Where There Was Fire

by John Manuel Arias

Genres: Hispanic & Latino; Sagas

Synopsis

A lush and lyrical debut novel about a Costa Rican family wrestling with a deadly secret, from rising literary star John Manuel Arias

Costa Rica, 1968. When a lethal fire erupts at the American Fruit Company’s most lucrative banana plantation burning all evidence of a massive cover-up, the future of Teresa Cepeda Valverde’s family is changed forever.

Now, twenty-seven years later, Teresa and her daughter Lyra are still picking up the pieces. Lyra wants nothing to do with Teresa, but is desperate to find out what happened to her family that fateful night. Teresa, haunted by a missing husband and the bitter ghost of her mother, Amarga, is unable to reconcile the past. What unfolds is a story of a mother and daughter trying to forgive what they do not yet understand, and the mystery at the heart of one family’s rupture, steeped in machismo, jealousy, labor uprisings, and the havoc wreaked by banana plantations in Central America.

Brimming with ancestral spirits, omens, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature, John Manuel Arias weaves a brilliant tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption in Where There was Fire.

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.

Release date: August 29, 2023

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

0Teresa, Barrio Ávila, 1968

Some still talk about how hot that night was. Old women whisper it over coffee, their just-as-old husbands debating over checkers outside. Even a tow truck driver named Luis, born that night, has been told about the malignancy of the heat. Its teeth. He says if his mother hadn’t known any better, she would have sworn she’d just given birth to the Antichrist.

That Friday was good until it wasn’t. Crucifixion reenactors drank clandestinely in bars, pyretic palmers unlocked their knees to scuttle home. Time wasn’t tallied, because the priests who normally manned the belfries lay naked inside the darkness of their churches, praying for the heat to pass. No singing bells to interrupt the hours. At dusk, it felt as if a second sun had risen—a sugar-white impostor with no warmth to its light. The full moon climbed center-sky, its body no longer a mirror but a magnifying glass focusing its beams on San José’s valley. It cast long shadows, boiled away stagnant pools of water. And when its glow leaked through the stained glass of the dark churches, the sweating priests, draped like towels over pews, couldn’t ignore the inkling that somehow the burning they felt was closer to that of the gnawing sensation of ice.

It all began on a banana plantation owned by the American Fruit Company. From its cantina emerged a man as drunk as the father he was named after. He stumbled out into a mud-dirt road and swayed in the imaginary breeze only drunken men feel. He gripped something invisible—a bottle … a machete?—and lumbered along La Guaria Railroad. The rails glittered in the moonlight, hypnotizing him. Over his slurred thoughts, a cool, rum-sweet voice persuaded him along. Past wilting hibiscus bushes. Past muggers, and mongrels, and Mothers Superior. Past shrieking ghosts tied tightly to the track like damsels in distress. This voice beckoned the man back to his home—a fragile little affluent neighborhood by the name of Barrio Ávila. There, his family and neighbors were still stuck in dreams, oblivious to his pilgrimage.

* * *

THE MOON WAS highest in the sky when Teresa startled from sleep, her face wet. Outside, Barrio Ávila slept peacefully. La Guaria Railroad sprawled out like a fat, tired snake, dividing Teresa’s lonely house from the rest. The newly installed streetlamps stood sentinel, their heads swarmed by lazy gnats and tiny things that touched the lights and fell to the track below. Trees gossiped in the hush. Two hounds lapped up each other’s urine. A cane toad’s croaking haunted streets and shadowed corners.

Teresa rubbed her eyes of sleep and picked her ears of echoes. The humidity trapped in the bedroom lay atop her, thick as caramel. In a tender reflex, she felt gently for her grandmother’s arm, but the sheets beside her were dry and undisturbed. A reflex she couldn’t shake, even though it had been many years since her grandmother died.

