Pedro Cabiya
from Reinbou
Translated from Spanish by Jessica Powell
1976
A thunderous knock.
Inma wakes up. Someone must be at the door. But who could it be at this hour of the morning? Maybe it was a dream.
Maybe it was the dream.
It’s been a while since she’s had it. It doesn’t matter if she dreamed it or not, because already she can’t remember anything. The dream has evaporated.
Inma struggles for a moment to wake up completely, to get her bearings. She sits up on the tiny pallet. Next to her, Raúl, in underwear and t-shirt, dead drunk. Before her, in the tiny space between her bed and the stove, is Maceta, her ten-year-old son, ironing the shirt of his school uniform on a tiny ironing board.
Everything is tiny in a shack, except its inhabitants.
Maceta is short for his age, but sturdy. His skin is a lustrous black, like his mother’s, not matte brown like his father’s, may he rest in peace.
He wears his afro trimmed in straight lines, short, compact, like the merengue musicians on television, not in the honeycomb-style—oval-shaped, big in the back and on the crown of the head, short in the front—like the salsa musicians from Puerto Rico.
Maceta is a patriot.
He’s inherited his father’s round eyes, but not his myopia: his vision, like Inma’s even today, is 20/20.
Which, when you really consider it, is the downfall of idealists and dreamers, who would benefit from seeing themselves surrounded by a reality just a bit more out of focus, a blurry, uncertain reality upon which they could impose their fantasies. To see things in 20/20, with all of their fine-grained, well-defined lines and angles and three-dimensionality, upsets the mechanisms of the imagination . . . in the majority of cases.
For Maceta, as we shall see, it presents no problem whatsoever.
Maceta was born with the umbilical cord wrapped twice around his neck, in a time before ultrasounds existed, or at least not for people like Inma. So Inma pushed and pushed and pushed, and the cord tightened and tightened and tightened around Maceta’s throat, until the midwife realized what was happening and freed him of the noose that had been his lifeline for nine months. There are times when Inma—who is not stupid, not now and not back then, nor before either, when she was a little girl—looks at Maceta, so serious, so even-tempered, so stoic, so, as Puro would have said, peculiar, with his way of being in this world and, at the same time, in another world altogether, and she wonders if the cause wasn’t that brief lack of oxygen to his brain when he was born. She’s heard it said, or maybe she read it somewhere: the brain needs oxygen in order to function and to maintain all its parts optimally calibrated. If some parts die or malfunction due to a lack of oxygen, the flaw is noticeable and the person who bears it is incapable of carrying out certain functions normally, such as retaining information, speaking, walking, thinking.
But Maceta is perfect. At the top of his class, a voracious reader, an ace at math, studious, diligent, responsible, mature beyond his years, eloquent, persuasive, curious, possessor of an immense and varied vocabulary. An old soul.
And Inma thinks that maybe we all have a part of our brains that sabotages us, that holds us back, that throws sand in the oil, sugar in the gas tank, soap in the sancocho, and prevents us from being the best versions of ourselves.
And this was the part that the two loops of umbilical cord strangled out of Maceta’s brain.
It’s almost spring and getting lighter in the early mornings. Maceta sits on an old, overturned powdered-milk tin and eats his breakfast.
He guesses that it will be a sunny day, with few clouds, hot. From the nearby river emanates a miasma of dead fish guts, rotten lilies, and diesel. Around him, the familiar landscape: the husk of a burned-out Volkswagen Beetle, buckets of varying colors and sizes (each with a specific function), a badly-pruned Maltese cross hedge, concrete blocks in diverse states of physical integrity, the un-whitewashed wall of a house that never was, a power line laden with tennis shoes, the communal water tap, always dripping, stray dogs that sniff in Maceta’s direction, coveting his piece of bread, but fearful, because Inma has already taught them a lesson several times, and an enormous, leafy tamarind tree on the edge of the unpaved street, under which, in the afternoons, his aunts do each other’s hair before heading off to work.
The neighborhood begins to gradually wake up and the street becomes peopled with men and women heading off to earn their livings in various ways. Men push their tricycle carts, women carry water in heavy cans atop their heads, mongrel dogs amble past, motorcycles with three or more passengers buzz by, street vendors show off their wares, coffee vendors serve small cups to their clients.
And Maceta, with his piece of bread in one hand and his cup of coffee in the other, feels like the luckiest boy on planet Earth.
