House Arrest

by Mary Morris

  It’s a bunch of crap, Rosalba says. Rosalba screams at her, Why don’t you do something useful with your life. Do something for the revolution.

  And Mummy says, Fuck the revolution; it’s not my revolution. It’s your stupid revolution. And Rosalba puts her hands over her ears, shaking her head.

  Rosalba has tried to get Mummy jobs. Once they sent her off to pick tobacco for two weeks and I slept upstairs in the narrow bed. When she returned, her hands were all cut, scratched raw. I dipped them in egg white and wrapped them in torn sheets. Mummy says, My father is a tyrant and this country is run by tyranny.

  Rosalba rings her hands and weeps. You don’t know him, she says. He is a great man. You don’t understand what we fought for.

  He is a pendejo, Mummy replies, and I’m afraid I do understand.

  My father lives in the center of town and I see him every day. He’s an artisan and makes ceramics in a little shop. He comes over or I take a bus to his place. He makes me a cup of tea or we have a soda together. Sometimes he will scramble an egg, but mostly he gives his rations to us. His parents named him Ernesto, after Che. Do you have any idea how many people here are named Ernesto? He only lived with my mother for a few months after I was born. Mummy really doesn’t want a man around the house. She says she does like their smell and they take up too much room.

  I don’t always go to school. I don’t go because there are often no buses to take me and once I arrive there are usually no pencils or books or teachers, for that matter. I don’t like what I learn. About how to be a good revolutionary and serve the state. How to put government before personal goals. The history of la isla is a history of throwing off the yoke of oppression. And the kids tease me. They say I bet you have enough chickens to eat. You have enough eggs. It is true that we aren’t starving, but we aren’t exactly well-fed. I’ve never seen a lobster except in the sea.

  I saw my grandfather once. He came to address my kindergarten class. He said he didn’t want to bore us with a long speech, but we said, Oh no, líder, you won’t bore us. So he talked for three hours about dialectics and his enemies and what we can do for the revolution, and we made paper airplanes and slept. Afterward when the teacher introduced me to him, he tapped me on the head like he wanted to hear if there was something in there.

  When I don’t go to school, I go down to the sea. This is where we like to hang out, my friends and me. My friends all have nicknames like El Gordo and Chichi. Chico is my boyfriend and we hang out on the seawall and do things. A lot of my friends go into the park at night and two of them had babies last year. But I just let Chico stick his hand in my blouse while we get wet from the ocean spray. Mostly we sit and think about all the things we want to have. It’s like we’re making our list for Santa Claus. I want Rollerblades and a CD player and a trip to Disney World. I like to chew gum and smoke Marlboros and draw pictures of the sea. But if somebody asks me what I want to be when I grow up, I say I want to be somewhere else.

  Mummy wants me to have everything. I want to give you the world, she says. Then she weeps because I don’t even go to school. Everybody here just hangs out because there’s nothing to do. Who cares about things, I tell her, I just want you to be happy. Mummy is so thin that when I hold her I think she will break in my arms. It is like hugging a bag of bones.

  Rosalba screams at her. You don’t eat and you don’t do anything. So many nights I wake and feel Mummy’s tears running down my neck. I want Mummy to go. Even if I have to sleep alone on the little cot in Rosalba’s apartment, I want her to go because I know that if she goes, then I will follow. It may take a while but Mummy will find a way to get me out of here.

  And then maybe I’ll get to sleep in my own bed in a house with her. Maybe I’ll be able to breathe again.

  Twenty

  BANANA TREES, stripped of their fruit, lined the Carretera Nacional. In the median strip, bushes of primrose bloomed. We were the only car on the highway, except for the pickup trucks carrying workers to and from the fields where they picked the oranges that never found their way into the stores. Because there was no traffic, the highway was ours. Isabel had bartered some extra gas rations and I brought the picnic—cheese, Spam, crackers, dried fruit. What was available at the tourist tienda.