Saints are just devils who cut off their tails, her grandmother’s voice said in the darkness. She’d been a famous soothsayer and sage, an encyclopedia of proverbs and sayings. Again, the echo of those saints and devils. It had been her grandmother’s greatest wisdom; she spoke of those who sanctified themselves by ridding their lives of vices and wickedness. But eventually she decided on a plain, simple addendum to her own adage: Men are the devils, and women the saints. And every woman is born with a sharp machete inside her heart. She must learn to wield it, to cut off men’s tails.

Women far and wide subscribed to her grandmother’s gospel, and she even advised Teresa to keep the tail locked away from the things she loved. If you were to open my drawer, the tails would scramble and jump out like vipers, her grandmother confessed. They would slither away and try to reattach themselves.

Teresa looked to her rattling nightstand, its varnished wood glimmering in the moonlight. There, she had locked away the only tail she’d ever collected: her husband’s, José María’s.

A man’s voice broke through her radio’s static.

“It’s almost midnight, folks, and it’s a scorcher,” crooned the announcer. “This next song is for all the lovers out there.”

“Historia de un Amor” played in a sensual, somber cloud. It was a familiar song for those who couldn’t sleep. Eydie Gormé’s seductive soprano filled the bedroom. A trio of guitars accompanied the velour of her voice. A damp nightclub’s smoke blew out from the speaker and danced a lazy bolero with the humidity.

“Tonight, the moon turns red as a heart,” said the radio announcer before signing off. “So hold that lover close.”

Another of her grandmother’s sayings bubbled up in Teresa’s memory. Beware of rainless nights. Never let your husband stand directly beneath a blood moon. His body will beckon for his tail, and it will find him with the help of the light.

Her nightstand quieted, and Teresa felt the other side of the bed again—not for the memory of her grandmother this time but for José María. He should have been home hours ago to escort her to the theater. They’d been invited by Cristina, Teresa’s best friend, who lived across the street. But José María never showed up, so Teresa had gone to tonight’s play without him.

Teresa’s head pulsed, and she couldn’t quite remember how she’d gotten to bed. She sat up, filing through the day’s memories.

She’d woken up at five in the morning to make coffee. José María was already awake, sitting sullenly at the kitchen table. It was the largest banana harvest of the year, so Teresa assumed he was mentally preparing for the day, and despite the rest of the country observing Holy Week, the American Fruit Company forced every worker to complete twelve-hour shifts. To fill the tense silence, Teresa reminded José María of Cristina’s invitation to see a production of Bodas de Sangre, a classic García Lorca play. Teresa knew he’d be exhausted from hacking millions of bushels, but she thought it would be a treat: to breathe easily in the new air-conditioning of the National Theater, to think of something other than the fruit.

“The reviews are spectacular,” she said in response to his hms and mhms, but she knew she wouldn’t get anywhere. José María had told Teresa many times he found Cristina pretentious, a classist who looked at him with the same eyes as her mother, Amarga; but like a good fake socialite, Cristina smiled instead of sneered. He said Cristina merely put up with him because of Teresa’s friendship. “To women like Cristina and your mother,” he said, “I’m just a peasant with bananas for fingers.”

José María left without finishing his coffee. Went off to the harvest on an empty stomach, his gleaming machete in hand. Teresa had ironed his suit anyway and set it out on their bed.

She looked to her feet, where it still lay, crumpled from tonight’s uneasy sleep.

Teresa’s two daughters, Lyra and Carmen, had skipped into the kitchen after their father left. Teresa fed them gallo pinto and a fried egg each. Coffees with milk, a pineapple cut into yellow suns. Then Teresa walked them to the house of a classmate, whose mother was to take them on a trip to the zoo. “The monkeys are the best part,” Teresa had said before kissing Lyra and Carmen on the lips, just as her grandmother used to do, and shooing them off to their friend.

At midday, Teresa’s mother, Amarga, left the refuge of the guesthouse and came over for lunch. Passing through the washroom between the yard and the kitchen, she grimaced and put her nose to José María’s drying work clothes. “They still stink,” she said, scrutinizing the grainy white bar of soap Teresa had used to scrub them. “With chemicals like that, you have to use baking soda.”

