House Arrest (25 page)

She tried to envision walks through autumn leaves, buttoning her jacket against the cold. She would find work. A profession that might suit her. Perhaps she could be a photographer or learn to fly airplanes. She would go to medical school. She’d wait tables. It didn’t matter. In three days she’d be gone. She’d leave as her half sister, Serena—a woman she’d despised in so many ways—had so many years before.

Perhaps she’d even return as Serena did every few years, wearing her
sombrero de fiesta
—those hats bedecked with jewelry, trinkets, hair ribbons, then deconstructed once they land in
la isla
into gifts for young girls. Serena came buxom with rice-and-coffee breasts that she’d jangle, laughing, and layers of underwear and denim vests. Once she arrived with
her hair rolled in sausages beneath her sombrero. Another time she came with a Crock-Pot on her head.

“I brought you everything you do not have,” she’d say as she unwrapped herself like an onion and displayed her contraband. Her undressing became a veritable banquet. She joked that she could carry a chicken between her legs. Then she would wander over to the old house by the sea, dipping into boxes, finding her schoolbooks, stuffed animals, a butterfly collection, gathering up her past, which she’d take back in her empty suitcases to the husband and the twin sons Rosalba had never seen.

Isabel wondered if once she was gone she’d ever be back. She wondered if they would ever let her return. She thought of the father she had never made peace with. He had never come to her with the gift she had asked his lawyers to have him bring. He had given her a wedding, then sent her husband to die in a foreign war in a country she cannot recall, nor did she ever know why they were fighting there. Her second husband died at sea, just as her grandfather and great-grandmother had. Her other husbands were forgotten soon after they left her. Perhaps it will not be that difficult to go.

Late that night, when Isabel crawled into bed, she wrapped her arms around Milagro, who she assumed would now be raised by an aging woman who slept alone. Milagro felt her mother’s tears—moist and warm—on her neck. Milagro turned, cradling her mother in her arms. “It’s okay, Mummy,” Milagro said. “You’re leaving. I know.”

The next few days were a blur in my mind. I’m not sure of where I went or what I saw, though I know I went many places and saw many things. I made no notes. I went alone, wandering close to the sea or into the maze of side streets in
the old part of the city. On and on I seemed to lose myself in its streets and alleyways. I had no identity. No passport, no way out. It would be so easy, I told myself, to drift down one of these alleyways and disappear.

I was beginning to think that this place had cast a spell on me. I felt inexplicably drawn to the Miramar and its seawall where water splashed onto the sidewalk. Drawn to the idle people who strolled the shore or sat on folding chairs in front of their small, dark rooms. It was not that I belonged here or wanted to stay. It was more as if I could not bring myself to leave, as if the pull of
la isla
was greater than the pull of home. And, of course, much of its pull was Isabel, and even her desperate need to leave was part of the spell.

I kept thinking I’d run into Isabel or that she’d find a way to let me know that all was well. That she would see me soon on the other side, in the next place. But I did not run into her, or into anyone. And she sent no message, though I kept looking and waiting for one, as I have continued to look and wait. I walked past some of our old haunts—the Church of the Apparitions, cafés we’d been to. But there were no familiar faces and no one seemed to recognize me. It was as if Isabel and everyone close to her had disappeared.

At the end of three days, as we had agreed, I raced down to the front desk early in the morning, agitated, and informed the desk clerk that my passport and ticket home were missing and appeared to have been stolen from my room. The clerk was a young man with acne on his face and he seemed genuinely concerned as I explained that I was preparing for my departure the next day and found that they were missing and I assumed had been taken. The young man listened carefully to what I was saying (I had intentionally chosen a young man) and after a while he picked up the phone. I didn’t have
to pretend to be in distress because I really was. He told me to wait in my room and someone would contact me.

It was not long before I received a phone call from the head of the hotel, who asked me to come to the office. He asked me who had been in my room and if I’d had any guests. Did I let anyone in? “You are sure that you let no one into your room?”

“Yes, I am sure.”

“Well,” he said, sounding exasperated, “these things happen more often than we’d like around here.” Two days later, via the Swiss consular services, I was presented with an exit visa and a plane ticket. I was allowed to leave without much difficulty and arrived home only a day later than I had planned.

