The Distant Marvels (25 page)

“Why have you helped me?” I asked.

The woman studied me a moment longer. She drew a man's pocket watch from the waist of her skirt, eyed it, ducked her head out of the carriage and peered down the dusty road, then sat down again. “We have some time, I suppose,” she said, and then answered my question.

H
ave you ever heard of New York City?” she asked me.

I nodded. I'd, in fact, been in New York City, I told her, though I was in Lulu's womb at the time. She laughed at that, saying, “Then the city is in you. I knew I liked you.”

Then, I asked her if she'd ever been there. The woman laughed again. “Querida, I was born there.” When I raised an eyebrow, she twittered away in American-inflected English, and I stared at her as if she'd grown another head.

“My mother is from Madrid. My father is an Irishman from a place called Pittsburgh. Have you heard of that city?” I shook my head. “No matter,” she said, waving her delicate hand in front of her face. “I'm a journalist, and this war is the best thing that's ever happened to my profession,” she said.

My left hand rose to my lips as if it had a will of its own and stayed there. Who was this woman? She seemed to be delighting in our war with Spain, as if the events of the age were a gift just for her, tied with a ribbon to match the one on her hat, or an experiment to examine so that she might bask in her findings. I was quivering now, my fear replaced by anger. My rage grew molten, and tears came to eyes.

“Oh, now I've upset you,” she said, and drew an embroidered handkerchief from her purse. I took it and wiped my eyes, happy that the white cloth came away grimy. I hoped I had ruined it. “I'm on your side,” she said. “I may have been formed in a Spanish matrix, but my blood runs red, white, and blue, I promise you.”

Did she mean the Cuban flag, or the American one? I wasn't sure. Nothing made sense in the presence of this woman. Just that morning, I had been starving in a reconcentrado camp, and now I was riding in a leather-upholstered carriage, clutching a fine handkerchief, my mouth still slick with sugar.

“I am writing a report on Weyler's reconcentrado policy. My editor said I wouldn't be able to manage it. He said, and I quote, ‘If you get yourself executed by the Spanish, or eaten by one of those Cubans, don't come haunting me.' I told him you Cubans weren't cannibals as far as I could tell, and that I technically was a Spaniard, on my mother's side at least. My Spanish is better than good. I had you fooled, didn't I?”

Yes, fooled, I thought. I looked miserably out of the carriage windows. I jumped when she touched my knee. Her face was soft now, and her eyes had lost that intense stare. She was no longer observing me the way a hawk catches a mouse with her sight before she digs her talons into its back. She was just a woman now, and her brow was creased in worry.

“I haven't answered your question. I couldn't leave you there. You look so young to me. What are you, eighteen? Nineteen?”

“Fifteen,” I said, and she sighed and patted my leg again. “Let me take care of you. We'll say you're a novice nurse, sent to the field by your father, an uncompromising Cuban farmer from Santiago who swears allegiance to Spain. That should do. Just make sure to say, ‘Viva Cuba española,' every so often and you'll pass.”

I could feel my stomach roiling now, protesting the candy. Nausea filled my mouth with an iron taste, and I bit my tongue against it.

“Oh, is it so hard to pretend to support the Spanish? In your heart you are still a rebel,” she said.

“It isn't that,” I said, holding the back of my hand to my mouth.

“Are you really ill?” she asked, flattening herself against the back of her seat. “I've heard about the diseases that rage in the camps. Dysentery. Cholera. Diós mío, what's wrong with you?”

“Pregnant,” I said, choking, and then I really did vomit out the window. When I sat down again I felt better, and hungrier than ever.

Now it was her turn to be stunned into silence. She scanned me again with her hawkish eyes, lingering long on my midsection, counting full moons in her head, I'm sure. “We'll come up with a story for that, too,” she said at last.

We rumbled along without speaking, the woman's eyes locked onto me the entire ride, memorizing the look of me, I was certain of it. What words would she use to describe me, I wondered. Thin, I thought, looking at my elbows. Ordinary, I knew, thinking of the smooth planes of my face, the shape of which was more round than anything else, and of my hair the color of an old coffee stain, and my eyes just as watery and without depth.

