House Arrest

by Mary Morris

  He shrugs. “Who knows? It could be because of anything,” he says.

  Manuel and I make a plan. He will return the next evening and have dinner with me. In the meantime he will try to talk with some people to see if this can’t be cleared up. I ask him if I should contact Rosalba and he presses his lips together. “Let me think about that,” he says. “We’ll figure a way out of this mess.”

  He kisses me on the cheek when he leaves, pressing my hand. “You still look great, baby; you really do.”

  “Have you … have you heard from her?” I gather the nerve to ask him after all.

  “Oh, sure, from time to time. You know, messages get through. She’s fine. She’s living in Spain.”

  “Spain?”

  “Yes. She likes it there.”

  I go back upstairs to my room and try Todd again. He answers on the first ring. I can’t talk, I tell him, but try to understand. The weather is not good, the climate is bad. If I can, I’m going to Jamaica.

  “Is the weather any better there?” he asks. Then he pauses as if something has just occurred to him. “Maggie, are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. Or at least I think I am.”

  He clears his throat the way Todd does when he’s starting to get concerned. “What does that mean? Is there some kind of trouble? Is something wrong?”

  “I can’t tell you now. I wish I could …” I think maybe I will tell him, but there is a loud crackling sound and the line goes dead.

  Seven

  I IMAGINE Isabel writing from a village in Spain: On the island where I come from, we have the smallest beasts. A frog that will rest on your fingernail. A mammal no bigger than a thimble that looks like a shrew. The pygmy owl a child can cup in his fist. And the zunzuncito, the world’s smallest bird, often mistaken for a bumblebee. This hummingbird’s wings beat with the force of a turbo engine, but its heart can be broken with the pressure of a thumb. It is amazing that in this world of little things we are ruled by someone so big that we cannot help but feel small. As if we too have come to rest in another’s palm.

  There are things I miss that I never thought I would. The sea is not the same because this one crashes against rocks and the earth is red and must be coaxed for something to grow. There is no scent of lemons, no sweet fruits I can pluck from the trees. These Spaniards wear black and are serious about life. I never wake to music blaring, people dancing in the street. No one throws cowrie shells at the ground to predict what lies ahead.

  I miss the color of mangoes, fuchsia flowers. A hundred kinds of palm trees, the dolphins that swam beside me in the sea. But some places, like some people, are best loved from afar. Some places are better when they are remembered.

  Eight

  THE DAY after Isabel stood me up, she left a message at the hotel. The desk clerk smiled as he handed me a slip of paper, torn from a child’s notebook. I could barely decipher her penciled scrawl. She wrote that there had been a problem with the buses and she had been delayed, that there was no phone in the district where she was so she couldn’t call. She pleaded with me to return, to come back and see her again.

  The next afternoon I made my way through the same tangle of vines, the same maze of thorny bushes that I’d come down the day before. The untended fruit trees had dropped their rotten fruit. A rodent peered at me, then scurried away with a tamarind between his orange teeth as I knocked on the door, which was on the floor below where Rosalba lived. On the door of Isabel’s apartment were two hand-painted pink hearts, with Isabel’s and her daughter Milagro’s names intertwined.

  Milagro let me in. She was a large, sturdy girl of about thirteen, as tall as her mother and almost twice her size, with gold baubles in her ears. A “Boss” Springsteen T-shirt clung to her burgeoning breasts. But she had her mother’s deep black eyes, her thick black hair that fell around her shoulders. “Mummy’s in here,” she said.

  The apartment smelled of incense and mint tea. Flower petals were strewn across the floor as if some secret ritual was being practiced here. The rooms with the shades wide open were as light as Rosalba’s were dark, and the heat of the day poured in. Salsa spewed forth from the radio and a song called “Latin Lover” played. Milagro lip-synched the words as she led me into the middle of the sparsely furnished room, to a Formica table and a bouquet of plastic flowers.

