Naomi

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.