Текст книги "Water from My Heart"

Автор книги: Charles Martin

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

The words swam around in my head. When they came to rest, so did the meaning. I turned to Leena. “What’d he just call me?”

Leena whispered, “I think you’ve made a friend.” A sly smile. “And more than one.”

“What do you mean?”

“Anna is quite taken with you.”

“That’s some…lady.”

“Let me tell you something about that lady. When her husband was sick last year, the medicine he needed was very expensive. Most people in his condition die. But Anna would work all day in the coffee plantation, then walk down the mountain at dusk to the peanut fields and work all night, by moonlight, digging up peanuts with her bare hands. She slept in the field for an hour or two before dawn; then she’d hide her peanut bag and walk back up the mountain to check on her husband and then make it to work on time. It’d take her three to four days to fill a hundred-pound bag with peanuts, and for that bag, they’d pay her ten dollars.”

“And her husband?”

“Healthy as a horse—thanks to her.”

When we’d finished, we packed up and moved toward the dwellings. The dwellings were about the size of a closet. Bunks on one side. They were made years ago from raw hardwood. Over the years, use had smoothed the wood, and oil in hands and bodies had turned it dark. People in the States would have paid thousands for the beauty of this wood. Those living in it would have paid thousands to be rid of it. The plantation filled a small shoulder off the southern end of Las Casitas. The owner’s house was a large plantation house equal in size to Colin’s house on the coast. Paulina walked me toward the middle of the building where a channel or walkway cut through the middle proving that just as many people lived in the middle as on the outside. The air was still and the heat oppressive. She waved her hand at the dirt, grime, shoeless kids, and snotty noses. “Don’t let your eyes fool you, these are proud people. They have nothing, but what they do have is kept. The dirt is swept in neat lines, they’ve sought out and placed smooth river stones at their front doors to wipe their feet and welcome guests, fresh bananas are hung above their beds, their clothes may be dirty but they’re folded neatly. The men wear belts, they remove their hats when they meet you, and the women wear scarves to cover their heads.”

I understood what she was telling me. I just couldn’t understand why. “Why’re you telling me this?”

“I am pointing out the difference between poverty and squalor.”

“How so?”

“You can be poor without living in filth.”

We walked into the row houses, which were more like a giant barn with dozens of stalls barely wide enough for a single horse. She explained, “These are for the younger workers with less seniority. Or”—she pushed on a door—“older ones who sell their homes on the outside when they are too old to work.”

Inside, a hammock stretched from wall to wall. In it sat what was once a man. Skin draped across bones. Barefoot. His shirt lay unbuttoned, pants were pulled up to his thighs, but his groin and bottom were exposed. His hands were large and had been muscled at one time. On the floor next to him sat a half-full bottle of water.

The door swung and light slowly entered the room. When the old man saw Paulina, he smiled and his eyelids closed and opened slowly. His lips were chalky white, and his tongue seemed swollen and stuck to the roof of his mouth. He made an attempt with his hands to pull his shirttail over his groin but was unsuccessful. Judging by the soaked hammock and the smell permeating the room, he’d been too tired to rise so he’d urinated on himself. She pulled off her pack, held his hand—letting her index finger rest on his pulse—and knelt on the ground next to him, whispering quietly and never letting her eyes leave his. Every few seconds, he would nod and his lips would move, but I couldn’t hear him. Isabella stood behind me outside the door, listening but not looking.

Keeping her eyes on the man, Leena pulled some baby wipes from her pack and began to gently bathe the man’s torso, arms, groin, and legs. Then, with delicate tenderness, she bathed the man’s bottom and penis.

When she finished, the old man patted Paulina’s hand and then placed his hand on her forehead as though he were giving her a blessing. She rose, kissed his forehead, his cheek, and then his hand.

When she walked out, a tear trickled down her face. She stopped at a basin to wash her hands, but collecting herself, she said nothing and offered no explanation. In the ten minutes she was with him, Leena’s smile never left her face, yet in that room I saw nothing to smile about. Finding him naked, she’d dressed him in honor and dignity. And in dressing him, she’d undressed me.

