Isabella had kissed the President of the Republic on the cheek in front of that big window in the living room. Isabella had had her first period in that apartment, mystified by the bleeding. Feeling as if she were going to die, she’d run into the arms of her Indian nanny crying, very frightened.
Her brother, Roberto Cruz, had changed some things about the apartment, modernizing many of the rooms after their parents died. He’d sold off some of the old-world furniture. Her brother loved everything new and everything American. He wanted, more than anything, to be a modern American swinger. Isabella loved the heavy antique furniture her grandmother had brought with her from France. It was said that her grandmother had been born and died in the same bed. Her brother had sold the bed and bought something out of a catalog from the United States, with an upholstered headboard and a built-in TV set. The advertisement had claimed that this style bed was used by the stars in Hollywood. The TV set had never worked.
She missed the heavy purple curtains that had hung in her grandmother’s bedroom. The dark curtains seemed in keeping with the somber visits she remembered from an ancient Spanish priest, who had fought alongside Franco and against the Spanish Republic. The priest came every day while Isabella’s grandmother was dying. He would hold Isabella’s hand and tell her that Christ loved her very much. She was glad that Christ loved her. It made her feel good. She knelt by her grandmother’s bed, her skates on, and prayed to Christ, asking him not to take her grandmother away.
Her grandmother died the month they sent Isabella to the United States to go to school. Her grandmother had said something to her in French the morning they brought Isabella in to say goodbye. Isabella never understood what her grandmother had said. She had simply told her granddaughter: “Enjoy life, dear. It is very short.”
Isabella wished she and her baby were in the capital, safe. But they weren’t. There was going to be a war. The air was different now. Even the rain was different now, the way it fell against the coffee patios in unforgiving thunderous moments.
She looked down the hallway of the plantation house towards the bedroom where her infant son, Russell, was sleeping. She wondered if he would always love her. Her son had the blood of two countries: Guatemala, the poor coffee country, and The United States, the great top hat country of Henry Ford and Broadway and jet planes and smoking factories. She called him her little Yankee when she fed him, and would laugh while stroking his white skin. She had bathed her son in the same bathtub she’d been bathed in, a bathtub her grandfather had bought and had carried from Puerto Barrios in 1899, through the jungle, to rest here in the plantation house that hadn’t changed in more than a hundred years. Indians who saw the porcelain bathtub coming up the narrow jungle track —like some porcelain god— would bow, her father had told her, laughing. The Indians, the story went, would run from their houses just to touch its white sides with the magical words “American Standard.”
“Olga. Olga…” Isabella said.
“Manda? ” the Indian girl answered.
Olga Montes De Oro stepped out of the bedroom and looked at Isabella. The two young women had known each other since they could remember. They were born two days apart, there on the plantation. If they weren’t sisters, they were—in Guatemalan terms—something very close. (Isabella’s American husband would never understand these mysterious relationships.) The sight of Olga made Isabella feel a little better. A little reassured. Like the day that Olga’s brother found them lost in the cafetales when they were children, terrified by the red ants they’d found crawling up their naked feet and legs.
“The child?” Isabella asked.
“Sleeping now, Doña Isabella,” Olga said. Isabella was ten when Isabella’s father insisted that Olga begin using the doña when she addressed her friend. The two girls laughed about it; it was as if Isabella had suddenly grown up. Olga was jealous, but never said anything to her friend. She wanted to be Doña Olga. Olga told her father. He said that she would be a doña when Olga saw pigs fly over their house, and laughed, rolling a cigarette with one hand. When Olga asked her father why her friend Isabella was a doña and she wasn’t, her father, a worker who smelled of sweat and cheap alcohol, and who’d never had more than three quetzales in his pocket at any one time in his life, said it was because they were poor and Isabella was rich. He told her it would be that way until the sea dried up and God came back to earth to take them all to heaven, rich and poor alike.
“I may drive us. Drive us to Quetzaltenango,” Isabella said. The two young women looked at each other in a way they didn’t normally. Each had a role to play—each had to give meaning to her society, master and servant. But this morning everything seemed to be different: the air itself seemed charged, dangerous, electric, like the afternoon when they had been lost together. They could hear the rain hitting the roof, and Isabella wasn’t sure that Olga had heard her. She wanted to reach for Olga’s hand and hold it, as she had when they had been children. She wanted to say she was frightened, but she didn’t.
“Did you hear me, Olga?” Isabella said instead.
“Yes, madam.” Olga’s eyes betrayed the obvious—that she was frightened, too. She had heard gunshots, and the radio said the war had started in earnest and that someone called Jimmy Carter was going to help them. In Olga’s mind, she saw Jimmy Carter dressed like a Catholic saint, with a stigmata on his naked side from a Roman lance. He wore a crown of dollar bills.
“I’ve called Don Roberto in the capital, but he’s not answering,” Isabella said. “I’ll try again later.”
The cook came running out of the kitchen, across the wet patio. Also a young girl, the cook was heavy-set, with thick legs. Her stomach pressed against the cheap fabric of her cotton dress, which had cost her exactly two weeks’ wages. She stopped under the awning, her hair shiny and very black. If there was a war, she knew nothing about it. The cook would die in a government ambush, her brain pierced by a bullet made in Indiana in a small factory with no sign. Ironically, the bullet was made by a woman, and fired by a woman who was fighting “in the name of the fatherland.”
Isabella watched the cook hesitate, pull open the screen door, and then walk in. The young woman, who’d also grown up on the plantation, smelled of wood smoke. They used wood in the kitchen to cook tortillas long after they could have used propane.
“Madam, I have the pork for lunch. Will there be anyone else today?”
“No,” Isabella said. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Don Antonio?” the cook asked. “Will he be coming to lunch?”
They heard more shots then, and there was no mistaking them; they were shots and they were coming from the south near the town, less than five kilometers away. The women could hear them over the rain and the rolling thunder, which had broken twice over the house since Isabella had come to use the phone.
Isabella instinctively told herself not to show fear; that if she did, that somehow it would be the beginning of something bad, something she couldn’t control, and the people around her would lose their courage too and they would all be lost. She felt, at this moment, as if she were the center of all their universes. She was the heart and soul of the plantation that her grandfather had left them. After all, she was a Cruz, and had her grandfather’s lion heart. She had the boy in the other room. He was sick. He was too small to be sick here on the plantation, with a war starting. He was fragile. What kind of Yankee was fragile? she wondered.
“I want you to turn on the radio in the living room,” Isabella said to the cook, instead of saying: “God help us. They’re here. The communists are here, and will kill us.”