  Sunken on the couch missing its springs, Isabel sat, looking more like a child than her own daughter. Milagro touched her mother on the shoulder. “Mummy, here’s your friend.” Then Milagro raised her mother up as if she were helping an invalid.

  “Oh, Milie,” Isabel said, “I’m not that old. I’m only thirty-five.”

  Carved saints with pleading hands and despondent gazes lined the mantel. On the wall were pictures of Jesus, Marilyn Monroe, a Rosalba who looked like the Elizabeth Taylor of la isla, and Isabel with her daughter. Except for Jesus there were no pictures of men. There was none of her father, though there was a poster of a singing group, Hijos de Andalucía.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” Isabel whispered. She pointed to each of the four walls, making a circling motion with her hands. Milagro turned the volume up on the music, pressing her fingers to her lips. “It is best not to speak here,” Isabel said.

  I don’t like whispering. I never have. When we were young, Lydia and I always spoke in hushed tones, afraid to be heard. “I don’t want to hear a peep out of you girls,” our father would say to us at night, “not a sound.” He aimed his finger our way so we knew he meant it. At home we spoke with a hand cupped to ear or in codes, by semaphore. A finger pointing downstairs, a thumb motioning outside. Whenever we could, we walked in the woods around our house. But even there we never raised our voices. Lydia now tells me how she remembers darkness, drawn shades, rooms without light. But what I remember are whispers.

  Isabel led me down long winding streets, through alleyways where children played with a discarded bicycle wheel and sticks. They rolled the wheel down muddy streets, garbage-strewn alleyways. There were no sandlot baseball games, no one shooting hoops. No bats, no balls.

  The streets were riddled with potholes. Huge craters pitted the roads as if they’d been bombed, and the few cars twisted past them as if through a maze. We passed a building with the first floor gutted, but a family living on the second floor. On the balcony a hen strutted; laundry of tattered undershirts and blue jeans flapped in the breeze.

  Along the Miramar, people wore cardboard signs, attached around their necks with string. At first I thought this was some form of public humiliation. But then I looked closer. A young couple with a small child wore a sign that said they wanted a two-bedroom anywhere in exchange for their one-bedroom in the center of the city. A single man who wished to marry was trying to convince an old woman who wanted to leave her large apartment that his studio was near the sea.

  We walked for a long time and I was hot and tired. But Isabel moved like a dancer, her arms reaching before her into space. Sweat beads formed on the corners of her brow, but other than that she moved effortlessly. I followed and we did not speak.

  At last we arrived at a café not far from the sea and the old cemetery. We sat down and looked around, waiting to be served, but no waiter came. Though the cafe was open, no one was working there. My mouth was parched, but there was nothing to drink. “I’m so thirsty,” I said. “Isn’t there anything?” Isabel went into the back of the café and returned with two glasses of warm tap water.

  I stared into my glass. “It’s okay,” Isabel said, “you can drink it. One of the few things my father has really done is make the water pure.” Sipping slowly, we sat facing each other with a view of the sea. “I like to come here,” Isabel said, “because my first husband is buried over there. My second husband as well.” She pointed to the old cemetery, which wasn’t far away. “I loved the first one and I liked the second one a lot. It’s a long story.”

  I looked at her, surprised. “Oh, I go through men like I’d go through money if I had any.” Sh
e laughed. “I’ve been married four times now. Milagro is the child of my third husband. My fourth was a businessman from Caracas. I married him to get me out of here, but of course my visa was denied. When I go to immigration, do you know what they say to me? They say I will never leave. They grin at me when they tell me this. They say that I will die here just like the rest of them.”

  Isabel took out a packet of cigarettes, Marlboros, in fact, tamped it, and offered me one.

  “No, thanks,” I shook my head. I hadn’t had a cigarette in nine years.

  Isabel shrugged, indifferent to my good or bad habits. She lit one, tilted her head back, and blew smoke into the sky as I sipped the water she’d brought me in slow, careful sips. As she held the cigarette between her fingers, I noticed for the first time her nails, which, like mine, were bitten down to the quick. “You’re married?” she asked, pointing to my ring.

