“We will take care of her,” Alfredo said to my parents. “This one has a very bright future ahead of her!”
I stared blankly at my feet. A small beetle was stuck between the floorboards. My parents were silent. Why did they have nothing to say?
“She learned to read and write quicker than any other girl here,” Rosalina said, smiling. “She has even translated Christian hymns into Wao Tededo!”
I had been at the mission for more than a year, perhaps almost two. I managed. As long as Rosalina did not go away, as long as the stairs did not creak beneath Alfredo’s feet. Sometimes they did.
I saw that, in the time I had been away, my parents had grown older. Dad still moved as easily and sleekly as an animal but a little more slowly. My mother’s face had hardened.
My dad spoke to me out of the side of his mouth. He said: “You are very skinny.”
I bit my lip.
“Your spirit is sad,” he continued. “Why do you want to go with them?”
I didn’t say anything. But I wanted my parents to see. To know that something had happened, something terrible. And then to hold me in their arms, to love me. To tell me that I had done nothing wrong. That they would protect me forever.
“How long will she be gone?” my mom asked quietly, in Spanish.
“She will come back often,” Alfredo said hesitantly. “We will make sure of that.”
Rosalina said brightly: “And we will make sure that she has all the warm clothes that she needs for the mountains. It will be cold up there, brrrrr.”
“Let her suffer,” Mom whispered in Wao Tededo. “That’s the only way she will learn.”
It was soon time for me to leave Damoïntaro.
“All clear?” the pilot shouted.
The entire village was standing at the side of the runway. Elders held back dogs and peccary and monkeys. Mothers held their young children. The backpack boy, Joseph, gave a thumbs-up to the pilot.
“All clear!”
Rosalina strapped me into the seat. The buckle clicked. She stroked my hair with her fingers.
“This is a big day,” she said, smiling gently.
Daboka stood at the edge of the crowd, gazing emptily into the plane. Her arms were stiff by her side. I understood her misery: Rosalina would be away from Damoïntaro for a while now. I put my hand against the window and bit my lip as my eye caught Alfredo’s. He waved and smiled at me. I turned. I was safe in the plane, away from him.
“Father God in the sky,” Rosalina prayed, clasping my hand, “we ask that You protect us today and deliver us safely to the town of Shell . . . and that You bless Inés with faith that all will be better in her new home. Amen.”
The plane rumbled and rattled, gathering speed. The leaf-houses, the gardens, the forest, they all started to shake and blur. I grasped the seat, gouging my nails into the cushion. The people below became blurry and small, and then they disappeared altogether. I had dreamed of flying since I was a little barefoot girl. I had imagined seeing the forest from above, the way white people and birds do, a floating feeling in my body, as if I was flying and not the plane. But it wasn’t like that. Instead, I felt trapped by the seat belt, the windows were small, and my head was dizzy. I wished my brother Víctor were there with me and felt a sudden pang of missing.
When I dared to look out of the window, beneath me, as in my dreams, was the jungle canopy. I could make out the ridgeline where I had met the jaguar, the dark water of a fishing hole, and, in the distance, the mighty, snaking Ëwengono River, its laziest curves caressed by white beaches. Pushing up against the river was the forest itself, linen woven from a thousand different threads in a thousand different shades of green. Massive. Unending. Inaccessible for centuries to everyone but my ancestors, who walked it with respect. I did not know that from so great a height it could be possible to love the forest so much.
“I don’t want to go,” I whispered to the trees. I searched, unsuccessfully, for my parents’ village amidst the rolling hills and jagged ridges.
But soon the forest began to change. Slowly the trees thinned and turned into grass, spindly peach palms, clusters of scrawny white animals. I tapped the window.
“Quiano?”
“Vacas!” Rosalina said.
I had only seen cows in picture books. I thought they lived very far away. What had they done to the forest? Had they eaten it?
The plane became weightless. I lost my stomach. Gigantic mountains appeared in the distance. Brown roads and gray roads and black roads wound across the land. I tapped the window again.
“That’s the town of Shell,” Rosalina said, raising her eyebrows. “That’s the military base.”
