by Mary Morris
In the car home he said he was very proud of us and Lydia asked if we could stop for ice cream. He said no, he wanted to get home, but she asked again. She said if he was so proud of us, why couldn’t we stop for ice cream. I nudged her and told her to stop, but Lydia could be like a Gila monster and never let go. “I’m not driving five miles out of my way for ice cream,” he said, his voice rising, and I elbowed Lydia, but she wouldn’t stop. She pleaded with him to take us. So he pulled the car over and took her dolls and put them in the trunk. “You are being very bad,” he told her. “When you are good, you can have them back.”
Lydia kept asking if she were good enough, but it would be weeks before she got her dolls back again. I asked him if he’d take something of mine, but he said, “No, Maggie. Nothing matters that much to you.”
He was always threatening to leave. He’d say, If you girls do this one more time, I’m out of here. Sometimes he threatened to leave when our mother was at work, and that was the most frightening. Lydia would howl and beg.
Once he actually left. It was during a snowstorm and he said we’d been bad and he wasn’t going to stay. There was a blizzard outside as he headed out to the garage. I put on my coat and boots and chased after him, but the snow was so deep I almost lost my way. I found myself literally following in his footsteps, placing one foot carefully into the impressions he’d made. But when I got to the garage, he was gone.
Eighteen
THE BEAUTICIAN’S NAME is Olga and she asks me what I’d like to have done. She has a lacquered beehive, the kind I haven’t seen since the sixties, and painted-on eyebrows. “I’d like you to do my nails,” I say. I extend my brittle, bitten fingers and Olga winces, turning away.
She is finishing up a client and apologizes for the wait. “That’s all right,” I tell her. “I’m not in a rush.” The beauty shop is all windows and I can sit in this kind of glass fishbowl and watch for Major Lorenzo here. Olga suggests I look at the colors. She hands me magazines with assorted designs. The woman in the chair is a German tourist and is having one of those designer manicures—green and orange swirls, pearly tips. Black glitter is sprinkled on. I wonder if I dare go this far; would Major Lorenzo think I’ve gone off the deep end? Would Todd think I’d lost my mind when I came home?
The last time I got my nails done was for my wedding. My mother set me up with her beautician, a dour woman named Corinne. My mother told me that you can judge a woman by her nails. Corinne filed mine to claws and told me to go catch my prey. I had a friend named Esther who had perfect nails. They were amazing—long, perfect, ruby red. Esther began doing her nails when her mother was dying and Esther lost her job. She said she found she couldn’t do anything to take care of herself, but she could do her nails. After that she decided to keep doing them. As long as my nails are done, Esther told me, I know I’m hanging on.
Olga works intently on the tourist’s nails, which seem to take a long time. I imagine fairy tales recounted into her tips—Hansel and Gretel again comes to mind, Little Red Riding Hood. Woodsy stories in line with current modes. As Olga works away in an intense silence, I leaf through the local couture magazine. Neo-cavewoman seems to be the latest thing. Women in furry fringe, tiger suits, shaggy, torn fur. In a country where there are no imports and no exports, the theme seems to be back to the woods. Or for women, at least, back to the cave.
Though I can’t remember seeing a motorcycle on la isla, a model stands before one on a dirt road. Leafs and twigs hang from their hair, her face is covered with soot, and she has a dead look to her eyes. She looks as if she has just been gang-raped on the soft shoulder. I look more closely until I see through the leaves and twigs and dirt and realize that the woman standing in front of the motorcycle is Isabel. She is all made-up and her hair falls wildly around her, but there is no mistaking those dark features, the distant look that gazes beyond the page. I check the date on the magazine and it is from two years ago and I have not laid eyes on her in just as long.
The German woman holds up her nails, smiling happily. She blows on them in short, hearty puffs, displaying them for me to see. There are no fairy tales here, just swirls and sprinkles in black and red. She tips Olga in deutsche marks and the beautician pockets the money, discreetly checking the amount.
