Horse Latitudes Page 9

  THEY WERE MARRIED two months later, Marietta and Camillo, two miles from the beach where they met. Her parents strung the breadfruit trees outside their house with lights and the town gathered in the old Spanish plaza. Camillo had no family on the island so he walked with her father and her father’s brothers to the colonial chapel. He wore one of her father’s white cotton Sunday suits, and as they went people cheered through open windows, whistled from the street corners and began to follow them. It was a mile and a half from her parents’ house on the beach to the Spanish plaza, but they walked the whole way, and as they did more people joined and walked with them.

  The Spanish, when they first came there, had laid the town center on a wide, flat plateau that the Indians had cleared for failed plantings. Eventually the rest of the town had been built on the mountainsides below the plaza, and the road from the beach was narrow and steep. What cars there were on the island back then could barely fit on both sides, and as they progressed, Camillo and her father’s brothers, and then far behind them now, Marietta and her mother, the street filled with the crowd so that there was almost no space to move. People looking out their windows whistled and hissed and joined the procession. The road rose out of the low-lying tree break and into the cleared hills. It rose and rose and here the palm and clapboard pine homes gave way to pastel-painted stucco houses. For a while, still, the sea was visible; it flickered in coins of light through the spaces in the trees, and then it was gone—there was just the palm forest, the town, and beyond that the mountain jungle, dense and wetly green against the darkening horizon. Rain was coming, everyone could smell it. The heat was breaking fast and the sky darkened into a ripe, fish-gut purple. When the wind freshened, the fruiting vines that grew tangled about the town’s few electric wires fluttered and dropped flowers over the gathering crowd.

  The men reached the Spanish chapel. They closed the door and waited inside until Marietta appeared, wearing her mother’s dress. Someone snapped a picture. Yolanda had seen it: her mother mounting the brick-cobbled stairs leading up to the chapel doors, wind held static in her hair and in her dress, and the air in the background going to lightning as a storm brewed, like the child she already carried, in the imminent distance.

  GROWING UP, Yolanda knew little of her father’s past. He was Colombian, originally, he told her, from Cartagena. In his youth he worked as a fisherman on the Caribbean coast just north of the Old City. Then he had to leave. He fled north in a fishing skip with his brother. They reached Copal on September fifteenth—Central American Independence Day, a holiday fraught with wet season storms. It rained and rained. Water poured down out of the mountains in makeshift rivers, waves rose and broke over the seawall. The coconut carts and rum shacks that lined the shore scuttled and drifted into the sea, the streets of the coastal city were flooded. It was a strange first day in a new country, he told her. As the rain bent the shade palms all along the waterfront almost to the ground, they looked, Camillo thought, like frail field hands crippled by toil. “I know it’s strange,” he said, “but that’s what it seemed, that’s how I first saw that country, as a land of toil.” And he turned out to be correct.

  Explosions sounded everywhere. Hundreds of them. Children ran through the flooding streets holding bandoliers of fireworks and matches above their heads. They couldn’t find any dry ground to light them on, so they set them off indoors on café tables, or scaled walls and threw them from the tops of buildings. The wooden mansard roofs of the summer houses and Victorian hotels caught fire and quickly went out in the rain. The whole city burned and flooded and burned again. Smoke drifted from the rooftops, clouds of hot steam hung above the swamping streets. Everywhere the water continued to rise. A child caked in mud wailed under a banyan tree as his friends scurried about, trying to find the finger he’d blown into the water with fireworks.

