Page 3 of Girl in the Water
Daniela bobbed her head.
Pedro said no more, but he paid her in sugarcane—a chunk almost as big as the missionary’s fish!
Daniela smiled all the way home. Unhappiness was impossible when someone had sugarcane.
She was grateful to have Pedro as her friend. When the missionary talked about the saints on Sundays, Daniela often wondered if Pedro was one of them, but she never dared ask. Nobody ever asked anything during the hillside sermons. When the heavenly father talked, you listened. No back talk,não senhor.
That night, as a heavy storm cracked lightning, Daniela’s mother let her wiggle into the big hammock. She put her arms around Daniela and kissed her head. She told Daniela some of Pula’s tales about their people, the Baniwa, the people of the forest.
Higher up the river, the villages had more native Baniwa, but Daniela’s village had been built bysoldados da borrachabrought fromCearáto a nearby rubber plantation by the government in her grandmother’s time. Most were killed by the jungle. When the plantation shut down, some of the survivors went home. Others stayed and built a tiny village on stilts on the bank of the Içana. The village was a mix of all kinds of people.
Ana was half Baniwa. She spoke Baniwa almost as well as Pula had. She knew the sacred name of things:u:nifor river and water,kepizenifor bird,a:pifor snake,haikufor tree,dzawifor jaguar, and a great many others.
Daniela loved rolling the words off her tongue.
She loved the rain, loved the flood that washed everything clean. But when a particularly loud thunderclap boomed above, she jumped.
Her mother took her hand. “The storms will be over soon. Then the nights will be quiet.”
She spoke truth. The following week, the water began receding. And then the week after that, at the start of June, the rainy season ended and the dry season began. Loggers came up the river to go deep into the jungle.
They didn’t come out again until the beginning of the next rainy season in December. They floated down the Içana with their overburdened barges, hurrying to the city of Manaus, where they’d get their pay, then could drink theircachaçaand enjoy the women at the countlessputeiros. They rarely stopped at Daniela’s tiny village.
But that December, a young logger did saunter up the path to Daniela’s hut. She was home alone, cleaning cassava in front of the hut for Pedro, who promised to give her some as payment. She meant to pass half her share to Tereza, the oldest woman in the village, who, without any teeth, liked eating the roots cooked and mashed.
The logger meandered up to Daniela. “Ana?”
She brushed the dirt from her hands and scrambled to her feet. “I’ll go find her. She’s not here.”
“I don’t mind,” the man said.
He was rangy—just bone and muscle, like most loggers—his dark eyes hungry as he looked her over. He pushed her down, then pushed himself between her legs.
It hurt very much, but it was over very fast.
Her mother came just as the man stood and fastened his pants, stepping around Daniela, who sat with her arms hugging her pulled-up knees.
Ana made the man pay. And when he left, she crouched next to Daniela and put her arms around her. They sat there like that for a long time before her mouth said, “Now you’re a woman.” And her eyes said,We endure.
She took Daniela to the market. She let Daniela pick two things, one for each hand, but for some reason, it didn’t feel like heaven.
They went into the jungle next, and Ana pointed out the plants to pick for the tea that would make sure Daniela wouldn’t have a child of her own.
After that, the men sometimes came for her mother, and sometimes they came for Daniela. She didn’t like it, but it no longer hurt. Most of them managed quickly enough. And even the ones who didn’t weren’t as bad as gnawing hunger.
A whole year passed like that. But at the end of the rainy season of the second year, at the end of May, the Içanarose higher than ever, the village flooded in the middle of the night, and Daniela’s mother drowned in the churning water.
Like an anaconda with a tapir, grief swallowed Daniela whole, trapped her and squeezed her in its bottomless dark belly.
“You can’t bury her in the hillside cemetery, not in hallowed ground.” The missionary’s tone was hard and unforgiving. “Ana was a sinner.”
He looked very black and very grim, more like a vulture than ever, the villagers in all their colors pulling back from him like scared macaws.
Daniela stood in front of him, anger bubbling inside her, rising like floodwater. Her body could not contain it all. So she looked the missionary right in the eye like she’d never dared before. “To slap you with a fish, senhor, would be an insult to the fish!”
Then she turned on her heels and marched away while the man shouted behind her.
Pedro helped Daniela bury her mother in the middle of the night, the old way. They hollowed out a log stuck in the mud of the riverbank, placed the body inside, covered it with palm fronds, then pushed the log back into the river, and watched it float away into the darkness.
