The Passage

by David Poyer

  The buzz of the A-phone brought him back. “Bridge, Lieutenant Lenson,” he said into it.

  “Dan, this is the XO. I’ve been looking over this inventory, what you came up with versus what Sipple signed off for before his accident. Are you sure these figures are right?”

  “The chief warrant and I counted everything twice, sir.”

  “Well, I got some questions. Can you come down to my stateroom?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll be right down.”

  2

  Cooperative Cane Production Facility Number 176, Camagüey Province, Cuba

  THE land sprawled like a sleeping child under the blanket of night, a vast plain unbroken by hill or mountain or city—only the land, naked to the wind. Across its black expanse, no cars, no vehicles moved in the last hour before dawn. Only at a huddle of concrete and tin buildings, at an intersection of the roads that led through the great plain, were a few lights coming on.

  The woman woke drenched with sweat, a distant whistle still sounding in her ears. She lay unmoving on her pallet, looking up into the darkness as if listening to a voice only she could hear. Then she swung her bare feet out and set them gingerly on the floor.

  The bed was pushed against the wall of a one-room house of unpainted palm boards, uninsulated and with one shuttered glassless window on the south. A colored picture of the Virgin, the kind that had been for sale everywhere before the revolution, was pinned up beside it. The floor was bare, swept concrete. Faint rustlings and scratchings came from the peaked darkness. Thatch from the palma real made a tight, waterproof roof, but it hosted mice and scorpions. For this reason, she slipped her feet into a pair of rubber-soled sandals, then got up. Moving quietly about the room, she lighted a small charcoal fire, poured water from a jar in the corner, and put a pan of it on to heat.

  The woman was very thin. Her dark legs were scarred with a pale map of old cuts. She had wide shoulders and a short muscular neck. The arm she stretched up to screw in a dangling bulb was long and sinewy, the hand calloused. As harsh light stabbed into the corners of the hut, it cut the planes of her face from darkness. Her angular cheekbones and long eyes she owed to a Chinese grandfather. The rest of her features were a blend of African and European, mixed for centuries on an island without barriers between races. Her narrow lips were set, her expression sad, as if she’d been waiting for something too long and now despaired of ever seeing it.

  The water was warm now, heating quickly above the blue and yellow flames dancing on the charcoal, and she dipped a little out and set the rest back till it should boil. She washed her face carefully, then under her arms, her neck. Crossing the room to a row of nails, she took down a work shirt and cotton trousers. Then, easing a door open, she went outside, under the stars.

  When she came back, the water was hissing and bubbling. She measured out a little ground coffee into a sieve, poured the water carefully into it, and set it aside to steep. She flicked a metal box open and set the bread on the table, which was, aside from the pallet and an old rawhide-and-hardwood chair, the only furniture. Then she took out a mirror. In the quiet, broken only by the steady drip of the coffee and the chirp of an awakened cricket, she brushed her hair back and tied it in place with a strip of red ribbon.

  She sat at the table and ate the bread and drank the strong black coffee, stirred thick with two spoonfuls of coarse raw sugar. She didn’t speak or look about, just stared in front of her as she ate.

  When she was done, she washed the mug in the remains of the water and hung it on a nail. She put the other things back, the sugar, the remaining coffee, and scooped the crumbs off the table and tossed them into the fire. Sitting on the pallet again, she pulled on a heavy pair of black military boots with worn-down heels and tears in the sides sewn up with twine.

  Getting up again, she took down from the thatch a two-foot-long, slightly curved blade of spring steel. Its cutting edge was wavy, concave and then convex, nicked and scarred with long use. From a handmade wooden haft dangled a loop of green cord.

  She sat again at the table, poured water out on a small flat stone, and set to work sharpening the machete. Each stroke began with a grinding rasp and ended with a faint musical singing. From time to time, she tried the edge with her thumb. Finally, satisfied, she fitted a slit-open length of rubber hose over it, thrust it into her belt, and opened the door.

