A Far Country (6 page)

She went back down the hill to her house and curled into the cool cup of her hammock. Twice she heard her uncle speak to her, and she whispered him away. She squeezed her fists, pinched her eyes tight and felt the fabric beneath her face grow wet and warm.

They completed a novena of mourning.

When the nine days were over, she began to hear different words in Saint Michael. They no longer spoke of the droughts, but of false papers and boxes of crickets. I will be run off my land by cricket piss, they said, and no one laughed. Their conversations dried, as tinder dries and becomes ready to burn.

She was awakened by her parents’ arguing. ‘What do you want me to do?’ her father said again and again. ‘I have no
choice—they have taken away my choices.’ At the weekly market in Prince Leopold, she joined the crowd around the canteen television. Images played of massive settlements made of black plastic tents, clashes between landless men and the police. One day, a young mother stared from the screen with such defiance that Isabel turned to look behind her in the square.

The days passed, but the henchmen didn’t return. Slowly the men put their guns away. Someone said there were bigger fights over better land elsewhere. ‘I never thought I would thank God for worthless land,’ said her father, smiling for the first time in months. That summer the men still found work in the cane fields. When the foreman offered them the same pay as the year before, one of her cousins shouted, ‘But prices have doubled!’ ‘I think there are many men who would be happy for your job if you don’t want to work,’ said the foreman.

In November, a family who lived near the highway locked the door to their house and boarded a parrot perch to the south, and two weeks later another followed. The older people cursed them as cowards. They asked, ‘Who will do the work if all the children have gone away?’

In December, on Saint Lucy’s Day, they set out six chips of salt at night. In the morning, four had dissolved: it would rain by February.

Now when her family gathered, they spoke only of the city in the south, as if the calm had cut a path for the rumors to pour in. Everyone had a story. In Isabel’s mind it ceased to be a place; it was the static in the background of the radio programs, the flickering on the television screen, a press of crowds, a screech of tires, a chorus of hawkers’ shouts. On the
news, a reporter stood before a bus station, where families dragged bags over concrete floors. He spoke of numbers, first tens and then hundreds of thousands, numbers she didn’t understand. In her imagination, the television’s forest of great glittering towers shattered and fell about the city. In their shadow grew a tangle of planked slums and brick escarpments, a city of cement and broken cement. It was a heaven and a terrible place, an emptiness, a tomb, a place to beg alms, a whorehouse, a street child’s playground, a floodland, a stink. Shimmering at the end of the great descent of her imagination.

One night Isaias shook her awake. ‘Come,’ he whispered, and she swiveled her legs from the hammock and followed him.

Outside, the square was empty and blue. He said, ‘Isa, I’m going. There’s a perch leaving for the city early tomorrow from Prince Leopold. If I leave now I can catch it.’

Sleep still clung to her. She stared at him mutely. ‘I am going to go mad here, Isa. I am going to die if I stay.’

She was quiet. He said, ‘Isa, you understand. I can’t take it.’

‘Those men aren’t coming back. Things will be better—’ she said, but he shook his head. ‘That’s not it. If I thought they were coming back I’d stay. But I’ll spend my life here. I’ll die in the cane if I don’t leave. At least I’ll have a chance.’ ‘At what?’ ‘You know: a
chance
. I’ll play music, I’ll perform, I’ll get a good job, I’ll send money. You don’t know the stories I’ve heard. I’m going to send you letters, and color photographs. I’ll make wishes for you at the cathedral.

‘Isa …’ He paused. ‘Are you all right?’

She nodded slowly and looked into the square. She wished something would happen: that a dog would pass by or someone
would start yelling somewhere, or the sun would come up and break the moment into day. She felt her lips tighten. She looked down at her feet.

‘Isa, I’m not abandoning you.’

‘I didn’t say you were.’

‘But it’s what you’re thinking. If you’re thinking something, you should say it.’ He watched her face for her reaction. ‘When you’re older, you’ll get it. You’ll see. You’ll understand that a person can’t just wait and let things happen to him.’

She traced a flagstone with her heel.

‘Isa—listen. What do you want? A brother who’s just a cane cutter? Another broken-back?’

She saw then that he had shaved, and his hair was combed. He wore his best shirt. The fiddle rested against the wall.

