The tree, a royal poinciana—normally a garish explosion of scarlet blooms—was most definitely dead, though it would be hard to discern its state at first glance. Miniature shoes festooned its scrabbled crescent of branches, each one painted red. “Painted” might not be correct—each shoe appeared as though it had been submerged in carmine paint. A plaque nailed to the trunk read Trae ofrendas a la bruja, lo que proporcionará para el futuro, which did not instill in me great confidence in either the veracity or the sanity of Old Vesta. The tiny white stucco villa, windows clad in ironwork, showed a small hand-painted tile set in the plaster by the front door: a hand, palm out, surmounted by the stylized representation of an eye. Had I been someone prone to seeing omens in the rising of exhaust smoke, cloud formations—or signs at old ladies’ doors—I would have considered the tile to be quite prophetic.
Holding the bottle of wine I’d bought at a nearby market, I approached the front door and before I could knock, it opened and a voice said, “Don’t stand there waiting, come in. Come in.”
I pushed into the darkened house and found myself standing before an apple-faced woman of such advanced age, guessing her number of years would be folly. She had merry dark eyes, rugose skin as though she had spent many years of her life outside in the wind and sun, and terrible posture from the weight of age. Her laugh lines were like arroyos carved from a river that stopped flowing a millennium ago, giving her a sort of wounded dignity. Her hair was magnificent. It was ghost-white with no hint of any other color and possessed of a volume and length equal to her age.
She accepted the bottle of wine then went into the kitchen and returned with a single ceramic cup. She sat at a small linoleum table in a dissected spill of light from the barred window in a small, shabby dining area, removed the cork, and poured herself a measure of wine. She stoppered the bottle and tucked it beneath her chair, easy to hand.
“Well,” she said. “What do you want?”
“I am looking for a woman,” I said.
“No, you’re not,” she said.
“Well, her family,” I said.
She took a drink and smacked her lips afterward. “Who is she, then?”
“A woman named Nivia Campos. She would’ve been born sometime around the end of the war, early to mid-forties. She moved to Santaverde at some point to marry.”
“And you think she might have come back home? Here?”
“No,” I said. “But I need to find her family.”
“What is the name of the man she married?”
I thought for a while. Finally, seeing no reason to hide it, I said, “Avendaño.”
Old Vesta coughed up a phlegmy laugh and jabbed a finger at my chest. “Yes, yes!” Her hands were twisted by arthritis. “I knew that already. I just wanted to hear you admit it.”
She drank more of her wine and then looked out the window at the street beyond. It was a poor area, but clean, the houses and dwellings well tended by owners and tenants.
“You know about the shoes, do you?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t want to—”
“I was married once. Can you believe that? Me?” she said. “Lost five children, the first to influenza, and the rest stillborn.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The wrinkles on her face took on strange contortions. Possibly she was outraged, possibly annoyed. “Why are you sorry?” she said. “You had nothing to do with it.”
“I’m sorry that you lost someone you loved.”
“Love,” she said, ineffably tired. “I don’t even know if I have ever loved anything. You can’t love what you’ve never held. And the babies—” She stopped. “I never held them.”
“But the one that died of influenza?” I said. How did I get into this conversation with her? About her long-dead children? I thought.
“I was fifteen,” she said. She waved her hand at the villa’s walls. “This city wasn’t even here then.” Another long drink, her throat working beneath wattles. She took the bottle from the floor, popped the cork, refilled her cup, stoppered the bottle, slipped it back under her chair. “I don’t think a fifteen-year-old can love anything but herself. I remember the image of me with the baby, like a photograph. Ernesto. I can see it in my mind, I’m outside and wearing a scarf, there’s a sugarcane field behind me. I’m squinting because the sun is bright. Tired. Very tired and look like I haven’t slept from the crying. The very picture of motherhood. But I don’t remember love,” she said. Another slurp of wine, another smacking of the lips. “This world doesn’t care for us.”
