House Arrest

by Mary Morris

  BY MARY MORRIS

  Vanishing Animals and Other Stories

  Crossroads

  The Bus of Dreams

  Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone

  The Waiting Room

  Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail

  A Mother’s Love

  House Arrest

  PUBLISHED BY NAN A. TALESE

  an imprint of Doubleday

  a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  DOUBLEDAY is a trademark of Doubleday, a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  Although this book contains material from the world in which we live, the characters, the places, and the events are all fiction. All dialogue is invented. Isabel, her family, the inhabitants, and even la isla itself are creations of the author’s imagination.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morris, Mary, 1947–

  House arrest / Mary Morris. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Detention of persons—Caribbean Area—Fiction.

  2. Women—Caribbean Area—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.087445H68 1996

  813′.54—dc20 95-36182

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80996-4

  Copyright © 1996 by Mary Morris

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  This book is for Cristina Garcia, Mark Rudman, and Dani Shapiro, friends who told me it was there and who showed me the way. And to the memory of Jerome Badanes, mentor and friend.

  With special thanks to Amanda Urban and Nan A. Talese for all their efforts and support, to Sloan Harris, Jesse Cohen, Diane Marcus, Sol H. Morris for his insightful comments, and, of course, as always, to Larry and Kate for everything.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  About the Author

  “For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat—hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plants (those hours we protest so loudly) which protect us so well from the pain of being alone.”

  —ALBERT CAMUS

  “Will you only let me go? You see, sir … traveling is a hard life, but I couldn’t live without it.”

  —FRANZ KAFKA, The Metamorphosis

  One

  THERE ARE NO BIRDS on la isla. Isabel told me the first time I came here. If you walk down a country road, there is no flutter of wings, no morning chirps. Deep in the forests and in the swamps, you can still find the trogon, the emerald hummingbird, the pygmy owl, but not near the towns. This is because the people have eaten them all. In the cities there are no pigeons picking at crumbs because there are no crumbs.

  There used to be all kinds of birds in the Zoológico Antiguo—rare blue macaws, ruby-throated finches, giant-crested cockatoos. But the looters ate them. They ate the giraffe as well. It is not difficult to see that the people are starving. They have eaten their cats. Their horses too. But they draw the line at dogs. They think that if they eat their dogs, they will eat their children next.

  Sometimes they put the dogs to sleep, but mostly they just let them go. Of course, the dogs don’t want to go so the people get on buses and ride with them out of town where they hurl them from the windows. On the outskirts of the city, you can see dogs chasing after buses for miles. This is what this country has become, Isabel said, a pack of desperate, starving dogs.

  I saw them myself the last time I was here—mutts mostly, but some still with their collars on. They run in feral packs, digging in garbage where almost nothing is thrown out. Everywhere you see the dogs. They roam, scrawny, tails between their legs, through Ciudad del Caballo, the City of the Horse.

  Once this ancient city of viceroys and buccaneers, of cobblestone streets and stone citadels, was called Puerto Angélico, named by the Spanish five hundred years ago because of the way the harbor shaped itself into an angel’s wings. But with the victory three decades ago they renamed it for the leader whom they have long called the Horse.

  Isabel joked with me that he is the only horse left. He is proud, fast, strong, but with blinders on. She told me that he would run back to his burning barn. In the end, she said, horses are not that smart.

  Of course it is Isabel I think of as I sit in this room. Not that I have stopped thinking about her for these past two years. I think of her as the shadow that cast itself over my life. I have asked myself many times how it is possible that someone I knew so briefly could have come to occupy so much space. Yet she has assumed the weight of memory. I can still see her clearly. Her bone-thin body, her breasts, the small craters they left in the sand.

  My name is Maggie Conover and I am thirty-six years old. I have lived a fairly ordinary life—a childhood in upstate New York, the same marriage and job for the last ten years. Yet for reasons that I cannot understand I have found myself at times in circumstances that others would consider to be extraordinary. This is one of those times. I am writing this down now because I do not know if my story will otherwise be told. I do not know if anyone will know where I have been or what has become of me.

  Except for the plastic chairs, the room where they have asked me to wait is small, empty, and white. A wall of blue doors stretches ahead of me, and beyond these doors the officials sit, though most have gone home now. They must know it is cold in this lounge where the air conditioner blasts above my head. It is loud and makes a rattling sound as if a screw is loose inside as it spews cold air on me. If Todd were here, he’d probably try to fix it. He’d tap its side, at least figure out what was wrong. I wish I knew how to do things with my hands. All I can do now is run them up and down my sides while I try to get warm.

