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scuttled over them. She moved with the other shadows at a steady pace, not brisk, not slow, following the deep powdery dust as it wound left and then right and then came out in a wide plaza lighted by bare bulbs on high poles. Beneath their light, huge shapes grumbled and chattered in the saurian speech of diesels. Wordlessly, the workers queued at the tailgates, the men climbing up first, then hauling the girls and boys, old people and women up by their arms.
    â€œ Listos. Vamos,” someone shouted outside, and, jolting and grunting, the trucks jerked into motion.
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    COOPERATIVE Cane Production Facility Number 176, Alcorcón, covered seventy-five square miles of fertile flatland that had been divided among fifteen small cattle ranches before the second agrarian reform law. Number 176 produced almost a hundred thousand tons of raw sugar a year, although this year it was running behind schedule. Cane did not sweeten fully till it dried, and an unseasonally wet January had extended the harvest a month beyond its usual termination. The central had its own worker housing, offices, machine station, railroad station, warehouses, store, staff housing, garage, and barracks for the army units, school groups, and urban workers who rotated through on “voluntary” work assignments during the cutting season. At the height of the zafra, the harvest, a thousand human beings rode out to the fields each morning before dawn.
    One of them this dark morning, sitting silently on a wooden bench in the back of a swaying Soviet-made two-and-a-half-ton truck, was Graciela Gutiérrez.

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    THE trucks stopped at the edge of one of the last still-standing fields. The tailboards slammed down and the macheteros spilled off. Not speaking, they ranged themselves out across the road, facing the cane like soldiers staring down an enemy. Drawing on a pair of worn gloves, lacing on leather shin protectors, Graciela looked down at it from the road; a vast, slowly tossing green sea half a mile across. Her expression was hard, but she did not feel as determined as she looked. She felt a heaviness in her stomach, a steady pressure. It was unpleasant, but she didn’t ask to be taken back to the batey. It was a heaviness; that was all.
    The jefe de brigada, the overseer, glanced at his watch, then shouted, “Time to go to work, compañeros.” And in a ragged wave the workers moved forward, stepping down off the road and into the cane.
    As she let herself down the slope, Graciela picked out the place she would begin. The cane, seven feet high and brownish green, came up from the dry soil in clumps of five or six stalks. Two feet away was another clump, then another. She took a deep breath and bent, folding herself awkwardly.
    Stooped, she seized a two-inch-thick stalk in her left hand and slashed it through half an inch from the soil with a quick stroke of the razor-sharp blade. Then, lifting it, she quickly trimmed the leaves off. She lopped off the leafy top, laid the cane aside, took a step forward, and reached for the next stem.
    Gradually, sweat broke under her clothing. Above her head even when she stood, the tops of the cane danced in the wind, but it was as if they absorbed the breeze. The air between them was dense and hot and filled with mosquitoes. They found her mouth and face. But the tender parts, the ankles and the back of the hands, she had covered. And she ignored the rest even as they settled and stung. Only occasionally did she pause long enough to blot the sweat from her eyes with the frayed cuff of her shirt.
    When she had eight or ten trimmed stalks laid aside, enough that it was heavy to carry, she began a pile. As she cut on, moving slowly deeper into the field, the initial stiffness ebbed away. The machete hissed as it sliced through the cane, and drops of pale sugar milk bubbled at the cut roots. Such a useful tool, she thought. You could saw through the tough stalk, like the volunteers from