“Like when I caught my dress in that trap the other day?” I asked, having done just that earlier in the week, tearing one of my only dresses in a spring-loaded trap I discovered in the woods. I’d been lucky not to lose a finger or toe.
Lulu laughed softly. “Something like that.”
“I want to marry a man who is nothing like a spring trap,” I said.
Lulu nodded. She said something that I couldn’t make out. Cicadas chirped incessantly outside our tent, and my ears rang a bit. It was not a night for whispers.
After a while I said, “I can’t sleep,” and so my mother told me a story.
3.
A Love Story
I will tell you, María Sirena, about the day I met your father. Come closer. Así, así. Don’t move that cool hand of yours an inch, bien? Bien.
When I was young and unmarried, my parents, your abuelos, decided to leave Baire and move to Santa Clara. There, my father opened a zapatería, making and selling fine shoes and boots for men and women. Working with the leather and the waxy thread, his arm would pump up and down, a shoe coming to life in his hands. Shoemaking was like breathing for my father. It was a trade he’d learned from his father before him, who’d learned from his father, and so on. Whenever someone called him a cobbler, my father would grow angry, and say, “A cobbler only patches holes. What I do is an art!” and stomp out of whatever room in which he happened to be. The shop was small but well stocked, and soon, the business was doing fine, in spite of Spanish taxes. I worked the register, measured insoles and foot widths, and took orders.
I was about seventeen years old then, and unmarried. I’d begun my studies with a tutor—an old Spaniard who smelled like cedar—and hoped to become a teacher someday. My girlfriends were all beginning to pair off. Several had babies already, sweet, chubby things I loved to hold, huffing their wispy hair and dreaming of my own children. But my father had put a stop to each and every boy who had come courting. He would show his revolver to the insistent ones, pointing out that the gun held six bullets, “But I only need one.” This he’d say meaningfully, his soft voice a whisper. Usually, the boy in question would leave, never to glance my way again. Without a single boy courting me, I knew what the neighborhood gossips were saying about me—that Illuminada Puentes would be una solterona, an old maid.
My parents kept me busy, hoping to occupy my mind with something other than young men. “There’s time for all of that,” my father would say, dismissing me with a wave of a ruler, strip of leather, or whatever he had on hand.
“He just wants you to be his little girl always,” my mother would say, then, she would promise to talk with him about the permutations of my heart.
During the day, I had my hands wrapped around customers’ stinking feet, the measuring tape I used coiled around my wrist like a snake. At night, I helped my mother sweep and cook and do laundry. I studied with the tutor twice a week. My hands were beginning to grow rough and thicken, like a farmer’s. What man would want hands like that on his face, his back, caressing his shoulders? Not a one, I can promise you that.
So, when the first war against Spain broke out, I was happy. It meant that the shop filled with soldiers looking to resole their boots before heading out to battle. I learned their names, promised I’d pray for them, and, once or twice, wiped fat tears off the faces of these boys who had never held a rifle before. Of course, the soldiers were mostly members of the Spanish army. My understanding of the cause was minimal then, I’m ashamed to say. The fact that my parents were born and raised in Madrid didn’t help the matter. Once, Spain had encouraged its citizens to leave the mother country, to spread its culture broadly, taking that Spanish lisp to every corner of the world. My parents were devoted disciples, and came to Cuba, Spain’s most beautiful colony, with a mind to recreate their own little corner of Madrid amid the palmas reáles.
The truth was, I was proud to be a daughter of Spain, albeit in sentiment only. I was born in Oriente, at dawn. I was told that the midwife gave me a bit of sugarcane to suck on shortly after I was born. “For strength,” she’d said. Encouraged by the superstitious nurses, my first clothes were yellow, the colors of la Virgen de la Caridád, Cuba’s patron. So you see, María Sirena, I was Cuban from the start. But at the onset of the war, I would have given up my liberty to be the wife of one of those Spanish soldiers, so much did I fear becoming a solterona.
I imagined the soldiers that came into the shop as they might look in battle, their faces a rictus of terror, eyes bloodshot, hands trembling around their weapons. I imagined them sleeping on the hard ground, their long lashes touching their cheeks. Boys are at their best when they are sleeping, and I envisioned each of them in turn, beside me in bed, clutching me, seeking solace from nightmares.
