Reyna Sántiz's water tank stood in the northwest corner of the courtyard, raised on four concrete blocks so the water would descend with a thread of pressure down to the jugs lined up underneath, and every morning, before the sun climbed above the neighbor's wall, Reyna filled the jugs and counted them aloud, one two three up to eleven, eleven twenty-liter jugs which was the measure of a day for her alone. The counting aloud had begun the year her husband left for Tijuana, so that the number eleven had become a way of saying the house still existed.

Mazatán is not the port, it is the small municipality on the Chiapas coast, between Tonalá and Tapachula, on the road that Central Americans have always taken because it is flat and follows the railway. In the twenty years spent in that courtyard, men from Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba had passed before Reyna's gate, and she had learned to recognize them not by their faces, which exhaustion makes identical, but by the way they drank. Those who are passing through drink with cupped hands, bent over the thread of water, without resting their lips on the rim of a jug that is not theirs.

One night in December two years earlier a white van had stopped right in front of the well, headlights off, and many had climbed out of it, perhaps forty, a long line that had bent over the tank in turns, with cupped hands, in silence, while two men who were not drinking stayed close to the doors. Reyna had watched from the window without turning on the light, and in the morning the van was gone, and the old road that leaves the town heading north, the one that runs along the mango fields before rejoining the railway, carried the wide tracks of a heavy vehicle that had turned in the mud.

The V Brigade entered Mazatán on the second Monday of May. They were mothers, mostly, and then siblings, and they came from Cuba, Honduras, Ecuador, Colombia, searching for a group of forty people who had disappeared at San José El Hueyate in December two years before. They walked along the main road, stopping at every gate, and at every gate they showed photographs nearly all laminated, because laminate holds against rain, sweat, the hands that have held them for two years.

Before Reyna's gate stopped a Cuban woman of sixty, who pulled from her bag a laminated photograph of a young man, and on the back, through the plastic, you could read a name written in marker and a date. The woman did not say much, she only asked whether that face had passed through here. Reyna kept her hand on the twisted wire that closed the gate in place of the broken latch, and instead of answering she offered water, went to fetch a glass, filled it from one of the eleven jugs, passed it through the bars.

The other doors along the road had stayed shut. Reyna could see this clearly from her gate: the mothers knocked, someone drew back a curtain, someone opened ten centimeters and then closed again. No one in Mazatán said anything, because whoever had disappeared forty people knew the roads, the houses, the relatives who remained, and because speaking to a passing mother brought no one back. Fear, in a small town, is not cowardice. It is a calculation that comes out even, every time you run it again.

Reyna watched the woman drink with hands cupped around the glass, bent, like someone who does not rest their lips on a rim that is not theirs. She wound the wire one turn tighter. She said that no, she did not remember that face, that in Mazatán too many faces pass through. Then, as the woman was putting the photograph back in her bag, Reyna added something else, in a low voice, counting the words the way she counted the jugs: that one night in December, two years before, there had been many of them drinking at her well, a long line, and that in the morning the old road heading north, the one along the mango fields, had carried the tracks of a heavy vehicle that had turned. She did not say the white van. She did not say the two men at the doors. She said the direction, and the direction was everything she could give without also giving the names of the houses beside hers.

The Cuban woman thanked her, wrote something in a notebook, and the brigade walked back up the road heading north, toward the mango fields, where after two years of rain no trace remained of any vehicle. After another two weeks in Chiapas and Mexico City the mothers would return to their countries empty-handed, because a direction is not a place, and a small trace is something you find and cannot read.

Reyna went back into the courtyard. It was ten o'clock, the sun was above the neighbor's wall. She refilled the jugs, because the woman had drunk from one, and counted them aloud, one two three up to eleven. In the plastic of the jug closest to the tank the water still trembled from the weight she had poured into it, a circle widening to the rim and coming back. Reyna stood watching it until the water was still again.