The Girl With the Golden Shoes Read online

  She began to sweat profusely as she left the cooler, denser woods behind and picked her way through lighter woods with smaller, thinner trees that came advancing from the road. She took the road, which she didn’t realize was the very one that ran in other places on the coast, and came upon an Indian reservation.

  The Indians were caribes; not madrasitos, the local name for workers who were brought from India in the 1800s to replace the slaves. The caribes were the remnants of the people who’d seen Columbus when he stumbled on their shore, who’d fought the Spanish for a hundred years. But like most Carlitos, they were now impure.

  Apart from a tin sign hammered to a shoulder-level post, nothing marked the reservation as important or unique. It was like any other village—a little road that cut a little shop in two; little lanes that led to little huts and little fields; little ribby dogs and little naked children; women by the road selling things nobody wanted, and the dominating mass of old Diablo, the volcano that had rumbled forty years before, rising high above the other peaks.

  The caribes were so small that at first Estrella thought that all of them were children. She found herself staring at their flat cheeks and straight hair, which most of them cut bluntly, while they looked at her with wonder and suspicion through eyes so dark and tiny that at times she thought they were closed.

  She went inside a bar—a dim square in coral pink with a zinc roof stretching past the door to shade a porch supported by unshaven posts; there, a pair of women sat on stools surrounded by displays of woven objects. One wore a bonnet and the other jazzed a yellow cowboy hat, and when the tall negrita passed to go inside the bar, they turned around to look.

  “Excuse me, what it have to eat?” Estrella asked across the counter. Two men were drinking and the barmaid looked as if she hadn’t fully gotten over a debilitating sleep.

  “It have ’possum and iguana. Fry and stew.”

  “No. I ain’t feeling that today,” she said politely, as a grimace flashed across her face.

  One of the men who’d been drinking pushed a plate of bones with knots of meat on them toward her.

  “It have some chicken too.”

  “Yes, please. I would rather take a plate o’ that.”

  She took a table by the door so she could look outside, and the barmaid brought the food.

  “This is chicken?” she asked after sniffing it. “It smell kind o’ different to me.”

  As soon as she’d said this she remembered there was another kind of chicken here—a giant frog that lived in mountain forests and whose hind legs had the shape and juicy texture of a duck.

  But you pay you money already, she thought. So you might as well eat it. Is not as if you have money to waste. You ain’t eat from this morning. If you eat it and pretend is something else, like octopus, then you stomach would be full. And Seville must be at least a hour or two by bus, so you should really eat. But what if this thing make you vomit? You can’t look for work if you sick.

  “If you don’t want it, I can eat it,” said the drunk from his position at the bar.

  “Gimme thirty pence for it.”

  He wobbled off his stool.

  “What? You trying to make a profit?”

  “Is fifty pence I pay for it. You saving twenty pence. Is almost half price.” She tossed her head toward the barmaid. “It cheaper than you would get it from she. And apart from a little piece I break off, you can’t really say I even touch it. Is almost brand new.”

  “Well, she’s my wife,” the drunkard said. “And I’m the owner o’ the bar. So if I want some more, I can just take it.”

  The woman and the other drunk began to laugh. Estrella went outside and asked the woman in the bonnet for directions to the bus. With a wrinkled thumb she pointed to the shop across the street, where a man wearing shoes was standing with a suitcase in his hand.

  “What kind o’ food they have over there?” Estrella asked.

  “Chicken. Nice, nice chicken from right up in them hills.”

  “Oh.”

  From the reservation, the bus descended through the empty wooded hills, then moved along the coast. Before, in a landscape that was strange, the girl had felt a sense of turgid peace, but here, moving through landscapes that were familiar in some ways—she’d glimpsed them by boat—she felt a need to double-check her orientation, to challenge her understanding of ideas she’d accepted all her life.

  Whole villages existed where she’d only seen the steeple of a church. The gaps between some hills were larger than she’d known. Half a mile from where she lived there was a district with a school. Buses rode higher than a boat, and when you were inside them you couldn’t see the wheels.

  She kept her sense of orientation by relating everything she saw to an imagined bearing on the sea. It was as if she had another, greater self out there, allowing her to see her journey from a seagull’s point of view.

  But when the driver turned into the northern hills to cross the island, ten miles before the rough Atlantic coast would taper to a neck and turn to swell again into the body of an avocado on the calm Caribbean shore, Estrella Thompson—miles from home—began to lose her sense of place, and tears began to trickle from her eyes.

  Where I going? she thought. To who? To do what? All my relatives in country. What I going to do?

  As the old bus labored up and down the steep volcanic slopes, which were planted thickly with bananas, Estrella felt a knot of hunger harden into bone.

  “What time we reaching town?” she asked across the aisle. The man who’d been waiting for the bus in shoes looked upward from his paper, which he gripped as if its pages were a thief’s lapels.

  “This bus isn’t going to town,” he said. “You wouldn’t get another bus directly into town until the morning, I don’t think. This one going down Speyside and turn back.”

  Seen from the bus, which beetled downward, Speyside was a floral accent in a plaid of greens, an embroidered rose of wood and brick in low relief against a quilt of sugarcane.

