The Center of the World (26 page)

CHAPTER 45

 

S
ofia found the dock and boarded a water taxi to Santiago. She put her newly inflated soccer ball inside a string bag she'd purchased. The interior of the boat was painted a delicious sky blue, with rows of seats, enough for twenty people. She had never done anything like this before, nothing that was this important. She had been shot out into the world and everything she had known before felt distorted.

At Santiago, the boatman reached out his hand to steady the passengers as they climbed up to the edge of the boat and onto the dock. Sofia put one foot on the bright blue edge and pushed up and over, declining the man's hand. She was an athlete. Her calves were reliable springboards, her quadriceps roped in firm flesh. Years of soccer left her light on her toes, with her knees flexed, sure of her place on the field.

She always wondered how far she could run if she had to. Say, if someone dropped her off in the center of a rain forest, how long could she run if she had to? Sofia had asked her mother about this once. Was it when she first entered high school? Her mother had dropped a pan of hot water filled with potatoes and shouted, “You will never be dropped off in a jungle! Why would you ask such a thing?” She vacillated between hating her mother and wanting her to be there with her right now.

Her muscles ticked to something new. There were two North Americans with a band of high school kids on the boat. Three Mayan women seated in the back of the boat glanced at Sofia when she climbed in at Pana. After spotting the brown-skinned women, all lit with primary colors of red, yellow, and blue, she felt a pinch in her chest, hot and hard. She wanted to say,
Excuse me, but I don't know who I am
.
I've grown up in white Leverett my whole life running around with a soccer ball. But do you happen to know my people?

The dock poured the passengers onto a road that led up a hill. Sofia hitched her ergonomically correct backpack to her right shoulder and started up the path. A cluster of small Mayan boys, all of whom came to her ribs, glanced at her and ran by, moving instead to the white high school kids. The little boys eagerly tried to sell small wooden flutes. A group of girls ran past her in blue
huipiles,
their little-girl hips wrapped in handwoven fabric held tight by a cloth belt. The girls held scraps of cloth for sale and they focused on the two adult North Americans.

Sofia was in a pool of people who looked like her, and yet did not. She walked up the hill, dotted with merchant booths on either side, filled with leather goods, fabric, hats, sandals, tinwork, and an unending array of crafts. She was taller than the Mayan women. Mom's home cooking, she thought with a stab of uncomfortable longing. Did she miss her mother or her birth mother? Sofia stopped and dug into her pack. She extracted the roll of fabric that Manuela had woven. She asked at the first booth,
Where is the village where the women weave this cloth? I am the daughter of Manuela and Jorge.

The woman had a roll of cloth wrapped around the crown of her head like a rope. She said something to Sofia in a language that she didn't understand. Her mother had called it Kaqchikel. Sofia shook her head. The woman called to a little boy across the street and she bent her head near his, her finger holding him firmly. She said something to him, and they both looked at Sofia. He ran off on what looked like an errand.

Sofia continued up the street, looking at the women in front of stacks of cloth. Now she asked only about the fabric, thinking that perhaps no one here knew Manuela and Jorge. Had too much time passed for them to be remembered? Did Sofia's Spanish sound too official, too North American? Did the merchants speak only Mayan?

Sofia continued up the steep street, gripping the cloth.

 

The air was filled with the raw scents of onions, potatoes, open piles of ground corn, bananas, along with stacks of fabric. At several stalls, women sat on the ground weaving, passing a smooth piece of wood back and forth. The weaving rig was attached to the women's waists and at the other end, to a pole. Smoke was the background flavor, lending a charcoal seasoning to everything.

She knew she was a strange mix of American dress, schoolgirl Spanish, and indigenous face. If what her mother said was true, the village she sought was not so far from Santiago. But could she believe anything that her mother said? That was a big question right now.

She began to experiment with streets, keeping the central square in sight, walking two blocks down one direction, making a right, then two blocks right again, and she was back at the central square. By mid-afternoon she had made a grid of the town that extended four blocks in each direction from the center.

She purchased and ate fresh palm-sized tortillas. They were not at all like the tortillas that came from the grocery store at home. They were thicker and so much smaller. She wasn't sure what else she should eat and nothing looked familiar. She bought a banana.

She heard a familiar sound down one street, the noise of children playing. She followed it and saw a group of boys outside a school. They were maybe ten or eleven, playing soccer with the most dilapidated ball she had ever seen. The ball was held together with tape. The boys played on hard-packed dirt. They were artful with the old ball, each boy dribbling it as if the ball were attached to them by an invisible band. Their control of the ball was easy and they flew from one end of the yard to the other, dancing lightly, shouting at one another.