I’ve seen a lot of things in my life, many I’m not proud of, but until that day, I’d never seen the face of an angel. Maybe for the first time, I saw one in that room. Sadly, if the angel of mercy had visited him today, I had a feeling that the angel of death wasn’t far behind. I think he knew that, too.

And the tear trailing down her cheek told me that Leena knew that most of all. She caught the disconcerted look on my face. “You want to say something?”

“No, well yes. It’s just that no one seems overly affected that that man is lying there dying right in front of their eyes. As if they’re not surprised.”

“People here don’t feel entitled to perfect health.”

“Yeah, but shouldn’t they? I mean, isn’t it a worthwhile goal?”

“Sure. But at what cost?”

“Well, at any cost.”

“That’s where you and them differ.” She held up a finger. “I’m going to let you in on a little secret. When I first traveled to the States to study, I was struck by how everyone I encountered spent their days working feverishly to make enough money to buy a better tomorrow. Here, people are content—they buy what they need today and leave tomorrow to God. These people don’t have a death grip on their life here. They hold it loosely because they’re not in control of it in the first place, and—” She paused, weighing her words. “In their experience, it can be ripped from their hands no matter how tightly they squeeze it.”

Somewhere in there, I clued in to the fact that for people like me, there is an undoing that occurs here. A breaking. Like dropping a glass rod. It is the sound of the shattering of our assumptions when we learn that our pretending, our masquerading, is all vanity. As if we have any control over any of this. I, like most everyone I’ve known, spent most of my life furiously attempting to protect myself from the truth, from the undignified bottle beneath the hammock. Truth is, we can’t protect us. These people don’t suffer from the illusions that I have built up to insulate myself—namely that death won’t come for me on a hammock in Nicaragua when I don’t have the strength to stand so I pee in my pants. That somehow I deserve different. As if my money or social status could buy me, could guarantee me, a dignified death. These people know that they are born, they might grow up, might be given in marriage, might live long, might laugh, and might know love, but they all know that they will die. That what they see here is fleeting. I, on the other hand, don’t think much about it. I looked around me, at all the eyes staring down on that skeleton of a man, knowing they don’t have that luxury. Nor do they pretend to. The contradiction was striking. I have lived my life fighting against a tidal wave of forces that I am powerless to defend, like a man standing at the ocean’s edge, swatting at the waves. I can no more turn back the tide than I can light up the sun.

*  *  *

She knocked on a few more doors and poked her head into rooms where two women nursed babies. Leena smiled widely as the babies gorged on their mothers’ milk, and the tired women made no effort to cover their breasts in my presence. I stood back until Leena beckoned me forward. She then dug into my pack and left several large bags of rice and beans and several bottles of cooking oil. The mothers nodded and smiled and repetitively thanked her. One of the girls had the remains of a black eye, which she was careful to hide from me. For the next hour, we stopped, Leena talked, and we unloaded rice, beans, and oil. The only thing better than the feeling of less weight in my pack were the smiles that small portion of food produced in those who received it.

Woodsmoke wafted through the interior. Dogs watched from a distance as Isabella led us through the living quarters. Finally, we turned toward the kitchen, a large building centered around an enormous wood fire. Large pots of rice and beans and corn sat simmering on iron grates suspended over the fires. Large, sweaty women worked the pots and poked the fires with long sticks. In the corner, two teenage girls worked feverishly making tortillas. A second fire glowed beneath a sheet of steel. The girls would dip their hands into a bucket of what looked like cornmeal and water, pound out a flat cake-like thing, and then drop it onto the hot sheet. They’d let it sit sixty to ninety seconds on one side and then flip it.

Paulina hugged the women and the girls and spoke quietly with each, listening and nodding. When they offered food, she refused, but when the young girls pointed toward the tortillas, she looked at me and must have seen my mouth salivating. She nodded; the girl quickly picked one off the hot sheet using only her fingers and handed it to me. Paulina nodded. “It’s okay.”