  The fields were separated by a grid of roads, along which mule trains pulling wooden carts of purple canes went inching by like centipedes, raising puffs of pinkish dust.

  All of this—the town, the fields, the carts—was contained by a corolla, a serrated crown of hills that gave no vision of the coast. There was about this place the sense of something continental, the sense of being in a place where life extended to the limits of ambition, a place where there were no continuous barriers like a shore.

  It was late afternoon, and the streets were waiting to be filled by workers from the factory and the fields. It was the island’s second largest town, about ten times smaller than Seville, and the buildings had the modesty and grace that had replaced the Spanish flair discouraged under British rule. Unlike Seville, the streets were laid out in a grid, as would be expected in a town that had been chartered as the most important base for English soldiers on the hunt for black maroons. On Estrella, the empty streets conferred an eerie feeling. She’d never seen a quiet town before.

  When the driver parked the bus beside the market, the hungry girl got off. Her mind was like a fist of dice, a dark and clammy place where thoughts and choices tumbled. Decisions came. Decisions went. None of them were firm.

  With her basket on her head to hide her face, she made a scouting trip along the cobbled streets that formed a square around the market, throwing furtive glances through the fence.

  The old fence was brick to the height of her knees, then rose in a stockade of iron stakes above her head. Where the stakes were anchored in the brick there was a ledge where groups of people sat to watch the day, leaning forward with their elbows on their knees, the pose of age and unemployment.

  It was a smaller market than the one beside the harbor in Seville, she saw. Smaller. More subdued. But like the one where she’d worked for two-thirds of her life, it was covered—but not in any fancy way—by a shingled roof supported with cast-iron beams. But unlike her market, this one didn’t spill it
s banks and flood the streets. Also, things like pots and pans and nails were sold here. In Seville, these things were sold in shops.

  But what struck her most was that the people in the market, like the people in the town, were mainly madrasitos. In her life she’d only seen a few.

  She found them strange and fascinating, and through the iron fence she looked at them like they were creatures in a zoo. There were different types, she saw. One type wore turbans, and another wore what looked to her like small, inverted bowls of cloth. She observed intently that the madrasitos bought and sold according to their type. Nearly half the men wore clothes that she’d describe as “normal”; but all the women dressed in brightly colored silk, and unlike negritas, seemed to live in awe of men.

  Estrella sat against the ledge. On either side of her small groups of madrasitos roosted. They were speaking in a language that she didn’t understand, and eating something with an odor that disturbed her nose.

  Across the narrow street, above a white imposing fence, she saw a high extended roof with missing shingles. From behind the heavy wooden gate there came the sound of voices, buzzing saws…the bangs and scrapes of lumber being moved.

  Down the lane, a long cart filled with timbers rumbled round a bend. The cart was drawn by oxen, heavy things whose skins recalled the grubby whiteness of a butcher’s coat. The beasts alone—without the cart—were almost wide enough to block the way.

  Behind the cart there came a band of little children shorter than the wheels. They were brown and thin and spread across the road. From feet to ankle they were covered in the pinkish dust.

  When the tall green gate was opened, Estrella looked inside the rutted yard and saw gangs of sweating men aligned on either side of heavy logs like ants about to move a turkey bone.

  As he turned into the lumberyard, the driver uttered something that Estrella didn’t grasp, and the men on either side of her began to laugh. The laughter spread among the children, and being the only one who didn’t get the joke, she decided she’d leave.

  Them people is not my people, she reflected, as she sucked her teeth and crossed her arms and walked away. They could say anything ’bout me right in front o’ my face and I wouldn’t even know. Plus, I ain’t trust what they eating. And people who like to talk things so you don’t understand, them is the kind o’ people that does like to thief.

  On returning to the entrance, where she’d gotten off the bus, she eased up on the ledge again, annoyed and apprehensive now, and gazed out on the empty street, trying to bring some order to her thoughts.

  Down the sidewalk, there were women hawking trays of homemade sweets. But so great was her annoyance that she told herself that madrasitas sold a kind of candy that negritas wouldn’t like.

  Across the street, a bull whose shape and color matched a rusty engine block began to bellow at the entrance of a bar. As she thought of what to do, a man, who from his looks was only partly madrasito, lurched out through the swinging doors and slumped against the steps and sang the bull a sweet bolero. She understood the lyrics, for he was singing in Sancoche, and as she drifted in the story being carried by the words—a man lamenting for a girl who ran away—her mind began to float.

  If it hard to live with strangers on a little island, what it going be like when time come to live in Europe? she thought. I wonder if I could really cope with that? But it shouldn’t be so hard. It only have white people in them places. And I never have no trouble with white people yet.

  In her mind she saw herself in Paris. Although she’d seen pictures of the city in the Star, she was unable to imagine it the way it was—a gray metropolis of stone. In her mind she saw it as a vast agglomeration of the kinds of buildings that she knew, like the nicer ones she’d seen while riding into town—wooden with glass windows framed by shutters set with mini louvers, verandas framed with latticework and bougainvillea frothing over decorative railings, and shingled roofs with peaks like hills. A few would have upper floors, and those that did, especially the shops, would have their stairs outside, beneath a roof of painted zinc. It was as if her mind had an accent, and her thoughts came out of her with fresh interpretations like the patois-twisted lyrics of a European song.