  They walked on, Camillo and his brother, and saw a horse, tethered to an iron fence-post, floundering in the water. When they tried to untie it someone shouted and pistol shots pocked the pooled water about their knees. They headed inland then, as fast as they could, turned away from the coast and climbed the mountain roads, which in the flood’s wake were strewn with a drowned ocelot, a car door, uprooted scrub bushes and boulders washed free of the hills. Rivers of mud swamped their path as the road rose and the ways grew lush and full with mountain foliage. They walked all day while below them the city burned and flooded; they dragged their bags through the mired lanes; they wandered into the mountain’s realms of solitude where children with no shoes or shirts watched them from the cabins of burned-out trucks and abandoned villages of stilt houses slid away, down the ravines, in torrents of falling mud. In the far valleys, banana plantations wavered green and wet beneath the webbing of mist and Spanish moss on the higher hills. Here hung leaves as big as suitcases, flowers with petals as thick as a man’s hand. That night they slept, covered by cut banana fronds, in the bed of a pickup truck. In the morning they crested the mountain and saw the sugar plantation spread into the distance against the thundercloud horizon, purple and still in the storm’s windless aftermath.

  “BUT WHY DID you leave Cartagena in the first place?” Yolanda would ask. She had not yet looked for it on a map, but to her the name sounded majestic. Cartagena. The Old City. Cultured beyond her island imaginings.

  “All the world is not as sweet as this island,” he would say. “Now try your question in English.”

  Her father spoke English. When people asked him where he’d learned it, he’d say, “I don’t know. Just something I picked up along the way.” As if he were speaking of an old pair of shoes, the ability to wiggle your ears. Along the way. What way it was that forced him from Cartagena and then again from the plantation on the mainland he never told her. She knew just that one day he came to the island and met her mother on the shore.

  “Darling,” he’d say, “the mainland was no different than Colombia. There were the same injustices, the same sorrows. Never leave this island if you don’t have to, and if you do, go far, far away.”

  On the island he worked, as he had in Colombia, as a fisherman. Before they were married, Marietta’s father lent him money for a basic boat and gear, money that he paid back double within the first four months of marriage.

  “I don’t know, mon,” he’d sometimes say in mock Cartagena Afro-English as he docked with his ridiculous haul. “Dese island fish be mighty trusting, dem.”

  He seemed touched by luck. Each day he’d haul like a man ladling from a cornucopia, as if the ocean were his own private bounty. He’d line bream and snapper, dive for conch and trap for crab and spiny lobster. Islanders begged to join him, to sign on as first mates or turtle spearers.

  “No, no,” he’d answer. “I’m not considering expanding. God hates pride and I’ve always loved turtles.”

  People began to talk in the village. Once another fisherman approached Marietta’s father where he sat every evening at the coconut palm counter in the café.

  “It’s hard to imagine how a man as talented as that could become so destitute,” he said. “Mother of God, he must have been in some trouble.”

  Marietta’s father drank from his rum, forked a baby octopus from his plate, and said, “Did you know I’m expecting another grandchild?”

  IT WAS TRUE. The family came quickly. A brother, Jose, followed Yolanda. They lived, all of them, on the shore not far from her grandparents’ house. Yolanda learned to sail and swim and dive for conch with her brother. Some days after school, if her mother didn’t need her about the house, she’d go down to the water and help her father unload his day’s catch. There were no other girls at the docks. It was not a place most men would ever bring their daughters. But the fishermen respected Yolanda. She was Camillo’s daughter, after all—Camillo, the man touched by the sea’s bounty—and they could see in the way she dove for conch or swam with the boys in the lagoons on Sundays that she must carry in her blood some similar grace. Also, everyone soon agreed, she was a better coo
k than her mother. On holidays she served stews with octopus and garlic and fresh-caught crab in plantain flower bowls. Her early youth was as her father said it would be: sweet beyond most imaginings. Days passed in the blinding glare of island sun, and at night, in the spring, when the currents moved in just beyond the windward passages, the forest canopy rustled under new wind and the air smelled like sea grapes and blossoming bougainvillea.

  Her father began to catch less and less and then he was gone.

  It started slowly: He’d go out on longer voyages, a day or sometimes two or three, longer anyway than seemed reasonable, and come back with half his usual fare. After a while the voyages grew even longer. He’d be gone a week at a time and come back with a necklace for Marietta from some distant port, someplace farther than you’d think his fishing boat could take him, books in English for Yolanda and Jose, but no fish at all. And then the typhoon struck while he was out at sea and they never saw him again.

