Page 1 of Girl in the Water
PART I
Chapter One
Daniela
A dozenjacundásflopped in a palm frond basket next to the missionary, the small fish unappreciative of their role in the lesson on how Jesus called his disciples to be fishers of men. The basket rattled as the fish fought to return to the river—a hopeless dream. They would be sent to the smoking racks right after the lecture.
The schoolhouse sat on stilts, at least a hundred yards from the Içana, a small tributary of the great Rio Negro, deep in the Amazon rain forest. During the rainy season the river could swell a kilometer wide. The dark water stretched nearly as far now, after months of rain that never let up more than a few hours. Everyone went about in boats. They hadn’t seen the ground in weeks.
The sound of water lapping at the stilts under the schoolhouse was as familiar to the children as their mothers’ whisperings. They kept their eyes on the missionary up front who wore long black pants and a short-sleeved black shirt, and never anything else. He was twice as wide as the average villager, and nearly twice as tall. Among the brightly dressed children of the Amazonian jungle, he looked like a great vulture.
“When God brought the first Jesuits here, they carried the light of our Lord to the savages at a great cost,” he intoned at the head of the one-room schoolhouse that had no walls, just a palm-thatch roof for protection from the worst of the rainy season. “Many of them were martyred. Thus have they earned their eternal place in heaven.”
Daniela, in the first row, closed her eyes and pictured the village market and how she would be able to pick anything she wanted—not even just one thing, but one foreach hand. She could not imagine anything more heavenly.
She liked when the missionary talked about heaven, but mostly, he talked about punishment, and how the wages of sin were death.
Someday, when Daniela became a teacher, she would only talk about heaven. She was not going to forever threaten the children with hell. She was going to be as respected as the missionary, but much kinder. The children wouldn’t just sit around scared. She would let them smile and sing and even play.
She’d spent the past month working up the nerve to tell her mother about her teaching dreams.Today. After school.She would do it.
As the rain pattered on the roof, Senhor Wintermann sent his heavy gaze around. “Now who can tell me what it means to bemartyred?”
Most of the children tucked their heads into their shoulders like turtles on the riverbank. They tried not to make eye contact.
Daniela’s hand shot in the air, but when the missionary called on her, instead of the response she knew very well, something else burst out. “Grandmother Pula said that her grandmother told her that when a priest led the first Portuguese soldiers into the forest, they killed half the Baniwa and carried off the other half to be slaves.”
Warm rain dripped from the sky, and if the humidity became any thicker, it could be woven into a floor mat. Yet a cold wind seemed to blow from the missionary’s flaring nostrils.
He reached into the basket next to him, grabbed on to the largest jacundáwithout looking, and—slap!—smacked Daniela across the face so hard, her ears rang.
He held on to the stunned fish as he bent forward, until the sharpness of his spearing eyes and the dark caves of his nostrils were all Daniela could see. “Does your cheek burn?”
“Sim, senhor.” She tucked in her head like the others, wishing she had a turtle shell to hide her.
The missionary bared his precisely straight teeth. “Now imagine a burning a thousand times worse, the fires of hell, melting your heathen flesh off your bones.” He tilted another few centimeters closer, until the air soured with his breath. Then he added in a grave tone, “And no water.”
Daniela could not imagine no water. The idea squeezed her chest like an anaconda’s embrace. She’d grown up by a river, in the middle of the rain forest. Water was like air, all around, all the time.
She didn’t say another word for the rest of the lesson.
The missionary kept his heavy gaze on her anyway.
Daniela loved school learning, but she suspected she would love it more without the missionary.
Someday, she was going to travel far away, become a teacher, then return to her village. She would teach the Bible, but she would also teach the jungle. She loved going into the jungle with her mother, Ana, and learning about the plants and the animals.
She daydreamed a little about that, until the missionary said at long last, “Class dismissed. Go with God’s blessing.” And as the two dozen children clambered into their boats and canoes, he called after them, “And don’t forget, if you take off your clothes, God will strike you dead.”
He forever fought to keep everyone covered, especially during the rainy season. Wet clothes chafed the skin, so most of the children preferred to go around naked in the rain. A habit of the devil.
Daniela paddled her small dugout canoe home, dropping off two younger children on the way. The hut she shared with her mother stood on tall stilts at the edge of the jungle—the last hut before the path disappeared in the thick of the rain forest—but now the water nearly reached the threshold. If the Içana rose any higher, they’d have to hang their belongings in bags from the rafters.
Her mother’s canoe, and no other, bobbed tied to the hut. As Daniela ducked inside, Ana glanced up from cooking rice and beans on the small woodstove in the corner, her long legs, toned from tree climbing, folded gracefully under her.
“Homework?” Her voice dripped with love and sounded to Daniela as sweet as dark jungle honey.
Daniela nodded.
