What You Taste in the Rain: Santigo’s Story

Written by Nicole Arthur

You think of Santigo when you stand in the rain. You think of his innocent, chipped-tooth smile, his black tar skin, the way the gold peeked out from his mud-brown irises. You think of him barefoot. Feet; dusty, rough and calloused—toes curled in, bracing themselves for each battered rock. He is not running when you think of him. He is staring. He wears a holey, orange Hawaiian button-down shirt tucked deep into powder blue gym shorts, all too big for his bone thin frame. He is a bald child, an old-man-child, and you feel his years in the way he grabs your hand and forces it around a swollen stalk of sugar cane. He makes your head feel light and your chest feel heavy—you flinch when you watch him tear his stalk into strips with his dagger teeth. Your tongue swells when he sucks and slurps up the lukewarm juices from the yellow fibers within—hungrily, feverishly, like he knows it by name. You ask him his name.

¿Como te llamas? You ask and a slow smile ripples through his lips. ¿Como te llamas? you ask and he stares. A smaller child waddles by you with a stick and a rag. You snap at him and point to the child before you. ¿Como se llama? You ask him and without looking up, he raps the dead stick against his hand and keeps walking. Sawn-tee-goh, he says, cuddling each syllable in-between his cheeks, Santigo.

You hold a piece of hard candy in one hand and a battered jump rope in the other. You extend them both. Quieres? His eyes drift skeptically over at your hands and then down at his feet. He grinds his heels deep into the earth but he does not move. You sit down in the dirt and motion for him to join you. He does and you smile because he made something nice move inside you. You set the candy and the jump rope in front of you and stare ahead. You feel his gold eyes scanning your body—your pink spotted skin, your meaty flesh. You are all of a sudden very aware of your size. Your legs are trees and your stomach holds the sun and you wrap your arms around yourself and try to look weak. You glance over and he is carving a deep line in the dirt with what remains of the stalk of sugar cane. You stare now at his limbs, they are close enough in diameter to the sugar cane that you feel scared and you wonder if you held him, how he would keep from breaking. Love them, your trip leader says, they just wanna be loved.

You look around and scan the village. Big white shapes move clumsily around the Haitian women and children. Some throw balls awkwardly through the air, wordlessly. Some carry small writhing black bodies on their backs. The children grab their silk fine hair and the white hands grab their black sandpaper feet and the children yell, Caballo! Caballo! And the white mouths cackle and neigh, pretending to buck them off, pretending to have their kind of strength. They run around with cameras and bubbles and sweat pools in the small of their backs and seeps through their cotton shirts. Many carry Bibles. The Dominican sun digs into their pores.

When the guide had yelled over the lip of the cattle truck and said you were almost there, you stood with the others with raised eyebrows and long necks trying to see up and over and through the dense fields of sugar cane. Just when you were convinced that they went on forever, the cane melted away and revealed a large round clearing. Rusting squares of tin and scrap metal fused together like Frankenstein, form sloppy lean-tos and tarp-roofed cubicles. The fifteen or so homes made the shape of a cross in the huge dirt clearing. From the road, you would have never even known it existed—this small sad sugar cane village—you would have only known the growing greens and yellows, the powder blue sky.

A man stands by a crooked shanty pointing at the pages of a book as a dark leathery face peeks over his shoulder, like a child sneaking downstairs after bedtime. He draws the face into the pages. He lets the pages do the work and he looks up at the sky. He sends his hands in abrupt and meaningful arcs through the air and nods forward emphatically with every word. The face nods in time with him now and you feel something for him.

A group of smaller children gather underneath the shade of a large tree. A man with lighter brown skin stands above them gesturing wildly, flailing ripe limbs through the sugary air, to the rhythm of the music. Dios es bueno, el me levantó. They clap cracked hands and bounce their bare butts against the bark of the tree. Dios es bueno, mi vida cambió. A young girl, no older than fourteen, stands back from the rest near a wooden post. She cradles a small living thing—too small—near her chest and even she is thumping her big toe to the beat of the music. She does not smile. You realize now that the small thing is feeding on her. She grimaces and shakes and adjusts the sagging breast and you swear you can hear the sucking, the wheezing—the soft coo of her words, Aki, mi bebe, aki.

You hadn’t realized Santigo had been humming along to the man’s song until he stopped. You become very aware of him now, feeling his shadow rest against your shoulder. You use your pointer finger to push the piece of candy across the line. He stares at it. Then you. Then it. Then you. And he keeps his eyes on you as he picks it up slowly and sends it to his yawning mouth. The wrapper, you say weakly and as you say it he is pushing the plastic wrapping out of his mouth and catching it in between his teeth. He spits it out and you watch it float gently down to the folds of his shirt. You look up and he is smiling with his chin up.

For the next few minutes you make music in your head to the sound of him sucking. You even pull out the stalk of sugar cane from your pocket and think about drumming it against the earth to the beat. You decide this might only be okay for him to do and you don’t want to be not okay and so you rub it back and forth between your dry palms.

