but he hasn’t come home.’

‘Hasn’t come home?’ Josiane frowned. ‘What’s that mean, hasn’t come home?’

‘He was here, but when I arrived he was gone. Almost two months now.’

‘Just disappeared? Have you been to the police?’

Isabel shook her head. ‘We don’t go to the police where I’m from.’

‘Neither do we. But the police for disappeared people are a different story. Some of them, at least. I went once, so I know.
When my boyfriend, my
ex-boyfriend
, the father of my baby, didn’t come around, I went to the station in the New Settlements and they told me to go to the Center, where they specialize in missing people.’ She paused. ‘That’s where I learned that most people who disappear want to be disappeared, if you know what I’m saying. That’s the worst part, almost worse than hearing something bad.’

Isabel didn’t know how to answer. Suddenly, she closed her eyes and pressed her face against the cold of the handrail. ‘Hey, hey, didn’t mean to upset you,’ said Josiane. She leaned forward and whispered, ‘There’s a happy ending. I revenged myself. I got his sister to dip a strip of my nightgown into his coffee. So he came back, but I didn’t take him.’ Isabel didn’t look up. ‘Hey, I’m just trying to cheer you up,’ said Josiane. ‘Just trying to make you laugh. You’ll find him, I promise. Does he have any friends? Do you know anyone he worked for? Did he leave anything?’

Isabel wiped her eyes with her palm. ‘I looked. When I came I looked in the house. Maybe not everywhere. But I didn’t think he was gone.’ She felt suddenly the need to tell about the flatbed ride to the south, about her first days in the room, waiting. The bus slowed. ‘This is my stop,’ said Josiane, and descended with a kiss on her cheek.

Later that night, Isabel remembered the little scrap of paper she had found on the first day she arrived. She was ashamed she had forgotten it until now, but at the time it had seemed unimportant. She took it from the pants.
PATRICIA M
/
APT 22
/
VILA CAPRI TOWER
/
PRESIDENT
KENNEDY
.

She showed the paper to her cousin. ‘Well, well,’ said her cousin.

Isabel didn’t understand. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong. But this neighborhood is …’ She shook her head. ‘Maybe he was looking for work.’

‘We could go,’ said Isabel. ‘And ask.’

‘Are you kidding? You can’t just visit a person like that because you have her name on a piece of paper.’

‘Maybe the lady you work for knows her.’

‘My boss? Maybe my boss knows her? You think they are friends because they both have money? Do you know every poor person in the world?’

‘I didn’t say that—’ Isabel began, and in his hammock Hugo began to cry. They both went to him, but Isabel reached him first. Her cousin watched as she rocked him. ‘And what would she know?’ Manuela said. ‘If Isaias was working for her, he would have told us, right?’

Later, Isabel asked, ‘What is she like?’

‘Who?’

‘Your boss. You never say what she’s like. You never say what the people you work for are like.’

‘You are still thinking about going.’

‘No.’

‘Then why are you bothering me with questions like that?’

‘I just wanted to know.’

‘You don’t need to know. She pays me and you eat. That’s enough. Why do you want to know about something that has nothing to do with you?’

The next weekend, when she returned to wave, Isabel showed the note to Josiane. Her friend whistled. ‘What was he doing
there?’
It was lunchtime, and they were sitting on the sidewalk, beneath the ficus.

Isabel shrugged. ‘I just found it.’

‘See? I told you to look.’ Josiane bit her lip and peered at the piece of paper again. ‘Did you go and ask?’

Isabel turned away.

‘What is it?’ asked Josiane. ‘I don’t understand you. You won’t go to the police, and now you’re scared.’

‘I’m not scared,’ Isabel protested. ‘I can’t just go to someone’s house because I have their name on a piece of paper.’

‘No? There’s a law about that?’ Josiane tugged angrily at a weed that sprouted through the sidewalk. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that because she lives in a neighborhood like that, she’s above you. She’s nothing. She’s like this—’ She held up her little finger. ‘If it was me, I’d be shaking her gates. I’d stand outside and scream until they took me away. Your problem is that you’re too meek. My relatives in the north are like you. Waiting people. You probably think the answer will come to you in a dream. You think waiting will solve everything. You think praying will solve everything. Maybe it would if you were rich. If you were rich, your brother would be in the papers.
Isabel’s brother missing!
they would say.
Top news!
But you’re not. You’re nothing to them. You could die and they’d walk right over your body.’

Isabel dug her fingers around a pavement stone.

Josiane said, ‘You don’t have enough hate in you. When you hate them, you won’t say such stupid things.’

‘I never met anyone like that,’ said Isabel, weakly. ‘I wouldn’t know which one to hate.’

‘Not
which one
. All. They don’t care. Don’t you understand? You can get skinny watching others eat. You’ll see. Being hungry and watching someone else eat is a lot worse than just being hungry.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Isabel. ‘I’ve seen people eat when I was hungry.’

‘She’s nothing.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Isabel again, and they returned to wave.

