When they needed to relieve themselves, they stepped into the other room, where Gloria had set an escupidera, and then they hurried back.
Gloria lit candles; Inés brought over the kerosene lamp. Valentina looked at Inés’s long fingers, bereft of her mundillo, restless on the tabletop, tapping out a song that no one could hear.
Lourdes fell asleep on her father’s lap while Javier slept with his arms cushioning his head on the table.
In the hour between night and day, the leaves on the trees ceased to whisper, animals became mute, and nature held its breath.
Then there was wind and rain that came in torrents; lightning buried electrical bolts into the ground. They sat at the table listening to the sounds of crashing objects outside; one thunderous clamor and violent vibrations shook the ground beneath the house. Vicente thought the earth might crack open.
They wouldn’t have been able to hear each other if they had spoken. Huddled together, the adults sat wide-eyed, the children hid under the table. The rain pounded the house, and lightning flashed through the cracks in the boarded-up windows, illuminating the fear on their faces.
In the early hours of the morning, Angelina and Inés rose from the table. What they said was lost in the rain. Vicente put his arms around his mother, his words imploring her to stay unheard. Valentina grasped Inés by the hand and Inés kissed it; she made a tiny sign of the cross on the younger woman’s forehead. Then Angelina and Inés took one of the candles and left.
The rain pounded the door of the house, demanding entrance. Vicente realized that he’d never heard such wind. He thought of his brother Raulito and Eusemia, just two of the peones who lived in the countryside in their huts made of straw and coconut palm; how could they survive such a storm? Would they? Yes, yes, they would, he told himself. And his coffee trees, could they survive? Soon the coffee would be ready for picking. Vicente rubbed his forehead to banish the vision of his coffee trees tossed on the ground like matchsticks, the berries scattered to the ends of the earth.
Finally, there was a lull in the wind.
Vicente went to check on his mother and Inés but the women weren’t in their bedroom or in the house.
“Mamá and Inés aren’t here!”
Vicente ran to the entrance of the house, his father behind him. When they couldn’t open the door because the wind pushed against it on the other side, Vicente ran to the wall for the pick to pry open the shuttered window.
Raúl Vega tossed one end of a heavy rope to Vicente.
“Tie it around your waist and knot it well,” he said.
Vicente followed his father out the window and bumped into him when he stopped short.
Gone were the citrus trees—lemon, orange, and grapefruit—that had provided fruit and perfumed the air. Mango trees, gone. Vines of roses and orchids that his mother had planted, the trellises she’d wrapped them round, gone. Bushes of herbs—cilantro, recao, marjoram—everything, gone. Gloria had often sent Valentina annatto seeds from the achiote tree that grew alongside the house. Gone. The chicken coop, gone. The shed with the sacks of coffee from last year’s harvest that no one wanted to buy—gone. The horses, gone.
The day had the darkness of night.
The rain slashed their faces. The rope gripped tight in his hands, Vicente followed his father like a blind man. They stumbled over the trunk of a twenty-foot palm tree that had been snapped in half. It seemed like hours before they reached the river, now swollen to twice its usual depth. A wild procession of dogs and cats and cows and horses and uprooted trees and beds and chairs flowed downward as if a giant hand had hurled them onto a river of mud. Men and women and children bobbled up and down and then disappeared, the river swallowing their screams. Bohíos, intact and with their occupants still inside, careened in the water. The wind picked up again, and the men knew it was the second front of the hurricane. They risked being carried away. Father and son turned back toward the house, pushing against the wind. A cow flew over them, upside down on its back, hooves and udders flapping like wings. A boy, his arm sliced off at the elbow by a flying blade of zinc, appeared, then disappeared, like an apparition. Vicente shouted over the din; he felt his breath in his diaphragm, but he couldn’t hear a sound.
Raulito clutched his mother Eusemia’s hands as they sat huddled together on the cot. It reminded him of how as a small boy, his mother had carried him to her bed when he had woken up crying about spirits; he was forever dreaming about spirits. (It didn’t help that Eusemia often saw her dead relatives—her mother and father and grandparents wandering the mountainside or next to her when she picked coffee.) His mother had explained that the spirits had once been human beings, but because of terrible tragedies they had suffered when they were alive, they couldn’t make their way into the spirit part of the world. There is only one world, Eusemia had said, everyone lives in it—the living and the dead. Raulito had cried because he didn’t want to live with his dead relatives. The spirits meant him no harm, his mother had reassured him, but they were among them always, whether he wanted them to be or not.
Now he pledged to protect his mother, this woman whose hands were rough like bark. Rain came through the thatched roof. His eardrums felt as if they would burst. Hours later, when the wind abated, his ears popped, and he clutched his head in pain. Mother and son stood outside their bohío, staring in silent horror. The few trees that remained had been snapped like kindling. The huge mango tree from which Eusemia had picked mangos for Vicente’s mother the day before, gone. Many of the bohíos had vanished. Some of their neighbors drifted in dazed circles or ran about in a crazed state; toward what, or away from what, it was impossible to tell. Later Raulito would realize that the people were naked.
The wind picked up again and they returned to their home of straw and plaited palm. Raulito reached for his mother’s hands again. He was sure that the terror on her face was reflected in his own. He fought against the scream that rose in his throat, even though no one would hear it. The rain came down in furious waves and carried off the hut’s thatched roof. Water gushed down over them like a waterfall. He felt himself lifted up.
When Raulito was a small boy, his father Raúl Vega picked him up and tossed him high up in the air and he flew up up up; Raulito flew up into the sky.
The mosquitoes and the rains came the day after the hurricane, but still the men prepared to go out to look for the missing women. They didn’t know that it would rain for twenty-eight days. Together, they set out; Raúl Vega and Vicente found the road to town impassable. They stepped over or around corpses of dogs, cats, oxen, horses, and sometimes, people. They turned over the bodies of young men and women who might have been Raulito and las damas. Each time, Vicente breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t one of his loved ones. As they followed the river a ways to look for the women, bodies floated past them. On a bank they found two little girls, facedown in the mud. Vicente couldn’t help crying out for a moment remembering Evita, even as he turned them over on the chance that they might still be alive. They returned home before dark, their shirts fashioned into slings filled with what fruit and vegetables they had picked up along the way.
The next day the men went out again; the women had brushed the dry mud off their clothes that morning while they ate their breakfast of coffee and cornbread spread with Gloria’s pasta de naranja, a sweet orange marmalade that was Vicente’s favorite. The women and children were instructed to stay inside because it was too dangerous. Valentina promised to preserve what she could of the fruit and vegetables they had found.