T. Boyle - The Women

They put up at the Coamo Inn, 45which featured hot-sulfur springs and endless plates of beans and rice and platanos graced with a skewer of marinated goat or pork, they bathed in the mornings and took long drives in the afternoons, and each day he joked and paraded up and down the patio in his bathing costume, keeping up the pretense that this was just what Olgivanna needed. Was she improving? Not visibly. Not that he could see. He hired a woman to look after the baby, had their meals brought to them in their rooms, read aloud to her and Svetlana at night. It was restful, almost like a vacation. But it wasn’t a vacation, it was exile, and they both knew it.

Beneath the shimmering surface, beneath the glaze of the banana plants, the primavera aflame with blood-red blooms and the nocturnal perfume of the jasmine, the place was corrupt in the way of the tropics, deeply wanting, a reverse image of Wisconsin. At night the mosquitoes descended like a black rain. There were open sewers. Emaciated dogs skulked in the shadows and roaches the size of field mice clung to the ceilings and clattered beneath the bed. “We are living like the Gypsies, Frank,” Olgivanna kept telling him, something harsh in her tone he’d never registered before, the tan on her cheeks like rouge on a corpse, her limbs thin as the stalks of sugarcane greening in the fields, “and I cannot have one degree of peace until I am home where I belong. And Svetlana — what of Svetlana? She must have a proper life. She must have schooling — you can see that. And this is no country for her. It is a poor place. It saddens me to have to be here and see these degraded people in their rags.”

“This is their home,” he countered, though he privately agreed with her. If only Puerto Rico could exist, like a kind of paradise, without the people. “This is the only thing they know.”

Her voice was thick, a lashing of blunted consonants. “Yes, but I do not want to know it.”

They lasted a month. On the final day, the day before they booked passage to New York and from there to Chicago, Madison and Spring Green, come what may, he was on his way back from the plaza when he was startled to see a man on horseback leaning forward to shout something unintelligible into the low casement windows of the hotel kitchen. He was very dark-skinned, this man — almost black — and for one crashing irremediable moment the image of Carleton 46came into his mind, Carleton as he would have been in middle age, and he pulled up short. There was a rising fecal odor. A pair of electric-green dragonflies settled in a puddle and chased away again. The man’s horse rocked in place, so twisted and starved it was like the ghost of a horse, its eyes vacant and its coat dulled with the dust of travel, and he saw now that the man had something cradled in one arm — a chicken bound up in a scrap of torn red cloth. “Gallina,” the man was shouting, “se vende una gallina. Muy barata.”

There was the sound of clattering pans from the kitchen. No one responded.

If it hadn’t been for the light, the way it etched the geometry of the near wall and sliced into the angles of the outbuilding as if to create something new altogether, something fluid and independent of concrete block and stucco, something created entirely by the sun in that moment, he would have moved on — he was in a hurry, arrangements to be made, suitcases to be packed, lawyers to be consulted and retained by wire and some sort of lunch served up for Olya and Svet — but he stayed, fascinated by the play of movement and shadow and the strangeness of the scene. It was then that one of the waiters from the hotel came hurtling out the door and began berating the man in a high strained voice. The man immediately slumped over in the saddle as if he’d been punched in the stomach. “Barata,” he pleaded. “Barata.”

“What is it?” Frank said, addressing the waiter. “What does he want?”

The waiter was a round-faced man in a white jacket, sweating titanically round his soiled collar, and he’d been sweating since they arrived and would go on sweating after they’d left. “It’s nothing, Don Frank,” he said, giving an elaborate shrug. “He comes down from the mountains, that is all”—and he pointed a finger over the red-tiled roof to the hazy crags of the central cordillera, at least ten miles distant. Another shrug. He gave the man on horseback an embittered look. “To sell this chicken that has less meat on its bones than a pigeon, a sparrow even.”

“But why? Why would he come all this way just to sell one chicken?”

Both men fixed their eyes on him now.

“Because he has nothing. Because he needs the money.”

Suddenly he felt very dense. He stood there in the glare of the sun, picturing the one-room shack thrown together without benefit of blueprints, without nails or hammers or any tool but a worn machete, the porous roof, the rude furniture, no electricity, no water, no glass for the solitary window and not a single object of beauty anywhere in sight. “Tell him I will buy his chicken,” he said.

“You? What do you want with it?”

“Just tell him.”

The money was exchanged, a few coins, the man’s hand fluttering delicately against his own. And then he had the thing in his grasp, the rag over its eyes, the feel of the withered reptilian feet against his knuckles — a pitiful thing, a runt, half the size of one of Taliesin’s birds — and immediately he tried to give it back, thrusting the warm bundle up across the sweated neck of the horse, but the man wouldn’t take it. He just held up his spanned fingers and open palm, then nodded and turned the horse back down the road.

Early the next morning, before the sun had climbed up out of the sea to cut away the shadows and illuminate the shanties in the hills, Frank took Olgivanna and the children and caught the boat for home.

So she had to endure another trip, reverse logic, running to instead of from, the sea mutating from a fragile turquoise to verdigris to a deep metallic gray as they steamed back into winter, Svetlana pestering her with her interminable questions—“Where’re we going, Mama? Uncle Vlada’s? Where’re we now, do you think? Can I have a sweet? ”—and then the thundering headache of the steel wheels pounding over the icebound rails all the way to Spring Green, Wisconsin, the Richardsons peregrinating as if it were their profession. Or fate. There was the car at the station. The familiar road. The river, the bridge, the lake. The long penstroke of the walls and the flourish of the roofs. Were they home? Were they really home? 47

At first she felt relief, the interior opening up to her with its familiar smells — brass polish, the wax Frank used on the woodwork, linseed oil, the sourness of the ash spread cold across the stones of the hearth all this time and a lingering hint of the charred remains beneath the floors — her bed, her things, the kitchen and its promise of homemade meals and bread and cakes and cookies, cookies like the ones she’d baked with Dione, Sylvia and Nobu, but by the time she rose the next morning, she could feel nothing but the heaviness of the place. Mrs. Taggertz reappeared to do the cooking; a skeleton staff moped round the corridors. They were burning green wood. Everything was out of place. She wanted to get up and take charge, but she was weak and ill and all the color seemed to have gone out of the world. And Frank — he wasn’t himself either, stealing around like a burglar in his own house, peering out the windows as if he expected a cordon of sheriffs, marshals and federal agents to come marching up the drive at any moment. What good were the windows, what good were the views, when all they did was make you feel naked?

“You can’t be seen,” Frank told her the day after they’d arrived, “not till this is settled,” and immediately went off to consult with his lawyers.