One of the women dipped a large spoon into the boiling beans and offered. I held the tortilla under while she dribbled goodness on top. Then I folded it and sank my teeth into it. I guess my smile betrayed me because the women laughed loudly, and evidently the delight on my face and absolute approval of their cooking made me an instant friend. They offered more, but Paulina quickly shooed them and ushered me out, laughing.

We continued walking out of the living area into what looked like the working part of the plantation. Large warehouses, tractors, and various pieces of oiled and rusty heavy equipment lay scattered about. Above us, huge trees shaded our walk. Flowers bloomed like peacock wings in the branches, and as I stood mesmerized, I noticed the birds shooting like F-16s between the branches. I shaded my eyes. “What are they?”

Isabella answered me. “Parrots.”

Farther off to my right, maybe several hundred yards, I heard a strange sound that was loud and can only be described as a howl. “What was that?”

Paulina spoke as she walked. “Howler monkeys. There’s one directly above you.” I stopped and stared upward, where I was met by two eyes staring back at me. Paulina snapped her fingers and made some whistling, clicking noise with her mouth that I’d never heard. The monkey jumped as if shot out of a cannon. It danced from tree limb to tree limb until it landed on the ground, where it ran across and, to Paulina’s great delight, climbed her like a tree and perched on her shoulder.

I adjusted the pack on my shoulders and shook my head. “This place should sell tours.”

Behind me, the little boy who’d had the thorn in his foot appeared from around a tree. He was dragging his mother—a skinny young woman carrying an infant. He pointed at me and proclaimed loudly, “El doctor!” He tugged on his mother’s shirt. “El doctor!”

I waved and she eyed me from a distance.

Paulina nuzzled and spoke quietly to the animated monkey, who drifted from shoulder to shoulder to arm and then to the top of her head. He was constant motion.

With another click of her lips, she set him down and he disappeared into the trees, swinging from limb to limb as we walked.

“I guess you and he have done that before?”

“No.” A knowing smile with a single shake of her head. “Just met.”

We walked into what looked like a garage where they repaired the tractors and heavy equipment. A man working on a large tire, with an enormous wrench in his hand, smiled widely when he saw Leena. He limped around the tire, and she extended her hands in the same way Isabella had with me. He bowed slightly and then she hugged him. His eyes lit.

She spoke, he nodded, and after a second, he sat in a chair while she knelt and began rolling up his pant leg, exposing a nasty wound. She rinsed it with bottled water, then cleaned the wound. Finally, she gave him an injection above the wound, covered it in a greasy antibiotic ointment, and wrapped it in gauze. She finished by giving instructions, which included politely, and with a smile, pointing at him to do exactly what she said. He nodded and pulled a small bag from next to the chair and gave it to her. She rolled it up and stuffed it into my pack, then kissed his hand and walked me through the back of the warehouse.

Beyond us, a large concrete world—half the size of a football field—opened up to us. Huge sheets of black plastic had been spread across the concrete, and men with brooms and rakes were spreading coffee beans in single rows across the sheeting. Leena spoke. “The first harvest of beans is coming in. They’ll spread and sort across these sheets, where they will dry. Then”—she led me by the hand—“they are bought in here.” We walked into a separate building where a huge belt-fed machine shook large sifters filled with beans. The noise was deafening, and the air was filled with dust and pieces of hull. The earth vibrated with the movement of the machines. “Where the husk is broken, leaving only the bean.” She continued walking, leading me by the hand out the back where a row of a dozen or so people sat sorting beans into bags between their legs. “They are then sorted into grades of bean. The best are sorted and sold as single source, organic, and fair trade, although I find little that is fair about the trade that occurs here.” When she said this, her tone turned acerbic. She continued. “The lesser or imperfect beans are sold to larger companies for ground coffees throughout the Americas.”

Leena spoke to several of the workers sorting beans, who waved or smiled at her. We exited out the side and down a hill that took us through a chicken coop holding several thousand chickens.

