The Distant Marvels (16 page)

T
he first Mario Betancourt was born in a thatched hut on a sugar plantation in Sabanilla, Matanzas province. The hut, a small dirt-floor home in a section of the sugar fields no longer cultivated, housed four other members of the Betancourt family—Mario's parents, Margarita and Ricardo, Ricardo's bedridden mother, Lidia, and Lidia's mother, whom they called Cuquita, an ancient woman well past one hundred years of age, who tended to her ill daughter day and night, murmuring in Yoruba, so that no one understood. She still venerated the old African gods, remembering that place, and had refused baptism, even when she was whipped for it. They were all slaves on the plantation, and were some of the very few slaves who were allowed to stay together as a family. The plantation owner, Don Peregrino Calderón, lived in the big house with his wife, the docile Doña Encarnación, who bore two children—a handsome son named Roque, and an underweight girl who could not hear or speak. It was said that Don Peregrino Calderón was too softhearted, and possibly a homosexual, despite his wife. Those were the accusations thrown at a man whose slaves lived so long—to the landowning Spanish, he was as weak as a freshly whipped meringue.

Such were the witnesses to the first Mario Betancourt's arrival, who died only six hours after his birth, his tiny heart fluttering to a stop under his mother's hand. The second Mario Betancourt died the same way, outliving his brother by only nine minutes. To Margarita, it felt as if she were the only one who mourned the baby boys. Ricardo toiled each day cutting sugarcane alongside his wife. He had no energy for grief. She cut the cane with a ferocity that she'd lacked before her babies had died. But still, had anyone asked her, she would have said that she felt as dead inside as her children were. Ricardo and Margarita came alive only at night, when their rough hands would trail over one another's bodies like blind, groping things. Meanwhile, Lidia and Cuquita were lost in their own conversation made up of the sick woman's moans and the ancient one's muttering. During both labors, Margarita had walked herself to the plantation house where the doctor tended the slaves (it was, he'd said, more sanitary in the big, wood-shuttered house). She had returned on her own, empty-handed, carrying the thin receiving blankets she'd taken with her with such hope in a tight bundle.

Upon both tiny bodies, Margarita had made sure to leave a mark before the doctor came to take them away. She'd dug her nail into each baby's chin just hard enough until a half-moon line of blood appeared. It was meant to be a physical token, a signpost, a portal, for the spirit of this child, and the one before him, to come back someday. When Margarita's next baby was born, the third Mario Betancourt, his chin bore a bright red crescent mark that faded to silver by the time he could talk. The doctor claimed it was damage done to the child with forceps at birth, but inwardly, Margarita disagreed.

Aside from that scar, there was no indication that Mario Betancourt harbored the souls of his brothers within him, and there was no way of proving that his soul was on its third try on earth. But Margarita believed it wholly, would sometimes tell the young Mario stories set during the days of his past lives. The child would come to know three sets of birthdays, each celebrated meagerly, but with joy. He was named for the three saint days of his three births—Mario Juan Damian Betancourt.

Margarita tried for another child in the years after Mario's birth. Because Ricardo had told her he liked women with long hair, Margarita refused to cut hers, in the hope of enticing her husband into bed more often. By Mario's fourth birthday, his mother's hair reached her hips in a tangle of curls, and her dress was so torn that it flapped at her ankles, making her seem like a ghost that floated to and fro on the plantation. When a baby did come, at long last, another boy, he too died a few days after birth. This time, Margarita settled both the baby and Mario in her arms. The two of them watched as he shuddered, as a white ring developed around his mouth, and the room filled with the scent of his passing—a smell like diluted nutmeg. “Do you smell it?” Margarita asked. “His sweet soul?” And Mario had nodded, sí, mami, sí.

Margarita wasn't the same afterwards. She began talking to herself in the small hut, adding to the steady trickling of voices in that place. One day, a little over a week after the baby's death, when she was still bleeding from it, Margarita disrobed and stood in the middle of the cane field, naked to all of the plantation, her hair whipping about her, Medusa-like, in the stiff sea breeze, howling like an animal in a trap, blood running thick down her leg.