I didn’t know what a town was, nor a military base. I didn’t see any palm-leaf houses. No woodsmoke rising.
The plane skidded onto a black runway with yellow stripes and we climbed out. The ground was hard and flat; I had never walked on ground like that before. The sun was hotter here and there were almost no trees. But there was a memory in the air: with every breath I took I inhaled the smell of the generator back at the Saints’ house in the village.
I walked closely beside Rosalina. Men in dirty clothes stared at me. Their hands were stained black.
“This is where the planes live,” Rosalina said. Then she pointed across the road. “You see that red house there?”
“Uuuu,” I said. My whole body was tense. I felt like a wild animal.
“We’ll be here for a few days, just until you’re ready to go to the mission. That house will be your new home!”
Trucks roared past us down the hill, whining and clanking. Their tires were bigger than me. I sprinted across the road, ribs shivering nervously, like a wild forest rodent. Rosalina led me to a room on the second floor of the big red house. There was a bed and a table and a small window.
“Come in here,” she said, opening a door. “This is your bathroom.”
I didn’t know what she meant. I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes gleamed black with something . . . with fear, with excitement, with survival. I didn’t like the way my nose spread across my face.
She turned a handle and water poured out. I was startled. Where did the water come from?
“This is where you go pee and poo,” she said, opening up a white lid that covered a bowl of water. She pushed down on a lever and the water disappeared. I shook my head.
“I will go in the forest.”
“No, Inés, you are in Civilization now. This is Civilization. You go in the toilet. Here is the toilet paper. Look, it’s softer than any leaves you’ll find!”
Dayuma had been right. She had told us that the white people go pee and poo right next to where they eat and sleep.
“Inés, before I take you to the mission in the mountains with the other Indian kids, you will have to learn how to live in Civilization.”
In the afternoon, we walked along the side of the road. The trucks blew dust and pebbles everywhere. I smelled bread coming from a storefront.
“This is a bakery,” Rosalina said, pulling money from her purse. “I will teach you how to buy bread.”
We walked into the bakery. I sniffed the sweet air like a jaguar and grabbed a piece of bread off the rack, as if it were a banana hanging from a bundle in our oko back home. Rosalina snapped at me. I lowered my head and felt afraid.
“You need to say: ‘Good afternoon, neighbor!’” Rosalina whispered into my ear.
I stared at my feet. I didn’t know the man behind the counter. Why would I talk to him?
We left the bakery and walked amongst many strangers in the shade of the houses and stores. The people looked at me strangely. I held Rosalina’s hand tightly.
“This is a produce market,” she said. I nodded eagerly. I wanted to do well.
“Now, will you please say to the nice lady: ‘Good afternoon, neighbor’?”
I stared at all the colorful fruits and vegetables. I recognized the papayas, the lemons, the limes, the plantains, and the manioc, but I didn’t recognize anything else.
“Good afternoon, neighbor,” I whispered, staring down at my hands.
Rosalina looked pleased. “Very good! Next time you should look into her eyes, okay?”
I nodded submissively.
“This is an onion.” She handed me a hard purple ball with flaky skin. “And this is garlic, and these are strawberries. They are very tasty.”
I wanted to smell everything, but I didn’t know if I was allowed to. I pointed to a bundle of moist, dark-green plants. There was something about them. They were calling to me.
“That’s rue,” the shop lady said. She was wearing a blue apron. “It’s medicine.”
I reached into the bundle, hesitantly pulled out a stem, and held it to my nose. The smell brought no memories at all.
Rosalina asked: “Do you like that?”
I nodded. I liked it even though rue was nothing I recognized from the forest.
“For my room,” I said.
At night the stars flickered over the mountains and a cold wind whipped and howled against the big red house. I slapped rue against the walls. I was freezing cold. I thought about my parents and my brothers and sisters, sitting around the fire, swinging in hammocks. I craved the smell of the forest. My room smelled of rue and diesel oil.
There were footsteps in the hallway. My body tensed in panic.
“Inés, Inés . . . are you sleeping?”
