Captives (11 page)

She'd never worn a flower in her hair. Back where she came from, girls didn't wear flowers in their hair. She was wondering why that might be, when Eduardo joined her at a point where the trail opened up. He held out to her a leaf shaped like a spearhead.

“You know,” he said, “there are at least sixty varieties of mango that grow here.”

“Really?” she said. “Like I could
care.
”

Eduardo shrugged and fell in behind her again. She began to wonder what the slight flare of her hips looked like to him and to regret she'd fended him off. For there were questions she wanted to ask. She turned around.

“Miguel's back … What happened to it?”

“Sometime,” he said, “I may tell you.”

But their light voices had carried to Miguel. He gave Louise the same fierce gesture he had earlier given to Tony. When Miguel looked away, Louise passed it on to Eduardo.

[CHAPTER 3]

a horse struck by lightning

It seemed they needed a photograph. Miguel and El Taino pushed them into a group and pointed to where each must go. Martin found himself squatting between his mother and Louise. How strange were the intimacies he was being forced to share. Like the other night, when his mother rose more than once from the shelter. He heard the vegetation crack beneath her, almost as if she'd gone no distance at all, then the rush of liquid and wind that poured from her. He'd kept as still as a stick, barely daring to breathe, as she brought her shame back into the shelter and lay between them again.

“Oh, God, I think I'm dying,” she whispered.

The first two or three nights he had allowed himself to be held. He was scared: the dark was intense and within it he foresaw the direst consequences for them all. When his mother's thin arms came around him, he bent himself into her, resting his head in the hollow below her collarbone.

“It's all right,” she said. “It's going to be all right. We're going to be all together again. Aren't we, Tony? We are, aren't we?”

“Yes, course we are.”

All together again.

He couldn't shift that feeling that when she was holding him, she would rather be holding Nick. Nick, her baby. So he began to stiffen slightly when her arms tried to enfold him, to turn away with a “
Mu-um,
I'm just getting comfy.” It seemed perfectly natural in an adolescent boy who was already taller than his mother. Besides, Martin was beginning to adjust to the fact that here, in this situation, they could not protect him, they could not guarantee that everything would be all right. His father couldn't do that. Not even Jacques could do that. So he began to create a shell around himself, to ensure that neither fear nor pity could weaken him. That was why it didn't seem unusual to him when one of his captors addressed him as
hombre.
For strange though it seemed, in one incredible week he began to feel that he was leaving his boyhood behind.

Yet this shell that was forming around him, how thin it was still and how easily breached.

“Tennes-
see,
” said Louise, refusing to be bowed. She turned to Martin, once the camera had clicked, and her outer thigh, naked, lay flat against his.

“Crazy, this,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Isn't it?” his mouth so dry the words would barely come.

*   *   *

They had been told they would eat well that night and they did—a young pig, its roasted flesh pink and sweet—though they'd had to wait for it, penned in an old shack, listening to Maria berate them. After the meal Rafael drew on one of the cigars the old woman had made for Miguel, El Taino, and him, the smoke rising in the still air, the ash growing long and white.

The old woman, Julia, told them that once she'd seen a horse struck by lightning. It had turned to ash, white as that ash on Rafael's cigar. But still it had stood there, till she went up and touched it on a star still outlined on its forehead. It was only then that it had crumbled and the last of the storm wind had blown it away.

Yes, said Miguel, he'd heard that could happen.

Eduardo finished the translation and Melanie wondered aloud why anyone thought they would want to hear such fairy tales.

“So,” said Rafael, “you do not care to hear our stories. I wonder what you
do
care for, apart from our steady sun and our blue sea. Yet, you know, you are privileged today.”

“You're not serious,” said Melanie.

“Yes, I am. For today, this evening, you have celebrated with us the Día de la Libertad.”

“That's a laugh,” said Melanie.

“
Basta!
” snapped Maria. “Listen. Learn.”

