“Two blocks that way,” he said, pointing towards the sunset.
I ran, taking one last look at the man, who might be my father, there on the ground, and I realized that the sight of him like that would dwell in my mind forever.
The doors of the inn were locked, as were the windows. Even so, I hugged myself in joy. Sooner or later, Lulu would have to leave the inn, and I would be outside, waiting for her. There was even the smell of the bakery in the air to keep me company. I took giant whiffs of it, and my growling stomach settled a bit.
That’s just about the time I heard my mother’s voice, thin but sharp, like a blade: “I’ll tear your hair out!”
“¡Mamá!” I shouted, and clawed at the front door until my knuckles were all scraped. I kicked at the door once, twice, then, on my third kick, I heard a gunshot. I thought of the prisoners at once. I didn’t know it then, but I was steeling myself for what might have happened inside. The memory of those dead prisoners gave me strength, for they had faced their deaths with open eyes, and I would not flinch from it.
I ran around the building, trying all the doors as I went. Looking up, I spotted the small window that led to the kitchens. The smell of chicken and rice—last night’s dinner—still lingered around the place. An old crate served as a step, and I pulled myself through the window, scuffing my charról shoes and tearing my stockings. Once inside, I could no longer hear Lulu, but I knew where she was.
I ran through the kitchen and burst out into the lobby. It was dark. The lamps were not lit, though the acrid smell of kerosene rested in the air. The lights, then, had been turned down recently. I slowed, listening for Lulu upstairs. It was frighteningly quiet, except for a rhythmic, muffled sort of sound, as if a horse were galloping very, very far off in the distance. For some reason, I closed my eyes against the darkness. Feeling safer that way, I felt the floor with my toe and made some progress. That’s when I tripped on something large and warm.
A moan sounded through the lobby. “Señor Reyes,” I said, bending down and feeling for the man with my hands. My fingers found his ankle, then his knee. He moaned again when I touched a bit of torn fabric on his arm soaked in something wet and sticky.
“Lulu,” Julio Reyes croaked. “He has Lulu.” I felt his heavy hands on my shoulders, and he pressed down on me as he raised himself up. It felt as if he might kill me with his weight, but I stifled my cries.
“I can go get help,” I said. “Where are the other guests?” I asked. The inn was sometimes full with guests. Other times, it was like a haunted place, and we were the souls trapped inside.
“They’ve all left,” Julio Reyes said. “Alarcón s-sent them away at g-gunpoint.” Julio Reyes coughed wetly, groaning after each cough.
A piercing cry from upstairs sent me running through the dark lobby. I heard Reyes call my name, but I had slipped away before he could say more. I stumbled over a warm and oddly shaped something on the floor, and was up again quickly. At the top of the stairs, I stopped. All was silent now and I grew frightened. The thick floorboards had been laid lengthwise down the hall, and they seemed to point to the directions I could take—to Lulu’s room, or back down to Julio Reyes.
That’s when I noticed that the door to Lulu’s room was ajar. I slid into the room and found that a single candle on the dresser lighted the space. The bedclothes had been thrown on the floor, and Lulu’s trunk had been packed haphazardly, so that a slip stuck out from under the closed lid, like a tail caught in a trap. And though I heard a grunting sound, like someone struggling with a heavy thing, I saw no one in the room.
My first thought was of ghosts, my father’s ghost specifically, coming back to haunt Lulu and me. Then, I heard a soft whimper coming from the other side of the bed, by the window. I climbed over the thin mattress and looked down. I met Aldo Alarcón’s eyes, and held his dark gaze for a few moments before realizing that my mother was right there, underneath him on the floor, her legs bare and white in the moonlight, and that one of his hands was pressed against her throat.
“Lárgate,” he said. It was the kind of thing a person said to an animal. “Get out,” he repeated. “Or I’ll kill you, too.” There was a trace of blood in the air. Lulu whimpered again. I thought of Julio Reyes downstairs. Perhaps he was dying. I wondered where Fernanda had gone.
“María Sirena,” my mother whispered, “run.”
