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Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
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“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.
“Tomás.”
“Feeling better today, Cousin?”
“I'm well, but …” She examined her cousin's familiar swarthy face. She wanted to tell him about the man in the cane field, but something held her back. What was it he'd said … “Someone is lying”? He meant the informers, the
chivatos.
Now she feared to speak her mind even to her relatives.
“They say this is the end of the harvest—the last day of cutting.”
“I thought there were some fields left over by Alcorcón.”
“They moved in an army unit and cut those yesterday. No, this is the last field, the one you're working.”
“What are you doing today?”
“Work assignment. Cleaning out the hog pens.”
“So that's why you smell like a pig.”
She liked his quick grin. “I don't care. As long as they pay me, I'm happy. If that makes me a pig, I've been called worse. Any letters from Armando yet?”
“No.”
“He hasn't written once since they took him.”
“No,” she said, wiping sweat from her hair. “I worry, Tomás. He wasn't well when they came for him. The first time he nearly died, and now he's not a young man.”
“He'll return,” said Tomás fiercely in a low voice. “If the Batistianos couldn't kill him, the Fidelistas never will. Are you eating? There's no line now … . What are they giving us today,
chico
?” he called to a passing boy.
“Rice, beans, a shred of pork, coffee, Comrade Tomás.”
“Shall we go in?” Tomás said, offering his arm like a gentleman to a great lady. She smiled sarcastically and struggled up, grateful for his strong arm under hers.
“Thank you, Señor Guzman. Let us go in to dine.”
 
 
THE afternoon was like the morning, only hotter, as if the whole earth itself was baking and nearly done. A group of older workers grew in the shade of the trucks, those who'd fainted or cut themselves, or couldn't finish for whatever reason. Graciela worked on, though her hands had gone numb and her shoulders felt like lead. Now she no longer thought about the man in the cane or about her missing husband, but only about the next stalk to be grasped and when the water would come around again. She finished her quota but kept on without slackening. The men and women sitting glumly by the trucks would not be paid today, though they'd labored through the morning. They hadn't made the
meta.
But once you had, you didn't stop. You had to keep cutting, for the revolution.
When at last the whistle sounded, she staggered back, straightening with a great effort. Her back was iron, twisted with pain. Her clothes were soaked dark and her hands shook as she fitted the hose back on the pitted, dulled blade.
 
 
SHE sat outside that evening on the rawhide
taburete,
which she'd taken out in front of the hut to escape the closed-in air that lingered from the day. And truly it was pleasant now, with the night coming, the breeze no longer a breath from hell, laden instead with the green perfume of spring flowers. She sat exhausted, not speaking as the children ran past her barefoot, only staring across the cropped dry fields that surrounded the
batey.
Her hands clutched her stomach, feeling, or perhaps imagining, a fluttering within.
She sat hunched, mind a hollow bowl, watching the coming of darkness. It was almost undetectable, the way evening came in the tropics; presaged only by an almost-imperceptible shadowiness, then, in seconds, the sudden descent of night.
Just then, she noticed something white off across the bare cut fields, out on the road. It was eclipsed by some ragged trees, then emerged again, closer. It was a person. No, two, one taller, one shorter.
Something about the tall one seemed familiar. She frowned but couldn't make it out. The darkness was falling swiftly now, like a black machete blade, and she was getting nearsighted; she'd noticed that.
But it
did
look like him … .
The two left the road where it cut away across the fields and they crossed toward her along a bare path.
She slowly put her fist to her mouth. The next moment, the chair tilted and fell, and she was on her feet, stumbling as her tired muscles gave way, but recovering and running, running toward the man who approached over the barren field. She screamed hoarsely as she stumbled over the cutoff stalks on the littered, hard-baked ground. Thought surfaced in her mind, then vanished in the manic tumbling of joy.
It was him.
They'd let him go. But why didn't he wave? Why did he stand waiting; why didn't he run to meet her?
Then she saw the boy.
Miguelito, looking sad and frightened, supported him under one arm; he was leading him.
Before she understood it, she had reached them, thrown her arms around him, screaming and sobbing in joy. She felt his arms come up around her, hesitantly at first, as if they could not believe what they held, as if her sturdy body were delicate as blown glass. He was so thin beneath the old white shirt. She thought, I must feed him. They didn't feed well at the prison. Those who had been there did not like to talk about it, but they always mentioned that. There were yuca and beans in the patch back of the house, but they weren't ready yet … . She'd fry plantains for him. He was really here, home! Oh Lord, she thought, you have delivered him.
“Graciela,” Armando said then, in a strange voice. It was his, but thick, strained, saddened as she'd never heard it, even at Victoria's death. And when she looked up, she saw why the boy had been leading him, saw that his eyes were open, yet could not perceive her, or the open fields, or the curious children who came running; could perceive none of it; could see nothing at all of the world of light.
Johns Island, South Carolina
T
HE light leapt out at them long before they reached the grounds, wheeling and dipping and blazing with vibrating electric brilliance; and the music, too, loud ludicrous hurdy-gurdy amplified through buzzing speakers till it boomed out across the cars and pickup trucks and the rapt open faces of the children and the wary suspicious faces of the adults, closed and defensive, as if they feared and grudged themselves any part of wonder or joy. The circus had set up on a plot of empty land, an old pasture or cornfield somehow left unbuilt on while all around it suburbs had crept out. Now, as they neared, the boy tugged at the man's hand. “Let me go, Dad.”
“No, buddy, better hold on. There's a crowd; I want you to stay close to me.”
“The Ferris wheel! A Tilt-A-Whirl! Keen!” The boy tugged again, and the man smiled, looking down at the top of his head. “Dad, let
go
of my
hand. Please!”
“Okay, but stay in sight. We'll need tickets to get on those, anyway.”
Released, the youngster darted ahead, looking back only when he'd wedged himself into line for the first ride. He waved wildly to his father, who waved back. Touching his wallet lightly through his slacks, he looked around for a ticket booth.
He was standing in front of it, smelling the roasting peanuts and the caramel coating of the apples and the sulfur reek of gunpowder that drifted from the shooting gallery, when he saw them.
Suddenly, a dry feeling came in his throat, a faint falling away behind his chest as he stared out.
They stood on the open field beyond the last row of stalls. The glaring garish electric lights on the wheeling rides, the strings of incandescent bulbs that lighted keno and bingo and the games of
chance and skill made the evening out there even darker. As he watched, money clenched in his damp hand, he saw two of them merge, melt, and then slowly dissolve into the darkness, till he could no longer make them out at all.
“How many, Mac?”
“What?”
“How many tickets you want, Mac?”
“Oh. Let's start with five dollars' worth.”
Tearing his eyes from the dark, he said, “Thanks,” then turned back toward the music, toward his son, hands clenching and unclenching as he looked openmouthed up at the Rocket to Mars.
Later he watched as the boy rotated high above him, fists white on the safety bar as the make-believe rocket twisted and rolled. Just watching it made him feel sick. But he was glad they'd come. This would be their last time together for a while. When he returned, the boy would be older; he'd have missed part of his life, and he regretted this even as he knew that he couldn't stop it, and wouldn't if he could. He had to grow up. Nothing could change that. But tonight they were together at the circus, and they were going to have fun.
When the ride was over and the attendant clanged up the safety bar, the boy struggled out. “That was great!”
“You liked that?”
“Hell yes. Why don't you go on it, Dad?”
“You're not getting me in one of those things. Maybe the Ferris wheel, though.”
They went on a couple of the easier rides together and had withered greasy hot dogs. They pitched pennies and the boy won. At last the man glanced at his watch. “Ten o'clock,” he said.
“Aw, Dad, we just got here. Can't we stay longer?”
“School day tomorrow, big guy. C'mon, Mom'll be waiting up for us. You remember where we left the car?”
 
