Esperanza (44 page)

He pressed his arm across his nose and mouth and pushed his way through the crowd, eyes watering, lungs on fire. As soldiers started shooting, staccato bursts echoed through the street, screams and cries pierced the air, people fell into Ian, knocking him forward. He struggled to maintain his balance, but someone slammed into him from the left, an injured woman sobbing and shrieking in pain, blood pouring from a gash in her head. He crashed into the wall, the woman collapsed. He tried to get to her, to help her, but she was quickly trampled. More shots rang out, sirens squealed.

Ian broke through the crowd and raced around the corner of the building, where several hundred protesters fled the pandemonium. He kept expecting fog to roll up the street, to hear the loud insidious chants,
Find the body, fuel the body.
But the threat seemed to be entirely human—more police cars roaring toward them, a pair of tanks thundering behind them.

Tanks.
He looked around frantically for a store he could dart into, an open doorway, a window. But shops were locked up tight, wooden shutters closed, people barricaded inside. He didn’t see any side streets, alleys, no way out except to turn back toward the riot.

The crowd split open, giving the cops and the tanks room to move, and people hugged the walls on either side of the street, shouting, shoving, stumbling. The cop cars sped past, sirens at full tilt, tanks rumbling after them. As soon as they were past, the crowd spread through the street again, racing for an intersection just ahead. Ian ran with them.

At the intersection, the crowd suddenly grew larger as people from the center of the riot poured toward them, a pulsing, rushing river of color and terror. Ian pushed his way past the intersection, where the road sloped steeply downward, past more ancient stone buildings. Police now streamed into the intersection, more gunfire shredded the air, more people fell.

Then he saw it, a space between two stone buildings that was so narrow he had to slip into it sideways. Light at the end. He moved toward it crablike, fast, the gunfire closer, echoing, bullets slamming into the corners of the buildings.

He finally stopped to catch his breath and fell into a crouch, breathing hard, perspiration rolling off him. He clutched his knees to his chest, pressed his forehead against them. His heart raced. Even though he had been here for two weeks, his body still wasn’t accustomed to the altitude. It hurt to breathe.

When he raised his head, a man, woman, teenage girl, and a young boy huddled in the alley with him.
“Señor, por favor, puedes ayudarnos?”
the man asked.

After two weeks in Ecuador, his Spanish was improved and he at least understood the man was asking for help. He also understood the man was dying or already dead and so was his family. Ian could see through them to the old stone walls against which they stood.

“Claro, señor.”
He groped through his tiny mental dictionary for the word “stay,” then in awkward, hesitant Spanish told the man it was safest if all of them stayed in the alley for now.

“My English no good,” said the man. Short and thin, he was gripping his teenage daughter’s hand and looked just as frightened as his companions. “
Los soldados,
my son he be pushed, he fell—”

“A soldier . . . shot my father,” said the girl in a soft, halting voice, her English heavily accented. She looked maybe sixteen. “Another soldier hit my mother. I try . . . to find my brother when I . . . something hit me in the back. I . . . I think we be dying. Or . . . we be dead. We want . . . to stay together . . .”

“Then you will.” Ian hoped that much was true. “It’s important that you all hold hands and that we stay here in the alley until the shooting stops.”

She spoke rapidly in Spanish to the others. The mother moved closer to her husband, who took her hand, but the young boy remained huddled against the wall.

“Jorge, ven acá,”
the girl said to her young brother.

Jorge shook his head adamantly, his eyes wide with terror.

“My brother . . . he too afraid,” the girl said.

Ian moved toward the boy, crouched in front of him. In Spanish, he told Jorge that everything was okay. But the boy’s lower lip trembled, tears now coursed down his cheeks, and he pressed his head against his arms, and started sobbing.

Ian rubbed his hand over the boy’s back. “Ask him if he’ll walk with me,” Ian said to the girl.

