Authors: Daniel Mason
Even the youngest children grew quiet and listless, and their skin grew soft lanugo hair. A baby developed pale marks like lichen on the skin of his groin. When Isabel held him, his
swollen legs pitted in the shape of a hand. Plump, translucent lids covered his eyes. When the families pooled together to feed him, he didn’t grow fat, but withered until his face was the face of a little old man.
Her mother began to cry, without warning or provocation. They waited for Isaias to send more money. When none came, they began to mix earth into the beans. It was the first time she came to see earth as food, and her mother had to teach her how to recognize the right kind. She found it satisfied an unfamiliar hunger, and soon she was craving it. On one of her walks, she fell asleep in the sun and woke up lost and disoriented, her skin burned and peeling. She had never fallen asleep in the noon sun before. In the market, they bought scraps of skin and zebu nose, haggled harder. She cut herself trying to dig up a bromeliad, and the wound wouldn’t heal.
Once, she came across a hogplum with low-hanging leaves. She ate one, and then another, and then she began to stuff her mouth with them, faster than she could swallow, the sweet taste making her salivate and quenching her thirst. Her mouth filled with leaves but still she stuffed herself. She ate until she vomited a heavy mass of fiber, and then heaved again and again until her stomach was empty. She understood that it was punishment for her greed.
Now each week there was news of someone else leaving. The teacher stopped coming. There were rumors that she had fallen sick and stayed in the city. Others said the landowners were angry that she was teaching poems about the retreat and backlands prophets. Others said she had just grown tired of the place.
Two months after the end of the harvest, someone heard there were foreigners distributing free rice in Prince Leopold.
Isabel rushed home when she heard the news. As she told her father, she began to laugh uncontrollably. Her father listened quietly and said, ‘I’m not taking anyone’s charity, especially foreigner charity,’ but three days later he led them along the long road to the city. There, where the streets ended, they found a crowd from the villages. They looked for the food, but a man told them the foreigners had come to first build a church, and there would be a dinner when they were finished. He said, ‘If we feed you now, you’ll go away.’
While her father worked, Isabel stayed with the other children. She watched a tall pink teenager with a crew cut hand out toys from a cardboard box. He had a mechanical toy car with a long wire and a lever that made it move. He stood in the center of a crowd of children with swollen bellies and chased them with the car. A woman handed out shirts with many colors. Isabel chose a green one with a picture of an orange-haired man in a fighting stance and words she didn’t understand. It had beautiful green letters, and she wore it over her dress.
There was a toy truck with a ladder on its flatbed and a doll whose eyes opened as they lifted her. Another doll could be filled with water, and when the boy squeezed its belly, a stream of urine arced out. The children watched first in amusement, and then in nervousness and silence as the water made a muddy puddle on the ground.
It took three days to build the church, and they spent the nights with a cousin. She slept with two other children on a stretch of leather hammered onto a frame with old black nails. It was age-burnished and tan in the stretches around the nails. During the night, the children slid toward one another in the center and awoke in a tangle.
On the second day, her mother asked a man in a tie, ‘Where
is the rice?’ ‘Soon,’ he said. When the church was finished they stood and listened to a sermon on living water and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well, and then a truck came and gave out bags of rice and sugar, which they carried home as night was falling.
After a month, her father found a job building a police station north of Prince Leopold. She was still always hungry, but they were able to afford beans. With money from an aunt, they bought a pair of goats. Now when Isabel grazed them in the hills, she was usually alone. She no longer passed other goatherds, or old men leading mules laden with handwoven baskets, or the children who used to run alongside her. The houses where she used to stop for a glass of water were empty.
Once, as she balanced her way along a rock outcropping, she came across a pair of black high-heeled shoes. Around her, the gray expanse of the forest spread up the hillslope, unbroken but for the cacti and the rare umbrella of a drinking-tree. She had just turned fourteen. She thought how she had never worn shoes with high heels. They lay wedged in a crack; she had to lie on her belly to reach them. The rock was sharp and dug into her breasts. When she couldn’t reach them, she broke a branch from a buckthorn. Then she hesitated. There were forest spirits who dressed as women when they came down into the villages. She withdrew her hand and whispered an invocation against ghosts, along with three Hail Marys and an Our Father. She could hear the tlingaling of goat bells somewhere in the brush.
