The Girl With the Golden Shoes (6 page)

“Spare you life,” he told Estrella. He gave a sign and two men hauled off the one who’d attacked her, no doubt for a smack-up down the aisle. “Listen what I say and go. Don’t turn back. Run. Don’t walk. That man you throw down is the most ignorant man I ever see. And the fellow I had to rough up was his son. Listen what I tell you. Go! Pick up you life in you hand and go! And learn to take a joke!”

V.

Estrella ran out of the market and stampeded past the rusty bull that had been sung to sleep outside the bar.

Knees pumping almost navel high, she took a bend that led her through an alleyway with doors that opened straight into the street, and swerved around a group of men in undershirts who’d set up stools around a table on the cobbles for their game of dominoes.

Emerging from the alleyway, she squinted as she headed down a path that led her past the finger-pointing tower of the spired clock, and slanted in a wheeling semicircle round a little park where children played a game of cricket with a two-by-four, then veered off by the courthouse with its large, imposing columns and its curving marble stairs and took the road by which the bus had brought her into town.

Raised with clannish people, she knew of all that could occur. So although she didn’t hear the sound of feet behind her, or get the sense that all the people who were laughing as she ran were going to gather in a mob, she sprinted, as she’d later tell her children, “like I heard a rumor that a rich old auntie came to visit from abroad.”

As she came upon the steep ascent, she cursed and tensed her middle, hunching forward, giving greater power to her legs, which labored with the challenge of the slope; and for half a mile she grunted onward till the band of muscles in her middle, which resembled little squares, began to soften like a chocolate bar.

Tired and hungry, she began to walk. They ain’t coming, she thought, and put her hands against her hips. She glanced across her shoulder down the steeply rising road, which disappeared around a bend into the bush.

They have better things to do, she told herself. But a coward man keep sound bones, as them old people say. I ain’t able for anybody to gimme a chop or a cuff right now. But anyways, is a good thing it happen, in a way, ’cause you had to get out o’ that damn place. You was only loitering and wasting time when you have important things to do. You have to get to town. And town way, way far away. And you have to get there before night come. ’Cause by 7:30 all them big stores going be closed. And that is the first place you have to go—a store where they sell shoes. ’Cause ain’t nobody giving any sensible job where you ain’t have to wear no shoes. And you have to get a job before tomorrow. ’Cause you ain’t have a soul in town.

As she spiraled up the lonely road Estrella fantasized about her coming life, and saw an older version of herself creating stares and whispers of excitement when her driver brought her to Salan’s, the island’s most elite department store—two floors, a wooden escalator, a soda fountain, and a cafeteria with a balcony that overlooked the Queens.

Smiling with a puckered mouth as if she held a secret, Estrella saw herself among the aisles, wearing yellow satin pumps—fancy shoes that had the bag and dress to match, her husband’s black fedora as an accent on her head, and behind her, waiting, a clerk whose arms were filled with boxes, calling her “Madame.”

The main cross-island road was seven miles away, and Estrella worked toward it at a slow but steady pace. From time to time, small herds of goats would trickle down the road or drip in ones and twos out of the dark encroaching woods, which at certain points would form a roof of shade.

Later, after she’d noticed that the goats were coming down the mountain in a heavy stream—groups of ten and twelve—she came upon a clump of leaning huts. To her mind they were the poorest homes she’d ever seen. They were made of cracked, ill-fitting timbers that had not been planed, and between some of the timbers there were spaces large enough to slip a hand.

The shaggy huts were built on stilts to keep them level. With their brown walls and dry roofs they looked like herds of animals reduced to skin and bone by drought. In their shadows lingered clouds of little children, their heads as round and dark as lice.

As she looked, an old
negrita
standing in the shadow of a doorway wiped her hands against her dress, which was a flour sack, and asked her with a mouth that had collapsed against its gums, “You hungry, sweetheart? You want a little something?”

