Chapter 13

13

EVERY DAY FRANCISCO DRESSED AND WALKED OUT OF THE HOUSE AND LOOKED down at the ground for footprints in the mud, but there were none. Inside, the bowl of salt was on the windowsill where he had left it the night before. The chairs at the table had not been budged by even an inch. The loose eggs on the counter sat untouched. Numbly, Francisco walked down to the shore, untied his boat, and got in. As he paddled out in the stark morning light, he stared back at the land, at the house, at what he could see of the road, but the boy did not appear.

In the beginning, Francisco paddled back to the shore in the evening with bits of hope in his heart. Maybe Omar would be there when he walked into the house. Maybe he would be seated at the table, rubbing his eyes. Maybe he would be standing at the washtub, cleaning himself. Maybe Francisco would not live the rest of his life alone, having lost the only two people he had ever loved. But each time Francisco stepped hopefully into the house, Omar was nowhere to be found. And after the first several days of disappointment, the feeling Francisco had when he came back to the shore was closer to dread. The thought of walking into the house only to discover that his son was not there—again—made him nauseous. For if the boy was gone, what had happened to him? Had he really, as Francisco had thought from the start, found a new place to live, away from his father? Had the six months of prolonged silence between them finally chased him away? Or was it, as Francisco had tried not to think, something far worse? That last thought in particular set the wave of nausea loose, and multiple times in those days Francisco leaned over the side of the boat and threw up. The idea did occur to him that he could go search for his son, but that brought the same strangling feeling of dread. For if he searched, what might he find? No. It was easier, Francisco had learned, to live in a world of delusion, which was after all not so different from hope, than to stand face-to-face with the truth.

***

AFTER ESME HAD disappeared, Francisco had stopped fishing for a few years. He had no choice. He could not take a baby out on the boat all day long, nor could he leave a baby at home. Instead Francisco bought a knock-kneed goat and milked it and poured the milk into a cheesecloth that had been filled with rice and let Omar suck the milk out. He mashed up plantain and papaya and boiled ?ame and greens, and fed that to him, too. When the goat died, he butchered it and ate the cooked meat. While Omar was sleeping, Francisco built boats like the one he had made for himself, and with Omar tied to his chest, he dragged the boats to the city and sold them to people. They got by this way.

But as soon as he could, as soon as Omar was old enough to stay home by himself, Francisco started fishing again. He found that out on the water, he felt closer to her. He knelt in the hull of the boat and peered over the sides. With his hand, he ruffled the water, which flashed in the sun. If she was magical—and he believed that she was—then she might come back. “Esme!” he whispered in case she could hear. Sometimes he dove in. He could hardly see more than he had seen from the boat, but the miraculous thing, the thing that made Francisco dive in again and again over the years, was not only desperation and grief but the fact that sometimes when he went under the water, it smelled distinctly of violets.

In 1899, nine years after Esme went from being the most magical creature ever to walk the earth to the most tragic ever to try to walk upon the sea, war broke out. At the time, Panamá was the westernmost department of the Republic of Colombia, and although the war started as a battle between the Liberals and the Conservatives in the Department of Santander farther to the east, it soon spread like ink, staining every part of the country. Francisco could remember hearing the sonorous boom of gunboats stationed in the Gulf of Panamá. On the streets of the city he saw children dressed in military uniforms so oversized that even with their belts cinched tight, they looked like crumpled bags, children who nevertheless had been enlisted to fight. When Victoriano Lorenzo, a Liberal leader who had fought valiantly to defend his people’s land rights, was executed in the Plaza de Chiriquí before a firing squad of twelve soldiers, it was impossible not to be horrified. And yet, somehow, much of life went on. Francisco fished, and he went to the market, where people discussed every development of the war—one day the Liberals had won a victory at La Negra Vieja, the next day the Conservatives had killed two hundred men, back and forth, an eye for an eye, until it was hard to tell who had the upper hand. Joaquín, who had begun avidly reviewing the newspaper, stood at his stall and as people gathered around—Francisco among them—imparted what he had read. Stories of villages burned in the mountains, a blockade on a river, a skirmish atop a bridge. For three years, war raged. And then one day in November 1902, a battleship from the United States arrived, a ship with the strange name Wisconsin , which no one could pronounce. Some people said it was the size of Noah’s great ark, but others said no, it only appeared so big because Panamá was so small. To Francisco both sides were saying the same thing and they were furthermore missing the point. The United States had arrived to meddle in the affairs of Panamá. But upon that ship, a treaty was reached, and the deadliest war in Francisco’s memory finally came to an end.

