Naomi
She had gone. Sofía had
gone. The media luna impression of
her body on the sheet was cold under José’s thin hands. It was not yet a year
since they’d first arrived here—man to tend the fields, woman to tend the
man—at the furthest outpost of the plantation, the finca. She had not wanted to come even then, not into the mouth of
the jungle where the tilled land gave way, unable to hold its ground from
morning to morning. But he had asked—not begged—and she had come. And now, all
these months later, she had gone. He went out to the garden, shucked a spindly
jointed length of sugar cane, set his teeth to the white banded meat, and
sucked.
He did not know where
she would go. North from the river on Cacique’s bony back, north along the edge
of the palm fields, then east across the rotting bridge, twenty kilometers east
by way of the road that wove up and out of the jungle. But then? Would she
leave Cacique in the plantation’s stable? Would she walk to Bananito on her
broad black feet, sit in the back on the noon bus, step out into Limón, into
Heredia?
The dog Ceiba lay
snuffling under the young lemon tree where Sofía had left her. Her legs had
been bound together with a horse lead, her long jaw shuttered with a cloth.
José had taught Sofía those nudos,
his fingers full of ropes and patterns, he had shown her how. The dog’s body
heaved for a moment, her strong neck rearing before she fell back against the
tree roots. José thought she must have lain and breached like this for hours,
the print of her body on the grass like the footsteps of a mountain pig on the
riverbank. She had too much force, Sofía would have known this, to be tied any
other way, and Sofía had not wanted the dog to leave him. José cut the knots
slowly, deliberately. She had taken such care with each.
The dog ran silently,
desperately, her ears flattened to her large skull. She was not long in
disappearing into the jungle—the pure, savage selva. José left the cut ends of the rope on the ground. He turned
back towards the house. Vaulted into the air on slender stilts, boards greening
with fine-haired lichen, it stood wobbly-legged beside the river. He would need
to find the burro that she had named Valentina. It was a long walk to the
fields of palma without Cacique. The
burro could bear him.
…
José’s dreams that
afternoon were of his niece, Naomi. She had forgotten him again. He knew this,
as he always knew this, because of her eyes, which were afraid. His sister Isa
was washing shirts in the sink in the family home, the wish-wish of her brush covering the sound of Naomi’s crying. He
reached out for his sister’s
daughter, for her small hands, watching as her feet kicked at the ground. She
was trying, he realized, to back away from him. He looked again to Isa, but his
sister and the clothes had gone. Sitting low on a stool was his grandmother.
I
am going to tell you about the water lion, she said in
Cabécar, her mother tongue, and you will
listen.
The congos erupted in that moment, the
beating howl passing from one monkey to the next until the canopy echoed. José rubbed the sweat from his eyes and stood
up. The burro’s shadow had lengthened on the ground. The high sun of noon had
passed.
He had not seen Naomi
since he had come to this house on its stilts. Before, when he had worked with
the others on the main part of the plantation, they had slept—nine men for
working, one woman, Sofía, to cook for them—in plaster buildings near the road,
and on the first of every third month, he had been given four days to go home.
Naomi would be almost
six by now, with Isa’s flat teeth and her father’s dark skin. José had never
known Naomi’s father, who had been called Santi. He had died before she came,
and though Isa did not say, José felt Santi must have been a good man. José
liked to think about these things, about his mountain village and his niece. It
was his daydream, to be for Naomi what no one had been for him. But he was not
given much time to go home now. He was needed here, at the farthest reaches, to
tend the palma, the garden and the
young saplings.
…
Sofía
was still gone when David brought the horse back five days later. The dog came
too. They arrived in late morning as José was steadying a mango tree.
“Hija de puta,” David barked as he slid,
fat and sweating, from the saddle, his palm thumping Gotas’ wet haunch. This
was all that was said about it. He’d brought sacks of beans, rice, sausage,
coffee, and they burst from Cacique’s back like burlap growths.
“More
food this time,” José said curiously. He gestured toward the chainsaw wrapped
in wool blankets, “¿Y la motosierra?”
“El jefe wants you to rebuild the
bridge,” David replied through a throatful of pear. “I come back for the saw in
three weeks. He thinks the food should last,” David spat, bits of pulp on his
lips.
“And if el jefe thinks it, we
know it must be so.”
“But if el jefe, in his grandeza magnífica, is wrong?” José
asked dully.
David’s
mouth brushed gently, “They say I am too fat and you, José, will be too
skinny.”
The
routine for re-supply was every nine days. It took five hours to get up the
sharp hills, through the dense weave of white cane, beyond the close heat of
the jungle. This was the first time that it had ever been different.