Rosalina peeked in the room.
“Have you recited your prayer?”
I nodded, even though I hadn’t. There were bits and pieces of rue all over the floor.
“Do you know how to turn off the light?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Here you go!” Click. The room went pitch black. “Tomorrow, we will buy you new clothes. Good night, dear Inés.”
The next day, when the sun was already high overhead, I reached into a cage of furry, big-toothed rodents and petted the fidgety animals. I had never seen the likes of them before.
“What are you doing?” a squat, wide-nosed woman in an apron shouted. “If you touch a cuy, you will have to buy it.”
I pulled my hand out of the cage and looked down at the ground.
Rosalina tugged at my arm. “You can’t just touch things that are not yours,” she said, pulling me along the sidewalk.
Why are the animals in cages? I wondered. I remembered how Mum had made Dad take our pet nocturnal monkey, Amonka, to the cowori to trade for salt and sugar, and he had exchanged her for a radio. Was she in a cage right now too? Was that what the cowori did with all the animals?
“Look!” Rosalina exclaimed. “Look at all of the pretty dresses!”
She led me through a door. “This is a clothes store.”
I had never seen so many clothes in my life. And so many colors! There were dresses hanging on racks, t-shirts folded on shelves, and socks piled in bins.
Rosalina held a blue dress to my shoulders.
“Do you like this color?”
I looked up at her curiously. If I liked the color, was the dress going to be mine?
“Inés!” Rosalina put the dress back on the rack. I wasn’t sure if she was mad at me or not. “I am going to buy you clothes today, so please tell me which ones you like.”
“With money?” I asked.
“Yes, with money.”
An old man, his belly oddly round, watched us from the corner. I felt timid.
“That’s the owner of all these clothes,” Rosalina said to me.
“Why does he have so many?”
“It’s his business.”
I didn’t understand.
“Did he make all these clothes?”
Rosalina looked impatient.
“And he will give us the clothes for money?” I continued.
I thought about the wads of smoke-blackened money crumpled up in the hanging basket in the oko. The moldy old money that was burned when Rachel died. And the money that Moipa threw into Amo’s grave.
“Yes, Inés! That’s how Civilization works.”
I touched a green dress in front of me and brought it to my nose, sniffing. It smelled moldy. But there was something else too. Something sour.
“You don’t need to smell the dresses,” Rosalina said, amused.
“How do they make the colors?” I asked.
Rosalina paused. “With dye.”
“From roots or leaves or the bark of a tree?”
“I don’t know. Probably from chemicals.”
Suddenly I realized that it didn’t matter that I could not understand all this. I could just pick what I liked and it would be mine. Whichever one I wanted.
I fanned through the rack of dresses, holding each one up to my shoulders, staring in the mirror. My heart was leaping with joy. I never imagined that I could have so many clothes. Did that mean that Wengongi wasn’t angry at me anymore?
When we left the store, I was wearing knee-high white socks, black shoes, a long blue dress, and red barrettes in my hair. Rosalina carried my other clothes in a bag over her shoulder.
As we walked across the green lawn in front of the big red house, she smiled at me lovingly. “You look so pretty, Inés! A true Christian girl! You are almost ready to go to the mission!”
I still didn’t know where the mission was, but I had gathered that it was somewhere along the road that led into the big mountains in the distance.
“Once Alfredo gets here,” she continued, looking across the road where the planes landed, “we’ll have a talk with the Lord and make sure you’re ready for your new life!”
So, Alfredo was coming to join us. The knowledge settled in my stomach like a stone.
That night, I examined all my new clothes and practiced my new words.
Footsteps were coming up the stairs. I picked up a white dress from on top of my pillow and hurriedly began folding it on my lap. I knew that Rosalina wouldn’t like seeing my new clothes scattered about like this.
“Inés-iiiita,” said a man’s voice from the doorway.
I froze, my chest jittering inside. When did he get here?
Alfredo walked into the room and closed the door behind him. He sat next to me on the bed. He smelled of woodsmoke and shampoo.
“Let me see how you fold those clothes,” he said. “God likes everything to be neat and tidy.”