After a while, she asked, “Who's the father?” I did not speak, because the words would not come. Thinking of Mario deflated me, and I thought if I spoke I would start crying. Already, I could feel my face tensing, growing ugly with the effort not to weep.

“No, no, you don't have to say,” she whispered, and I knew she was imagining some ugly moment for me in a dark, muddy bohío. A rape. Incest. It was all over her face—pity bordering on fear. She was writing the story even as I sat before her.

“I love him,” I said at last. “He's just a boy. A rebel. He's a hero and my husband,” I lied, and touched my stomach.

She smiled. “Have you thought of a name?” she asked.

It was a curious question, and not the first one I would ask of a girl in my position. “Name?” I repeated.

She nodded.

“Mario. Like his father. Mayito,” I said. It was the first time I'd given it any thought, and the name came unbidden, without thinking, really.

“That is sweet. And if it's a girl?”

“I don't know,” I said. Again, I hadn't given any of it much thought. Boy, girl, names, none of it seemed to matter while in La Cuchilla. But now, with the green Oriente hills outside, and the reverberation of the carriage wheels and clop of horse hooves, and in the hands of this capable woman, these things took on greater importance. “What's yours?” I asked.

“Blythe Quinn,” she said. “But they know me as Blanca Lora around here.” She winked at me. I told her I couldn't pronounce her real name anyway. Then, I told Blanca Lora my name, and she said it wouldn't do. “Carla Carvajál,” she dubbed me, and I nodded in approval.

“It's the name I'll use when I write your story.”

“Gracias,” I said.

Years later, the name Carla Carvajál would return to me in the haze of smoke when I told the cigar rollers my life cloaked as fiction. She was the author of the tale, I told them, as if it were all a fantasy. In my heart of hearts, I wished it really had been untrue.

A
s Blanca Lora promised, the others stayed far away from me, afraid that I'd caught some kind of jungle disease. Some of the nurses were Spanish, and for them the island represented a final frontier. They were the upstart daughters of wealthy families, unwilling to allow themselves to be married off, seeking their own paths in the world. Most of the nurses were Cuban-born, and sympathetic to the Spanish cause. They, too, were the kind of young women that did not fit the typical mold, who nurtured romantic natures (though of the monarchic kind). There were, at the time, parallel field hospitals in other places around the island, staffed by American and Cuban nurses, run by a woman named Clara Barton, who'd garnered some fame for herself as a wartime nurse and volunteer. Her name, among others, fell from Blanca Lora's lips as if she knew these people, and for a long time, I thought she regularly consorted with Theodore Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan and Fanny Brown.

Blanca regaled me with stories of New York City, but more than that, she asked questions. A thousand questions or more she put to me as I “rested” in a bed in a curtained corner of the field hospital. She wanted to know about La Cuchilla, of course, and whether I knew the names of the soldiers in charge of the place (I did not), and how many in the village had died (I wasn't sure. “Many” was my answer), and all about life in the tallér (which I described with such longing for those days that Blanca sobbed at my bedside and told me I was a born storyteller.)

Once I recovered, Blanca introduced me to the other nurses. My backstory as a Santiaguera with a rigid father was swallowed like a juicy bit of fruit, and when Blanca revealed my pregnancy, explaining that my condition was the product of a violent rape by a vengeful Cuban rebel, the others treated me like a glass figurine, giving me the smallest of jobs to do and bringing me food all of the time—buttered slices of bread, figs and a glass of milk, mashed bananas and rice—so that I fattened up quickly, my cheeks filling out in time with my belly.

Blanca's story had angered me, though. She'd applied a sensational gloss over the narrative my expanding body was telling, which was, in truth, one of love and devotion. How I missed Mario. And Lulu, too. At night, I dreamed they were with me at the field hospital, that we'd switched sides in the war and that Mario now spoke with a Spanish lisp. I would dream him up beside me, conjuring a vision so real and pleasurable that I would wake gasping and shuddering, afraid that the other nurses would notice the way love possessed me, even in the dead of night.

There was this, too: when Blanca spread the story of how I came to be in such a condition, more than one concerned nurse asked me, in tones hushed and deliberate because I was a creature to be pitied, whether my assailant was un negro, one of the dreaded mambíses, those machete-wielding warriors that the Spanish soldiers feared, the ones who threatened to take this paradise of a colony and turn it into another Africa.