Despite the sun, it seemed colder in the room.
“They started bringing me shoes, shortly after. I don’t know who. To torture me, maybe. My husband beat me. I stopped going to church. Because why? Why should I pray? They started calling me ‘bruja’ and eventually, maybe, that’s what I became.” Her face settled into a mask. I saw that her laugh lines really weren’t from laughter, after all. Her craggy lips drew back with her next swallow of wine, showing a hint of carious-black teeth. A woman who had let hate fill her as if she were an empty glass with no cracks. “They come at night when I’m sleeping, and put their children’s shoes in the tree. I take them down.” She placed both hands on the tabletop and pushed herself up, tottered over to a cabinet, opened it, and withdrew two pairs of baby shoes. “I take them down, see? Little shoes for little babies. I hold them in my hands. They have never taken a step. The babies, they cannot walk. The shoes are useless, except for fortune-telling.” A drink of wine and then smacking. “When I’m ready, I dip them in the paint and hang them back up, with a fortune inside written on a slip of paper. ‘She will marry rich,’ I say sometimes, or ‘Disease will take her.’ Sometimes I’ll write ‘He will be a disgrace, and break your heart,’ or ‘Never trust this one, the devil slipped in.’ Sometimes I’ll just write one word, like ‘Police’ or ‘Whore,’ and let them work out what it will mean. The world does not care for us. Why should I care for them?”
Why indeed, I thought. A parent looking at a little girl, thinking they can never trust her. A boy who is always expected to do wrong. An old woman who was hurt, and tortured, and had the capacity for love burned from her. Perhaps just as important, why should I care?
And then I thought about Avendaño, when he said, full of good-natured mischievousness, Misery is a condition that we are all promised. On the screen, painted in light, that misery is very small. Little witches! Next time, we will go see wrestlers fighting vampires and maybe you’ll understand. I missed him then, desperately.
“Nivia Campos,” I said. “You know her people? Her family?”
Old Vesta’s eyes hardened, and she pursed her lips. “I will give you no answer without knowing one thing,” she said.
There are holes in the world, spewing out darkness, covering up hope. One of these holes was Old Vesta’s rotten mouth.
“All right,” I said.
“Who told you of me?” she asked.
There was no hesitation on my part. To what end? Protecting a man I didn’t know? From an old, miserable woman? “The bartender at Piñon Cervecería. Good-looking. Likes books.”
She tightened her jaw. “You’re looking for Jorge Campos. Nivia Campos’s brother. He lives on Boulevard Agustín Garzón, near where it ends at the university. White house, blue shutters. Red tile roof.”
White, blue, red. I stood up. “Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “I appreciate it.” I didn’t try to make any more pleasantries. I moved to the door and had it open, the street in sight.
“Don’t you want me to tell your fortune?” she said, smiling. Her eyes were terrible. “It’s very good wine. I like the looks of you.”
“I’ll make my own fortune,” I said. But I didn’t turn and flee. Her hard, tight gaze held me in place.
“You will never be happy,” she said. Her voice had changed. It was empty of hate, empty of glee. It was simply dead, with less feeling than Odysseus’s mother, Anticlea, in the underworld. “Your purpose is folly. But you may find justice.”
Avendaño would have sorted this old bag out. But Avendaño was not here, and that’s why I was. I set my jaw. “I’ve got a fortune for you,” I said. I walked back into her dining room and approached the table. Standing above her, I took her cup and drained the wine to the dregs. I had paid for it, after all. “When you die, you won’t know peace. You’ll writhe in your grave. For a hundred years, the sons and daughters of Córdoba will curse your name. And then you’ll be forgotten.” I dropped the cup on the table, where it clattered, spattering the surface with a fine spray of wine droplets. It bounced once, twice, without breaking, and then spun to a stop. It seemed so loud in her small dining room. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Good wine.”
Old Vesta began to wheeze laughter, a high, dry sound like dust whipped down roads by wind from the Andes.