After the torment of the war, everyone in the country was exhausted and enraged. Instead of discussing battles and what kinds of weapons had been shipped over in piano boxes and which bridges were damaged and how many thousands of men had been killed, the people in the fish market, who were the only people Francisco saw all day long, started clamoring about the idea of una separación from Colombia. The talk was timid at first. Even the word, Francisco felt, was timid. A separation. As if it could all be so polite. But as time passed, the talk grew more intense. His entire life he had heard Panamanians dream that they might become a country that belonged to itself. In the eighty or so years since declaring independence from Spain, Panamanians had tried numerous times to extract themselves from Colombia, hopeful that they might control their own interests without answering to the whims and demands of Bogotá.

The difference between the talk of La Separación this time and every time before was that now Panamanians had someone on their side who could ensure their success—the United States. The United States, Joaquín explained to anyone who would listen, wanted to build a canal. Some of the men in the fish market, those who recalled that twenty years earlier Frenchmen had declared the same thing, laughed. The French effort had lasted nine dismal years, and by the time the French went home, they had made only minor progress. Why, since the time of Christopher Columbus people had wanted to create a canal across the isthmus, and no one yet had gotten it done. What made the North Americans think they could do it now? Audacity, Joaquín told them, and Francisco knew his friend well enough to know that he meant it as praise.

Joaquín summarized what he had read. The United States had attempted to negotiate a treaty with the government in Bogotá in which they had offered to pay $10 million, plus $250,000 every year for one hundred years, if Bogotá gave them the rights and sovereignty over an area of land six miles wide for the length of the canal. Joaquín recited the terms with a certain melodrama. “And do you know what the government said to that offer?” he asked. “They said no!” he sputtered. Francisco listened politely. Joaquín shared the attitude of many Panamanians who believed that the tiny strip of land upon which they lived had been chosen for greatness by God Himself and that a canal across the isthmus would finally bring the region of Panamá the prosperity it deserved. In their view, to have Bogotá deny them their God-given fate as well as their future wealth was sacrilege. In Francisco’s view, he would rather everything simply be left alone.

The Panamanians who favored separation became quite vocal after that. Every time Francisco went to the market, Joaquín spoke of riots and uprisings. Francisco himself saw new ships in the harbor—first one displaying a Colombian flag, and then one flying the flag of the United States, as if in direct response—which made it seem as though something serious were afoot. “The United States will not take no for an answer,” Joaquín effused. “Thanks to them, we might get our canal after all.” It was not until later that Joaquín and Francisco understood just what the United States had done. They had not simply stood up to the government in Bogotá; they had tacitly offered military support to the separatists in Panamá. For if the separation occurred, then the United States could try anew to negotiate a treaty for the canal—only this time with a country that wanted it anyway. One day in November 1903 people heard that two Colombian generals had been jailed, and they saw the Colombian ship in the harbor retreat, and word spread that the Republic of Panamá had been born.

At the fish market, Joaquín stood up on a crate one afternoon and waved a newspaper in the air. The provisional junta had published something they were calling the Manifesto on Panamanian Independence.

