Through a broken nose, shattered teeth, and a fractured jaw, Anatoli cursed his captors. But there was no physical fight left in him now. Darkness came down on him like a collapsing brick wall.
Everything hurt. Consciousness faded. And even as darkness descended, his right eye twitched uncontrollably, even more than usual.
Then one of the assailants pressed something to the side of his head. The nose of a pistol, it felt like. A few seconds later, there was a tremendous explosion and darkness.
SIXTY-SEVEN
From the day she arrived in Barranco Lajoya, Alex kept her eyes and ears open on behalf of her employer, Joseph Collins. Her assignment had been to take a good look at things and report back. What’s being done right? What might be done better? And above all, see who might be trying to push these poor indigenous people off their land.
Identify who and report back.
To that end, Alex embedded herself in the everyday life of the village, the better to catch the pace and feel of the place. The better to observe.
Father Martin installed her in a thatched hut located behind the church. Some of the wives from the village, accompanied by their daughters, had scrubbed the concrete floor of the hut with a heavy bleach and disinfectant before Alex’s arrival. As noxious as the smell was, it kept the insects at bay, though when she lay down to sleep, she could see the insects crawling above her, through the leaves and branches of the roof. There was also a small supply of citronella candles on a wooden table and a small can of insecticide.
Bedding was a thin foam mattress spread on the floor, plus a sheet and mosquito netting. There was a ring of chili powder around the sleeping area, which kept most of the crawling spiders, lice, and red ants away. In the evening, two candles lit the room, and Alex was cautioned to leave one on at night to deter the occasional small snake that might intrude. Rattlers, she was reminded, could sense the body heat of their prey and would strike in complete darkness.
The best plumbing in town was also in the back of the church, in an attached shed, but this was in a single open room where food supplies were also kept. When Alex used it, two of the women from the town, whom she quickly befriended, “stood guard” for her so that no men would walk in. The village men were too well mannered, or intimidated, to burst in on her, but accidents could happen.
Bathing was rudimentary, too. About a hundred yards through the woods there was a mountain stream which was about twenty feet wide where it ran past the village. The women of Barranco Lajoya considered it safe in terms of pollution and wildlife. They had been using it to bathe and wash laundry for many generations.
The men tended to be away during the day, so the women would go together in the late afternoon before dusk, maybe ten to fifteen at a time, usually with many children. Alex tended to go to the river with the younger women, the wives who were sometimes barely older than sixteen, but mostly in their twenties.
They would disrobe completely, leave their clothes in neat piles on the riverbank and move quickly into a meter of rushing water. They would scrub themselves with bars of a strong Mexican soap. The water came from a great elevation and was surprisingly refreshing. A strong current kept it clean.
Alex was hesitant at the procedure at first and reluctant to undress in front of the women of the village, though the venue was really no more than an outdoor version of a women’s locker room. But she quickly got used to the procedure. In a strange primal way she felt at one with God’s nature when she waded into the cool stream and then slowly submerged herself. It occurred to her that the topography here had probably not changed much in two thousand years, since the time of Christ. People had probably been bathing in this tributary for just as long. Before many days had passed, she looked forward to the daily ritual.
She had heard that sometimes soldiers came through the area and would stand on the opposite riverbank, watch the women, and shout to them. Sometimes the soldiers would even take pictures. The men of the village tolerated this. They knew better than to challenge the soldiers. Everyone in Venezuela knew better than to challenge groups of military.
Alex kept an eye out for the soldiers. She had no inclination to put on a show for them. But she did see them once. Two of the younger soldiers were taking pictures from the opposite shore while Alex and three others were bathing in knee-deep water.
Surprisingly to Alex, the women bathing made no effort to cover themselves and actually waved to the men in uniform. One blew kisses.
Later one of the women explained. “We are safer when the soldiers come by to watch us,” she said. “Because we bathe in the river, the soldiers pass by our village. If they didn’t pass by, we would be at the complete mercy of bandits.”
To bathe, the women also needed to wear rubber sandals. The thongs protected the soles of the feet from microscopic dangers that lurked on the bed of the stream. It was through the soles of the feet that parasites, some of which could be fatal, might enter the body. A woman named Inéz who was always accompanied by three small children, gave Alex a pair of black rubber thongs made from an old tire.
Two weeks after Alex arrived, a medical mission from Maracaibo visited Barranco Lajoya. With the exception of Mr. Collins’s missionaries, foreign visits were a rarity in the little town perched three thousand feet above the valley floor. The scenery may have been Aspencaliber, but there were no ski lifts here, no businesses. There weren’t even toilets outside of the church. On one side of the town, the drop on the mountain was so steep that one could fall off. Sometimes children did.
The people of the town were endlessly grateful when the doctors and nurses arrived. If residents of Barranco Lajoya got sick, they usually had to hope they would get better on their own. Some didn’t even bother to do that. They had learned to live with pain and infection, and sometimes die with it.
“The worst thing that can happen to a human being is to lose hope,” Father Martin said one morning. “A lot of people here feel hopeless.”
On the first day of the visit, the missionaries turned the town’s church into a medical clinic in a matter of minutes. Two doctors from Maracaibo set up shop behind little-kid-style desks. Other missionaries set up stations to take blood pressure and test adults for diabetes. Bags of pills and medical supplies were stashed behind the altar of the church. Outside on the playground, the cluster of townspeople was organized into a line and missionaries registered every single person. They wrote down names, ages, and complaints, which ranged from hacking coughs and stomach aches to limbs rotting from blood poisoning.
What followed wasn’t textbook medicine. The doctors made diagnoses on the fly, seeing ten times the number of patients they would on a typical day in the US. The little pills that Americans took for granted made a huge difference in Barranco Lajoya. They could whip lingering infections and knock out the stomach parasites that could starve even a well-fed child.
Alex used her fluent Spanish to help counsel some patients. She saw one ten-year-old girl who had been suffering from a sore throat that made her wince every time she swallowed.
She asked how long the girl had been in pain.
The girl’s response: “Seis años.” Six years.
The doctor prescribed antibiotics but told the girl’s mother she would need to take her to one of the hospitals on the distant coast to have her tonsils removed. She wasn’t sure that would happen. The medical brigade like this was like a strobe flash in the dark. The stomach parasites were going to come back, blood pressure medicine would eventually run out, lice would again infest the children. Suspected cancers would go untreated. But temporarily suffering had been lessened. At least those who brought in help from the outside had done something.