Afterlife - Julia Alvarez Page 0,30

minute they touched ground in the DR, a more self-assured self took over. But in English, even after years of education and employment, the worm of self-doubt still eats away at the core of her certainties.

The trailer door finally opens a crack. Déjala entrar, Mario calls to José. Soon el patrón will be back from his errand, and he has already told them in a loud voice, as if the issue is volume not language: NO VISITORS. Visitors spell trouble. Roger’s illegal aliens are his own dirty little secret. He doesn’t relish breaking the law but sometimes even law-abiding citizens have to defy the authorities in order to survive. Desperate situations call for desperate moves. Not so different, after all, from the undocumented he employs. Antonia was at that debate on campus a few months ago, farmers and their workers, talking about the similar predicaments they were in.

Inside the trailer, Antonia tries to persuade Mario. Estela’s just a girl. She’s got nowhere to go. And no, I can’t keep her with me, she adds. You’re going to have to figure something out.

Mario studies the scuffed linoleum floor as if it were a road map that might show him a way out of his dilemma. Antonia knows he’s in the unenviable position of not wanting to contradict la do?ita: she could turn him in; she could complain to el patrón. But he can’t get past his revulsion at taking up with a girl who willingly gave herself to another man. He has his own honor as a man to defend, he says.

Honor, schmonor. Antonia waves the word away. What about showing a little compassion? Estela made a stupid choice, but it was only because she was lonely. She thought she had lost you. She loves you. It’s you she wants to be with.

Then she shouldn’t have done what she did. He had to make many sacrifices himself. It took him a while to cross over, to pay back the money he’d borrowed to pay the coyotes so he had something to send home. Even then, he had been against her making the journey north, precisely because he did not want her exposed to any harm. But it turns out, she had already willfully thrown away the flower of her girlhood.

Antonia is surprised by the fanciful phrase coming from the mouth of this impoverished and uneducated man. As if poetry can’t survive in such impoverished conditions. In fact, poetry (and honor) might be all you do have. Sometimes she catches a glimpse of her faulty default self, and she doesn’t like what she sees. We all make mistakes, she reminds Mario more gently. Look at Jesus, didn’t he teach us to forgive? Perdónanos nuestras deudas, así como nosotros perdonamos a nuestros deudores, she intones. Forgive us our trespasses. How readily she recalls the words of her childhood prayers. Bedrock stuff she’ll never get rid of. Madre Teresa, after all.

But Mario’s bedrock machismo has an equally strong hold. He shakes his head in quick jabs. He will have nothing to do with esa puta. Take her to the migra and they will send her back home, where she belongs.

Don’t call her that! Antonia feels her own anger rising. She’s not a puta. She’s . . . una jovencita, loca enamorada . . . Antonia struggles for the correct term, convinced if she lands on the right phrasing, it will be the abracadabra that unlocks the young man’s heart. But she’s fallen out of practice of arguing her case in Spanish now that Mami and Papi are gone.

Call her what you want, Mario says, a snarky insolence in his voice Antonia has never heard before. It grants her a rare glimpse of who the young man might be in a world where he could be the macho, wielding power. But to me she is no better than a prostitute.

José has been standing by, witnessing the escalating scene. He comes forward now. El patrón is due back any moment. If la do?ita will allow him, he, José, will talk to Mario, convince him of the honorable thing to do even if the girl has done a dishonorable thing. ?Hasta ma?ana?

Antonia is relieved to defer the confrontation till tomorrow. She needs to run into town, get a few groceries, connect with her sisters over what has or hasn’t transpired with Izzy. Has Investigator Kempowski come up with anything? Has Mona landed in Boston? Tilly set out from home? She also needs to make those calls to