“Listen here!” Joaquín said, and everyone did. “It says, ‘The transcendental act that by a spontaneous movement the inhabitants of the Isthmus of Panamá have just executed is the inevitable consequence of a situation which has become graver daily. The Isthmus of Panamá has been governed by the Republic of Colombia with the narrow-mindedness that in past times were applied to their colonies by the European nations—the isthmian people and territory was a source of fiscal resources and nothing more.’”

Francisco watched as people around him nodded.

After several minutes, Joaquín came to a part that said: “The people of the Isthmus, in view of such notorious causes, have decided to recover their sovereignty and begin to form a part of the society of the free and independent nations, in order to work out its own destiny, to insure its future in a stable manner, and discharge the duties which it is called on to do by the situation of its territory and its immense riches.” Everyone cheered. “?Viva el Istmo Libre!” Francisco thought they were fools. With bright eyes, people went around reciting the words. Part of the society of the free and independent nations! Its own destiny! They drank them in, intoxicated. But Francisco believed he understood something that they did not. To be independent and to be sovereign were two different things. Panamá, detaching itself from Colombia, had merely done an about-face and attached itself to the United States instead.

In the years to come, Francisco might have had any number of grievances. He might have complained that the American immigrants who flowed into Panamá brought their strange music and their strange food. He might have complained how few of them tried to learn Spanish or about how they imposed taxes on goods imported into the Canal Zone, even goods from other parts of Panamá. No one had ever heard of such a thing. A tax on goods imported from Panamá to Panamá was absurdity of the highest degree. He might have complained about all the United States flags that were suddenly strung up everywhere, fluttering in the sea breeze, or about how the cobblestone streets were now being paved, as if their unruliness were in need of being smoothed out, or about how the names of so many of those streets and plazas were being changed from what they had always been, or about how everywhere Francisco looked, there were new stores, new hotels, new restaurants, none of which he could afford. Measure by measure, the world as he knew it was giving way.

But what happened with the tinaja is what put him over the edge.

Francisco and Omar never had visitors on the road where they lived, so it was with considerable alarm that, eighteen months or so after the treaty, Francisco was awoken early one morning by a great ruckus, a profusion of sound that at first he mistook for a plague of locusts, insects that sometimes raided the coast, bleating in a mad chorus and scraping their dry, discarded shells. He sat up in bed. The sun had not yet risen, but it was huddled somewhere just below the horizon and gave off the subtlest glow of light, just enough to allow him to see.

Francisco looked around his bedroom in confusion, trying to remember the last time the locusts had come. They tended to keep to a schedule—every three years, every seven, Francisco did not know what it was, but he knew that right then was not their appointed time. He got out of bed and walked to Omar’s room, but the boy was asleep. Seeing that only added to Francisco’s confusion. How could Omar sleep through all of this racket? Was the commotion only in Francisco’s head? He stuck a finger in each of his ears to clean out any wax in case that would help, but now the noise sounded louder to him than it had before.

Frightened by what he might find, Francisco crept through the house and very slowly opened the front door. What he saw out on the road, beyond the aloe plants in the yard and the snails and the frogs lazing in the dirt, was not a swarm of locusts but a swarm of men. In the darkness of the morning, he could barely make them out. But they were no doubt men, maybe four or five of them, whistling and walking and carrying things—Francisco was not sure what—as if they were in a parade. Francisco watched them march all the way to the end of the road and stop in front of his house. Again he thought: Is this all in my head? Is this only a dream?

One of the men from the swarm came forward and, in imperfect Spanish, said, “Hello! We are the fumigation brigade.” He walked through the yard toward the front door where Francisco stood peering out in his underwear. It was only when the man was close enough that Francisco could see he was white. He was carrying an aluminum oil can.

Francisco did not know the meaning of “fumigation brigade.” It sounded like a military operation, perhaps. He asked, “Are we in another war?”

The man at his door laughed. “Yes. In a manner of speaking. A war against mosquitoes.”

