I woke to a pounding on the door.
“Get up,” a voice said.
My head felt heavy from lack of sleep, and my body ached from walking for four long days, but I jerked awake because my clothes writhed against my skin. I pulled down my pants and my mother’s slip, yanked up my sweater and T-shirt and looked under my clothes. My stomach was speckled with little flat brown bugs that pinched. I slapped and scratched at them, and when the door opened, my pants were around my ankles, and heat rose to my face in a rush.
Ofelia stood in the doorway, her hands on her hips. She looked at me, then uttered a bark of a laugh.
“Bed bugs, girl. Ain’t you ever had bed bugs before? Pull your pants up before one of the boys sees you.”
I eased my T-shirt and sweater down and my pants up while willing myself not to cry, even though the tears threatened to fall any minute. I tried to breathe deeply, catching the breath that stuck in my throat, but I couldn’t find a calm place. I slid the veil over my head, concealing my burning cheeks, and followed Ofelia out the door. The bugs continued to bite, and I couldn’t think of a time I’d felt more uncomfortable—maybe chained to the ground in front of a doghouse.
None of the people in the hallway had split lips or exposed gums, nor did they have smooth, perfect features. They chattered, laughed and grumbled at each other. I wandered behind Ofelia, scratched my stomach and tried to hide beneath my veil.
“Show us what you got, girl,” said a tiny person beside me. Her head reached to my chest, but she was not a child. Her head was disproportionately big in comparison to her body, and she had breasts and hips. She crossed her arms over her chest and waited. She was the only clean person in the hallway.
I slid the veil off and kept my eyes down, focused on the material in my hands, trying to keep them from fluttering and twitching.
“I’ve seen your type pass through this place. I give you one month.”
“I’ll give her six weeks,” said a voice near my feet. I looked down and saw a boy pulling himself along on his hands. He dragged his body down the filthy hallway, dirt gathered in drifts and patches across his skin, his pant legs filled to about six inches below his torso but empty and flat where the rest of his legs should have been. “I’m an optimist,” he said.
“Don’t listen to them, dearie,” said someone from the doorway of room 8. The person was probably a woman, but it was difficult to tell, since her skin, bubbled and scarred, was stretched tight from the top of her head all the way down her neck. She was covered in burns, like the patch on Jeremia’s arm where he’d bumped into the hot soup cauldron. “I’ll bet you surprise us all and only last a night.” She merged with the rest of the residents in the hallway.
Where did people who never grew, people with shortened arms and miniature fingers, people so filthy with grime that it was part of their skin, come from? Maybe they were from Astatla, my parents’ village—I had seen a few other children there with deformities. Maybe they were the survivors from Gloriosa. Maybe they’d grown up right here, in the cardboard houses around the city where I’d seen the children with sores on their arms.
I didn’t need my veil here.
We climbed the stairs at the end of the hallway and entered an enormous common room, the floor almost as grimy as the hallway on the first floor. This room had a kitchen at one end, which consisted of a huge stove, a giant refrigerator and shelves lined with cans and boxes of foods. Lightbulbs shone naked over our heads. Two long wooden tables stretched from one end of the room to the other, and at the head of one of the tables an elderly man with no hair and wrinkled skin served breakfast. When I got closer and heard him talk, I realized that he was young in an old body. I stood in line beside the boy who had pulled himself along on the floor with his hands and picked up a bowl for me and one for him. Oatmeal was ladled into the bowls, and the old-young boy crossed his eyes, stuck out his tongue and hissed when he saw me looking at his wrinkled hands.
The boy from the hallway pulled himself up to the table and sat beside me. He was about my age—maybe a year or two older. He grinned, and big dimples appeared in his cheeks. In the last week I had met more people than I’d met in my first sixteen years of life. I knew none of them yet, but would sit with them, sleep near them, share food with them and pretend to be their friend.
“Don’t take the betting personally,” the boy said. “We always bet on the new people. I’ve never seen someone like you stay, though, and I’ve been here almost my entire life. I’m Oscar. Welcome to Purgatory Palace.” He stuck his hand out for me to shake. His lower left lip pulled down when he talked, but the rest of his mouth stayed straight.