  Yolanda remembered rumors of squalls moving up the coast, small storms and flash floods, but nothing dire—just talk in the market and on the docks. No warnings came from the mainland and it was May anyway, too early for hurricanes. And then there was the day when the sky greened into oxidized copper and the temperature dropped and a thousand birds broke suddenly into the sky. Then it was just wind and the sound of wind, the world tearing itself apart as the lagoons emptied into the sea as if sucked through a straw, and the sea, then, rose up and lifted docked boats and dashed them against the boardwalk on waves dark with rent coral and river silt. The palm break on the windward shore uprooted to the air, the leaves of breadfruit trees screamed and tore against the wind, sand off the beach blew through the latticed windows of what few houses still stood.

  Yolanda’s grandparents did not survive the storm. The gale lifted and littered their house across the inland mangroves like the detritus of a shipwreck. In the days following the typhoon, Yolanda wandered the shore with her mother and her brother like travelers who find their destination sacked by barbarians. They walked and wandered, they wore no shoes and what clothes remained were tattered and muddy from digging for their grandparents’ bodies in the flooded mangroves. They turned slow circles under the sad skeletons of still-standing trees. At night they burned bonfires on the shore, cooked what fish they could find. Every day they shoveled through the mangroves in the filthy marsh heat of the afternoon, where the dug clay writhed with the wattled iguanas that slunk out of the forest to scavenge the floating dead. Circling buzzards mottled the shore with their shadows and the town by the Spanish plaza lay deserted. Survivors swarmed to the jungle to collect windfall wood and fruit, and at night black howler monkeys no one had ever seen before clambered down to the shore and pillaged the beach camps. People spoke of aid missions that never came, or came to the other side of the island, or were seized by bandits. People spoke, for the first time, of guerrillas.

  One afternoon Marietta found a canvas tarp for the children and they spent the rest of the day making camp, cutting and laying in stakes and digging a fire pit for the evening bonfire. They dug and cut, erected the tarp, and laid a circle wall of dried coral. When they were finished they were exhausted and hungry. They had no more drinkable water and the sky over the ocean had settled into a slow nectarine dusk. Everywhere fireflies flashed and the day’s last light illuminated the distant whitecaps where the water broke on underwater shoals. Marietta and her children spent that night shivering into diarrhetic fever.

  After three weeks, Yolanda said, two things happened on the same day: they gave up her father for lost, and Gabriel, one of his brothers whom they had never met before, arrived from the mainland. The official aid missions never made it to their side of the island, but Peace Corps volunteers had chartered a boat and filled it with clean water and what medical supplies they could find, and Gabriel came with them as a passenger. He appeared before them in the morning like a figure out of dream.

  “You must accept it,” Marietta had told the children while they cooked the last of their eggs on a wind-thrown scrap of tin. “Your father will not return.”

  For days they’d argued that perhaps he was safe but stranded at some mainland port, safe and waiting for a new boat or any other way to send word. But by then, by the third week and still no word, no sign of him or his boat, and her parents still not found, still lost in the mangroves, she said, “Children, my children, you must accept it, we must accept that he is gone.”

  And then there he was, this man who walked as Camillo walked, who loped and looked down at his feet and wore his beard short and close about his neck—a man coming to them through a shadebreak of sea grapes and broken palms, a man with the sun behind him, slicing the horizon into ribbons of wavering heat so that he seemed to tremble into form as he walked.

  “Marietta,” he said as he stepped into their camp through the smoke.

  She looked up and did not speak and crossed herself as he stepped around the fire and put his hand on her shoulder and said it again, her name, and then told her his: “I am Gabriel, Camillo’s older brother.”

  “Camillo is dead,” Marietta said. Yolanda still, remembering it, this moment, does not know if she was asking or telling him.

  “Yes, he is dead,” Gabriel said. “In the typhoon.”

  “Are you sure? How do you know?” asked Jose.

  “Yes, I am sure.”

  “But how do you know?”