Back in New Eden, Isabel listened to the washerwomen’s gossip. She remembered that the daughter of one of the women was a maid in a wealthy district. ‘What is her boss like?’ she asked. ‘Her boss?’ the woman answered. ‘She paid for my grandson to go to school. She paid our hospital bills. She buys us bus tickets when we need to go home.’ She swirled a shirt through the water. ‘Why do you want to know? You want to be a maid? Because you have to remember, they’re not all like that. Long ago, my boss burned me because her husband liked to put his hand up my skirt. She knocked over a pot of boiling water.’ She lifted her hand to show a scar. ‘She said it was an accident, but I knew.’

In the quiet of her room, Isabel sat and stared at the letters of Isaias’s note. The ink ran dry at the
c
of Patricia, and the
n’
s in Kennedy reminded her of distant birds. She waited for a dream to tell her what to do. She listened to the radio. They played old country songs and ran advertisements for bus tickets to the north, sold in installments. One afternoon, they played a song by a famous music star, a fiddler whose photo her brother carried in his pocket. She watched Hugo bob his head with the music.

When the song stopped, Isabel wiped tears away with the neckline of her shirt. She could hear her father scolding:
You do not come from crying people
. She took the baby outside. What is it, she asked herself, that is making me so afraid?

The next morning, she took a bus to the Center, where she changed for another. She wore her yellow dress and carried Hugo in his sling, in a clean blanket of napped, printed felt.

On the way, she turned to the window and practiced speaking. Say all the letters! she told herself. Don’t call her Patricia, call her madam and don’t stare. They don’t understand silence, they think it’s simplicity, they think the natural state of a person is to talk. It is what Isaias would have told her. Isaias … she felt a surge of joy pronouncing his name. I am really going to see him, she thought. Even if he isn’t there, Patricia will know. She will know the next step. When she descended, she asked a taxi driver for the name of the building. He pointed to a nearby tower. ‘Tall one there.’ He spoke with a heavy northern accent. She paused, fighting an impulse to confide everything in him. ‘Visiting someone?’ he asked curiously. ‘Yes,’ she said, and saw the doubt on his face.

She found the building, its name in brass curlicues on a white wall. It was very tall, set back behind a fence topped with razor wire. Bougainvillea garlanded the glass eye of a security camera. She hesitated by the buzzer until the intercom crackled. ‘Hello?’ came a man’s voice. Startled, she looked up toward the camera. ‘I am here to see Mrs. Patricia, in apartment twenty-two,’ she enunciated carefully. ‘Are you the applicant for the maid’s job?’ asked the voice. She paused. She had invented a story, partially true, about her brother, the drought, a turned-over flatbed.

‘Yes,’ she said slowly, ‘I’m the maid.’

There was a mechanical click and the door opened. She found herself in a barren walkway, before another set of doors. There was a guard-booth with blackened glass. Suddenly, she wished she hadn’t lied. The door clanged shut behind her. The
booth opened and a man came out, swinging a key chain. ‘I need to search you,’ he said. He patted her down with the back of his hand and peeked inside the sling, where Hugo was sleeping. He opened the second door for her and led her across a long driveway and into a lobby with gleaming floors and real flowers. Classical music played from a hidden speaker. A second, stocky guard motioned her into the elevator and pressed the top button. He had light blue eyes like her brother. He crossed his arms and stared at her without looking away.

The same music from the lobby played as the lift rose. It was plated with a gold-tinted mirror and the lights were low. She studied herself. Now, she was ashamed by how old her dress looked. On the hill, she had combed back her hair, but it had begun to spring from its clasp. Hugo’s sling suddenly seemed dirty; she had washed it only yesterday. She realized she had no idea what she would say: the words she rehearsed on the bus seemed ridiculous, and now she’d lied. She wanted to stop the elevator but didn’t know how. Her stomach was tight; she was glad she hadn’t eaten.

Hugo stirred. Don’t wake up, she thought. Please, be quiet. Please don’t make trouble.

The door opened. There was a small vestibule with a vase of violet irises. A maid waited by a second door. She glanced at the baby in Isabel’s arms and smiled politely but distantly. She reminded Isabel of the girls at home, but she wore a stiff apron and her hair was tied tightly back. She led Isabel into a room with a wooden floor, where a cream leather couch stretched before a long glass table. In a painting on the wall, a man with smooth gray hair stood by a seated woman in a strapless white dress and pearls. His hand rested on the arm of her chair. Her
hand rested on his, but didn’t hold it. Her thin lips were scarlet. A gray dog with the face of a rat stared contemptuously from her side. An identical woman sat at the far end of the room by a glass door that opened onto a patio. In the distance, Isabel could see the skyline of the city. The woman wore a white dress that ended at her knees. It was cut low over her breasts, which were tan and sun-mottled. On the table beside her was a plate of wet grapes.

She held an unlit cigarette and slouched. Her bare arms looked unnaturally smooth.