For Maceta, the best part about living in a neighborhood like his is the intimacy of its spaces. Obviously, at his age, Maceta was not in possession of the analytical apparatus that would have allowed him to express it in that way, but let’s read his mind and take a few licenses, okay?
From the front of his shack, it’s just two steps to the right and we’re at Mercedes’s shack, the jamona who works as a seamstress; one step further and you come to the little cement house of Don Jorge Aníbal, the old cane-field foreman who lives with a group of retired sugar cane cutters from Puerto Plata; three more steps and we’re at Abulraziq’s, the old Palestinian patriarch who runs an upholstery shop with his many sons.
Ten steps to the back and bordering his own house, past an acerola bush and a tangle of pumpkin vines that appear to have trapped, among its tentacles, the tractor-trailer without wheels that’s been lying in the same place since before Maceta can remember, and we’ve arrived at Don Goyo’s, the hermit who sells ornamental plants. Five steps to the front and
Maceta crosses the street toward Lidio López Gutiérrez’s Auto Body and Paint Shop, as the sign hanging above the door proudly announces. The shop is on the corner, and the street peters out in a straight line toward other shacks, almost all of them built of wood and scrap, and houses made of cinder blocks and cement, since there are some of these in the neighborhood too, sometimes even with two stories and a balcony. This is the route Inma takes to work.
To get to school, Maceta takes the route to the left.
Four steps and he’s in front of Don Chago’s, whose vegetables and groceries and fruits are beautifully arranged in the basket of his tricycle cart. But Don Chago appears to be having serious problems with the chain and is not ready to make his rounds.
“Good morning, Don Chago,” says Maceta.
“Good morning, Maceta,” replies Don Chago. “Learn something good today so you can teach it to me.”
They both start laughing.
“I’m serious! I’m sick of selling lettuce!”
Three more steps and Maceta comes to a couple standing in front of a shack, using a bucket to pour water on themselves and their five sons of varying ages. “Good morning, Don Jacinto,” says Maceta. “Good morning, Doña Eneida.”
“Good morning, son!” says Don Jacinto.
“Good morning, Maceta!” says Doña Eneida.
Maceta makes a show of taking a huge lungful of air.
“Good morning, Olivero, Jacintico, Juan Matías, Garibaldi and William Sócrates!” he shouts.
The aforementioned respond in unison:
“Good morning, Maceta!”
Three steps further, only three more steps, Maceta passes by the grocery owned by Don Tomás, who is quarreling with his son, Simón, just outside the door. They always argue about the same thing at the same time of morning, every blessed day.
Simón is sitting astride his motorbike, ready to start it up, but his father will only let him go after having carefully inspected the list of deliveries, already packed in the basket.
“Virgen de la Altagracia! Don’t argue with me!” despairs Don Tomás. “Go to Doña Aura’s house first, then take Duarte and deliver the rest that way . . .”
“Oh, Papá,” interrupts Simón, “I can take Duarte first and then go to Doña Aura’s after.”
“Oh, sure!” cries Don Tomás in triumph. “But if you do it that way you’ll be going the wrong way down that little one-way street you like to take as a shortcut. I know you, dummy! I don’t want another accident!”
“Good morning, Don Tomás,” says Maceta, not slowing his pace. “Good morning, Simón.”
“Good morning, son,” says Don Tomás, tempering himself.
“Good morning, Maceta,” says Simón, grateful for the détente.
Father and son watch Maceta walk up the street, away from the grocery, then look at one another again, suddenly remembering their topic of conversation.
“Look, you know what?” Don Tomás relents. “Do whatever you want.”
“It’s okay,” Simón surrenders. “I’ll do it your way.”
* * *
Maceta continues along his way to school, but he stops suddenly and bends over to retrieve something from the ground. Curious, he considers the object in the palm of his hand.
Others would recognize the object as a simple glass marble, a white ball sticking up from the ground it’s been trampled into, a shooter with multi-colored horizontal veins.
People with simple minds that house simple ideas about the simple world in which they live.
For Maceta, however, nothing is what it appears.
Appearance is an object’s most deceptive trait, a visual, tactile, olfactory and, at times, also a gustatory ruse. A distraction. Maceta sees straight through appearances. His eye is a laser beam, as are the rest of his senses.