“So, you sign up to help with breakfast, lunch and supper once a week. My specialty is pizza. They love it when I cook. We have curfew and wake-up call, but otherwise the rest of the day is yours. We can’t go back to our rooms until after two AM because the night shift works until then, but we can come here, to the common room. If you make more money than you need for Ofelia or to send home to your family, you get to keep that money. You should visit my room sometime and see all the stuff I’ve bought.”
I understood the words he said, but nothing made sense to me—the night shift, making money for Ofelia, visiting rooms. I opened my mouth, intending to ask about the night shift, but the tiny woman who’d told me to take off my veil sat down across the table from us. She looked like a child, her arms plump and short, but her face had high cheekbones beneath black, narrow eyes. Her jaw pushed forward.
“There’s one rule here,” she said, “and you’ve got to respect that rule. You never, never work someone else’s territory. You got me? You find yourself a street corner somewhere, camp out and make sure no one else has claimed that spot before you.”
The oatmeal would not go down my throat, even though I’d shoved it to the back so it wouldn’t spill out beneath my nose. I swallowed, choked and felt tears come to my eyes. A street corner, making money, staying clear of other people’s territory. I still didn’t understand what I was supposed to do.
“I’m Candela,” the woman said and stuck out her hand.
“You don’t talk?” asked Candela.
“I do,” I said a bit louder.
“You can’t just sit out there and whisper. People will ignore you.”
And that’s when my stomach came up into my mouth and I choked, even though I’d eaten very little. I couldn’t do this. All my life I’d tried to do the opposite—be quiet, try not to be noticed, blend in with blackberry bushes and oak trees—and now they wanted me to draw attention to myself. If Candela saw my tears, she pretended not to or didn’t care.
“You’ve got to get attention. How can you make people listen and give you money?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. What was required of me? That I shout like everyone else?
“I play the violin,” I said. Both Oscar and Candela lowered their shoulders and relaxed their tight mouths.
“You didn’t tell us you had a talent.”
Tears stung my nose, but I held them in. I swallowed a few bites of the oatmeal and then stood, following Candela, Oscar and the others. At the stairs, Oscar put his hand against the wall and lowered himself from side to side down each step. He pointed to the bathroom, the first door at the bottom of the stairs, and I followed Candela inside: four stalls, none of them with doors, all of them with toilets that flushed, and three sinks. Candela and I sat in the stalls and did what we needed to. I tried to pretend that this was all normal, that I wasn’t embarrassed, that I didn’t mind when people glanced at me as they walked past, that I didn’t care how sticky the toilet seat was. I felt more exposed here than I ever had in the woods, where we had relieved ourselves in a crude outhouse.
At the third sink stood two girls whose shoulders were joined together; between their bodies emerged one arm.
“Hi, Maria, hi, Selene,” Candela said to the attached girls while I kept my head down, watching the paths of grime on the floor rather than stare at people who were inseparable. I followed Candela, trying not to collide with anyone in the hallway, trying not to breathe too quickly or to gasp. Oscar met us in front of room 13.
“Bring your violin,” he said.
I stepped into the room, slung the violin over my shoulder and took a deep breath. My hands shook against my violin case and felt slick with sweat when I lowered the strap over my shoulder. Just go along—just do what they do, and everything will work out. I followed the others into the street. The door to the building closed behind us, the bars clanging like the tolling of bells.
Oscar pulled himself along the street to the right. Candela crossed the street and turned a corner. All the other people from the building wandered off in pairs or by themselves. I stood on a patch of gray cement in front of my new place of residence and watched everyone disappear. My eyes hurt. My stomach itched. I pressed the knuckle of my right hand into my eye and clutched the carved violin with my other hand.
I would not cry. I would not flutter my hands and panic, even though my understanding of the world was winging away from me. Pulling my arms in tight, pushing my elbows against my ribs, I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to imagine the world when it had made sense, when the creek gurgled at night, when the coyotes howled in the hills, when I played rummy with Eva and let her pick out the good cards from the discard stack.
After a few minutes, when I could remember the smell of trees and the sound of larks, I relaxed my arms and opened my eyes. Jeremia’s violin was around my neck and my mother’s slip warmed my legs. For now, that would have to be enough.
I stepped to the left, then to the right, not sure how to get away from the slanted building that in the daylight looked more like a dwelling for animals than for people. Yet I still would have preferred it to these unknown streets. The city shuffled around me, more noise and bustling than I’d ever experienced before. I could hear babies crying through the open windows, men and women talking to each other and older children yelling.
