“And you? You slept well?” Alma asks the mayor as he offers her a cup of what turns out to be wonderfully strong but too sweet coffee she can hardly get down.
He slept very well, thank you.
She does not go on to ask him where he slept, because she wants to drink her coffee quietly, look around, shake off this foggy feeling and pounding headache and growing sense of dread of a world without Richard. She walks beyond the kitchen, with its sweet smell of wood smoke, a zinc roof protecting the cooking fire from rain, and looks around. Not more than fifty feet away, she sees the chain-link fence, the sign she couldn’t read last night: CENTRO VERDE DEL CARIBE, and below, in smaller letters: CLíNICA DE INVESTIGACIONES SWAN. The sun is just beginning to rise in the east. She wonders if Richard is watching it. If he is scared, hungry. If he slept at all. If he is getting any coffee.
Richard, are you there? Alma is again tempted to cry out. But what if her voice is enough to snap some terrorist’s frayed nerves, to jerk a trigger finger, to spill the life she loves more than anything on the ground forever? Oh, Jesus God, no! Isabel!
As she guessed last night, the compound is surrounded by sandbags, crouching soldiers in camouflage, leaning against the bags, some of them catching a snooze before Camacho comes by to inspect and kick ass. A few of the soldiers who are awake look over at her. They are boys—no more than seventeen, eighteen years old—boys who stayed up all night, boys who are hungry and staring at the coffee cup in her hand.
She waves without thinking, and without thinking they wave back, giving away their position to the enemy, who are not the enemy, but—if the mayor is to be believed, a bunch of young boys he has known since they were this high.
Just inside the fence, there is a picnic table with an umbrella. She wishes she could go in through the little pedestrian gate, drink her coffee. Her journal is in her jacket pocket, a pen. She wants to write Richard a love note, give it to the little boys to deliver when they take in those big pots of boiled roots the mayor’s wife and daughters are cooking. Or is this breakfast for the young soldiers behind sandbags? Or for the patients locked up in their dormitorios, who periodically call out? They are hungry. They are hot. They are sick, innocent people. Have a conscience for the love of God!
“We were offered such an oportunidad, señora.” The mayor has come up beside her to gaze upon what he hoped would be the bright future of his little village. In the morning light, Alma sees Don Jacobo is not so old, at most in his late thirties, just worn out with a life of hard work, a hundred lean pounds, more or less. He has donned a baseball cap with the logo of an American feed company, one of the many articles Richard picked up at recycling to take down in a duffel bag. “Señora, it grieves my heart to see this hen killed because we could not eat her golden eggs.”
He has got the story garbled, but no matter. The grief is real. So much hope gone to waste, the packed duffel bags, the pickup full of goodies. But maybe that hope was misplaced. A clinic testing an experimental AIDS vaccine laying the gold egg of a green center? Boys infected with a virus to save the world from smallpox? Every good threaded through with, at best, dubious goods. Hope and history rhyming, but only by violence or sheer accident.
“And now no hen, no eggs.”
Alma is not going to be able to get rid of Don Jacobo. In fact, it is a courtesy to her to keep her company. “El problema is these jóvenes, they can’t get jobs, but they can get sick, that is what they worry about. La señorita Starr explained to them they can’t get AIDS just because the clinic is here. That is not how it works. I am a bruto who never learned letters, but I believe her. And they believe her, too. She told them they are going to get jobs with the programa your husband is starting, but la señorita Starr leaves, the money she gives them to help their families until the work starts, they spend it all, and they start drinking, fooling with drogas, talking to other elements. Well, you can imagine, one thing leads to another.”
So much for the cable TV theory, Alma thinks. “Are they armed, do you know, Don Jacobo?”
“Desgraciadamente, there are some bad elements in the group. They are not from this village,” Mayor Jacobo is quick to add.
“But are they armed?” Why won’t people give her straight answers? Are they trying to protect her from a truth she is going to have to face anyway?
