The Distant Marvels (3 page)

“¡Déjame!” I yell. My jaw aches as I speak, as if my body is tired of saying the word.

“I have my orders,” she says in a very deep voice. She sounds like a man. Somehow, she manages to get me into the life vest. “Get the old people to safety,” she goes on.

“I'm safe here,” I tell her.

“Only together can we be safe,” she says, and tugs on the straps of the vest hard, pulling the air out of my lungs.

“I'm not leaving my house,” I say, gripping the doorway.

“That's what they all think,” the soldier answers, grabs my wrists, and pulls me along. She is my height, but stronger than I ever was. Two thick veins crisscross on her forearms. Her damp skin gives off a lemony scent, and the fair hairs on her arms suggest vanity. This young woman douses herself in lemon to lighten her hair. I know. I once did that, too.

I follow, stumbling, freeing one hand at last and feeling in my pocket for the picture of Mayito. It is there, the frame's edge poking my thigh. She leads me to a bus filled with others, mainly solitary women my age. Where are all the men? Dead, I hear a voice say, and recognize it as my own, resounding in my head. Not newly dead, I think again, and can imagine the women suddenly, each in mourning, beside a grave. It is a bus full of widows. I look at them all in turn. I can tell, by the way they sit, that there are some women here I could never like. One, who has taken the first seat by the soldier, and has leaned over to whisper to her, seems too ambitious, as if she is ready to jump behind the wheel at any moment. Another, seated next to me, is busy chewing her thumb and staring out the window in terror. I've never liked fearful women. Yet I can tell we all have grief in common. There is that. Also, they all wear orange vests like mine. Where in the world have they found the vests? Did the soldier's commanding officer think a wave would wash the bus out to sea? I scan the horizon and look at the churning sea. There is one young woman among us. Her life vest rests under her feet, and she grinds her heels into it, as if she might punch through the thing. She has her head wrapped in a blue rag. I can see a slice of pale skin at the base of her skull, and it is clear she has no hair. A cancer patient, I think, and make a small cross in the air. Her countenance is angry. I have never seen such an angry face, and I can tell that she had wanted to drown in the storm, too.

I turn to take one last look at my house before the bus pulls away. At least the lemon-scented soldier managed to shut my front door. My house is the last stop, and I wonder if Ada tipped the government off about me.

Thunder booms fantastically, and a few of the women in the bus shriek. My heart pounds after the sound. Another flash of lightning comes on the heels of the first, followed by a sonorous crack of thunder. Again my heart beats wildly, and I rest my hand on my chest and watch the sky.

The soldier turns up the radio. On one station, they are playing Beny Moré's “Amor Sin Fe.” She turns the dial and finds another clear station, which is broadcasting bulletins about Hurricane Flora. The voice is tinny, but audible, and the soldier leaves the report on.

“Five thousand dead in Haiti,” a woman behind me says, parroting what we'd just heard the announcer say. “The eye is as big as all of Port-au-Prince,” she says, repeating again. The voice strikes me as familiar. I turn to look at the woman, and my breath catches. There sits Mireya Peña, who listens as if the reporter is sitting before her. Her hands reach out as if she could touch him, and her eyes are wide, the whites visible all around her gray irises. This one, I know, does not want to drown. “Twelve foot waves, Dios mío,” Mireya says, still replicating the announcer, when, finally, the young one with the cloth covering her head turns around and shouts, “¡Cállate!”

I am certain Mireya has noticed me, but she is pretending I am not here. She lives in Maisí, though I have not seen her this close in years. Whenever we spot one another in the market, we look away uneasily, each thinking, I'm sure, that she has bested the other in some unspoken duel. At times, my anger at Mireya runs molten. Mostly, I am filled with sadness at losing a dear friend.

There is silence. Then comes another boom of thunder that makes us all jump. The soldier turns the radio dial again, and this time finds another Moré song, “Hoy Como Ayer.” She punches the radio once more, and there is old Beny again, singing “Como Fue.” Moré died that February, and all the stations pay him tribute by playing his songs for much of the day. With a savage punch, the soldier turns the radio off, and we listen to one another's breathing, and the thunder diminishing as we drive inland.

