by Mary Morris
But now suddenly it’s all different and Mummy is silent as if there’s some big secret around here and you open your mouth and it will jump out of her head. But I am no estúpida. I can see things as they are. I know by the way she sips these stews and fills the house with the petals of roses and cowrie shells, the way she lights candles to Madre de Caridad, that something is going to happen. You don’t have to be a genius to see that Mummy is tossing out old clothes, throwing away what she doesn’t need anymore. Since she’s a bit of a pack rat, when she starts to throw things out, that’s when I know. She thinks she’s going somewhere, but for once she’s not talking about it and I know better than to ask.
Anyway, I don’t need to. Because that’s the one thing about me and Mummy. She can’t fool me.
Forty-two
IT IS LATE in the day when Major Lorenzo brings me back to my hotel. The afternoon light is waning, the birds are returning to roost in the trees above the plaza. He asks if there is anything I need and I beg him to take me around, show me the sights. A quick visit to the fortress. “Please,” I beg him, “just let me take a short walk by the sea.”
He shakes his head because that is what he cannot do. “I wish I could. I understand how you are feeling.” I wonder how he could understand, but then he asks with concern in his voice if I will be all right.
“Yes, I suppose I will.” My eyes are burning, my skin stings from the salt of my tears.
When Major Lorenzo drops me off, I invite him in, but he refuses. He says it gently, but somehow I feel as if something has changed between us. “Wouldn’t you like a coffee?” I say. He points to his Rolex watch and says he must be getting home. I try to picture Mrs. Lorenzo—a short, stout woman, built close to the ground, preparing a mutton stew with rice and beans. Or perhaps I would be surprised. Perhaps she is tall and European. He lusts after her all the time.
“That’s a nice watch,” I tell him.
“Yes,” he says, “it was a gift from a colleague.” He doesn’t say which colleague.
“You don’t have trouble getting nice watches like that here?”
“No, there is very little we have trouble getting.” He opens the car door for me. “You’ll be all right,” he says, “won’t you?”
“Yes, of course I will.”
The prostitutes are sitting at a table in the bar and they wave at me as I walk into the lobby. I find I am actually glad to see them, happy to see familiar faces. It seems as if the prostitutes have accepted me as one of their own. They don’t exactly understand it, but since I seem to more or less always be in the hotel like them, they decide I am an international operator. They motion for me to join them for a beer, which of course I will buy.
“Hey,” Flora says, “why don’t you come out with us tonight? We can drum up some business for you.”
“We see you went out with the commandant today,” Flora says with a smirk on her face. “Did you have a good time?”
They are joking, but then they seem to notice that my eyes are red, that something is wrong. “Hey,” María says, offering me a seat. There is something about her that I like, the gentleness of her features. She is so small and petite, always in the same red dress, her friendly smile, like someone I’d be happy to have baby-sitting for Jessica, telling her when bedtime is, what stories to read. “You’ve been crying,” she says. “Actually I’m not in a very good situation.”
She pulls a chair back and I sit down beside her. Her face is filled with concern. “What is it?” she says, “What did you do?”
I don’t know why it is, but I need to confide. “The last time I was here,” I tell her, “I helped someone leave.”
She gasps, catching her breath. “Ah,” she sighs, “I see.”
“Now I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know when they’ll let me leave.”
“Who was it?” she asks. “Who did you help go?”
I almost tell her, but then I think better of it. “It was nobody,” I tell her, “nobody you’d know.” She nods, a look of disappointment on her face that seems more extreme than the situation warrants.
Later I return to my room. As I approach the door, I see a small object leaning against the jamb. It is a little doll made of cloth, dark, with black hair. A scrawny, unappealing doll, though it looks vaguely familiar to me. I cannot imagine who left it here, or why. I’m not sure if its purpose is to protect me or harm me, but I take it inside. I put it on my dresser, turning it this way and that. Then it occurs to me that from a certain angle as I look at its dark hair, its stick-figure form, this doll could be Isabel.