The sun was falling as Leena led me to a pot of water sitting off to the side of a fire where the embers glowed red and white. She touched the water with her finger, then pulled a bar of soap from her pack, and we washed at the water. She made me scrub my arms nearly to the pits, my face and neck. Isabella, too. When finished, we shook dry, shouldered our packs, and began descending the hill through the coffee plants. With the smell of the plantation still wafting around us, Paulina stopped and listened. The sound of an engine. A diesel. Grew closer. Paulina pulled us behind a large tree, and we squatted as a newer white Toyota 4-wheel drive HiLux with roof racks and aggressive tread mud tires climbed up the mountain. Leena leaned around the tree to get a good look at the driver. She whispered, “That’s the foreman.” Her face grew tight, and she spat, “Can’t afford clean water for his workers, but he can drive a new $20,000 truck.” She paused, shaking her head. “He doesn’t allow us here. Says we’re bad for business. For morale.”

“You’re doing all this, and they don’t want you here?”

She shook her head. “Nope.” She listened again. “He fancies himself a cardplayer, so he plays a game every Tuesday night in León. Sleeps off his hangover until Wednesday about noon. Pays his whores. Returns here about dinnertime.” She weighed her head back and forth. “He’s early today. That means he won, and he’s back in time to show off.”

I spoke while watching the truck ramble over the rocks. “Did you say he likes to play cards?”

She looked irritated, and the veins in her arms had popped out like rose vines. “Yeah.”

“And you say that truck is new?”

She watched with disapproval as it rolled and bumped over the rocks and roots. “He wasn’t driving it last week. Why?”

“Just curious.”

I’d only seen pictures of Colin’s truck, but I doubted there were two just like that. And if the foreman was driving it, that meant Zaul had lost it in a card game, which made me wonder what else he’d lost. León was not a big town, and I’d be surprised if there was more than one high-stakes poker game on Tuesday night.

She stared up through the trees at the plantation, which was now out of sight. She spoke quietly. “The two young nursing mothers are his—” She spat in anger and shook her head. “And he makes no provision for them. He feeds them scraps from the table when they do what he wants, but they just gave birth two and three weeks ago so they can’t”—she held up her fingers like quotation marks—“do what he wants.”

Isabella tugged on my shirtsleeve and waved her index finger. Wiper again. “That means they don’t do any kissing. ’Cause kissing makes babies. Then when the babies are big enough, they pop out the zipper.” She poked me in the side. “I have a zipper ’cause I’m a girl. And momma has a zipper ’cause she’s a girl, but you don’t have a zipper ’cause you’re a boy.”

I nodded and looked at Leena. “Zipper?”

Leena shrugged. “You have a better explanation?”

“No. No, I do not.”

We continued walking. My pack was empty, for which I was grateful. As we walked, I heard a thud, followed by a second and a third. Finally, I saw the cause of the noise—something orange and yellow falling from the tree above us.

Leena picked one up. Cutting a slice, she handed it to Isabella, who shoved it in its entirety into her mouth. She smiled widely, pushing the juice out the sides of her mouth, which did not go unnoticed. Leena smiled, and the look spoke of healing of a deep wound. She offered one to me and I accepted. “I’ve never eaten a mango that I can recall.”

“Never?”

“Certainly not like this.”

She shoved a section in her mouth and spoke around it. “It’s the taste of Nicaragua.”

My teeth sank deeply and the juice exploded. I’d never tasted anything like it. Leena enjoyed my reaction. “Good, huh?”

I nodded but didn’t speak, trying to keep the juice in my mouth. Isabella retrieved four more, and while Leena peeled another, I asked her, “Tell me about the man in the hammock.”

She paused. “Roberto. He used to feed me mango when I was Isabella’s age.” She looked up. Eyes red. “He’s dying.”

“Can anything be done for him?”