  After she’d thought of Paris for a very long time, she composed herself and asked a passerby about the schedule of the bus that went to town. Like her, he was a young negrito. He wore a denim cap with a low brim.

  “Not till 6 o’clock,” he said, with what she thought of as a useless grin. “London say that petrol short, so the buses get cut back. You ain’t notice you ain’t see any cars?”

  “I ain’t see any people with sense either. What London saying ’bout that?”

  “Why you so cantankerous?”

  “Mind you business. If I have to reach town before that, what is there for me to do?”

  He shrugged and put a fist against his chin and tapped his nose.

  “You could go by the main road and beg a ride. But you ain’t going get no ride right now. You have to wait until they blow the whistle over there by Royal Standard and them big trucks taking people up the hill.”

  “And how I would get to town from there?” she asked him, drumming her heels against the wall.

  He shrugged.

  “Beg another ride…or walk…or take the same bus you would take if you waited here till 6.”

  “But it ain’t have other buses that ain’t stop here that go to town? It have one you could take from the caribes straight to town they say. I take one from there that bring me here this afternoon. But is the wrong one I did take.”

  “I only know the bus that come there,” the boy replied. “Them other buses that go other places I ain’t really business with them.”

  Live in a place and don’t know a blasted thing, she thought, as she watched him walk away. Damn head tough like concrete. Not even water can soak it, much less learning. That’s why I can’t live here. That’s why I have to leave. Nobody ain’t care to know ’bout nothing. All they care to know ’bout is their self.

  In the central square, located in the nest of streets behind the bar, the town clock began to chime, and Estrella felt a lightness in her head. Along her spinal cord there ran a soft reverberation, a rising force that made her feel as if her body were the tower of the clock.

  It was the force of recollection. She’d been here once before. She was four…or five…and she’d come with Big Tuck and her grandmother. They were visiting Big Tuck’s younger brother, a chubby man who liked to laugh. He was kind, she remembered…and when they were ready to leave he’d given her a tin whistle and a piece of boiled corn.

  And as she sat there feeling stranded, she thought: That man ain’t know ’bout a thing that happen with me and Big Tuck. And seeing that he’s a nice man, I could tell him that Big Tuck send me for a borrows, that since the fish not coming, times hard. And who knows? He might give it to me. If I tell him they turn me out, he going take their side for sure, for blood is blood and Big Tuck ain’t my blood. But first I have to find him. I know the last name and I know the pet name, but I ain’t know the first name. But I ain’t bound to know the first name to find him, because everybody know each other by their pet name in this place, just like my friends know me as Pepper, ’cause when I cuss, my words is very hot. But lemme watch these madrasitos, yes. I heard they could thief milk out you coffee, and is only when you drink it you would know.

  She reached to hold her basket as she jumped down off the ledge and found to her surprise that it was gone.

  IV.

  “Thief! Thief!”

  The little naked madman dropped the mop and dashed off through the market with her basket on his shoulder, pumping with his only arm. The other one was amputated at the elbow, and he held it at the ready like a club.

  He was a knobbly yam masala, a mix of black and Indian bloods, with ribs like an accordion and a fibrous beard that swept across his chest like a broom.

  “Thief! Thief! You goddamn thief!”

  The grou
p of children who’d been following the lumber cart appeared and chanted: “Run, professor, run!”

  Estrella hopped up on the ledge and hooked her toes between the staves and climbed. It was a gut reaction. She was right beside the gate.

  The staves were topped with ornamental arrows made of brass, and they were sharp enough to gore her if she slipped. At the top, before the final leap, she glanced away from the madman to check her hands, but when she looked again he was gone.

  Landing on her toes inside the market, she fell into a crouch and ran with doubled fists along the cobbles from the heat into the coolness of the shade.

  “You see a naked fellow running with my things?” Estrella shouted as she sprinted through the aisles. They were lined with makeshift counters piled with multicolored fruit and lumpy tubers. While speaking, she made sweeping glances like a spraying Tommy gun.

  When no one answered, and she heard the way the shoppers laughed, and saw the way the vendors shook their heads, she realized that she wasn’t strictly speaking what you’d call a victim; instead, she was the object of a local joke. And as she stood there with her hands against her hips she guessed they’d been communicating with each other using signs and gestures, giggling as they waited for the drama to unfold.

  They think they have me going, Estrella thought. They think I ain’t know what’s going on. They ain’t know I sell in market too. I do this to people before—laugh and carry on like I ain’t see nothing. Is only sport. Is only sport. Calm yourself, Pepper. Is only sport. And if you get vex they going laugh even more. Calm yourself, Pepper. I know is wasting time. But calm yourself. You ain’t know these people. And this ain’t you place. You getting vex. But calm yourself. Make a sport of it. Don’t take it on.

  “What is your name?” she asked a butcher, who was smiling broadly with two rows of perfect teeth.

  “They call me Asif,” he said, his machete pausing then descending in a chop against a shank of beef.