Puente

FICTION by Alexandre Mas

In the café where I met Louisa, men sit all day with their cigarettes. I used to earn a few coins cleaning up for Gustavo, the old man who owned the café and still talked about the revolution. This was in Puente, a farming town of sugar cane, simple people, and date palms that bent for the hurricanes. My mother used to say that if you gave most people in Puente a smile, they had all they needed for the day.

My best friend was a neighbor, Ignacio, and my mother said he was an evil influence. From Ignacio I learned many of the small crimes of survival, like petty theft and the odd hustle. We would spend hours following irrigation ditches through the fields, collecting snails in sacks we tied at our waists. When our sacks were full we would sneak up to the bell tower and talk of the things we would do once we got off the island and up to America. Ignacio said he would make the Olympic team for judo and then earn a fortune smacking canvas as a wrestler. I bragged about baseball. Then we'd tire of talk and stand to toss our snails over the plaza, calling out targets before each throw. "The old lady with her hair in a bun." "That black dog under the wheelbarrow." "The man with the braid of garlic just off the train." With so much commotion in the middle of town, we could get through most of our snails before we were noticed, and then we'd slide down the back of the bell tower and be gone. Ignacio and I were fast and knew each curve of the back streets, so in minutes we would be laughing in the sugar cane at the edge of town. We were 14 years old then, and as sure as cocks dragging spurs in the dirt behind.

Louisa came to the café with three friends, all young and dressed like movie stars. She walked to the bar and asked Gustavo for "café au lait," which made her friends laugh. "Louisa, they speak Spanish here," they said, pulling at the ends of their hair.

Louisa blinked twice, hard. I could see she was willful, even as her face flushed red. "I know that," she said, smoothing the front of her skirt. "Cuatro cafés, por favor."

She glared at her friends and walked to the back, for the bathroom maybe, and straight to the closet where Gustavo kept the mops and the contraband. She pulled at the door and it caught. Gustavo gestured at me with his lips and I walked over to her.

"No se puede pasar," I said, pointing to the sign on the door. My English was rough but I was the best in my school and proud of it. "That means 'no admittance.'"

She looked at me and then back to the sign. She was a head taller, with long, swinging arms and hair like corn husks pulled behind her head. Her friends had found a table and now were raising their eyebrows and nodding for her to return, which I could see made her bolder.

"They're being ridiculous," she said and looked me full in the face. " 'No se puede pasar,' " she repeated, and her accent was good.

Before Louisa, the only white woman I had met was my grandmother. My sisters and I used to sit around her chair and listen to stories of Spain, of castles and hot winds in the grassland and of blooming rosemary with a smell like a faraway forest. At 73, my grandmother still kept a cigar pushed to one side of her mouth when she talked to us. She told us she had the eyes of an Arab and the nose of a Jew, but in our town of honey and chocolate she was white like a precious stone. She was the first to say I would be trouble. "Tomás, I see that look and I know where you're going. Watch yourself." And my sisters would lean away, wary already of the things I might do.

"I can show you Puente," I said to Louisa. "My English is very good."

Her lips were thin but when she smiled I saw her teeth were wide and clean. "Well aren't you the pushy one," she said and put her hands on her hips. "Maybe just the bridge. You've got some kind of special bridge here, don't you?"

"Yes, I can show you everything," I said. "Tell you the stories."

Not many people came to visit our town, but when they did it was to see the bridge the Spaniards built. It crossed the river in one curved stack of stone, connecting plantations to the distillery and the ports beyond, and each block had been cut so cleanly it was hard to find all the seams. Some said it looked like the bridges the Romans built in Spain, and it was our proudest piece of history.

Louisa joined her friends and I could see them roll their eyes and look over at me. They sipped at their coffee and chatted, looking like America to me, so comfortable in their bright clothes. Eventually, Louisa came back to tell me that her friends would wait with the car, but that she'd like to see the bridge, if I would take her. I agreed at once and said I would meet her in front in 10 minutes.

I ran home and found Ignacio in a hammock with his slingshot, flinging rocks at the birds that hopped between banana fronds.

"Four American women are at the café and one wants me to take her to see the bridge," I told him. "What should we do?"

