Whisper (20 page)

“And because you're new to the city and don't know the rules around here, we'll take it easy on you this time.”

I covered my sweater pocket with my hand.

“You want to use our street corner, you have to pay for it. If you decide not to pay, we take all of your money and a little something else.”

He looked at my body. His eyeteeth settled on his bottom lip, and the whites of his eyes looked bloodied and bruised. The palm of my hand became clammy against the coins. The people who walked by avoided my eyes—they were all busy.

I didn't know how much money weighed down my pocket, but the coins were mine—he would get none of them. I shook my head.

He raised his eyebrows and then whistled a quick, high note. The two men moved away from the gray walls and stepped into the street, walking across without pausing. One was tall, with hunched shoulders and hair that floated in stringy wisps and curls about his head. The other was shorter, with thick arms that he held away from his body. They didn't look to their right or left to avoid the cars but marched across, their strides long and confident, the cars swerving around them and honking like geese.

My back turned hot and cold at the same time. I thought about Belen's hand slapping me across the face and his boot kicking me in the side. I thought of Celso tying me to a tree with a mule.

Just before the men reached us, a man with a long, heavy coat brushed against me. He said, “Excuse me,” stepped into the street to get around the eyetooth man and then stepped back onto the walkway. I reached for his wrist and whispered, “Please.”

He looked at me, flinched when he saw my face and then glanced at the three men around me. He backed away, yanking his arm from my grasp, and then he ran.

“People know us,” said the first man. His smile evaporated, his face more narrow and skunk-like than before. “No one will help you. Now we need all the money, and if you give it to us without argument, we won't make you pay in other ways.” The two men stepped closer, their smell caustic and biting, like marsh cabbage.

“I need this,” I whispered.

“I don't give a shit,” he whispered back and then laughed. The two men behind him laughed with him.

“Let's give this a try,” said the man with the thick arms. He stepped around the leader. I held my hand over my pocket and tried to back away, but before I could step beyond his reach, a fist landed in my stomach, knocking the air out of me, and I curled up, gasping.

The first man reached into my pocket and pulled out the coins. I looked at his shoes—black, pointed, the material patterned in diamonds, like snakeskin. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes and darkened the gray cement in splotches.

“I'll let you keep one as a reminder of what you'll lose if you refuse to pay us.” And then they were gone, back across the street, stopping the flow of cars.

I sat down on the cement and tried to catch my breath. Each of my lives seemed to grow shorter and sink lower. How low could a life go? Lower than the earth, lower than the worms, lower than death. When I was able to stand erect and breathe, I didn't feel like crying anymore. I was done crying. Now I would merely exist.

We couldn't return to our rooms until 2:00
AM
. I didn't know why I couldn't return until then, I didn't know how to figure out if it was 2:00
AM
, and I didn't dare go to the common room in case I was the only one there, so I wandered.

People in the city were always talking to someone, yelling across the street, speaking into cell phones. People in the cars called out of the windows and honked horns, their anger palpable even where I walked. The buildings were all crooked, ragged and cracked, with laundry strung across them and between them. I kept my head down and felt more lonely here than I had when chained to the doghouse.
Sometimes
it is worse to be noticed.
Nathanael might have been right in some circumstances, but here I felt like vapor, like smoke, like a shadow that might as well not exist. People brushed against me, bumped into my shoulder, stepped on the heel of my shoe, but no one looked at me or said sorry. The only proof of my existence was the muffled sound of my shoes scuffing against the hard ground.

Everywhere I turned, someone with crooked limbs, distorted features or missing body parts sat with a hat, jar or can in front of them. So many of us. What was wrong with this world that so many human beings were distorted in some way? I stood in the middle of a bridge that rose above the river like a rainbow arch, and on that bridge I saw three beggars, all seated on the cold ground, calling out for money. I returned the way I'd come.

I walked until fewer and fewer people passed me, until the buildings shrank in size, more and more houses appeared and every now and then I passed a square of grass, vibrant and alive. The buildings felt substantial here, rectangular, individual, upright houses painted solid colors. They weren't built on top of each other precariously but stood alone, well cared for.

I stopped at a patch of green that stretched like a surprise meadow in front of me. The open space bustled with shrieking children, benches lined the walkways, and a pond with lily pads rippled with the slight wind. It was as though all the green growth in the city had fled to this one spot, an oasis in the desert of manmade structures. A sign in the middle of the grass said
Hernando Park
.

I walked to the pond as quietly as I could, glancing beside me now and then to see if anyone followed or rushed at me, shouting that I had to leave. It was the first time since coming here that I had smelled green leaves, earth and flowers—it was the first time I could picture my camp in the woods without having to close my eyes and squeeze out a memory. This was where I would collect myself and get rid of the panicked feeling I'd had since arriving in the city.

An elderly woman holding a cane occupied one of the benches next to the pond. Her eyes were closed and her head was leaned back, the hazy sun warming her face. I sat two benches away. My feet ached from all the walking, and my back groaned with relief when I sat. While orange and white fish flashed through the water in the pond, I pressed my hand where the man had forced the air out of me.

