Chapter 63
It was another six miles before I exited the highway.
After the clamor of San Miguel, the hushed verdure astonished me.
Fields of soybeans, their green iridescent in the late-afternoon light, pastures dissected by twisting paths of darker green that traced the edges of creeks.
A few cows bent, still as statues. A man on a bicycle pedaled by.
Two women walked at the side of the road, balancing baskets on their heads.
A field ahead was filled with people. All women, perhaps thirty of them, sitting or bending forward on squatting legs, gathered into groups.
I parked. Stepping from the car, I approached the nearest clutch of four women. They seemed completely uninterested in me, absorbed, their arms moving ceaselessly. They were washing clothes, I realized, the field a marshland in which the thermal waters had been funneled into stone basins.
“Buenas tardes, senoras,” I began.
“Buenas tardes,” they chorused, barely looking up.
“I’m looking for a couple. They have a young girl with them.”
In unison, they shook their heads; no, they didn’t know of any such couple.
“You’re sure?” I pressed. “They’re old; the woman has short gray hair.” After a pause, “The girl has short hair also.”
“A girl with short hair,” one said, and they all laughed. I felt myself stiffen but held my smile.
Reining herself in, the tallest said, “No, but there was an older woman and a child at the house of the painter.”
I had translated her words, la casa del pintor, in that literal way, my stomach tightening at the mention of a painter.
“Impossible,” the fattest of them was saying, “the painter lives alone, he sees no one. Es muy solitario.”
“Sí, en la casa del pintor,” the first insisted. “I saw them together, walking along the road with a small dog.”
My heart quickened; it had to be them. The women had begun to bicker, who’d seen what, who was the greater authority, and I cut in, “Please tell me where he lives, el pintor.” It was as though I hadn’t spoken, I wasn’t there. “Where is the man’s house?” I repeated loudly.
“Ana cleans it,” said the one woman who hadn’t yet spoken in a dull voice.
I wanted to scream at her—what did it matter who cleaned the house?
But they were all calling to her at once, “Ana, come speak to this lady, ven aquí,” as at the far end of the field I saw a girl detach herself from her gaggle and begin across the field.
She was much younger than the women to whom I’d been speaking, no more than sixteen, but with a woman’s voluptuous body, all heavy breasts and broad swishing hips.
A thick braid of reddish-brown hair swung behind her as she walked.
The women were still calling to her, the tallest gesturing at me, saying primly:
“This lady wants you to show her the painter’s house, do you think it’s correct?”
“What has the painter ever done for you that you’re so concerned to protect his privacy?” the fat one rebutted, laughing contemptuously. “What business is it of yours, anyway? What are you, the empress?”
Ana was near now. I appealed to her with my eyes, attempting to secure her sympathy, this teenage girl who, in an instant, had assumed the full measure of her power and was looking at me as from a judge’s bench.
A crucifix glinted at her throat. I thought, Deny me and I’ll rip that bit of gold from your neck.
Then, unable to hold myself back any longer, I ran to her, panting, “Can you help me?”
She regarded me as if amused, lifting the corner of her mouth skeptically.
“Please!” I was nearly crying. “I need to find my daughter; she needs to come home.”
With a small gesture, she turned and began to lead me away, both of us retracing the distance she had just crossed.
In the road ahead, I could see two small boys riding a dirt bike.
The one behind was lifted up slightly, as though standing out of a saddle above a galloping horse, his mouth opened wide.
Nonsensically, I searched their faces for Ida, then the faces of the older girls Ana had been speaking to, Ana stopping now to tell them without emotion, “I’m taking this lady to the painter’s,” while I stood crying and trembling in impotence.
She resumed her sluggish progress. We reached the edge of the field, stepped onto the road.
The boys on the dirt bike had turned around.
As they shot past us, spraying gravel, Ana shouted curses at them.
They were barefoot, not more than ten or eleven years old.
“The one driving is my cousin,” she told me.
As if I cared who they were! She was standing motionless and I wanted to shove her forward, deride her, You don’t need to stop walking to speak.
But in the next instant, she bent forward, drawing aside a branch, and I saw a narrow, overgrown road.
“Aquí,” she said, with the universal boredom of teenagers, pointing to a primitive-looking house at the end of the lane. Crude cinder blocks without any stucco over them; lengths of rebar stuck from the tops of each corner.
“Es la casa del pintor, ?estás segura?” I asked, my heart fluttering up again.
“Sí, claro,” she answered with that same bored manner, looking at me as though daring me to walk away.
In the low sun, she appeared gilded, like a Renaissance painting of a Madonna.
For the first time, I saw that she was pregnant.
She had that shape, swollen in only those places, her legs and arms slender.
She seemed on the point of saying something, and it crossed my mind she wanted something for her troubles, a few pesos.
Instinctively I felt at my pockets, though I’d left the house without my wallet.
“Now you can bring your daughter home,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. And for a second, it filled me with terror.