“No one ever knows peace, little girl,” she said. She pulled the wine bottle from under her chair, popped the cork, and tossed it at my feet. She took a long drink from the bottle. “And every goddamned soul is forgotten.” She stood. “Now go. Go find your desaparecidos, if you can.”
* * *
The home of Jorge Campos was a tidy affair, ringed in planters with thick, oily-leaved vegetation I could not recognize. I went to the shop across the street and bought a Fanta and drank it under the awning near my Yamaha. It was so sweet, I felt the fuzzy divergent sensations of a sugar rush and the soporific of a heavy dessert. There was no traffic to or near the house, so I tucked my helmet under my arm and crossed the street, letting myself into the waist-high walled yard through a metal gate, up the steps to the shaded patio with the multifarious and waxy-looking plants, and knocked on the door.
It pushed slightly open, as if it had not been latched properly.
Light washed into the home’s interior, revealing a hallway with arched doors and dark-stained wooden floors. On a credenza stood once-lovely purple sprays of lupinus flowers, now flaccid and dropping petals onto the floor.
“Hello?” I said. “Jorge Campos?”
I am as sensitive to situation and intuition as any person. The idea that academics—especially female academics—are cloistered ascetics that retreat from the real world to content themselves only with books is nonsense.
All of that was to say: Something was very wrong here. I pushed open the door and walked inside, listening. I called out again. Nothing. After a few moments, my eyes adjusted to the dimmer light and it was unsatisfyingly cool in the house. My body responded to the temperature change; every follicle firmed and prickled, my hairs standing on end. I tried to concentrate on the ambient noise of the house, if I could discern any movement by sound alone, but I was distracted by the cloying aftertaste of the Fanta I’d drunk outside and the odd scent that hung in the still air. I walked down the hallway, looking into a formal dining room, another room with a television and record player and many seats. The Camposes were wealthy; it was a large house with many rooms. All of them empty. So far.
I pushed through a knobless swinging door into a large sun-drenched area, copper pots strung from a center ceiling rack, wood chopping block. Tile counters and cabinets.
He was maybe eight or nine, lying on the floor of the kitchen, shot in the head. The blood around him had dried and turned black and tacky. His skin, gray-blue. Flies had begun to gather, not too many, but there were enough, feasting at the corners of his mouth and in the wet surfaces of his open eyes. A man lay in the opening of a doorway to a hall leading back into the center of the house. He’d been running, maybe, toward the kitchen. One arm out in panic when he was shot.
I stopped, terrified. It was hard to hold it all in my head. I felt as though I was a water droplet spattered on a hot skillet, the aggressive boil sending it careening around the cast-iron surface until it’s gone, evaporated. I should call the police, I thought. I could not look at the boy, so I found myself staring blankly at the man. As he was facedown, his back pockets were easily accessible and the one on the right had a distinct bulge. Avoiding the blood, I withdrew his wallet and identification card. The flies took flight from his face, agitated. Jorge Campos.
They did not even look like people. With nothing animating them—not breath, not the subtle yet very real pulse of blood through artery, vein, and capillary—they seemed carved from some soft foreign material. He’d fallen forward in his bolt for the kitchen—whoever had killed him must have been holding his son—and his head had turned sideways with the death-fall, arm outstretched. His mouth was open, as if he’d been bellowing something. But there was something more, something strange about his mouth.
I bent again and gingerly worked my index finger and thumb between his lips. As my skin encountered the ivory of his teeth, I felt an unreasoning fear that at any moment they would close viciously. A dead man biting. Some malicious chemical spark left in the meat of the fallen. I drew my hand away. A puff of foul air emanated from him. The churning posthumous gas of his gut, erupting. I coughed, gagging.
I knelt carefully, avoiding the blood. There was something there, I was sure. I extended my hand again. From his mouth, I withdrew a piece of torn paper. Yellow, and discolored at the edges from the man’s death molt.
-19.569912, -70.197901
Isabel