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After a while you dig through your pack and find a fake rubber baseball. You bring the ball to eyelevel and widen your lids slightly. ¿Quieres? He just stares blankly so you stand up and make for another kid. Probably one that has been walking around you picking small green kernels up from the ground and collecting them in an empty and battered coke bottle. You catch his eye and hold up the ball, stealing glances at Santigo over your shoulder. ¿Quieres jugar? you ask the other child boldly. He shakes his head aggressively and gallops backwards, smacking his hands together and then pushing his palms towards the air. He licks his lips. You toss it underhand and as soon as you release it, the boy balls his hands into fists and steps back and to the side into a baseball stance that takes your breath and pauses time and then you are watching that fake rubber ball soar through the air like a small living thing and everything gets blurry as you watch the boy run a large square around you. You throw your hands up excitedly and you hear yourself, sounding not quite like yourself, saying Bien! Muy bien! The kid jumps up and down smiling and laughing. He lets his tongue fall carelessly out of his mouth.

You don’t notice Santigo approaching until you see his shadow in the dirt. You turn and he darts away into the sugar cane. The other child comes near to your leg—so near his face is almost brushing your hand, and together you watch Santigo climb a bent tree in the distance. He squirms out onto a thick limb and you are surprised because you realize you are holding your breath. He grips a straight branch and rips it from its home. You blink and he is back on the ground. He is running towards you with the branch poised like a javelin or a sword and his feet are fast and they blur together and multiply and there might be four of them now and he is charging. You are scared. You dig your heels into the ground and he pulls up just before he reaches your bulging stomach. He pats it and looks up at you with desperate eyes. He cradles the branch into his chest and nods. The other child jumps once and nods. And you nod too, though you aren’t sure why and he backs up and up and up until he could almost be a man in the distance.

Listo? You yell through the empty space. He brings the stick up behind his right shoulder and plants his feet on a diagonal and you think you’d might like to stay there with him. You throw the ball, overhand this time, and the little boy makes a whistling sound with his tongue that tells you you’ve done alright, and the boy is laughing now but his whistle lasts. It defies the air and the law and it resonates through every dark and light space and thing in the entire clearing. Faces turn. Spaces turn. And everybody is waiting for Santigo’s moment. It comes and he sends it out to the corners of the earth—you don’t see it go; rather, you see that it is gone and you hear the rumbling of voices and a murmured song and you feel that something has left. Other boys have gathered around now and they are waving wildly at Santigo to run. Rápido! Rápido! Santigo stands and gazes around at the excited faces, his chest expands and contracts grandly. His eyes flash up for the briefest of seconds then he throws the branch to the sky, crouches back on his hinds, and springs forward frantically into a rough somersault. The crowd sighs, some laugh, and Santigo gets up and runs away into the cane again.

You hand the ball to the other boy and he lets your skin linger on his fingertips. You want to give him something too and so you dig out the rest of your candy and place it in handfuls in front of him. He might want you to stay but he understands what you have to do so he squats down near the pile and digs out his plastic coke bottle again and pretends to be satisfied.

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As you push through the stiff green stalks, you hear humming. When you see him, he is standing. He is waiting. He walks towards you and grabs your hand. Something electric pulses through his skin and you flinch. He holds tight, clasping your middle and pointer finger tight between the warmth of his fists. You try to arc your pinky down and around so that it is touching his hand also. It hurts but you make it work. You duck and writhe through the sugar, trying to keep up with his wise, beaten feet. You stumble and struggle but Santigo is patient and he understands the way you move and he knows that it is not your fault. He lets go and you are at a smaller clearing.

The stalks here are black and burnt down to the roots. They burn it so it grows, the guide yelled through the rushing wind as you passed by the stretches of black and collapsed cane. When the time is right, they just burn it all down. It makes it grow, he says excitedly, running a well-manicured hand through is bronze mane. The charred bits of cane and ash blow off in the wind and dance through the air as you breathe it in. You let the black flakes fall and melt on a warm tongue. Santigo watches. He rolls up his bright Hawaiian sleeve—slowly, carefully, and exposes a warped arm. The skin on it is crisp but oily, pink but brown. It is glassy but rough and bulbous—mutated, swollen flesh. He holds it out and looks up at you expectantly.

He wants something from you and you might know what and your skull contracts just a little bit tighter around your brain and a sharp pang echoes through your chest. You rest your body on knees now and trace the wrinkles and lines and bumps of his scars with a shaky finger. He keeps his eyes on your face and you are embarrassed. Something wet rolls down your cheek and then it is raining. He rolls down his sleeve hurriedly and gently strokes the surface of your arm. The rain meets his finger and draws translucent streaks over your flesh. You flex your muscle and soften it and you watch the rain roll clean stripes of pure brown against his ashy skin. You don’t know why but you mark a cross in the wet on his forehead and he smiles. Something like a chill ripples over you and he notices.

He claps the outsides of your thighs and motions for you to rise. You feel no blood in your veins, no beat, and you slump over helplessly. The rain falls critically around you and you hear a soft melody sifting through his lips. Dios es bueno, el me levanto. Dios es bueno… and when you look up he is standing again, pounding rough feet into the mushy earth and smacking wet hands against his knobby knees. He is not smiling. But he is trying and you are thankful. You mimic his moves and try to welcome the rain but something dark is living in your throat now; it chokes you. The drops fall from above and seep from lidded eyes and you would give anything for it to keep on raining. He rips open a piece of sugar cane and together you dig into them with fighting teeth. You let the rain mix into the yellow gold crevices. You make sugar soup and slurp it up. You pretend to be satisfied.

And when the swollen rain is slapping hard against your soft soggy skin and air is rushing through air like two trains colliding, you think of him. Santigo.

And you hear him whisper thick syllabus through the roaring rain—something like a history. My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?