Another long pause. She continued. “Somewhere in there I got pregnant. My husband, Gabriel, wanted to name her Isabella because it means ‘devoted to God.’ I remember him standing not too far from here up on a shoulder of the mountain, staring at a wall of mud one mile wide and thirty miles long, stretching to the ocean, and saying that something or someone in the midst of this hell needed to be devoted to God because nothing else had been. We worked around the clock. He went for days without sleep. With a weakened system, he contracted the virus that attacked the lining of his heart. We buried him six months later. One more death amid a sea of others. I was pregnant and brokenhearted, I tried to pick up the pieces. I went to the bank, took out one more loan—basically on my father’s good name because we had nothing left except the homestead—and in so doing leveraged what had once been the heart of Alejandro’s Mango Café and Cinco Padres Café Compañía. While I have my father’s heart for these people, I don’t have his business savvy. I was desperate, didn’t read the fine print, and then the bank sold and the new owner”—she held up her fingers like quotation marks—“called in the loan. When the bank called to tell me, I had to ask. I had no idea you could ‘call in a loan.’” A painful shrug. “The foreclosure was quick and decisive. We walked down that mountain three weeks later having lost everything. If it hadn’t been for Paulo, I’m not sure where I’d be. He’s…special to me. To Isabella.”
I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole.
She continued, “Losing my father’s mountain was tough at first, but it’s been a decade so sometimes my life there seems like a distant memory.”
“Why did you stay? Why not move? Start over someplace else?”
“I love these people. Losing the farm changed how I do that. Not the fact that I do.” She pointed to a small rise on the lush plateau once purchased by her father. “The well that my father dug is there. He dug it when I was just a kid. Younger than Isabella. He would be digging by an oil lamp, some three hundred feet down, and sending up buckets of dirt that hung suspended over his head. Which is why you need to trust the man holding the rope. Anyway, he’d be down there all day, digging, sending up buckets, and I’d pull one off the rope, drag it to the garden, and by the time I got back, Paulo would have lifted another for me. Late in the afternoons, when I got tired and wanted to play with my friends or do something, anything, other than haul a five-gallon bucket of dirt over my shoulder to some hot garden, he would write a note and attach it to the bucket. I’d read it when it came up.”
“What’d the note say?”
“Este es el amor con las piernas.” She then translated without being asked. “‘This is love with legs.’ My father used to say that you can tell someone you love them until you’re blue in the face, but until they see that walked out, they have no idea what it means. Hence, ‘love with legs.’” A wide smile spread across her face. “Every day he’d climb out of that hole covered in mud from head to foot. The only thing you could see were the whites of his eyes. When he finally hit water, Paulo pulled him up, and my father stood under the wellhead while Paulo showered him. The water was muddy and brown at first, but the more he pumped, the more pure and clear it became. Finishing the well, with a concrete cap and hand pump, he was so proud. While the concrete was still wet, he took a stick and carved deep into the side, “Agua de mi corazón.” She pointed with her toe. “It means, ‘Water from my heart.’” A warm breeze washed across us and cooled the sweat trickling down my back. “Whenever he would walk me to school, we’d pass by that well, and he’d hold my hand and point with an ear-to-ear grin. ‘That’s love with legs. That’s love with legs.’ My father was proud of many things, but he was especially proud of that well.”
“I understand you love these people, but with so many hard memories, how can you stay here?”
“I, like Paulo, like Isabella, am a child of this land. My soul breathes here. It doesn’t breathe in town. I’ve tried it.”
“You could make more money in town.”
“Money doesn’t buy the air I need.” I had no response to that. She eyed the valley, the mountainside, the homes dotting the landscape, and continued, “We, all of us, have been affected by war, hurricanes, drought, economic hardship. The result is a disease—an epidemic—called ‘hopelessness.’ It’s carried on the air around here, and I am fighting it.”
My voice dropped to a whisper. The enormity and impossibility of her task weighing on me. “How do you plan to do that?”
She didn’t look at me. “With the antidote.”
I’d never felt this passionate about anything in my entire life and I knew it. I spoke slowly. “Which is?”
Her eyes found mine and in them I saw no pretension. No quarter. “With my life.” She straddled the bike and waited for me. “It’s the antidote. And it’s all I have to give.”
* * *
I swung my leg over, careful not to kick her in the chin, and cranked the bike. We sat idling, staring up at the mountains. She spoke over me. The tectonic plates of my life were shifting with every word she spoke. Nothing felt certain. She continued. “Every now and then, somebody will be working a garden or digging a well, and we find another body or a bone or something that someone can identify as having belonged to someone they love. When they do, we erect another cross. Hold another funeral. We pause. Dead a decade, the pain is very much alive. Sometimes I remind myself when I’m walking up the mountain that my father bought with his blood and sweat that my dad’s looking down, watching my sweat mix with his. I hope he’s pleased with what I’ve poured out.” A smile and a single shake. “But I will admit, I sure do miss his coffee.”
We drove north out of Valle Cruces onto the main highway, and then I followed Paulina’s finger down dirt roads toward the coast. We stopped at every surfing destination, dive, and hangout we could find—and there were many. Nicaragua is a surfer’s Central American paradise. We talked to a dozen tanned and bleached surfers carrying boards of different lengths and sizes. None had seen or heard of Zaul. Evidently, he’d not made it this far north.
We returned after lunch and met Paulo at the house. I was anxious to get back out on the road, but Paulina reminded me of my deal with Paulo. Paulina picked up on my anxiety. “Nothing happens in Nicaragua between lunch and dinner other than a bunch of naps. Besides—” She motioned to Paulo, who was holding three new coils of rope and a rather stout-looking harness. “Jefe, will you dig?”
I turned to Paulina. “Jefe?”
“Boss.”
I pointed at the ropes. “He wants to drop me down in that hole, doesn’t he?”
She nodded. “He thinks if he can show the people that you’re not afraid to go down there—”
“Seeing as how I’m an ignorant gringo.”
“Pretty much. They’ll have no reason to be afraid.”
“You mean, my corpse hanging on that rope will shame them into digging it out themselves.”
The purity in her laughter was unlike any I’d ever heard. “Yep. Something like that.” She shrugged. “You can say no.” A pause. “But…you can also say yes.”
“What happened to ‘nothing happens in this country after lunch’? I was thinking about a nap.”
“It’s ninety-six degrees in that chicken coop. You think you can sleep in that?”
I fingered the ropes, as if I knew some way to test the strength. As if holding them would convince me that they were strong enough to hold me. Paulo stretched a length between two arms. “Strong. Very strong. No concern.” He grabbed my forearm with his hand, squeezing it. The effect was that my hand latched onto his forearm where the muscles rippled. He held it there. Popeye with skin. “I hold the rope.” He smacked his forearm with his other hand in order to bring attention to his strength.