Back in the clinic, Alma finds that the women are camping out by their dead. She gets two of the younger ones to help her put Richard on the floor where she struggles to take off his pinkish windbreaker. You don’t have to be a good sport anymore, she tells him in one of the many conversations she will have with him in her head from now on. The inner lining is stained with his blood. It’s already dry. Alma closes her eyes to keep her tears to herself. This will be her first night without him, then a second, a third … The beginning of so many good-byes.
In a while the guardia come and evacuate the place.
That night in Richard’s bunk bed that still smells of him, Alma will not be able to sleep, not after two Ambiens, not after roaming the little house and finding Emerson asleep on a mat in the front room. She will enter the little bathroom and burst into tears at the sight of the glowing toilet seat. She will bring the lid down and sit in the dark, her leg hurting, her head aching, and wonder how she can stand to go on. And because she hasn’t a clue, she will cast about for an answer that is not an answer. How could Isabel bear the disappointment of seeing all the hard work of the expedition unraveling as revolutions overran the Americas and destroyed the vaccination juntas and the vaccine was again lost? How could she live with the burden of knowing that the stories of hope she had told the boys were just that, stories that were just stories?
“Alma?” It’s Emerson at the door. “Are you all right?”
“I’m okay,” she sobs.
This is how you do it, Alma thinks. You stand up because someone needs to use the john. You turn your light on and try to read, then turn it off, and pull yourself from the edge, from the eyes you keep seeing in the dark. You tell yourself a story—Isabel’s returning to Puebla, to Benito, waiting for her lieutenant—until you fall into a drugged sleep.
You keep going for as long as it takes, years, months, weeks.
The stiff Heart questions was it He that bore, / And Yesterday or Centuries before?
THE VERY NEXT DAY, the forensic guy issues his certificates. The bodies are released. The list of the dead makes its way to Don Jacobo’s house; the names are legal names, so they don’t match the earlier list with the nicknames the locals knew these young men by. Not one of the dead is over age twenty-five. It turns out two are still at large, but the ringleader, Francisco Villanueva, known as Bolo, is in custody.
How did he manage to escape the bullets indiscriminately sprayed into the front room? How did he and his buddies get arms? Why did he stage this suicide takeover? As far as Alma can gather, Bolo is not talking. They will probably break him with torture and then execute whatever is left of him. Poor guy. It probably would have been luckier for him to die in the bloodbath, after all.
“They’re just scapegoating him,” Alma tells the little group of los americanos, as they are collectively known now in the village. The group is spending its quarantine together at the mayor’s house. Alma is in and out of the house, in and out of their discussions. The masked woman. “Why pin everything on this one guy?”
“He’s been in trouble before.” Walter or Frank happens to know for a fact. “This isn’t the first time.”
Of course not. Unlike the others, Bolo learned to read and write; he got out and looked around and saw enough to tell him he hadn’t been dealt the best hand. A chance to be a human being, the lucky kind.
“No one’s going to scapegoat anybody,” Walter or Frank asserts.
Right, Alma thinks, just like nobody was going to bomb anything. One good thing about wearing a mask, no one can see her mouth twisting, the scorn she momentarily heaps upon them.
“He’s the only one left to help now.” Alma can’t let it go. “He and the patients. I hope Swan’s not going to desert them,” she addresses Jim straight on. “I mean, you can’t just walk out on them.”
“Swan will honor its agreement,” Jim speaks up quickly, publicly. “We’re committed to the patients until virological failure. And the Centro, we’ll have to decide where to go from here … if it makes sense …” Jim sighs. This fiasco has been his first and it will probably be his last. At the head office, his replacement is already being discussed.
“It makes sense.” Emerson has been out in the rain, checking on the hundreds of trees planted, the tiny saplings in the nursery ready for the new terraces Richard and Bienvenido’s crew had just completed. It’d be a shame to let the project die now.