Forty-three
THOUGH they rarely ate together, this night they would. Rosalba had a pot cooking on the stove. Chicken, rice, and peas. Isabel arrived with a bowl of flower petals and incense, talismans around her neck. Milagro wore a Disneyland T-shirt and carried with her a small stuffed bear. A faint odor of tobacco and a feeling that someone had recently been there filled the room. Isabel sniffed like a dog. “Who was it, Mother?” And then she asked again, more insistently. “Did he come and see you again?”
“No, mi hija, he did not come,” Rosalba said, “but I will tell you this. Your father is going to die.”
“We are all going to die,” Isabel said.
“But he is going to die soon.”
“So let him die and take his whole goddamn country to hell with him.”
Rosalba shuddered. She knew that when she approached her daughter, Isabel turned cold, as if Rosalba had done something Isabel could not forgive. She had seen Isabel’s laughter turn dull when Rosalba entered a room and seen her daughter recoil at her touch. It was what Umberto Calderón taught her, Rosalba assumed. He taught all these ways of pushing away. We learn the most from those who do not want us, Rosalba knew.
“He was a man of great dreams,” Rosalba said. “You have no right to say these things.”
“I hate this place,” Isabel said. “I hate him. And I hate what I have become.”
Then Rosalba raised her gnarled hands, her joints like the burls of old trees, the only part of her that betrayed her age. “There is no use fighting over this,” she said. Then she turned to Isabel. “If you can,” she said, “you will go.”
That night as Rosalba sat on her patio, feeling the sultry breeze, she knew that soon her second child would leave her and probably her granddaughter too and she would be left alone. She thought how Isabel would take the eyes of El Caballo with her when she went. Once El Caballo said to her, Rosa come with me and we will change the world, but she was a woman with two children to raise. How could she go? A man cannot understand this.
She was with him for more than a dozen years and had thought about him every day since she was sixteen years old. That is a lifetime. Before she left the apartment that had been their love nest, she went to the botánica, where she bought votive candles, which she lit in every corner of their rooms. She bought new floor washes—Go Away Evil and Never Look Back. Rosalba scrubbed the floor and the walls as high as she could reach. She washed every inch of that apartment, then bathed in Love Leave Me bath oils.
She cut pieces of her hair and the traces she found of his. She found bits of a fingernail, flower petals, dust motes under the bed. All this she burned in a small bowl. But Rosalba knew even as she sat on her patio, breathing in the breeze through the tamarind and jasmine trees, that there was this part that she could never wash or burn. And even if Isabel went and took what little she had left of him, or of anything in this world, this part would remain.
Forty-four
THE NIGHT I was supposed to leave my passport and ticket by the seawall, the streets were deserted in Puerto Angélico, though it wasn’t late, just after nine. I walked slowly, as if I were only out for an evening stroll, and listened to my own footsteps clicking on the cobblestone. I rarely walk alone at night in New York and so the sound of my footsteps surprised me. Only lovers and a few solitary souls were out that night, but no one paid any attention to me and I knew what it felt l
ike at last to be invisible.
It was a balmy night and the moon was high and I wished Isabel were with me. The last time I saw her, she had told me that we would not meet again on la isla. That she would see me, as she put it, on the other side.
I walked a hundred paces past the fortress until I found the place where the two broken slabs of concrete made a cradle. Here I sat on the seawall and gazed out to sea, letting my bag rest on the wall and slip between the boulders that held back the water. After a few moments I dug down and found the tickets and my passport.
Carefully I turned the bag over, listening as its contents tumbled into the space between the two slabs. I heard a lipstick, coins, a pen, and paper drop. I listened as they slipped down as if into a well. Then I dipped my hand into the bag and was surprised at how empty it felt. And when I was sure there was nothing left, I stood up and walked back to the hotel.