And in a moment of illumination, Estrella knew that these were not the poorest homes she’d ever seen. Her people in the cove had homes like these.

Looking at the dirt she hadn’t dusted from her clothes, her hands entangled in her fraying hair, feeling dust transforming into mud along her sweaty feet and shins, glancing as she passed the old
negrita,
Estrella held her basket and began to run again, her breathing dry and cracked with effort, like someone waking from nightmarish dreams.

She was at a height now where the intermittent grunts and groans of vehicles on the main cross-island road began to filter through the net of soft translucent sounds that caught and held the chirrups of the woods.

Her feet were budding with the early pain of blisters, whispered pangs that felt as if her soles were giving birth to cleats. Although the pain had not emerged completely, she began to hobble, balanced on the outer lines that marked the point at which her soles were fused against the uppers of her leather-colored feet.

Eventually, Estrella came upon a bridge. It was old and white, with small columns at each end and parapets of stone. On approaching it, she saw a path that led into a bamboo grove and heard the sizzle of a stream. After taking minutes to decide, she headed down the path and inched her way toward the water, holding onto creaking stems to keep herself from falling, watching out for razor-pointed stumps.

It was a narrow stream, thirty yards across, and she came out of the thick, steep-sided forest onto rugged grass that grew along the wide embankment.

She sat against the edge of the embankment with her feet above the flow, and lay back in the furry hotness of the grass, the sun pressing on her like a boy who’d waited long for them to be alone.

When she’d rested for a while, she stripped and lay there thinking, her body smooth as wood without the bark, then slipped into the olive stream.

She cavorted with amphibian ease, turned on her back and stroked like a frog with her forceful legs, then twisted sharply in a shallow dive, head down, toes long, strong arms by her side, tadpoling over stones and grass along the muddy bed.

In the middle of the stream there was a scattered line of oval rocks that had been sanded by erosion to an eggy whiteness, and she played at leaping on their warm, protruding tops although the landing sometimes stung her feet.

After she’d played, she used a hunk of soap to wash her purple dress and underwear and laid them on the grass, then swam against the current to the point at which the river swung beneath an arch of overhanging trees and fell in baby steps.

She sat against the broad, flat stone that she’d felt for with her hands beneath the flow, braced her feet against two upright ones, and let the falling water pound her neck and back. Although the stream was moving slowly and the drop was from a shallow height, the water had the power of a solid force, and as it hammered her, she felt old fears dispersing and the hairs that formed her brows untwining from their knit. She closed her eyes and smiled out of her diamond face while spitting plastered hair out of her mouth.

I is the luckiest girl in the world right now, she thought. It might have people with more money and thing. But right now, as I feeling this water on me and hear them birds how they make sweet sounds, it ain’t have nobody with more luck than me.

She returned downstream to bathe. With a scrap of cloth, Estrella creamed her body in a slop of suds. The whiteness of the soap against her dark complexion made it seem as if she were about to hide herself in snow.

Her waist was tightly tapered, and her breasts were little banks of mud with twigs. She had no cleavage, and standing up her bosom looked the same as when she lay down; but her hips were matriarchal and her buttocks had deep clefts, and when she sank into the stream to rinse, emerging from the slick of suds to walk toward the bank, she was the vision of a goddess coming through the clouds.

On the bank, she wrung her hair as if it were a towel and lay down on her stomach in the grass beside her dress. With her face against her folded arms she listened to the sloshing water and, above her head, the flap of lifting wings. And for the first time in her life, she experienced what it meant to have the privacy in which to read.

From her basket, which was placed beside her head, she took her only toy, a wooden doll with missing arms that she’d never named, and read the story of another girl who’d led an awful life. Her reading voice was mumbled and self-conscious, and she didn’t fully understand what punctuation meant, as such she ran through periods and rear-ended sentence openings like a granny at the wheel.