  “Yes, and I have a daughter.” I fumbled in my wallet, though the pictures I carried were a few years old.

  “Oh, she is beautiful. She looks just like you,” Isabel said, her face lightening for the first time.

  I didn’t want to argue that she doesn’t look like me. “But she acts like her father,” I said.

  “And how is that?”

  “Oh, she’s chaotic; I’m more orderly.”

  “But she’s just a child,” Isabel said with a laugh. “Do you leave them often?”

  I shook my head. “Not often, but it is good to get away. I find it gives me a new perspective.”

  “Yes, I imagine it does.” She gave me a wry smile. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry …”

  “It’s all right. In fact, I’ve never been anywhere. You know, when we toast in this country, we don’t say ‘salud;’ we say ‘visa.’ We all want to leave, but there are no exit visas. My father is tyrant. What more can I say.”

  I wanted to ask about her father, but her bitterness surprised me and Isabel seemed agitated, almost angry. “It’s hard to imagine. I’ve always been free …”

  “Of course you have. How could you know, but it’s all I want, you see. To get away.” She sighed, gazing out to sea.

  “And you can’t …”

  “Oh, no”—she laughed a nervous laugh—“he’ll never let me go.” Isabel paused. “Believe me, I’m a prisoner, as surely as if I were behind bars.”

  As we sipped our water in a deserted café off the Miramar, Isabel told me that she had once lived in a house of many rooms that opened onto the sea. Its wide doors were never shut, except during the most violent storms; its windows let in the breeze. At night she was lulled to sleep by the surf pounding the shore, and every morning she awakened to the same sound, and it became the rhythm of her days and her nights. Even now, years after she moved into the ground-floor apartment, over a mile from the sea, she still thinks she wakes to the sound of the surf.

  In the house where she grew up, there were yellow curtains in her room and yellow flowers in the vase. She had a yellow cat named Topaz who slept at the foot of her bed in the pools of golden sun that poured in. Fruit trees bloomed outside her window and some mornings Mercedes—the ancient nanny who had come to the family when she herself was not more than a child to care for Rosalba and had stayed with them all these years—plucked tamarind and papaya ripe from their branches. Each morning at seven Mercedes brought her a tray of warm milk and almond biscuits, a boiled egg, and fresh-squeezed juice while her parents ate alone downstairs.

  The man who called himself her father was a small man with blue eyes whom her mother had married when she was just a girl. Umberto Calderón always wore a black suit and smelled of antiseptic soaps and lingering disease. He was a dermatologist who specialized in skin ailments of the tropics. But his patients were mainly the wealthy of la isla who wanted him to cure their age spots, the dark blotches and moles that blossomed in the relentless sun and made Dr. Calderón’s medical practice flourish almost as much as did the business of the island’s only abortionist (whom the Calderón women would visit from time to time).

  Isabel’s older half sister, Serena, had her mother’s and father’s blue eyes and soft brown hair—the genetic vestiges of the Spanish aristocracy that once ruled. But Isabel had dark eyes and dark hair, and when she looked into the face of the man who called himself her father she knew that she was looking at a stranger. Umberto Calderón, also, had no doubt as to his daughter’s parentage. He informed his beautiful wife, whom he adored, that as long as she did not humiliate him, he would accept the child, giving her his name, but never his heart.

  One day a Portuguese freighter, filled with sailors, crashed into their seawall, and the sailors had to stay for a week until their ship was repaired and towed out to sea. During that time the sailors taught Isabel how to tie knots and do a dance in which she clapped her heels. They let her wear their hats and told her stories of monsters they’d seen rising out of the darkest seas.

  When the sailors left, Isabel begged them to take her with them but they laughed and gave her a hat to keep. She wore it around the house for years.

  She was miserable when Umberto came home from his trips to the outer ends of the island, where he tended the needs of wealthy finca owners and ladies who guarded over the sugarcane plantations that their fathers had purchased in Spain. He returned with gifts for Serena, but nothing for her. She missed the Portuguese sailors and held on to dreams of stowing away. She did not see why when there was an outing to the beach she would be left behind to wander the rooms of the big house with Mercedes in tow. And then one day she understood.