My hands were trembling. Where was Rosalina? I started to fold the white dress. He touched the ends of my hair.
I couldn’t move. I was too afraid to move.
He leaned his mouth into my neck and pulled me backwards.
“Lord, she is so pure,” he said, tearing off the underpants that his wife had bought me. “Forgive me, Lord.”
The next morning, I waited in my room with the door locked until Rosalina called me down to breakfast. I walked into the kitchen barefoot, wearing my forest clothes.
“Inés!” Rosalina gasped. “What are you doing?”
I stood beside the table, motionless.
“Go back up to your room and put on your new clothes,” she said sternly.
I wanted to go home. I wanted to be with my family in the forest.
“Sit down, Inésita,” Alfredo said gently, pulling out a chair. He smiled at me. “This will be your last barefoot breakfast.”
I sat down on the chair next to him. I was hurting inside. Burning. Throbbing.
“What did you read last night?” Alfredo asked. He looked at me hard, a private look.
I picked a piece of scrambled egg off the plate with my fingers.
“Inés, what did I teach you?” Rosalina looked annoyed. “Please use the fork. It’s right there.”
“Did you read anything last night?” Alfredo repeated.
I didn’t respond. The silence upset Rosalina.
She asked quietly: “Are you okay, Inés? Do you miss your parents?”
I nodded and began to cry.
“Let us pray for Inés,” Rosalina said to Alfredo. She clasped one of my hands and lifted it up onto the table. I flinched as Alfredo clasped the other.
“Father God in the sky,” she continued, “Soon Inés will go to her new home, the mission in the mountains. We ask that You keep her parents, Tiri and Manuela, safe from all harm, and help Inés feel Your love in Quito. Lord, give her the courage to walk Your trail. Amen.”
After breakfast, I helped Rosalina wash the dishes while Alfredo played the guitar in the living room.
“Followers, follow Jesus!” he sang. “Don’t turn back!”
The road was long and windy through the mountains. We drove through dank, rocky tunnels and dreary settlements, where peccary-looking creatures roasted on spits. We barreled past herds of strange, long-necked animals called alpacas, swerved between steep ridges covered with plots of corn and potato, until soon a gray blanket of concrete, of many-storeyed buildings and roads, spread endlessly across a valley of towering peaks.
“That is the city of Quito!” Rosalina announced as we raced along a wide road that rimmed the frightening wilderness.
“Are we going inside there?” I asked. I was worried that I would get lost, that the buildings would swallow me, that the cars would trample me.
Rosalina reassured me: “Your new home is on a hill just outside the city.”
When we arrived, I knew that I was in trouble with the Lord because although the sun was burning bright white in the thin air, I was black and cold inside. Alfredo and Rosalina waved goodbye and turned to make the long journey back to Shell. I watched as they drove down the hill out of sight. I stared at my knee-high white socks and my black shoes.
“This is your new home, Inés,” the missionary lady, Barbara, said in an accent that reminded me of Rachel Saint. “And when I speak to you, you look at me!”
Her voice was harsh and now she grabbed my chin firmly with one of her fleshy, pale hands. She had that same superior scowl that Rachel had worn in the village of my childhood, the same icy blue eyes, blotchy skin, and trembling lips.
A pair of boys ran down the gray steps carved out of the hillside. I followed them with my eyes, instinctively. Barbara pinched my cheek hard.
“You are not here to look at boys,” she said, her chin wobbling. “You’re here to become God’s servant. Not another pregnant jungle girl. You hear me, Inés?”
I didn’t know what she meant. Yet I was afraid of her words, afraid of what she could see. I nodded submissively.
We walked across an open courtyard with gray buildings on each side. There were many kids, my age and older, staring at me through windows, from balconies, out of doorways. I had never seen so many different kinds of faces.
The girls’ dormitory was on a grassy terrace near the top of the hill. There were four beds in the small room and little windows that looked out on the clouds and the mountains. Barbara picked up the Bible from the white sheets.
“This is what you are here for,” she said, shaking the Bible. “By the time you are through, Inés, you will have memorized every word in this book.”