Miguel edged out of the darkness.

“It is the day,” Rafael continued, “when we honor our first great liberator, Manuel Grau. It was he who gave his life to drive the Spanish imperialists from our land. It is a day when everyone in Santa Clara should think of freedom and sacrifice.”

Louise narrowed her eyes in thought. She was remembering the threads of a story told on a brief historical tour of the capital. She had been hot and impatient for it all to be over, lingering at the back, as the others had nodded and checked the images on their digital cameras. Manuel Grau sat on a white horse in a plaza in the center of the city. His arm was raised to his threadbare troops and he would soon be dead. His short life had been lived in smoky rooms as an exile and in brief, inconclusive campaigns that swept the island. If the campaigns were not in his favor, it was not only his soldiers who suffered—villages were fired, collaborators shot. Yet Manuel Grau had been born the privileged son of a wealthy planter. He had chosen this life, the freedom of his people.

“He inspires us still,” said Rafael. “We just take the war to the oppressors in a different way.”

Louise was still unimpressed. But talk of the Día de la Libertad led her back to her last Fourth of July celebration. It was what you could do here sometimes, to quell the boredom and the strangeness of it all—take something someone had said like a ticket that triggered a memory. Then project it onto the shadows and the stillness of the night.

Their next-door neighbours, the Drakes, had been holding their annual barbecue. Trestle tables were set up in the two-car garage where everyone could lay their predictable offerings. One regular was famous for sauerkraut, another for cookies, and, “Careful of that salsa! If you've not tried it before, go easy. It's got the kick of the devil.”

Neighbours brought chairs and coolers, ready to sit out the day. Most of the kids were younger than Louise these days—a spate of high-school leavers going east to college had left her stranded between generations. Even remembering it now made her feel lonely. Oh, but these kids were cute in their Stars and Stripes T-shirts with their chocolatey mouths. She just stayed on the grass verge, her face turned to the sun, and they came to her every so often to ask her to take them to the rest room or to show her their new sneakers.

The men stood in the drive, talking politics and football. The mothers sat on picnic chairs and told stories about their husbands.
Absence
was Melanie's story, though she buttressed it with humor. Louise was old enough to know that Jacques was envied by the men for his adventurous life and that there were wives whose voices developed a light trill when they looked up at him and asked for a hamburger: “So, Jacques, how
are
you? Where've you
been?
”

As the heat went out of the day, Jim Drake brought out a bag of fireworks and arranged all the smallest seats for the kids to watch from the curbside. The fireworks were low-key—pyramids that foamed into color and soon subsided; ones like iridescent spiders that crawled a few dazzling steps and were gone. The children applauded each one.

Then other bags appeared. These fireworks were more sinister. Some emitted great plumes of black smoke. Others fire-cracked across the road. The gloomiest of them simply expanded into black snakes, writhing themselves into ash. Children covered their ears, curled their heads between their knees. It was dark when Dan Morris's pick-up took off to buy more.

He returned with two large bags. He twisted fuses together and fired them with his gas torch. The fireworks exploded in a random sequence, lighting up the darkness of the road.

“There goes thirty dollars, right there,” one of the neighbors said.

Dan Morris held the boxes under his arms, ripped the cellophane off, and began to prepare his next explosion.

“Iraq,” Jim Drake said simply. “His platoon was attacked. He lost his best buddy. Never the same since.”

The roadway was Dan Morris's theater now and he never left it. He was small and thick-set, and when the fireworks briefly lit up his face, he was wearing a different mask each time—pleasure, pain, nothingness. It was a theater with no care for its audience and with little sense of celebration. The kids had lost interest—withdrawn up the front lawns or gone inside to watch a video. Sparks from other parties had begun to flare up silently against the black cut outs of the Rockies, as Dan continued to litter the street to the strains of one more country singer's version of “God Bless America.” Something dark was spreading through the heart of the party and no one knew what to do. Not till Jacques, towering over him, took Dan by the arm and led him gently off the road.

