A Far Country (24 page)

‘You know,’ he said suddenly. ‘Last week, in the papers, they had an article about the migrations. They said everyone’s leaving the country for the city now. They had photos of the flatbeds, people crammed together like cattle. They said
whole towns have been abandoned. I knew, of course, but I hadn’t thought about it like that, like it was a story worth writing about, like it was history.’

Isabel wrapped her arms around the baby. ‘A lot of people left my village.’

‘I’m not talking just about your village. I’m talking about the whole country.’ He paused. ‘The
whole world.’

She shifted nervously. Desperately, she wanted to leave.

‘What do you eat on the flatbeds?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘What do you eat? I started thinking about that. They said the flatbeds don’t stop.’ ‘We bring food. Or we don’t eat.’ ‘Don’t eat? Those things take four days.’ ‘It isn’t so bad.’ She clenched her teeth. ‘Other people have it worse.’

‘And your parents are still in the north?’

She nodded, her head hot.

‘And they’re making it through the drought?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘They say people are starving.’ ‘We’re not starving.’ ‘They say people are eating cactus.’ ‘Eating cactus is not starving,’ she said angrily, and he stared at her for a long time.

Then he said, ‘It’s late.’ He looked much older. She stood and hoisted Hugo against her shoulder and let his sling hang loosely at her side. She kept her eyes away from the poem.

The inspector opened the door for her and accompanied her into the elevator. Several times she thought he would say something, but he was silent. At the bottom floor, Isabel said, ‘I know the way.’ But he walked with her to the exit to the street.

It was early evening. People were getting out of work, and the streets were crowded. She didn’t remember how she arrived, so she just walked, looking for a familiar sign. She
stopped at a concrete planter to give the bottle to Hugo and watch the buses. He drank greedily. The lines were long and the buses were full. She couldn’t imagine standing for the two-hour ride home in traffic and left the stop to wander again.

She waited for thoughts about Isaias, but nothing came. She thought maybe she would cry, but she couldn’t, so she just kept walking, and soon found herself in the square outside the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary. Inside, it was mostly empty. She sat and stared at the painted angels, the little heads floating on clouds and feathered wings. A nun had taken the saints down and set them in the front pews to clean them. Many of them were the size of children, and from where she sat, it looked as though they were praying, too. They had cordoned them off with a rope. A woman came and reached for Saint Roch, but he was too far away. She almost fell. The nun came and unlatched the rope for her. ‘Thank you,’ the woman said when she came back. ‘Look.’ She lifted her sleeve above her forearm. ‘I can’t get out of work to see a doctor, and it’s already infected. I had to see him today.’

Isabel stayed until Hugo became restless. Then she went back to the lines for the buses. She was standing behind an old woman in a gray sweater when a piece of paper on the side of a pavilion caught her attention. It was a photo of a young boy.
MISSING
, it said, and gave his name and a telephone number with a distant city code. It was the first time she had seen a Missing poster, and thought, I must be noticing them only now. She stared at it for a long time, and then, farther along the street, a paper on a light post fluttered. She left the line for the bus and approached it, it said
MISSING
and showed the face of a girl, and a name and a number. As she looked at the girl,
there came suddenly a sense of something tearing: a strange sense that seemed to have come to her from a far country, and she knew that this girl wouldn’t be found, just like she had known what would happen to her second brother in the photo taken long ago. She left the lamp, and on a wall there was a paper, it said missing and showed the face of a woman, and a note,
I FORGIVE, PLEASE COME HOME
, and she knew this woman would be found, but not for a very long time. Then she turned, and on a newspaper booth was another, it said
MISSING
and showed the face of a boy, and the words
WE ARE TOO POOR TO OFFER A REWARD
/
YOU WILL BE THANKED BY THE GRACE OF GOD AND THE BLESSINGS OF MARY
, and she realized not a single poster promised a reward, and she turned, and on a telephone pole there were three stapled papers and they each said
MISSING
and one had a photo of a young man and said
GOES BY ‘LITTLE ANT’
and another had a photo of a woman and said
SHE NEEDS HER MEDICINES
, and the bottom one said nothing else, it was a grainy snapshot of a baby that looked as if it had been in the sun for some months, and Isabel knew that the young man would be found and the woman would be found and lost again and the baby would never be found. She turned, and on the back of a bench was a photo of an old man and it said
MISSING
and on the side of a passing bus was a photo of a girl and it said
MISSING
, and she stopped, and littered on the ground were torn papers and photos and fragments of words. She ran to the steps of the church and tried to catch her breath, but from behind her she heard the drone of a Hail Mary, and looked up to see a woman with signboards hung over her chest and back like a chasuble and a sign in her hand. The signboards were posted with photos of a little boy, the word, repeated,
MISSING
. She ranted, and Isabel ran again.

