The second day was much like the first—we shuffled along the path and met another traveler or two—but on the third day the sounds around me changed. No longer did I hear the song of birds or the chirping of crickets: I heard voices, the shuffling of feet, the creaking of wheels and the hum of machines I could not name. Now and then the roaring of a truck could be heard, and I imagined the word SWINC written on the side.
We moved from the path onto a much broader road, which was busy with people. We all trudged along, most of us staring at our feet, ignoring each other, while I wondered what their stories were, where they were going, what their songs might be. Only part of me marched along this road, the part made of muscle, bone and blood. The rest of me lived with Nathanael, Jeremia, Eva and Ranita, and a tiny piece of me, unsure and battered, baked bread with David.
Celso and I reached a farm just as night fell. I was so tired my feet barely lifted from the ground, and my head felt thick. The smell I had first noticed in my father’s village, ten times as strong now, grew, swelled, burst from the air around me. The smell was so bad I feared that it was actually part of me, my fear and dread dripping like sweat.
The road we marched on passed huge buildings, great rectangles that could have held fifty houses like Belen’s. They grew up into the air, flat, abnormal dwellings that blocked the setting sun and threw a cool, suffocating shadow over the road. A churning noise groaned from these buildings—the sound of animals crowded into enclosed spaces—and on the sides of the buildings in dark lettering were the words SWINC: SWINE INCORPORATED. We still followed the creek, the same stream that ran through my camp, through Belen’s village, all the way to the city. But here the water was a sluggish swamp covered by a greasy film, three times the width of my creek and barely moving. I shivered as we trudged along.
When darkness fell that third night, we looked past the structures and saw people in a field, stirring a broad lagoon with sticks. Above the lagoon a haze hovered, a fog of thick stench that pushed the oxygen out of the air. This was where the smell was most concentrated, and it was so strong I felt dizzy and swayed from side to side behind the mule.
Once we left the lagoon behind and were beyond the immediate smell and sound, I lifted my head and felt my face pushing through the odor to the cleaner air above. I tried to understand this smell, discern what it reminded me of. But all I could think of was the dead wolf, the rotted body covered with sores.
After passing the enormous buildings, we reached the outskirts of a village called Gloriosa and stopped at the first house, a small wood building with a wide, inviting front porch. Celso placed his hand against my back, and I climbed the steps to the front door. The door was opened by a woman with eye wrinkles that reached out into her cheeks. Her face was as old as Nathanael’s, but something about the way she held herself—shoulders back, arms thick with muscle, legs sturdy—made me think she was younger than her face appeared. Her eyes were clouded, but around her mouth were smile creases, and her cheeks had a rosy glow. She peered at my veil with curiosity but not with fear.
“We are traveling to the city,” Celso said. “We wondered if you would know of a place where we could stay for the night.”
The woman crossed her arms over her chest and looked at Celso. She didn’t smile, didn’t speak, but simply appraised. She examined him for what seemed a long time and then looked at me. Her face softened, her mouth turned up at the corners into a smile, and the creases around her eyes reached almost to her hair.
“The child needs a place to stay,” said the woman, and she opened the door wide.
Celso placed his hand under my elbow and guided me into the house. It appeared that I would not be left outside with the mule this evening but must act the role of a person.
The room was small and warm, with wood floors, wood walls, a wood ceiling. A wood table with benches on either side occupied the middle of the room, and rugs made from strips of bright red and yellow cloth gave the room some cheer. Two pairs of dirt-covered boots and two sets of worn work gloves rested beside the door. I added my brown shoes to the line. On the left side of the room, a fire blazed on the hearth and a weathered man, knobby ankles emerging red and chapped from beneath his canvas pants, sat in a rocking chair, smoking a pipe. He waved us in but didn’t get out of the chair.
“We’ll be off before dawn,” Celso said. He didn’t remove his shoes. I saw him glance over to the table, where leftovers from their dinner still emitted delicious smells of butter and pepper that seemed to push the lagoon’s odors to the fringes of the room. The woman saw Celso’s look and ushered us to the table. She gave us each a fork and instructed us to eat the leftovers from the bowls.
Before I was able to understand where we were and why, I sat at the table with a fork in my hand. My muscles, so tired from marching behind the mule for three days now, didn’t want to lift the fork. I could have laid my head on the table and slept right there.
“Ines and Hugo. Don’t get many visitors,” she said. She slid onto the bench. I could feel her face turned toward me, her watchful eyes examining my veil. She helped me lift the violin off my shoulder and slide it under the table.
“We’re going to the city. Her husband waits for us there.” Celso stuffed bits of stew and potato into his mouth quickly.