“There
isn’t any salt,” José fingered the slick corner of the plastic rice bag.
The
other man shrugged; then, wistfully, “She always had something for me when I
arrived…”
“No
sal,” José mumbled. The dog stuck her
nose under his hand.
David
waited for the young afternoon to pass and left before the late afternoon had
arrived. It was tricky, between the heat and the early-setting sun, to choose
the right time to leave.
…
José
remembered what he had thought first, which was that Sofía had strong arms,
dark as pitch. She had arrived during a week of rains, when even the fish in
the river asked for dryness, nearly three years ago. It was soon discovered
that she would not take up with any of them. In those early evenings, she would
lead the blind milk cow to water, and her white dress would spread, drifting
like ash or smoke against the wide horizon of the animal’s soft flank. José
would watch her from his window—the only cabin with a view to the white stone
riverbank—watch as she took each ear in turn, ran her fingertips in circles
through the warm, delicate hairs. He would often wonder then why she was only
ever like this, gentle, when she
thought herself alone.
El jefe
liked that she would have none of them: a cook whose guts would not mound up
just five months after she had been delivered to the plantation. He told them
to let her be.
José
remembered her in his room that first night. From the doorway, he stared at
her, aware of the smell of the fields on his arms and his chest. She held a
candle in her hands. Her lips swollen
from where Antonio had hit her.
“Thank
you,” she said slowly.
“He
should not drink so much,” he replied as he came into the room.
He
felt her eyes on his shoulders, his neck. When he looked back at her, she
stared at his moonish face—round, flat—as though he were the sky, something to
be read in the morning with care.
“They
say, ‘José no es Tico.’” She lowered
the candle, light sliding off her forehead, “‘He is not like us.’” A pause,
“‘He is indio.’”
José
did not know why she said these things. He did not know what she wanted.
“I
can help you,” she told him at last. “You can help me.”
…
On
the tenth day before David was to return, José waded waist deep through the
river with a slab of manú wood on his back. He moved slowly, the rocks rolling
beneath his toes like slick folds of fat. He had been days in finding the tree,
its weighty carcass laid under close hung vines, and days in dividing it—the
good from the rot, the unsharpened teeth of his saw kicking back long curls
before the engine bogged down, clearing its throat deeply over and over again.
The wood was hard, heavy. It was the best for making bridges.
José
was in the middle of the river when he saw her—Naomi on the bank. She was
wearing red, Isa had always liked to put her in red, and she looked, José
thought, like a bird or a banana flower, condensed and alive. He called her
name, and his mind, which had been turning over in a dull, wordless rotation,
seemed to scream as though some part of him was in pain.
The
board slid backwards off his shoulder as he straightened, the edge dragging
against the hot skin of his neck. José caught, staggered, fell, his mouth open
with Naomi’s name as he entered the water. He struggled, hauled the wood
forward—this was the biggest slab, the most important—but when he shook the wet
from his eyes, she had gone. Naomi had gone.
He
sat down. He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling like footsteps.
The manú had opened his neck almost exactly as the chainsaw would have: an
unclean, messy line. He pressed his fingers to it, and they trembled slightly
with his pulse. After a moment, he thought to look. There in the mud, something
had lain down prints, soft and shallow huellas.
…
Under
her breath, Sofía would hum as she cooked in the plantation’s kitchen. She wore
cloths over her hair and tied her skirts up around her knees, her sandals
snapping against the white tiles. José hardly ever saw her smile those first
few months, but it was a thing to see, the way it would rise up on her lips. He
had taken to stocking the shelves for her. Out of his backpack, he pulled
sucker-mouthed araza and
rubber-spined mamon chinos, papaya
slotted beside piña, the cucumbers
laid gently against half-cut rounds of coconut.
The
first time he had brought her a watermelon, she had lit up like a flame. He had
laughed, tipping the fruit into her arms so that she could carry it around the
kitchen, held close to her belly like a baby. The rains had started again—José
was dripping delicately—and he had grinned and said, “My sobrina Naomi likes sandia
too.”
Sofía
was nesting the watermelon tenderly on the middle shelf. When she turned back
she replied quietly, “Then, I think, she must be good.”
José nodded. She did not like to talk about
these sorts of things. Sofía began cutting the coil of sausage into thick
medallions, flicking the meat in long arcs into the greased pan. José’s socks
left dark streaks as he walked to the plastic chair in the corner. He did not
mind her silences. He thought that it was nice for there to be two of them, for
her to cut sausage and for him to sit watching, because even when she said no
words, Sofía made him feel not alone.
