Stranger (15 page)

You've been in an earthquake?

Yes, twice. But they were short, and not powerful. If they aren't powerful they are interesting. The ground moves, the lamps sway, the pictures on the wall shift. A tornado arrives like a lion.

You know a lion?

No. But I've seen movies, and heard the noises they make. She said that those were events directed by God. And then there were those events directed by men. She said that the night previous, their encampment had been raided. Soldiers had come and torn down the tents and destroyed their belongings. Everyone had been arrested.

But you?

I was fetching water. And when I returned I saw the lights and the cars and the horses with men in helmets and I saw the clubs and all I heard were the noises from the cars overhead on the freeway. I ran. And later I went back and found a few of my things. There was hardly anything left.

Íso was quiet. She said that she was sorry. You must be sad.

Vitoria shrugged. I was lucky, she said.

And the others? Your friends?

She shrugged again.

What will you do?

Find some new place. There are other places to sleep.

There's the Y, Íso said.

Too much money.

And so Íso did what she knew she must, though she also understood that her decision was a selfish one. She needed Vitoria.

Chaz was at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and smoking his morning cigarette, when they arrived. Sutt on his lap. He saw Vitoria and he looked at Íso and before she could speak he said that if the new girl was going to stay, she'd have to sleep in Íso's room. And then he grinned and said, Unless she needs someone stronger.

They ate that night, the five of them, by the light of a candelabra that Rita had found while out foraging. Falsely gold-leafed, it sat in the centre of the table while five candles of various sizes and colours guttered and waved. They ate fried sausages and peppers and old feta and they ate doughnuts for dessert. They drank coffee and water and Vitoria and Chaz shared a beer. Chaz liked it that
Vitoria was an imbiber, as he called it, and he asked where she had learned to drink.

Is it necessary to learn? she asked.

Íso here doesn
't touch the stuff.

Is it okay? Íso? She was quite serious and would have handed back her beer if Íso had been offended.

Don't listen to him, Íso said. He likes attention.

And she saw that Vitoria was willing to give it. She was intrigued by Vitoria's comfort with Chaz, how effortlessly she spoke to him, how open she was. That night she lay beside Vitoria on their narrow bed and she asked if she had always found it easy talking to men.

Am I easy? Vitoria asked.

Not easy. But you're not afraid to speak, or to laugh, or to offend.

They were whispering, speaking their language. Íso was happy to have Vitoria's body beside her.

I learned young, Vitoria said. I was fourteen when my mother sold me to Daunte, the boss of the barrio where we lived. And she told Íso the story of her earlier life in the barrio flanking the garbage dump in Guatemala City. She said that her mother was a crier for garbage who had moved up to being a collector, and it was Vitoria's job to help her mother. They lived in a shanty that belonged to Daunte. Daunte was not a man in the real sense. He'd been castrated by his enemies at the age of twenty, but this had in fact obliged him to appear unscathed, and so he chose young girls from the barrio to visit him, to prove that he had a potent beak, and Vitoria had been one of those chosen.

He paid my mother, she said. A good amount. I didn't have to do anything except arrive at his house when he asked for me, dress up for him, watch soccer, eat pizza, kiss him on the mouth and stroke his feet. He liked to lie on the bed in his Adidas shorts and he'd speak to me as I rubbed his body with ointments and lotions. I returned to my mother in the morning. He had a guard named Julio who was much more dangerous, and it was Julio who sometimes visited my shanty and tried to get in and I always shouted at him that Daunte would kill us both, which was true, and so he sat outside my door and he wept. He was sentimental. Men can be very stupid. This is why it is easy to talk to them. They listen. Especially if you are young and if you praise them and call them handsome and kind and generous, which they might not be, but who will not believe lies dressed up as flattery?

She said that when she turned eighteen, Daunte found a younger girl, perhaps even two or three more, and so she was no longer wanted. Her mother had died two years earlier, and she was alone, and so she took the money she had saved, and she left and rode La Bestia up through Mexico and crossed the Rio Grande into America. I had a friend here, in this city, and so I came. Otherwise I would have gone to Los Angeles or San Francisco. My friend left last month.