“Sí,” I told them, and their faces would freeze, their worst fears confirmed. What was I to say? The baby would be born in a few months' time, and he would not be fair. He would be like Mario, and these women would loathe him for that.

Were they capable of hurting my baby? Of taking vengeance on my behalf? I thought so, though I also thought them gentle, especially when tending to the wounded soldiers. Their hands were like butterflies hovering over gashes and split skin. Their mouths made only shushing sounds, and some of them hummed softly, soothing hurt men the way infants are soothed, by filling their eardrums with a continuous sound, mimicking the rush of the womb.

Would they hurt my baby? I wasn't sure. They never referred to him as a baby. The child was “it” and “my complication,” and the head nurse, a woman named Andromeda, called him “the issue” with an arch of her eyebrows. Andromeda was aptly named, as there were constellations of moles up and down her arms, in strange patterns. So, I made plans to leave a month before the baby was due. My strategy was only to head back through Oriente province, in the hopes of stumbling upon another tallér somewhere.

I didn't tell Blanca Lora my plans. Anyhow, she had moved beyond me as her pet project. She would travel with medical units to the reconcentrado villages every chance she had.

“There isn't much we can do to help there,” she would report to me. “Everyone is starving. Medicine can't cure that. I'm heartsick over it, Carla,” she would say, having adopted my new name so fully I'm certain she forgot my real one. I was also certain that she wasn't as heartsick as she claimed. Each night, Blanca Lora would sit, poring over pages filled with figures that mimicked letters, but, upon inspection, were only squiggles and dashes. “Shorthand,” she told me once, as if I knew what she meant.

“Have you been back to La Cuchilla?” I asked her, desperate for news about Lulu and Mario. Underneath the palm of my hand, the baby squirmed, and I squeezed a little knob of flesh beneath my skin, felt the retreat of a tiny limb, then resistance again. The baby fought back each time I intruded in its space, and this filled me with joy.

“Yes.”

“Is it bad there?”

“It's bad in all the villages,” she said, then dropped her voice and covered her pages with her hands, “but this can't last. I overheard a captain saying that the Cubans had them retreating all over the island. The Spanish can't fight guerillas.”

“Freedom,” I said as if it were a prayer.

“This is what 1776 must have felt like back home,” Blanca Lora said with a smile, and I returned the grin, having no idea at all what she meant.

So, the days went, with Blanca Lora talking with me in whispers when she could, and that nurse, Andromeda, following me around the hospital, reprimanding me for bandaging a soldier's wound too tightly, or for sitting on the edge of an unoccupied bed when it felt as if my back would snap in two. Once, she eyed me for a long minute, then, asked, “Where are your parents from?”

“My father was born in the Canaries. My mother in Oriente Province,” I answered.

“Where are they now?” she asked.

“My father is dead,” I told her without thinking.

“I thought he was a landowner. I thought he sent you here to stay with us, to do your part for Spanish Cuba?”

“I meant my grandfather. My grandfather is dead,” I said lamely, keeping my eyes trained on the floor. Andromeda said nothing else, only reminded me to sweep the supply closet sooner rather than later, and to check the splint on a certain Lieutenant Torrejo two beds over.

Every few days, Andromeda would check my pulse and palpate my belly, her eyebrows forming a deep V of consternation. I would tolerate her touch only by counting her moles, which were countless. Sometimes, she spoke of “the issue” and what was to be done with it.

“I will raise him, of course,” I told her.

“Raise him,” she echoed me, but in that clipped way of speech that was solely hers. When she gave orders in the hospital, it was as if a telegram had come alive and was speaking, dropping articles and the flourishes of sentences. “Clean pans,” she would bark, and the other nurses would scurry, cleaning the pans with hands gone raw and cramped. Andromeda's speech. Blanca Lora's shorthand. I was living in a world of abruptness and efficiency, and so I should not have been surprised when my plan to slip away in the night, back towards Dos Ríos, in the hopes of finding a new tallér, amounted to nothing. The clock in the field hospital, it seemed, moved faster than anywhere else in the world, and my body responded in kind.