She ran off as the day was ending. Her legs were warm with the radiating heat of the ground, but her shoulders were cold. She found the goats and ran them home.
Another day, she passed a small cross. They were common in the backlands; she didn’t know why she had stopped. The cross had been painted, but the paint had worn away. Before it, someone had placed a pair of heat-wilted candles and the bottom half of a green plastic bottle, shredded along its length, with the end of each strip painted with a dash of nail polish, like a little bouquet of flowers. On the cross was carved a single word,
IZABEL
, with no dates. Perhaps it was a baby, she thought, or an old woman whose last name was forgotten. The thought of the marker bothered her for a long time, as if below was not one Isabel but many, perhaps every Isabel in the world one day found her way to this spot. Later, she avoided the cross and the path that led there.
Isaias wrote again. The city was hot and crowded, he said. He sometimes found work playing alongside an accordion and a drummer at an open-air restaurant. He couldn’t send money this time. It was more difficult to find jobs, he was earning only enough to get by, but that would change. He used city expressions, such as ‘things are on the up-and-up.’ He promised to send money soon. When his letters came, she first scanned them slowly for some mention of when he would come home, and then returned to ‘Dear Isabel,’ and read them word by word.
In his third letter, he wrote of seeing a beautiful girl. He was playing in the Cathedral Square, and she stopped and listened to him play. He didn’t know her name. He filled both sides of the page, and in a thin blank space at the bottom he drew little buildings like the skyline of a city.
Isabel read the letter twice, folded it and took it with her on her walks. She broke the rattling pods angrily and kicked at the loose stones. It was a week before Carnival. When
the festivals began, her family walked to Prince Leopold to watch the processions. She said she was sick. She stayed home and pushed herself back and forth in her hammock with her foot.
Her family came home late at night, their hair crisp with starch that children tossed at passersby in tiny wax balls. They laughed and recalled the processions, the girl who was the princess, the costumes of glitter and ribbon. The high point, they said, was a fight that broke out between the Procession of the Three Kings from Prince Leopold and the Great Lion of God, a marching orchestra that had come all the way from the coast. An angel punched the king, a drunk in a priest’s cassock smashed a bottle over a Fierce Indian, a man on a cardboard horse purloined a kiss from the princess.
The story cheered her. She went with them the next day. Her cousin wore wings made of real feathers. The street flashed with sequins. She marveled at the wondrous costumes, but it was different from the years before: quieter, emptier, and the drunks were angry. Because so many men had left for the south, the girls danced mostly with one another. I live in a world of women, she thought. She whirled, her hands in her mother’s.
Only once, a man in a woman’s stockings came close to her. His chest was bare and he wore lipstick and tinted glasses. He spun around her, his hips moving faster and faster, until they were a blur. She turned and he was gone.
In late March, not long after Carnival, they spotted a file of dust plumes on the horizon. Word came that they were building a highway from the coast. A representative of the governor
came and erected a sign that said
PROGRESS INTO THE BACKLANDS IS PROGRESS FORWARD
.
Over the following weeks, the highway came closer. When the wind shifted, they could hear the roar of the machines. Clouds of dust swept through town, coating the windows and the uncovered food, tinting the white walls a light orange that the children blew away with puffed cheeks. It formed soft slopes in the corners of doorways and settled in films in the water jars.
In the afternoons, Isabel went with the other girls to a hillside overlooking the highway. They watched huge vehicles drive through the white forest with a scouring chain slung between them, tearing through the trees as if they were nothing but dry twigs. In places, the crew followed the old road that wove its way around the thickest copses; in others, they pushed straight over them, the bulldozers crushing the brush, the backhoes clanging against the stones.
Isabel could see men below, tiny against the machines. They shoved sticks of dynamite beneath the largest rocks and exploded them, or drilled them, screeching, until they shattered apart. The children stared with amazement and chased one another, repeating the noises. There were soldiers, too, with helmets and rifles, pacing the road and watching the hills. At night in town, her family talked about the soldiers, and why the government thought the roads needed to be protected, and from whom.