 
WHEN he dropped the boy off, his wife was at the door, smiling at them both, and he winked as he turned away, calling, “I'll be back in a little while, okay?”
“Where are you going?”
“We need some milk. I'll pick up a quart at the Piggly Wiggly. Anything else we need?”
“We're out of your cereal,” she said.
He stopped at the corner and got milk and cereal, then sat in the car with the engine running, there in the lot. His hands felt numb, gripping and releasing the padded plastic of the wheel.
You shouldn't do this, he told himself.
But he knew even as he thought this that he was going to. It had been too long and he would not be able to resist. He had tried not to want to; he had even, once, prayed not to want to. But it was something inside him that was different and unalterable—not something that he did, but something he was and would always be.
 
 
THE fairway was almost empty, dying back now toward night. Darkness trickled like black blood between the naked transparent bulbs. His loafers scuffed up dry dust that smelled of cotton candy and stale popcorn and old cowshit and oil from the engines that powered the wheels and rides and the sharp scared smell of his own body. The barkers and roustabouts and sharp-voiced stall keepers glanced incuriously past him as he strolled, sleeves rolled up in the lingering heat of the summer night. The grinning and crying masks leered down from the carousel; the painted horses nodded knowingly as they swept round in endless circles, the music jangling and bleating out into the night with forced desperate joy.
The shadows waited—out there, beyond where the last parents tugged the last whining kids toward the cars, past where the last teens threw baseballs at cascades of milk bottles.
He stood under the light and bought a Coke he didn't want. He drank it with a dry mouth, tossing the ice cubes back and crunching them as he looked blankly at the grinning faces of stuffed dinosaurs, rag clowns, cheap stuffed dolls. If they found out, he would lose everything. He'd seen it happen to others, men he knew and respected. Decades of work, sacrifice, achievement, none of that mattered. They'd been cast into the outer darkness, and there was no way back.
And his family—he
did
love them; he loved his wife, his son, his daughter. It was not their fault that love was, somehow, not enough. He could lose them, too. No, this was madness, idiocy. It wasn't too late to turn back. He tossed the empty cup toward a trash barrel and touched his slacks lightly. Wallet, car keys … he had only to get into his car, return to his wife, his home, his family.
Touching his lips lightly with the back of his hand, he walked slowly out from the circle of light. His chest was tight with mingled fear and yearning. Fear, because you never knew exactly what or whom you would encounter. He moistened his lips, eyes flicking around in the growing darkness around him. Avoid groups. Look for cover. Sometimes he thought it might be wise to carry a knife. But he never had, and up till now, he'd been lucky.
And yearning, because if just once in a long time you could take off the mask and breathe … then you could stand it. You could stand all the rest.
He walked slowly on, back rigid, as his shadow grew longer out in front of him and the field grew dark and the music faded to a whisper, a jangling discordant rumble—until he heard the whisper, so close and intimate, it seemed to come from within some secret chamber of his own divided heart.

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