She looks over at Emerson, and for the first time since this nightmare started he meets her eye. Alma might have to remind him every step of the way, but Emerson is not going to bail out. One bad thing about her mask, he can’t see Alma smile for the first time since the nightmare started and the last time in a while.
THE BURIALS START THAT very evening, and since the cemetery lies just outside the village, the corteges go by Don Jacobo’s house, past the Centro, visible to every eye, audible to every ear. Starr and Mariana try to distract Alma, as if her mind were not already a tangle of distractions, punctuated by awful moments. One of the worst has to be when the cell phones arrive from the embassy, in a shipment of supplies left at the roadblock at the edge of town. Alma calls her stepsons. The connections are terrible. Both Ben and David are out; Alma can’t bear to leave a message on their machines, so she hangs up.
Because it is still early on the West Coast, she manages to get Sam, half asleep. “What time is it?” he asks, his voice groggy.
Alma is grateful for this brief stall before the awful moment that is coming. She remembers the black-kerchief poet’s asking for the time, Bolo’s proudly announcing the hour, to the minute, then shooting the clock. Alma tells Sam the time in their two time zones, and then she tells him the news she can’t make sound any less shocking than it is.
“You can’t be serious?” Sam says. He is totally awake now.
Alma wishes she could spare him, one more orphan in the world. “Oh, Sam, I’m sorry.”
But Sam seems impervious to the news. He just talked to his father on Monday. They were making plans to meet in that week between Christmas and New Year’s. Sam would fly down to Florida, meet up with Alma and his dad. Sam goes on, detail by painful detail, as if to prove Alma wrong. How can a father who was making holiday plans a few days ago not be around anymore?
Alma has to agree with him. It’s inconceivable. “But it’s true, Sam, Richard is dead. He got caught in the cross fire during a siege.” Keep it simple. There will be plenty of time later to infect everyone she knows with her questions.
A wrenching silence follows. And then, as if released from their cage of denial, a half-dozen questions fly out, so fast, one after another, Alma can’t keep up with them. “What siege? Dad didn’t say anything about a siege. Why was there a siege? Look, I’m coming down. How do I get there? I mean, where do I fly to?” He is moving around. Opening a door, turning on a faucet. He must be on a portable. A woman’s voice is asking him something. A woman in Sam’s life! And here she’d been telling Richard for years that Sam was gay. The good looks, the swift clothes, the privacy around his personal life. So Sam has a girlfriend. A bit of news Alma would have wanted to share with Richard. There will be so many of these moments, and that will be how time heals. In months that will turn into years, Alma’s life will be filled with so many stories Richard will never hear. She will be living some other life than the one that stopped hours ago here.
“The thing about coming, Sam, is I don’t really know if you’ll be able to see your father.” She explains about the quarantine. How they all have to wait. How Richard has to be buried temporarily. At one point when she breaks down, telling her story, Emerson comes forward. Does Alma want for him to talk to Sam? She shakes her head. Sam doesn’t need one more stranger between him and his dead father. Alma explains how Richard had always said he wanted to be cremated. Maybe if the quarantine gets lifted soon, the boys can come down and see their father and then they can have him cremated here and take his ashes back.
“I don’t want his fucking ashes,?
?? Sam sobs.
When Alma hangs up, she feels what bomber pilots must feel, returning from a mission, having dropped off their deadly cargo. They can’t let themselves imagine the suffering they have just sowed, the woman still up tending to a sick child, the lovers in bed, the father washing his hands, ready to eat a late supper, the people caught in the middle. They must shut off that knowledge or how else can they go on living?
BY WEEK’S END, they get the all clear. The guys from the Centers for Disease Control found no evidence of monkey pox or any other deadly virus in the Marshall residence or in Michael and Hannah McMullen’s pickup. What happens next? Hannah, and maybe Mickey, will probably get convicted, terrorist threats being a serious federal crime these days. Or maybe they’ll be deemed too crazy to stand trial and be locked up in the state hospital at Waterbury instead. Meanwhile, the mad world gets off scot-free, Alma can’t help thinking bitterly.
