Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

Down at the jetty, the House-on-Wheels was preparing to move on but Lorna was nowhere to be found. ‘Hard to misplace someone that big,’ said Lottie irritably. They’d already stayed a couple of days longer than planned because Lorna had complained she was exhausted from moving all the time. ‘Two days,’ Lottie said to Jonah, holding up two fingers, her voice fast, shrill. ‘Two days, getting more conspicuous by the minute, the police sniffing round, helping themselves to cigarettes, letting the kids shine their shoes for free.’

‘Baby hormones,’ said Subong cheerfully and he looked at my father for a response. But my father was barely listening. He stared out at the boats and the boys shifting cargo further down the beach, trying perhaps to imagine how the place would change: the jetty standing empty, the smaller cargo boats and outriggers landing further up the coast near the passenger ferry, being unloaded by a new Jonah, a new Subong, a new Dante Santos.

‘Stupid cow,’ said Lottie. ‘She’ll get us all in trouble. We should just go. Let her walk round the whole country looking for us.’ But she stayed where she was, the sack and the pots and the bedding still unpacked and draped variously over the House-on-Wheels behind her.

Lando put his hand on the warm wood of the House. ‘She’s a good girl,’ he said. ‘She’ll be back.’ He edged his thumbnail slowly along the grain, towards his wife. Lottie watched his hand like she might have eyed a cockroach before swatting it.

‘If she’s not back by the evening we’ll all go looking for her,’ Jonah said. ‘What about you, eh?’ he said to me.

‘Sure,’ I said reluctantly. Even if Aunt Mary didn’t need me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend my evening scouring Esperanza for the girl, pregnant or not. ‘I’ve got schoolwork,’ I said, but it wasn’t much of an excuse and I added guiltily, ‘I guess it can wait.’ It could wait, too. I’d lost interest in school lately and my grades were beginning to slide. I couldn’t seem to help it. I found myself daydreaming whatever the subject; nothing held my interest. At school, everything felt dead and flat. Yet, in the evenings when my time was my own, I read everything I could find — Aunt Mary’s art books, books about American or European history, novels by long-dead English authors in which the language curled round itself before blooming out and presenting an idea like a bud. I was consumed for days by unexpected images: an artist walking along a coast in pursuit of the ship that had sailed with his life’s work on board, succumbing to a fever before he made the next port; the architecture of an ancient people of another continent whose blood, brought here by the Spanish, flowed in our veins too. Every day brought a new thing to light and, though I couldn’t have put it into words back then, I think now that I read with the hope something would finally arrive that would illuminate everything, a single piece of knowledge that would show me how my life was meant to unfold. Back then, my life didn’t feel like my own; anyone else — my father, Aunt Mary, God — might have a better plan for how I might live it than I. And so I coasted at school, though I was sure my grades wouldn’t escape Aunt Mary’s attention for long and I’d be reminded soon enough of the importance of accurate punctuation.

I turned to leave for the boarding house but my father gripped my arm tightly. ‘Some time with my boy,’ he said.

Jonah looked surprised; my father was never one to ask for slack if there was still work to be done. ‘Sure, Dante.’ He clapped my father on the back, gently, waved us on. I’d noticed recently how he’d started giving the younger boys the heavier loads.

My father pulled me for several paces along the sea wall before letting go of my arm and then he kept walking. I followed. Fed well by America, I’d grown quickly this year and my father seemed suddenly smaller to me, more tired, his strength diminishing as mine grew. When we were out of earshot he said, without catching my eye, ‘I know where she is.’ I stared at him but still he looked away.

‘Where?’

‘Walk with me, boy.’ We cut through the market and into the curandero’s alley to the sari-sari store. Rico and his boys weren’t around which meant, no doubt, that Suelita wasn’t on duty. I felt both disappointed and relieved.

Fidel was at the hatch chewing gum. He was reading a komik and started when my father rapped on the counter with his knuckles. My father opened his mouth to speak but already Fidel was ducking beneath the partitioning curtain. We heard him call out to his mother. Missy was on the stoop in an instant, a half-gutted fish in one hand, a knife in the other. When she saw my father, she raised the fish in acknowledgement. She stepped back inside and we listened as she snapped orders at her son to deposit the fish in the Frigidaire, to sluice water over her hands as she scrubbed them at the pail in the yard, to bring the rubbing alcohol from her midwife’s bag, to put it back.

Missy Bukaykay might have been slight but her frailty was a deception. She had a certain kind of doggedness about her, slow-grown like a callus on skin. Inevitable perhaps for the eldest of nine, born of peasant farmers who made their way to Puerto when they lost their land: a teenager when she came for the first time to the city. Missy had never undertaken any official training to become a midwife. Still, it was said she’d never lost a baby, even in the worst of conditions, so no one paid much mind to the details of her state midwifery licence, which was displayed on the wall of the shack and was several years out of date.

She was back on the stoop within minutes, her midwife’s bag in hand. She sniffed at her fingers. ‘Better not arrive today. Be a shame for that to be the first thing to smell on coming into this world.’ She held out her fingers for my father to sniff but he waved them away, smiling.

‘Baby will either love fish for life or hate it,’ he said.

‘Better be love because we’re no distance at all from the sea.’

She walked ahead of us through the alley towards the basilica, turning off into the street of my father’s apartment. She didn’t hesitate as she entered his building and climbed the stairs to the room where my mother had lived and died.

Inside, the room was dark, the curtains drawn. A small fan hummed on the dining table. As we walked in, my father called out ‘Lorna— ’ but the rest of his words died on his lips. In the corner of the room Lorna squatted, legs apart, dress pulled up around her breasts, naked from the waist down, one arm gripping the table, her eyes like cornered prey. She was moaning. Around her feet, the floor was wet and between her legs I could see something, a dome with soft black hairs and beside it what looked like a tiny hand.

My father and I froze. Missy snapped into action, barking at us for towels, cloths, clean water. We obeyed, fumbling through each task. She lay Lorna down on the floor and I watched, nauseous now, as she pinched and pushed the baby’s fingers until the hand withdrew inside Lorna’s body. Missy’s hand seemed to follow it and I looked away. The smell filled me, something raw and pungent, like ammonia. The room was full of noise: Lorna’s moans and Missy’s commands to breathe, push, fetch this thing or that, the sound of my own heartbeat shaking my body. The child emerged slowly at first and then in a rush, and when it was out and in its mother’s arms my father sank into a chair and put his head in his hands.

Missy beckoned me over and together we moved mother and baby to the bed away from the blood and the mess and the smell. I gathered the dirty towels and sheets into a ball and went to fetch a pail and some phenol with which to scrub the floor.