Hastily I close the magazine as Olga motions for me to sit down at her little table. As I wait while she changes the towel and the water, I feel strangely disoriented, as if I have been awakened suddenly and don’t know where I am. She brings a small plastic tub with fresh warm water and soap and again motions for me to stick one of my hands in and I feel powerless to do anything other than what she commands. In her dark red claws she picks up my other hand. She stares with a look of disdain at nails broken, chewed down, brittle, the result of years of worry and work. I chew anything I can—pens, gum, carrots, my nails.
“Tsk, tsk,” Olga says. “You should take better care of your hands.” My hands, my hair, my body, my head, my heart, the whole thing, I want to tell her, but who am I to confide in her?
“So,” she says, “are you enjoying it here? Do you like your visit so far?”
“Oh, yes,” I tell her. “Everything is wonderful.”
“And what have you seen?”
I make it all up. The churches, the fortress, the zoo. Why do I suspect she is being paid to ask these questions? How could this nice woman doing my nails be an informer? But I feel certain she is, like everyone who works in the hotel.
I decide to call her bluff. “You know, back home, in the United States, people say that you don’t have anything here. That you can’t get goods; that you are not free.”
“That is not true. No one is starving; we can work if we choose. You have people who sleep in your streets; you have people who die of the cold.”
“Yes, but we are free,” I tell her.
“Free to do what?” Olga asks, filing my nails a little too briskly. At any moment I expect them to bleed.
“So you are happy.”
“Of course I am happy. I love it here,” Olga tells me. “I love our leader. I hope he lives for twenty more years.”
“Why do you love him?”
“Because he has given us everything—I have food, a place to live, a job. People who say otherwise are just lazy. They don’t want to work for this country. They are spoiled children who only know how to complain. They don’t realize the gift they’ve been given.”
“Where do you live?” I ask her.
“Oh,” she says, with a whirl of her hand, “it is far away.” This is what people from la isla say when they want to make sure you won’t come to their house. I smile at the irony; don’t worry, I want to add, you can’t take me there, even if you wanted to. “What color?” she asks.
There are only three or four colors, outside of the green and orange and black. There’s a pearly pink, which seems too muted, given the circumstances, and a nice copper, if I had a tan. In the end I can’t choose so I let Olga decide for me.
She picks out ruby red. I watch as with a sure, even stroke she paints my nails red as blood.
Major Lorenzo can’t be more than ten years older than me. I wonder what he thinks as he enters the lobby of the hotel. He waves as if he is glad to see me. I wave back, thinking this will help my nails dry more quickly. As I approach, I am hoping he has some news.
He extends his hand to shake mine, but I point to my nails. “Manicure,” I say with a grin and he laughs, finding me amusing. I wonder what he really thinks. Does he see an attractive young woman in her prime or an enemy of the state? Would he try to sleep with me in another moment under other circumstances? Or am I just a problem he has to deal with? Paperwork. A person to process, then get on to the next thing.
I am not a counterrevolutionary, I want to explain. I’m not even a journalist. I am just a travel writer. My work is to appraise the worthiness of a meal, the firmness of a bed. I run my finger over the tops of dressers, I ask desk clerks to perform impossible tasks (to get me a car wh
en there are none to be had, to provide a box lunch when the kitchen is closed) in order to see how accommodating they can be. Mine is not a job of conviction, but of details. Departure times, the costs of rooms, the distance between things.
Whatever I became involved in here, I want to tell him, has nothing to do with my feelings for the state, but everything to do with my feelings for a person. However, Major Lorenzo does not care about such things. He has come to inform me of my options—options that will produce more red tape. He leans forward as he speaks, his arms resting on his knees, though his gaze is out the door, toward the street. For a moment I look that way too as if someone we both know might walk in the door. I hear him explaining why he doesn’t think he can send me to Jamaica. “It is not customary to send you to another place. What we normally do, our policy, is to return you to your point of origin.”
“Yes, but if I provided the money, the cash …,” I offer.
“Well, that might help.” I stare at him for a moment, wondering when Major Lorenzo stopped looking me in the eye. I don’t remember when he began glancing at sheets of paper, gazing at the floor, out into the plaza, and this reminds me of someone, not anyone very close, but someone who frightens me.
