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two months since he had left. She walked the last length of the road with him, as if she had been with him all along. At their home, she entered at his side to see her mother turning, wiping her hands in her skirt, her father rising from his hammock.
    Isaias leaned the fiddle case against the wall and without saying anything put a short stack of bills on the table. Her father counted them. ‘This isn’t much,’ he said, but he put them in his pocket. ‘Planting starts soon.’ He turned to let Isaias pass.
    That night, when Isabel asked him about the capital, Isaias said he had joined a band performing for tourists at a seaside hotel. He said a man told him he had a true talent. Isaias’s eyes twinkled.
You will go far
were the words the man had used, and the next day, Isabel repeated them to the other children.
    Over time, he told her about nights in plazas lit by long strings of bare bulbs, dances that went on until dawn. Hedescribed tips falling so fast that they rang in the plastic bowl like a shaking tambourine. He had a girlfriend there, a beautiful girl with long black hair, and Isabel imagined her to be like the Princess of China.
    Their walks resumed.
    One warm night, when the villagers dragged their chairs into the street, Isabel was with her brother by the empty fountain. Two men who worked with him in the cane fields came and sat next to them. They were drinking. ‘Want some?’ said one, raising a half-empty bottle. Isaias shook his head. ‘Why not?’ said the man. ‘No reason,’ said Isaias. ‘Just don’t feel like it tonight. I have to play at a wedding tomorrow.’ The man took another swig from the bottle.
‘Isabel,’
he slurred, ‘why does your brother think he’s better than us?’
    ‘He has to play, in Prince Leopold,’ she said.
    The man snorted. ‘Bullshit.’
    ‘Don’t talk to her,’ said Isaias. ‘There you go,’ said the man, ‘thinking you’re too good for cane cutters.’ ‘I never said that,’ said Isaias. He took Isabel’s hand and stood to leave. ‘Where you going?’ said the man, lurching up, his machete clanging against the chair. Isaias tried to push past him, but the man grabbed his shoulder. Isabel could smell the liquor on his breath.
    Suddenly, the man spat. ‘That’s what I think of you,’ he said. Then Isaias hit him, falling on him as the bottle clunked in the dirt. An uncle pulled him off. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Said the rest of us are dogs,’ sputtered the man. ‘Said nothing,’ shouted Isaias, his face red. Isabel could see tears in the corners of his eyes. ‘Easy there, music-star,’ said someone, and Isaias turned and took swift strides toward the thorn.
    He began to spend more time in the hills.
    It was summer, and hot, and people began to whisper of another drought. When Isabel went with him, he talked about a different place, a city in the south.
    She couldn’t remember when she first heard of the city. In the earliest geographies of her imagination, there was Saint Michael and Prince Leopold, and beyond the mountains, the state capital by the sea. The city in the south had a name, but when they spoke of it, they called it simply
the city
, as if it were the only city in the world. She had learned of it in school: a place of kings and fleets of caravels, sea monsters, corsairs and cold southern squalls, a single cross erected on cliffs above the coast. On the school map, it sat on the underbelly of the country, and she imagined it at the end of a long descent down a great plain: when people left to work there, it was said they had ‘gone down to the city.’ A shuddering descent, like falling from the sky.
    As she got older, she imagined a vast, shifting place, a light, a rush of noise. The old men who had been there spoke of mansions built on great avenues, elegant ladies who carried parasols with their long white gloves and wrapped themselves in mantillas against the fog. Their sons told of automobile factories and rising