I trailed behind Oscar, keeping enough distance from his dragging legs that he wouldn’t see me but following closely enough that I didn’t lose him. I wanted Nathanael back. I wanted something natural—the stream with the crayfish, and the trees with the mangoes. I wanted bats flicking across the moon and Jeremia’s predictable unpredictability. It was cold here—there were no trees, no flowers, nothing green. Everything was too frantic and fast-paced. The buildings felt tenuous, as though they might fall down as soon as the people in them left.
After crossing three streets, Oscar stopped. We’d reached a cobblestone town square with a large fountain in the center. Benches, chairs and tables were grouped sociably here and there. I could see a row of chess tables set up beside a short wall against which Oscar seated himself. He didn’t rest on a blanket; he didn’t give himself any sort of comfort but instead leaned against the short stone wall that surrounded the square. He slumped precariously to the side and changed his face. The grin was gone, the dimples had disappeared, and his shoulders drooped.
Aside from us, few people were in the square. Those who did appear walked quickly across the stones, using it as a shortcut. No cars roared across the bricks. I wanted to look at the fountain, reach my hand into its cold depths, feel the texture of moving water on my skin to remind me of the pond at home, but the water sprayed in bursts, pouring from the hands of angels, and I could not allow myself to touch that beauty, to amble through the open space where people would stare or, worse yet, pretend I didn’t exist. I was tempted to untie the veil from around my neck and drape it over my head, but I could tell from Oscar’s example that our defects were to be used to our advantage when begging for money.
Four stunted trees in pots occupied the south side of the square. Oscar sat to the west, to my left. I crouched between the four trees, rested my back against one of the pots and watched. It was shaded here, filled with the slight rustling of leaves, and if I closed my eyes, I could pretend I was in the woods. Oscar sat, waiting for someone to notice him. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Jeremia here—Jeremia filling his time with nothing. He would never have rested against a wall, sat passively and hoped for money. He would have angrily pushed past anyone offering him sympathy, run back to the woods and lived with the foxes. He would have carved his way through the blandness of the stone around him, creating living sculptures of water and wind from dead rock. My fingers moved to the violin around my neck, and I held it in my hand.
A girl my age lurched to the opposite side of the square. Her body curved in a strange manner—her back twisted sideways. When she walked, she used wooden crutches and rocked from side to side. She sat against the wall on the east side of the square and placed a cup on the ground in front of her.
The light grew, became day, but seemed to be filtered through a cloud of dust. People crossed the square in a steady flow now. Most were dressed in pants, skirts and dark straight coats that were not dirty or full of holes. Some of them passed by Oscar or the girl and threw coins into the containers on the ground. Oscar spoke to the people who walked by, his hands reaching out, imploring, but from where I crouched, I couldn’t hear what he said.
I understood what I needed to do, and judging from what Oscar and the other girl did, it wouldn’t be difficult—if you were able to speak and didn’t care that what you said turned you into a carrion eater, a scavenger. I would not make fifty dollars crouched between the pots of four unhealthy trees.
My legs shook as I stood and stepped out from between the pots, joining the walking crowds. I thought the people would avoid me, glare at me, turn up their noses, but they didn’t seem to care that I had joined them. I exited the square and stood on a street corner where six roads intersected. The streets angled away from the square, curved around it, bustled with cars and pedestrians or people rolling along on the two-wheeled vehicles. The warmth of the sun began to seep through my black sweater.
No one occupied a corner of one of the streets, so I eased my way between the people and sat against a closed gray door. I kept my head down, not wanting to admit to anyone or to myself that I was about to ask for money. The violin felt good in my hands—heavy, something to occupy my time and attention. The case, a black outer shell with a crimson lining, covered the gray space in front of me, a throbbing heart against the gray stones. The violin was an answer in my hands—the key to something. I fit it beneath my chin and eased the bow over the strings.
The first few attempts to play a song came out scratchy and shaky as my fingers warmed up, but soon the tune smoothed, and I heard the sound of larks singing at dusk. I was able to make my way back to the trees. I played the song of Whisper and closed my eyes to the chaos and confusion around me.
The sun shone high and bright, having consumed half the day when I finally lowered the violin and straightened my shoulders. My neck cracked when I tilted it back, and as I opened my eyes, the canopy of trees from my home in the woods, the song of the crickets and the aroma of the hibiscus faded like a rainbow.