‘Where are you going to stay?’ she asked.

‘With Manuela. She has a new man, you know, but he works at sea. There’ll be room for me.’ ‘When are you coming back?’ ‘Soon.’ ‘What’s soon?’ ‘Months, just months.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Why didn’t you tell Mother, then?’ ‘Because she won’t let me, Father won’t let me. They think a person can cut cane forever. I’ll tell them when I get there. When I have my first job and they can’t say no.’ He laughed. She said, ‘But you promise you’re coming back?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Say you promise, Isaias.’ ‘You’ll be okay here,’ he said. ‘I’ll write letters to you. It will be like you’re there with me.’ ‘Say you promise, Isaias. Say: “I promise, Isabel.” ’ ‘I already said I did. Now you are acting like a child.’

She looked away and bit her nails. Her hand was trembling, and she put it down. ‘I promise,’ he said. He kissed both her cheeks, her forehead. ‘Tell everyone not to be mad.’ He laughed and poked her. ‘Come on, look up … Imagine your
brother, like on the radio:
Isaias, the King.’
Her cheeks were hot; she wouldn’t smile.

Two weeks later, the phone rang again in the empty plaza. This time her father retrieved it. He white-knuckled the receiver. ‘Where did you get the money to pay for the trip?’ he shouted. ‘How long is it going to take you to make that much? Doing what? I don’t care what a man once told you, those kinds of things are not for people like you.’

When Isabel took the receiver from him, Isaias said, ‘You wouldn’t believe it, there are buildings as far as you can see.’ He spoke breathlessly about the city and its crowds. At last he stopped. ‘I have to go, my token’s going to run out.’ ‘I’ll call you back,’ she said. ‘It’s free.’ He paused. ‘I’ll write to you,’ he said. She could hear the echo of his voice, like a ghost in the line.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked finally. Then: ‘Isa, you there? You all right? Is everything there all right?’ ‘Yes,’ she managed, but her voice began to break. ‘You sure?’ he said, quieter now. ‘I’m sure,’ she said, turning to watch a cousin leap from the doorstep of a house, run across the square and disappear laughing into the brush.

Saint Lucy’s salt was off by one month that year: it rained in January, in the mountains. So the spring ran and the cane fields bloomed.

Isaias wrote after a month, a long letter in a bounding hand, his words clipping the lines. He described the buildings, the maze of highways, how he took buses without stopping just to watch the city from the window.
I began to perform in the city park
, he wrote.
There are other performers too, street magicians and
rhyme singers, and they are all from the north, although from other villages far away. It’s like everyone is fleeing the drought and bringing home here. A city built of drought
, he wrote. He said he was staying with their cousin Manuela.
Most of the time, she lives at her employer’s and comes home only on the weekend. She is well, she works very hard
. He said little else about her. Isabel imagined her as one of the soap opera maids on the market television, in a mansion like a marble palace, with a pressed apron and her hair in beautiful curls. She carried the letter with her and read it over until the words came easily.

Since her uncle was killed, they hadn’t seen the cricket men. They returned to the hillside, to graze the goats and zebu cows. But they no longer stayed overnight, and as they walked, they squinted constantly into the horizon to look for new trucks.

Despite the rain, Isabel felt a new, vise-like fear grip the village. In the market in Prince Leopold, they saw the cost of goods rise each week. Her relatives who crushed their own cane found fewer buyers for their sugar because the merchants argued that the new roads made it cheaper to buy from the coast. The money her father earned from the harvest disappeared. Someone stole one of their chickens. They wrote relatives in the state capital and asked for help, ‘to tide things over.’

As the bean and manioc stores dwindled, they began to hunt, to lay traps for turtles and armadillos. They loaded shotguns with gravel and rose at dawn to kill the antwrens that came to pry insects from the tree bark. In the market, they haggled fiercely. Hunger’s returning, they said. Isabel listened suspiciously. Hadn’t the government promised that this wouldn’t happen? Hadn’t it rained? Hunger was a beast from
years ago, when the houses were built of wattle and thatch, not now, not with brick houses and cobbled streets, a telephone in the square.

