Refuge Read online

  She must have slept. When she lifted the window shade hours later, the farms had disappeared. Instead, a wide, sprawling river tugged the train along as if it were snagged in its wake.

  “Ol’ Miss,” the young porter said. She’d seen porters like him at the station in Chicago, but this man looked her right in the eye. So when she happened upon him later in the space between the cars, staring out over the backyards the train was lumbering through, she didn’t lower her eyes and hurry on as she might have done just a day before.

  “Where are we?” she shouted over the pulsing of the wind.

  “Home,” he shouted back.

  “You live here?” She nodded toward the slow-moving spectacle of old men on back stoops, young men in netted undershirts propping up doorframes, women pulling in laundry, raising their hands to hollering children who scurried like small animals around corners, down hardpan lanes.

  He shook his head and mouthed, “Chicago. But it’s the same, no matter where.”

  He threw her a smile and she tossed one back. “No, it’s not.”

  Through the second day, the land flattened, taking on the colour of sulphur powders, emptying, too, until it was scrubbed clean of houses, of people, animals, trees, any living thing. She stood on the narrow balcony that hung off the back of the train and watched the tracks disappear into the horizon, a neat stitching across bared skin.

  She put her hand to her neck, to the curve of bone her father had carved for her the year she turned ten. It had the shape of a teardrop, although it felt like a wing. “What is it?” she’d asked as he knotted the leather lace around her neck, and he’d said, “What do you want it to be?”

  The strangeness of the landscape seemed to require something of her. She reached up to her hair and pulled the pins from the French twist she’d worn since her first day of nursing, when the superintendent had declared, “It is wild and unmanageable any other way.” The wind lifted the strands and whipped them across her face, stinging her cheeks, catching in the corners of her eyes, blinding her until she saw exactly what to do. She rushed to her seat, dug her scissors from her travelling bag, and in the tiny, rocking toilet, pulled the tangled waves taut, snipped them just below her ear.

  “That’s better,” she said to the fist-sized mirror screwed to the wall. “Now we’ll see what we can see.”

  She couldn’t bear to sit. She walked the train end to end, through the Pullmans to the parlour car at the back, then up to the front again, never stopping, as if her effort alone would get them all where they needed to go. She matched her stride to the sound of the wheels, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, the passing poles a hi-hat cymbal, a syncopated swooosh-swooosh-swooosh that rose to a crescendo as she stepped between the cars, muted swiftly when she pulled the doors to.

  Her blood pulsed to the train-wheel thrum and songs lifted to her lips, snags of ragtime tunes she and Helen would sing when they were happy or sad or too exhausted to speak, cranking up the Victrola, rolling down their stockings, wailing the words that rose from her footsteps as she paced the train up and down. I won’t say that I will, and I won’t say that I won’t. ’Tain’t nobody’s bizness if I do.

  Everyone was singing. Who could help it? Mothers mouthed silly ditties as they bounced babies on their laps. Young men back from the Great War — she could tell by the cocky look in their shadowy eyes, by the way their suits hung on their gaunt frames as they draped themselves over the seats — harmonized songs without words, or so it seemed to her, for their voices lowered as she passed, paused for a laugh or a whistle, then picked up again as she moved farther down the coach.

  In the last car, a sprawl of dusky men covered the seats through the day, though when she got up, restless in the night, to walk the dim and silent aisles, they were the only ones awake, their guitars, drumsticks, and horns released from the luggage racks, raised to fingers and lips, taking as their bass beat the steady rhythm of the train. Toot, toot, Tootsie, goodbye. All through the second night, she leaned in the space between the cars and listened to the band rehearse, tapping her feet to the jazzy numbers, singing with all her heart There’ll be some changes made, the train’s whistle a cornet’s riff, urging her on.

  At San Antonio, the band got off, but Texas went on forever, the towns not much more than a row of squat, squared buildings making a beeline for the brown smudge of grassland at the end of the solitary street. The terrain had a hasty, unfinished look: people hunkered down in the middle of that vastness, no sheltering valleys, no shading trees, no reason for the train to do anything but what it did — bowl on through without so much as slowing down.

  The temperature warmed steadily. She’d taken Helen’s advice and left her coat at home, although it was mid-October. People had stared as she’d stepped onto the train in her navy silk dress, only a light shawl over her shoulders against the early snow. Now, she stood at her post between the cars, the sun hot on her face as she watched for some alteration in the landscape, some sign other than the quiver inside her that she was nearing the edge of all that she knew.

  At Laredo, the American customs agents strolled through, asking in a friendly way, as if they were next-door neighbours, where the passengers were from, where they were going, and why. She gave a simple answer — on her way to visit Helen Klassen, her friend from nursing school — which seemed to satisfy them, although as soon as they moved on, she had the urge to call out, But wait! It’s so much more!

  The agents sealed the train, then it slow-steamed off the cliffs of Texas onto the bridge that spanned a wide red chasm. She looked down at the thin stream meandering east toward the sea, living its double life, Rio Grande to the Americans, and to the Mexicans, Rio Bravo del Norte, brave river of the north, which made her laugh out loud — it was all so cock-eyed, so easy.

