Without Borders

by Amanda Heger

  “Oh.”

  “But if there is a riot, I will be outside with Phillip. Giving my own educación sexual.”

  Annie threw a condom at her, but Marisol ducked and walked through the red door.

  Three deep breaths, one cold panic, and two pep talks later, Annie finished organizing her display of antique birth control methods. It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be more than fine. She dragged ten pint-sized chairs into a semi-circle in the front of the blackboard. On one side of the board she drew the female reproductive system. On the other, the male.

  Shit.

  She erased it and redrew. This time it was worse—a giant erection and balls floating on the expanse of the chalkboard. She erased it with the side of her hand and wiped the chalk dust on her shorts. She drew it a third time, and a snicker grabbed her attention from the back of the room.

  “It needs more veins.” Felipe grinned.

  She sighed. “I give up.”

  “Ready?” He stepped to the front of the room.

  She shrugged. Marisol’s words echoed through her head. First time. Gringa. Riots.

  He rested his hands on her shoulders, then gave them one quick squeeze. His stethoscope hung around his neck, the flat end ducking into the pocket of his scrub shirt. “You will do fine,” he said. “And I will be there to translate if you need help.”

  Annie glanced over at the giant plantain. “Okay.”

  “I will be right back.” The door swung closed behind him, and she wiped her forehead on the hem of her shirt, trying to stay focused. A second later he returned, a line of people following. Bearded men sat in the child-sized seats with their knees inching toward their ears, and women bounced babies on their laps. Two teenage boys stood in the back, pointing and whispering to one another between glances at Annie and her table-o-birth-control.

  Annie flushed hot, and she couldn’t remember if she had put on deodorant that morning. She suspected not, given the sweat stains forming on her gray shirt. Felipe stood and introduced her to the crowd, but his words were muffled by the thudding of her heart in her ears. She plastered on a stiff smile.

  “Hola.” She stepped forward and waved.

  The people muttered a greeting.

  “Hablemos de sexo.” She raised her eyebrows, praying for a laugh or at least a nervous giggle from the audience. But her students stared at her, twelve silent, blank faces. Annie’s toes went numb, and her dry, sticky throat made it hard to swallow.

  “Read the paper,” Felipe mouthed from his spot next to the teenage boys.

  She picked up the notepad from the desk. Her hands quaked, leaving smudges of sweat along the edge of the yellow paper. With a shaky breath, she rammed through the first half of the lecture, reading too fast and barely stopping for air. Her Spanish tumbled out, harsh and angular, but the more she thought about smoothing it, the rougher it became.

  A woman raised her hand wildly in the air, jolting out of her seat with the movement. Her purple dress shifted with each flail, and for a minute Annie feared the woman was about to give them all a firsthand view of the female reproductive system.

  “She asks you to talk louder,” Felipe said.

  “Oh.” Annie’s voice sounded too loud to her own ear, but she pulled up from her diaphragm and increased her volume.

  The expressions in the crowd never changed, twenty-four wide eyes blinking back at her. Maybe I’m still not loud enough. She raised her voice another decibel. The audience’s reaction failed to improve. As she strained against her ugly Spanish, she resorted to simply yelling.

  “EL SEMEN ENTRA EN LA VAGINA.” The words tore at her throat and the effort left her short of breath. But Annie kept going, tumbling toward the end of the lecture.

  A man in a green t-shirt put his hands to his ears and screamed at her. Spit flew from his mouth, clinging to his syllables while Annie fell silent.

  “Okay. It is okay.” Felipe moved toward the man, speaking to him in hushed tones, slipping Spanish words in between the man’s diatribe.

  “What’s going on?” Annie leaned against the desk, her knees threatening to give out.

  Felipe waved her off, still talking to the man. The others in the room stared at Annie, the fervor of their collective gaze searing holes into her already shredded confidence.

  “You can continue.” Felipe gave her a quick nod as the man calmed.