The woman watched me with faintly furrowed eyebrows and eyes so clouded with a white film that I didn’t know how much she could see.
“Just a child,” she murmured, her breath touching the side of my veil. “So young.”
The food was simple, warm and filling, but as it cooled, the smell from the food dissipated and was replaced by the horrid smell surrounding this town. When Celso had eaten his fill, we sat with Hugo and Ines by the fire. I squatted on the floor and Ines knelt next to me, leaving the other chair for Celso. Hugo sat in his chair, rocked back and forth and watched the crackling flames. Ines was like the wind, always touching me, petting my knee, brushing her fingers against the back of my hand. They had lived in Gloriosa all their lives and had worked on the SWINC farm that had been the main employer in Gloriosa for twenty years.
My camp in the woods didn’t have a name. Or if it did, I didn’t know what it was. The reject place, maybe, or the place of disfiguration. The Hidden Camp.
“Aren’t very many children in this town,” Ines said, again touching me, her knee against mine.
“Can you play us a song?” Hugo asked, his rocking chair issuing a steady creak. He was worn and weathered, with creases around his eyes and mouth and on his cheeks, but he was like Nathanael—strong, with knotted muscles twisting just beneath his skin. “I haven’t heard a violin for years.”
My arms were too tired, my head too filled with decay, to liven this room, refresh it from the thick smell that weighed it down, but Celso glowered at me, his face dark and drawn. I pulled the violin out from under the table, unlatched the case and fit the instrument beneath my chin. I eased the bow against the strings and began to play.
I chose to play songs my mother had sung to me, but as I ran out of those tunes, I searched through my own songs, ones I had composed myself, which came to my fingers like treasures. The more I played, the more I wanted to keep playing. Music and stench throbbed for domination of the room.
Hugo smiled in his chair, his lips curved around the mouthpiece of his pipe. I could see sparks from the fire reflecting in his eyes. Ines sat next to me by the fire, her head thrown back and her eyes closed. Whenever I stopped playing a song, they asked for another.
To escape this strange room, I closed my eyes and let my hands hum their language. What would these lonely and empty people have said if I had pulled the veil off my face and showed them my distorted features? They would have been grateful and glad that they’d had no children as hideous as me. There was no place in this world for me, nowhere but with others who looked like I did. I drifted away, feeling the music.
I awoke when my bow clattered to the floor. Ines took the violin from me, laid it in the case and then took a handstitched pillow from the other chair and laid it on the floor.
I slept on the floor in front of the fire. Before leaving the room, Celso leaned down and whispered into my ear, “You run, and I’ll hunt you down. You leave, and your friends in the camp will suffer because of it.”
Then he was taken to a different room, somewhere beyond the light of the fire. Ines asked me if I wanted a bed as well, in the same room as my uncle, but how could I leave the glow of the fire to sleep in the same room as him? Ines brought me a blanket and patted my shoulder.
“Eight,” she whispered to me, the glow from the fire painting hollows in her cheeks and shadowing her eyes. “Eight babies. All of them imperfect but so beautiful. I would have loved them, even just one of them, if only they’d lived. Some children live in this town, but not many.”
She smiled when she said this. Her eyes shone. She saw all. She saw beyond the veil, beyond our secrecy, beyond Celso’s lies. I wanted to pull away from her, but there was nowhere to go, and she’d been nothing but kind to me.
If she had been my mother, she would have kept me, and I would have grown up in a town, accepted and welcome.
Before dawn, Celso came to get me. We did not say goodbye to Ines and Hugo, but Celso placed one small silver coin in the middle of the table.
On the fourth morning, we no longer felt the cool shade of trees, stunted or tall. Our packed dirt road merged with a street coated in a hard black substance from which the heat rose through the soles of my shoes. The plants along the side of the road twisted crooked and thin beneath the sun. I felt exposed here, conspicuous, lost in the wide spaces like an ant without a hill. As the sun grew hotter, people joined us from similar dirt roads. Horses pulled carts, people hunched forward with fruits and vegetables on their backs, cars hummed and buzzed, emitting an odor of burning butter, and the white, growling trucks with the word SWINC on them roared past. Too much noise and smell thumped in my head, and I felt confused.
A different vehicle, a small, quiet, two-wheeled one with no smell, rolled by often. I wished I had one. I would use it to propel myself to a place with less noise, fewer people, better smells. My feet hurt, my heels were blistered, my right shoe was falling apart. Now was the time to run back to the woods—a world that felt comfortable and understandable—but under Celso’s skin seethed a dark and menacing anger. I knew he would not hesitate to hurt my family.
I stared as we walked, and many of the people stared back. No one else appeared disfigured here or walked beneath the filmy cloud of a veil, but I was not the only one with troubles.
