The Distant Marvels (17 page)

Mario remembered the fury in his father's eyes most clearly, how that fury turned to tears, and how his face reshaped itself into a grimace. “Keep the baby,” he said to Peregrino's daughter. “She's none of mine.”

“No, Papá!” Mario cried, tugging on his father's arms, which had gone limp.

“You must choose, Mario,” Ricardo said, his voice flat, his lip curled as if he'd tasted something that had gone sour. “Stay with the women, or come with me.”

In the end, Mario chose his father, who did not even give him a chance to kiss his grandmothers or his sister goodbye, or to weep for his mother. They wailed in the woods, left behind with Peregrino's daughter, who joined the chorus of cries after a while, grunting like an animal, which was all she could do. Soon, Mario and Ricardo, heading east as planned, could no longer hear them.

N
o puedo mas,” Mireya says, standing and marching to the door. She wiggles the handle and finds that we are locked in. She pounds the wood, shouting, “Let me out! I can't stand another moment!”

Of my stories? I wonder. Or of this confinement?

“Why is the door locked?” Susana asks, and joins Mireya, twisting the crystal knob hard. Then, she too starts knocking on the door.

Soon, a few other women have begun shouting, including Rosalia, who squeaks, “¡Auxilio!” as if she's being physically hurt.

It looks as if Dulce is struggling to control her breathing, so I sit beside her. Estrella runs to the window, throws it open, and starts to shout, “They've locked us in!” She does this for a bit, then stops midsentence. “I don't see anyone outside,” she says in a small voice.

Celia fishes a piece of paper and a pen from her purse, scribbles a note on the paper, and slides it under the door. Then, she sits very quietly on the bed and closes her eyes, her lips moving a little.

“What if they've all left? What if they've locked up the house and forgotten us?” Dulce is asking me, and I am telling her, no, this is not possible. I tell her to listen carefully. There are the sounds of wood creaking, and pipes knocking.

“Casa Velázquez is full of people,” I say. I imagine this place back when it was new, and the ladies of the house walked about in full skirts that swept the floors. I imagine that the sound of lapping water outside is actually the noise their dresses must have made against the floors and walls.

Mireya is jamming a hairpin into the lock of the door, while Susana, pale all of a sudden, sits down on the floor and clamps a hand over her mouth.

Finally, the doorknob turns, and Ofelia pushes her way inside.

“You've locked us in,” Mireya yells at her, jabbing a thick finger into Ofelia's shoulder. Fear washes over the soldier's face for a moment, but is then replaced by anger.

“Of course I locked the door,” Ofelia says, her voice booming. The women take a step away from her. “There are looters in Santiago. It was for your safety.”

“The Marco Polo dishes?” Estrella asks.

“Gone,” Ofelia says. “As are the Tiffany lamps that were in the dining room downstairs. Animals, I tell you. The country is overrun with animals.” She runs her hands through her curly hair.

“They didn't get these!” Estrella says, her laughter a bark as she holds up two of the dishes from the dining room.

Ofelia smiles, her shoulders relaxing a moment when, suddenly, a gun goes off on the floor beneath us. Ofelia spins and leaves, closing the door and locking it behind her. We hear two more shots before there is silence. The fearsome noise has set a few of the women to weeping, and all but Mireya have pulled away from the door and huddled in the corners of the room. But Mireya continues to slam her fist into the wood, shouting for someone to let her out.

“Please, calm down,” Susana is saying.

Mireya begins to kick the door, and when her shoe goes flying off her foot, she pounds the door with a calloused heel.

“Stop it, just stop!” Rosalia says, shuffling towards Mireya. “Get away from the door, you could be shot.” Rosalia tugs at Mireya's arm.

“Miren,” Estrella says, and opens her purse to reveal a series of small photo albums with pictures of her twin sons in them. “A distraction,” she says, handing the albums out to the women. Her boys are dark-haired and pout-lipped, with curls atop their heads like little rooster combs. “They're fifty-three years old now, can you imagine? You all must have pictures, yes? Let's see them. Come, come,” Estrella says, and she points at our purses.