  The customs officials—both men and women—wear olive green. Olive green combat uniforms, camouflage shirts, stretch pants. Though there’s no war, it’s all standard-issue military gear. Only a few of the guards stand by with guns but one ambles back and forth, carrying his machine gun
like a lunch box. Occasionally they glance my way. When they whisper, I try to imagine what they are saying. Do they think I am pathetic, like a child being punished in the hall? Do they think I am a spy? Do they want to buy my khaki pants?

  Just a few hours ago I stepped on the tarmac, into the sultry night. The air was warm and smelled of citrus and the sea. The line in which I stood moved swiftly and the tourists with their jackets and sweaters draped across their arms were all excited, ready to have a good time. Soon I was smiling at the young immigration officer with the dark hair and he smiled back.

  Then he glanced at my passport, fondling it as if he’d never seen one before. He studied its number, flipping through the pages of stamps. He stared at my picture, then back at me. It is an old passport, due for renewal in June, so perhaps I don’t look the way I did when I was twenty-six. Perhaps I looked better then.

  The young man seemed to hesitate, unsure of what to do. Behind me a man put down his carry-on, a woman sighed. There was a shuffling of feet as the line of travelers pressed against my back. Then the young immigration officer picked up the phone. “Un momentito,” he told me. He spoke softly with his lips close to the receiver, as if he were arranging to meet someone in a secret place. Then, looking up at me, his brown eyes tinged with regret, he asked me to step aside.

  So I did. I stepped aside as flights came through from Brussels and Berlin, from Cancún and Moscow. I waited as elegant tourists and shabby tourists and tourists in safari clothes with video cameras breezed through customs. A few times I tried to ask for an explanation, but the immigration officer told me to be patient because he was awaiting a phone call. A formality, he assured me, though already I suspected something wasn’t right. “Un ratito,” he said, shaping his fingers into the equivalent of an inch.

  At first I was not the only one waiting. A man with a beard played video games on his laptop. I glimpsed at his screen as a gobbling creature chased a mouse around. He had a visa problem too. So did the older gentleman in the gray fedora. A married couple with a wailing baby had been waiting for hours. But soon they let the others go.

  The man with the laptop gave me a little salute as he left. “They never get it right,” he said. He was an amiable enough person, a gringo who lives on la isla. He works in import-export, but he didn’t say of what. The husband of the couple with a small child in tears paced, and I could tell his case was cause for some concern. For hours their relatives stood on the other side of the partition, faces pressed to the glass, waving, pleading.

  At last, with one sweep of the hand, they were allowed to pass to the other side, where they fell into the arms of weeping grandparents, patient friends. The older man with the fedora sat with a resigned look on his face, but eventually he too was let through. A late flight from Jamaica arrived and the tourists, some wearing dreadlocks and carrying musical instruments, were quickly processed. Then the doors of the airport were locked and I was left alone in the cold room.

  Next they took things from me. My camera, my tape recorder, my ticket home. They already had my passport. For hours now I have watched officials, shuffling papers, moving about. Rubbing my arms, I try to determine what had gotten me into this predicament. At first I assumed it had something to do with the update I did the last time I was here.

  It is true that I traveled on a tourist’s visa, but then I always do. I wrote a soft piece by anyone’s standards, describing buildings in disrepair, rubble on the boardwalk. I poked fun at the show at the Club Tropical—the women in their trailing boas and tutus whose sequins flew off as men in toreador pants twirled them. I mentioned prison terms for those who insult the regime, but I spoke of no dissidents, revealed no state secrets.

  Recalling all of this, it occurs to me that I am not sitting in this room because of the guidebook I wrote. I am here because of Isabel. I suppose the mistake I made was listening to Manuel and letting him offer to have me meet her in the first place. I should not have listened to Manuel and I should not have made contact with Isabel, though our first meeting was (or so I still want to believe) coincidental. And then once I made contact—once I understood who she was and what she wanted—I should have stayed away.

  Probably I should not have come back at all. Lydia, my sister, told me not to come. Astrologically, the signs were inauspicious from the start. She warned me that the alignment of the stars on the day of my departure was the same as it had been the night of the Playa Negrita invasion. She called me at one in the morning to tell me this. “I looked it up for you,” she said as Todd lay beside me, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Just last week Lydia and I stood on the banks of a frozen Hudson River, where we found shredded pieces of a Bible. Bits of Psalms, the Book of Job fluttered in the wind, stuck to the snow. I picked up a torn and burned fragment and read her these words: “Ye shall travel to a distant land and will find nothing there and ye shall not return.”