That was not what Francisco had expected the man to say, and now, though Francisco was the one standing there in his underwear, he felt pity for the man before him, who had either made an asinine joke or else was so delusional that he thought a war against mosquitoes was one worth fighting, a war that could actually be won. Francisco, who only minutes earlier had been frightened and confused, suddenly felt the dynamic between them reverse and believed that he was on top, looking down upon this poor misguided man.

Francisco came out onto the step and closed the door behind him. He smiled and, simply to humor the man, said, “How can I help?”

The man did not answer but nodded and whistled to the rest of the brigade still standing in the road. They were dark-skinned men, though not Panamanian it seemed, and at once they stormed toward the house, some going in one direction, some going in another, all of them moving with efficiency and purpose, speaking to one another in English, and Francisco watched, at first with amusement and then with increasing concern as one of the men rested a ladder against his roof while another tore long strips of newspaper and began gluing them to the windows while yet another poured some sort of liquid into the aluminum oil can.

“What are you doing?” Francisco shouted to a man on the roof. “There are no mosquitoes up there!”

It was such a bizarre sight, these men in their futile swirl of activity descending upon his small house, that part of him still clung to the idea that it was all some sort of ludicrous dream.

But when the man Francisco had first spoken to set fire to the liquid in the can and said he needed to put it inside the house, Francisco threw himself in front of the door and held his arms out to the side, blocking the man’s way.

“I do not know what you are doing here, but I will not let you burn down my house.”

“The fire stays in the can,” the man said. “It’s the smoke that we need. The smoke suffocates any mosquitoes inside.”

But that sounded as preposterous as the rest of it. And Omar was inside. Though surely he could not still be sleeping, could he?

“I will not let you in,” Francisco said.

The man frowned. The sun was coming up, lightening the day, and Francisco could see more clearly by then. The man, clean-shaven, was holding the smoldering oil can in his hand. In Spanish he said, “Then you will be fined.”

“Fined? For what? Not allowing you to set fire to my house? Under whose authority are you here?”

“The Americans’.”

Francisco balked. “The North Americans’, you mean?”

“I mean the Americans’.”

“But that is all of us.”

“Who?”

“Those of us from the Americas.”

The man pointed to his chest and said slowly in Spanish, overenunciating each word, “I am an American. They are West Indians. You are a Panamanian.”

Francisco, greatly annoyed, jabbed a finger to his own chest and, just as slowly, said, “I was born here, in the Americas. Therefore, I am an American.”

The man raised his eyebrows.

Francisco said, “We were Americans long before you were.”

There was a pause. And then the man at whom Francisco was staring simply shrugged. “Until a year ago, you were Colombian. Now please step aside.”

But Francisco did not. “Are you saying that the United States sent you here? To burn down my house?”

“To get rid of mosquitoes.”

“But that cannot be done.”

“We are going to try. Now, if you will stand to the side...”

Francisco stayed where he was, his body an X in front of the door, naked except for his thin underwear.

The man looked sternly at him. “These are my orders. And if you do not comply, you will be fined or imprisoned.”

Francisco understood that another reversal had occurred, that the men in his yard and crawling all over his house saw him as a fool, the object of their pity, a man whose delusion was that he could stand up to the power of the United States and not be squashed like a pest. And maybe he was.

“No,” Francisco said.

The man looked surprised. “Did you understand what I said?”

“I will not let you in.”

“What is your name?”

But Francisco stood with his arms and feet wide and said nothing more.

And finally, after releasing a great sigh of frustration, the man walked back out into the yard and put the flaming can on the ground and doused it with another liquid that extinguished the fire and stopped it from smoking. In English, he called the men down from the roof. They hoisted the ladder up on their shoulders and carried it back to the road. As his parting gesture, the white man walked over to the tinaja filled with rainwater Francisco kept by the side of the house. As it was too heavy to lift, he pushed it over onto its side, and Francisco watched in horror as the water he had collected for months gushed out, darkening the dirt. “No open containers,” was all the man said. Then the brigade left his property, and Francisco watched them go. As a group, they trekked back up the road toward the house of Do?a Ruiz, where possibly they would try to do the same thing. Who knew? All Francisco knew was that they could not come in his home, and if they returned, he would stop them again.