Aldo Alarcón snatched at me suddenly with his free hand, and I was surprised into action. Bolting off the bed, I ran out of the room and into the hallway that was suddenly lit by a single, approaching light. It blinded me at first, and I prayed hard. Not Fernanda, not Fernanda, I said to God and la Virgen and San Francisco de Asis—all of them at once.
The light was all I could see until it glided past me, and I felt a warm hand caress the top of my head for a moment. Turning around, I saw that it was Julio Reyes who had gone past, going into Lulu’s room. In the clarifying light that spilled from his lamp, I noticed the bloodstains on the hallway floorboards, and the red footprints that were too small to be my mother’s, and too large to be mine. I was about to measure my foot against one of the bloody prints when a shot rang out. The alarming sound sent me into tremors, and I cried out, “¡Mamá!”
Rushing to the room I had shared with her for so many years, I expected to see my mother’s corpse. What I saw instead was the body of the captain, Aldo Alarcón, facedown on the carpet, his blood soaking the place where he lay. Either my mother or Julio Reyes had killed the man. I’d assumed it was Julio Reyes, but then I saw the pistol—the very one I’d seen Aldo Alarcón holding—drop from my mother’s hand.
There on the ground it resembled a dead bat, so black and angular and still. Immediately, Lulu wrapped herself in a sheet. I noticed blood upon her, too, trickling down her legs.
“The baby. The baby,” she was whimpering, and I thought, of course, that she meant me.
“I am here, Mamá,” I said.
“He’s killed it. Our baby,” she kept saying to Julio Reyes, who watched her tearfully. “Oh,” she cried, and doubled over, clutching her abdomen.
“Mamá, I am here. I am well!” I shouted at her, patting my body with my hands to prove the point. But when she spotted me, Lulu uttered two words that were garbled in her throat: “Get out.”
The memory of her in that moment, ragged and hostile, remained a vague one for a long time. It became clear only a few months later, when I’d seen enough to make meaning of those blurry shapes. I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when the remembrance suddenly sharpened in my head, but it was similar to the feeling of putting on eyeglasses for the first time. Like a miracle, the images made sense. When I brought it up, Lulu would claim to know nothing of that evening. I would ask her about the baby, the one she’d lost after Alarcón raped her, and she’d shake her head and say, “Do not speak of such things.”
Until now, I have not spoken of it.
My mother told me to get out, but I stood still. From outside the window came the sound of gravel crunching underfoot. Julio Reyes pulled on the sash and the curtain came open. “Dios mío,” he said, turning to Lulu with frightened eyes. He tried to tidy the room, pushing a chamber pot under the bed, stepping over Aldo Alarcón’s body to tuck stray clothes back into Lulu’s trunk. But then he stopped, leaned against a wall, and held his arm tightly. His bloody fingerprints were all over Lulu’s things.
Lulu had looked outside the window, too, and her chest swelled, as if the future itself had filled her at once. Things would be different now, she knew, and she closed her eyes tightly. Julio began to move again, trying to put the room in order.
“Julio, stop,” she cried, and his hands froze over a kerosene lamp he was trying to light. “Just stop. You know what must happen next.” She walked over to him, half-dressed still, sobbing, and laid her palm on his cheek. He kissed her hand.
From downstairs came a long, weak moan. “Fernanda,” Jul
io Reyes said, and looked at me with pleading eyes. “Help her.”
Confused, but determined to make some sense of everything, I took the candle that Julio Reyes had brought upstairs, and followed the sound of Fernanda’s moaning down the burnished steps. I found her awake, and half-sitting at the foot of the stairs. She was holding one of her feet tightly with both hands, and when she showed me, I could see where the bullet had pierced her foot.
“All I’m good for now is a convent,” she sobbed, wrapping her arms, bloody hands and all, around my neck. “Damn Alarcón forever,” she cried through gritted teeth.
“It will be fine,” I told her, though my spine had gone rigid at her touch. What was she capable of now that she’d lost everything? I caught sight of the two of us in a mirror on the other side of the room. I could just see Fernanda’s face. She was crying in silence, her mouth open wide in the effort.
She held onto me until we heard the front door being kicked in. It gave way easily and a man in a prison uniform that looked as if it had been scorched in places stood unsteadily, gripping the doorframe.
“Is Iluminada Alonso here?” he asked.