  Annie wanted to slip out of the school and hide in the boat until it was time to leave this village. Instead, she fumbled through the rest of the lecture. Her tongue still tripped over much of the terminology, but she kept her voice steady and slow, speaking louder than she wanted but not at sonic boom levels. She paused every few lines to catch her breath, tearing her eyes from the page to see if anyone walked out.

  They stared at her, expressionless, but stayed planted in their seats. By the time she pulled out a condom and Marisol’s monster plantain, Annie’s pulse had slowed from just-ran-a-marathon pace to somewhere around out-for-a-light-jog.

  “¡Dios mío!” The woman in the purple dress threw her hands in front of her face. The plantain slid from Annie’s fingers, and she fumbled, catching it before it smacked the dirt floor.

  The teenagers in the back snickered. Annie pretended not to notice, but her ears flamed. And it was impossible to ignore the boys once the room exploded into laughter. She tried to keep her chin up and her shoulders back, but they sagged. Get through this.

  “What are you doing with that? Is it a real plantain?” Felipe asked. His face contorted as he tried to keep it hidden, but Annie saw the amusement flickering on his lips.

  A bruise bloomed on the end of the fruit, right where she’d been clutching it between her nervous fingers—which barely wrapped around the width of it. “I asked Marisol to find one for me.” She shook her head and a smile crossed her face, even with the horrible shame gnawing at her insides.

  Felipe looked at the ground then at Annie, his shoulders shaking with pent-up laughter.

  The woman in the purple dress shot from her chair and pried the plantain from Annie’s hands, giggling and dropping her arms low, as if the fruit weighed fifty pounds.

  “No, no. I need that,” Annie said, but even she couldn’t help but laugh at the woman’s expression. “For the, uh, condom demonstration.”

  Felipe said something to the plantain thief, and she waved her hands in reply, nearly smacking Annie in the forehead with the penis substitute. The entire class erupted into laughter.

  Before she could ask what was happening, one of the leering boys in the back sauntered to the front and plucked the plantain from the woman.

  Annie turned to the kid, holding out one hand. “Gracias. I—” Her sentence was lost as the boy held the plantain to his crotch, rubbing against Annie and stroking it as if it were his own giant, yellow genitalia. “What? No. Come on.” She grabbed the fruit from his hands. “Knock. It. Off.”

  The kid’s smirk stayed plastered on his face, but he let go of the plantain, holding his palms up in surrender.

  Felipe inserted himself between them. “You are okay?” He grabbed the collar of the boy’s shirt, and the faded green fabric bunched around the kid’s neck.

  Annie nodded. “Let him go.”

  Felipe’s face puckered. “I think I will take him outside.”

  Behind him the other students shuffled in their seats, muttering and whispering to one another, all eyes trained on the trio at the front of the room. I’m losing them.

  “No. He stays. I need him. And I need you to translate.” She shoved the half-burst plantain into the boy’s fingers and tugged him to the center of the room. The voices dimmed as she cleared her throat. “We have a volunteer for our demonstration.” She held up an unopened condom.

  Felipe stared at her.

  “Translate. Please.”

  He shook his head, and a small smile played at the corners of his lips. “Tenemos un voluntario.”

  The room buzzed with nervous laughter, and Annie’s plantain mo
lester shook his head furiously. “Sí,” she said. “Oh, so much sí.” She kept her gaze steady and locked on his, hoping she looked sterner and scarier than she felt.

  “First, you have to open the condom. Look for the little notch along the top.” She held up the foil square and pointed to the notch as Felipe translated. “Now our voluntario will show us how much he loves this banana.”

  • • •

  The last person filtered out of the classroom, and Felipe wrapped his arms around Annie’s waist. She kept packing, her spine stiff and straight.

  “What is the matter?” he asked.

  Annie sighed, and Felipe felt it as much as heard it. “I’m sorry the class was so horrible. I should have practiced more. I was too distracted before, with everything…”

  He took the fluffy uterus from her hands and spun her around. “Annie, I was worried no one would come. But the room was full. Then I worried they would run us out of the village. Talking about sex here is not like the United States.” He held up his hands. “But we are still here. No pitchforks. You did a good job.”

