The Lands Behind Their Eyes

On the night they met, as he told her stories of his home, she felt as though his face opened up and pulled her into a world more richly colored and intricately drawn than anything she had experienced.

She had found this cafe a couple weeks prior, after looking for a quiet place to study and, honestly, to just be alone with herself. Something past the city traffic and away from her classmates’ effortless focus but not all the way to the rocky hills and unspoken worries that surrounded the farmhouse she lived with her parents.

For him, the cafe was the living room of a home he had built out of the disconnected spaces of his life since moving here. The bedroom at his host family’s house, the office he shared with three other bedraggled T.A.s, and this dark neighborhood coffee shop. He had come to cherish the couple friends he had here, and hoped everyone else would regard him as unremarkable as the bistro tables they perched around.

She had seen him before — almost always with back to the door, sheafs of paper and a few books fanned out in front of him, taking up one end of a communal table that usually sat empty — but for some reason, tonight she really noticed him.

She walked up and asked if she could share the table and he looked up and replied, “Yes. Please.” Out of courtesy, she sat at the far end, but as she pulled her books out of her bag, she felt his eyes on her.

“Thanks for letting me share the table,” She said, looking up. “You’ve got your work cut out for you.”

“Research paper,” he replied, sticking his tongue out. “I think it’s killing me.”

She apologized for interrupting him and he closed his laptop, “I’m happy for the break if I’m not keeping you.”

Her mind went not to the exam she was preparing for but the dinner she was avoiding. “not at all.”

He asked if she was in school and she replied yes, a sophomore. He looked at her book and asked if she was majoring in Economics. Surprised, she looked at the book herself, “Oh, no ... I have no idea what I’m doing.”

She had always felt uncomfortable talking about herself. This type of conversation, specifically. She had been raised in a family that communicated mostly with actions, and so she had found this time in her life difficult. Exactly where she had planned to be, but somewhat rudderless,  searching for direction. The weight of her parents’ hopes for her had been getting heavier, as had their unspoken questions. She was an only child and the first to go to school. They had wanted this for her, and worked desperately to make it happen. Still, she could feel them wondering, in their quiet, concerned way, what would come of it. Honestly, she had begun coming to this coffee shop so that she didn’t have to spend as much time at home.

And so, as she had gotten used to doing, she turned the conversation to him. He looked like he was using primary sources, well-worn books and even just loose pieces of paper. She wondered if he was in grad school.  “What are you studying? Those don’t look like text books.”

He laughed and said he wondered the same thing sometimes. He said he was getting a masters in Public History and that all this was just for a tiny thing he was trying to piece together. “It’s really interesting, but holy shit. A lot of work, you know?”

She told him, honestly, that she’d never even heard of that discipline, and asked how he’d gotten interested in it. He laughed and said, “We would be here all night.” She thought about the drive home and said, “I’ve got time.”

He looked at her and exhaled a smile. “Okay, well I warned you.”

He began by talking about his earliest memories, running up and down the hills around the houses of his grandmothers, aunts and uncles with the other kids of the neighborhood. Built on the sides of incredibly steep hills, often with salvaged materials. The houses shared walls with their neighbors. The roof of one person’s home would form part of another’s floor. Many of his playmates were his cousins, but many weren’t. They played as though none of that mattered, an entire neighborhood of children running frantically through homes like Bolivar charging up the Magdalena. And on these conquests, the way his tias disciplined everyone who ran through their kitchens as though they were their own children — and the way he, in turn, was disciplined by women he’d never met — had taught him a broad definition of family.

His parents were academics, and lived in a neat apartment sequestered from its neighbors in the city, but they had both come from this neighborhood, and had wanted him to grow up the way they had, too, even if they no longer lived that way. When he was with his abuelas, he felt as though he was raised by no one person, but by a whole community. And it hadn’t really mattered to him whether the kids he ran with were his actual relatives. He called them all primos. He would spend days on end there, especially in July, after the end of the school year. And then, when he would return to the more austere environs of the apartment, his parents helped him understand that this was a unique and beautiful part of their collective culture.

Most of his classmates at the British School were city kids, who came from generational wealth and didn’t know this world, and so he had always felt his grandmothers’ neighborhood was a place of magic that only he knew about. The neighborhood was constantly multiplying. Sometimes he’d come back to find a new doorway opening into a space he had never known before. Other times he’d come back to find a whole new house perching atop an old. Everytime a new room or house sprouted, the owner would run a line to siphon electricity from the poles that stood at irregular intervals. He would lay on the roofs at night and imagine the lines forming a latticework that protected the whole neighborhood. He imagined them carrying him from place to place the way they carried electricity.

He told her how his tios told stories that grew with every telling until the lives of men who had never left the hills began to take on the epic character of the globe-trotting Francisco de Miranda. And they would talk about a hot-headed scuffle after a couple beers as though it were a clash of civilizations. Their uncles would tell the children they were descended from los llaneros and he and his cousins would run off, herding the neighborhood dogs as though they were feral cattle of the plains.