Coins of various shapes, silver and copper, lay on the crimson cloth. I lifted one of these coins between my fingers. It was a thin metal disk with the head of a man on the front and a sheaf of grain on the back. I didn’t know what to do with it, what it meant. Was this enough money to pay the rent? Did I have more than the rent—something for Celso? I should have spent more time with Nathanael’s money, understanding its value.
I collected the coins and slid them into one of the pockets of my sweater, where they weighed down the material and felt satisfying. I slid my violin into its case, nestling it against the red cloth, and stood. When I raised my head, I looked into the eyes of a man.
He was young and had a thin smile broken by sharp eyeteeth. His face was rough, with hair that grew in uneven bursts. I thought of a skunk with its pointed face and secret weapon.
“Hey, ugly,” he said. “We’ve been watching you.” He jerked his head. I looked across the street and saw two more men standing on the corner. Their waxy skin matched the washedout gray of the stones that made up the buildings and streets—they looked like they’d stepped from the very walls themselves. Black cars skittered like roaring bugs in the street, but I could see the hunched shoulders and thick necks of the men from where I stood.
“And because you’re new to the city and don’t know the rules around here, we’ll take it easy on you this time.”
I covered my sweater pocket with my hand.
“You want to use our street corner, you have to pay for it. If you decide not to pay, we take all of your money and a little something else.”
He looked at my body. His eyeteeth settled on his bottom lip, and the whites of his eyes looked bloodied and bruised. The palm of my hand became clammy against the coins. The people who walked by avoided my eyes—they were all busy.
I didn’t know how much money weighed down my pocket, but the coins were mine—he would get none of them. I shook my head.
He raised his eyebrows and then whistled a quick, high note. The two men moved away from the gray walls and stepped into the street, walking across without pausing. One was tall, with hunched shoulders and hair that floated in stringy wisps and curls about his head. The other was shorter, with thick arms that he held away from his body. They didn’t look to their right or left to avoid the cars but marched across, their strides long and confident, the cars swerving around them and honking like geese.
My back turned hot and cold at the same time. I thought about Belen’s hand slapping me across the face and his boot kicking me in the side. I thought of Celso tying me to a tree with a mule.
Just before the men reached us, a man with a long, heavy coat brushed against me. He said, “Excuse me,” stepped into the street to get around the eyetooth man and then stepped back onto the walkway. I reached for his wrist and whispered, “Please.”
He looked at me, flinched when he saw my face and then glanced at the three men around me. He backed away, yanking his arm from my grasp, and then he ran.
“People know us,” said the first man. His smile evaporated, his face more narrow and skunk-like than before. “No one will help you. Now we need all the money, and if you give it to us without argument, we won’t make you pay in other ways.” The two men stepped closer, their smell caustic and biting, like marsh cabbage.
“I need this,” I whispered.
“I don’t give a shit,” he whispered back and then laughed. The two men behind him laughed with him.
“Let’s give this a try,” said the man with the thick arms. He stepped around the leader. I held my hand over my pocket and tried to back away, but before I could step beyond his reach, a fist landed in my stomach, knocking the air out of me, and I curled up, gasping.
The first man reached into my pocket and pulled out the coins. I looked at his shoes—black, pointed, the material patterned in diamonds, like snakeskin. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes and darkened the gray cement in splotches.
“I’ll let you keep one as a reminder of what you’ll lose if you refuse to pay us.” And then they were gone, back across the street, stopping the flow of cars.
I sat down on the cement and tried to catch my breath. Each of my lives seemed to grow shorter and sink lower. How low could a life go? Lower than the earth, lower than the worms, lower than death. When I was able to stand erect and breathe, I didn’t feel like crying anymore. I was done crying. Now I would merely exist.
We couldn’t return to our rooms until 2:00 AM. I didn’t know why I couldn’t return until then, I didn’t know how to figure out if it was 2:00 AM, and I didn’t dare go to the common room in case I was the only one there, so I wandered.