  On the Mexican side, the train stopped and she inched through the dining car with the others, shuffling forward, sweat glistening on her upper lip as she opened her passport before the foreign officials, trim, handsome men who did not return her smile, just took her documents without looking up, as if the armed guards at their sides were there as much to keep them to their task as to stop the felons and forgers, the rebels and runaways from slipping across their border.

  Stepping down from the suffocating customs car was like stepping out of purgatory into paradise. Women in brightly coloured shawls and long, flounced skirts milled among the passengers, holding up flattened palms heaped with rounds of cheese, slices of strange unnamed fruits in pastel colours of sun-yellow, rose, a warm chartreuse. A beautiful, slender man wearing a tall straw hat and garlands of garlic around his neck waved fistfuls of bulbs in the air. Along the edge of the platform, striped blankets were heaped with pottery bowls and baskets. Here and there, a girl squatted by a brazier, poking at bits of meat browning over the coals. Everyone was calling at the tops of their lungs in a language she couldn’t understand, although she desperately wanted to, wanted to be part of the swirling crowd, not taken for one of the Americans who stood like marooned islands, their baggage clustered at their feet as they tried to hail one of the boys who were heaving trunks to their heads, running for the customs shed as if this were games day and they might win a prize.

  She set off in a direction all her own. The rising food smells stirred her belly after her fast of apples and cheese. In a complicated barter carried out entirely with hand signals, she gave a young girl her hair clasp in exchange for some well-roasted meat on a leaf. She ate with her fingers as she wandered through the multitudes, her senses pricked to the unfamiliar smells, the strangely musical chatter, the faces with their rounded shape and flattened features, their sun-browned skin. She felt strangely distinct, as if her outline were drawn in sharp pencil. At the same time, she felt herself invisible, anonymous, immune to the stares of others. The meat in her mouth tasted odd — spicy yet sweet. She thought of sharing all this with Helen, how they would make each other laugh. Then another tho
ught rose to take its place: how glad she was to be alone, free to make her own way.

  In confusion, she turned toward the customs shed, which was at some distance now. The lineup had thinned to almost nothing. She hurried back in the direction she’d come, pushing past the vendors who waved their wares in her face. She reclaimed her suitcase from the officials, who smiled broadly at her now, offering incomprehensible salutations and bowing deeply as she stepped, the last passenger, onto the train.

  ~

  Texas was barren; Mexico, a slate wiped clean by heat. A world moulded from a single substance — the people, the houses, desert cacti, even the twilit sky, all the colour of baked clay, of virgin stone.

  The train slowed as it climbed onto the plateau of the Sierra Madre. Then the dusty plain gave way to patchy woodlands and open fields. At the first village, the engine throttled to a crawl. She had taken her usual place on the platform between two cars; otherwise, she might have missed the dark-limbed tree by the rail bed, its branches hanging with clumps of flowers or fruits that glowed russet in the dusk. She was marvelling at the strangeness when, in the wake of the engine’s passing, the clusters broke apart and took flight, thousands upon thousands of butterflies twirling through the train’s backdraft onto the platform where she stood. They landed on her arms, her dress, her hair, a mantle of flaming wings that hinged open and closed, winking their bright secrets. Then, as suddenly as they had landed, they caught the breeze and lifted.

  She leaned out into the gap as they soared away on the updraft.

  “Cuidado, señorita!”

  She felt a hand on her elbow. The voice sounded young, although when she turned with reluctance, she could see the man’s hair was lit with silver. He gestured upward, as if to gather the last of the butterflies in his hands, keep them safe.

  “Las mariposas, they are beautiful, yes? To the ancients, these butterflies were sacred. The souls of warriors killed in battle, of mothers who died as they gave birth.”

  She watched the flickering cloud drift out of sight. “I’ve never seen so many monarchs in one place.”

  He bowed slightly and extended his hand. “Don Arturo Arcadio Alves dos Santos. This is your first visit to Mexico?”

  Something in his manner made her conscious of how she was standing, feet apart as she struggled to hold her balance against the rollicking train. She blushed.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You will be transformed,” he said, taking the hand she offered. “As will we.”

  ~

  He led her through the vaulted entrance and into the courtyard, setting off such a chaos of trilling, chirring, and warbling from the birds in the bamboo cages nestled among the shrubberies that she almost missed the click of a beaded curtain as it was pushed aside by a small brown woman hastily wiping her hands on her dress and trilling too.

  “¡Don Arturo! ¡Bienvenido!”

  Perhaps it was the long dark skirt or the floury hands that made her think of the aunts, all the women who had come bustling out of kitchens toward her, smelling faintly of sweat and onions. The birds continued to shriek as the sun beat down and Don Arturo and Adela carried on in a language she had never heard before, but even so, she felt at ease.