Sofia put down her pack and dug around in the string bag until she found the new soccer ball that she had brought with her. What would they think of her, this brown girl, taller and older than them?

She dropped the ball to the ground, flipped it to one knee and then the other, while advancing toward the boys. It didn't matter if this was Guatemala or Massachusetts, she had a glistening new soccer ball, dazzling white with black lines, and they would not be able to resist. If she couldn't find the village, she could at least play soccer.

The boys saw right away that Sofia was very good. Their game slowed as Sofia came closer, and then they stopped completely. They stared at her as if she were a gazelle.

“Can anyone play?” she asked, not really a question, but an announcement. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail.

Several boys stared at her with mouths open, others stole sideways glances to each other.

“We can use this ball,” she said in her best Spanish. They would not be able to resist the ball, no soccer player could. “
Me llamo Sofia,
” she said. She asked the boys to say their names and then they divided into teams in a way that Sofia did not entirely understand, but it felt good to run, to be fast, to use her body. Soon the boys shouted her name.
Sofia, Sofia, here, pass the ball!

This is what she loved about running, about soccer; she could forget everything else. There was nothing except her body and the ball, the heavy breath of the other players, the feel of the ball beneath her shoes or on her knees, the shocking thump of it on her forehead as she headed the ball to a teammate.

The boys danced with the ball, as agile as if they had been born with it. A small lad named Roberto slid so perfectly between two opponents that he would have qualified as a shape-shifter. He made the goal, marked by two rocks. Sofia jumped in the air, pumping one arm up, and gave a whoop.

The boys stopped and looked beyond Sofia. She turned around and a white guy walked toward her. There was a kid with him. Wasn't he from the first stall where she had asked about the village?

“Sofia?” the man asked, tilting his head to one side.

She nodded, still breathing hard from the game.

“I hear that you are looking for Santa Teresa,” he said in English.

Her heart thumped so loudly that everyone must hear it.

“And that you are the daughter of Manuela and Jorge.”

Maybe it was the altitude. Her mother had said that they needed to drink water, that the mountain air was dry and dehydration could take them by surprise. She felt light-headed.

“Hello, Will,” she said.

CHAPTER 46

T
hey arrived in Pana hours after sunset. The wind howled, a fierce
El Norte
across the lake.

“The water taxis have closed down,” said Fernando. “Even in better weather, the boats do not have lights and accidents have been deadly at night. There is no one willing to take us across the lake and for that, I am grateful.”

The three of them stood on the dock as the wind whipped their hair. They looked out on the dark waters with white caps that rivaled an unruly sea. Kate tried to imagine Sofia finding her way in Santiago. She was so young, so driven by one purpose that she would be unaware of dangers, of men who would find her beautiful and offer their assistance. What did Sofia know of any of this?

Before she could speculate aloud, Sam said, “Our girl is not an idiot. She has checked into a hotel and has wedged a chair against the doorknob. She knows what she wants.” He turned to Fernando. “How long do these
El Norte
weather systems last?”

“By morning, the lake will be as smooth as glass again. Allow me to help you find rooms for the night. We will take a boat in the morning.”

They walked up the steep incline from the dock and several blocks to a hotel. Nothing about Pana looked the same except the lake. The streets were paved and restaurants were filled with people eating at small tables. When they walked past a storefront that said
Internet Café,
Kate stopped as if struck by an invisible wall.

“I can't believe this,” she said.

Fernando smiled. “The world has found us, but more importantly, we have found the world.”

Sam rubbed Kate's upper arm. “This place doesn't look anything like what you told us about Guatemala. I was expecting a tiny village with dogs and chickens running around. This must be what it feels like for vets when they travel to Saigon and see a vibrant city filled with food carts and kids running off to school.” Sam stopped. “Okay, not quite the same, but I understand how disorienting this must be.”

She felt more like a ghost from the past.

They checked into a small hotel. Fernando and Sam went in search of food with promises to bring back something for Kate. But she would not be able to eat, not while Sofia was out there on her own.

CHAPTER 47

 

“I
'm here alone,” Sofia said. “I want to find the village where I was born. My mother and grandfather are back in Antigua. I wanted to do this alone. Do you know where my village is?”

Will was an older guy, she didn't know how old, but it had been twelve years since she left, so that must make him . . . She didn't know, but his hair was whitish around his temples. The rest of his hair was light, a sun-bleached kind of blond. He wore sandals and his feet were really tan, like he wore only sandals. She'd never seen such tanned feet.

She stuffed her soccer ball back in the bag, despite the groans of the boys.