I nodded. I wanted her to go away. I was cold. My head was throbbing. A gust of wind licked and rattled the window.
“What do you know?” she asked, nodding at the Bible.
I creased my brow and shifted my eyes across the ground.
“Do you know any of the psalms by heart?”
I shook my head.
“What have Rosalina and Alfredo taught you then, out there in the jungle?”
I felt a dark cobweb spreading across my chest. I didn’t want to hear his name.
“Ribs . . .” I whispered desperately.
“What did you say?”
I shook my head.
“Tell me what you said.”
“Women come from the ribs of man,” I said, looking up at her and fidgeting back and forth. I was hurting between my legs.
A strange, amused smile spread across her face.
“Let me see what you have in your bag.” She began picking out my clothes one by one and setting them on the bed beside me.
I looked around the room. There were girls’ clothes hanging in the closet, photographs on the bedside table, little jars of flowers.
“You will only wear long dresses,” she said, lifting the blue one up into the light of the window. “Yes, very good. These will do. Dresses that go to your wrists and ankles.”
She opened a drawer and handed me a small notebook and a pen.
“Do you know what this is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s a devotional.” Her voice was suddenly tender. “Each night, after prayer, you will open this book and you will write a letter to God. Do you know how to write?”
I nodded.
“Good. God knows how to read.”
I looked up at her, startled. She was smirking.
“Now sit up straight, like a Christian girl.” She was stepping away from me into the hallway. “When you hear the bell, go down to the dining hall. Don’t be late.”
She closed the door behind her. When her footsteps were gone, I felt lonely. Deeply lonely, like a huge hole inside me. I scanned the landscape outside the window. What had happened to all the trees?
In the dining hall, I sat at the end of a long table, staring at my plate of food. Wet green leaves, a white goo. Oily yellow meat. The smell from the kitchen made me nauseous.
A girl sat down next to me. “What are you?”
I shook my head.
“Are you a Kichwa?”
I shook my head again.
“Waorani,” I whispered.
She laughed.
“Why aren’t you naked then? Aren’t you supposed to be naked?”
I looked down at my white dress. My white socks were itchy.
“Do you even know how to speak Spanish?”
I felt ugly inside. Little black seeds were sprouting in my heart. The dining hall echoed with clanking plates and scraping spoons and grating chatter. I couldn’t tell if the girl was trying to be mean to me or if that was just how she was.
I asked her: “Are you from the forest?”
“What do you think?” she replied. Her skin was dark like mine. Her cheeks were raised sharp. Her hair was long and black.
She said: “I am Shuar.”
I nodded. I didn’t know much about the Shuar.
“My ancestors used to shrink heads. But now we don’t do that anymore.”
I didn’t know what she meant. Was that some kind of witchcraft?
At night, the Shuar girl sat on the bed next to mine, combing her hair. She was my roommate.
“Why don’t you have any pictures of your family?” she asked.
I was trembling. I thought I could hear his footsteps outside. I was sure that he was coming.
“Is someone in the hallway?” I asked nervously.
“No! Anyways, I thought the Waorani weren’t scared of anything!”
I tried to think about something nice. My dad beside the warm orange light of the fire. Smoke and stories and laughter swirling around the oko. But I could only form a fleeting picture of my old life.
“Are your mom and dad going to visit you, at least?”
I shook my head. Her questions were like sharp thorns.
“My parents don’t know where I am,” I said.
“Did you run away?”
I shook my head.
“The missionaries took you from your family, right?”
I shook my head again.
“Do you know how to make your bed?” she demanded.
I picked up the little blank book on the bedside table.
“If you don’t make your bed, then the old lady will spank you! She has a wooden paddle, you know.”
I closed my eyes.
“They read everything you write in there, by the way. I mean, the devotionals. Whatever you write, they read.”
I knew that I had been born into darkness, into the clutches of the devil. My people were stray sheep, the last of the sheep to be herded, the last to be corralled into the light of God’s merciful love. I pulled the itchy bedcover over my head and started to sob.