  Don Arturo’s house was nothing at all like the farm at Newbliss, which pleased her to no end. Every room opened onto the courtyard at the centre. A kitchen and servants’ quarters took up one side, and across from them, the library, a dining room, and the living room — the sala, Don Arturo called it. His private apartment was on the third side of the square, and opposite that was her suite: a sitting room on the main floor, and upstairs, a bedroom with a narrow balcony that overlooked the aviaries. There was a bathroom with a toilet in its own closet and a dressing room with a light well and a large cupboard for her clothes. Don Arturo offered storage for her luggage elsewhere in the house, but she said no, she would keep her valise with her, and she placed it in the clothes cupboard with her skirt, her few blouses, and a change of shoes, possessions that, when she laid them out on the shelves, seemed spare and prudent.

  She emptied her handbag, setting Terry’s Guide to Mexico on the bedside table with her notebook and the fountain pen she’d bought for the trip. The notebook was black, the same size and shape as the ones her father had filled with his questions and observations. When she left for nurses’ training, she’d asked May if she could take one of her father’s with her as a talisman. “Leave them,” May said. “That way you’ll always know where they are.” But on her last visit, when May was busy in the barn, she’d eased a single volume from the bookcase, running her fingers along the spines to close the gap.

  She lifted the book now from the bottom of her bag and held it square in her lap, her hand flat against the cover as if it were a Bible and she was about to swear a truth, or as if the words her father had written might rise up through the thin cardboard, through the skin of her palm into her veins, inoculating her with whatever she would need to find her way in this strange place.

  Only death is constant, her father wrote. Life is change, and change works ever to the good.

  ~

  She saw Mexico City in those first days as if drunk on champagne, dazed and light-headed, her eardrums fluttering. The altitude, Don Arturo said. Every morning they climbed into the long Buick touring car and Ramón drove them through the narrow streets to the sights Arturo had arranged for her to see.

  Chapultepec Park. The zócalo and the cathedral built over Aztec ruins. The Palacio de Bellas Artes and the San Carlos Picture Gallery, where he showed her paintings by Rubens, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci as well as the great Spanish artist Murillo and Mexican painters whose canvases flowed together in an unbroken image of conquest and pain. She sat on the edge of her seat, her forehead bared to the breeze, taking it all in.

  “I’d like to walk,” she said to Don Arturo.

  “As you wish,” he cautioned. “But only in the light of day.”

  She crossed the little plaza, took the first right and circled the block, then down a street and circled again, rippling out from the faded pink mansion until she knew her way. In an open-air market, she watched women weaving brightly coloured cloth on looms tied around their backs; young men twisting twigs into cages for the parrots tethered by one foot to spindly trees; children cutting mangoes into the shape of flowers. She nibbled honeycomb broken from a slab still crawling with bees, ate thin slices of sweet potato deep-fried in a cut-down oil drum and drizzled with freshly squeezed lime.

  The heat had such presence, was so palpable on her skin, that she almost expected it to have its own colour, shape, and texture, its own high-pitched sound. She had never felt anything like it, except perhaps standing in front of the hospital incinerator, tossing in the blood-soaked wrappings of the patients on her ward. She felt she could be consumed by this heat, too, in some breathless, rapturous way. As she moved, it licked the moisture out of her, dampening her camisole, her undergarments, tracing dark rings under her arms, fingering a line down the small of her back.

  The next day, she bought a straw hat and a fan of carved wood and white lace, and set out again. The closer she moved toward the city centre, the more agitated the streets became. The sidewalks were an obstacle course of mounded fruit and glowing braziers, scurrying water-carriers and porters, parrots shrieking, vendors hawking, mongrels giving birth, men and women offering to shine her shoes, massage her scalp, find her future in the peckings of a blue-grey bird.

  She picked her way through it all, an explorer in an untamed jungle. Only the beggars unsettled her, clutching at her skirt, pointing to their sores, their mangled limbs, their mutilated children. She emptied her pockets for them, which only lured more children from the alleyways until she was surrounded, hemmed in by their deformed and festering flesh.

  “Why doesn’t someone help them?” she demanded of Don Arturo.

  “It is not as it seems,” Don Art
uro said calmly. “Little in life is.” They were sitting across from each other near the centre of the long table, candles jabbing at the darkness between them as they ate. “This is how they choose to earn their living.”

  “But people pass by without even looking at them. I don’t understand.”

  “You will,” he said, “in time.”

  The days gathered into a week, then two. In the mornings, she took her café and bolillo with Don Arturo in the courtyard. When he went off to work, she wandered the streets, stopping at small cantinas or eating beans and shredded vegetables heaped on a tortilla that she bought from a sidewalk stall. Helen, in her letters, had warned her not to drink the water, to avoid butter and milk, lettuce and shellfish, fruits that couldn’t be peeled, but she set her friend’s advice aside and made her own rules. She ordered the cheapest dishes, a different one each day, until she understood that moros y cristianos was simply black beans and rice, and huevos divorciados, nothing more than two eggs, sunny-side up, one smothered in green sauce, the other in red.

  In the evenings, she was glad to see him. He asked about her adventures, what she’d seen, where she’d been, inserting Spanish words into their conversation and encouraging her to repeat the clipped consonants and soft vowels for which she found she had a strange affinity.

  “What is the word for eye? Scab? Infection?” she’d ask, then watch his pale lips move through the words, reciting after him, loving the feel of the syllables on her tongue, cream to the crisp edges of the English they spoke.