  I’d laughed because it was a joke, but Lydia has never had much of a sense of humor. She foresees bad whereas I see good. Not good naively, but I just don’t expect bad things will happen the way Lydia does. She has a grim view, and at times I wonder how it is possible we came from the same family. In her more cryptic moments, Lydia says we did not. “You take things too seriously, Lyd,” I told her. That was the last thing I said to her before I left.

  I’ve never had an airport all to myself before The quiet is unsettling. Airports are noisy places, filled with the bustle of comings and goings. But here there are only distant sounds—music, voices, footsteps. A television is on somewhere inside. I can hear a generic announcer’s voice, shouting when a team scores, giving the play-by-play. The men in the back give brief cheers, break out in laughs.

  The airport maintenance people arrive to wash the windows, scrub the floor. With squeegees the men rub the windows clean, making sweeping motions. They are meticulous in their task, careful to get every spot. I am impressed with their work as they reach high into the corners, coming down straight. No drips. Then they sweep the floor, making sure to get under my feet. Politely they ask me to raise my bags to the seat, which I do.

  When the maintenance people leave, they lock the doors. For a long time I don’t see anybody. There are things I would like to ask for. My head is throbbing but I have no water to take some aspirin. In the hours I’ve been sitting in this hard, plastic chair I’ve begun to have a longing for simple things—a bed, a home-cooked meal.

  There is an art to keeping people waiting, and these bureaucrats have perfected it. It is nothing like keeping someone waiting in a doctor’s office or at a bus stop. Because you know that eventually the doctor will take you, the bus will come. And I know that sooner or later they will explain to me what the problem is. But it feels as if they could keep me here forever, as if they have nothing but time.

  In the middle of the night I am escorted into a small office where the colonel who is now overseeing my situation explains that they are trying to decide what to do with me. He is an unpleasant man with dead eyes. Eyes that never look anyone in the face. Eyes set on the paper in front of him. He has the kind of eyes that make you understand that one human being can actually pull out the fingernails of another.

  He will not explain the problem, but refers to it as my “case.” He says that they are looking into my case, never taking his gaze off the floor. He informs me that it is the decision of the head of customs that I will not be allowed entry into this country. He says that this has not been up to him. It comes from a place much higher up. I will be returned, he tells me, to my port of embarkation when the next flight leaves.

  “And when will that be?” I ask in my best Spanish, my voice trembling. Though he will not look at me, I stare at his face. He has smooth skin, the color of olive oil, and his lips are fine and red. Perhaps if I cry, he will take pity on me. Or perhaps he won’t.

  “In six days, but we will make every effort to expedite your departure.”

  “And what will I do until my flight leaves?”
r />   He shrugs. “That is being decided.”

  “Can you at least tell me what the problem is, sir?” I add sir, hoping this will make him think I am respectful and polite.

  “No,” he says, “I cannot.” He suggests I take it up with their embassy when I am returned to my place of origin. I am surprised by this construction. One thinks of oneself as returning, but not of being returned. Lost keys, stray dogs, bodies are returned.

  “Are you a journalist?” he asks.

  “No,” I tell him, “I am not a journalist.” Of course, I am a journalist, of sorts. But I am not the kind that they should concern themselves with. A technicality that happens to be true, though probably they would consider it a lie.

  By profession, I do updates for travel guides. Often my updates take me to places where travelers’ advisories are in effect. But the travelers’ advisory has been in effect here for almost three decades, and it is the belief of my editors at Easy Rider Guides, the aging-hippie travel-guide service for which I work, that la isla, as the people who live here call it, will be opening up soon.

  I’ve had my share of dubious assignments. Paying my dues, Kurt, my editor, calls it. I’ve wined and dined my way through the Czech Republic, feasting on potato stew. When the couple sent the postcard from Honduras to say that the ferry from La Ceiba to Roatán hadn’t run in years, I was the one who was sent to find the rotting dock on the mosquito-infested coast to verify that, indeed, the ferry hadn’t run in years. I did a five-day stint in Haiti last year (where I would have been happy to have never left the hotel) because my editor told me, You’ll see, any day now, Haiti will be opening up too. All I saw were shantytowns, open sewers, and naked children playing in mud.

  Certainly a country that is trying to promote its tourist industry shouldn’t be detaining a woman who updates travel guides. If they’d just let me explain, they’d know how foolish this is. I could show them the checklist I have in my bag. I have to confirm that you can eat for under five dollars at El Colibrí or fly to Cayo Grande for twelve dollars. I have to rent a car and drive from one end of the island to the other and note all the places where you can use a coupon and get some gas, where you can buy a cheese sandwich.