The mayor takes off his cap, as if in deference to the truth he is about to pronounce. “Desgraciadamente, I do not know but that these other elements are armed.”
Alma feels herself breaking out again in a cold sweat. This is not going to turn out as the journalist led her to hope. Last night, after she and Starr and Mariana said their good nights, she could hear Emerson and Jim and the embassy guys, talking in their room with Camacho. What were they plotting? She strained to hear, but she could not make out their words, just that serious murmuring of men at the wheel. She feels desperate. She has got to save Richard before these guys mount some stupid operation. “Don Jacobo, please,” she pleads. “Tell me in your estimation. Do you think they would hurt my husband?”
“Absolutamente, no.” Don Jacobo shakes his head with his whole body. “Not my boys. They are malcriado and hardheaded but they are not criminal types. But desgraciadamente, the elements, not from this village, are not to be trusted.”
Alma sighs. What a roller coaster, talking to this guy.
“La señorita Starr talked to them. Your husband talked to them. Those elements have been making trouble for everyone.”
Alma watches the sun reflecting off the roofs and solar panels of the Swan compound while the mayor talks on at her side. Soon, the others will begin stirring, car and van doors banging, and he will leave her alone to attend to them. For now, though, he needs to pour out his heart to someone who will listen, how the building of the clinic brought everyone jobs, how all the houses—he points and she turns to the skyline of the little village behind her—every one of those houses was going to get a solar panel, a good latrine, running water; his was the first. And then, when the patients came, the local women got jobs cooking and cleaning, and then the señorita Starr came and explained and helped everyone out with a regalía, and then Don Ricardo came, and the local men were starting to get jobs working for the green center.
Alma can see the main building, where the clinic is housed, flanked on either side by little adobe houses. The slopes behind look newly planted. This has been Richard’s world for the last month and a half. Alma feels a nostalgia that makes her afraid, as if she has come back years from now to see the place that cost him his life. She shivers. Isabel and Balmis and most of the little boys survived, she reminds herself. Isabel!
“That little house is where your husband and Bienvenido stay. All that land around is planted already with many, many hectares of coffee. It will bring in good money. That is what I tell the boys. But now ¿quién sabe?”
That’s right. This green pipe dream has gone down the tubes at least for now. But maybe Swan and HI can let the locals pick and sell the coffee? Maybe something can be salvaged?
“I want to write my husband a note,” Alma explains. She wants to tell Richard she is here. She loves him. Everything is going to be okay. Hold tight. Hold tight for what? The vision takes her breath away. “Are the boys going to take food in to them?”
Mayor Jacobo looks down at the empty inside of his cap as if the future were pictured there. “This I cannot confirm. There is a clinic kitchen, but the women last night said the food is running out.”
A phone has started ringing, such an odd sound in this isolated spot. On and on, it rings. It could be any number of cell phones, now getting signals, belonging to the visitors. Wives and daughters and mistresses and mothers calling up, worried about their men who did not come home last night. Finally somebody picks it up. But it’s as if this ringing phone were the wakeup signal. The village comes awake behind them. Car doors bang, voices call out, a rooster crows lustily, a donkey brays, a baby wails.
And as the world comes awake in all
its beautiful, baffling detail, Alma can’t help but think of other mornings with Richard. The sounds and smells wafting up from the kitchen, the silverware drawer opening, the coffee perking, Richard letting in the cats, the furnace kicking in. She needs to be with him. If anything is going to happen to Richard, she must not survive him.
Mayor Jacobo excuses himself, and as he heads back to his house, Alma walks toward where the young men recline on their sandbags. Duck down! one of them gestures desperately. Alma obliges, running forward, and as she thrusts herself beside them they turn to face the compound, suddenly remembering their mission, now that she has joined them.
“You must go back, señora,” one of the tougher, older-looking boys tells her.