I can imagine the kind of music the soldier wants to listen to. Ada's grandsons have records of The Beatles that they used to play incessantly on her suitcase record player whenever they visited. I would sing along to “Love, love me do” when the wind carried the song to me. But The Beatles' music was banned by the government, deemed antirevolutionary earlier this year, and I have not heard a single note coming from Ada's house since. The soldier seems young enough, and bold enough, to prefer forbidden music to those dusty Beny Moré songs, in spite of her uniform. I can see rebellion in the way she grips the steering wheel, her knuckles white, and the way her thumb taps the stick shift, as if she were listening to a secret song in her head. There is frustration written all over her, and suddenly, the young soldier becomes very dear to me. I think, let her take me to safety, and I close my eyes.

Just then, as a reward for the thought, the pain in my stomach flares, and I have to press my fist against it for a long time until the feeling passes.

“Where are we going, huh?” the bald woman asks loudly.

“Casa Velázquez,” the soldier answers quietly. “You're the last group to be evacuated.” She wipes her brow with the back of her hand. “Maisí is in the middle of nowhere,” she says. “I don't know how you can live in that backwater.”

“It's on the edge of everything,” I say, defending the little town that I've called home for so long. It was the first thing that came to mind, and for a moment I regret opening my mouth. But the soldier shrugs, and then, the women around me seem to relax. Some of them nod at me.

“Good one,” the young woman says to me, and for the first time, she, too, seems to relax. She rests against her seatback finally, sneaks a long finger between the rag and her skull, and scratches her head.

I
have a perfect memory. I remember nearly everything I've ever read or heard. When we pull up to Casa Velázquez, I know what it looks like on the inside, though I've never crossed the threshold of that place. I feel a cold wisp of air on my neck. The soldier has opened the bus doors, and I feel that the temperature outside has dipped considerably. Yet I can't help thinking that Agustín's ghost has touched me. I rise, stretch, and climb out of the bus. I feel my father's cold palm lying still against my throat.

Casa Velázquez is the oldest house in the island. The first Cuban governor, the Spanish conquerer Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, was the home's resident, back in the sixteenth century. By the time he founded Santiago de Cuba, Velázquez had already sailed with Columbus, seen the deaths of a thousand Indians, and set his dark, Spanish eyes on the Mayans across the sea. In this house, he'd drunk tea and thought of gold and conquest, while all of Europe buzzed with the news that there was more to the earth, so much more. These days, the house is being converted into a museum of colonial history. The soldier lines us up in front of the building, the massive stone wall blocking the wind that has picked up again. Some of the women have thought to bring suitcases with them, and these bulge like overstuffed pillows in their arms and at their feet. I have nothing but Mayito's picture in my pocket.

As we enter I am struck silent with the force of my father's memory. He spent time in Casa Velázquez as a child. My grandmother, Inconsolada, served as governess in the grand house. Here are the painted scrolls along the walls. I squint at them, and see the faces he described. “Like furry demons,” he'd said, and I see them, too, the patterns rising out of remembrance. We walk in single file past enormous mahogany shutters with a thousand Moorish cutouts in them. “Like a prison,” Agustín would tell me, then show me the scars around his ankle, from the time the mayor's eldest son had tried to use the shutters as a stockade, forcing my father's wrists and ankles into those cutouts and leaving him there, dangling, for the better part of an afternoon.

We are led in silence through room after room. In one place, I look up and see archways made of stained glass, above a set of dark shutters. Light pours in through them, and we step in rainbow puddles on the floor. Where in the world is the light coming from? Clouds have obscured the sun for hours.

“Wait here,” the soldier tells us, and walks through another door, which she props open with a brick someone has left on the floor for that purpose. I can hear her talking to someone. Beyond that are the weary murmurs of others. Another round of lightning and thunder come, darkening the room. The colors fade from the floor, and at once, I hear wailing, and dozens of voices singing,
oba 'ye oba yana yana
. I don't understand the words, but I understand the fear behind them. When the lightning flares again, and the room is bright for a second, they sing more loudly.
OBA 'YE OBA YANA YANA
. Somewhere, women are screaming. A baby in a diaper and bare feet clings to a long, cotton skirt. It raises thin ochre arms, hoping to be picked up. Hibiscus flowers, red and yellow, swirl on the ground, flapping like fish out of water. I hear a man's voice saying,
Por Dios, the storm is coming
, and then, more singing
.
I look to the open door through which our soldier has disappeared, and I see people laughing, raising crystal goblets to their lips, unafraid of the weather.