She did and Jorge raised his head, nodding fast. Ian adjusted his pack and gestured for the boy to get on his back. Jorge climbed on quickly and Ian stood, shocked that he could feel the boy’s skinny little arms around his
neck, that he could feel his weight—all forty or fifty pounds of him—and that he could even smell Jorge’s fear.

“
Es mejor así
?” Ian asked him.
Is it better like this?

Jorge’s arms tightened around Ian’s neck.
“Sí, sí, gracias, señor.”

Ian groped around in his mental dictionary for a few more words and, in Spanish, said, “I’m your horse.”

The boy actually laughed.

The five of them moved single file up the alley, their clasped hands connecting them like paper cutout dolls. The gunfire, screams, and shouts echoed loudly and seemed uncomfortably close again. Now and then, they spoke quickly among themselves, then the father glanced back at Ian. “You are dead, señor?”

Ian shook his head. “Not yet.”

“My mother says you must be shaman,” the teenager remarked. “Is that why you can see us, talk to us?”

“I’m not a shaman. I can talk to you because months ago, I died and came back. While I was dead, I ended up in a place called Esperanza. Have you heard of it?”

She rapidly translated what he said and all of them nodded. But it was the boy, Jorge, who replied in broken English. “Esperanza. Májica.”

“Sí, sí,” the girl said. “There are many stories among Quechuans about Esperanza, that it is magical place, once a place for souls. We learned—”

The rest of whatever she was going to say was truncated by the appearance of a brilliant ball of light that bounced soundlessly toward them, like something from the TV show
The Prisoner.
It expanded as it moved, looming over them, taller than the buildings on either side, as wide as the alley, then it started to glow and pulsate. Before they had a chance to react, it swept over them. For the briefest moment, an overpowering sense of love and well-being filled him. Then the luminous ball of light was gone and he was alone in the alley again. Ian spun around, but didn’t see the light or the family.

Freaked out, he ran to the end of the alley and it emptied into a wide, deeply shadowed street. No cops or fleeing rioters. This area looked and felt like a very old part of the city, where Quito turned labyrinthine, strange, infinitely mysterious. It was as if the alley connected the new and old section of Quito.

He moved forward hesitantly, passing families of Quechuans living where they sat. Most were bundled up in layers of clothing and had small
fires for cooking. The food odors permeated the air. Quechua children ran through the street, laughing, tossing a red ball back and forth. Skinny dogs and cats skulked through shadows, noses to the ground. Now and then kids came up to him, hawking native jewelry that dripped from their arms. The blunt contrast between this and what he had just experienced astonished him. It was as if that narrow slit between the colonial buildings had been a portal to another world.

As the street widened, the areas the Quechuans had carved out for themselves grew proportionately larger. Here and there stood makeshift huts of tin and wood, donkeys, wagons piled high with hay, baskets filled with vegetables, fruits. His hotel bordered El Ejido Park, but he had no idea where it was in relation to his location now. He’d been lost since the day he arrived, a gringo adrift, Heinlein’s stranger in a strange land.

But he had his pack, had been paying by the week, didn’t have to return to his hotel.
“Permiso,”
he said to an elderly Quechuan woman, who stirred the contents of her iron cauldron with infinite patience.

“Sí?”
Her eyes met his.

Ian didn’t know how to ask his question in Spanish, so he pointed at his stomach, at the cauldron, and pulled out a dollar.

“Ah, tienes hambre.”
Her smile threw her face into a chaos of wrinkles, and she reached back and brought out a metal bowl. She spooned stuff into it, dropped a tarnished metal spoon into it, held it out.

The dollar Ian handed her disappeared into the folds of her clothing. The bowl was warm enough to take the chill from his hands. He didn’t have any idea what he was eating, but it tasted delicious and filled the gaping hole in his stomach.
“Es bueno?”
she asked.

“Delicioso.”