“Let me go make a phone call,” I ask him. “Maybe I can clear this up …” I excuse myself and go to my room, where I place a collect call to my editor, Kurt, at Easy Rider, and, of course, as I assumed it would, this call goes right through. “Maggie,” Kurt says, accepting the charges, “it’s not the same around here without you.” Kurt has been trying to get me in bed for years, though I think it’s more like a dog chasing a car. What would the dog do with the car if he caught it?
Kurt, who is approaching fifty faster than he would like, started Easy Rider almost three decades ago. His first guidebooks were to Central America and Bali and he claims to have started it all—hippie travel, backpackers. The stick-out-your-thumb kind of travelers. He takes full responsibility for the Galápagos and ecotourism. Of course, his readers have grown up with him and now they have kids and thinning hair and they are less inclined to go where they can’t eat the salad. Now we publish a survivor’s guide to Disney World and a Europe with kids, which lists every safari park and water slide on the Continent, and Todd keeps threatening, once we’ve got a few more house payments under our belt, to go, though so far we haven’t.
About once a year, for all the paying of my dues, Kurt hands me a plum. Jessica and I did Galapagos last year, where blue-footed boobies walked right up to her hand. Sardinia. A barge tour along the Danube. He sent us to Jamaica a few years ago, where it rained the whole time and Todd kept staring out the window, looking for the sun. Go with the flow, I told him. I didn’t mind being inside, curled in damp sheets with paperback novels, watching Errol Flynn on TV. Now I’ll tell Kurt he owes me one. A four-star restaurant tour of France, the Dolomites. “What’s wrong, Maggie?”
“What’s wrong is that I’m in some kind of trouble and I want you to guarantee me a ticket to anywhere.”
“Are you serious about this?” he asks.
“Kurt,” I tell him, “I am completely serious.”
“Then I’ll do what I can.”
I gaze around my room. It feels small, sterile. Cobwebs have appeared in a corner. “You have to do better than that,” I tell him. “You need to promise that you’ll get me out of here.”
“Maggie, there are no foreign journalists in jail there.”
But I am not being kept here as a journalist. I am being punished by someone in a rage. That is what is starting to become clear to me. An enraged man whose daughter has denounced him, that’s what is keeping me here. When I hang up, I find that I am shaking, as if someone had just walked in and startled me. My body shakes as I long for things that are far away. I miss Todd and I miss Jessica and I lie back on the bed and weep. My pillow, my dog, the room where I sleep. The sound of familiar footsteps in the hall. I miss talking on the phone and not wondering who is listening in. Am I supposed to tell someone something? Is there something they have to know before they’ll let me leave?
But the truth is, I know nothing, except that Isabel is gone and perhaps I helped her depart. Perhaps I did not. I know nothing of what happened or became of her after the last night I saw her, though, of course, this was our plan.
I press my face into the pillow and try to smell who has been there before. I sniff for a scent of perfume, oil, the odors of human intimacy. But there is nothing there, not a trace. I sit up, thinking that I am supposed to confess. That when I go downstairs and see Major Lorenzo, I’ll tell him all I know. A confession, that is what they want out of me. I’ll tell him and he’ll let me go.
Somehow relieved with my decision, I splash water on my face and go back downstairs. Major Lorenzo and his aide are still sitting on the wicker settee in the lobby. I decide that I will go up to Major Lorenzo now and tell him all my secrets, whatever it is he thinks I know. That she’s hiding in Jamaica, that she’s living in Madrid, that she never left la isla. That I could love my family more and my intrigues less, that my restlessness is the source of all this trouble, but I am not an enemy of the state. I am prepared to say this and more. It has only been three days, but I can easily imagine the defeat of the coerced confession, the empty hole that true confinement must be.
As I walk toward Major Lorenzo with Isabel’s name on the tip of my tongue, I notice Manuel sitting at the bar. He seems to have this sixth sense about me, about when I’ll show up. Or perhaps he is just always here. I think I see Major Lorenzo and Manuel exchanging glances, but I cannot be sure. But there is something about Manuel’s presence that fortifies me. I feel a seismic shift. I know nothing; there is nothing to tell. The matter has all been misconstrued and the essential thing is for me to leave.