“Oye,” I hear very close to me. “Oye, are you okay?” It's the bald woman. She is clutching my chin and shaking my face. “Wake up. I'll go get help, but first wake up for me.”

I open my eyes, and the first thing I notice is that my hand is at my stomach again, and that my fingers ache from the pressure I've been putting on myself. The woman sees my hand. She pushes it away roughly, pats my stomach, and I wince. Only then do her eyes soften when she looks at me, as if I am an old friend, someone she has not recognized until just now.

“Where are they?” I ask her.

“Who?”

“The people singing. It was another language. They were afraid,” I say, looking around. The old women are all staring at me in silence. Wary-eyed, they seem to fear me more than the storm. I cannot blame them. I would not want to ride out a hurricane with a crazy person either.

“In here, all of you,” the soldier says from the doorway. The women start to file in.

“Up you go,” the woman at my side says to me, holding out her hand. I feel strange, like a person whose heart stops for a moment before she is revived, as if I've been somewhere else for a while. Standing brings clarity. The chanting was a memory that didn't belong to me, but to my father.

“Me llamo María Sirena,” I say, wanting to normalize this moment a little, keep the color from flooding my whole face.

“Susana Soto,” she says in return. “Come on, they're leaving us behind.”

I follow Susana through the heavy door. The soldier is giving us a bored look, as if she can't wait for this storm to start and do some real damage. I think again that she must be very young. Children always get excited about hurricanes. While their parents flutter about wildly, covering windows in wood and cardboard, children gaze longingly through the gaps in the shutters and see pictures in the shadowy clouds. I remember Beatríz during a small storm, how she escaped Gilberto's grasp and ran outside, her mouth open, her tongue catching raindrops that whipped her little face and left red marks on her cheeks. The soldier reminds me of Beatríz just now. I catch her looking out the window, chewing her lower lip in anticipation, just before she shuts the door behind us.

Though the door is heavy and unwieldy, it clicks closed softly, the sound like a rumor of the past. The clatter of the rain is muted, and the thunder sounds far away, though I know the lightning strikes are close by.

Our soldier speaks. “Huracán Flora is expected to hit land by midnight. Orders are to stay here in Casa Velázquez until the entire storm passes Cuba.” She looks at us all in turn as she speaks in that deep voice. She commands the room, and I feel another surge of affection for this girl. There is something familiar about her I cannot place.

“Yes, you,” she says, pointing firmly at the nervous woman with her arm raised. Her name, I've learned, is Asela.

“Are we safe here?” Asela asks tremulously. Her arm comes down slowly as she speaks, and she clutches at her throat.

“Perfectly,” the soldier says. She takes a deep breath, and I can tell she's ready to launch into something.

“Can you name another country in all the world that would allow commonplace women like us to take shelter in a national treasure such as this house?” our soldier asks proudly. Her back is straight, making her breasts seem larger. There is a gleam in her eye, as if she were trying to seduce all of us.

“Not one,” she says. She turns around and lifts a very thin porcelain dish from a cabinet behind her that is missing its glass pane. “Eleventh century,” she says, fingering the delicate green flowers on the edge of the plate. At its center is a dragon curling in on itself, its mouth touching its tail. “Very old Chinese ceramic,” she says. “Perhaps Marco Polo himself brought it to Europe. From Spain it came here, maybe?” she suggests, then places the plate in Asela's trembling hands. “Here, to rest in your hands, compañera.”

Asela pushes the plate away. “No, it costs too much. What if it breaks?” she asks. Around her, some of the other women eye the plate, and the cabinet full of others like it, with interest. I notice Mireya looking at me with the gaze of a hawk. When I meet the stare, she turns to look at the plate. My stomach hurts again at the noiseless confrontation with her.