Ignacio set the slingshot on his chest and put both hands behind his head. We were the same height but Ignacio was built like a prize fighter, with heavy shoulders and muscles he could make dance along his arms. He cut his own hair with a razor and rubbed his palms on his scalp when he was thinking.

"Just one?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. "If just one, then you should bring her to the bridge like she asks. When you get there I will jump out with a stick, knock you down, then take her money and run. Easy."

I looked at Ignacio and said nothing. He hopped up and clapped a hand on my shoulder.

"It will be perfect. And don't worry, little Tomás, I won't hit too hard."

"I'm not worried," I said, wondering why I had come to find Ignacio. I kicked at the dirt.

"Well go, then," he said. "Hurry back but take your time walking with her so I can find a good stick."

I ran to the café and found Louisa waiting out front. She was wearing a straw sun hat that cast a dimpled shade on the pink of her face. She smiled when she saw me.

We walked out of town and as we passed the fields, I described to Louisa how it was at harvest, with every able body out with a machete working the rows, ending long days with bright lines of blood on their face and arms because the cane leaves were like blades. I told her things I thought would interest her, like that sugar cane was really just a kind of grass, and that sometimes the spray from a fresh cut stem was turned by the sun into caramel. She nodded thoughtfully, like she was truly listening, and asked questions like how many years I had worked in the fields.

"This will be my third harvest," I told her. "And I'm already as strong as the men." I flexed my arm to show her and she patted my head and laughed.

"And the rest of the year?"

"The rest is slow," I said. "Unless you work at the mill, or in Baracoa. But I keep busy, practice baseball. I'll be famous one day. You can see me play in America."

She smiled. "I'm a nurse," she said. "My friends and I just finished our training. This trip is a kind of last hurrah for us. When we get back, we all start work at hospitals around Toronto. That's in Canada."

I looked at her. "Not America?"

"No," she said and smiled. "Canada. That's the country above America. Some people call it the 'Great Neighbor to the North' or —"

She stopped when I gripped her arm and pointed to the sky. In the air above the fields, ground doves were circling, looking for seeds in the cane. Even higher was a lone black hawk. In one motion, the hawk broke its glide, folded its wings and fell towards the doves. They met with a burst of feathers and the doves scattered. The hawk opened its wings and arched back up, a dove locked tight in its talons.

"Amazing," Louisa said and looked at me. I was still holding her arm. "You're a great guide, do you know that? If something happens ..." She paused and looked back at the sky. "I mean, if something happens that keeps you from playing baseball the way you'd like, I really think you'd make a wonderful guide. Or teacher."

I looked down and felt my face warm. It had never occurred to me that I would do anything but play baseball, but I liked the way things sounded when Louisa said them. I liked the idea that people might pay attention to my words, believe them, as Louisa did. I could picture her as a nurse, ministering to the wounds of others. I took my hand from her arm and we started to walk.

In a few minutes she said, "You know, one of my favorite songs is about a bridge. I can sing it for you if you like."

With all of our talking, I had forgotten where I was taking her. My mind raced.

"Yes," I said, stopping by a rock under a rubber tree. "We can rest and you can sing."

She sat on the rock and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, I noticed for the first time that one of her eyes was clouded over like someone had filled it with cream. It moved like it was following the blue one, but I realized that it probably could not see. In the café I hadn't noticed. Then she sang. The language was alien and I had never heard a melody quite the same. It sounded haunted, sad, but also hopeful, and her voice was clear and lovely.

She smiled when she finished. "It's in Hebrew, but the words are simple and they've always made me feel braver about things to come. They mean 'The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid, not be afraid at all.' Did you like it?"

I nodded and folded one hand inside the other. The melody was still in my ears.

"So, should we be going then?" she asked.

I looked down the road to where Ignacio was waiting. "It's not so nice, really, our bridge." I squinted and cupped my hand over my eyes. "Not really. All of this —" I waved my arm around at the unbroken fields of cane. "Much better."

She looked at me with her blue eye and her milky one. She looked around at the sugar cane and puckered her lips like she was sucking at something. "You're the guide," she said at last, and we walked back into town. *

Mas - 4