When she read, she overlaid her life against the tale of Cinderella and felt a smoky joy, a kind of bluesy satisfaction, which in
Sancoche
was called
memweh
, for which there is no good translation. In English, the closest feeling is nostalgia. But this is not enough.
Memweh
is nostalgia for a person or a thing that might have existed in another life, a vital kind of sadness experienced as a grope, like swimming upward from deep water into light and breaking through the surface only to be covered by a wave, then sinking with a glimpse of something beautiful that propels you to grope upward once again, a lament for the amnesia of the middle passage, a search for a suspected loss that only
negritos
fully understand.

How I never meet nobody like a prince? Estrella thought, caught up in the tidal cycle of
memweh
. I wonder if it have men like that in truth. It would shock them if a man like that come sweep me off my feet, I tell you. Old Tuck and my grandmother would lose their mind. That would shame them, boy. I tell you. They think I ain’t going come to nothing in this life. But watch me. When I get to town and get my shoes and get a job and work and save my money and put myself together with my shoes that match my bag and my bag that match my frock, I going meet a man who going make me feel like that white lady at La Sala that day. Me and my husband, all we going do all day is write each other notes. Even when I see him face-to-face, I going slip one in his pocket so he can read it later. For no reason. Just for so.

But in nearly fifteen years on earth, she’d never seen a man who looked like her do anything that anyone considered princely, had never seen a woman of her color being treated in a way that made her think of queens.

She’d seen
negritos
giving women what Carlitos knew as “talks,” frilly conversation on a sheet of innuendo, seen fellows making women tremble with their bluff. But she’d never heard a loving word from a
negrito
if it wasn’t in a song, or witnessed a
negrito
read a book, or heard about
negritos
who would do these things. Not even in a rumor or a tale.

When she thought of all of this, Estrella gave herself an explanation—like fashion, all things go in and out of style, and maybe, long ago, before her time,
negritos
used to do the kinds of things that people came to know as white. So one day, when styles had changed, they’d do these things again.

She curled up on her side, stretched out on her back, crossed her arms beneath her head, and pursed her lips as if she’d tasted something that was sweet but acidic.

Of the men she’d been with, who’d come the closest to a prince? There’d been a few, for she’d lost her hymen at the age of twelve when a game of wrestling accidentally put her and a playmate in a pose that triggered the desire to explore. With this kind of introduction, sex for her was something rugged—a game in which she liked to have the upper hand. She must win and he must lose. He must like it more than me. I ain’t want to be no woman who exchange rum for man. I ain’t want to be no cockaholic.

With a finger on her nipple, she began to stroke her tender parts until the air was crackled by a tiny scream.

She lay there half-smiling till her strength returned.

VI.

On the bridge, she leaned against the parapet and waited. Her purple dress was not completely dry, but she’d packed it and was wearing now her only change of clothes—a dark blue skirt and a green striped blouse, both of which were old.

With her hair down to her shoulders, her face seemed more mature; and features that had not revealed themselves before were now pronounced. She had a small nose with a low bridge that ended in a smooth, compacted mound, and nostrils that you couldn’t see unless she raised her head.

Her mouth was small and oval like a circle cut in two. The upper lip was shiny, with a reddish tone, and from its corners ran an upward-slanting seam that made it look as if her mouth and cheeks were linked beneath the skin with guitar strings. The space between her nose and mouth was close, as if her lips were resting on a sheet of glass; and where the hair along her temples grew toward her brow, there was a scar, a little crescent moon, whose ridge of smoothness you could follow with your thumb.

She heard the sound of diesel engines and looked with expectation down the road, then stood up when she saw the tall, imposing grillwork of a truck.

It lurched around the bend and rumbled by so closely that she could’ve stretched her hand and touched it. It was filled with
madrasitos
, workers from the factory and the fields, and their limbs protruded through the gaps between the slatted sides that formed the bed like they were stalks of cane. Some sat on the cab as if it were an elephant’s head. Those who found a ledge on which to hook their toes and fingers rode along the side; and she watched the driver take the curves without regard, coming close against the bush, as if the people holding on were fleas.