They put on their stiff organza dresses — the ones reserved for national or religious holidays — with frills and bibs and broad skirts puffed up with crinoline, like light-colored cotton clouds: baby-chick yellow for Sayonara, cotton-candy pink for Ana, sky blue for Susana, mint green for Juana, and white like the snows of days gone by for little Chuza. They greased down their hair and splashed on perfume, brushed their teeth, put on their stockings and shoes, and started walking behind their madrina, dressed up in their Sunday best on a Tuesday and advancing through briers and underbrush that threatened to tear the organza and that messed up their hairdos. In spite of everything, they proceeded carefully and elegantly like country people when they come into town for mass, because Todos los Santos had warned them that if they wanted to know the other world, they had to arrive with their dignity intact.
“So that no one dares to pity us,” she said.
“This dress is scratchy, madrina,” complained Susana.
“You’ll just have to put up with it.”
They reached a place outside of the fence around the Troco by walking along a path that Todos los Santos knew. They went down a hill and crossed a stream after taking off their shoes to keep them from getting wet, then sat on the rocks to dry their feet, put on their shoes again, brushed their hair, before finally arriving at their destination.
“Well, there it is. That is the other world,” announced Todos los Santos, in front of a place where the thick vines that clung to the length of the fence had fallen away, and where, due to some oversight in security, there were no armed guards to scare off curious or ill-intentioned people.
Piled one against another and sheathed in their colorful organza dresses, like packages of bonbons, the five girls could see better than if they had a first-tier box, all five faces pressed against the stretch of wire fence to avoid the quadrangular frames, the five pairs of Asiatic eyes opened so wide and round that they lost their slant. From there they saw what their fantasies could not have even attempted to imagine: the mythic and impenetrable Barrio Staff, where the Tropical Oil Company had installed and isolated the North American personnel who held positions of management, administration, and supervision, and which was a reduced-scale replica of the American Way of Life. It was as if a slice of a comfortable neighborhood in Fort Wayne, Indiana, or Phoenix, Arizona, had been removed and transplanted in the middle of the tropical jungle, with its gardens and swimming pools, its well-manicured lawns, its mailboxes like birdhouses, the golf course, the tennis courts, and three dozen white, spacious houses, all identical and completely imported, from the bedroom furniture to the roof tiles and down to the last screw. In the background and on the top of a hill, dominating the barrio, rose a house built of pine called Casa Loma, the residence of the general manager of the company, with its ample rooms, its vestibule, terraces, and garages.
For a long time the five girls looked mutely at everything, and since they didn’t see anyone appear there inside the fence, they thought the other world was a bewitched and deserted place like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. It seemed as if the inhabitants had left suddenly, without time to take any of their belongings with them. A solitary towel lay abandoned at the edge of a pool, the translucent water still agitated by an absent swimmer, a tricycle overturned as if the child who had been riding it had fallen and run to look for his mother, a lawn mower that was waiting for the man who had just gone inside for a glass of water. These objects were gleaming, still unused, as powerful as fetishes, possessed of a well-being not belonging to the people who used them but rather to the objects themselves.
“Doesn’t anyone live here, madrina?” asked Sayonara in a voice lowered out of fear of shattering the mirage, but at that moment the lawn-mower man came out of nowhere, started it up, and began working.
“What is that man doing, madrina?” asked Susana.
“He’s cutting the grass.”
“To give it to the animals?”
“No, he is cutting it because he likes it short.”
“What a strange man…,” said Ana. “And why do they have those poor people locked behind this fence?”
“We are the ones who are locked away, the ones on the outside, because they can leave, but they won’t let us in.”
“Why won’t they let us in?”
“Because they are afraid of us.”
“Why are they afraid of us?”
“Because we are poor and dark-skinned and we don’t speak English.”
“Look, madrina, the houses are like cages too,” said Juana, “they can’t come out through the door or the windows.”
“Those are screens, so the mosquitoes don’t get in.”
“The mosquitoes can’t get in? And the other animals can’t get in either?”
“Only dogs.”
“Can the dogs come out?”
“If the people open the door for them.”
“What is that woman doing?” asked Ana when she saw the owner of the towel stretch out on a lawn chair to sun herself.
“She is going to lie in the sun.”
“Lie in the sun? Then she must have cold blood. Machuca told me that lizards lie in the sun to get warm because they have cold blood.”
“No. She wants to lie in the sun to make her skin darker.”
“But why do they do that,” said Sayonara, “if they don’t like dark-skinned people?”
“You have to understand them,” said Todos los Santos. “They weren’t born here. They are North Americans.”
“Why did they come here?”
“To take oil from the land.”
“Why do they take it?”
“To sell it.”
“Oh! Is it a good business to sell land without oil?”
“What are those two doing?” asked Ana, pointing to a pair of women who were chatting at the door of a house.
“They are speaking English.”
“Then how do they understand each other?”
“Because they know how to speak English. Inside there no one speaks Spanish.”
“Someone should teach them…”
A group of children jumps into the pool to paddle around, a man starts washing his car, a woman picks up a hose and begins to wash her dog. Little Chuza, dazed, watched everything without missing a detail, but she didn’t ask anything because little Chuza never opened her mouth.
“They wash dogs, they wash children, they wash cars…,” said Juana. “What clean people! And where do they get so dirty, if there’s no dirt in there?”
“There is no dirt because they clean it.”
“But why do they clean it if there is no dirt…?”
“To keep busy and to kill time until they can return to their country.”
“Look, madrina, they’re barefoot. Don’t they have shoes?”
“Yes, they do. They’re barefoot because they like it — they keep their shoes in their houses.”
“So they don’t get dirty?”
“Maybe.”
“What if their feet get dirty?”
“Then they wash them, like their dogs.”
“But why would they wash a dog?” asked Ana, who never in her life had seen anyone wash a dog.
“So he won’t smell.”
“Do their dogs smell very bad?”
“All dogs smell the same.”
“I heard something,” said Sayonara. “Señor Manrique told me. He said that the floors of some houses are covered with wool, like sheep.”
“That really is strange!” shouted Susana. “That must be one of Sayonara’s lies.”
“It’s true,” confirmed Todos los Santos. “They are houses with rugs.”
“What crazy people!”