  The hot dark wind came out of the night and fanned her sweating face. It brought with it the smells of smoke and dust and drying urine, but above all of the soil—a crisp checkerboard of cracks at the end of the dry season, la seca. The sky was gray to the east, over the next house, the door of which opened, and two shadows stepped out, as she just had.

  “Buenos dias, Augustín, Xiomara.”

  “Graciela. You’re working today? Feeling better, then?”

  “Better, yes, thank you.”

  A woman’s voice, concerned: “Are you sure? If you don’t, we’ll let the comrade brigadier know—”

  “I’m well enough to work,” she said again, sharply now, and they said nothing more.

  As they spoke, more shadows emerged from other huts. They did not linger in the open area in front of the batey, the cluster of workers’ dwellings, but turned up onto an unpaved dusty road that led away between the still-dark fields. She moved with them, unspeaking. Bare feet and shoes and boots scuffed along as a faint light began to diffuse downward from the eastern stars, gradually bringing out the silvery surface of the road. Gradually bringing into view the nothingness that surrounded them, great expanses of flat earth stretching off till they met the sky. A month before, she remembered, the cane had hemmed in the road like two black walls. Now the fields were stripped bare, shorn, littered with the detritus of harvest; the cane leaves were like discarded corn husks, crackling-dry on the parched ground, rustling like a million insects as the predawn wind scuttled over them. She moved with the other shadows at a steady pace, not brisk, not slow, following the deep powdery dust as it wound left and then right and then came out in a wide plaza lighted by bare bulbs on high poles. Beneath their light, huge shapes grumbled and chattered in the saurian speech of diesels. Wordlessly, the workers queued at the tailgates, the men climbing up first, then hauling the girls and boys, old people and women up by their arms.

  “Listos. Vamos,” someone shouted outside, and, jolting and grunting, the trucks jerked into motion.

  COOPERATIVE Cane Production Facility Number 176, Alcorcón, covered seventy-five square miles of fertile flatland that had been divided among fifteen small cattle ranches before the second agrarian reform law. Number 176 produced almost a hundred thousand tons of raw sugar a year, although this year it was running behind schedule. Cane did not sweeten fully till it dried, and an unseasonally wet January had extended the harvest a month beyond its usual termination. The central had its own worker housing, offices, machine station, railroad station, warehouses, store, staff housing, garage, and barracks for the army units, school groups, and urban workers who rotated through on “voluntary” work assignments during the cutting season. At the height of the zafra, the harvest, a thousand human beings rode out to the fields each morning before dawn.

  One of them this dark morning, sitting silently on a wooden bench in the back of a swaying Soviet-made two-and-a-half-ton truck, was Graciela Gutiérrez.

  THE trucks stopped at the edge of one of the last still-standing fields. The tailboards slammed down and the macheteros spilled off. Not speaking, they ranged themselves out across the road, facing the cane like soldiers staring down an enemy. Drawing on a pair of worn gloves, lacing on leather shin protectors, Graciela looked down at it from the road; a vast, slowly tossing green sea half a mile across. Her expression was hard, but she did not feel as determined as she looked. She felt a heaviness in her stomach, a steady pressure. It was unpleasant, but she didn’t ask to be taken back to the batey. It was a heaviness; that was all.

  The jefe de brigada, the overseer, glanced at his watch, then shou
ted, “Time to go to work, compañeros.” And in a ragged wave the workers moved forward, stepping down off the road and into the cane.

  As she let herself down the slope, Graciela picked out the place she would begin. The cane, seven feet high and brownish green, came up from the dry soil in clumps of five or six stalks. Two feet away was another clump, then another. She took a deep breath and bent, folding herself awkwardly.

  Stooped, she seized a two-inch-thick stalk in her left hand and slashed it through half an inch from the soil with a quick stroke of the razor-sharp blade. Then, lifting it, she quickly trimmed the leaves off. She lopped off the leafy top, laid the cane aside, took a step forward, and reached for the next stem.

