House Arrest (6 page)

Whenever my husband was out of town, I left our daughter, Serena, with my mother and stayed with El Caballo in the little apartment. He was a restless sleeper, up half the night, smoking cigars, drinking white rum. Fitful. He was always going to the window, looking out, coming back to bed, turning on the light.

I am a sound sleeper, but when he was with me I could feel the bed rise and fall. One night, I don’t know what it was, he fell asleep hard and for almost the entire night he did not move. Suddenly, near dawn, he woke with a jolt as if
something had startled him. He sat up and had difficulty catching his breath.

I opened the windows wide to let in the air. He asked for water and I brought it to him. Then he told me his dream. He said he saw himself as a horse, beautiful, sleek, galloping across an open field. He watched himself racing across fields, until it occurred to him that he couldn’t stop. All night long, he said, he’d ridden on and on because he knew that when he did stop he would be dead. He was frightened then. He told me, Rosa—that was what he always called me, Rosa—I can never stop.

Recently there have been rumors of illness. Talk of colon cancer, rare diseases of the blood. But the people call him a
bicho malo
—a bad bug who will live to be very old. We have been apart for over thirty years, but I know that he will come back to me. People say he won’t, but someday he will. I think he will come back when it is time for him to die.

For years now, she said, I have hardly seen him, but it is as if I know where he is, what he is doing every day. And, of course, there is Isabel. My daughter, you know, she is everything to me. Serena went to America long ago and Isabel is all that I have left. I cannot look at her and not think of him.

The shadows of the day were growing long when Rosalba finally rose. “Well,” she said, “I’ve just gone on and on. Really, it’s so unlike me.” She went to the edge of the patio and peered at the road. “I can’t imagine what’s keeping my daughter. It’s so rude of her, if she told you to come, not to call.”

“It’s all right. Probably she was delayed. Or maybe she just forgot …”

“I worry about her. Here I’ve gone on and on, but I know nothing about you. Do you have a child?”

“Yes, I do …”

“Well, then you know what it is. To worry about someone so.”

“You can’t really ever forget or get away when you have a child, can you?” I asked.

Rosalba looked up at me sadly. “Oh, some people can.” She poured the last of the warm lemonade into my glass as darkness settled over the holes in the roof of the house. The absence of cooking smells brought a despair over me, as heavy as the one within those walls.

“My life,” Rosalba said, with a tinge of remorse, “would have been completely different if I hadn’t had her. But, of course, I can’t imagine my life without her. If she could just get along with her father, I wouldn’t worry so. The problem with them, you know, is that they are so much alike.”

When I left, no taxi could be found. Though I was only a few miles from the center of town, no buses came there either. Rosalba had to bribe a neighbor to drive me to the Miramar, where I found a taxi driver who for five dollars would take me to my hotel. I asked him to take the Miramar though it was longer because I wanted to be close to the water. Opening my window, I breathed in deeply. Spray moistened my arm. In the distance out to sea I could see a gathering storm.

M
ANUEL says I look well and healthy with my tan. He leans against the barstool, dressed in a blue T-shirt and jeans. He asks if I have been island-hopping, but I tell him that my tan comes from a half hour on the Hotel España roof deck.
La isla
, I tell him, was to be my only stop. I ask how it is that he knows I am here, but he says he didn’t know. This is just one of his haunts. I eye him suspiciously and then he offers, “Word gets around.”

I tell him that I have had some problems with immigration and I am not allowed to leave the hotel. That, in fact, I am being deported in the next few days, and he doesn’t look very surprised.

“Have they told you what they think you’ve done?”

“They haven’t told me a thing.” I ask him what he thinks the problem is and he shrugs. “Do you think it’s because of Isabel?”

He shrugs. “Who knows? It could be because of anything,” he says.

Manuel and I make a plan. He will return the next evening and have dinner with me. In the meantime he will try to talk with some people to see if this can’t be cleared up. I ask him if I should contact Rosalba and he presses his lips together. “Let me think about that,” he says. “We’ll figure a way out of this mess.”

He kisses me on the cheek when he leaves, pressing my hand. “You still look great, baby; you really do.”