As I closed my eyes, ready to dream myself back home, I heard music—real music, played with fingers and strings, not music squeezed through a radio speaker and interwoven with static. I stood, looked around and hobbled on sore feet to a small grove of trees. Willow trees, the branches long and feathery, guarded the sides of the creek like hunched osprey, the branches dangling over a stream that trickled through the park. Underneath the branches I saw four musicians, three of them seated on folding chairs. One played a violin, one played a larger violin, one played a much larger instrument that he leaned against the ground and held between his legs, and the last played a violin so huge she had to stand up to play it.

The music pulled me back to my camp, to running through the grasses, to a warm fire and laughter. I untied my veil from around my neck and adjusted it over my head. I crept to the other side of the tree and sat on the roots, my back rubbing against the rough bark. I breathed in the beauty of the music—the lightness of the high notes, the sureness of the middle notes, the groans of the lowest notes. There was a wholeness to the music that I never heard when I played by myself.

I dreamed of dark nights by the fire, coyotes creeping just outside our camp circle of warmth, wolves howling up on the hills. Even the smell of this green area seemed right—woods, water, earth. If I had music to warm me, it would be enough.

When the music stopped, I opened my eyes. The musicians shuffled their instruments into cases. They talked and laughed. I didn't belong—not here, in this place where rejects sat on corners and begged for money. I felt self-conscious and unworthy. Someone would come along and command me to leave any minute now. When I'd listened to the music, I had felt like a part of something—a beauty that included even me—but now I was again nothing, and if I disappeared, only Celso would care, because he wouldn't get his money.

As I walked away from the park and back to my new residence, I saw three others like me, one walking with crutches, one limping and one looking down at her feet. All of their shoulders were hunched, trying to conceal the disfiguration that tainted them. I followed them back to the neighborhood where the building with the barred windows leaned toward the dilapidated building next to it. It wasn't dark yet. I wasn't supposed to return to my room, but I didn't know where else to go, and my hands felt stiff and useless as I tucked them under my armpits.

But the doors were open, and I walked inside. I felt a bit of warmth and shook off the cold that had followed me down the street. I walked to room 13, opened the door, closed it softly behind me and then shut my eyes. In the middle of the room I lifted up my arms, raised them so they stretched straight from my body on either side, and tilted my head back. In my head I heard the instruments with their individual melody lines, and I let them ring.

Fourteen

As I stood in my room, my body open to the music, I began to see fireflies against the lids of my eyes. My head resonated with the music from the park, the notes winging through the air. I emptied myself of the last few days, and I began to see the music. The notes were as tangible to me as my own hand. They flitted through the air like hummingbirds and I watched the patterns they made. I saw birds flying in formation, the notes fitting together.

But the pattern began to dissolve when the door to room 13 slammed shut. Candela looked up at me as I stood in the middle of the room with my arms spread wide. She reminded me of Eva, with her watchful eyes, but Eva was quick to laugh, quick to be silly, and I didn't think Candela had been silly for a very long time.

“How much did you make?”

The music in my head dissipated, and all that beauty rushed out of me. I was left with the reality of my life—sitting on a street corner, losing the money I'd earned and living in a house full of rejects. I reached into my pocket and felt the cold metal edge of the one coin.

“Why'd you have your eyes closed when I came in?”

I looked around the room, trying to find a way to describe the music I had seen in my head. I didn't know how to explain that music made me feel real and whole. But maybe I could show her.

“May I play my violin beside you tomorrow?”

“I don't work with other rejects.”

“Just one day?” I asked. “One day.”

“I thought you were different from Rosa, but you're not, are you?”

I blinked and felt a jolt. Rosa. The idea of Rosa made me feel small again, exposed. I had always been the dumb unrelated sister, the one who wet her bed and cried out for her mother. Rosa had wanted to be beautiful more than any of us. She'd hated her face, hated herself, and I remembered how when we'd looked into the creek together, watching our broken faces appear on the surface of the water, she'd held a handkerchief over the right side of her face, hiding the deepred discoloration. She'd winked at the image of herself and said, “Buried beauty, but beauty all the same.”

“You know Rosa?” I said now.

Candela looked at me with her lips drawn into a tight line. Her hands were still on her hips and she looked like a cat, wary and aloof, ready to flee or pounce.

“Why should I be nice to you? You'll end up selling sex just like she does. My friends never stay.”

The words floated in the air between us, hovered and then dropped. When I understood what she'd said, my chest began to squeeze tight. Rosa sold sex. Rosa had been the one who'd told me about sex, about male body parts, about how babies were made. When she had gotten her period, she had declared herself a woman. She said now she could find a husband, someone who didn't care about her raised birthmark, who would see her buried beauty. She would create her own family, one that would never reject her.

So many times I'd woken up in our hut with her hand pushing against my lips, blocking my breath. “You were crying again. Stop it,” she would say. But she'd changed my diapers when I was little, and she'd taught me my first word—
wind
. She'd combed and braided my hair when her mood had been right. I looked down at the mattress, envisioning Rosa there, Rosa's limbs entwined with someone else's—someone like Celso, with his unused muscles and sweaty hands.

“One day,” Candela said. “That's it, you understand? One day, and then you find your own spot.”

I looked at the map of water stains on the walls, at the flaking ceiling, at the exposed boards in the north corner of the room, where I'd heard a rat the night before. How could Rosa stay in this room? No one stayed in this room. Maybe my destiny would match Rosa's. I now knew what a brothel was. I should have known all along.