Vitoria sighed. Yawned. Her story was just a story to her. The tale of her life. No better or worse than anyone else's tale. This was her nature. She asked about Íso, what was her story?

It's nothing, Íso said.

I'm sure it's something, Vitoria said, and she fell asleep.

Íso lay awake for a long time. Vitoria
's story had given her courage. She felt strong. She thought that tomorrow she would begin to eat more. She would gain weight. She would store up fat for the time when she needed it.

T
HE
couple was young. The woman was taller than her husband, even in bare feet, but she liked to wear high-heeled boots or shoes, as if it gave her great pleasure to look down on her husband. Íso always knew when the woman was home because she heard her heels on the floor and she smelled her, a citrus scent that she wore. The woman's name was Barbara, the man was called Chris. He worked in information and she was in finance. They had a driver who took them downtown every day and returned them to their house in the evening. Íso's job was to clean the bathrooms, of which there were four, and to vacuum, and to polish the kitchen from top to bottom, and to walk the dog, and to iron and fold laundry. Dry cleaning was taken care of by the driver, whose name was Oliver, and who sometimes drove Íso back downtown in the evening, if the husband and wife were late coming home and the buses had stopped running.

When they had interviewed her, she sat on a chair in their front room, and they sat on a white leather couch. Barbara had a notebook, and she kept referring to it, as if the notebook might tell her something important about Íso. Chris was more relaxed, he liked to joke, and he seemed impatient to get the interview over with. Barbara asked her if she had ever worked with foreigners
before. She told them that she had. In her village, where tourists came because of the beauty of the lake. She described the lake and she told them about the volcanoes and she said that one could ride on horseback to the cloud forest and from there look down on the lake. It was popular. She said that she was an intern, and that she had worked at the hospital in the town, and that she had worked with doctors from America who had come there to volunteer. She did not make mention of the clinic. She understood that Barbara and Chris might speak to their neighbours, who in turn might speak to theirs, and in that manner the doctor and his wife might hear that there was a Guatemalan girl in Zone 7 who had worked at a fertility clinic. This was her reasoning.

Her English was good, of course, and this surprised Barbara, and it made Chris flirtatious.

He asked if she had a boyfriend.

She said that she didn't.

Barbara looked at Chris but she didn't say anything. She just looked.

Chris said that he'd love to visit the lake where she lived.

Do you have papers? Barbara asked.

She handed them her health certificate, which she had picked up the day before. She was clean.

Permit papers? Barbara asked.

Íso shook her head. No.

We might be able to arrange something, Barbara said. In any case, it's impossible to find workers. Everyone is struggling.

Íso agreed that everyone was struggling.

If you're asked by the authorities where you work, Barbara said, you can't say.

Of course.

This job isn't a job.

Yes.

It doesn't exist.

Yes.

Chris laughed. What can happen? he said. They arrest us.

No, Barbara said. They arrest Íso. And we lose her. And she is deported. She turned back to Íso and said that she would be given a test run. For a week. And then they would re-evaluate. She would have a key to the house. And the security code. She would have a pass to enter Zone 7. She was not to give that pass to anyone else. Barbara told her how much she would be paid, and when. Íso did not let on that this was a large amount, much more than she'd earned at the clinic.

She worked in the afternoons, starting at one. After the first week, Barbara told her that she was good. She could stay on. The house was silent, and if she had been inclined towards loneliness, she would have felt terribly isolated. As it was, she was happy to be alone. The house had security cameras, inside and out. Of course, there were cameras everywhere in the city as well—on the buses, on street corners, in restaurants and malls—but she was surprised to see cameras in the house, where Chris and Barbara lived private lives. Only the bathrooms were free from cameras. She liked to spend time in Barbara's bathroom. It reminded her of the tiled and scented massage rooms at the clinic. The low hum, the
cleanliness, the soft white towels, the privacy. She went through Barbara's toiletries. Makeup, lipstick, eyeliner, pills, vitamins, face wash, tweezers, four different sizes of nail clippers, condoms, bars of soap, facial scrub pads, deodorant, perfume, shaver, cream, hand lotion. She sometimes took a little lotion for her hands when she'd finished cleaning. It was rich and creamy and thick. It had no scent.