Louise thought of that evening again the following morning, when they were about to leave the shack and the cold ashes of the fire. Julia kissed each of the guerrillas in turn, then held Eduardo's face between her palms. Out of respect, Louise imagined, he had not turned away like you might expect a boy to do, but had stayed still as she'd wanted him to. He smiled slightly at the concern in Julia's face.

“
Cuidado, eh,
” she said to Rafael. “
Cuidado con el niño.
”

And there was something vulnerable about Eduardo then that she'd not seen before—or not cared to see, for why should she?
They
carried the guns, after all. It was the smiling vulnerability that reminded her of Lance. She'd known him the previous year, when she still held the general opinion that most of the boys her age were geeks, into nothing but computer games and football. Lance had captured her interest—a shadowy figure with floppy black hair, who'd “gone off the rails,” her mother had been told. Mary Steinberg's boy from a first marriage gone wrong. “Reckon there's Indian blood in there somewhere,” she'd heard someone say.

At the Fourth of July party she remembered him at the margins of the evening, firing his pocketful of tame fireworks for a group of the smallest kids. In school, he'd stayed aloof, challenging teachers, running roughshod over his fellow pupils' careful hierarchies. Louise liked both the brazenness that scared others off—and the vulnerability. She hoped he saw something of a kindred spirit in her. Whatever, they'd begun to smile at each other and to give each other greetings in the corridors, not in the showy way the geeks did—“Yo!” “Hey!” “High five!”—but simply by raising a hand. Lance's long slim fingers rarely rose above waist height, but his sharp brown eyes always looked directly at hers. Louise had thought that, perhaps over the long summer vacation, they could begin to be friends—or more. But then, a week after school finished, his mother had packed him off to his father. He'd never come back.

“
Cuidado, eh.
” She liked the sound of the words. “
Cuidado con el niño.
”

[CHAPTER 4]

the failure of friendliness

Gabriel's father seemed to be shrinking into his bed. He held his sides and coughed—a wet, painful cough. Gabriel raised his father's head so that he might expel the phlegm that threatened to choke him.

In the corner there was the glare of a small TV screen. Gabriel twisted its aerial to try to receive a picture that was more than lines of gray metal filings dancing before his eyes. Finally he managed to still the picture, to give its images hazy outlines.

General Quitano was thundering out his message. Terrorism, he was saying, will never be tolerated in the patria. And he knows, mark his words, that terrorist activity is imported, is fanned by extremists, who are not motivated by love of our island, but instead by hatred of our friends.
Small
people.
Bitter
people.

Quitano has always managed to bring out a crowd, and this day—the Día de la Libertad—is no exception. They have risen early, those who make up the crowd, and packed into rusting buses or lorries or simply walked, threatened with losing their jobs, to avoid the heat of the sun. They mass now in the Plaza de la Republica, waving the two small flags with which they've been issued—the Stars and Stripes of the country Quitano insists is their equal partner and their own flag: the red stripe of blood that has made them, the blue of the sea that surrounds them. But apart from the core around the podium, there seems to be little enthusiasm for Quitano's message. On the fringes, in the shade of trees hung with speakers, they chat, beating out a rhythm with the cheap flag sticks. They let the rhythm pass through them and want, always want, to dance.

“This latest outrage,” said Quitano, “what is it designed to achieve? I'll tell you. It's the work of our enemies. It's designed to take from us a chance to sit at the top table, to keep us as a nation of peasants and slaves. I ask you, is this the way forward?”

There was a pause, for Quitano was used to speaking without interruption. Now, however, he needed a response.

“I say, is this the way forward?”

“No!” the people roared.

“Is this the life we want?”

“No!” the people roared again.

“Are we to be peasants and slaves?”

“No! No! No!”

And then the spontaneous chant: “Qui-tan-o. Qui-tan-o. Qui-tan-o.”