Hippo. My mother thought nothing of taking us out of school to go to Belize for the winter.
What I remember of this time lodged itself in my mind without the help of a journal. At seven I still had trouble writing my last name; it would never have occurred to me then to try to burn a moment into my memory, to catalog events. What I remember is free of logic and of chronology. I remember that my uncle and his family were with us for Christmas, that we decorated a tree branch with red construction paper, that my aunt made donuts. In February, at Carnaval, young men with their faces covered in charcoal and sacking ran through the village throwing stones. In April, Shelly had a birthday party and cracked her pinata open with a stout stick.
San Antonio was a grid of dirt roads lined with small, whitewashed houses. The river, the Rio Hondo, ran along the east side and jungle bordered the rest. My uncle’s field stood at the south end. To walk home from the field, Shelly and I took a path through the jungle, where we sometimes saw leaf-cutter ants, each hefting a scrap of bright green. Out in the sunlit front yards little boys stood in their underpants and waved machetes as tall as they were. Behind the houses women in bright cotton dresses hung laundry out to dry by size, the underthings always farthest from the street. Inside, some of the houses had pages of magazines plastered up for wallpaper. Our friend Ruby lived near the south end of town, in a house with faded turquoise trim and a yard full of red hibiscus.
Up a low hill sat the general store where you could buy bottles of Coke and orange Fanta, cans of sweetened condensed milk, green mosquito coils, girls’ frilled underpants with the days of the week embroidered on the bottom, pigs’ tails cured in brine. Below the store, to the right, was the ferry across the Rio Hondo. It ran on underwater cables and had to be cranked by hand. In the shallows by the ferry dock we trapped minnows in empty liquor bottles baited with raw tortilla.
To the north of the store was the schoolhouse, the largest building in San Antonio. Bats nested under the eaves, and I had seen boys knock them down with broomsticks and beat them to death. Further along, to the left, stood the house of Dona Dominga, who made a candy called coco brut, which she sold from her living room. At the end of her street we had once watched a man process
The house we stayed in had been made for the schoolteacher. It became vacant when he built his own just across the street, a modern building with cement block walls and a tin roof. The old house stood on stilts. It had an old-fashioned palm roof that let in the breeze: My mother said it was like sleeping in a tree. On hot days the schoolteacher’s wife would come over to sit on the steps with us and list the disadvantages of a tin roof: hot in the sun, noisy in the rain. Our roof never leaked, even during the rainy season when mud washed through the streets in waves and people ran about with pieces of cardboard held over their heads.
Nearly everyone in San Antonio kept pigs. In the morning we’d see blood on the pigs’ ears where vampire bats had fed during the night; everyone slept with their windows closed. The pigs at our end of the village ran loose during the day, rooting through the garbage and corn husks in the gutters along the street and getting into people’s gardens. At night, and in the heat of the day, they slept under our house, the only one on stilts in that part of the village. We could hear them snuffle and grunt below us. Shelly and I came in one day and found our cousin Cedric lying face down on the floor. He’d found a knothole and was peeing through it. We were thrilled: The path to the outhouse was overgrown and I had seen snakes there and once, I swear, a bumblebee the size of my fist. Why use the outhouse when we could pee through the floor? Our mother put an end to this plan.
The house had two rooms, furnished almost entirely with hammocks. From the start I loved the feeling of being suspended and at the same time held tight. At night we lit the brittle, dark green mosquito coils under our hammocks. You balanced each coil on a little metal stand and lit the outside end with a match. They burned for about eight hours with a strong, unpleasant smoke designed to drive away mosquitoes. In the morning there’d be circles of gray ash on the plank floor. When the floor got dusty we washed it down with water Shelly and I carried from the river in red and blue plastic buckets, proud that we could carry two at a time.
The muddy green Rio Hondo was slow moving, with trees and vines draped over its banks. We bathed in it near our house, where a clearing along the bank led down to the remains of an old dock, slippery with river slime. Shelly and I were the only ones in the village with bathing suits. The boys swam at a dock by the ferry, in shorts, and the girls wore old cotton dresses. Further along the bank, under a huge tree, the girls showed us a deposit of green clay they used on their hair. You scooped out a handful and rubbed it on; it made your hair soft and slick. Around the swimming hole grew ‘sensitive plant,’ a low plant with mimosalike leaves that shrank and wilted when you touched them. A few minutes later it came back to life. I used to sit on the bank, water running off my braids, brushing my fingers over the leaves.
We ate with my mother’s friends, Froylan and Balbina. Balbina had a wide face and dark, glossy hair that she kept short in front and long in the back, so that her face was fringed with curls. She wore flowered dresses over her soft, rounded body. Froylan was lean and wiry. They had three children: Maely, a son, who was a year younger than I was, and two daughters, Teti and Mirna. Their house had two rooms, a dirt floor, a thatched roof and a yard with custard apple trees.
The door that looked into the backyard was always open; chickens and sometimes a pig would wander in to look for food. Just behind the house stood the thatched cooking shed where Balbina made tortillas, taking a ball of corn dough and patting it, over and over, between two pieces of plastic bag. The corn had a dry, almost chalky smell. Balbina cooked the tortillas on a round sheet of blackened steel set over the fire pit. When the first side was done she flipped the tortilla neatly with her bare fingers.
We ate rice and beans. We ate this for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sometimes there was an egg, sometimes Froylan brought fish from the river. The fish were called
We walked to school with Maely after breakfast, barefoot but with neatly combed hair. Kindergarten, first and second grades met in a whitewashed room with the same teacher, round Don Carmen. The day began with the ringing of the huge bell in the school yard. We found our places at the low wooden desks, then stood together to recite the Lord’s Prayer. If not for my time in Belize I would never have learned it, and although my Spanish faded, it has stuck firmly in my mind, the words inseparable from the singsong in which we all intoned them. After the Lord’s Prayer we belted out the national anthem: ‘Oh Land of the Gods by the Carib Sea, our tran-quil haven of dem-o-cra-cy!’
English is the official language of Belize, and though everyone speaks Spanish or Mayan at home, school is taught in English. It is an English ever so slightly unfamiliar; ‘Don’t vex me now,’ Don Carmen said when a student misbehaved. Or he might ask one of us to ‘fetch’ the chalk. At home on Long Island I’d struggled hopelessly over phonetics worksheets; in Don Carmen’s class, because of my English, I was the star pupil. It was in Belize that I finally learned to read.
The texts were Dick and Jane primers, yellow and cracked. In San Antonio, Dick and Jane read like fantasy. Spot, their pet, bore no resemblance to the lean, mangy dogs with narrow faces who fought and copulated in the dusty streets. And it was impossible to believe that Dick and Jane had ever had head lice, or used old newsprint for toilet paper, or been struck with a ruler. Don Carmen’s corporal punishment, if the class grew noisy, consisted of going around the room with a ruler, making us stand and slapping each of us on the palm; the slap was called a ‘cookie.’ This was a joke by San Antonio standards, where fathers used belts to discipline their children. But I was so scared the first time I held out my palm that when I sat down I missed the chair, landed hard on the concrete floor and began to cry.
The village ran on sugarcane. At five in the morning when the cane trucks rattled down the hill and turned onto the road near our house, Shelly and I would wake in the dark to see their headlights slide along the walls.