She didn't have to cook. Chris did that. Though she was required to help at dinner parties, alongside the caterers. During these dinner parties she usually stayed in the kitchen and helped the chef, or she cleaned up the bathrooms if someone had left a mess, which seemed to happen quite often. One time she came upon a couple in the shower. She heard voices, caught a glimpse of the couple, stepped back, and went downstairs to the kitchen. This was the same dinner party where Barbara had hired five young women to walk around topless and serve hors d'oeuvres and canapés. Íso was in the kitchen, and when the girls returned to fill up the platters, they talked amongst themselves, and a few of them, later in the evening, stepped out into the garden to have a cigarette. Smoking bare-breasted. Íso did not know where to look when the girls spoke to her, asking for something, and so she looked at their feet, but the girls didn't seem to notice Íso, and so she stopped looking at them altogether. She simply responded to their requests by pointing or gesturing. The one time she'd gone out into the main room, to help with the lighting of candles, the guests had appeared not to notice the young women.

Oliver drove her back to the city in the limousine late that night. He rarely spoke, though the one time she heard him talking
to Barbara she knew instantly which country he came from. She was hungry and tired and her hands were shaking and she wanted to talk to someone, even if there was no response, and so she said to Oliver that the girls were very pretty.

He grunted.

You're from Russia, she said.

If he was surprised he didn't show it. He shrugged and asked how she knew.

I recognize the voice.

The accent, he said.

Yes. The accent.

He said that a girl was pretty for only a moment. He said that being beautiful was like a fog—it made everyone blind. You understand? The boy, the girl, the other boy, the other girl. And then you grow up and the fog is gone and you find out the truth.

Íso was surprised by this long speech. She said that the girls
were smoking in the garden. Without their shirts.

Oliver grunted, and then he said, You'll get used to it.

Do you have family? she asked. This was forward of her.

He was quiet. Then he said he had a little boy who was still in Russia. And you? he asked.

No. Nothing, she said.

O
NE
night, late, there was a large fire downtown. Someone said it was a mall that had been broken into and looted, and she watched the fire from the balcony, along with Chaz and Rita and Sutt and
Vitoria. Neighbours gathered in the street below, and folks settled on chairs to watch the smoke pluming. It was like a carnival. Chaz said that the smell of tear gas meant there was a revolution happening. He grinned. The following day police on horseback rolled through the neighbourhood, gathering up vagrants. They clubbed those they caught, and chased down the runners, and threw the captured into black vans. There were shouts and sighs and cries for mercy, but none of those watching, of which Íso was one, intervened. People were just happy to be above the fray.

She learned that those who had nothing to lose are the most dangerous. She learned that the young children who ran in packs didn't have fathers, and sometimes they didn't have mothers, and she thought that even where she came from, a family might be poor, but it was still a family. She learned that Sutt's father was in prison. She learned that Rita was adept at finding food in the dumpsters behind the supermarkets, and when she heard this she thought of her mother, who had arrived in this country years earlier and foraged for food in this manner. She learned that the “best before” date meant little, except for milk and cream. Yogurt and cheese could be eaten weeks after that date—you simply had to remove the mould. And so she learned to eat yogurt and cheese, even though these things made her mouth curl. She learned that Vitoria was fond of Chaz and vice versa. Sometimes at night Vitoria was absent and
Íso
knew that she had gone to visit Chaz in his room. This did not bother her, though she missed the comfort of Vitoria's body and she missed her voice. She had not yet told Vitoria about her baby, and she realized that she wouldn't tell her.
It was too dangerous. She learned not to think too much about what might happen, and she learned not to dwell too much on the existence of her child out there. She learned that her employers, Barbara and Chris, were fearful, not so much of the day to day, but of the possibility that what they had might be taken from them—their advantage, their safety—and this being so, they celebrated their fragile security by living extravagantly, by throwing large parties, and by spending large amounts of money on objects they would never use. She learned to be silent, and never to ask questions, and to do whatever was bidden. This was not difficult. She had learned the art of igual long ago, at the clinic, with the women who had come to take the waters at Ixchel.