They began to cut down the forest, burning the white wood to make charcoal to sell in the market. On the hillside above the village, the land became bare, quiet, sick. The zebu walked over the empty fields, loosening clods. Dust curled off like smoke from something burning slowly.

In the day, Isabel led the goats to graze. The slope was hot, the air stale; she often needed to stop to rest. Each week, she had to walk farther. The animals grew so skinny that she could see the arteries pulsating in their necks. When the rain did come, coffee rivulets wound down the hill and fouled the stream.

Once, one of the charcoal burnings flamed out of control. The fire crackled in long waves over the hillside. They beat at it with spades and doused it in sand. It licked up the hill until it was contained by a high rock seam that ran through the white forest like a wall of defense. Angry accusations broke out. They blamed an uncle named Ulises, and he blamed it on his three-year-old son. Under her breath, Isabel cursed him as a coward.

Her mother cooked a little less with each passing night. A week went by with no meat, and her parents debated in low voices about whether to kill a goat. There were four of them, and then one became sick. It was small and ringstraked and once her best climber, but now it walked in circles and fell on its left side, kicking its legs and lurching its neck as it tried to rise. They killed it and flayed the dark red carcass of its skin. The lidless eyes bulged from their sockets and watched her wherever she walked. They ate the meat, boiled the hoof for broth and chopped up the innards. When the second goat fell
sick, her father killed it, and then killed the two that remained. He salted the meat to dry in the sun, where Isabel whisked a rag at the bottle flies. They found their guts full of sand, scraped them clean and dried them on the thorn.

They finished the goat meat. The zebus’ humps thinned and hung limp. They began to flavor the rice and cornmeal with stringy meat from birds and armadillos. Isabel was ashamed when she saw how little meat came from a hummingbird, but for the first time she could remember, she was hungry all the time. With her front teeth, she scraped the meat from the gleaming breastbones and crushed the wings with her molars. They caught lizards and bull toads fleeing the dry creek beds in search of water.

Two months after he left, Isaias sent money through a family member in Prince Leopold. It was enough to last them several weeks. In his letter, he said it came from performing at restaurants. They bought beans that very day because the prices were rising. Her father got drunk and said, ‘To my son the musician!’ Isabel told everyone of his success. They waited for him to send more.

Later her father went to Prince Leopold to look for work, but the flatbeds that passed were already full.

They began to search for tubers and cactus fruit in the hills. They sharpened their knives on stones, held one end of the cactus with their teeth and the other with their fingers. They slit them open as though they were animals’ bellies and ate the white meat inside. She helped pull spines from the palm cactus flesh, swiftly plucking them until her thumbnail splintered and she had to use the knife. They ate the leaves of the hogplums. They followed woodcreepers to leaf-cutter-ant columns, the ant columns to the colonies, broke open the colonies and collected the swollen abdomens of the queens.
The smell of the roasted ants was sweet and made them hungrier. When there was enough to drink, they oversalted the food so they would fill their bellies with water. They got drunk, dizzy on the water. She tried to think of her brother in the city, but hunger dominated her, followed her everywhere like a thin dog. Alone in the thorn, she fantasized that she could smell meat cooking. The world separated into categories of things that could and could not be eaten.

She began to have a recurring dream of eating a sweet melon. She could taste the melon and feel the juice run over her cheeks as she laughed. In her dream, she was ravenous, not even scraping the peel but biting the honey centers from an endless supply of identical melons. She awoke crying. She began to kneel by her hammock before sleeping, to pray that the dream wouldn’t come,
It is making me sick, I don’t want it anymore, just let me go hungry but don’t drive me crazy like this
. One night she awoke in the kitchen, coughing on uncooked beans. She wondered if she should wake her mother. She wanted a prayer or a candle to stop the dream, but she was ashamed to ask. Who ever heard of that? she thought, A prayer against dreams of eating a melon?

She awoke with headaches that wouldn’t go away. One of her infant cousins became sick from eating a dead carrion bird he found in the scrub. Her grandfather began to complain of night blindness and grew too weak to leave his hammock. She had to help him turn, and wiped his legs of sparse, pungent urine. On his back they found an ulcer like the yolk of an egg. Her first impression was not disgust or sadness, but disbelief that there was enough meat for the disease to take hold.