“I do know where the village is, but let's get back to you being here alone. Does Kate know that you're here? Why isn't she with you?” He handed her a backpacker's bottle of water, the refillable kind. Yes, this was her mother's kind of guy.

“I want to do this alone. She will try to soften everything, protect me. Believe me, they'll know where I've gone. I'm guessing that I've got about a half-day lead on them. Will you take me to Santa Teresa?”

“What do you mean by
them?
I thought that her husband, your stepfather had . . .” For someone who was supposed to be so smart, Will looked sort of clueless.

“My grandfather is with us. And you're right, my stepfather is . . . he was killed in a bike accident. I mean a car accident. I mean he was hit by a car when he was riding his bike.” It was still hard to talk about the way Martin had died. “Will you take me there?”

Will rubbed his eyes as if there was something in them. “I'm sorry about your stepfather. It's terrible to lose someone you love.” He took a breath. “I've been in Santiago for about a month. The truth is, I've been waiting for you. I'll take you there only because I know Kate and I know that she'll come after you. I'm guessing that she's with Fernando. But you need to know something first and then you can be the one to decide if we should go to the village before your mother gets here.”

A shiver ran up her spine.

“Your brother survived the massacre. I found him a few months ago.”

Sofia's breath flew out of her, her hands pressed against her mouth, and she made a squeaking kind of noise, unintelligible, birdlike. She had a brother, a brother, someone else who was part of her first family. She was right! A balloon of loneliness that she never fully recognized before burst as if hit by a pin. Tiny stars came out of the balloon and glittered throughout her body.

“I knew it, I've always known it,” she said. The day was growing later and it had a dreamy quality. The wind whipped up the dust along the playing field. “I knew he was alive, I could feel him.” She had the weirdest sensation that her heart was turning inside out.

“Wait, why were you expecting us?”

Will smiled at her and the skin around the sides of his eyes crinkled. “It's a long story. I'll tell you as we walk. But I wish that I could have known Martin. I'm glad he was with you and your mother.”

 

Sofia stole glances at Will as they walked along the road that turned to dirt as soon as they left Santiago. Three men overtook them and passed easily, short-handled hoes hanging from their belts. They wore pants that looked too short for them.

So this was the man her mother had loved. This was the man who had suffered at the hands of the military when her mother had taken her out of the country. This was the man who had known her when she was just a toddler. This was the man who was taking her to her brother, her home.

“The village is tucked behind the volcano about four miles from Santiago,” he said. “But Santiago is where people come to shop, to sell their merchandise, and for those kids who can, this is where they go to school,” Will said. His legs were long and Sofia had to double her speed to keep up with him. He had on cargo shorts that brushed his knees and his muscles were tight and toned.

She stopped walking. Her stomach clenched and for the first time since she had planned this, she was afraid.

Sofia blurted, “What if he doesn't want me? What if he resents me?”

Will had a tenderness around his eyes that Martin had too. “You and Mateo share ancestors, and for the Maya, that means everything. You are a missing piece in the family puzzle for them. They had extraordinary losses, deaths that were unimaginable. The fact that you are alive means they lost a little less, that life won out over the war just a little more. He's had more time to think about this than you have.”

“What do you mean? My mother thought he was dead. How would he know anything about me?” Even as she spoke, she felt something growing closer to her; part of her brother was carried on the wind.

“Your stepdad, who must have been some kind of guy, arranged for a letter to be sent to me in the event of his death. He let me know a few things, and by then, I had found Mateo. So he's had a few weeks to think about you coming here. Which, by the way, he insisted you would do.”

A hint of cool air ran up the path from a shadowy gully. “When I first found Mateo, it took me months to put the picture together. I was here with a group that wanted to reunite the men who had been conscripted as boys to be soldiers with the people of the area villages. They were also trying to identify people from some of the older mass graves.”

Birds rustled in the trees, rattling the leaves.

“He has an amazing affinity for languages. I could spot it right away with him. He's been learning English. And French from one of the French anthropologists.”

The sun sank a little lower. “Can we keep going now?” Will asked. “Mateo isn't always in the village. Most days he's in Santiago studying, but today he's helping his grandfather. Not a blood grandfather, but the man who took care of him after the massacre.”

Sofia exhaled a shuddered breath. Her head was ready to burst with old imagined images of her brother and now he was real. “I'm ready,” she said.

They turned off the dirt road and walked up a partially paved road, some concrete, some stones set in place, but ever upward. Was she going home?