S
OMEONE knocks on my door. I must have dozed off because it takes me a long time to get up and open it. When I find Manuel standing there, I motion for him to come in. Then I put on the television, loudly. The program is MTV and there are young black people and white people, walking down a beach, barefoot in the surf. They wear pastel shorts and T-shirts and their skin is clear, shiny.

“They are not going to let me go,” I tell him. “They know about Isabel, about what I did. They won’t let me go.”

Manuel wraps his arm around me. “They will. They’re just trying to frighten you,” he says. “If they considered you really dangerous, they would have put you in prison by now.”

“What should I do?”

Manuel folds me in his arms. He is caressing my neck when there is another knock at my door. We look at each other, our eyes filled with fear. “I really shouldn’t be up here,” Manuel says.

“Get in the bathroom,” I tell him. He listens to me, ducking in.

I open the door, expecting to see Major Lorenzo or one of his aides with reflector shades and a gun, ready to take me away. The questioning that afternoon was really an interview, to see if I was ready for prison. Perhaps even now they are preparing my cell.

Instead I see a black man dressed in a blue uniform and missing several teeth. He holds a lightbulb in his hand. “I’ve come to change your bulb.”

I look around my room and all the bulbs are on. “Everything is fine,” I tell him. “I don’t need a bulb.”

He looks perplexed. “I have to check your lights,” he tells me. He limps as he comes into the room. He is just doing his job, I tell myself. Carefully he unscrews all the lightbulbs, testing them. There are five, six of them. Then he comes to the lamp I unplugged so that I could plug in the television. “It must be this one,” he says.

I point to where I have unplugged it and he nods. He says he must check it. This is his job. He turns off the television with the young people singing on the beach, plugs in the light, and it goes on. Satisfied that there is nothing wrong with my lightbulbs, he takes the one he has brought and leaves.

When he goes, I quickly open the bathroom door, my heart pounding in my chest. Manuel motions to the television and I put it back on, louder than before.

“Who are you?” I ask, as he slides his hands under my shirt. “Who are you working for?”

Now Manuel reaches for me, he pulls me to him. I push him away, but he tugs harder. “Manuel, please …,” I say, trying to push him away. His hands are hurting my arms as he
pulls me toward the bed. “Please,” I say, struggling to get free, “I don’t want to do this.”

He flings me onto the bed, throws his body on top of mine. With my hands, I am pounding his back as he thrusts his body against mine. I start to scream, a loud, protracted scream, but he puts his hand over my mouth. “All right,” he says, “shut up now. I’ll go.”

“Yes, you’d better do that.”

He rises off the bed and heads for the door. I lie there, trembling, wondering where I can go now. In the bathroom the frog still croaks, its voice growing fainter.

I
N THE MORNING I wake up late and find I can barely get out of bed. As I am washing my face, trying to bring some life back into my eyes, I see that I have chipped a nail. Normally such a thing would not bother me because I’ve never worn polish so I would never notice if I’ve chipped a nail, but somehow I can’t bear the sight of that white arched half-moon against all that red. I am struck by the whiteness of my own nail. I get dressed and go down to see Olga.

Olga is there, filing her own nails. She files them in broad, impatient strokes. Business must not be good today. I walk in and point to where the red has separated from the white.
Tsk, tsk
, she says, shaking her head. I know, I know, I want to tell her. I can’t do anything right. She takes the file and applies it to my nail, making those same, broad strokes. Then she dips her brush into the red polish and covers the spot again.

She makes me sit still while she puts a little blowing machine on my nail. “So,” she says, “you are enjoying your visit to
la isla
?”

“Oh, yes,” I tell her, “I am having a wonderful time.” “And did you see everything I told you to see.” “Oh, yes,” I tell her, thinking she can’t be putting me on. She must not know. “That and more.”

When my nail is dry, I go into the lobby bathroom across the hall. There a young woman approaches me. She is thin with a greenish tint to her face. She looks ill, but also threatening at the same time. Either she will beg or she will rob me. She is carrying a baby who sucks on a pacifier so I assume it will be the former. The woman takes the pacifier out of the baby’s mouth and holds it up to my face. The baby can’t suck, the woman tells me. I stare at the pacifier, which has a big hole where the nipple should be. The nipple is not good. Now the woman points to her heart. And my heart is not good.