As it was, they did not return because the boundaries for the fumigation efforts were revised such that Francisco’s house fell outside the lines. The area of more pressing concern became the city proper. But Francisco did not know that. When no one came back, he regarded it simply as his personal success. He had turned them away. He yanked the strips of newspaper down from the windows and wadded them up, he scrubbed off the glue, and the only thing left behind from the encounter was the bitter feeling Francisco had for the meddlesome Yankees who, like a plague of locusts, had invaded Panamá.

***

FRANCISCO FELT THAT same bitter feeling come flooding back when, many months later, Omar told him that he had gotten a job working on the canal. At the very suggestion, Francisco had flown into a fury so that Omar would stop saying things Francisco did not want to hear.

The problem was that it worked. It was effective beyond reason. Not only did Omar stop saying things Francisco did not want to hear, but he stopped saying things altogether, and Francisco, in his rage and disappointment, decided that for one entire day he would do the same. For a full day, he walked past Omar, looked past him, ignored him completely.

He should have ended it there, having gotten his point across, but when Francisco woke up the next day, the outrage still boiled, so he did it again. Maybe two days in a row would change the boy’s mind, make him reconsider his mistake. By the third day, Francisco was mostly annoyed that his silent protest was not having the desired effect. He could feel Omar looking at him at times, but the boy did not speak, did not apologize, did not ask for forgiveness, said nothing at all, and Francisco understood that they were both dug in. It was a cockfight in which both of them were pecking at the air, circling each other to see who went down first. Francisco resolved it would not be him. An action born from righteousness quickly transformed into one sustained by pride.

Now, he had said nothing to the boy for nearly six months.

Many days, Francisco woke up in the morning with every in tention of saying something to his son. Sometimes he thought he might say, “I am sorry. Let us stop this,” and they could move on. Other times he thought the better approach would be to act as if nothing had happened and say something banal, like “Bananas are yellow,” and see how Omar would respond. They could have an honest debate about how bananas were sometimes green and sometimes brown, it didn’t matter the topic, as long as they were talking about something . Still other times Francisco had the idea that he could just say a word, any word under the sun—“Butterfly” or “window” or “spoon”—and that one lone word would be enough to break apart the accumulation of silence. But every time Francisco opened his mouth he could not get even one single word to come out. The original outrage still simmered, but it was not even that. Speaking was so impossible that he would have thought the problem was physical except that when he went to the fish market and talked to any other person, his voice still came out loud and clear. The impasse was only with Omar. Until his son stopped working in the Mouth, Francisco could not open his.

Not speaking to someone was one thing. But not speaking to no one was another thing entirely. The whole time that Omar did not come home, there was no one for Francisco to assiduously ignore. At some point, he started to feel he was coming undone. He stood in the middle of the house and shouted, “?Hola!” just to hear the sound of his voice, which he had not heard in the house for nearly half a year. He shouted, “The rain is drowning the frogs!” He shouted, “I cannot make sense of this life!” And then he stood alone in the echo and felt worse than before.

When he went to the market, Francisco interacted with Joaquín, but those interactions always involved less speaking than listening. Joaquín liked to vent about whatever happened to be on his mind—the weather, his wife. One day Francisco lumbered up to Joaquín’s stall with his catch, and Joaquín was carrying on about Panama hats.

“I ask you, my friend, what is a Panama hat?”

Francisco replied that he did not know.

“Have you seen the straw hats that all the so-called important men wear?”

“No.”

Joaquín recoiled a little and gave Francisco an exasperated look. “Don’t you ever go out anywhere?”

“I come here.”

