The Girl With the Golden Shoes Read online

  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 t
all, 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.

  I ain’t able for them people, thought Estrella, as the madrasitos called to her and waved. They run me out their town already. I ain’t want to get inside no truck with them. Worst of all, they have machete. I ain’t going nowhere with them. The fellow by the market said it have a bus. I prefer to wait for that. Plus is only dirty people I seeing in them trucks. And I now just bathe myself.

  The trucks were coming close together in a convoy like an army in retreat, and she kept her eyes engaged by reading so she didn’t have to look.

  But when another thirty minutes passed and she hadn’t seen the bus, and the gaps between the trucks began to lengthen to the point where she would hear one engine fading out before another grunted up the hill, she changed her mind.

  VII.

  The truck was crowded, but not as crowded as the ones that came before. No one clung against the side or rode the cab. But those who had seats were stacked on others like jars of pickled pork. With their backs against the cab, hats aligned in humps below the glass, some were sitting on the truck’s short bed with hands around their ankles, chins against their knees, gazing at their toes. The others stood and held onto the ribbing of the missing canvas sheet.

  The old blue truck groaned on. It was a Pierce-Arrow from the ’20s, with an upright cab like a telephone booth and light external fenders of the type you see on motorbikes today. It was older than the other trucks, and smaller, and rode like a carriage on weak leaf springs that creaked.

  With the engine under stress, they passed a scrappy settlement and turned onto the main cross-island road.

  They came upon a string of solid villages with paved streets and good houses—verandas, hedges, lattice trim—a pond below the wreckage of a white great house, then for miles, on rolling land, long rows of young banana trees just planted by United Fruit. Guards rode up and down the verge on horses—some of them with guns.

  From there, the road was like a lashing whip, and the old truck rose and fell along its dips and rises, flanked by humps of land in terraced cultivation—tenant farms of beans and cabbage next to ample citrus groves whose owners had new cars and concrete villas.

  The truck made frequent stops, and Estrella dropped her head each time. This way she wouldn’t feel compelled to wave.

  Although she was grateful that they’d slapped their hands against the truck to make the driver stop, and had gripped her arm and helped her in, Estrella held the workers in contempt. They’d failed. They were dirty and poor, and wore their tattered clothes on bodies in decay.

  In their company she felt as if her bath had been a waste. Above them hung a tender stink that slipped inside her body when she sighed or made a sharp intake of breath—as she did on seeing a man unearth a booger from his nose and crush it on his sleeve.

  The stores would be closed when she got to Seville, which meant she’d be going to bed without a job, and waking up without a future in the morning, after sleeping who-knows-where.

  “Which part you going?” somebody asked.

  Without looking she replied, “I going town.”

  By now she was the only person standing, and was staring at the road behind her as it faded into dusk.

  She felt the heat of eyes on her, and when she looked she saw a woman leaning forward to reveal the man who’d asked. He was in his twenties, with a handsome face spoiled in places by a rash, and as she peered at him Estrella wondered why he didn’t hide it with a beard.

  “Which part you coming from?” he asked.

  The leaning woman put her elbows on her knees, and now the man looked like her bidet.

  Estrella answered, “Far.”

  “Far like far where? Every far has a name.”

  “Farther than you’d want to go.”

  “How you know that?”

  “I ain’t know that. And I ain’t care that you know I ain’t know that. Worse, I ain’t care what you want to know for.”

  “Suppose I have important reasons?”

  “I’d say ‘good for you.’”

  “Well, it must be good for me. Because I want to know so I could go and see you mother and thank her. For she made a lovely girl like you.”

  When the laughter in the truck had died, he pointed at the woman in his lap and said, “Don’t worry. Me and her ain’t nothing. When she gone I’ll take you.”

  “If you know where I want to go, you wouldn’t say that.”

  “How you know for sure?”

  “Well, you old enough. If you did want to go you’d be gone already.”

  “Maybe I was waiting for you.”

  “Some kind o’ things can’t cook in the same pot,” she said, annoyed but also quite amused. “Some things together is poison. Like cornmeal and rum. You ever drink that?”