She shook her head. “He has a disease in his kidneys. It is caused from pesticides, which are sprayed on the sugarcane. They aren’t legal in any civilized country, but here in Nicaragua they are used in plenty. Before they cut the cane, they burn it. Making it easier to harvest. Burning it does something to the pesticide, turning it into some other chemical or something that is even more harmful. The men working the cane breathe it, and it is filtered by their kidneys. There are scientists here from America studying it, but even they have no idea what’s going on. All they know is that what is sprayed on the cane is killing the men that work it. Roberto started working in the cane when he was five.”

“How long have you known him?”

“My whole life.”

“Does he have family?”

She shook her head. “They were either killed by Carlos or left for Honduras.”

Either the heat or the insanity of this place was starting to get to me. “So, he’s going to die alone in that dark, hot room, soaked in his own urine, and all he has to show for his life is half a bottle of water and one piece of candy?”

She stared at me. A long pause. Her head tilted as she considered me. A tear accompanied her whisper. “Yes.”

We walked down the mountain in the dark. Isabella got tired halfway down and reached for my hand. We walked a few hundred yards like that, and when she stumbled, I picked her up and set her on my shoulders, which seemed to wake her momentarily. When we reached the road beneath, Isabella raised her hands high in the air and stared up at the stars. “Look, Mom, I can touch them.”

I’d never seen so many stars.

We got to their home sometime after nine. Isabella ran inside, where I heard a man talking. Leena walked to the hand pump attached to the well and began filling a bucket. When full, she dropped a smaller bucket into it and slid the whole thing next to a black plastic curtain. “I’m going to heat up some dinner. You shower first.” She pointed to the building where I’d spent my recovery. “Should be some more clothes in there. Wear whatever fits.”

Leena broke some sticks in half and shoved them into the embers of the fire in the corner where she intended to heat dinner. The she disappeared into the kitchen, where again I heard a man’s voice. I stepped behind the curtain, stripped, found the soap, and took a bucket shower. Cold at first, it felt divine. Dumping water over my head, I took a look at myself. My arms and legs were filthy to where the line of my clothing had been. My ankles and feet were white. Relatively clean. Then the tips of my toes were dark and caked in mud and dust.

Outside, Leena poured water over a naked and sudsy Isabella who was squatting on the concrete sink.

In my room, I found a pair of cutoff jeans and gray T-shirt that fit. When I returned to the kitchen, Leena stuck her soapy head out of the plastic sheeting. “Dinner’s on the table.”

“Thank you.”

I walked into the kitchen and found Isabella laughing at the table with an older man, maybe sixtyish. He stood, shook my hand, and tapped his chest. “Pow-low.” He had, quite possibly, the strongest hands of any human being I’d ever met. Not to mention his forearms. He was a walking, talking Popeye.

Paulina shouted over the edge of the curtain. “Charlie, meet Pow-low. It’s spelled like Paulo but”—she laughed easily—“we say it a bit different around here.” She said matter-of-factly, “He helped me lift you into the back of the truck.”

I tapped myself. “Charlie.”

He smiled, exposing gums missing more teeth than he owned. He pointed at his truck, sitting in the backyard. “You vomit and manure my truck.”

“I’m sorry?” He pointed matter-of-factly to the bed of his truck, then to his mouth. “Vomit. You.” He shook his head and held his nose. More hand motions. “Truck.” He pointed to my shorts. “You…dirty…smell very much bad.”

I heard Paulina laughing from behind the curtain.

Paulo evidently didn’t speak very much English, but I understood what he was saying. I shrugged. “Yeah, about that. I’m sorry.”

He smiled kindly, as if it happened every day.

“No problema.” He acted as if he were emptying a bucket. “I water.”

Dinner consisted of rice, beans, a fried plantain, and some water. I was hungry enough to eat the table, the neighbor’s dog, and the chair I sat in, but when offered seconds, I declined. Leena watched me with quiet amusement. Paulo hovered, elbows on the table, and spoke quietly with Leena and Isabella. Leena translated his Spanish to my English as he spoke, not wanting me to feel excluded. He told her about his day working in the sugarcane fields, and she scolded him and told him he shouldn’t have worked there today. He waved a finger and said something that she didn’t translate.