Mario watched it happen, and claimed that he dreamed of her that way, in nightmare upon nightmare. Sometimes, too, he'd dream of his infant brothers, with hollowed-out eyes and tiny mouths that chanted all of their names in a horrific chorus. But those deaths, and his mother's madness, were not the worst of the story. The plantation overseer, a man named Rubén Oviedo, was on horseback the morning Margarita stood naked in the cane field. Mario heard the galloping horse before he saw it, and knew it could only be Oviedo, a figure who had taken on monstrous properties in his imagination. Surely, thought Mario, Oviedo had fangs instead of teeth, and that whip of his, coiled at his waist, was a stinging tail. Ricardo, Mario's father, had urged Mario to stay away from Oviedo, and should he ever come upon the boy, he advised Mario to stare at Oviedo's feet and check for cloven hooves, but never, ever look up at the overseer. Mario and Oviedo had crossed paths twice—once without any repercussion, for Oviedo had just trotted past Mario without so much as a glance in the boy's direction, and a second time, when Mario had been digging in a mud puddle and Oviedo, horseless this time, had snuck up behind him and said, “Take a bath in it, negrito,” then, left, chuckling at a joke Mario did not understand.

This time, Mario watched as Oviedo swooped down and pulled Margarita by her long hair onto his horse. He'd wrapped the dark curls three times around his forearms before yanking her up, and she'd flown, it seemed, over the saddle, landing on the pommel with a thud. Oviedo paused only to look around, and his gaze caught Mario's, who only whimpered where he stood. Then, Oviedo galloped away with Margarita, naked and helpless, deep into the cane field.

Later that night, Ricardo took Mario with him to the house, to beg for his wife's life. Don Peregrino himself had ushered Ricardo into the sitting room, a large space with low tables and chairs upholstered in gold velvet. White shutters graced each window, and the light poured through the slats like beams from a lighthouse.

“We cannot have a mad woman on the plantation, Ricardo,” Don Peregrino said.

“Sí, señor,” Ricardo answered, his eyes staring directly at Don Peregrino's feet.

“She's a liability,” Don Peregrino said.

“She's my wife, señor,” Ricardo answered. “And the boy's mother,” he added, patting Mario's head.

Don Peregrino shook his head. “She may yet recover,” he said. Ricardo looked up with eyes wide. His lips parted, but he did not speak.

“Recover?” Mario asked, and his little voice was a like a whip cracking in the room. The adults looked at him sharply. “But she was not hurt when she was taken,” Mario persisted. That was when Ricardo grabbed the boy and clamped his hand over the boy's mouth.

“Cállate,” Ricardo whispered fiercely.

“If she recovers from her injuries, we shall return the woman to you. But hear me, Ricardo, another disruption to the peace we have here will not be tolerated.” Don Peregrino said all of this without taking his eyes off of Mario, the way a person talks when in the presence of a dangerous creature, like a toxic snake or caimán.

Ricardo waited a full year to see Margarita again. Certain she was dead, though Don Peregrino insisted the woman was still recovering from whatever wounds she'd incurred that day that Oviedo took her away on his horse, Ricardo began to shape a new life for himself, which included meeting secretly with other slaves from plantations all over Matanzas, men who would later stage slave rebellions, and, after that, join the insurrectionists in the war of independence. When at last Ricardo and Mario saw Margarita again, she arrived in the hut carrying a baby girl.

“Our daughter,” she'd said, though the child was fair-skinned and her ears fanned out like a carriage with the doors open.

“Peregrino's ears,” Ricardo remarked, turning his back on Margarita.

As for Mario, he was smitten by his baby sister, and asked to hold her again and again. When Margarita returned to the cane field it was Mario's job to care for the baby, whom Margarita had named Regla. At night, Mario slept next to little Regla, his body curved like a sickle around hers. The baby learned to walk holding onto her brother's fingers. She would eat well for him, opening her mouth to the spoon like a fledgling bird. Her skin was the color of driftwood, and her nose had tiny freckles all over it. Mario would run his fingers on her nose, tapping the dots and counting them. Regla would laugh as if she knew what he was talking about.

