MARTINEZ: The first day we get to Los Laureles we run into this woman. She’s very young, no older than twenty. Barefoot, wearing a night gown—all frayed, covered in mud. Two long disheveled braids curl down her back, very frizzy like the tail of a frightened cat. She’s tiny. Most women around these parts are, aren’t they? Smallest women I’ve ever seen. The woman looks completely dehydrated, bone-dry. She’s sitting cross-legged on a pile of debris, holding a baby wrapped in a green checkered piece of fabric, like a tablecloth. The bundle in her arms is long and thin. The woman’s humming some lullaby, but I’m not even sure if she’s humming it in Spanish or some other language I don’t recognize. She’s just one of many, too many to count. All around us survivors wander in all directions, aimlessly, as if they’ve gone blind. Some are calling out names of relatives, others are pulling at mounds of rubble, turning over spare legs of chairs and tables, studying cracked picture frames yanked out of the mud, searching for their belongings without realizing it’s all junk now, there’s nothing salvageable there. We’re in a sea of debris—whatever they’re looking for is gone. I look at them, these small human beings I’m supposed to rescue, to drive away somewhere safer, wondering if they’re real; if they’re actually there or I’m making them up; if they’ll vanish into one Humvee and I’ll get to the shelter in mine and find their cargo hold empty. And then this idea that they’re just steam emanating from the earth gets stuck in my head, Daniel. The woman is still humming the same tune when I snap out of it and approach her. I’m going to introduce myself, explain what we’re doing there, but she hushes me, puts a finger on her lips to quiet me as soon as she hears my voice. I wait until she finishes the lullaby, and then I say they need to come with me, she and her baby. She labors to her feet without objection and lets me lead them to the tents the Red Cross has set up at the far end of the valley, right where the rubble ends. She’s very weak, every step seems to be a monumental effort. I offer to carry the baby, but she refuses, sharply. I get the feeling she might bite me if I come near her child. When we finally get to the Red Cross tent, nurses and paramedics are triaging survivors, assessing if they’ll need to be flown to Tapachula or sent to the local emergency post—or if they’re healthy enough to come to the shelter with us. One of the nurses wants to take the baby, make sure it’s all right, but the woman refuses at first. She glares at the nurse, says something in a language neither the nurse nor I can speak. She’ll only let go of the baby when the nurse promises she’ll bring it back in no time. It’ll be only a minute, the nurse says, and the mother finally agrees with a nod. But I see something’s off when the nurse takes the baby and walks away into a tent next door. I can see it on her face. Once I make sure the woman’s been taken care of, I go into the other tent, where the nurse went. The baby’s lying naked on a table, his whole body marbled with mud, the checkered tablecloth that covered him minutes ago is gone. I ask the nurse if the baby’s okay and she says, I’m sorry, something must have happened during the flood. She shows me the bruises around the baby’s neck. Looks like he’s been dead for hours, the nurse says. I ask her how old she thinks the baby was, and she says, Around six months.
PROUST: Oh, God—
MARTINEZ: You should have heard the nurse’s voice when she said it, Daniel—the misery, the helplessness. You might think you get used to this, seeing the dead. But when they’re so small—
[SILENCE]
MARTINEZ: The next day, we’re back at Los Laureles, even though by then we know our chances of finding survivors there are slim at best. The day before, we only left when we couldn’t find anybody else. We get there around 0800. The mountain fog hasn’t dissipated yet, and I’m worried another storm’s coming. Only after a few days living here do you realize the fucking fog never goes away. It’s like the whole mountain is haunted. Anyway, it’s past 1200; we’ve been out searching for hours and all we’ve found so far is lost arms, severed legs, hands sticking out of the mud like offshoots of fallen trees. I can hear the mud and the fog hiss, like a gas leak under my feet, the ground humming. At the far end of the valley, I spot this black-and-white dot in the distance, a miniscule spectral presence. I rush in its direction, praying for it to be one of them. One survivor would be enough to think straight again. But it’s her. The tiny woman we rescued the day before. She’s back at Los Laureles. What she’s doing there, how she got there—I don’t know. The smell of decay is rising from the ground, so pungent it sticks to your palate—that smell you were talking about, Daniel. It hasn’t gone away yet—I can taste it in my mouth even as we speak. I tell the tiny woman she should be at the shelter. It’s not safe to be out there anymore, but she says she’s looking for her son.
PROUST: How many children did she have?
MARTINEZ: That’s what I ask her. But she says, One, her son.
