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skyscrapers. Their grandchildren spoke of a different place, an endless cinder-block city with gangs of angry young men. On the single marketplace television in Prince Leopold, mantis-thin women sipped glasses of bubbles before a shimmering skyline. Until she was five, Isabel thought that in the city the sky and land were somehow reversed, until her brother explained how the lights could stretch forever beneath a blanket of clouds.
    Each year, the men debated whether to take the ship for the jungles or the flatbed to the city. They drew up the merits,dangers and possibilities of each: rubber plantations versus auto plants, gold strikes versus the mansions, malaria versus city thieves. As they sewed bags with sisal and shaped roof tiles over their thighs, they spoke of impossible factories. They said, In the city in the south you don’t go hungry. In the city the clinics have doctors, the schools have paper, the stores have food. In the city, families put their maid’s children through school, babies are bigger. In the city, the poor are rich, minimum-wagers are kings. The men don’t cheat on you in the city, they aren’t powerless, they don’t drown themselves in drink, they don’t hit. The women don’t get old before their time. In the city, if you are thirsty there are fountains, I’ve seen them myself, big fountains, with water spraying from horses’ mouths. In the city, they have markets every day, they have rain.
    At first the men went, and then some of the women, including their cousin Manuela. When Isabel was eight, an entire family bundled their belongings in a knotted sheet and climbed onto one of the flatbeds they called parrot perches for the metal bars that the passengers clung to on the long trip.
    The following year, another family left. They were one of the poorest in Saint Michael, and abandoned a wattle house out in the thorn forest, latching the door with a string and a little stick. On their walks, Isaias took Isabel there, where the wind whistled through the cracks in the walls. Inside, he ran his fingers over the grooves worn into the beams by swaying hammocks. Sometimes they waited out the heat of the day together in the shade of the rooms.
    As he spent more and more time in the hills, Isabel often found him in the empty house. Someone took its door away, and the chinks in the wattle widened. Once they surprised a pair of rhea. The birds screeched and hurled themselves aboutthe room in panicked, scratching loops until they leaped through an empty window. For days Isaias imitated them, shoving his fists into his armpits and spinning around the room as Isabel chased behind.
    Usually, it was empty. A pair of anthills appeared in the floor, and the carapaces of insects swung in the dusty strands of abandoned spiderwebs. Thin centipedes formed question marks as they dried and curled.
    Once she found him there with the fiddle. ‘Maybe I should also go,’ he said, and he played for a long time.
    When she was twelve, Isabel began to travel with her aunt and uncle to an uneven hillside overlooking the valley, where they kept a pair of thin zebu cows, grew some manioc, collected wood for charcoal and led the goats to graze. The soil was thick with stones and barren except for thorn scrub and the occasional cereus cactus with sticky white fruit. It was a long afternoon’s walk from town. They spent days there, sleeping in hammocks strung from the low trees. They returned with plastic buckets of milk, kept warm by the heat of the day, sloshing beneath a scrim of yellow fat.
    In the evenings, they watched a plume of dust winding its way into the distance until it disappeared.
    One day they returned to town to find a white pickup parked in the square. In their home, three men sat with her father. There were two pistols on the table. Her uncle approached warily as a man rose to shake his hand. He wore a bolo tie, its clasp fashioned from the rowel of a spur.
    ‘This man’s from the city,’ said her