Maceta cleans the marble and looks at it in the sunlight. Immediately, he comprehends the nature of the object he holds in his hands. He takes a small notebook from his backpack, turns the pages and begins to write.
Pocket Jupiter. Sphere with bands of color representing different atmospheric strata. Great Red Spot absent, possibly in formation: observe over the following months in order to detect its gradual appearance. Deceptive solidity, produced, perhaps, by a time-space discrepancy. Fallen from the sky, without a doubt.
After school, Maceta takes a different route on the way home to his miserable little shack.
He walks along the path until he comes to a place where the trunk of a fallen tree blocks his way. He drops his backpack on the ground and sits on the trunk, expectant. A routine. The usual.
The chain link fence protects a beautiful, very well-maintained golf course. Maceta sits comfortably on the trunk, as if waiting for a show to begin.
The show Maceta is awaiting is not that of golfers absorbed in the complexities of their sport. A golf cart with two of them inside has just parked nearby and Maceta grows impatient.
“What, what? Don’t . . .”
The men climb out of the cart, look for a ball. They find it; chat casually. “Come on, whack your little ball and go after it,” murmurs Maceta, who still doesn’t exactly understand the objective of the game.
One of the men gets ready to swing . . . but he always stops just before hitting the ball and measures all over again.
Maceta breathes a sigh of exasperation. The man hits the golf ball at last.
“Finally!”
Maceta applauds happily. The men climb back into the golf cart and drive away. The green is completely empty.
The sun shines radiantly. On Maceta’s face, an expression of pure anticipation.
“Maybe it’s some sort of automatic mechanism,” Maceta thinks or says. “A clock that, at just the right time, sends a signal to another mechanism that triggers the switch. How this is achieved, how a mechanism can send a signal to another mechanism so that it behaves in this way or in that way . . . well, I can imagine it, but I couldn’t say if what I imagine and the reality of it correspond. Probably not. If it’s an automatic mechanism, it’s getting behind schedule today. Isn’t it time for what always happens to happen?”
Indeed: obediently, inexorably, the sprinklers come on and in just a few seconds there appears a fabulous, pristine, clearly defined rainbow.
“Yes . . .”
Maceta’s face is the epitome of delight, pure and perfect.
“There you are.”
Maceta stands up, throws a shovel over the fence and then, with some difficulty, climbs over himself, landing on the other side. He runs toward the rainbow, but the rainbow grows father away with equal speed, and Maceta never reaches it.
“What on Earth?”
Maceta reasons that the rainbow is a surly creature and he cannot approach it so abruptly.
Slowly, then.
Step by step, Maceta manages to reach the place where the rainbow meets the ground, drenching himself in the water from the sprinklers and the seven primary colors.
He begins to dig.
After a good long while, Maceta uses his hands to remove a final fistful of earth and sticks his face down into the moderately-sized hole he has made in the lawn. He gazes at his discovery in silence, making an effort to decipher it. He bends to pick it up.
Maceta is walking home; he carries an old bicycle chain in his hands.
In his notebook he has written:
Linked Factors. Not one is the first and not one is the last. If the order does not alter the product, then the order does not exist. The product is a type of necklace without a clasp.
He runs into Don Chago along the way, squatting with Jacinto in front of his tricycle cart.
“It’s very short, Chago,” concludes Jacinto. “You have to find the right one. Or, to make this one work, we have to cut or flatten these tubes and weld them to get closer to the cogs. It’ll be just like from the factory.”
Chago looks at him with the expression of a person who cannot believe his own ears.
“That will take too long, Jacinto,” laments Chago, “and I’ve already lost a whole day of work looking for a replacement.”
“Good afternoon, Don Chago. Good afternoon, Don Jacinto.”
“Good afternoon, Maceta,” the men say in unison. Chago notices the chain in Maceta’s hands.
“Mactea, son, where did you find that chain?”
“I dug it up. In the rainbow field.”
Chago and Jacinto look at each other, perplexed. They’ve known Maceta since he was a baby, but they still have trouble getting used to the things he comes up with.
“Uh huh . . .” says Chago.
“But it isn’t a chain. They are . . . well. I’ll give them to you, if you want them,” says Maceta, handing the chain to Chago. “I already wrote it down in my notebook, so . . . it’s all yours.”
“Thank you, Maceta.”
“You’re welcome, Don Chago.”
Maceta goes on his way. Jacinto tries the chain.
It fits perfectly.