[SILENCE]
MARTINEZ: I ask how old is this son she’s looking for. He’s just a baby, she says. I can’t find him. He was with me yesterday. I woke up this morning at the shelter, and he wasn’t by my side. I haven’t fed him since last night. I need to find him; he must be hungry. She asks, Would you help me find him?
[SILENCE]
PROUST: What did you do, sir?
MARTINEZ: I don’t know, Daniel. I can’t remember what happened next. I woke up the next morning here, in the shelter. No one at the military post was able to tell me what had happened the day before, why or how I ended up here. In the evening, a nurse from the Red Cross stopped by and asked how I was feeling. I said I had just a little bit of a headache. My arms and my hands were sore. I had bruises and cuts around my fingers, and some of my fingernails were broken off, crusts of mud and dried blood underneath them. Other than that, I felt fine. She said she was glad to hear that. I asked if she knew what had happened at Los Laureles. I couldn’t remember anything about the night before. She said I got lost. The convoy was ready to leave at the end of the day, but they didn’t know where I was, so they set out to look for me. She said they found me up in the hills, away from the search zone, digging a hole in the ground, with my hands. They asked what I was doing. She said I told them I was helping the woman look for her son. What woman, they asked. The tiny woman we rescued yesterday, I said, the one with the dead baby. I told them she’d come back from the shelter to Los Laureles to look for her son and I needed to help her find him. They didn’t know what to say, the nurse said, then one of the paramedics said they’d already found the baby—he was here at the shelter—and asked me to come with them. The nurse said I fell asleep in the Humvee on the way back to the shelter; they couldn’t wake me up when we got here. Four soldiers had to carry me inside. After I talked to the nurse, General Torres stopped by and told me it was better if I stayed in the shelter for now, taking care of the people here.
[SILENCE]
PROUST: I’m sure folks appreciate what you’re doing for them, sir.
MARTINEZ: The lives they had, Daniel, before the floods—they’re all gone. Nothing I can do will change that.
[SILENCE]
PROUST: What happened to the woman? The tiny woman and her baby.
MARTINEZ: I never saw her again. I guess she moved on. I hope she has relatives and she’s staying with them.
[SILENCE]
PROUST: I was wondering if I could spend the night, sir.
MARTINEZ: You don’t have a place to stay?
PROUST: I do. I rented a room in the back of a grocery store down the street. I just wanted to see what it’s like here at night, how folks manage. I won’t bother anybody, I promise. I just want to watch, to hear. Get a sense of the place.
MARTINEZ: You must enjoy doing this somehow, don’t you?
PROUST: It’s part of my job, sir.
[SILENCE]
MARTINEZ: Things get a bit restless around here once everybody’s in bed. People have nothing to do but think. The children are fast asleep, but the parents—it’s different. They start remembering. They have all the time in the world to take inventory of everything they’ve lost. They turn and tumble in their cots. But not their whole body, Daniel, just the upper layer that covers their skin—it’s like a plastic wrap that peels away from them in their sleep. Some of them rise, walk up to the windows and start howling at the stars in the sky. Others approach people they haven’t met before and grope them, right there, next to their wives; it gets loud but no one wakes up. Some of the elderly slap their own grandchildren, they yell at them in languages I don’t understand, words that sound like reproach, but the children won’t wake up either, they keep sleeping, their limbs limp. I check on them, casually, the next morning to see if the kids have marks on their cheeks, but they don’t. I see their grandparents cooing to them, sharing their food with them as if they didn’t mind going without eating as long as they can feed the little ones. Other people, at night, their auras—they turn runny, like egg yolks. They wander around the shelter, counting the minutes and the hours out loud until dawn, then they go back to their cots and I can see that plastic wrap layer cover their bodies back over again, and it’s only then that some of the children, those orphaned by the floods, wake up with a start, as if from a nightmare, and begin to sob, begging for their parents. Do you know what I’m saying, Daniel?
PROUST: I’ve never seen what you’re describing, sir.
MARTINEZ: It’s hard to understand, to believe it even, if you haven’t seen it with your own eyes.
PROUST: That’s why I’d like to spend the night.
MARTINEZ: I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Daniel, but I think you should leave now.
PROUST: I’ll be so quiet you won’t even notice me. Please.
MARTINEZ: I know there are things you must record, for your newspaper, the real numbers so others are informed. That’s your job, but how would you like it if someone printed the visions that haunt your sleep, published them for all to see? How would that make you feel, Daniel?