  She had been coming to my hotel, saying there were things she wanted to show me. For Easy Rider Guides I had a tight schedule, a carefully planned itinerary of things to do. There were walks I needed to take each day, restaurants where food needed sampling. There were seventeen colonial churches in Puerto Angélico alone that I was supposed to visit. But Isabel told me there were little villages tucked away where no one ever went, and cigar factories miles from any town. “If you want to know how this country works,” she said with a laugh, “you should see the cane-processing plants.” And I knew we were going to the beach.

  We drove for an hour before we ran out of gas. Isabel banged on the gas meter, which read full. Damn, she said. It was blazing hot as we pulled off to the side of the road. We’ll never get out of here, I thought. But it wasn’t long before a car pulled up. A man in a blue polo shirt and polyester pants asked if he could help. He offered to siphon gas out of his car to get us to the station, which was about ten miles’ drive. I was impressed with the generosity of this stranger in a country so short of gas, but Isabel took the gas without saying a word.

  In the car she was silent, morose all the way to the gas station, for which there were no signs. “It’s his job to follow me,” she said. “You see, my father likes to know my every move. He monitors me, though, of course, he never sees me. Isn’t that unbelievable?”

  “I know it’s not the same,” I told her, “but my father used to make us stay home too … for the slightest thing.”

  She gave me a smile from the corner of her mouth. “So,” she said, “then perhaps you know what I mean.”

  We drove to a secluded beach where mongooses overran the remains of a beach bar and the disintegrating thatch huts that lined the beach. Beneath one of the huts, Isabel spread out our blanket and picnic. Along the beach were makeshift love hotels—blankets and tents beneath which pairs of feet protruded. In the water perhaps a quarter of a mile out to sea couples stood in timeless embraces, bikini bottoms floating close beside them in the tranquil Caribbean Sea.

  “I know all the secret places on la isla,” Isabel said as she kicked off her sandals. “This is Playa de Paraíso. Only lovers come here. They can’t afford hotels. I’ve been here myself a few other times.” She gave me a wink. “Anyway, no one will bother us here. I love this beach. I’ve swam with the dolphins right where the waves break. I’ve found black and salmon-colored coral. Priceless shells. I keep them in a box in my room.” She stripped down to her faded green bathing suit. “I loved a boy once,” she said, watching the blankets that lined the beach move up and down, gazing at the lovers who stood like aquatic birds along the shore. “And we used to come here.”

  When I was twenty, I fell in love, Isabel said, stretching out under the thatched hut in the sand. He was the first man I ever loved and perhaps the only one. He was a student of law, just a few years older than me, and we decided to marry. We met in a café where we were both reading the same book. Lorca. So we had coffee together and started having coffee almost every day. We became great friends.

  First, you know, it is important to be friends. There was so much we liked to do together. We both liked to swim. He was a wonderful swimmer and he could just stay in the water all day like a fish. And he loved to read and cook. I never ate much but I ate whatever he made. He cooked all kinds of food. He made arroz con polio, ropa vieja. I had an appetite then. He lived in a little flat off the Miramar and we’d stay inside—played house, really. We’d read and write poems and compose love songs to each other. We kissed and lay in bed until it was time for me to go home to my mother.

  It is difficult to believe, I know, but I was a virgin on my wedding night. We wanted to wait. We thought it should happen after we’d made our vow
s. That’s how foolish we were. It’s hard to believe now. He was very gentle when he made love to me. He never hurt me, not once. We lived together as a married couple for two weeks. It was the only happy time I’ve known.

  I convinced my father to throw me a wedding. I had not been alone with my father since the night he came and danced with me and I hadn’t heard from him since the day he tried to adopt me. We’d barely spoken in years, but he was always cordial when I saw him at official functions. So I went to his office one day and waited several hours until he would see me. He glared when I came in, but I just said, Look, I’m your only daughter and I am in love so I want you to give me a wedding. He hemmed and hawed, but in the end he agreed.