“I have some, too,” Celia says. “Just a few I could grab at the last minute.” She shares photos of her own twin boys. Suddenly, Estrella and Celia are talking animatedly about things the rest of us don't understand. “The boys grew up together,” Celia explains when we ask. “Four boys, two sets of twins, all living on the same street in Maisí.”

How hadn't I noticed the two of them, Estrella and Celia, clearly old friends? I look at Mireya and wish I could turn back the clock, reverse the damage done to our friendship. It would be good, I think, to have a dear friend in this place.

Now, more of the women are sharing photographs. The little frame with Mayito's picture stays in my pocket. I finger it gently and close my eyes, remembering my own little boy, and the way his tiny fingers curled around my thumb.

I overhear Susana describing a picture she is holding. “My great-uncle,” she says. “He died laughing.”

“Lucky man,” Rosalia says, and then giggles herself.

“Mireya, you must have a picture or two in this giant purse of yours,” Dulce says, tugging at the straps of Mireya's bag.

Mireya leaves the door at last, opens her purse, and pulls out a yellow envelope, fat with photographs.

The pictures are going from hand to hand, and I hold each of them. Here are Celia's twin boys—one blond, one dark, both with narrow eyes set close together, so that they appear to be conspiring some strange deed. Here are Dulce's grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all sitting about the Malecón in Havana, a stiff breeze blowing their curls. I ponder the frozen motion of it, the gravity-defying trickery of a camera lens, before Susana snatches the photograph away and another lands in my hands.

This one is of Alejandro. It is a professional portrait of a young man in a suit, his face made smooth and glowing by the camera's soft focus. He peers to the left of the lens, his red lips parted just a touch, his long fingers folded together in his lap. This was the boy my Beatríz loved, ten years before he died. I run my thumb over his face.

“Don't you dare,” Mireya says, startling me. Then she takes the picture from me, shouting, “Your fault! Your fault my Alejandro is gone from this world!” She shoves me hard in the shoulder. I start to take one of my slippers off, thinking to strike her with it, the way mothers spank children when they've pushed their limits of patience.

“What's wrong with you?” Susana says, holding Mireya back. Mireya falls to the floor, sobbing.

I join her on the floor and wrap my arms around my old friend. “I don't know what you mean,” I whisper to her. “I don't know what I've done to hurt you.”

Mireya looks up at me with distant eyes, so red and swollen that I think that she has not felt any joy in a very long time, and I am awash with sympathy. We are alike, so very alike, I think for the first time, and feel my eyes filling with tears too.

Mireya is about to say something when Ofelia returns to us. Her hands are trembling, and her hair is wild, as if she has been running her fingers through it again and again. Her eyeliner is smeared and her pale lipstick is long gone. She no longer looks like a woman of the times, but like the pictures of ancient Egyptians in books and museums—dark-eyed and haunted.

“What happened?” Rosalia asks.

“We caught someone shooting at an ibis that had perched on a windowsill. He could have killed someone,” she says.

“Ay,” Dulce says, crossing herself.

“He's just a boy,” she says, still trembling and damp. “He's been arrested.” She pauses again, looking off into the distance. When she speaks again, it is as if she is talking to herself. “Skinny, shirtless boy. Using a military issue gun, too. God knows where he—” Ofelia says, but her gaze falls upon Mireya and me on the floor. In an instant she composes herself and is all action again.

“Ven conmigo,” she says to Mireya.

Mireya shakes her head. “No, it's fine. I just wanted the door unlocked. I'm better now.”

Ofelia rubs her eyes, kneeling beside Mireya. “I need to make sure we don't have any leaks. I could use the help,” Ofelia says.

“Bueno,” Mireya says, and allows herself to be helped to her feet. Ofelia struggles a bit until Estrella offers a hand. Then, Ofelia ushers Mireya out the door. Mireya has left Alejandro's portrait behind, and I tuck it into my pocket to sit with Mayito's frame. Our two lost boys, I think, will keep each other company.

Susana helps me to a seat next to Dulce again, who is toying with her painted fan again. Even though she keeps her watery eyes trained on her fan, she speaks to me softly, and I can feel my nerves calming as she talks. “I am sorry that bad things have happened and are happening to you.”