  He turned back to Marietta. Behind him the sky had settled into the dusty ochre of morning and the sea was the same color as the sky.

  “You can come with me to Rio de Caña,” he said. “You can find work there.”

  “How do you know my father is dead?” Jose said again.

  “It is very easy to tell if a man is dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Marietta, who had not been to the mainland since she was a little girl. “But this is my home. It is my children’s home.”

  Gabriel waved his hand in the air. A general motion, a man passing benediction or condemnation.

  “Look at this.” He pointed now specifically—a monkey rooted through the shore’s rubble, everywhere the smoke rose off scrub fires. “This is nobody’s home anymore.”

  “No,” Marietta said and turned her face that Ethan sees as Yolanda’s away from the sun, away from Gabriel. “We will not go.”

  “Yes, you will. Of course you will. Please stop lying and start packing.”

  Jose, then, up and on his feet and raising their carved bamboo fish spear.

  “My mother doesn’t lie.”

  “Do not believe that, chico. Even the best women lie. Especially when they don’t know that you know what they know.”

  “And what is that?” said Marietta. A whisper now.

  “There is no water or food here. And you are pregnant.”

  SO THEY MOVED to mainland Copal, to Rio de Caña, the farming town in the basin between the mountains, the cane fields and the Rio Sulaco—the river that ran through the malarial jungle to the sea.

  “You can imagine,” Yolanda said to Ethan, “that my life had changed forever. I did not know it, but I had spent my life in paradise. And then came the hurricane and Gabriel and Rio de Caña, and nothing was the same again. After that it was toil in the fields from dawn to dusk. It was sunburn and starving nights. Look at my hands.” She held them out to him. “It was calluses that will never heal.”

  “Are you sure your uncle was named Gabriel and not Michael?” Ethan asked.

  Yolanda withdrew her hands from his sight.

  “Your shame makes you very ugly,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Ethan said and poured more rum. “It’s just that I’ve heard this story before. Generally speaking. It’s just that something’s wrong with me.”

  “And you think that means anything?” Yolanda said. “Step outside. Look around you. Everything is wrong with everybody here.”

  HER SISTER, MIRABELLE, her missing father’s last child, was born during their first spring in de Caña
.

  “My sister was different,” Yolanda said. “She was special somehow. Our mother died giving birth, but Mirabelle never cried, and she did not stop growing even though she had little milk and less formula.”

  When they ran out of formula, they filled her bottle with Coca-Cola. As Mirabelle grew, several things became apparent: the first was that she did not have the constitution for field work, and the second was that she was exceedingly intelligent. Gifted, maybe. Gabriel taught her English, and she learned it quickly, far more quickly than either of her siblings.

  “This girl is different,” he said to Yolanda. “Maybe she is blessed. But I wish she would sleep through the night.”

  It was true. Mirabelle did not sleep. As a baby, even after her mother died and they had no milk to nurse her on, she slept fine, but as she grew so did her insomnia. Every night, in the hours past midnight, she’d wake sweating and crying, troubled by dreams and the memory of dreams. Yolanda held her, the shaken girl, as she rocked into waking. And when Mirabelle woke, the whole house woke with her. They lived in a former boathouse, a two-room, concrete-and-stucco rectangle perched on the bank of the Rio Sulaco. From the house to the cane fields it was a mile and a half, and work began at dawn. If you didn’t report to the cane on time you lost the entire day’s wages. There were not enough hours in the night as it was.

  Finally, Gabriel reached the end of his tether. That was the expression Yolanda used, and when she did, Ethan stopped her, smiled and wiped his forehead, tried to appear something other than demented.

  “Where did you learn that?” he asked. The end of his tether—it sounded so English, it sounded performed, and again he wondered how many people she had told this story.

  She shrugged and said, “In a book, I guess, I don’t know.”

  He watched her then, watched as something, worry or uncertainty, began forming in her expression. It came like a hardening, a contracting. Her cheeks drew in, tautened, her brow furrowed. Her eyes—he found, he could not meet her eyes.