“Here, yes, fine. But there is a whole other world out there .” Joaquín pointed behind him toward the city, indeed the whole country, that lay beyond the dock.

Francisco shrugged.

“Well, if you went anywhere, you would see them. They have become ubiquitous on men of a certain station. They are pale, finely woven hats with a black ribbon band.”

“You mean Ecuador hats?”

Joaquín clapped his hands. “You do not let me down after all! Yes, Ecuador hats! Do the Yankees not know those hats are made in Ecuador? But now they are calling them Panama hats. And they sell them that way.”

“But why?”

Joaquín leaned over that day’s heap of fish and sifted them, their silver bodies slipping over one another. “Why do you think?”

“They are using our name.”

“They are using every part of us that they please.” Joaquín plucked one fish up by the tail. “It is like this fish. Someone can use the scales for jewelry and the eyes for bait and the flesh for a meal and the bones for a soup, and when they are done, there will be nothing left.” He tossed the fish to the side.

Francisco stared at the space that was left in the air. He remembered during the time of La Separación how optimistic and hopeful Joaquín had been. “I call it La Boca,” Francisco said.

“Call what?”

“The canal.”

“You call it the Mouth?”

“Yes. It is eating us.”

Solemnly, Joaquín nodded. “That is right, my friend. We are the fish.”

***

AFTER ABOUT A week, desperation took hold and Francisco walked up the road to the house of Do?a Ruiz. It was a Sunday, the day of rest, and Francisco found her lying in repose in a hammock stretched between two cedar trees. Her eyes were closed, and her hands were folded over her chest as though she were dead.

Francisco walked up next to the hammock and stood there, looking down. Do?a Ruiz was wearing a colorfully embroidered bata, and her feet were bare.

Without opening her eyes, she said, “Why are you here?”

Francisco blinked, then he snorted in a mocking way. “Aren’t you supposed to know?”

He saw Do?a Ruiz grin. “Ah—he speaks.”

Chastened, Francisco closed his mouth. Do?a Ruiz opened her eyes and stared up at him. Francisco, afraid of her gaze, looked away.

“Five months and twenty-two days, by my count,” Do?a Ruiz said. “That is a long time for a man to behave like a stone.”

Francisco had not come to be reprimanded. “Do you know where he is?”

“I know where he is not.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

Francisco had an urge to spit on the old bat. Why had he thought she would help him? Just because she had once predicted that he would marry Esme? Anyone could have predicted that. Anyone could have taken one look at the two of them and said the same thing. That was not even a prediction. That was eyesight and common sense. A long time ago he had vowed to himself to steer clear of Do?a Ruiz, and he should have upheld his vow. Not here. Of course the boy was not here. Francisco had cautioned him, too, not to go near this old cow. He should have listened to his own advice.

“Have you looked for him?” she asked.

“No.”

“No? Well what do you think? That if something is lost it will come to find you? Open your eyes, Francisco Aquino. Your mouth is one thing, but you need to open your eyes.” Then it was she who laughed in a mocking way, a sound that wounded him and repulsed him.

Francisco stumbled back and still she laughed, and had Francisco not been so eager to escape her presence, he would have pointed out that until a minute ago, she was the one who had her eyes closed.