She stopped before a bank of phones and hid inside their hoods. Suddenly, she took out a phone token, grabbed the receiver and dialed the number of the plaza phone in Saint Michael. Her fingers were shaking, and she kept pressing the wrong buttons, dialing again and again until finally the line engaged and she heard a static and a distant ringing.

After many rings, a woman answered. ‘Hello?’ ‘It’s Isabel, it’s me, can I speak to my mother?’ ‘Hello?’ said the woman again. It sounded like her aunt. ‘It’s me! It’s Isabel!’ she shouted. ‘Hello?’ ‘It’s Isabel. Can’t you hear me? Shit phone!’ She hit it against the booth. ‘You shit shit phone!’ She shouted into the mouthpiece, ‘It’s Isabel! Please hear me!’ ‘Hello?’ said the woman, and the line went dead.

She called again. This time, a different voice, and she recognized her father. He sounded tired. At the sound of his voice, she began to cry. ‘It’s me!’ she shouted. ‘Father, it’s me, Isabel.’ ‘Hello?’ ‘Yes! I’m here.’ She hit the phone. ‘God God God, it’s me, it’s Isabel.’ ‘Hello?’ ‘Please, hear me, you can hear me, you can hear me shouting.’ ‘Hello? Who is there?’ ‘It’s me,’ she cried. There was a long wait, and then her father said, ‘Hello, Isaias? Isaias, is that you?’

F
og came.

Lolling in great white tongues, the mist crept up from the sea and slunk through the city. It wrapped the spires and carpeted the hills, deadened the rattle of the buses and muted the distant music. It streamed down the narrow backstreets and blanketed the soccer pitch. Below the jacarandas, drops stained the ground like shadows.

In Manuela’s house it crept through the window and dewed the mirror. With her finger, Isabel wrote the letters of her name,
ISABELISSABELSIBELBELISSA
, until she reached the sharp edge. Then the mist filled the letters and the letters wept.

On the hill the fog became so thick and the air so quiet that there were moments when Isabel thought she was alone. At times, she was seized by a sudden temptation to scream as loud as she could, but she couldn’t, like she couldn’t scream in dreams. And what would people think, she asked, a girl alone, screaming at the fog?

She went down into the Center to look for her brother
almost every day now, except for the weekends, when she went to wave flags. She took Hugo, with a handkerchief to cover his head. His bottle dangled from her fingers in a plastic bag.

At first she walked without aim, a slow drifting path through neighborhoods of dry-goods shops and bustling street stalls. In the penny thrift stores, women burrowed through piles of colored clothing. Girls smoked beneath faded pink photos at the entrances to pornographic theaters. Unlit supermarkets advertised sales for boxes of rice and beans and ground manioc. The people seemed to move in whispers. When it rained, street children grabbed the bus fenders and slid on the soles of their sandals.

She walked for as many hours as her feet could bear. She descended on the shuddering buses with the day-shifters and returned with them, or waited until night fell and took emptier buses home. She recalled Manuela’s warnings about the city at night, but she didn’t care. She set out on long winding courses or circled the same blocks until the women at the thrift stores eyed her cautiously and the girls outside the theaters winked. She lowered her head and walked faster.