“It’s okay. I have permission,” she lies, avoiding his eyes, because surely he’ll be able to tell. She remembers what Tera has told her about civil disobedience. Stay calm. Act like you know what you are doing. We have the right. The world is ours. We need to take it back. There are forty-some patients locked in those dormitories; Richard and the staff are in the clinic, guarded by dozens of local boys and their friends, the elements not from here. So many expendable lives. Alma is another American life, another reason not to bombard or storm the place and cause a tragedy. Hope and history might rhyme, especially if Alma doesn’t let her fear and indecision keep her from what might work out just this one time.
“I have permission,” Alma repeats. And suddenly, she is standing up, scrambling quickly over the mound of sandbags as several soldiers lunge, trying to grab her back. But she is too quick for them, too scared, too lucky-unlucky, and the pedestrian gate is so close by, unlocked, so that she has slipped inside and is heading up the cobbled path with her hands in the air before the soldiers begin yelling for her to halt.
Soon other voices are joining in, Emerson and Starr calling her back, Camacho shouting orders to hold fire! The commotion, of course, has not gone unnoticed on this side of the chain-link fence. Just ahead of Alma, two figures emerge onto the front porch; the one in front, the shield, is Richard! Standing behind him is a young man with a kerchief over half his face and what looks like a real-life gun he is holding up to Richard’s head.
“Get away!” Richard calls out. The guy holding him by the collar gives him a jerk to shut up.
“It’s okay,” Alma calls back. “I’m not armed!” she calls out to the man with the kerchief. It is the longest walk she has ever had to take, those twenty steps toward a man holding a gun to the head of the man she loves. And all that way, she feels as if another woman inside her is leading her forward, the woman she once saw out of the corner of her eye, whom she has identified as Isabel because sometimes a story can take over your life. If you are desperate enough to let it happen. Which Alma is. Which is why she tells Richard again, “I’m okay. This is where I want to be.” And to the man now screaming in a voice muffled by his kerchief “Stop!” she repeats, “I’m not armed.”
Behind her, she feels the sudden deafening silence of the troops and Starr and Emerson and Jim and the embassy folks and Camacho, watching her. Thinking she is crazy, which she probably is, stepping out like this from where they were all headed and might still be headed if she doesn’t succeed.
VI
MARCH–DECEMBER 1804
LATER, THE MANY PORTS of call, the welcome or unwelcome we received, the thousands we vaccinated, the bared arms, the ripe vesicles, the many officials proclaiming us saviors or setting up impediments to our smallpox salvation—all of it seemed to blur together into one great tapestry of the expedition.
One would think that I hung that whole tapestry in my memory. Curious indeed how the mind works! For what I remembered was a particular scene, a seemingly insignificant incident, a certain face such as an artist might draw.
During our crossing, on those long evenings aboard the Pita, Dr. Salvany often perused a book of prints he had purchased in Madrid by the artist Francisco de Goya. Los Caprichos, it was called. Once, when I asked if I might view it, Dr. Salvany’s face turned quite pink. They were not for the eyes of a lady, he claimed.
It was not until our departure from Puerto Rico, as we were hurriedly assembling our equipage that the book came into my hands. A servant had found it fallen behind the night table of Dr. Salvany’s chamber and turned it over to me.
I confess that before I returned it, I could not help but peek. I had imagined something far naughtier than I found. They were etchings of moments in our human lives, some dark, some light. Each one bore a caption that bespoke what the etching was about. A dozing figure was beset by horrid blackbirds and owls. The sleep of human reason produces monsters, read the note. Another showed a donkey mounted on a poor laborer, jabbing at him with a golden spur. I knew the saying that served as its caption: The poor carry the rich on their backs. Those who do thus, the artist seemed to suggest, were indeed asses. I suppose the book was naughty enough.
I was only able to view a few of the prints before I was summoned to some task or other. But even that quick glimpse left quite the impression on me. As the expedition unfolded, I would catch myself making a mental drawing of this or that moment, inscribing it with a message, storing it in my memory. Later, reviewing those moments, each place would come alive again in my mind’s eye, complete with its own caption: Caracas, Havana, Veracruz, Mexico City, Puebla de los Ángeles …
GOLFO TRISTE—EN ROUTE FROM PUERTO RICO TO VENEZUELA: Afloat on gray waters, a small ship wanders. In the background, veiled in mist, officials are assembling at a port.