At first, the children watched warily from the bluff, but each day they made their way closer. The construction men were friendly. They showed them the machines and let them play on them during their noon breaks. The children asked where the asphalt was, and the men said that it was coming
later, that they were just clearing a path, ‘We go first, It’s a harder job with the stones and thorn.’ Isabel stood uneasily at the edge of it all, watching a little cousin as he clambered over the seats and slid down the dusty concavity of the bulldozer’s scoop, whistling with surprise at the heat of the metal in the sun. She noticed that some of the girls began to wear lipstick and their best clothes, and hold their shoes in their hands as they made their way barefoot down the hillside. They sat in the shade with the men, laughed with them and took short drinks from label-less bottles.
There was one man who smiled at Isabel when she sat alone, watching from beneath a buckthorn not far from camp. Once, when he approached, she stood quickly, brushed off her skirt and took the hand of her cousin. She retreated up the hillside and watched the man shrug and move back to the camp. Another time, when her cousin disappeared to play in the cab of the bulldozer, the man came and stood at the edge of the tree’s shade. He offered her a bottle of soda. ‘It’s cold,’ he said. There was only one icebox in Saint Michael, in the canteen, but it was unplugged and usually empty. She let him sit with her. The rock was wide, but his leg pressed against hers. ‘From the town?’ he asked. She nodded. ‘Not much here,’ he said, ‘It must get lonely.’ ‘It’s all right.’ She didn’t know what else to say. He continued, ‘Where I’m from, we’ve got a lot more green than this, although not much more money.’ He laughed. ‘If we did, I suppose I wouldn’t be out here. What’s your name?’ he asked.
When she finished the soda, she held the bottle against her arm until it wasn’t cold anymore and then handed it back to him. His leg was still against hers, and he put the bottle down at his feet. She realized they were alone. She could hear only
scraps of the children’s distant voices, and she couldn’t see the other girls. ‘Why are you so frightened?’ said the man. ‘I’m not frightened.’ ‘You aren’t? You remind me of the little birds that flit about the edge of camp.’ She laughed a little. He smiled. ‘You have orange soda on your mouth,’ he said, and placed his thumb on her lip. She felt her heart race, but she didn’t move. His hands were dry and heavy and reminded her of the machines. He ran his thumb along her lip, slowly lowering it to where it was wet with her saliva. She could taste the soda on his finger. Suddenly, she pinched her mouth closed. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’ She started away, but he grabbed her wrist. ‘Sweetheart, take it easy! Have some fun.’ She twisted her wrist from his hand. His grip was tight, her skin burned. He pulled her toward him, but she broke his grip and ran, pulled her cousin from the hot hollow of the bulldozer plow and fled up the hill. She noticed then that she was crying. Farther up the hillside, the tears became hacking coughs. She stopped, and spit and spit and wiped her mouth with the edge of her shirt. Her cousin stood a few feet away. When she stopped crying and wiped her eyes, she said angrily to him, ‘This is your fault. You will never go back.’
At home, she looked at herself in a small hand mirror her mother had been given by the foreigners. She tried to see what the man saw. Her eyes were red and swollen. She felt strangely distant from the girl in the mirror, as if she were staring from far away, as if, by blinking, the girl would vanish. There was still a smudge of the orange soda on her chin. She spit on her fingers and rubbed it away.
After two days, her mother said, ‘Something happened. You’re acting strange.’ She shook her head. She thought: It was my fault, I went down there and let him give me the soda
to drink, I should have accepted no charity, I should have stayed away. A bruise bloomed around her wrist. She wore her single long-sleeved shirt despite the heat.
In town, they whispered about the girls who began to visit the camp and dance with the men. When the wind was right, they could hear the radio music coming up from the valley. A girl came to Isabel and said, ‘Why don’t you come anymore? You are a prude. Your friend asks about you every day.’ Another girl said, ‘She already has a boyfriend. It’s her brother.’ Isabel wanted to strike her. Later, she imagined the moment over and over. You can’t just be quiet all the time, she told herself. She wished for her brother’s facility with words. She wished she had said, It is not that, it isn’t anything that you can understand. If he was here he would explain.