Whisper (21 page)

While the sun still shone, Candela helped me drag the mattresses from room 13 out the front door of the building. She hit them with a flat paddle while I held them up and watched bugs jump into the cracks of the sidewalk. Candela told me this wasn't enough—we'd have to spray the mattresses with poison or the eggs already in the material would hatch, grow and bite.

After sending the bedbugs to a new home, we put the mattresses back along the walls and left the room. Candela showed me a clock on the wall in the common room, one like Nathanael had used back at the camp. When it read 5:00
PM
, it was time for us to leave our rooms to the use of others. The front door of the building opened and closed, opened and closed, allowing women with short skirts, tall boots and revealing blouses to enter the building and take their places in the rooms. I walked with my head down and avoided eye contact with any of these ladies, just in case one of them was Rosa. I couldn't face her—not yet.

Candela and I ate dinner, a warm stew thick with vegetables and meat. I was so hungry, I ate two full bowls. The cook, Winston, a boy about ten years old, had two faces, which startled me. He appeared blurred, repeated, like déjà vu. Both faces smiled at me when I complimented him on his delicious stew. I wasn't sure which face to focus on—both sets of eyes looked down when I whispered to him—but I watched him slip extra chunks of meat and large wedges of potato into my bowl. When he handed the bowl back to me and smiled, I felt a little piece of beauty returning to my life. Two smiles on the same boy—there was nothing ugly about that.

The common room hummed with people. Some slept on the benches, some played games in the corners, some drew pictures or stared at the ceiling. Oscar played cards with the burned woman, a boy with only one arm and another boy whose hooded eyes were too low on his face, his forehead long and empty. There were coins in the middle of the table, and the players shouted, laughed and even yelled occasionally. I sat in the corner, my violin at my feet, and watched. This house wasn't so different from my camp in the woods. Here, too, the people didn't fit with the outside world. Here, too, we became our own family due to necessity rather than choice, but I didn't feel included and didn't know that I ever would.

Too tired to think or attempt socializing, I leaned my head against the wall and after a while drifted into a hazy dream of boys with two faces and girls sharing an arm.

The next day, Candela allowed me to follow her out of the house.

“It's called The Half-Way House, or Purgatory Palace.” She waved her arm backward, indicating the building we had exited. “We'll take the sidewalk this way.”

I'd followed Oscar to the north yesterday, to the city center, but today Candela walked west. She towed a maroon suitcase on wheels behind her, and when she arrived at a huge hill that slanted away from the morning sun, I helped her pull it up.

“Don't think you're ingratiating yourself with me by pulling my suitcase up the hill. We work one day together and that's it. Got it?”

“I understand,” I said, but I didn't. In this city, working together seemed safe.

Before we reached the top of the hill, the buildings began to change. The new structures were covered in a white hard paint that was rough and bumpy. The houses here didn't have words scrawled on them or pictures painted on their fronts. They were pristine, like the houses I'd seen around Hernando Park the day before. Grass appeared in patches, the faded green of winter a welcome relief from the otherwise washedout colors of the city, and big palm fronds added shade to the house fronts. We passed larger buildings filled with windows, layers and layers of windows that lay flat and opaque beneath statues of leering creatures with horns and fangs. These buildings did not slant to the side or look as though a strong wind could blow them away. They planted their walls firmly into the ground and held the upper levels confidently.

Candela paused, catching her breath for a minute, and then turned to the right. I looked into the windows of shops we passed and saw lamps, furniture carved from marbled wood, toys painted red and purple—there was even a store filled only with angels. Candela tugged at my sleeve when I lingered in front of the stores too long. At a shop where the warming smell of coffee and bread overcame any other street smells, we paused. From her suitcase she pulled a folded stool and an easel, which she set up in the middle of the sidewalk. She placed a pad of paper on the easel and put a flat box filled with thin black rectangles on her knees. She hung a sign from the easel that read
CARICATURES. $5.00 each
. Over her left ear she angled a slanted red hat.

“I have an arrangement. I recommend their coffee and pastries, and they let me draw caricatures in front of their store.” She leaned in close and whispered to me, “I've done all of their caricatures for free. Look through the window.”

When I peered through the window, I didn't see anything beyond the glare of the sun, so I shielded my face with my hands and pressed my nose against the cold glass. There were no customers inside the shop yet, only empty tables, a counter area and maybe fifty pictures lining the walls. The people in the drawings had disproportionately large heads with tiny bodies. One, I realized, was Oscar, his dimples prominent, his mouth wide and warm, his missing legs irrelevant beneath the square jaw and warm grin.

When I looked back at Candela, she picked up one of the black rectangles and drew on the pad of paper with it. Her hands were fast, sure, and beneath the different shades of gray and black, I began to emerge. She made my eyes dark with thick black eyelashes. The eyebrows became prominent, the nose straight, the openings between my nose and mouth mere slits, barely perceivable smudges. The widened nostrils were smooth, softened. I was beautiful.

She gave the picture to me when she was done. I reached into my pocket and tried to give her the coin. She pushed my hand away.

“Play your violin,” she said. “Even if you don't make money, you're not getting any of mine.” I squatted next to Candela, placing the violin case in front of me and fitting the instrument beneath my chin. I eased the bow over the strings and thought of the music I'd heard in the park the day before. The notes lined up in my mind like the birds flying in formation. I felt the music in my chest, in my head, down my arms and out my fingers. Tucking my chin in close to the instrument, I played the song I'd heard from the four musicians. Then I played it again.