“Upstairs,” Fernanda replied, and I pinched her hard for giving my mother away to a stranger. She didn’t seem to notice me.
The prisoner did not say gracias, but brushed past us roughly, knocking the side of my head with his knee as he climbed the stairs. He smelled like smoke.
“I knew he’d come. I tried to warn Tío Julio,” Fernanda whispered.
“Who?”
“You little idiot,” Fernanda said . . . “It’s your father.”
13.
A Nightmare Within a Nightmare
The lightbulb overhead gutters, then burns out with a pop. We sit in semidarkness. The moon is full and things are cast in a strange, pink light.
“I’ve never heard a romance that goes like that,” Noraida whispers. What is it about the dark that quiets voices?
The door opens and closes before I can see who it was that left. I try counting the women, but I realize that, despite the full moon, there are patches of darkness in the room so profound that it’s as if the women have disappeared. We say nothing to one another. The wind has died down and the rain has all but stopped. I can hear the tinny sound of a radio playing next door, and we strain to hear if it’s news of the hurricane. I catch snatches of advertisements for a movie called Cuba Baila. The rhythms of a mambo filter through the air, and an announcer baritone-voice proclaims the film a “delight” and “1963’s premier event” and other such hyperbole. In a corner of the room, Rosalia begins to shift, and then, Estrella whispers, “Anda, baila,” and the two of them shimmy as they sit, drawn to the music. The advertisement ends and a news report starts. But the voice is hard to make out. I catch only the word “flood,” repeated a few times.
I wish one of the women would go and listen for us all. I wish one among us would be bolder about such things. But I know the women are afraid of Ofelia, though they seem to like her. We’ve grown accustomed to strange rules in this new Cuba—what we can buy or sell is decided in Havana, and we can’t leave the island at all without permission. Rubber stamps have taken on the power of gods here. Even leaving this room seems as if it might be forbidden.
I’m afraid to leave for other reasons. So many secrets have poured out like spilled dirt from a broken pot. I feel a sudden closeness to the women in the room, even to Mireya, who can’t look me in the eye. They know my mother’s shame. What if I told them of our time in the Spanish reconcentration camps? If I told them about Mayito, of what I did to my own son, would they understand? It paralyzes me to think of it. Meanwhile, the radio drones on and on, meaninglessly.
Just then, Ofelia throws open the door to our room. She’s carrying a flashlight in one hand. The light is sickly and yellow. Under her other arm, she’s tucked several flat pillows, and these she drops on the floor.
“A dormír,” she commands, as if we are children. I am surprised to see the women scrambling, faster than I thought they could move. The pillows seem thin, musty, and not worth the effort. Susana stops and turns to look at me, gesturing towards the pillows. Later, I mouth. Ofelia leaves again, and I wonder where she is sleeping at night.
With the door to our room open, the radio next door is clearly audible now, and the announcer is, indeed, talking about the hurricane. The final bands of wind are off-coast now. Damage is extensive throughout the island. There is no word of whether or not Maisí has been blown into the ocean, to become our very own Cuban Atlantis. Noraida gets to her feet and peeks out the front door. Then, she disappears. Nobody says a word. When she appears again, she is blinking hard, the darkness of our room suddenly unfamiliar. “The water is waist-high downstairs,” she says. “I saw rats swimming in it.” Then she sits alone, and covers her face with her hands. Next door, the radio blares on. It feels as if the entire house has gone still to listen to the reports. I wonder who is next door. Are they old women like us? Sick ones like Susana? Could they be orphans? A whole roomful of elderly men? People in wheelchairs? I have this sudden, ridiculous vision of a room full of clowns and dwarves—circus refugees who have lost their colorful tents in the storm.
I should have drowned in my cottage in Maisí. In my pocket, the picture frame with Mayito’s small face in it has rubbed a part of my skin raw through the fabric. I touch my stomach tenderly in that place that bulges and aches. Yes, the hurt is still there. I pray that the end comes quickly when it comes.
When I get up at last, there is only one flat pillow left. It has no pillowcase, and rusty stains have made strange shapes on the fabric. I pick it up. The pillow smells like onions.