She heard the village before she saw it. A few dogs with tightly curled tails approached them and others barked in the distance. She smelled wood smoke, even though the day was still warm. She wondered how this would all go. Would they be shy? Run to each other in cinematic joy? She didn't know how to be with a brother. She only knew that nothing would be the same after this.

Will knelt down to the first child he saw and said something, not in Spanish so it had to be in Mayan. The child, a little girl with a red skirt exactly like the cloth that Sofia had in her pack, looked wide-eyed at Sofia and took off running up the road.

“I just rang the alarm,” said Will. “Now everyone will know that you are here.”

They walked into the center of the village, paved with stones, and highlighted by a small church. It was unlike any house of worship that Sofia had ever seen, and she knew what it was only because of the wood cross atop the one-story building. Next door was an adobe building. The sign outside it said
CLINICA.
A few dark-haired women washed clothing in a concrete water tank. They looked up at Will.

How much farther would they have to go? Sofia wasn't sure that she could keep breathing. Tiny paths and streets darted off the central area. She swiveled her head around, wanting to find something familiar, something that she could remember.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and there he was. He was a few inches taller than she was. She had to turn her chin up only a fraction to look into his eyes. She shivered. The dark eyes of her brother flicked a switch and she would never be a child again. She doubted that he had ever been a child after their parents were killed. She reached up with one hand and put her palm on his cheek. He was not a dream. He was solid and real. He mirrored her and did the same with his hand.

“Mateo, Mateo,” she said.

“My sister,” he said in English. His chin quivered and he blinked hard, just as Sofia did.

 

The brother and sister sat on a stucco wall outside his house on the steep hill. Mateo had not let go of the roll of fabric that Sofia pulled from her pack. He clenched it in his hands. A veranda was covered with wide palm leaves, layered like roof tiles to let the rain run off the low stone wall.

“On the day that you disappeared, chaos reigned for weeks. How could the dead be tallied, never mind the missing? Both our parents were dead, first our father, then our mother was killed in the massacre. I can show you their graves. I was taken to a hospital in Sololá and it was the start of the rainy season before I was well enough to leave. Children heal quickly, but our ancestors were searching for you and too busy to tend to my torn body.”

They spoke in English and Spanish. He paused and Sofia was too mesmerized to speak, afraid that if she made a sound, he would evaporate like the morning fog on the river. She wanted him to take his shoes off so she could look at his feet. Would they look the same as her childhood dreams of brown feet?

“The big question back then was who was going to take care of me. I was a small child without parents or grandparents. I don't remember being in the hospital. I remember something about the smell of not being touched. How does that smell, you ask? Like burned beans mixed with a drink they gave all the children. In the hospital you are touched, and kindly, when a wound needs tending, like mine, or when the women come to change the sheets, wash them and hang them from the clotheslines on the roof. You are touched for all kinds of reasons, but not the way a mother or father touches a child, not the way you are wrapped tightly on her back, surrounded by her smell.”

They held Manuela's red cloth between them, each rubbing between thumb and fingers as they talked.

Sofia's foot had gone to sleep because she had tucked it beneath her. Squirming, she said, “If I move, I'm afraid you will vanish. I have dreamt of you for so long. But if I don't move, the blood will be cut off to my leg.”

“Please save your leg. And watch, I will not disappear.”

He wore tan pants, with a belt, and his shirt was tucked in. There was a gap between his two front teeth, spacious enough that she could easily slip a dime through. This would never happen in Leverett, where all teeth are perfectly spaced and precisely straight.

“There was a question of who would claim me. The country was filled with orphans of the war. One of the doctors wanted to send me to the orphanage in Antigua. And then Juan Ortega came for me. He was old then and he is even older now,” he said. “He told them he was my grandfather, which he was not, but he became my grandfather. He came for me because he said the ancestors called to him. He saw our mother and all the others killed and saw the white woman pick you out of the pile of bodies, right in front of the soldiers. He said she was filled with courage and very stupid.”

Sofia put her hands over her face. “Why didn't she take you with us?”

Mateo reached to put his hand on Sofia's arm. “Everyone thought I was dead. Do not blame her. Kate saw a dead boy. It was not until they moved the dead bodies that someone saw that I was still alive, breathing quietly.”

Two little girls walked by in traditional dress, woven cloth wrapped around their thin bodies, tied at the waist. They turned their heads to stare at Sofia, who was like them, but not. What was she?

Sofia turned her head at the crunch of gravel footsteps. It was getting dark and the wind had picked up. It was Will, looking sorry to interrupt.

“Kate won't make it across the lake tonight. All the boats have stopped. We'll need to sleep here. Mateo?”

“My grandfather is already preparing hammocks and sleeping mats for you,” he said, smiling.