But such foreknowledge is denied to those on board. We see faces distorted with anger, suspicion. The captain, his eyes dark pools of despair, holds a dead child in his arms, his mouth ripped open with a cry we cannot hear.
Days upon days, we were lost at sea. Yellow fever raged on board. Our director himself was stricken with fever and worry, for it seemed we would not find landfall by the time our last carrier’s vesicle reached its tenth day.
That morning when I heard the wailing of a man, I thought my own heart had found a voice. It was our captain, crying over the body of his cabin boy. For days afterward, he locked himself up in his cabin, refusing to let us bury the boy at sea, neglecting his duties. Lieutenant Pozo and the pilot did the best they could, but a ship without a captain is a body without a soul.
Puerto Rico had been a disaster. It had brought out the worst in our director, in all the men. They were at odds with each other. There was talk of returning to Spain; there was talk of the crew taking a knife to our throats, talk of the expedition arming themselves against this attempt.
And, of course, there was the murderous look in the steward’s eye each time he spotted one of our boys. He claimed they had tried to kill him with bow and arrow and should all be hung from the starboard foreyard, then thrown in the sea. I kept a close eye on my charges. No longer did we linger in the forward part of the ship, sitting in the galley with the crew. Besides, most of my boys were ill with the fever and the cook was no friend to a vomiter around his steaming pots of stew—as if his fare were not already beyond spoiling!
The aft part of the ship was no less peaceable.
Dr. Salvany no longer trusted our director. Dr. Grajales and Don Basilio Bolaños and Don Rafael Lozano fell in with him. The rest of the expedition members defended Don Francisco, who no longer trusted anyone. Only one person seemed to be agreeable to all members on that ship. I had turned into what I had hoped Don Francisco would be. Someone to remind us all of how grandly we could dream.
We were indeed lost at sea, which in an odd way seemed the correct state for our embattled expedition to be.
VENEZUELA—LAST NIGHT IN CARACAS: A much lighter scene. The great hall is filled with guests, ladies and gentlemen lined up for a quadrille. So many bright, happy faces. And yet at the edges of the party one lady has a face covered with—are they scars or letters? How dreadful that she should be so disfigured. We yearn for the artist to provide us with an explanation.
But wait, look c
losely at the other faces and they are all similarly marked. Here is the guest of honor with the letters of shame written across his features. A young man holds a book whose words are crawling up his arms toward his proud face. Ah, the carnival of human desires!
In the background, faces, hundreds of them. They have been saved by those who are now enjoying this grand celebration in their honor.
We became whole again in Caracas.
After being lost at sea, we finally sighted land just in time. The vesicle was ripe on our last boy. Don Francisco was distraught with the impending loss of the fluid and the debacle of his expedition. The last thing I wanted I forced myself to do.
We were lowered into the sea on the small boat, Don Ángel accompanying us—oh, paint wings on that dear, angelic man! Lieutenant Pozo guided two crew members to row toward an indistinct shape that might be a storm cloud, a pirate ship, the Leviathan, or the coast of Venezuela. My heart was in my throat as we moved through that thick fog.
When we landed, it seemed a miracle. The local comandante was waiting for us with the leading families of the town, who had brought with them twenty-eight carriers!
I looked at each fresh, young face and reminded myself: no, not carriers, but children, dear, worthy human beings.
From the port, we traveled inland, arriving in Caracas during Holy Week. The whole city turned out to celebrate us with fireworks and tributes. This was the welcome that Don Francisco had so sorely missed in Puerto Rico. Honorary regidor, concerts, masses, our director turned back into the noble man who had inspired me to be the woman I was struggling to become.
Saving the World Page 27