While Teresa served stew, Amarga flipped through the newspaper’s limp pages. “They killed El Martin Luther King last week,” she began. “Right on his hotel balcony. Imagine that, stretching in the sun and they shoot you dead, right there.” Teresa nodded, lighting the first in a long chain of cigarettes, eyeing grains of rice and white dribble congealing in the corner of her mother’s mouth. “And they’re burning every city to the ground,” Amarga continued. “On every street, every other negro lit a match, and they are watching it all burn. Good for them.”

Teresa fanned the smoke from her surprised face.

“Let Gringolandia burn,” Amarga said, and went right back to a fibrous short rib.

At five in the evening, Teresa dressed herself. She perfumed her hair, sneaked a double shot of guaro, and sat like an ember on her bed, waiting until Cristina knocked on her door at six.

After that, nothing. A blank as large as the room. And all Teresa knew was that right now she was upright on her bed at almost midnight and the landscape was so bright that she wondered if she’d overslept until noon.

The fact that José María still wasn’t home worried her. Sure, he liked to drink, but an all-night bender was rare. In fact, he had only ever stayed out till morning a handful of times during their eleven years of marriage, returning home at dawn, stumbling into the walls and obstacles that drunken men make of inanimate objects. Or crawling into bed, with his laughter and annoying jokes beneath the sheets. Once, after a whole bottle, his voice took on a childish tone and he cried in Teresa’s lap. And after the most recent bender, he yammered in his sleep about boars. But always, no matter the jubilance of his inebriation or how harmless he seemed, there lurked something gnashing: the beast that all men are capable of unchaining, alcohol often the key to the lock. With the echo of her grandmother’s warnings, Teresa now plucked the worst outcomes from her imagination. Maybe José María had fallen into a ditch and broken his arm. Or maybe another woman had seduced him at a bar. Or, worse but most improbable of all, maybe La Cegua had found him alone on a road and taken his life with her toothy smile.

Teresa couldn’t control José María’s absence, but she could find a way to fill the gap in her memory. Cristina might know. Teresa walked to the bedroom window. Barrio Ávila was growing eerily dark. A shadow devoured the moon mid-sky. Mansion roofs were painted black, then copper. Only Cristina’s gaudy pink abode resisted the night, shining like a lighthouse, its top floor illuminated. It was where her husband, Desiderio, kept his studio, where he sharpened tools and chipped at marble. Where he carved statues as large as men. If Desiderio was awake, he could explain to Teresa what had happened. He could ease the tension in her shoulders.

The entire house yawned as Teresa opened the bedroom door. She tiptoed down the hallway that expanded like the esophagus of a leviathan. At the other end of the house, a small octagonal window peered out to the back of the property, where the guesthouse moped like an afterthought. It was where Amarga slept uneasily, because she hadn’t slept soundly since the year Teresa’s father went missing. He’d disappeared without a trace, and now Teresa worried the same of José María.

Teresa slipped into the bathroom and out of her dress. Her hair curled tight in the humidity. Coarse, shiny black waves streaked with silver. Sterling sea snakes, jellyfish tentacles. Siren songs. The sudden fluorescent light faded her dark brown skin like winter. She ran her fingers over her cheekbones, high and soft on her face, wiped her full lips of gloss, and removed her dainty gold hoops. Cristina often said Teresa was breathtaking enough to star in movies. That is, if movie starlets—Mexican or gringa—were allowed to look like her.

Teresa checked her wristwatch again. She was nervous about knocking on Cristina’s door at this hour. She didn’t want to be a disturbance, especially with something so trivial as a husband yet to come home. But Teresa knew her anxiety was really because of Desiderio. Because of the way he had begun looking at her. She didn’t want to admit it, but these past few months she’d been aware of Desiderio’s glances. The salacious, arrogant eyes he made at her in front of his own wife. It made Teresa uncomfortable, but what made it worse was that Cristina never seemed to notice, while José María noticed immediately.