  My father had the wedding at his hunting estate in the woods about twenty miles from the city. You know, he lives in many places, though he claims he only lives in a room in the apartment of his compañera, where he has a single bed and a balcony with a stationary bicycle. Every day people see him on that balcony, exercising fanatically, lifting weights, riding the bicycle.

  While my father has no true home, he has many houses. There is a mansion on Eighty-third Street in Ciudad del Caballo and another in the eastern provinces where he also keeps a sugarcane finca. He is said to preside over its harvest. There is a fishing hut at Playa Negrita and a huge waterfront home on Isla Azul. There’s his hunting estate, which he seized from an old aristocratic family. First he imprisoned the owner of the estate, though the man begged on his knees to be allowed to leave with his family. The family left but the man stayed in prison, where he died. When my father hunts, he has the air force strafe the mangroves to flush out the pheasants and quail that, of course, are raised on the property. Many pilots have crashed during this mission.

  My father has a tiny island, called Cayo Doloroso, with swimming pools and bowling alleys that he saves for his special trysts with the dancers he imports from the various clubs and for special meetings with heads of state or foreign military advisers or drug lords. The island has an airport where people can be flown in under absolute secrecy. Here there are no visas, no passports. He can conduct his business in total isolation.

  I have never been to any of these houses, except his office in the city and the hunting estate where my wedding was held. Most of what I know about my father is what I’ve heard, what has been told to me, but I do not doubt a word.

  Often he reserves different houses for different women. I have heard that I have sixteen brothers, but I am said to be the only girl. They don’t call him the Horse for nothing. There was the dancer at the Club Tropical and the mysterious blue-haired woman from Argentina. There was the woman who was just herself a child and the one driven mad by grief. The jealous woman, if you can imagine such a person with El Caballo, and even the American woman. And then there was the beautiful woman—my mother, of course. And the wife he trusted and the mistress who betrayed him. And the one who he can never forget because she told him the truth. But then she died.

  He kept them all in different houses, where they raised their different children. One had the swimming pool shaped like a crocodile and the other had six white horses that she rode naked and the third killed herself in a tub of white rum and the fourth lives in a house of decay and twisted vines, wrapped in the past and a passion greater than any grief, longing for a body that a lifetime ago pulled away. When she sleeps, it is beside him; when she dreams, it is of him. At night I have heard her awaken at the sound of a car turning around at the end of our street. I have heard her whispering through the darkened rooms, as she listens for footsteps that have eluded her these past twenty-five years. Mi Amor, she says, is that you?

  But he gave me a wedding where waiters in black jackets carried trays of jumbo shrimp on the tips of their fingers. Champagne was uncorked by the case. There were delicacies from the sea, drinks from coconuts and brandied fruit, colored umbrellas and santería costumes, salsa bands and disco bands played on different parts of the lawn, and of course the rum flowed, endless bottles of white rum. Lambs and pigs roasted on the spits, chickens sizzled on the grills.

  My father will not eat in public. And he will not eat sitting down. He will not be photographed eating. But on this night he ate right beside me. He toasted me and my groom. And then when the music began, my father danced with me. It was an old Latin love song, “Bésame, Bésame,” and I was embarrassed to be dancing to that song with my father. I should have been dancing with my husband, but anyway I danced with him in a way that I hadn’t danced since I was eight years old and had felt like a broom, sweeping the floor clean.

  Two weeks after the wedding, my husband was drafted into the army and sent to fight a foreign war. Once more I went to my father’s office, and this time I begged him not to send my husband. I pleaded, but he said it was not his jurisdiction; he said there was nothing he could do. You are the head of the armed forces, I shouted at him. How could this not be your jurisdiction? My husband was a slight, studious man. He collected cowrie shells that he made into a necklace for me before he left. And, of course, he never returned.

