PROLOGUE:
Mateo, Colombia
Miguel scrambled up the ladder made from two small trees. The stripped branches Father Thomas and Doctor Neill nailed to the uprights still had some sharp points. As he climbed, they dug into his feet and hands. He pressed his lips together to keep from crying out. When he
settled onto the scrap of wood that had been cut and wedged across one corner of the steeple of The Chapel of Our Lady of the Miracle, a splinter jabbed his into thigh. He cursed the polite way Father Thomas had taught him. G-D. S-O-B. F-K.
The bell loomed behind him. Sitting in the tower day after day, he thought he sensed it giving off, not only heat from the relentless sun, but also vibrations, a sound that he couldn't hear, like that made by the dog whistle he'd found in the dump. Father Thomas said that was entirely possible because The Church was always calling out to people, whether or not they sensed it, offering sanctuary for their bodies and spirits.
A hot, moist breeze rippled the leaves of the thick canopy that inch by inch encroached upon the village of Mateo. The perfume of a hundred different kinds of flowers drifted on the air, as did the rich, damp odor given off by a million years of rotting vegetation, and the the stench from the dump. Miguel took the thick rope attached to the clapper of the bell in his two hands, draped it over his arms, and rested his head on it. He didn't care that it made a prickly pillow. He dared not sleep.
His job was the most important in the whole village. Because he was the smallest of the older boys, he alone, among all of all of them, could fit into the tiny space. For the first time in his life, his
size in relation to his age, was an advantage. All the taunting for being so small and being left out of games was meaningless now that he was appointed watchman.
And where were all those mean boys? Miguel laughed to think of them stuck in the schoolroom that had been set up on the second floor of the clinic. Their voices in sing-song unison recitation of the times tables drifted across the green to him. "Cinco por siete es treintay cinco. Seis por siete es cuarentay dos."
Even in the steeple, with such an important job to do, he couldn't escape the useless things the gringos thought the children of Mateo needed to learn. And he couldn't keep his mind from joining in. When Nurse Margaret called out Peru, shown of the huge wall map, also a treasure from the dump, Miguel would whisper Lima, the capitol, before the children in the classroom could respond.
He wiped sweat from his forehead to keep the salty drops from running into his eyes and blurring his vision. On his next trip to the dump, he was going to keep looking until he found a red,
genuine NBA Chicago Bulls sweat band.
"To stay in the game as watchman," Father Thomas had said when he'd appointed Miguel to the job, "Keep your eyes moving."
Miguel looked around the village for the tenth time that morning. On the right, next to the church, stood the two story building that served as a clinic and school house. It was originally an inn with
many sleeping rooms upstairs and a large dining room and kitchen on the first floor. Clear, he thought, like the cops in movies he'd seen in the city.
Scattered here and there around the green were houses of various sizes. When times were good, they bore fresh, brightly colored paint. But their paint, like the white of the church and the inn, had faded and was peeling away. Clear.
To the left of the church stood a small store that had been built when many visitors came to Mateo to bathe in the pool at the bottom of the falls. All three buildings were over one hundred and twenty-five years old. Built at the time of the miracle. Nestor, the store owner, on his weekly trips to Medellin or Cali, bought only the items he thought the villagers would barter for or buy,
so there were many empty shelves. But the story was a busy place where the men gathered to drink and to talk about matters that didn't concern the doctor or the priest. Clear.
Suddenly Isabella came from the old inn and started across the green. Miguel sat up straight to his full height to show himself to best advantage in the big opening in the steeple. She was smart in school and, once in a while, she was sent from class, while the others finished their lessons, to help clean the sanctuary for Sunday mass. Miguel watched her make her way across the shady square.
Except for a scar on her right temple, which Father Thomas and Doctor
Neill said was where God had touched her to make the small pox go away,
she had flawless skin the color of the meat of a walnut. Her hair was
long, black, and straight. A wide red ribbon with white stars on it, tied in a big bow at the
nape of her neck, kept her hair away from her face. Her eyes could be soft
or sharp depending on her mood. Her smile was beautiful. One day she would be his wife.
"Hola, Miguel," she called softly as she entered the church.
"Hola," he whispered just loud enough for her to hear, making sure not to wave, as he had done the first time she came to help. The gesture had set off the bell. Everyone immediately began to run
around according to Father Thomas' and Doctor Neill's plan. Miguel was humiliated when he had to admit, after everyone had calmed down and he was in the privacy of the confessional, that it was Isabella's arrival and not the sighting of bandits that had caused him to accidentally pull the rope. Even though Father Thomas swore he never revealed matters mentioned in the confessional, when the men sat in Nestor's store smoking and talking about the nasties, Mateo's name was linked with Isabella's.
He put these thoughts aside and searched the tree line around the village for any sign of unnatural movement. Birds sang and howler monkeys called to each other without undue urgency. Clear.
Miguel wiggled his toes and flexed his ankles, as Nurse Margaret had told him to do, to keep his legs, dangling into the void below his seat, from falling asleep. He worked at getting the splinter out of his thigh, but only drove it further under his skin. He cursed the letters of the English words. He would mention the splinter when Father Thomas and Doctor Neill came to relieve him for lunch and recess. They would say it would have to come out immediately to prevent infection. They would summon Nurse Margaret and she would lead him across the green. The other children
would know his job was not only important, but also fraught with many dangers. And they would see the shirt he had found in the dump. It was red with a black bull on the front and had the number twenty-three on the back. Above the number, it said "I want to be like" and below the number it had said, "Mike" Using a thick, black marker, he had blotted out that name and written "Miguel" in bold letters.
Doctor Neill had warned everyone in the village to stay away from the dump. While he agreed that gringos threw away many valuable things, he said that the dump was filled with invisible germs that caused disease. Miguel didn't believe in Doctor Neill's invisible germs any more than he believed in Father Thomas' invisible God.
I could feel the pain when he was going up the ladder and got jabbed in the leg.
So will Miguel and Isabella be more than friends?
Posted by: She | August 04, 2006 at 01:20 PM