  Gradually, sweat broke under her clothing. Above her head even when she stood, the tops of the cane danced in the wind, but it was as if they absorbed the breeze. The air between them was dense and hot and filled with mosquitoes. They found her mouth and face. But the tender parts, the ankles and the back of the hands, she had covered. And she ignored the rest even as they settled and stung. Only occasionally did she pause long enough to blot the sweat from her eyes with the frayed cuff of her shirt.

  When she had eight or ten trimmed stalks laid aside, enough that it was heavy to carry, she began a pile. As she cut on, moving slowly deeper into the field, the initial stiffness ebbed away. The machete hissed as it sliced through the cane, and drops of pale sugar milk bubbled at the cut roots. Such a useful tool, she thought. You could saw through the tough stalk, like the volunteers from the city did at first. Or, if you had a sharp-enough blade, you could slice through with a sudden, nearly invisible wrist flick that clipped through the tough fiber like a razor blade through a stalk of celery.

  And gradually, her tight lips relaxed. She forgot what was past and what might come and swung the flat blade, dust-streaked now, again and again. She merged with the work and the dry heat, the smoke and dust that drifted in golden sparkling, itching clouds between the stalks; with the endless stoop-slash-trim-toss, the steady progress across the fields, hearing and sometimes glimpsing at the edge of one’s own gradually lengthening clearing the knotted kerchief or the plaited straw hat of a neighbor, the quick grin or averted eyes of another worker. Till all that existed in the world was the swaying, waiting cane, darker green at the base, then lighter, and finally a withered brown at the leaf tips. Each stalk shuddered as she grasped it, as if it sensed the moment had come when it would lose its grip on the earth and become raw material for the mills. She worked in silence, without joining in the shouts and encouragements of the other workers, or the songs. Although she listened, and sometimes her lips moved with the refrain.

  ¡Venceremos! Venceremos!

  ¡Guerrillero adelante, adelante!

  After an hour, a boy made his way through the stalks, carrying galvanized buckets carefully balanced, one to each hand. When he came to her, she paused and lifted her head to the bright blue sky, put her hands to her back, wiped her face, and only then bent to the dipper of cool water that she drank a few swallows of, a few swallows only. She smiled at the thin, shy youth with the gaptoothed smile and big dark eyes that searched the ground as she spoke.

  “Miguelito, this water is fresh? You didn’t let the men piss in it?”

  “No, Tia Graciela. How are you feeling?”

  “I’ll get through the day. Go on, along with you.” She gave him a playful tap with the back of the blade, then reached for the next stand of cane.

  When she saw the shadow stretching forward from behind her, she thought at first that it was the boy again. She was thirsty, and she said sharply, not pausing, “Miguelito, bring it up here. I don’t want to take one step backward today.”

  “Spoken, at least, like a daughter of the revolution,” said an unfamiliar voice. Her hand went tight on the stalk it had already grasped, then released it.

  He stood with the sun behind him, so she couldn’t see his face. She could see that he was a large man, though. And what they called a gallego—light-skinned. He wore boots but not a uniform. His clothes didn’t look ragged, though, as hers and all the other workers’ did.

  Suddenly, she shivered. A cold wind seemed to blow over her, like the icy breath from the heart of the approaching storm.

  “Are you speaking to me, compañero? I’m working now.”

  “I’ve been watching. You’re a good worker.”

  “Who are you? What do you want with me? I have a meta to meet.”

  “I have a question for you, mulata—a question about certain worms.”

  “What worms?”

  “The question is: ‘The guitars, why do they sing to me of your tears, O Cuba?’”

  She blinked sweat out of her eyes, staring into the sun and in front of it this blackness, this shadow, and suddenly she was so frightened, it was hard to breathe. He wasn’t in uniform, so he wasn’t from the army or the police. He carried a machete, but his boots were new and his clothes fit him and were not torn or patched, and he was muscular and well fed. So there was really only one thing he could be.

  “Graciela Gutiérrez?”

  “You’re speaking to me. But who are you?”

  “What do you say to my question?”

