Cave of Little Faces. Aída Besançon Spencer
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“A cow!” yelled Basil, pointing. There on the mound of dirt was a black cow lumbering along the crest. As the white mound beside them tapered off, they saw four more cows grazing on the stiff grass beyond the dust.
The truck rumbled by, and Star waved in delight. Then a motorcycle with two soldiers on it jolted by, and the road turned to the left.
“This looks like a city dump!” grumbled Basil. And, indeed, mounds of garbage replaced the mounds of dust. Some of it was burning, giving off an acrid odor. Cans and food waste and paper and clouds of flies spread for a quarter mile before they came to a perpendicular road with trees and shrubs on the other side.
Star turned left and started up the road, momentarily disoriented, assuming she was on the other side of the lake now and wanting to pick up the shoreline drive.
“Look, a crane,” said Basil, pointing to Star’s left. A beautiful white crane sat on a small tree limb, regarding them.
“There’s one on your right—a brown one,” said Star, and Basil turned to see an even larger brown crane in another small tree.
“There are cranes everywhere in these woods. . . .”
“Bo, look at the road ahead,” cried Star. She stopped the truck in the middle of the road. What they saw was a panoramic view of what looked like the dissolution of civilization. Twenty yards ahead, the road simply disappeared. No wonder nobody was on this road except for them.
Basil got out and started walking forward. To his right, no more than six feet from the highway they were on, water was among the trees. As he walked the first ten yards, the water came right up to the edge of the road. All the little trees and bushes were standing in water. Two crude little rowboats foundered half submerged in it. Parts of their wooden bottoms were rotted away. Neither had obviously been used for a long time. Basil guessed they had been contraband carriers, smuggling drugs or human cargo in from the foot of the mountains looming to the left. Perhaps here they transferred to trucks. More likely they were just poor little fishing vessels that had succumbed at last to sea worms or simple rot, but positing smuggling was the way his mind worked.
The next ten yards of walking took him to the edge where the road was simply no more. He could not make it out under the surface. Even the trees and shrubs petered out as the lake itself took hold. He glanced behind himself. There was the lonely stretch of road with their little truck and Star’s head in the driver’s seat twenty yards behind him, watching him intently. And, then, he turned back around. Here was land’s end. The road simply immersed and disappeared. Far away was the mountainous shore. He could see nothing on the other side but the foot of the mountain. Whatever the road had connected to was also long gone—and so would be the spot where he was now standing in just a short while. Basil backed up as if it were already happening—which, indeed, it was. The power of the waters. What was it exactly that the innkeeper had said? “You do not know the power of the lake or you would not be talking so.”
Basil jogged back quickly to the truck and got in. “The trees are full of cranes,” he muttered. “The road is so gone I can’t even see it—plus, there’s no connection on the other side. It’s all gone—completely.”
Without a word, Star threw the truck into reverse, backed it up quickly into a jolting K-turn, and barreled up the road. She flew by the detour turnoff and covered the short space to the intersection where this turnoff ended. There a group of young men and boys were cleaning off their motorcycles in an outpour of water that splayed across the road. “Which way?” she grunted.
“Right,” said Basil, looking at the map.
Immediately, homes and gas stations and stores began to pop up. Star pulled into the first gas station they saw, for the gas gauge had dropped dangerously low, “bending the needle,” as Basil always put it. He got out and eyed the attendant suspiciously. “Fooolll!” he said with the right intonation, and added, “Regulaar!”
“Fooolll ’er up!” smiled the attendant, popping the hose out and, sizing up Basil, he pointed to the meter, clicked it, and said in his approximation of English, “Zaaaro!” pointing with the nozzle at the zeros across the gauge.
Basil nodded and soon parted with the better part of three thousand pesos—about seventy dollars.
“Gas is expensive here,” whined Star when he got back in.
“You’re telling me!”
“It’s all going out, Bo, and nothing’s coming in,” she warned him as they plunged deeper into the city of Jimani, the last great outpost before Mal Paso and the beautiful inland lake of Haiti, reaching across to Lake Enriquillo like the hands of lovers beneath a table.
“I know, I know,” he snapped. “I’m thinking about it. I still think there’s something in this lake for us. We just gotta put our heads together. There’s an angle to everything that nobody’s got a claim on. This is all undeveloped. Well, I can see why, because the lake’s taking over everything. Okay, if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is, but it’s still got an angle. We just got to find it.”
But the other side of Jimani did not look like it was going to yield any ideas to either of them. On the contrary, the road led them through a pass and down into a stark, completely undeveloped wilderness. The only sign of the human touch was the flotsam and jetsam of an occasional can or bottle or bit of paper lying here and there at great intervals beside the road or tangled in the low bushes.
Where Jimani had boasted a “Palace of Justice,” a concrete and cement works, even some farms, this great plain was desolate, empty except for distant mounds of dirt and little patches of dusty shrubs that stretched far away to hills in the distance.
Behind them loomed the high Haitian mountains. Storms had gathered at their tops as if warning them not to cross over, having enough trouble of their own already to need a Basil or a Star. Happily for Haiti, neither of them was capable of considering it, though they missed a beautiful land and gracious people on the other side, since all they could see was the horror in their own minds. Similarly, all they could see on this side of the mountains was emptiness: the empty road, the empty plains, the empty hills in the distance. Worse yet, the lake was no longer in sight and the road had veered a distance off. In fact, it was so empty that every once in a while now a huge tractor trailer came running down the center of the road like an airplane taking off, using the center line for guidance, and then crowding over to the right lane, whizzing past them, then centering itself once again in the middle of the road. All that lined the highway, besides the bushes and small trees, was a lonely stretch of telephone poles, the only thing connecting the country to itself. When one of these poles sported a wind-battered poster for the election of a prospective president, Basil pointed it out. Then a little house came up by the side of the road in the middle of nothing but scrub on either side. Basil shook his head in wonder. Far off, on a distant mound of dirt he soon saw two men digging with spades. How had they gotten there? Why were they bothering to dig in one of many similar mounds scattered across the empty plain? Why would anyone want to live in such a place? He had no idea.
When the town of Limon—“the Lemon”—came up, it was like a benediction, announcing the end of the desolation. The land was still arid, and the very old and tiny wooden houses that sheltered the people seemed very poorly made from mere scraps of wood. But at least there were people. Then a number of cement houses began to appear around a large National Guard compound. Next to this, in what passed for the center of town, stood a dry little square alive with children playing and graced by the bust of a Taino Indian. The children were climbing up next to it and playing at its base as if clinging to it for protection. A little farther on, they saw a poster of Jesus Christ and a message about deliverance in his grace. The Savior and the Indian seemed connected. Even Star and Basil could feel a healthy exuberance about Limon, perhaps, they thought, because they also noticed an enormous sign announcing a government agricultural project commencing. All in all, despite the dryness of the land, they felt they had come out of the wilderness at last. The terrain was still arid, but they had seen people and they crossed the rest of the great plain, ignored the mountains of Haiti to their right, and then, to