In the brief moment that we stand there, face-to-face, she tells me the story of her life. She has three more children at home and no job. Her husband has left her and she does not know where to find him. It was a love marriage, but he could not find work and he began to drink. Then he began to hit her until late one night he walked out, as he did so many nights. But that night he did not come back again. She cannot feed her children, let alone herself. The woman tells me that she is twenty-three years old and her heart is failing her. She puts her hand to her throat as if she will throw up. This country, she says, her voice filled with disdain, it will never be right.

I know she wants money, but I offer to go into the
tienda
and buy the baby a nipple. The woman nods at me, grateful. But the
tienda
doesn’t have a nipple, so I buy other things instead. Cans of Spam and sardines, cheese, shampoo, pencils. Tuna fish, crackers, children’s T-shirts, little shoes.

When I hand her the bag and she feels its heft, her threatening look is gone. “Why are you doing this?” she asks, gazing into the bag.

“Because I am being deported,” I tell her, “so I thought I’d give you these things.” As a going-away present, I want to add.

Now her face is visibly altered. “Why are you being deported?” she asks.

“Because I am a journalist,” I tell her.

“Suerte,”
she tells me, her face welling up in tears. “Take care of yourself.”

As I stand in the lobby, staring at the double doors, I see Major Lorenzo approaching. My Major Lorenzo, I think. He is waving something at me and I see pieces of paper in his hands, fluttering in the breeze. I see my father when I got into college with the letters of acceptance he’d opened and read, greeting me at the door.

“Well,” Major Lorenzo says, “it is done. Here are your documents. You will leave on tomorrow’s plane.”

P
ERHAPS Rosalba knew right away that Isabel was gone. She did not know because there was no longer the smell of mint tea and incense wafting from downstairs, no mantras being chanted, no windows flung open or flower petals carpeting the floor. She knew because everything was so still, the air heavy with a yellowish tinge. When you live on an island and the breeze stops, it can only mean one thing. It is a gathering offerees elsewhere. A hurricane out to sea. Rosalba had not felt such a heaviness in the air in the thirty-five years since Isabel was born. It had been that long since the wind ripped the wall of mangroves out by the roots, opening the vistas to the sea, and a whale was found in the swimming pool of someone who would soon flee
la isla
and never return.

Toward evening the wind picked up. Milagro arrived with her pillow and a teddy bear clutched in her arms as if she were a small child and Rosalba knew that what she sensed and feared was so. She closed the storm shutters, battening
down the house. Then she made tea with mint she plucked from the plant that grew wild on the patio and they sat together in the breeze. Milagro turned to her grandmother and said, “Would you go too? If you could, would you go?”

Rosalba shook her head slowly. “Everything I have is here,” she said. “I would never leave.”

Rosalba sat beside Milagro who was lying on the cot. She stroked the child’s brow as she had once stroked other children’s brows. She loved their moist heads, their cherubic faces when they slept. She loved the smell of sleeping children, and a peacefulness settled over her.

When Milagro was finally asleep, Rosalba tiptoed out of the room and went downstairs. She walked into Isabel’s empty apartment, where the heavy wind that would bring torrents was starting to blow, and struggled to pull the shutters closed. As soon as she did, she felt the air growing heavy, dust settling on the furniture. She would keep these rooms in darkness, the way she kept hers upstairs, and they would remain closed for a long time. Then she went outside and stood beneath the now whirling branches of the frangipani and thought how she held to this place as stubbornly as the screw pines clung to the ground.

Rosalba made a bath for herself, a warm bath on a warm night, and she scented the bath with vanilla and almond oil. From under the sink she produced a bottle of Come to Me, Love bath oil and this she also poured in. She lit votive candles on her nightstand, beside her bed. To Madre de Caridad she prayed for her daughter’s safe arrival and for someone else’s return. A long night of waves pummeling the shore stretched before her, branches banging her shutters as if begging to be let in.