“Have you … have you heard from her?” I gather the nerve to ask him after all.

“Oh, sure, from time to time. You know, messages get through. She’s fine. She’s living in Spain.”

“Spain?”

“Yes. She likes it there.”

I go back upstairs to my room and try Todd again. He answers on the first ring. I can’t talk, I tell him, but try to understand. The weather is not good, the climate is bad. If I can, I’m going to Jamaica.

“Is the weather any better there?” he asks. Then he pauses as if something has just occurred to him. “Maggie, are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Or at least I think I am.”

He clears his throat the way Todd does when he’s starting to get concerned. “What does that mean? Is there some kind of trouble? Is something wrong?”

“I can’t tell you now. I wish I could …” I think maybe I will tell him, but there is a loud crackling sound and the line goes dead.

I
IMAGINE Isabel writing from a village in Spain:
On the island where I come from, we have the smallest beasts. A frog that will rest on your fingernail. A mammal no bigger than a thimble that looks like a shrew. The pygmy owl a child can cup in his fist. And the zunzuncito, the world’s smallest bird, often mistaken for a bumblebee. This hummingbird’s wings beat with the force of a turbo engine, but its heart can be broken with the pressure of a thumb. It is amazing that in this world of little things we are ruled by someone so big that we cannot help but feel small. As if we too have come to rest in another’s palm
.

There are things I miss that I never thought I would. The sea is not the same because this one crashes against rocks and the earth is red and must be coaxed for something to grow. There is no scent of lemons, no sweet fruits I can pluck from the trees. These Spaniards wear black and are serious about life. I never wake to music blaring
,
people dancing in the street. No one throws cowrie shells at the ground to predict what lies ahead
.

I miss the color of mangoes, fuchsia flowers. A hundred kinds of palm trees, the dolphins that swam beside me in the sea. But some places, like some people, are best loved from afar. Some places are better when they are remembered
.

T
HE DAY after Isabel stood me up, she left a message at the hotel. The desk clerk smiled as he handed me a slip of paper, torn from a child’s notebook. I could barely decipher her penciled scrawl. She wrote that there had been a problem with the buses and she had been delayed, that there was no phone in the district where she was so she couldn’t call. She pleaded with me to return, to come back and see her again.

The next afternoon I made my way through the same tangle of vines, the same maze of thorny bushes that I’d come down the day before. The untended fruit trees had dropped their rotten fruit. A rodent peered at me, then scurried away with a tamarind between his orange teeth as I knocked on the door, which was on the floor below where Rosalba lived. On the door of Isabel’s apartment were two hand-painted pink hearts, with Isabel’s and her daughter Milagro’s names intertwined.

Milagro let me in. She was a large, sturdy girl of about
thirteen, as tall as her mother and almost twice her size, with gold baubles in her ears. A “Boss” Springsteen T-shirt clung to her burgeoning breasts. But she had her mother’s deep black eyes, her thick black hair that fell around her shoulders. “Mummy’s in here,” she said.

The apartment smelled of incense and mint tea. Flower petals were strewn across the floor as if some secret ritual was being practiced here. The rooms with the shades wide open were as light as Rosalba’s were dark, and the heat of the day poured in. Salsa spewed forth from the radio and a song called “Latin Lover” played. Milagro lip-synched the words as she led me into the middle of the sparsely furnished room, to a Formica table and a bouquet of plastic flowers.

Sunken on the couch missing its springs, Isabel sat, looking more like a child than her own daughter. Milagro touched her mother on the shoulder. “Mummy, here’s your friend.” Then Milagro raised her mother up as if she were helping an invalid.

“Oh, Milie,” Isabel said, “I’m not that old. I’m only thirty-five.”

Carved saints with pleading hands and despondent gazes lined the mantel. On the wall were pictures of Jesus, Marilyn Monroe, a Rosalba who looked like the Elizabeth Taylor of
la isla
, and Isabel with her daughter. Except for Jesus there were no pictures of men. There was none of her father, though there was a poster of a singing group, Hijos de Andalucía.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” Isabel whispered. She pointed to each of the four walls, making a circling motion with her hands. Milagro turned the volume up on the music, pressing her fingers to her lips. “It is best not to speak here,” Isabel said.