Everyone is relieved. Jim Larsen, Emerson, Starr, Starr’s daddy who has flown in and is waiting in the capital to take her home. Alma, too, is glad to get off the mountain. Now she can go back to a life that will never be all clear again. Her clean windshield is gone. Like Helen coming through her stroke to die of terminal cancer a few weeks after Alma finally gets back to Vermont.
Out of guilt or a sense of responsibility, Emerson can’t do enough for her. When the boys arrive at the Las Américas Airport, Emerson goes out with her. She spots them coming through Immigration. Their first time in her country and probably their last. Why would they ever come back? And Richard so wanted them to fall in love with this place! To come volunteer for a week while he was on site. But the gene for personal passions does not get passed on by blood. Not an opinion, but an intuition. How to pass on that intuition? Alma wonders. Only by story, if at all.
As she watches from the glass partition, Alma realizes she is looking at her stepsons with a new intensity, trying to find traces of Richard. They are built like their father, slender and not too tall, though they seem tall here, surrounded by the shorter Dominicans. How bereft they all look, glancing around as if they are lost in this place of color and noisy crowds and oppressively bright sunlight.
Watching them, Alma is reminded of her wedding day, ten going on eleven years ago. They were just boys—Sam was only twelve, for heaven’s sake—all of them trying to be happy for their father’s new life, which is now over.
Interestingly, Sam is the only one to bring his girlfriend with him. Soraya Guzmán. A Latina, must be, maybe Mexican, maybe Ecuadorian, hard to pin down. “I was born here, I mean, the States,” she answers when Alma asks where she is from. You know, the brown skin, the last name of Guzmán.
Fair enough, Alma thinks. A strong, no-nonsense woman, just what Sam needs right now. Of the three sons, Sam is the one who has given Alma the hardest time, fiercely loyal to the past—the true, original family, his father’s second marriage being an aberration, his violent death proof of this error. And yet, over time, Sam will be the son who stays in touch. David and Ben, both friendly, tolerant sorts, will disappear from her life except for occasional communications.
But all three will keep their promise: next summer on Snake Mountain.
VIII
THREE SUMMERS, 1810, 1811, 1830
SUMMER 1810
“Doña Isabel, a visitor from Spain!” Benito was calling out.
My heart leapt with joy. After six long years of sacrifice and waiting, I was to be rewarded, after all. Lieutenant Pozo had come back to keep his solemn promise!
I was in bed that morning, a bad morning, of which there were many since my return from the Philippines. I had held off my own home coming to go, village by village, returning my charges: six from Valladolid, returning five; five from Guadalajara, all accounted for; one from Querétaro; six from Zacatecas; five from Fresnillo, returning four; two from Sombrerete; one from León.
My work completed, Viceroy Iturrigaray had granted me permission to settle in the city of the angels with my son, allotting me a stipend until I regained my health. Of course, what I hoped was that the lieutenant would be waiting for me and the stipend would prove unnecessary, though helpful. But no word had come from Lieutenant Pozo during my absence. So began the long wait—six years since our parting in Veracruz!—which this morning, as I heard my son’s summons, I was convinced would end with gladness.
“Doña Isabel!” Benito kept calling from the front room. He knew better than to yell like that. It seemed I was back in La Coruña, unable to curb the wildness of my little boys as they stampeded down the hallways, announcing the arrival of Doña Teresa. When we returned from Manila, a letter from Nati had been waiting for me, written the year before. Our benefactress had taken ill with a catarrh and died; Nati’s own sons had been pressed into the navy; one son had been wounded at Trafalagar; a grandson had been born.
“I will be there presently,” I called from my back room. Quickly, I dressed and brushed my hair. In the glass, I appraised myself. How would I look after a six years’ absence? Far too thin, gray in my dark hair. But the sun and sea and the years themselves had been kind to me, just as Don Francisco had promised. The fresh air had invigorated my skin, so that the marks were less disfiguring. Or perhaps I had learned to live with my pocked face at last.