Finally, she turned to me. “Thanks to you, we were able to see about four times as many folks. Thank you.” A genuine smile. “You make a good mule. The truck leaves tomorrow a little after noon. Paulo is going to work in the morning, and when he returns on the noon work bus, he’ll take you to León.”

Her tone of voice told me that something occurred before noon, which prohibited him from driving me. “Anything I could do to be useful?”

She spoke to Paulo, who weighed the question and then nodded. Leena returned to me. “You could work with Paulo. It would double his daily rate.” A shrug. “It’d help pay for gas.”

“Seems the least I can do.”

Paulo seemed to appreciate the gesture and poked me in the arm. “I wake. We work with me. It’s good. Very good. Work not hard.”

The night was quiet, and people had returned to their homes around us. The smell of smoke was constant. Somewhere a pig grunted and two dogs fought. In the distance, I could hear singing.

Paulina cleared the plates. “He’ll wake you in time to leave.” Isabella stood from the table, sleep heavy in her eyes, and hugged Paulo and then her mother. Finally, without giving it a second’s thought, she hugged me and then climbed into the bed. It was the only bed in the small space, so she must share it with her mother. She was asleep by the time Leena pulled the covers up over her shoulders. Leena returned and began washing the plates in the concrete sink when I stood next to her. “I’ll wash.”

She shook her head. “Nicaraguan men don’t do dishes.”

She was tired and hadn’t stopped moving since before I’d awakened. She had to be dead on her feet. I offered a second time. “I am not Nicaraguan.”

She nodded, dried her hands. Retrieving the bag from my pack that had been given to her by the man at the coffee-sorting house, she poured its contents onto a large cloth napkin and sorted through them.

She picked through the beans as one who’d done it before.

“Will you roast them?”

“If there’s time…this weekend.”

Paulo had gone to bed in the room next to theirs. I could hear him snoring quietly. When I finished the dishes, Leena chuckled. “I don’t know what you do for a living, but if it doesn’t work out, you make a pretty good el doctor in the volcanic mountains of Nicaragua.” More laughter. “You got skill.”

I looked at my hands in the growing moonlight. She followed with, “I set a jug of water next to your bed. You need to make yourself drink it. You’ll need it tomorrow morning.”

“Okay.”

“And fill it again before you leave.”

She was walking away when I asked her the question that had been on the tip of my tongue since I saw her kneel next to that man’s hammock. “Can I ask you something?”

She turned. Waited.

I glanced up at the coffee plantation atop the mountain. “How do you do this? Day in and day out.”

She paused, stared up at the mountain, and then answered the heart of my question. “I love them without trying to change them. I look at their suffering, their hopelessness, and while I’d like to wave a wand and fix it, I can’t, so I do what I can.”

“Which is?”

“Climb down in their misery and love them where they are.” She waved her hand across the landscape. “People would much rather die holding someone’s hand than live alone.”

“How do you not let it taint you?”

A shrug. “Never said it didn’t.”

She disappeared inside as I whispered, “Sure fooled me.”

I walked to my little plastic-wrapped shed and lay on my bed in the dark. The mosquitoes were buzzing my ears, so I turned on the fan, opting for the lion breathing in my face instead of the buzzing horde.

As the fan oscillated, I kept asking myself how I got there. The world had turned upside down and yet something about it felt completely right. The problem of Zaul seemed a long way away. Colin. Maria. The Bertram. My shack in Bimini. Shelly. Drugs.

As sleep pulled heavy on my lids, one image would not retreat. The sign that read, CINCO PADRES CAFÉ COMPAÑíA. As I tossed and turned, an image returned. When I worked for Marshall and he’d dismantled Cinco Padres, I had returned to my office in León to close up. My last afternoon, when I’d taken a motorbike up into the hills, I remembered stopping and watching families walk down—carrying their lives on their backs. That road was the same we’d walked up and back today.

I whispered to myself, “Those people were these people.”