Her hands cramped with the weight of the baby. She brought the sling, but found she preferred holding him. She shifted him from arm to arm, rested him on her shoulder, crooked him in her elbow or canted her body to balance him on her waist. She knotted the handkerchief in the shape of a dog and gave it to him to play with. When he cried, she dipped the dog’s head into the formula for him to suck.

She found a rhythm, slowly. The days washed over her as they did back home. At night, she sometimes went to watch the soap opera about the maid Cindy. She agreed with Josiane: there was no one so beautiful. She found herself floating
into Cindy’s world. On some nights, she stayed awake worrying for Cindy, whose mother was in the intensive care unit, after a heart attack. They were the only thoughts that could distract her from her brother. She remembered little from the walks or how she returned.

She surrendered to signs and suspicions.

In the city plazas, she watched the street pigeons and found significance in their flight, their numbers, how they watched her and when they took to the air. She noticed certain footprints shimmered on the wet streets; she took this to be a sign of Isaias’s passage. Hugo’s crying meant a path was mistaken, as did an ache in her shoulder. She rode a bus to its terminal because its numbers added to Isaias’s age. On a misty afternoon, when a golden dog turned to look at her, she followed it for an hour, losing its trail in a back-alley tangle of greased crates and wet cardboard.

She heard a rumor that a statue of the Our Lady of Good Birth was found wet with amniotic fluid and was answering prayers of unmarried girls. It was on the western edge of the Settlements, but the story frightened her and she didn’t go. The same woman told her of a magical baby who could find missing people. She imagined it on a wooden throne, attended by women in white gowns, a long line filing out through the door and down the hill. He was in Vila Marigold, said the woman, but when she asked, no one else had heard of a Vila Marigold.

A grasshopper appeared one morning in her room. Isabel knew this meant good luck, but the day unfolded like any other. She studied the swirls in the gravel outside the door for
omens. She spent a day’s wage on a street-corner prophetess. The prophetess rubbed her hands over a crystal and forecasted a man in her future and a new job. As the women spoke, Isabel wondered how she would explain the missing wages to her cousin.

She spent another day’s salary on a magazine called
Woman’s Life
. On the cover, in purple letters, it said
NEW HOME? GUIDE FOR STARTING OUT
. Inside there was a long article about decorating a kitchen. She returned to the man who sold it. ‘There’s a mistake,’ she said, but he wouldn’t give her money back.

At times she was seized by sudden waves of fear. She began to feel a pain in her stomach. She paused outside the white-tiled pharmacies and thought of going inside, but she didn’t know how to explain what was wrong. In Cathedral Square, a man selling elixirs spoke through a megaphone about a new regimen for the liver. Perhaps it is my liver, she wondered.

She found a phone token. She clenched it in her fist until it grew wet and warm in her palm. Then she traded it for a coin, which she traded for a prayer card of Saint Anthony, saint of lost people and things. She tucked it into her dress, against her heart. At night, the print left ghostly images of the saint on her skin. She recited from the fading print until she had memorized the invocation.

Each day she wondered, When will I stop? The only answer seemed to be that she would stop when she was too tired to look more. She began to welcome the exhaustion that descended on her at night.

At the campaign office, Josiane asked, ‘Why are you so sad now?’ ‘I’m not sad.’ ‘Did you go to the police?’ ‘Yes,’ said
Isabel sharply. ‘And?’ ‘And what? They told me that there were hundreds of Isaiases, thousands of Isaiases. That’s the only thing they said.’

Josiane tried to cheer her with a story about the street carnival. ‘The rides and machines are still there,’ she said, taking Isabel’s hand, ‘I think someone forgot them. Maybe they will be there forever.’ She said the couples went into a room filled with mirrors, so many mirrors that you didn’t know which person was real and which was only a reflection. ‘I went in there with a boy. I thought I would search forever and not be able to find him.’