All of the travelers were dirty, all moved forward in unison, but I watched carefully from beneath the veil and saw our differences. A man walking on the other side of the road pulled a cart with wheels. A strap stretched from the front of the cart to his shoulders and chest. He leaned against the band, willing the rattling and banging cart to follow him down the road. A woman wearing a long brown skirt shuffled her feet in the dust of the road. Two children walked beside her, the girl also shuffling her feet, but the boy marched by his mother and sister with his head held high, his eyes flashing, his mouth angry.
Hills pushed from the ground on either side of the road and were dotted with rocks. Where was Jeremia’s hill, the one where he’d tucked a broken boy into a hollow and then turned that hollow into a grave? The odor from Gloriosa was lower here, beneath our feet, saturating the ground. Between the hills, as we neared the city, the road grew a border of houses, but these were houses as I’d never seen them before, not even in my books. They were made from cardboard boxes or sometimes wooden slats balanced against each other. The smells from these houses rose pitifully—urine, I thought, and sickness. The children we walked past stared at my veil. I stared at the dirt covering their bodies and at the open sores on their arms.
This couldn’t be the city. I found that my hand moved to the carved violin around my neck more and more often with each step that brought us closer to our destination, and I tried to still the twitching of my hands.
We did not stop when darkness shrank the lights to small stars but continued on the road, the houses changing from dilapidated cardboard boxes to houses stacked on top of each other like rocks under a waterfall. The people’s voices spilled from the open windows like the din from a flock of starlings. Lines of clothing stretched from the buildings, crisscrossing each other in disorganized spider webs. Here and there in front of the buildings, a few trees jutted through squares cut into hard gray rock, but they looked so forlorn, so lonely and separated, that I wanted to hug one and stay there, our loneliness united. So many people lived here—hoards of people shuffling, pushing, calling to each other. I was just one more.
Celso no longer rode the mule but walked ahead, the rope in his hand. The mule was as tired as I was, its hooves sliding across the hard ground, its head hanging low searching for something to eat, but there was no grass. I kept a hand on its back and leaned slightly, gaining support from its warmth and swaying movements. I tried to look everywhere at once, but I couldn’t take it all in. I jumped at noises behind me, at shouts from the windows, at the bump of a stranger’s shoulder against mine. My nerves jangled, and I felt flustered and uncertain.
Groups of women, their faces painted vivid colors that blurred their features, stood in clusters where streets came together. Breasts bulged from shirts, naked thighs erupted from short skirts. They moved with big gestures, their strides long, their shoulders rotating. They strode into the streets and leaned into the open windows of cars, where men with square teeth smiled and passed coins from the windows to the hands of the women. My stomach lurched in this place, and my skin tingled the way it did in the moments before a thunderstorm, but no one even glanced at me. It was Celso who didn’t fit—a man with a mule who didn’t belong in the city.
This was why the rejects from my camp came to the city and stayed. We may not have fit perfectly, but we weren’t alone and could, perhaps, get lost in the crowd.
Celso stopped. We stood in front of a building painted a flat gray, like the color of the sky before a torrential rain. The building tilted to the left, almost leaning against its neighbor, and it glowed with swirls, lines and huge swollen words painted on the front. Bars lined windows set high in the walls. No faces appeared at the windows, no singing voices could be heard. This building was cold and lifeless in comparison to the other buildings on the street.
Celso pounded on the door and continued to pound until a light went on in the windows beside the wooden door. The door opened a crack and a woman’s face appeared behind the bars.
“What?” she said. I took a step back. She looked rotten, overdone. She was maybe ten years older than my mother, her hair black with a clump of gray right in the front. Her eyes had dark bags beneath them—purple and black bags—and her nose, streaked with red lines, was swollen like her body. Her breath gushed between the bars in front of the door and smelled of rotten fruits.
“I brought another worker,” Celso said. Another worker. Celso had intended for me to come here from the moment he came to our camp and pushed me into this new world. He had done this before. This was how he earned his living.
The woman unlocked the barred door with a cluster of keys, then opened the door wide and stood in the opening, one hand holding the door, the other leaning on her hip. Her body, clothed in a tight nightgown, bulged oddly, like it had been squeezed tight in the middle and pushed out at the chest and hips.
“Take off the veil,” she said. I slid the veil off my head.
“She’ll do. She’s young enough to look like a child still. We’ll have her sit on the corner until she looks too old for that. Then she can work in the brothel with the others.” Her eyes watched me, but she spoke to Celso. “Same as always. Fifty a week for room and board. I take it you want the rest?”
“I will return in a month to be paid.” He held out a folded piece of white paper. Her left hand tightened around it, crinkling it. Celso grasped the back of my neck with his hand and squeezed. I hunched up my shoulders.