  And she had. Her Spanish was sometimes hard to understand, and at one point her voice had grown so high and so loud he considered the logistics of giving all the students a hearing exam after the lecture. But Annie handled that arrogant teenager far better than Felipe would have.

  When the kid stole that giant plantain, Felipe’s instincts had braced him for Annie’s temper tantrum. Something about how teenagers in America would never do such a thing. Instead, she had turned everything he thought he knew on its head. Again.

  “Are you sure? You don’t have to say that just because I let you cop a feel now and then.” Her smile was small, but amusement flickered through her eyes.

  “What is this policing a feel?” He lowered his forehead and kissed her top lip.

  “No. Copping. Like this.” She smacked him hard on the butt.

  “I see.” He smiled at her, counting the flecks of gold in her wide, brown eyes. “Actually, I do not see. I think you may need to explain this further. On our way to rounds.” He slipped his hand into Annie’s and tugged her toward the door.

  She kept her feet planted. “You really think the class was okay? Because it felt like a total disaster to me.”

  “Sí. Next time we come to this village, they will be more open. They will participate more. And the time after that, the room will be so full we will have to move the class outside. When that happens, we will teach someone from the village to lead it. Probably Bianca. That is the woman in the purple clothes, she sat here in the front?” He waited for Annie to nod in recognition. “And then she will become the person everyone in this village goes to for questions about sexual education.” If her questions today were any indication, being the sexual educator for the village would be the fulfillment of Bianca’s every dream.

  “Okay.” Annie took a deep breath. “If you’re sure.”

  “I am sure. It takes time.”

  Something cool and wet smacked the back of Felipe’s neck as they hiked through the village, but he was so wrapped up in Annie—her wide smile, the curve of her cheekbone, the way her breath always caught under his touch—he didn’t realize what was happening. Not until the rain drops dumped from the sky all at once, soaking him to the core.

  The ground beneath them turned to mud, and they ran toward the cover of trees.

  “You will like this woman. They say she has an abscess. But I hope not. She is one of my favorite patients.” Felipe handed Annie his poncho, struggling to be heard over the drumbeat of the rain.

  To the left, the woman’s house sat slanted against the trees. But the rain came down so hard and fast in front of them that it was nothing but a blur of brown against a sea of green.

  “There.” He pointed to the house. “Ready?”

  Her response was to barrel into the rain, head down as mud kicked up behind her.

  Felipe ran behind, his fist raised to pound on the door the second they arrived.

  No one came.

  He thudded again, the edge of his balled fist beating against the wet wood. Every bit of him was drenched, and water dripped into his eyes. “¿Buenas?”

  He cracked the door and poked his dripping head inside. The old woman sat on a bed in the corner. She seemed to be made entirely of loose skin propped up by a few bones. Far frailer than the last time Felipe had been up to see her. She nodded him in, and he ducked through the doorway. Rain dripped through the ceiling, creating a scattered maze of mud puddles. The scent of roasted corn and bonfire mixed with the sharp smell of rain.

  Behind him, Annie peeled off the poncho, nearly as soaked through as Felipe. “Hola,” she whispered.

  The woman’s expression stayed slack and still. He squatted on the floor in front of her and put on an easy smile. “¿Cómo está?”

  She chewed on her thin, pale lips and opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Her shoulders lifted in a shrug, and Felipe rubbed the back of his neck. “Doña Godoy is one-hundred and three years old.” His gaze flicked over her frail arms for signs of the abscess.

  “Seriously?” Annie took a step forward. The disheveled knot on top of her head bobbed with the movement. “¿Tiene ciento tres años?”

  Doña Godoy opened her mouth again and held her lips there, wheezing in and out between them. A few seconds later a faint “sí” escaped.

  As she spoke, he found the lime-sized lump near her shoulder. Angry red streaks traveled from the abscess to her elbow and toward her neck. With a gentle finger, he pressed it. Her skin was hot and feverish, at least a few degrees hotter than the scorching midday air. She didn’t move or acknowledge him, her eyes still trained on Annie. He pushed harder. This time the woman turned to look at him, her left eye hazy with cataracts.