“I’ll be damned . . .” he says. “It’s the perfect size, Chago. We’re done. It just needs a little grease and you’re back in business.”
Chago looks stunned. He looks at Maceta walking happily away toward his house. He looks back at the chain.
“How could it . . .?”
* * *
The second treasure the rainbow reveals to Maceta on the golf course is a number eight billiard ball.
An eight ball . . . a special one.
It is much larger than normal and it’s full of liquid. It’s not completely round, but has a flat side that serves as a base, in which there is also a small transparent window. Every time Maceta turns the base upward, a polyhedron floats through the liquid—which turns out to be blue—and knocks against the little window. The faces of the polyhedron present a different message each time.
Maceta stops by Simón and Tomás’s shop.
“Simón, my son, drop it. No one wants that gum. Let’s stick with the other brand.”
“Papá, I’m telling you. This is the one they’re asking for. The other stores are already carrying it. We’re the only shop in the neighborhood that doesn’t have it.”
“What does it say there? ‘Duble Buble’”?
“Double Bubble,” says Simón, his pronunciation almost perfect. Not for nothing does he have a Dominican York girlfriend.
“You see, some stupid thing impossible to pronounce.”
“And do you have to pronounce it right to know what they’re asking us for?
What difference does it make? The way you just said it is how the kids are asking for it in all the other shops, and the shopkeepers aren’t throwing a fit saying they don’t know what they’re asking for.” “Hello, Don Tomás and Simón,” says Maceta, crouching down in front of the debaters to tie his shoes.
“Hi, Maceta,” reply father and son.
“Simón,” says Tomás, determined to have the last word, “let me put it to you this way. That thick gum costs me three cents more, so we have to sell it for more. Are people really going to buy more expensive gum just because it’s popular with the kids?”
The eight ball rolls out of Maceta’s half-tipped-over backpack toward Tomás’ feet. Tomás picks it up and, together with Simón, examines it. Against the transparent little window the following message appears: Signs point to yes. Simón opens his eyes wide and gives a little jump.
“Ha!” he exclaims in triumph. “Look at that!”
Maceta stands up and looks at the pair of them. Tomás shakes the ball.
“If I don’t sell that gum,” the shopkeeper specifies, “will the competition get ahead of me?”
Upon consulting the little window, the following advice emerges from the bluish water: You may rely on it.
Simón takes the eight ball from his father, shakes it, and asks:
“Am I always right or what?”
The answer: Don’t count on it.
Now it’s Tomás’ turn to laugh, exultant.
“Ah . . .” says Maceta, raising his chin at the dawning of comprehension. “That’s what it’s for!”
Tomás and Simón try to give the eight ball back to Maceta, but Maceta won’t accept it.
“I think you two can get better use out of it,” he says.
Minutes later, sitting on a tall stool at the counter, devouring the cookie and Malta Morena that Tomás and Simón have given him, Maceta writes in his journal.
Portable Umpire. Mysterious object that answers important questions and offers instant mediation in any argument. The secret is in the blue-colored water, doubtless a mysterious liquid being with wondrous abilities.
The next day, Maceta arrives on his street with a basketball hoop.
Maceta has never seen a basketball court in all his life, much less a hoop like the one he’s carrying, and so he doesn’t have the slightest idea what it is.
Neither do Jacinto and Eneida’s many sons, who scamper about, shove one another, fight, cry, get bored, make life impossible for their parents, get scolded, punished and spanked by said parents, only to begin the cycle all over again.
But Jacinto recognizes the hoop and knows what it’s for.
“Maceta,” Jacinto calls out. “Come here.”
Maceta obeys.
“What’s that?”
“Today’s treasure.”
“Uh huh . . .”
“It’s a steel circle,” says Maceta, showing the hoop to Jacinto. “But, of course, it can’t be only a steel circle. It must be something else and I’m not recognizing it.”
“Maceta,” explains Jacinto, taking the hoop from his hands, “this is . . .let’s see.”
Jacinto motions for Maceta to follow him.
They find four nails in Chago’s house and Lidio loans them a hammer from his shop. A neighbor, reading Jacinto’s intention, calls out that, without a backboard, they might as well throw that hoop in the trash, which another neighbor overhears, promptly furnishing a thick sheet of plywood that he had lying around. A can of black paint appears from somewhere, and Lidio shouts at Maceta to go find a paintbrush.