I imagine that later the same night Isabel stood in her garden. She was proud that she could name all the trees—the frangipani, the ceiba, the júcaro. Where she was going, she would not know what to call the trees or the flowers, but she knew they wouldn’t have names like these. She had no clothes to warm her thin bones. She had never felt the scratch of wool against her skin. She would learn to live without the gentle sea breezes, the do-nothing days.
She tried to envision walks through autumn leaves, buttoning her jacket against the cold. She would find work. A profession that might suit her. Perhaps she could be a photographer or learn to fly airplanes. She would go to medical school. She’d wait tables. It didn’t matter. In three days she’d be gone. She’d leave as her half sister, Serena—a woman she’d despised in so many ways—had so many years before.
Perhaps she’d even return as Serena did every few years, wearing her sombrero de fiesta—those hats bedecked with jewelry, trinkets, hair ribbons, then deconstructed once they land in la isla into gifts for young girls. Serena came buxom with rice-and-coffee breasts that she’d jangle, laughing, and layers of underwear and denim vests. Once she arrived with her hair rolled in sausages beneath her sombrero. Another time she came with a Crock-Pot on her head.
“I brought you everything you do not have,” she’d say as she unwrapped herself like an onion and displayed her contraband. Her undressing became a veritable banquet. She joked that she could carry a chicken between her legs. Then she would wander over to the old house by the sea, dipping into boxes, finding her schoolbooks, stuffed animals, a butterfly collection, gathering up her past, which she’d take back in her empty suitcases to the husband and the twin sons Rosalba had never seen.
Isabel wondered if once she was gone she’d ever be back. She wondered if they would ever let her return. She thought of the father she had never made peace with. He had never come to her with the gift she had asked his lawyers to have him bring. He had given her a wedding, then sent her husband to die in a foreign war in a country she cannot recall, nor did she ever know why they were fighting there. Her second husband died at sea, just as her grandfather and great-grandmother had. Her other husbands were forgotten soon after they left her. Perhaps it will not be that difficult to go.
Late that night, when Isabel crawled into bed, she wrapped her arms around Milagro, who she assumed would now be raised by an aging woman who slept alone. Milagro felt her mother’s tears—moist and warm—on her neck. Milagro turned, cradling her mother in her arms. “It’s okay, Mummy,” Milagro said. “You’re leaving. I know.”
The next few days were a blur in my mind. I’m not sure of where I went or what I saw, though I know I went many places and saw many things. I made no notes. I went alone, wandering close to the sea or into the maze of side streets in the old part of the city. On and on I seemed to lose myself in its streets and alleyways. I had no identity. No passport, no way out. It would be so easy, I told myself, to drift down one of these alleyways and disappear.
I was beginning to think that this place had cast a spell on me. I felt inexplicably drawn to the Miramar and its seawall where water splashed onto the sidewalk. Drawn to the idle people who strolled the shore or sat on folding chairs in front of their small, dark rooms. It was not that I belonged here or wanted to stay. It was more as if I could not bring myself to leave, as if the pull of la isla was greater than the pull of home. And, of course, much of its pull was Isabel, and even her desperate need to leave was part of the spell.
I kept thinking I’d run into Isabel or that she’d find a way to let me know that all was well. That she would see me soon on the other side, in the next place. But I did not run into her, or into anyone. And she sent no message, though I kept looking and waiting for one, as I have continued to look and wait. I walked past some of our old haunts—the Church of the Apparitions, cafés we’d been to. But there were no familiar faces and no one seemed to recognize me. It was as if Isabel and everyone close to her had disappeared.
At the end of three days, as we had agreed, I raced down to the front desk early in the morning, agitated, and informed the desk clerk that my passport and ticket home were missing and appeared to have been stolen from my room. The clerk was a young man with acne on his face and he seemed genuinely concerned as I explained that I was preparing for my departure the next day and found that they were missing and I assumed had been taken. The young man listened carefully to what I was saying (I had intentionally chosen a young man) and after a while he picked up the phone. I didn’t have to pretend to be in distress because I really was. He told me to wait in my room and someone would contact me.