“She
likes beetles,” he spoke to her back as she leaned over the gas stove, “and the
candy wrappers my sister gets her. I think it’s the colors, because they have
all those colors.” Sofía hadn’t moved, other than her forearm, which was
turning in circles as she stirred. “My grandmother tells her the old stories
just like she told me,” he paused, but there was a rush of things in his
throat. “And she loves to touch the sheep, and Isa caught her once with her
fingers in the sheep’s mouth, and my grandmother laughed because she has such chispa, the same spark my grandmother
says my mother had too, which made my sister very happy because she’d named
Naomi after her, Naomi Augustina—Augustina was my mother’s name.”
Sofía
was looking at him without blinking, her eyes like pebbles set back behind her
brow-bone.
“José,
why are you here?” she asked evenly, and José wished that the rains would end
so that sunlight could fall through the kitchen windows and illuminate her
face, because he could not see it really, so far away in the half-dark.
“I
am here like you are here, Sofía. To work. To bring money to my family.”
She
began to fix him a plate—she did that sometimes, for the fruit and things—and
José could not keep himself from asking.
“There
must be someone that you miss?”
At
first he thought she would not answer, but a moment after she had laid the
ladle against the lip of the rice pot, she looked at him and said, “Yes.”
…
José
had sorted the manú boards into longs and shorts on the muddy bank. It was
quite a stretch from this bend of the river to the section where the bridge
spanned with its rotting beams. He led Cacique to the piles, tied the horse’s
lead to a thick, quick-rising root. He’d laid three saddle blankets across the
horse’s ridged back, then a wooden frame to which to fasten the manú. The slabs
would have to drag. He bundled up the boards in twos and threes—heavy, but not
to break the animal—laying one set against the horse’s left side, then another
across the right flank, so that they crossed just behind Cacique’s damp neck,
the ends sliding along the ground. He worked the stiff ropes tight, settling
the weight as best he could. It was difficult, this, for a man so alone.
The
horse, at first, did not want to walk. It would set its muscles as though to
rear, blowing out great streams of air, and José would yell, flicking at the
horse with the hard end of the lead, and only then, in a great shuddering
motion, would Cacique move. José followed the path he had beaten earlier, and
everywhere, he began to see Naomi. José cried out to her until the sound of his
voice cracked, the horse flattening its ears:
“Mi sobrina, ¡espérame!”
She
was always just ahead: darting between the tall stalks of white cane, the red
of her dress like a bird’s wing.
“I will be
better if you wait, Naomi, ¡por fa!”
If
he could just see her, if he could just see her clearly, then he could go to
her.
“I
will bring money, and grandmother will be well again, but you must wait—espérame…”
When
they came at last to the bridge, José could not think properly with the shadow
of Naomi around him, and he ripped his fingers on the knots. The horse moved to
the river, pulling in great swallows of water as José, sweating and light-headed,
stared into the sky.
He
was thinking about Limón, that city of brightness. Four years ago, he had taken
Naomi with him to see the city’s markets and its great white cemetery. He had
thought she would like it, all the color and the noise and the gente, so different from this, from the
mountains, the greens, the jungle. It was a place he would have wanted to see,
when he was young. He had bought her a little necklace with a painted shell. So
that when she grew up, she could remember.
José
was carrying Naomi towards the beach to look out at Isla Uvita—Little Grape Island, he said to her, you are my little grape too. He wanted
them to imagine together where it was that they said the golden warships of
Colón had landed, when the police tried to take her away from him. She was too
dark, or he was too light, and the policeman said, La estás robando. He stopped them there on the street and said: You are stealing her.
José
had spoken loudly with a dry tongue. El
papá era negro. She is my niece,
please. She is mine.
It
took him an hour, men and women looking on with strange faces, to convince the
police to let him keep her. When at last they let him go, he went without
thinking to the green and orange buses that would take them home, the salty
winds cooling on his forehead and his neck. Naomi in his arms like a hot stone.
She was too young. She could not speak, could not say: ¡Es mi tío! No, no, ¡es
mi tío!
José
shuddered from the memory. He watched as the horse stepped forward and put its
front hooves beneath the surface of the water. He was trying. He was trying to
make things better for Naomi. He blinked once, twice, the red of a vine-hanging
flower catching like an ember in his eyes.
…
José
did not think, as long as he lived, that he would forget that smell. He would
eat with the others—Roberto laughing as David scraped the pot for the last of
the beans, Jorge frowning absently into his cup, Antonio sitting back on his
heels, watching—fire bugs and cigarette tips sparking in the new dark. He would
drink his coffee, ignore the whining of the dogs, get up and go to the place
where he slept, the one-room plaster cabin with its cement veranda.