People in the city were always talking to someone, yelling across the street, speaking into cell phones. People in the cars called out of the windows and honked horns, their anger palpable even where I walked. The buildings were all crooked, ragged and cracked, with laundry strung across them and between them. I kept my head down and felt more lonely here than I had when chained to the doghouse. Sometimes it is worse to be noticed. Nathanael might have been right in some circumstances, but here I felt like vapor, like smoke, like a shadow that might as well not exist. People brushed against me, bumped into my shoulder, stepped on the heel of my shoe, but no one looked at me or said sorry. The only proof of my existence was the muffled sound of my shoes scuffing against the hard ground.
Everywhere I turned, someone with crooked limbs, distorted features or missing body parts sat with a hat, jar or can in front of them. So many of us. What was wrong with this world that so many human beings were distorted in some way? I stood in the middle of a bridge that rose above the river like a rainbow arch, and on that bridge I saw three beggars, all seated on the cold ground, calling out for money. I returned the way I’d come.
I walked until fewer and fewer people passed me, until the buildings shrank in size, more and more houses appeared and every now and then I passed a square of grass, vibrant and alive. The buildings felt substantial here, rectangular, individual, upright houses painted solid colors. They weren’t built on top of each other precariously but stood alone, well cared for.
I stopped at a patch of green that stretched like a surprise meadow in front of me. The open space bustled with shrieking children, benches lined the walkways, and a pond with lily pads rippled with the slight wind. It was as though all the green growth in the city had fled to this one spot, an oasis in the desert of manmade structures. A sign in the middle of the grass said Hernando Park.
I walked to the pond as quietly as I could, glancing beside me now and then to see if anyone followed or rushed at me, shouting that I had to leave. It was the first time since coming here that I had smelled green leaves, earth and flowers—it was the first time I could picture my camp in the woods without having to close my eyes and squeeze out a memory. This was where I would collect myself and get rid of the panicked feeling I’d had since arriving in the city.
An elderly woman holding a cane occupied one of the benches next to the pond. Her eyes were closed and her head was leaned back, the hazy sun warming her face. I sat two benches away. My feet ached from all the walking, and my back groaned with relief when I sat. While orange and white fish flashed through the water in the pond, I pressed my hand where the man had forced the air out of me.
As I closed my eyes, ready to dream myself back home, I heard music—real music, played with fingers and strings, not music squeezed through a radio speaker and interwoven with static. I stood, looked around and hobbled on sore feet to a small grove of trees. Willow trees, the branches long and feathery, guarded the sides of the creek like hunched osprey, the branches dangling over a stream that trickled through the park. Underneath the branches I saw four musicians, three of them seated on folding chairs. One played a violin, one played a larger violin, one played a much larger instrument that he leaned against the ground and held between his legs, and the last played a violin so huge she had to stand up to play it.
The music pulled me back to my camp, to running through the grasses, to a warm fire and laughter. I untied my veil from around my neck and adjusted it over my head. I crept to the other side of the tree and sat on the roots, my back rubbing against the rough bark. I breathed in the beauty of the music—the lightness of the high notes, the sureness of the middle notes, the groans of the lowest notes. There was a wholeness to the music that I never heard when I played by myself.
I dreamed of dark nights by the fire, coyotes creeping just outside our camp circle of warmth, wolves howling up on the hills. Even the smell of this green area seemed right—woods, water, earth. If I had music to warm me, it would be enough.
When the music stopped, I opened my eyes. The musicians shuffled their instruments into cases. They talked and laughed. I didn’t belong—not here, in this place where rejects sat on corners and begged for money. I felt self-conscious and unworthy. Someone would come along and command me to leave any minute now. When I’d listened to the music, I had felt like a part of something—a beauty that included even me—but now I was again nothing, and if I disappeared, only Celso would care, because he wouldn’t get his money.
As I walked away from the park and back to my new residence, I saw three others like me, one walking with crutches, one limping and one looking down at her feet. All of their shoulders were hunched, trying to conceal the disfiguration that tainted them. I followed them back to the neighborhood where the building with the barred windows leaned toward the dilapidated building next to it. It wasn’t dark yet. I wasn’t supposed to return to my room, but I didn’t know where else to go, and my hands felt stiff and useless as I tucked them under my armpits.
But the doors were open, and I walked inside. I felt a bit of warmth and shook off the cold that had followed me down the street. I walked to room 13, opened the door, closed it softly behind me and then shut my eyes. In the middle of the room I lifted up my arms, raised them so they stretched straight from my body on either side, and tilted my head back. In my head I heard the instruments with their individual melody lines, and I let them ring.