When I finished, I looked at Candela. My head felt a bit woozy. It felt good to play the song, but it didn't have the wholeness, the filled-in melodies, of the music in the park. I felt dissatisfaction now, as though I were trying to make do with a fountain when all my life I'd had waterfalls to splash in, but Candela's eyes were wide, her eyebrows furrowed.

“Where did you learn that song?”

“Hernando Park.”

“You heard it in the park? Yesterday? And now you're playing it.”

I looked down at the sidewalk and felt uncertain—maybe it wasn't okay. I'd stolen the song and then made it worse.

“Play again,” she said, “and make everyone want to hold their arms out and lift their faces to the sun.”

I looked up at her. There was an intensity to the way she looked at me that I'd misjudged. Candela wasn't angry or frustrated, she was surprised. Maybe this was how she talked to people—not through smiles or winks but through intensity. It was okay—I hadn't done anything wrong. I closed my eyes, and all around me was the music. I forgot the rest—the bugs in the bed, a lost sister named Rosa, the shocked stares of people around me, the men who'd stolen my money. When I played the violin, I was transported to a different world, a world of sweet smells, tolerance and blue dragonflies in golden fields.

A tap on my shoulder pulled me out of the music. Candela stood in front of me with a mug of hot cocoa in her hands. The steam rose up around her face and made her look unearthly, like a dark-haired angel.

“Time for a break,” she said and squatted down on the sidewalk next to me. Coins littered the red lining of my violin case. “Yeah, honey, you're working with me every day. Usually I do three or four caricatures on a good day. Today I've done twice that, and it's not even the afternoon yet. You're good for business.”

A girl with a very red nose and watery eyes stood in front of us with two plates. She sniffed and avoided looking at my face.

“That was so beautiful,” the girl said. “Here, these are from him.”

She nodded toward a table behind me where a customer sat. I looked over, not daring to look up, and saw brown shoes beneath brown slacks. Candela stood and said thank you, but a hand waved at her from above the table, and a voice said, “I would pay far more to hear music like that.” The server set the plates on the ground. On them were sandwiches—sandwiches with meat, cheese, lettuce and tomatoes, everything good, crunchy and fresh. Candela took one of the sandwiches and talked to me around a mouthful.

“I don't know, girl. I haven't heard anyone play the violin like that. The guy's right—people would pay good money for this kind of music. How'd you learn to play that thing?”

I thought about the music flying around, waiting to be caught. How do you explain to someone that the music was a part of me, something I'd always known? All I'd needed was the instrument and Nathanael's help with the fingering. It was like Ranita. No one had taught me to love her—I'd just done it. I felt warmth as I sat there on the cement in front of this café, warmth that refreshed my spirit and helped me feel like maybe there was a place for me in this dilapidated world, even if that place happened to be where others put their feet.

On the way home, Candela and I stepped into a small store with bars across the door and windows. A greasy man was behind the counter, his black hair swiped in sticky strands from the right side of his head over the top to the left. His nose had a large red wart on the bridge. Candela walked to the counter with a can of bedbug repellent and pushed some coins at the man. His gnarled hands took our money, pushed the can at us.

“You filthy people, covered in lice, infested with germs, itching with fleas, scabies, ticks, crawling with worms…”

“Yeah, yeah,” Candela said, turning her back on the man. “Ever looked at your own nose?”

I was ready to run, ready to protect my body, ready for a boot to kick me or a fist to land in my stomach, but nothing happened and the man didn't follow us out of his shop. I didn't understand this city. When I didn't expect anger and cruelty, it rose like thorns from the ground, and when I expected it, nothing happened.

We dragged the mattresses from room
13
outside once again and sprayed them with bug repellent. Candela said they needed to air out for a while, and in the meantime we went to the only space available to us, the common room. Already many of the other residents were sitting at the tables, playing games, talking, dozing. I hoped no one would need to use my room tonight. The mattresses were miserable to sleep on, but the floors would be close to unbearable.

Fifteen

I worked with Candela every day after that. I played the violin until my fingers ached and my neck felt like it might never straighten again, but I could feel my songs taking shape, coming alive. I started new songs. I didn't know if the people around me cared that I played only a few songs they might recognize, the rest coming from places inside me where the woods still grew and the breeze rustled the branches. I liked composing my own songs—they felt like something to hold on to in this chaotic place where noises were so piercing and sharp that they buried the undertones of nature.

I began to notice patterns—the same people came to the café where Candela and I sat, and even though I didn't dare look these customers in the eye, I recognized them from their shoes. A pair of brown shoes tapped to the beat of my music, and every day those loafers resided under an outside table, the one closest to me, and they stayed there for a long time, even though the mornings were cold and few others chose to sit outside.

I continued to collect coins and Candela taught me how to count them. The big one with the head of the man and the sheaf of grain on the back was worth five dollars. The smaller, silver one with the pig on the front and the numeral one on the back was worth one dollar. Those were the ones you wanted, the ones that added up to something substantial. The smaller ones were good too but took many more to equal the others. After a week I had enough to pay for two weeks of rent with a bit left over for Celso. Candela said I needed to talk to Ofelia about my documentation. I knew what she meant—the crumpled piece of paper that had been passed from Celso's hands to Ofelia's. It wasn't mine. I didn't really want it. We stood outside Ofelia's door—she lived in room 1—and I tried to stand up straight and look her in the eye, but I'd become used to staring at feet.