It was not long before I received a phone call from the head of the hotel, who asked me to come to the office. He asked me who had been in my room and if I’d had any guests. Did I let anyone in? “You are sure that you let no one into your room?”
“Yes, I am sure.”
“Well,” he said, sounding exasperated, “these things happen more often than we’d like around here.” Two days later, via the Swiss consular services, I was presented with an exit visa and a plane ticket. I was allowed to leave without much difficulty and arrived home only a day later than I had planned.
Forty-five
SOMEONE knocks on my door. I must have dozed off because it takes me a long time to get up and open it. When I find Manuel standing there, I motion for him to come in. Then I put on the television, loudly. The program is MTV and there are young black people and white people, walking down a beach, barefoot in the surf. They wear pastel shorts and T-shirts and their skin is clear, shiny.
“They are not going to let me go,” I tell him. “They know about Isabel, about what I did. They won’t let me go.”
Manuel wraps his arm around me. “They will. They’re just trying to frighten you,” he says. “If they considered you really dangerous, they would have put you in prison by now.”
“What should I do?”
Manuel folds me in his arms. He is caressing my neck when there is another knock at my door. We look at each other, our eyes filled with fear. “I really shouldn’t be up here,” Manuel says.
“Get in the bathroom,” I tell him. He listens to me, ducking in.
I open the door, expecting to see Major Lorenzo or one of his aides with reflector shades and a gun, ready to take me away. The questioning that afternoon was really an interview, to see if I was ready for prison. Perhaps even now they are preparing my cell.
Instead I see a black man dressed in a blue uniform and missing several teeth. He holds a lightbulb in his hand. “I’ve come to change your bulb.”
I look around my room and all the bulbs are on. “Everything is fine,” I tell him. “I don’t need a bulb.”
He looks perplexed. “I have to check your lights,” he tells me. He limps as he comes into the room. He is just doing his job, I tell myself. Carefully he unscrews all the lightbulbs, testing them. There are five, six of them. Then he comes to the lamp I unplugged so that I could plug in the television. “It must be this one,” he says.
I point to where I have unplugged it and he no
ds. He says he must check it. This is his job. He turns off the television with the young people singing on the beach, plugs in the light, and it goes on. Satisfied that there is nothing wrong with my lightbulbs, he takes the one he has brought and leaves.
When he goes, I quickly open the bathroom door, my heart pounding in my chest. Manuel motions to the television and I put it back on, louder than before.
“Who are you?” I ask, as he slides his hands under my shirt. “Who are you working for?”
Now Manuel reaches for me, he pulls me to him. I push him away, but he tugs harder. “Manuel, please …,” I say, trying to push him away. His hands are hurting my arms as he pulls me toward the bed. “Please,” I say, struggling to get free, “I don’t want to do this.”
He flings me onto the bed, throws his body on top of mine. With my hands, I am pounding his back as he thrusts his body against mine. I start to scream, a loud, protracted scream, but he puts his hand over my mouth. “All right,” he says, “shut up now. I’ll go.”
“Yes, you’d better do that.”
He rises off the bed and heads for the door. I lie there, trembling, wondering where I can go now. In the bathroom the frog still croaks, its voice growing fainter.
Forty-six
IN THE MORNING I wake up late and find I can barely get out of bed. As I am washing my face, trying to bring some life back into my eyes, I see that I have chipped a nail. Normally such a thing would not bother me because I’ve never worn polish so I would never notice if I’ve chipped a nail, but somehow I can’t bear the sight of that white arched half-moon against all that red. I am struck by the whiteness of my own nail. I get dressed and go down to see Olga.
Olga is there, filing her own nails. She files them in broad, impatient strokes. Business must not be good today. I walk in and point to where the red has separated from the white. Tsk, tsk, she says, shaking her head. I know, I know, I want to tell her. I can’t do anything right. She takes the file and applies it to my nail, making those same, broad strokes. Then she dips her brush into the red polish and covers the spot again.