Olivero, Jacintico, Juan Matías, Garibaldi and William Sócrates, all exactly one year in age apart from the next, quit annoying their mother and join the group of men who have gathered around Jacinto, who is painting a black square on the bottom edge of the piece of plywood. Someone brings more nails, tie wire, another hammer. A ladder appears.
After a great deal of discussion about regulation height, after much hammering and reinforcing with wire, Jacinto, his sons, Maceta, and the rest of the men who helped with the operation look up at the basketball hoop they have erected on a sturdy light post.
Someone—most likely the same man who had earlier suggested they toss the hoop in the trash; there’s a guy like him in every neighborhood—shouts, unseen, that the hoop turned out so great that probably, if they stare at it long enough, it will give birth to a ball. But from his store, Simón bounces a ball toward the crowd, an old Spalding he’s just inflated, a gift from
Yolanda, his girlfriend, when she came to visit last year for Semana Santa.
Olivero, Jacinto and Eneida’s eldest son, intercepts the ball with ease.
He’s never dribbled a ball before in his life, but that’s exactly what he does now, before passing it to Jacintico who does the same, then passes it to Juan Matías, who does the same and passes it to Garibaldi, who adds a dribble through his legs and passes it to William Sócrates who, not thinking twice about the impulse he feels upon holding the ball in his hands, throws it up toward the hoop and scores a basket.
The rest is history.
Last year, Olivero was inducted into the Hall of Fame and he sent us that great photo that you two keep in your bedroom. Jacintico retired in November due to a knee injury, but he’s happy: he’s been wanting to spend more time with his family for a while now. Juan Matías and Garibaldi followed in their footsteps with the Chicago Bulls, and William Sócrates just signed with the Lakers.
* * *
Maceta discovered many treasures in the weeks to come, and every one of them had the virtue of transforming someone’s day. Many of the beneficiaries of his gifts needed no more than that: a little push on a single day, a jumpstart to their battery just that once, for someone to apply the necessary spark. After that, they’d tend the fire, feed the flames, stoke the embers all on their own.
And as the residents’ personal outlooks begin to change, so too, does the neighborhood begin to change.
Maceta’s gifts, needless to say, were just pieces of junk. At least to the untrained eye. And possibly they were junk, it’s true, but miraculously opportune junk. But opportune junk is an oxymoron. Opportune junk ceases to be junk and turns into something else. It turns into what Maceta has always insisted it is: treasure.
Maceta’s treasures were of all different sorts. Maceta never settled for conventional explanations or for the commonly accepted names for things. Rather, he waited to gather sufficient data to allow him to penetrate the essence of the treasures that the rainbow revealed to him, without fail, on the golf course. Sometimes a single careful observation of the item and its workings was all he needed. Other times he had to wait to examine the effects of an object upon one or more people, or to study the way in which someone put it to use. Because
Maceta was interested exclusively in the spirit of the thing, not in the thing itself.
At first glance, for example, the vinyl disc that he receives from the earth’s bowels is clearly an old Benny Moré LP, perfectly preserved inside its record sleeve. But Maceta would never profane his notebook by writing LP. It’s not until he observes what Don Jorge Aníbal and his band of little old men and women do with it, and the effect it has on them, that he opens his journal and records:
Revolving Happiness. Black circle that contains happiness and memories. In order to release them, it is necessary to spin it on a special machine.
Likewise, the flute that the Arab upholsterers at the end of the street ask him for, which, expertly played by the aged patriarch, transforms the standoffish foreigners into lighthearted dancers clapping their hands, is less a flute than a Party Concentrate. “Just add air,” is all he notes in his inventory.
The bird feeder he gave to Mercedes, the seamstress, is a Bird Multiplier; the little Saint Christopher figurine that Alberto, the taxi driver, asked him for, is a Force Field for Automobiles; the antenna that Lidio used to repair his transistor radio is a Perch for Voices . . .
And so on.
Maceta’s treasures also had a residual effect.
Jorge Aníbal’s revolving happiness summoned others, rescued by other neighbors or acquired in other parts of the city, in such a way that the old folks’ collection grew. And not only the collection; the number of people who gathered together at Jorge Aníbal’s house grew as well. It became necessary to establish a schedule. Then, rules. Later, they began to charge membership fees, and the gathering became a club. With the membership fee money, they bought a new hi-fi system and more records, and they rented out event spaces for parties.