The old woman looked pleased and patted the ground beside her. Ian held out his bowl, raised his brows, and she laughed and scooped out more of the delicious stew. He handed her a couple more dollars, sat down. In fairly decent English, the woman said, “You run from guns?”

Ian nodded. “I was trying to get a travel visa. The office was going to close for lunch and people didn’t like it.”

“Ah.” She tipped a bottle of Ecuadorian beer to her mouth, then passed it to Ian. The stuff was slightly warmer than the air, but tasted great.

“You want to go where? U.S.?”

“To Esperanza.”

She threw her head back, laughing. “No, no,
guapo.
Esperanza is, how do you say?” Her hand moved through the air, searching for the right word.
“Leyenda.”

Legend. Ian shook his head, set his empty bowl on the ground between them. “No, I went there. It’s not just a legend.”

Maybe it was the shadows in the street, his imagination, or something else altogether. But Ian thought her expression changed.
“Tu nombre, señor?”

“Ian Ritter.”

For long, uneasy moments, her dark eyes held his. Then, in a mixture of Spanish and English, she said, “The story is ancient. It is not a story in which you should become involved.”

“I’m already involved.”

“You have my sympathy.” The old woman touched his arm. “How may I help you?”

“Tell me how to get out of the city. To Otavalo. I can pay.”

“How much?”

“What can you offer?”

Twenty bucks bought him a ride deep in the hay on a donkey-drawn wagon bound for Otavalo, no travel papers necessary. Potholes riddled the dirt road, the hay made him sneeze, but the sky above him was a perfect liquid blue. Once they were outside of Quito, the sky looked almost incandescent and contrasted sharply with the lush green countryside and the spectacular mountains. He wished that Luke were with him. He wished for the company of people he knew. But he finally was out of the city.

The journey took three days over rough, mostly unpaved roads. They ate at local restaurants—huts made of tin and wood with a few tables outside and pots simmering on open fires. At night, they camped wherever they happened to be when dusk fell, and slept in the back of the wagon, beneath a sky strewn with more stars than Ian had ever seen. Every night, he dreamed of Tess and woke wondering if she had found his message in any of the South Florida newspapers. He worried that she might not remember him or Esperanza. Or that she’d returned and married her picky lover. Or that he would arrive in Esperanza and discover she hadn’t made it back. Or that the place didn’t exist at all, that it really was a myth. Sometimes, he despaired. But always, he kept moving forward a step at a time, one mile after another.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, they entered the town of Otavalo, home to the Otavalon Indians, among the wealthiest and most self-sustaining indigenous tribes in Ecuador. Everywhere he looked, he saw men
and woman in traditional Otavalon clothing. The men wore white calf-length knickers, blue ponchos, fedora hats, and sported
shimbas,
long braids that fell nearly to their waists. The women dressed in white blouses, blue skirts and shawls, gold beads, and red coral bracelets. A festival of color.

The scenery was the sort of thing poets idealized—mountains rising on every side, Imbabura volcano visible in the distance, colonial buildings lining the narrow streets. The driver dropped him off at the ExPat Inn, a beautiful three-story colonial structure owned, he said, by two Europeans.

Inside, arched doors and window frames were made of hardwood, the floors terra-cotta. Light streamed across a dining room large enough to seat fifty, glass doors overlooked a courtyard filled with lush, exotic plants and trees.

The attractive brunette at the front desk looked to be about thirty and greeted him in French. He shook his head and she switched to Spanish, then English, equally fluent in all three. She didn’t ask to see his travel visa or passport, just his cash payment for the room, a bargain at fifteen bucks a night, with one meal a day included. She didn’t even ask his name.

“I hear things in Quito are very bad,” she remarked.

“It’s like an armed camp.”

“Until the elections are over next month, you should stay out of large cities.”

“I intend to.”

“I’ll show you your room. It faces the garden.”

“Is it possible to call the States from here?”

“I can place the call for you and have it ring in your room. But it’s not cheap.”