  “No.”

  “Next time I see you, remind me, and I promise to make some for you.”

  The people in the truck began to laugh again.

  “You hair pretty,” he said almost shyly. “You have Indian in you?”

  “No.”

  “You want some?”

  “You’re a blasted fool. You know that?”

  “Stop acting like you vex. I can see you want to laugh.”

  “It have children just like you, you know. They fill they eye before they fill they belly. They always asking for big plate o’ food and when they get it they choke.”

  “I never hear a truer word,” a woman in a red bandanna said. She tapped Estrella on the arm and offered her a lighted cigarette.

  Estrella sat on the tailgate, held onto the frame, crossed her legs, and smoked, the slow wind picking on her still-damp hair.

  She had the nature of a gambler, and as she smoked, her lips began to clamp more tightly as she played the conversation back and forth in her mind. She felt as if she’d lost.

  “Which part you want to take me to?” she asked the man directly.

  “Well …”

  “Don’t play jackass now. I’m interested. Tell me where you want me and you to go. Where this place is where they giving people Indian blood?” She took her deepest drag, then added, “Or is Indian baby you did say?”

  As the workers chuckled, Estrella laughed and settled down to smoke again.

  “Vashti, you can’t have them woman laughing so,” a man began to tease.

  “What you want me do? Beat her?”

  “No. It ain’t call for that. A man like you so full o’ argument should have the strength to give her back some talks.”

  “You right. I going take you advice. So,” he started, looking at Estrella now, “you want to know where I going take you? That is what you want to know, right? Well, hear now where I going take you. Listen good and—”

  “Vashti, cut the shit and talk nuh, man.”

  “You want to know where I going take you?” he began again. “That is what I was going tell you before this eunuch interrupted me. Well, hear now where I going take you. Listen good. I going take you to a place where you not going know yourself. Where you going see yourself and wonder if is you because you never see yourself like that before…looking happy like you just finish eating a plate o’ goat stew with white yam…like when the goat stew finish and you make a belch and cut a fart you best friend give you back the money he borrow thirty years ago…with interest…and take you down the bar and put your drinks on his tab. But it ain’t done yet. Because after you leave the bar, you go to church and find that Jesus tell the pastor to forgive a
ll them rudeness I could look at you and tell you like to do.” He paused to add a dash of intrigue and excitement. “You is a bad girl. I can tell. An experienced Indian ever take the time to light a fire on you tail?”

  She sucked her teeth and didn’t answer.

  “Eh?” he prompted.

  “Sister, what you have in the basket?” someone asked her from a corner by the cab. “It have anything to eat?”

  “It ain’t have no food,” she said, smirking in the dimming light. “It have book though. And soap. But if you look like you friend here who just tell me all this stupidness, then book and soap ain’t make for you.”

  “Boy, the country girl have words, eh?” Vashti said.

  “And you from which part?” Estrella answered. “Paris? You acting like you come from town. Man, don’t try me this evening. All you make for is one thing.”

  The woman in the red bandanna fired: “That’s to burn and throw away.”

  They were easing down into the flats now, where the central mountains stuttered in a taper to the Caribbean coast. Only four of them remained—three workers and Estrella, who by now knew all their names.

  The naughty banter had evolved into an easy conversation, during which she’d shared with them a little of her life, and they’d shown a new regard for the negrita when she lit a match and grabbed a book from her basket and showed that she could read.

  When the truck reached its final stop, four miles before the intersection with the coastal road, Vashti, the man who’d tried to give her talks, said, “Wait here while we see what we can do.”

  The workers gathered by the driver’s door, and Vashti said, “Do me a favor, boss, and take her down the road?”

  “She who?” came the sharp reply.

  “The girl we pick up by the Sandy River Bridge. She going town.”

  “That’s what you telling me now,” the driver said impatiently. “But I ain’t business with that. This ain’t even my truck. Rambana drive my truck and crash it last week and now I have to drive this skeleton they dig up from the boneyard. I ain’t even know if it can take them hills it have to go back home.”