I go up to Major Lorenzo and inform him that I have spoken with my boss and he has guaranteed me a plane ticket anywhere out of here and Major Lorenzo nods. “So,” he says, “we’ll see what we can do.”
“Have you been to Jamaica?” I ask him.
“Yes,” he says, getting up to leave, “it is a lovely place.” Then he looks at me rather coldly. “But we have very nice beaches here.”
After he walks out the door, Manuel motions for me to join him at the bar. “I’ve been thinking about your calling Rosalba, because perhaps she could help you,” he says after our coffees arrive. “But I don’t think it is a good idea. In fact, it is a bad idea. But I have some friends and they are trying to see if we can’t get this matter cleared up.”
“I’d just like to get out of here as soon as possible.”
Manuel nods. “Of course, that would be best.”
“I’m thinking I should tell them everything. I should tell them what I did, about helping Isabel.”
Manuel looks at me sternly. For the first time I think he is angry with me. “That is a very bad idea. Don’t even think about that again.”
After a pause, I glance up at him. “Do you hear from Isabel?” I ask. “Does she write to you?” I had not wanted to ask him this question because I’d never heard from her myself and I didn’t want to know, but now suddenly I do.
“Isabel is fine. Her daughter is with her now.”
“You mean he let Milagro go.”
Manuel nods again. “Oh, yes, he let her go.”
Nineteen
I’VE ALWAYS SLEPT in Mummy’s bed, Milagro told me when I saw her again. I can hardly remember sleeping anywhere else, except on nights when it is very hot and we sleep outside under the júcaro tree. Mummy gathers those round little leaves to make our bed and the leaves smell sweet, like sap, and the air is full of the scent of the jasmine tree. Otherwise I sleep curled in her bed, but I like it best sleeping in the garden because inside Mummy wraps me tight and holds me until I can hardly breathe.
She opens the windows wide so the breeze blows in, what little breeze there is, but I wake up hot, sweaty, trapped in her arms. Even when she’s married or when a man lives with us, I sleep with her
and he sleeps in the room that was mine. Only the last husband seemed to mind and this is probably why he went back to Caracas.
Sometimes Mummy goes away. She’ll be gone for a night or a week, and then I go upstairs and stay with Rosalba. But I never sleep well alone in her closed rooms, in the narrow beds.
Mummy lets men break her heart. I’ve watched this over and over again. Of course, El Caballo was the first one to break her heart. I cannot tell you how many times she told me about the night he came and danced with her. How she still waits for him to come and take her away. Really, it was as if nothing important ever happened to her, before or since. I think she’s just been waiting for him, all these years, the way you wait for a bus that’s not going to come.
In the meantime she falls in love with all kinds of guys for a week. A month, a day. She’ll spend a weekend with one; a year with another. Once she fell in love with the man who painted our house. They became lovers while he was painting it yellow. And when he was done, she said she wanted it blue like the sky on a clear day. He said no and that was the end of that. It’s always the same. She’ll tell me, Milie—that’s what she calls me, Milie—I’ve met the one. For me there can be no other. And then six months later she won’t remember his name.
The ones she usually meets come from other places. They have a mother who’s Mexican or they are here on business. Once she spent a few months with a Russian engineer who was working in agronomy. He was the most boring man you could imagine. All he talked about was bushels per acre and irrigation systems, but she’d say, I’ll marry him, Milie, and he’ll get us out of here. But of course he never did. None of them ever will. They just come and go.
Mummy is crazy. I have to say that. She is crazy. But I don’t care. It’s not bad crazy. She decorates the house in flower petals and the pictures of the saints. She dresses all in white so she looks like a ghost, like somebody carved her out of marble, and goes to the house of Ángel, the santero, where they sacrifice goats and drink blood. Rosalba screams at her that Ángel puts things in people’s heads. That what kind of a jerk drops sixteen palm-tree seeds into a tray and from this predicts the future.