I settle into a corner of the room, away from Susana for the first time since the storm began. She’s asleep already, in a moonlit patch of floor, her scarf crooked on her head. I want to be alone. I long for my little cottage, and when I close my eyes, I pretend I’m there again, in my own bed. I do sleep a little. Perhaps for just an hour or so. And in that sleep I dream, but it is more memory than dream.
I’m remembering the day my father escaped prison, how I’d left Fernanda at the bottom of the stairs, clutching her foot, and how I’d traced her bloody footprints back to the room where the adults were now arguing.
Agustín, his hands blackened with what appeared to be ash of some kind, was holding Julio Reyes up against a wall, those dark hands around the inn owner’s throat. Julio Reyes’s wounded arm bled onto Agustín’s shoes
My mother was weeping openly, and the blood between her legs was still trickling in clots. The smell of iron was nauseating. “He saved me, Agustín. He saved me. Déjalo, por favor,” she said as Julio Reyes’s face began to turn purple under pressure from my father’s grip.
“¿Y éste?” Agustín asked, kicking Aldo Alarcón’s body with his foot.
My mother said nothing. But I found my voice in that moment. “That is Capitán Alarcón. He tried to kill us all,” I said. I wanted my father’s eyes to meet mine. I wanted him to demand something from me, too. After all, wasn’t I his daughter? Hadn’t I been waiting for him all this time? Hadn’t I mourned his death at the prison, though clearly, I’d been wrong? That other prisoner had been a stranger after all.
Agustín looked at me intently for a moment. Then, releasing Julio Reyes, he flipped the captain over with his foot. A weak groan escaped the captain’s lips. “That’s a poor shot. The man is still alive,” my father said, pointing at the wound in the captain’s abdomen.
“I’m no good with a gun,” Julio Reyes said without stammering.
Aldo Alarcón tried to speak, to accuse my mother of his murder, I knew. She stared at him wide-eyed, her own lips moving only a little, perhaps cursing him, or willing him to be still, or to die more quickly.
“I recognize this bastard,” my father said, leaning low over the captain who’d turned him over to the Spanish authorities fourteen years ea
rlier. A strange laugh burst from Agustín’s throat. “A reunion!” he shouted, picked up the pistol that my mother had dropped, cocked it, and shot Aldo Alarcón in the face. “Now, no one will recognize you,” he said.
My mother had screamed when the gun went off. I made no sound at all, and this seemed to please my father. He turned to Lulu and said, “Get yourself cleaned up. We’re leaving.”
“Where?” she asked, shakily, obeying him, wiping her legs down with a bedsheet.
“Away from Havana,” my father said. He laid the pistol on the dresser. “Dos Rios, in Santiago,” he said. “The rebels are amassing there. I hear José Martí is among them.”
My mother’s deep-set eyes fell upon my father, and she became very still. “Still a rebel?” she asked.
“Para siempre,” he told her.
Julio Reyes must have been sure at that moment of having lost Lulu forever. For the first time in my life, I saw purpose in my mother’s eyes. I saw fire.
Julio Reyes begged us to stay the night. He said it was safer to hide for now. Agustín’s prison uniform was burned in the oven, and Julio Reyes gave him some of his own clothes to wear. As for Alarcón’s body, they would stuff him in a laundry sack come dawn, and throw the remains into the sea. All was planned.
By midnight, Lulu and Agustín were asleep in the lobby, each on a different couch. Julio Reyes made a bed for me of blankets behind the counter, and I lay there and watched as he washed the flesh wound on his arm and bandaged it. Nobody wanted to sleep upstairs with Aldo Alarcón’s body.
It is a wonder I slept. But when I did, I dreamed of fire. I dreamed of my mother and father and me huddled together in a prison cell. Around us, hundreds of drawings of flowers peeled off the walls and struck our faces. As they touched us, they burst into flames, so that we were left scorched in places. We cried out but no one heard us, or came to unlock the bars. One drawing lit upon a dirty, gray mattress, and that caught fire quickly, as if the mattress were stuffed with coal. We pressed against one another, our eyes stinging, all of us coughing, choking. “We are leaving, we are leaving, we are leaving this place,” my father kept saying, and I could feel my mother nodding against me, holding my head against her chest.
The Distant Marvels Page 7