  Mercedes got her up early and told her she had to dress in her prettiest clothes. Mercedes put bows in her hair and fluffed up her skirt. And then Mercedes took her downstairs. Her mother sat in the living room with a man who looked familiar to her, though she did not know from where. He was tall and his eyes were black and shiny as polished stones and he wore a soldier’s uniform. “So,” he said as Isabel was brought in, “this is the child.” And for a moment Isabel thought that she was going to be taken away from everything she knew.

  Rosalba said, “Come closer, Isabel, come here.”

  Tentatively Isabel walked toward him. She smelled his cigars, the rum, and she smelled her mother’s perfume. He towered above her, more like a monument than a man, and she tilted her head back in order to get a better look, and this made him laugh. Perhaps there was a statue with his and other soldiers’ faces on it at the Plaza of the Heroes of the Revolution (there was not). Or perhaps she had glimpsed him on television, pounding his fists during late-night harangues as her mother listened, spellbound.

  But it wasn’t in any of these places that Isabel had seen him before. Rather, she looked up and stared into his dark eyes and found her own. “She looks just like you,” she heard her mother say.

  The year when I turned eight, Isabel said, my real father came and danced with me. My mother and her husband, Umberto Calderón, whom I called Papi until the day he died, had gone to a conference in Spain, and in the evening when I was already in my nightgown in my bed, a large, dark car pulled up. A door slammed and I heard a low whistle. Without a word, Mercedes let him in.

  He wore a suit of camouflage that looked like falling leaves. He said he’d come to dance with me. I had no idea what he meant, but he put a record on the phonograph. It was a marimba band, playing mambos, and he knew the steps very well. Step together one two three he showed me as he took me into his arms. “I want to see,” he said, “if you can follow me.” He pressed me to him and I felt his arms around my waist.

  I was a little girl and he twirled me around the room like a mop, my feet sweeping the floor. All the arms that had ever held me were women’s arms—pale, thin. But his were wide and strong. He hummed the music into my ears. He was a delicate dancer and I felt light as a plucked flower in his arms.

  He smelled of ashes and rum, but I could see what it must have been like for my mother when she fell in love with him. Then he stopped dancing and told m
e he had to go away for a while and it might be a long time before he would see me again. “You are my little one,” he told me. Mi hijita. “The world is changing. You’ll see. Everything will change. You can join me. Your mother chose not to and that of course was her decision. But I will come back for you and together we will make the world a different place.”

  When he left, he touched Mercedes on the arm and I knew she had agreed to let him come. He patted me on the head and said, “Don’t tell your mother I was here tonight. It is our secret.”

  I never told my mother. After he went away, I wrote him a letter, which Mercedes promised to mail for me. “When the moon is high, I think you will come and dance with me again. I listen for your whistle, but it is always the wind. The other day there was a fire and a dog was burned alive. I can still hear him howling. I hope you will come back soon.”

  But he never answered my letter. He never came back to dance with me again. I would see him from time to time at official functions and he’d come over and touch me on the head. Sometimes, when Umberto was away, he came to our house and I could hear his voice rumbling in another room. But it would be many years before he tried to see me again. And then only by sending his lawyers to come and claim me.

  Not long after his visit, when she was still waiting for his return, Isabel woke and felt a weight on her chest. The room was dark and she could not see, but something heavy lay there. Mercedes told her once that if she ever woke and found a snake in her bed, not to move or breathe. That it was only looking for a warm place to sleep. In the morning it would wake and slither outside again, returning the way it had come.

  For the rest of that night Isabel lay on her back, with the snake on her chest, trying not to breathe. She did not know what kind of snake it was but she knew that the Caribe rattler, brought from Africa on slave ships, lived in the moist, sandy woods not far from the house. For hours she lay perfectly still, her breath shallow, afraid the snake would feel the rise and fall of her chest.