He told her how his aunties would yell after them, saying their uncles wouldn’t know a horse from a hole in the head and how they had their own, very old, form of magic. They and all of their neighbors would gather to make hallacas, a traditional food handed down from enslaved ancestors who had mixed masa with scraps from their masters’ plates into the cuisine that had sustained them in the indigo fields. There was wonder in his voice as he described entire neighborhoods of mothers coming together to create seemingly endless feasts that would spill out of their doorways until entire hillsides sprouted like cornucopias around Caracas.

Though his school took pains to teach him about his country, he had realized that the lives of people like his family were as rich as that of any liberator, but had no home in any history he had ever read. It was kinetic, and ephemeral. It lived in those rooms but wasn’t contained by it. It rushed in and out of the doorways of all those houses, that carried in the air itself, along the tangled electrical lines.

Even as a young child, he told her, he had wanted to catch those stories.

“Those neighborhoods,” She asked, “Are those favelas?”

“We call them barrios, but it’s the same thing,” he replied. “Slums.”

“I hate that word,” she said.

He smiled and looked at her. “There have always been barrios. The people are poor, but they have their own power.”

She felt like she was going to cry, listening to him. “That’s why you’re sitting here with those papers,” She said.

“There are so many histories of Bolivar in my country,” he said, “I want to write a history of the barrios.”

She told him her family didn’t have any stories like that and he said that  no one does until you make them. She said she wouldn’t even know where to start and he said, quietly, that where to start a story is wherever you feel comfortable, and a good place to go next is a place you think the person you’re telling the story to might understand.

This gave her a kind of confidence, and so she just began. “Well when you mentioned the power lines in those neighborhoods, all I could think of was the pole at the end of our driveway,” she said. “There’s one big, twisted line that runs from the transformer off the highway to the pole, and these littler wires running from there to the house and to the garage and to the barn. Then a line my dad buried running from the barn to the chicken coop.”

She talked about how quiet and wild her childhood had been, and how with all that land and so few people, her imagination had grown to fill the whole space. She told of the friends and kingdoms she would invent running between the pine woods and the pasture, then out among the cattle, all the way to the strange little aspen grove in the middle. The grove wasn’t good for grazing but her father never considered cutting it down. On one particular day she remembered hiding in the grove when her dad came looking for a young calf who had gotten separated from the herd. He trudged around for a moment, then sat on one of the big rocks that sprouted out of the ground alongside the trees and just looked up at the sky. For the rest of her childhood, whenever she passed by that rock, she sat and said little prayers for the peace of her parents.

The words came haltingly, at first, but eased as she spoke them  until they were flowing so freely she could hardly believe the simple truth of what was coming out of her mouth.

She remembered, now that she mentioned it, that the solitude of her childhood was frequently punctuated by her own family. Though it was just her and her parents on her dad’s family homestead, with her grandparents retired in a double-wide on the other end of the property, the farmhouse had raised 7 siblings and they all returned frequently with their kids and, increasingly, grandkids so that, pretty regularly, the quiet old house made its own electricity.

Her father had been the only sibling to continue the family work and most days, the stress and uncertainty of this cut deep lines into her parents’ foreheads and at the corners of their eyes and cheeks. But when the family gathered, those lines also accentuated the joy that flickered to life on their faces. She remembered, too, that when her city cousins wanted to run out into the vast wild of their family property, they all begged her to play tour guide. Through the years, the cousins would continue going out into the property, but their adventures became less wild, gradually taking on worries of their own.

She realized, as she told him these things, that the self-consciousness she felt had fallen away, as though her own face had opened up and beckoned him inside. It was as though she hadn’t been telling him a story, but walking with him through the memory itself. Realizing this broke the spell and suddenly they were back in the cafe.

She also realized, as she felt a tear building in the corner of her eye, how much she missed her kingdom. “I don’t know why talking about this makes me sad,” she said. “I think my parents want me to have an easier life than they’ve had. And maybe what I want is to find that magic again and live in it.”

She couldn’t think of anything else to say and so she stopped. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to fill the gap and, somehow, she found herself comforted by the silence. “It’s beautiful,” he said, finally. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”

All at once she became aware of herself again and, reflexively, said, “I bet my parents are wondering where I am.”

He smiled, “Yeah, my host family is making dinner.”

///

They packed in silence, but as they walked she felt herself wanting more of him. He opened the door for her and she took the opportunity to linger there, asking “So you’re not going home for break?”

“Thanksgiving isn’t really a thing in Venezuela,” he said, with that calm smile.

She laughed at herself, “Oh right. Obviously. Christmas then?”

His smile broadened. “They’re coming up here, actually. For like a month.”

“Oh that’s great.” She said, and then without really thinking, added, “I’d love to meet them.”

A cold wind hit the doorway at a moment that and her feelings of self-conscious returned, as if carried in on it. She moved through the doorway and fought the urge to break into a run.

When his words came — “Maybe we could show them your family’s farm” — they felt as though they weren’t coming from behind her, but from inside her own head.

“I’d like that” she replied, or maybe just thought. Either way, she was sure he had heard.