By 1886, Ricardo had helped organize two unsuccessful slave rebellions deep in Matanzas, on another plantation. No one connected him to the events, though the rebellions made life on the Peregrino plantation more difficult, as Peregrino gave Oviedo a freer hand in disciplining the slaves. Ricardo and Margarita were spared punishment, for they knew never to look at Oviedo, but to stare only at his feet. But the sound of the whip whizzing through the thick, tropical air could be heard at all hours of the day. Margarita was allowed to abandon her work in the field to care for the hurt slaves. Mario sometimes went with her. He would snap off aloe stems from the small garden his family kept, and rub the plant's glossy sap onto the slaves' small cuts. The long, burning lacerations were up to his mother to tend, and these she packed with clean cloths soaked in salted water.

 

Mario was six years old when he was freed, along with all of Cuba's slaves. The whole enterprise of carting humans across the Atlantic, breeding them, killing them, and starting over again had become an embarrassment to Spain. Even the Americans had washed their hands of the practice. Besides, the slave rebellions were becoming increasingly intolerable. “Just look at Haiti,” the landowners would say to one another, fear bubbling to the surface of their skin, nearly cracking that stoic, Spanish façade these men seemed to have perfected.

When the news of their freedom reached them at last, Ricardo ran around their hut, shouting for joy. Cuquita got down on her ancient knees and prayed to her gods, and Margarita held up Regla and Mario and twirled them around, both children crying out joyfully.

That very night, three men arrived at the hut looking for Ricardo. They were former slaves of the Requejo sugar plantation nearby. Mario could not remember their names, but swore he would recognize them anywhere, for one of the men had a scar on his scalp that ran from one ear to the other, parting his hair like a line on a map. Another was the tallest man Mario had ever seen. He'd had to duck to get into the hut, and the top of his head scraped the ceiling. The third man's ears were like two tiny seashells. At the time, Mario had wondered if he could hear at all.

They carried unlit torches in their hands, and machetes were tied to their waists with frayed rope.

“Tonight,” the one with the small ears said, “is for paying them back.”

Ricardo seemed to know at once what they meant. “Where will my family go afterwards? We cannot stay here.”

“East, hombre. To Oriente. There are safe places to stay along the way,” the very tall man said. His voice seemed to shake the very earth under their feet. Mario could not help himself—he crept closer to the giant man.

“Bueno. Pack light,” Ricardo said to the women in the house, and left with the men, arguing over who had the flint and which place might take light the quickest.

Margarita waited until Ricardo and the men were out of sight. “Say nothing,” she told Mario, handing the baby over to him. Then, she ran into the night, in the opposite direction from the one Ricardo had taken.

Mario stayed in the hut as he was commanded, feeding his baby sister a bottle of goat's milk, and listening to his grandmother tell a story in Yoruba, which he did not understand save for a word or two. A large crack, like a massive tree falling, caught his attention at one point, and when he threw open the door of the hut, he saw the plantation house in flames, bright tongues of fire licking at the windows on the eastern side of the home. On the west, the fire did not yet rage, but smoke, black and billowy, poured from the windows there. Whoever was inside, Mario knew, was trapped.

Mario could not have known then that one of those people was his mother.

It was Peregrino's deaf-mute daughter who told them, after the fire had consumed the entire house. She'd run into the woods, sooty-cheeked, her eyes wild, coughing and gagging when she saw Ricardo, Lidia, Cuquita, and the children hiding. Ricardo had meant for them to go east with the three men, but Margarita was nowhere to be found, so they waited for the conflagration to gut itself out in the hopes that she would appear. Peregrino's daughter threw her arms around Ricardo's neck and cried. When he peeled her off of him, she clutched his face and mouthed the word, “Perdón,” a few times before Ricardo understood. “Your wife,” she mouthed, and tears filled her eyes. The girl held her arms out to Regla, who thrust pudgy hands in the girl's direction. Now, their faces so close together, it was clear that the two were sisters. No one could mistake it.

“Margarita tried to warn you? About the fire?” Ricardo said slowly so that the girl could read his lips. She nodded, and nuzzled Regla's hair.

“She loved us,” the girl mouthed. Her bottom lip trembled and an odd, grunting sound escaped her, as if she were trying to say more.