***

THROUGH THE brANCHES of the trees that hovered high above her head, Do?a Ruiz looked up at the sky from her hammock. Fifteen years ago, she had been given the hammock by a poor soul from Portobelo who had no money to pay for his palm reading, and lying in it on Sundays had been her tradition ever since. Ordinarily, Do?a Ruiz would have had little sympathy for someone who had sought out her services knowing that they had not a single silver coin in their pocket, but in her youth Do?a Ruiz had been to Portobelo, and the town had made a lasting impression on her. Many Panamanians undertook an annual pilgrimage to the ancient town to worship at the feet of the Black Jesus that was housed in its church, and Do?a Ruiz’s mother had insisted the whole family take part. It did not end up being the journey her mother had envisioned. Customarily, people walked most of the way and then fell to their knees and crawled to the church for the final mile or so, but Do?a Ruiz’s mother, in her extreme piety, wanted the family to crawl for the full three days. Do?a Ruiz’s brothers, Armando and Ismael, kept poking and swatting each other as they crawled, and they wrestled and roughhoused so much that the family kept having to stop so that Do?a Ruiz’s mother could scold them and pry them apart. After a time, her father stood up and announced that he would walk the rest of the way. His knees were bloody, he groused. Her mother had snarled, “That is the point.” But her father had merely shrugged and walked upright beside them until her mother finally relented and sent the men home. It took young Do?a Ruiz and her mother another two days to arrive, and by the end their knees were indeed bloodied almost down to the bone. When they got to the church, it was ringed with so many worshippers scrabbling beneath the blaze of the sun that no one could get close enough to actually see El Cristo Negro. “What bullshit is this?” her mother said. Before long, a spirit of revolt spread through the crowd. There was talk of storming the church, of tearing down the wooden walls so El Cristo Negro would be revealed. There was shoving and squirming. And then, amid the agitation, a dark shadow passed over the crowd, as if day had plunged into night, and everyone stopped and looked about in confusion. When Do?a Ruiz looked up, she saw in the darkened sky the figure of a man, which was really a cloud, but which in her mind she took for El Cristo Negro, as if he had departed the church and revealed himself to those with the daring to look up. To this day, lying in the hammock, she always made sure she did.

Do?a Ruiz was older now, though, and getting out of the hammock was not as easy as it used to be. Because of that, she stayed in it for hours sometimes. She napped and let her mind wander and she plotted how she would get out, rolling her body one way then the other to gain some momentum, hooking a leg over the side.

On the day that Francisco came to her, she had been lying there already for two hours, enjoying the breeze before the rain that would surely come.

Francisco was a hot wind, and when he had blown up beside her, she could tell he was there without opening her eyes. Do?a Ruiz had known Francisco for quite some time. She had already lived on this road when he arrived to build his small house, and though he was never friendly and they rarely spoke, he had walked up and down the road so many times, passing her house each time, that she had had ample opportunity to watch him and read his energy even from afar. In the early years, he was determined, bringing in the supplies and materials to erect his house, and from her front patio sometimes, Do?a Ruiz could hear the echo of the hammer knocking sticks of wood into place as he worked. Then there was the period of sublime happiness, the sort of happiness that only comes from falling in love, and it was not long before Do?a Ruiz saw Francisco walk down the road with a woman at his side, a brooding raven-haired woman named Esme. Do?a Ruiz predicted their matrimony before Francisco himself realized it would occur. From experience she had learned that when a man is stupefied with joy as Francisco was in those days, there are only two possible outcomes—marriage or heartbreak. As it happened, Francisco would get both. The period of happiness ended a year and a half after it began and was followed by a period of intense and smothering grief. Esme disappeared. Do?a Ruiz never saw her again. The next thing she saw was Francisco walking down the road with an infant strapped to his chest and the weight of all the rest of the world saddled onto his back. In time, Do?a Ruiz watched the baby grow into a boy and then into a young man. He had a very different temperament from his father. He was shy and quiet but open to things, pliable, flexible, eager to learn. At one point she’d had a mule that took her to the city, but the mule had died, and when it had become harder for her to walk to the city herself, she had asked Omar to run errands for her, an arrangement that lasted for some years. He was always polite; he always did as she asked. Do?a Ruiz never saw Omar and Francisco together, but because they were all the other had, she imagined they must have been close. The day Francisco came to her, she had not seen him in quite a while. She was surprised to find that in all that time his energy was as yet unchanged. He was as sorrowful now as she had observed him to be in the days of his grief, and she pitied him because it was clear to her that for seventeen years, he had been trapped in that sorrow. Lying there in the hammock, she asked the gods to lift it from him.