I don’t like whispering. I never have. When we were young, Lydia and I always spoke in hushed tones, afraid to be heard. “I don’t want to hear a peep out of you girls,” our father would say to us at night, “not a sound.” He aimed his finger our way so we knew he meant it. At home we spoke with a hand cupped to ear or in codes, by semaphore. A finger pointing downstairs, a thumb motioning outside. Whenever we could, we walked in the woods around our house. But even there we never raised our voices. Lydia now tells me how she remembers darkness, drawn shades, rooms without light. But what I remember are whispers.

Isabel led me down long winding streets, through alleyways where children played with a discarded bicycle wheel and sticks. They rolled the wheel down muddy streets, garbage-strewn alleyways. There were no sandlot baseball games, no one shooting hoops. No bats, no balls.

The streets were riddled with potholes. Huge craters pitted the roads as if they’d been bombed, and the few cars twisted past them as if through a maze. We passed a building with the first floor gutted, but a family living on the second floor. On the balcony a hen strutted; laundry of tattered undershirts and blue jeans flapped in the breeze.

Along the Miramar, people wore cardboard signs, attached around their necks with string. At first I thought this was some form of public humiliation. But then I looked closer. A young couple with a small child wore a sign that said they wanted a two-bedroom anywhere in exchange for their one-bedroom in the center of the city. A single man who wished to marry was trying to convince an old woman who wanted to leave her large apartment that his studio was near the sea.

We walked for a long time and I was hot and tired. But
Isabel moved like a dancer, her arms reaching before her into space. Sweat beads formed on the corners of her brow, but other than that she moved effortlessly. I followed and we did not speak.

At last we arrived at a café not far from the sea and the old cemetery. We sat down and looked around, waiting to be served, but no waiter came. Though the cafe was open, no one was working there. My mouth was parched, but there was nothing to drink. “I’m so thirsty,” I said. “Isn’t there anything?” Isabel went into the back of the café and returned with two glasses of warm tap water.

I stared into my glass. “It’s okay,” Isabel said, “you can drink it. One of the few things my father has really done is make the water pure.” Sipping slowly, we sat facing each other with a view of the sea. “I like to come here,” Isabel said, “because my first husband is buried over there. My second husband as well.” She pointed to the old cemetery, which wasn’t far away. “I loved the first one and I liked the second one a lot. It’s a long story.”

I looked at her, surprised. “Oh, I go through men like I’d go through money if I had any.” She laughed. “I’ve been married four times now. Milagro is the child of my third husband. My fourth was a businessman from Caracas. I married him to get me out of here, but of course my visa was denied. When I go to immigration, do you know what they say to me? They say I will never leave. They grin at me when they tell me this. They say that I will die here just like the rest of them.”

Isabel took out a packet of cigarettes, Marlboros, in fact, tamped it, and offered me one.

“No, thanks,” I shook my head. I hadn’t had a cigarette in nine years.

Isabel shrugged, indifferent to my good or bad habits. She lit one, tilted her head back, and blew smoke into the sky as I sipped the water she’d brought me in slow, careful sips. As she held the cigarette between her fingers, I noticed for the first time her nails, which, like mine, were bitten down to the quick. “You’re married?” she asked, pointing to my ring.

“Yes, and I have a daughter.” I fumbled in my wallet, though the pictures I carried were a few years old.

“Oh, she is beautiful. She looks just like you,” Isabel said, her face lightening for the first time.

I didn’t want to argue that she doesn’t look like me. “But she acts like her father,” I said.

“And how is that?”

“Oh, she’s chaotic; I’m more orderly.”

“But she’s just a child,” Isabel said with a laugh. “Do you leave them often?”

I shook my head. “Not often, but it is good to get away. I find it gives me a new perspective.”

“Yes, I imagine it does.” She gave me a wry smile. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Oh, I’m sorry …”

“It’s all right. In fact, I’ve never been anywhere. You know, when we toast in this country, we don’t say
‘salud;’
we say ‘visa.’ We all want to leave, but there are no exit visas. My father is tyrant. What more can I say.”