She
had dragged her mattress into his room when they’d all been out in the fields
many weeks ago, and he would find her there, asleep—the room clean, his other
pair of clothes laid out, tortillas and sausage wrapped and placed beside the
door.
He
stood looking at her, wishing to see more than the round of her body turned
away. He walked towards her, stopped. She kept her hair short like so many of
the women with the Caribbean in their veins. It was the animal smell of the
milk cow, of lemons, of Sofía, and it burned in the air like glow bugs, hung in
this place that was his. José lay down beside her, his hand finding her hip
beneath the sheet.
There
was no catch in her breath, as though she never had been asleep. She turned
from her side to her back and he felt the length of her against him. Her eyes
shone in the dark like oil or black water, and she did not struggle but looked
at him with an open face, as absent as a horse or an old blind cow. José
wondered, sinkingly, where it was that she had gone, because he could still
feel her, the warmth of her beside him. Beneath his fingers, her belly
trembled.
…
He
dug up half the garden for the bottle of rum
that Sofía had buried there, the shadow of the stilt house on him. He could
still hear the way she’d laughed as she’d spirited it away.
You’ll have it all after one bad
day,
she’d said, hiding the bottle behind
her back. And then, where will I be?
That
night, he’d heard her get up, take the shovel, go out into the garden. He knew
it was better this way. At first it would burn like a live thing in his throat,
dragging tracks down into his belly, but then it would suspend the air into
lights and darks, and he would have to move through them: through the sunlight
to the shadow, and he would feel it. Feel it under his palms, below his
cheek—the lump like an orange in the old woman’s guts, his grandmother making
small noises as she pressed her hands to her stomach.
It is growing like a child,
she would say to the doctor in broken-down Spanish.
José
found the rum where Sofía had lain it, deep in the roots of the lemon tree. She had been gone nineteen days. He was
making notches on one of the stilt-legs so that he would not forget. He was
going to run out of beans. He had no salt. The last of the manú planks was far
too heavy. Some of the dirt had gotten into the bottle, into the drink. He
wiped at the glass with his shirt. He drank.
“You
need the money,” el jefe had said to
him a year ago. “More colones to pay
the doctor,” he squinted into the sun. “They’ll want it soon now, maybe even
before the surgery. Tumors grow fast in the old.” El jefe was not looking at José, but at the scar marking José’s
right eyebrow, a bit of moon’s shine against the dark hairs. “I’ll pay you more
for being out there—of course I’ll pay you more—and you will only have to do
the same work you’ve always done.”
José
remembered the unease, the way those words had sat in his guts and grown. It
had taken him two days to decide, a week to convince Sofía to go with him, and
that is how they’d come to be at the ends of the plantation. In the beginning,
she had not seemed so unhappy.
José
lay on the ground beneath the spread of the almond tree. When he turned his
head, he could see the dog rooting around in the hole that he had made. He
called out to her. She looked at him with her black eyes, but she would not
come.
…
His
grandmother was afraid of the water lion. You
must be careful of the river, she would tell him. You must watch for signs that it is near.
José
wrapped his shirt around his fist, dropped his arm into the water. The current
pulled at him, playing a game with his muscles—up, down—as though he were
waving. He drew back slowly, ran the cloth against his neck. He must take more
care to keep it clean, to keep dirt from setting into the rift, from being
closed over by the disks of scabbing. José reached again into the river. He
could see into the depths here, see the silver-finned fishes as they trapped
light on their scales. But further out, he could see no fish, no nothing except
the dark water, silt stirred on silent underwater waves, the riverbed giving
way to the deep.
One
of those mornings before they had come here, he had watched from his window as
Sofía washed herself by the water. She must have supposed him asleep because
she had moved with such carelessness. She touched her skin with the same
gentleness she showed the dog and the cow. On the third arc of her rib, ink on
her like a shadow laid over night, he saw the tatujae: a cat’s paw, or a puma’s, or a lion’s. It was like a print
of what had once been there but was no longer.
The
dog had begun to bark. José looked at her, then stared across the water to see
what she had seen. Naomi was a blot of red against the sweep and variation of
green behind her. She threw white rocks, playing in the shallows of the bank,
and when she saw him, she opened her mouth wide as if to call out his name. The
air José had taken into his lungs seemed to catch and burst. He could see her
so clearly now, far away across the river. She turned in circles, kicking up
water that fell in half-moons, stopping to stare at him. The dog kept barking.
Naomi held her hand out to him.