  “I don’t know anything about guitars. I don’t have a guitar.” He came a step nearer, and she caught his face as the shadow of the cane brushed it. “You’re not stupid. You have no education, but you’re shrewd. Then why do you act stupid, like a hija boba?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, guitars,” she said stubbornly, flicking her machete over the stub of a stalk. The flies started up at the motion, circled, settled again, feeding on the sweet ooze. Their buzzing seemed very loud. In the distance, men began a décima, a folk song.

  “You are Graciela Lopez Gutiérrez. Born on a sugar estate near Esmeralda. Your father was a tercedario—”

  “Yes. He was a sharecropper.”

  “You began living with Armando Guzman Diéguez, a son of a mill engineer, when you were fourteen. You have never been married. You have borne him three children, of whom one is still living. Diéguez has been convicted as an enemy of the revolution—”

  “Not so—”

  “He is an enemy of the people and of the revolution. In 1967, he was condemned by a tribunal and sentenced to five years in prison for setting fire to standing crops, an act of CIA-inspired sabotage. He pretended to reform and in good faith we released him and assigned him to productive labor at Central Number One seventy-six, with his family, just as he wanted. Then last year, he was caught stealing state property and sent again to prison for a further term of seven years.” The man waited, then added, “Is all this correct?”

  “It’s correct. But it’s not all.”

  “What do you mean, ‘it’s not all’?”

  “I mean that yes, he stole, but this is not a just act, to condemn a man for stealing a bag of corn for his family.”

  “You are also a worm, the woman of a worm.”

  “You know nothing about my husband. His brother was killed by the Batistianos. Beaten, his legs broken, driven over with a jeep—”

  “His brother would be disappointed in him.”

  “No, he would be proud. Armando fought against them, too. He took up a gun and fought.”

  “I find that hard to believe. All you worms are good for is talk.”

  “I have never spoken against the revolution.”

  “Someone is lying, then? All your neighbors are lying to us?”

  “A measure of sand for a measure of lime.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That if you pay people for lies, you will get lies for your pay.”

  The man said harshly, “A woman with a tongue like yours should keep it firmly in her mouth. What were your people before the revolution? Sharecroppers. Now you have a free house and food. Your daughter’s books, food, classes, everything paid for. Would she have gone to school before Fidel? Would she not be cutting cane like you or bearing bastards
for the pleasure of some fat latifundista ?”

  She said reluctantly, looking at the dusty ground, “No, compañero. She would not have gone to school; that is certain.”

  “Yet still you people continue to speak against us, carry out thefts and sabotage … . I warn you, our patience is at an end. You can tell that to your fellow counterrevolutionaries.”

  “I know no other—”

  “Be quiet. The revolution cannot be opposed. It moves from victory to victory, marching toward a future we only glimpse. Well, perhaps it will have one final gift for you.” He laughed, a muted snort of contempt. “For you and the rest of the blind worms.”

  She glanced up in sudden fear, but where he had stood was only the sun now, shining so brilliantly between the swaying tassels of the cane that she could not look into it.

  THE confrontation left her feeling ill and dizzy. So when she bent again, the water sprang into her mouth and she swayed to one side and vomited. She wiped bitter acid from her lips with her sleeve, staring at the ground with open, unseeing eyes.

  Then her gloved hand reached out for the next stalk of cane.

  She worked through the morning and when the sun was high had sheared eighty yards of field twelve feet wide and left eight huge square stacks of stalks behind her along the rows of what were now stubbled fields. Each stalk was sheared off close to the ground so that next year it would grow again.

  A distant whistle signaled the end of the morning. She carefully put the hose back on her blade, took off her gloves, and turned and trudged back to the road. Other figures came out of the fields with her, most in ragged cotton work dresses or trousers, a few in army fatigues. They gathered by the road, squatting and exchanging a few words, and presently the trucks came into sight.

  They rolled into the buildings at the crossroads and eased themselves down. No one could work now, at the peak of the day. Those who were too hungry to wait joined the line in front of the dining hall. The others found shade and huddled in it, waiting their turn to eat. Graciela looked at the line, then headed for the shade. When she had settled in it, a man joined her.