“I'm fine—”

“There is no cosmic justice. This is just life, me entiendes?” I take Dulce's papery hand in mine and squeeze a little. Perhaps she is right, that there is no reason to suffering, no fair dealing when it comes to meting out bliss and pain. There are just choices, and the echoes of those choices.

The photos go around until they have returned to their owners. They are put away carefully, tenderly.

“We never saw any of your photos,” Celia says to me.

“I didn't bring them,” I tell her, adjusting my dress.

Celia's brow furrows, and she opens her mouth to say something when Dulce interrupts her. “Tell your story, María Sirena. Go on.”

When I resume the story, the women fall quiet, and I think that my voice has come to resemble the sound the rain makes—a feature of the current landscape, broken up by passing flashes of light by which we see more clearly.

M
y mother's recovery from the fever went quickly, and the months since Agustín left us at the tallér came tumbling by like river water. Not all of those days were unhappy. Every woman and child there had a role to play. Lulu took charge of the children's schooling, and she taught the little ones to read and write and to manipulate numbers, the older ones to recite poetry and compose clear letters. We also learned how to polish and sharpen machetes, and how to clean rifles and pistols. We kept a small garden and raised chickens and goats. In the shadows of that rich valley, the tallér was a secret place, the kind of green and lush corner of the world one read about in books, where duendes and adas flitted inside flower blossoms, granting wishes.

As for Mario, his fingers were meant for weapons. Dulled machetes became deadly again in his hands. His father, Captain Ricardo Betancourt, helped Mario set up a smithy during one of his return trips and taught the boy simple blacksmithing. The tools the captain brought with him all bore Spanish insignias, and he'd laughed, saying that at least one Spanish cavalry unit would have to go without equipment.

As Mario worked in that furnace of a place, Marcela and Graciela, the twins, would loiter to watch, sweat collecting on their upper lips and under their arms. It was worth it, they'd said to me, to watch the boy work, shirtless, whistling as he labored.

“What are you talking about?” I'd asked them.

“Don't be stupid,” Graciela said. She was the rough-tongued one, often in trouble for cursing. “He's a beautiful specimen.”

“There's no one else worth looking at,” Marcela added. They were sixteen that summer, and had outgrown their girl-sized dresses. Graciela had become, overnight, all hips. And Marcela, who was her fraternal twin, was all chest. I'd overheard one of the boys say that each was half a woman. I'd blushed and run away from the conversation, understanding what the boy meant. I didn't need to learn about sex from the older children, or at least not the mechanics of it. My mother had shared her bed with Julio Reyes for years while I had tried very hard to sleep. And yet, discussions about boys among the girls in the tallér suddenly gathered a different meaning. Bodies became something I noticed—who was hairy, who was fit or fat, whose hand I wanted to hold.

To hear the twins talk about Mario in this way, to know that they dreamed of doing things with him in the dark, caused a curious feeling in me. I was unsettled around the girls. Once, I pulled a chair out from under Graciela just as she was about to sit down. She rose and slapped me hard for the prank. When her mother asked me why I did it, I could only shrug. I had no idea myself. I would try to make it up to the twins by picking flowers for them, or offering to braid their hair, but then I'd see them eyeing Mario and it was like a small furnace had been lit in my chest, and I'd pull their hair too hard while I braided, yanking out a strand at a time until I was slapped again.

Lulu arched her eyebrows at the twins whenever she saw them sweaty and breathless, returning from a trip to Mario's smithy. “Have some pride,” she'd said to them once in the middle of a history lesson, when she'd caught the twins writing their names alongside Mario's, encasing their fine calligraphy inside hearts.

It all ended when their mother, Bernarda, learned what the girls had been up to. “¿Un negro?” she'd shouted again and again, her voice growing shriller each time. She'd dragged Marcela and Graciela away by the hair, a twin in each hand, and we could all hear how she beat them, and how they screamed, “¡No, mamá!”

Later, the women would sit down with Bernarda and reprimand her. They would say that the spirit of the revolution was one of equality, that Mario was one of them, despite his color. But when Bernarda turned on them, saying, “What if one of your children took up with a negro? I don't believe you'd be so idealistic then,” the others said nothing.