“I want a hundred from you by the middle of November. Anything less, and we send you to the brothel. Or if you’re lucky, you’ll work for SWINC.”
I knew I didn’t want to go to a brothel, a place for girls who were too old for sitting on the corners. When Celso let go of my neck, my shoulders slumped and my bottom lip trembled. Nothing felt like home here—the darkness didn’t soothe and calm me like at home. I was jarred by the shrieks and the hum of cars. I would have welcomed the sound of the wolf howling.
Celso turned the mule around and walked back into the street. He didn’t look at me and I didn’t say goodbye. He looked strange, out of date, as he pulled the mule behind him through the painted women. The mule was silent and calm, shuffling its way beneath the music, shouts and screams of this city. I would not miss Celso, and I didn’t want to run after him, but at that moment he was all I knew. I felt sweaty, hot and cold at the same time, and the lid above my left eye twitched.
“Well, come on then, girl,” the woman said. “Someone will show you how things work in the morning.”
I stepped into the light of the hallway and heard the barred door shut and lock behind me. Light came from a huge lamp hung in the middle of the ceiling. It glowed and glittered, casting shards of light into the hallway like sun reflecting off the spray from a waterfall. Cobwebs stretched from the lamp and shot to all corners of the room. A skittering black bug crossed a patch of oil on the ground that swirled with iridescent purples and greens. The walls were streaked with dirt and patches of rust. I followed the woman and saw a scurrying rat, its nails clicking on the cement floor, leading us down the hallway. It disappeared into a hole in the wall, a natural ending to the crack that started as a thread on the ceiling and became a fissure by the time it reached the floor. My hand moved to Jeremia’s carved violin resting against my chest. I squeezed it until my palm throbbed.
Brown doors with gouges hacked out of them like ax wounds on a tree lined the hallway. They were all closed and had only one distinguishing feature—a clear number painted on them in black.
“I’m Ofelia,” the woman said. “Your room will be thirteen—unlucky and always vacant. Between five PM and two AM, it’s off limits. I lock the doors at night, whether you’re in or not.”
When she stopped, I bumped into her soft body, which dented and then popped back into shape. She turned, put her hand out and shoved me against the wall.
“Let’s get something straight, girl.” Her teeth were brown, broken and crooked, with big gaps between them. Deep grooves that might once have been dimples lined her sunken cheeks. “You don’t touch me, ever. It’s bad enough I have to live with you freaks. I won’t be touched by you too. You pay for your room and board, and you’ll have a place to stay. As soon as you miss a week of rent, you’re on the streets. Understand?”
She unlocked the door to room 13, pushed it open and shoved me inside. She slammed the door behind me. I tried to blink away the darkness.
My eyes burned, my nose tingled, my feet ached. I wanted Nathanael, I wanted Jeremia, I wanted Eva, I wanted Ranita’s heart beating against mine. I’d never whine about my mother leaving me, I’d never complain about anything ever again, if I could just go back home. I didn’t need a mother, I didn’t need a father—I had a family who loved me. I wiped the sleeve of my sweater under my nose.
A slice of moonlight shone onto the floor from a window set high in the wall, and once my eyes adjusted I could make out two mattresses on the floor, on opposite sides of the room. A small table with three legs and stacked bricks for the other leg stood under the window. The cracks in the walls revealed the bones of this building.
Closing my hand around the violin at my neck, I brought it out of my shirt and pressed it against my cheek. The coolness of the wood soothed my hot face. I removed the real violin from my shoulders and laid it on the ground, and then I slipped my shoes off. The small sack from my mother sat lonely and small on the crooked table.
What else was I to do?
A patter of footsteps, like a child’s tiptoeing, came down the hall and stopped. I heard a soft shuffle, and something slid through the crack beneath the door. Then the footsteps retreated and a door softly closed. I picked up the piece of paper and held it up to the white light of the moon. It was a hand-drawn picture of the building, its size exaggerated and swollen between anemic buildings on either side. On the bottom of the picture were two words.
Welcome home.
I slid the picture under a mattress and then lay down, trying to calm my heart and find a way to be quiet, relaxed. I closed my eyes against the sight of the battered room, trying to find a place that soothed, but I heard rodents nibbling at something in the corner, I heard the whoosh of cars passing on the road, and I heard my heart tapping out the pattern of my life against my chest. Was this it? Was this what my life would consist of? I closed my eyes and searched for home inside my head, and slowly the nibbling became the crackle of a warm fire, the whoosh became a soft wind through the trees, and the tapping inside me became the chirp of night crickets. If I could live in my head, I would survive this place.
But this would never be my home.