Don Francisco and his promises … Some of them had come true, I thought as I slipped on my shoes. We had gotten news even before we left Manila that he had made it back to Spain. The only one of us to return! He had been received by the king—when we still had our king, honored at the court. But then Spain had been overrun by the French and our king had gone into exile; the world across the ocean had crumbled.
I could hear Benito chattering in the front room, a boy of about eleven now. Strange, the boy was usually more of an observer than a talker. When questioned, he often took moments to consider before replying. Although in many ways he had thrived under the bishop’s direction and advanced in his studies, my long absence had hurt him. It seemed at first the boy had asked constantly after me. Then, abruptly, his questions had stopped. After my return, though I earnestly petitioned him and sometimes punished him, he would no longer call me mother. Not that there was any disrespect in his address. He used usted and always preceded my name with doña. I might have saved thousands upon thousands from the smallpox, but I had failed him. Was it possible to act in this world, I wondered, without hurting someone?
“Doña Isabel works with cures,” I heard the boy saying. “She nurses the sick when she feels well herself. Mostly, she’s sick, though. She has a weak heart, and some days she has to stay in bed all day long.”
I hurried my steps. By the time I could greet my suitor, my son would have driven him away.
“Good day,” I said, entering the room. My first glimpse of the lieutenant, I thought: he is no longer as tall as I remember him.
Don Francisco!
I reeled with surprise and shock and seemed to be about to prove my son’s pronouncements by fainting on the spot. Our local doctor had indeed diagnosed a weak heart and advised that I guard against anything that might excite me. How to keep life at bay in order to go on living?
Don Francisco came forward and led me to a chair. “I never thought I would see you again,” I confessed. How had he made it out? Of course, I was thinking, if an older man could get through enemy lines, why not a younger lieutenant?
“I was lucky,” Don Francisco was explaining. He had fled from Madrid when the French invaded, following the Junta Suprema to Seville and, when Seville fell, to Cádiz. It was this very junta, the only legitimate authority while Napoleon had our king in chains, that had authorized him to come to New Spain. He was on his way to the capital and had stopped in Puebla to say hello to his old friend, Bishop Gonzales. What a surprise to hear that Doña Isabel and her son were living across the courtyard in the old porter’s cottage!
“I see you have made a home here.” Don Francisco gestured with a sweep of his hand, a gesture more suited to the court than to this humble
house at the entrance of the Episcopal palace. He was not as ill or old as when I had last seen him in Manila. He must have gotten new teeth. And his face was fuller. He had begun wearing a wig—I believe it was a wig. Perhaps he had lost his hair?
“You look well,” I noted. “How brave of you to come see after us.”
He bowed, acknowledging my compliment. “What have we to lose but our lives, which are not ours to keep anyway?” he observed. He went on to detail his losses. His home in Madrid had been sacked; the Botanical Gardens with all his specimens from Canton and Macao had been overrun; the Royal Biblioteca with the Spanish-Chinese dictionary he had donated and hundreds of prints of medicinal plants were now part of Bonaparte’s booty. His wife had died.
This last piece of news came at the end of such a long litany, I almost missed it in the outpouring of his story. Poor Doña Josefa, to have awaited her husband for three years, only to leave the life they might have shared! “I am sorry to hear of your loss,” I intoned in consolation.
“The invasion, the destruction of our home … She never did want to leave Madrid.” He had refused the chair I offered him. His was a brief visit. He was eager to reach the capital, to ascertain the disturbing rumors circulating in Spain. The colonies were in rebellion. The vaccination juntas were falling apart. The vaccine itself was dying out. He looked around, suddenly anxious to combat this encroaching disaster. I saw the plainness of our home through his eyes—the bare walls but for a simple crucifix, the benches stacked by the door for our patients. The old porter’s cottage had become our vaccination center here in Puebla. Benito and I had been granted the rooms in back. Bishop Gonzales had been kind.