  “¿Duele?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “¿Qué pasó?”

  Her answer was a mix of broken thoughts and cracked phrases that made sense less than half the time. “I am not certain,” he translated, “but I think this started as a bug bite. It got infected, and someone from the village tried to treat her with camphor.”

  “Camphor? Like the stuff that’s in lip balm?”

  “It is like a, how do you say…” He squinted, searching for the right English phrase. “Like a snake salesman. You got a bug bite? Camphor. You have a sunburn? Camphor. You have a headache? Camphor.”

  Her face went as blank as Doña Godoy’s before it lit up again. “Snake oil salesman?”

  He nodded. “Snake oil. What is this?”

  “No clue.” Annie shrugged, staring at the lump on the woman’s arm.

  “It did not work. Now she has this abscess. It needs to be drained, and she needs antibiotics.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  He handed her a stack of gauze packs. “Hold these. I am going to numb it.” He prepped a syringe as he explained the procedure to their patient in Spanish. “But when I open it, I will need the gauze right away.”

  “Open it?”

  “The abscess.”

  The previously inert woman jerked her arm away from him, scooting across the bed and waving her arms. “No, no.” Her eyes shined with tears.

  He put down the syringe and showed her his palms. “Todo bien, Doña.”

  With newfound agility, she shoved her age-spotted hands under the jumble of pillows and sheets, her entire body shaking with the effort.

  “We’ll get her calmed down. Like we did Leonardo.” Annie squatted in front of the woman. “Todo bien.”

  “¡No!” Their patient whipped around, waving something in the air above her shock of white hair.

  A steak knife. Nothing like Leonardo.

  Its wooden handle was grayed with age, and years of use had dulled the serrated edge. But the old woman brandished it at them as if it were a freshly sharpened machete.

  “Annie, back up.”

  But she was already scrambling away from the woman, backing herself into the corner of the room.
“She has a knife? She’s a million years old.”

  “That is why she has a knife,” he whispered. “Stay here.”

  He crept forward, still keeping his hands near his face. At the other end of the bed, his scalpel and a syringe full of Lidocaine sat out in the open, and he put himself between the woman and his supplies. “Look, I have nothing,” he said in firm but quiet Spanish. “Nada.”

  She lifted the knife an inch higher.

  “You remember me, yes? I was here three months ago. You gave me two mangoes when I left. Look.” He inched toward his bag, and pulled out the mangoes he’d packed that morning. “And I brought these for you.” He set them on the bed next to her, their red and yellow skin stark against the pale blue sheets.

  Her eyes darted between the fruit and his face, and millimeter by millimeter she lowered the knife onto her lap.

  “Give me your knife, and I will peel one for you.”

  “Go away.”

  Annie shuffled toward them. “Hey, what if I—”

  Doña Godoy lurched forward, jabbing the knife in Annie’s direction. “¡No! ¡No!”

  “Get back.” The words came out sharp and jagged, harsher than Felipe intended. “Please, Annie. Get back.”

  She took one step backwards, and the old woman lowered her knife.

  “Your arm is infected. I want to help you.” He moved the mangoes. “Can I sit?”

  She stared without a word, and he sat beside her, careful to move at sloth speed. The lumpy mattress shifted, and the fruit rolled to his side. Felipe held one to his nose, breathing in the cloying scent.

  He held out his other hand. “Por favor?”

  She handed him the knife, and as she did, tears rolled down the crinkles in her face.

  “Gracias.” Felipe peeled the mango, its sticky skin falling in a pile in his wet lap. “Here.” He offered the woman a slice of the fruit, and she took it between trembling fingers.

  “Do not cut me.” Juice dripped down her arm. “I am tired. I do not want this.”

  Felipe froze, and the mango slipped between his fingers and tumbled onto the pile of peelings. “But if you do not let me help you, you will get very sick.” He wiped his hands on his shirt. And I will not be here to help you. “You will die.” The words stuck to the roof of his mouth, but he shoved them out before he swallowed them.