  The first time we came to the beach I did not look at Isabel as she lay beside me in the sand, but now I did. I stared at her green suit, worn thin. In places I could see through to her skin. Her bronzed legs were riddled with blue lines. Her long, skinny arms drooped at her sides and she reminded me of a marionette, resting on its strings. But suddenly she stood up and turned and dashed down to the water and dove in. She splashed and I ran after her.

  The water was warm and the sand soft as a mattress underfoot. It was shallow for almost a half mile out to sea and Isabel swam in that clear water. She swam straight out for a long time, then back again. “Come with me,” she said, “I want to take you somewhere.”

  She led me toward the edge of the bay, where the shoreline curved just beyond some rocks. It was easy to walk on the soft sand, which felt warm between my toes. Where the shoreline curved, Isabel climbed onto a rock and pointed to a small island on the other side of the bend, not more than two hundred yards from where we were. “That is Redondo,” she said, “the round island. The island is like a doughnut and in the middle there is a little beach, called Playa de Amor. When the tide is low, we can reach that beach. Can you swim that far?”

  “Yes, I think I can.”

  Isabel took me by the hand and together we jumped off the rock into colder, rougher seas, unprotected by the bay. She swam first, pulling me along, then when she was sure I could swim in the rougher water she swam beside me. I could see her sleek legs as they kicked, her face so intent as she turned to breathe. Soon we reached the round rock and Isabel motioned for me to follow her. We swam around to the far side where seabirds nested, gulls and gull-like birds with blue feet, others with red, as if they were wearing plastic gloves. Brown pelicans cruised overhead.

  Around the side of the island we came to a narrow channel that the sea had cut through the rock. Down that channel, which was perhaps just a hundred feet long, I could see a circle of turquoise water and a white beach, surrounded by rose-colored rock. Isabel pointed the way and said, “We have to swim through here, but just let the current carry you. Don’t fight it when the waves pull you back.” Water battered the sides of the narrow channel and I was afraid of being smashed against the sides, but I let the sea carry me. Soon we were tossed like flotsam onto that crescent of white sand where, Isabel said as we flopped down, lovers and pirates and poets have come. We lay on our backs on this inland beach, a circle of blue above us, crisscrossed by seabirds. Orange and blue crabs crawled across the wall of rocks behind us. The sea had dug caverns into the rock, pounding like thunder. “For me,” Isabel said with a laugh, “this is what I call never-never land. But then the tide comes in and I have to leave.” I glanced at our narrow cavern, wondering how long we had.

  Once again Isabel took off her halter, but this time I didn’t look away. I stared at her round, firm breasts, pointed toward the sky. My breasts are large, pendulous. Melons, Todd jokes, fondling
them. It was not that I wanted to caress hers or suck on them. I wanted to lay naked on my back in the sun. I thought how I could easily spend days here on remote beaches, eating shellfish and dried fruit. How I could lie beside Isabel and smell her sunscreen and her Nina Ricci and her soap and listen to her tell me about Portuguese sailors and snakes sleeping on her chest and a father who came one night and danced with her.

  I turned to Isabel and said, “I was thinking that I could help you. Or that I want to help you. There must be something I can do?”

  Isabel frowned, shaking her head. “I don’t know. I doubt it.”

  “But when I get home, there must be something I could do for you.”

  “Oh, especially not then,” Isabel said, thoughtfully. “There is something that could be done here, but there are risks. I could not ask you. No, I don’t want anyone implicated in my life. I will just stay here and grow old and die and it will have been a stupid life.”

  Suddenly I felt as if I could not bear her suffering anymore. “But I want to help you. Tell me what it is.”

  She touched my cheek. “You are a beautiful woman. You have a family and a life and you will go home and forget all about this. You will forget all about me. It will be as if none of it ever happened to you.”

  “No, I won’t. I’ll never forget you.”

  She patted my face again and I felt rough sand against my skin. “Oh, yes, you will.”

  Then she closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep. I watched her for a little while, then I must have dozed off too. Suddenly she was shaking me. “Now we must go. In another hour it will be impossible to leave.”