Many were the solitary widowers and abandoned widows who met at these soirées, never again to be parted.
One of the grateful who found a girlfriend in his old age was Don Goyo, the cantankerous gardener. A woman from Higüey with whom he, almost by accident, had danced a son in Jorge Aníbal’s carport, moved into his house. From that moment on, it became common knowledge that any neighbor who took an empty jar, tin can, flower pot, planter, bucket or bin over to Don Goyo’s house, was a neighbor who’d leave with a cutting from a wisteria, clock vine, golden trumpet, Maltese cross, hibiscus, bougainvillea, angel’s trumpet, shrimp plant, or lantana. In no time at all, the neighborhood filled with color.
Happiness makes people feel like giving. And planting.
And flying.
Visiting Mercedes’s house to drop off items to be mended or sewn became a pleasant experience, as the customer was instantly surrounded by doves, bananaquits, nightingales, kingbirds and palm chats. When Mercedes saw that the birdseed wasn’t enough to satisfy all her winged visitors, and that the kingbirds bullied the peaceful doves and the nightingales frightened the bananaquits, she had two additional bird feeders built. The air around her shack now hummed with fluttering wings and bird song, and flocks of broad-billed todies, greater antillean pewees, village weavers, thrushes, tanagers, nightjars and grackles joined the more regular visitors.
In the evenings, when the commotion died down, a timid black-whiskered vireo would approach and ring in the hour with its song.
Soon, Mercedes couldn’t keep up with the volume of work she received and she had to hire help. Later she left the neighborhood and bought a shop in a bustling shopping center.
And so on.
One day, Maceta comes home with a mirror.
It’s an unusual mirror. It’s not made of glass, but rather, of metal, and it has a heavily ornamented metallic frame.
It might be a tray . . . but it’s square and it doesn’t have any handles.
It’s a mirror.
It’s a mirror for the common folk. Maceta still doesn’t know what he’ll write in his notebook.
The clientele at his aunts’ improvised, open air “beauty salon,” has increased, in part because the women and young ladies who take their mending to Mercedes take advantage of the opportunity to have their hair washed and dried before heading back home.
Maceta greets his aunts, who kiss and fawn over him as always. When he manages to detach himself, he walks to the tamarind tree, takes down the old, broken mirror and hangs up the one he’s just found.
“Oh, Maceta!” exclaims Clarisa. “What’s that?”
Melisa comes over.
“Thank you!” says Melisa, peering at it closely. The mirror is cloudy, dusty. “Wait,” says Clarisa. “Let’s wipe it down with a rag.”
Clarisa holds the mirror while Melisa polishes it with a piece of damp cloth. And, little by little, the twins’ reflection emerges on the metallic surface.
Clarisa and Melisa appear hypnotized, enthralled, absorbed by what they see. They are so used to seeing themselves fragmented in the old, cracked mirror that now that they can see themselves as they really are, they feel as though they are seeing two strangers.
Two strangers of indescribable beauty, of captivating hauteur, of overwhelming insolence, of unshakeable disposition, of highly dangerous recklessness.
The reflection awakens pleasant memories in them. They look at one another. It’s a long look of understanding, of decision. They don’t need to say a single word; everything has been said.
“Yocelyn,” calls Clarisa, “come get your hair dried.”
Yocelyn heeds her call and comes to sit in front of the mirror.
“Sobeida,” calls Melisa, “come get your hair washed.”
Sobeida obeys.
And the women keep on coming.
Maceta writes in his notebook:
Mirror mirror. Smooth surface that returns a reflection without interference or sound, showing whoever uses it the best possible version of themselves.
Clarisa, Melisa, Inma, Maceta and Amparo, the baby, left the neighborhood on a Palm Sunday, just after mass. They tied all their baskets and bundles into a pickup truck and hit the road. Actually, they only took some of their baskets and bundles; they gave most of their possessions to those who needed them more than they did.
They weren’t the only ones to leave. Mercedes left, and so did Jacinto and Eneida and their whole family.
But poverty is a revolving door. Not a day had passed before Inma’s old shack would be occupied again, this time by an even larger family . . . and they’d be cooking again in the wood stove under the shade of the tamarind tree, and the laundry hanging on the clotheslines would return and return and return and return. And when they leave, others will come, and others and others and others . . .
For how long?
No one knows.