The truth is, I had a wonderful imagination then, but I misplaced it the day the battle came to our street in Santa Clara. Rebels had come into the city, machetes in the air, rifles on their backs. They wanted to take Santa Clara back in the name of a free Cuba, and began by raiding each store down la Calle San Pedro for supplies.
I was alone in the shop, hiding behind the counter, when Agustín rushed in. He ran the length of the store, knocking down shoe samples from wooden shelves that lined the walls. He turned over tables and tested the wood of the table legs with a thump of his fingers. Finding them unsatisfactory (they were made of cheap pine after all), he vaulted over the counter next, and found me there, crouched, my hands over my head.
I heard him breathing hard as he stood over me. I feared the worst of this rebel, whom I hadn’t looked at yet. Where were my Spanish soldiers? Where was my rescue?
I felt a soft touch on my hair and heard a whispered command: “Levántate.” I did what he asked, rising slowly. When I looked up at Agustín for the first time, a curious feeling came over me. It felt as if someone had shaken me hard, like a doll being played with by a spirited child. My limbs, my cheeks, my eyelids, all of me felt looser, pliable. Dios, we were so young then. Agustín’s dark hair was long, and it hung across his left eye, giving him a dangerous, half-hidden look. His plump lips were pink and glossy, as if he’d just been kissed. A thin mustache lined the top of his mouth, but his chin was shaven. Dots of dried blood here and there told me he’d shaved recently.
All of this I noticed at once. By the time Agustín opened his mouth to speak, I was already half in love with him.
“Do you have weapons in the store, mi vida? Anything I can use against those Spanish bastards?”
I swear I only heard the part where he’d called me “mi vida.” It was a sweet nothing, a way of getting me to do what he asked, and it worked wonders. I flew to the back of the store, found my father’s revolver, and handed it over to Agustín.
He whistled when I presented it to him, then he spun the cylinder only to find it empty. “Bullets?” he asked.
“Follow me, and help me look,” I said, gripping his warm hand and leading the way to the storeroom. Together, we emptied drawers and upended boxes. Twice, Agustín’s arm brushed mine as we worked. Once, he pulled a bit of cobweb from my hair gently. We found a half-empty box of bullets underneath a pile of invoices, and these Agustín loaded carefully, holding a bullet between his teeth while he slipped each one into the cylinder. The gun full, Agustín put the weapon in the waistband of his pants.
“No, here,” I told him, pouring out the two remaining bullets from the box into the palm of his hand. “Just in case.” These, he slipped into his pants pocket.
“Gracias, mi vida,” he said, then kissed my cheek softly. It was a whispery kiss, but he pulled away so slowly that I could breathe in his coppery smell deeply. Then, he left, running back into the fray in the street. I could hear the popping of gunfire, the slap of revolvers and rifles going off like lightning. Unafraid suddenly, I stood outside the shop and watched Agustín’s slender form as he ducked and dashed down la calle, disappearing from view.
&
nbsp; I hid in the storeroom for the rest of the day. At night, my parents finally arrived, shaken and happy to see me alive. My father searched for his revolver for a long time before I burst into tears and made up a story about a rebel who had come and taken it, and had threatened me with a knife until I showed him where the bullets were.
“Animales,” my father said, his voice a growl. “If I ever meet that scum of a man I will cut off his balls with my sharpest shears,” he said, shaking a trembling fist in the air.
“Calma, calma,” my mother murmured into his ear, rubbing his back in that way of hers that I still miss.
Methodically, with patience only a shoemaker knows, my father began to cover the broken windows with sheets of leather. It was all we had on hand. Outside, the street was quiet. Here and there, a shout would traverse the air, startling us before it went silent again. At one point, the sound of dogs barking and growling and the sharp cry of a human being pierced the night. There was the sound of two gunshots, then nothing. My mother and I held each other, but my father kept working at the window, tapping the leather in place with short nails into the wood molding.
Someone knocked on the door a few moments later.
“¿Quien es?” my father called.
A weak voice said only, “It’s me.”
My father faced us in confusion, but I knew. Tearing away from my mother, I ran to the door, wrenching it open. Agustín fell forward into my arms, his own arms scratched and bleeding. His legs were worse. His pants were torn to shreds and the skin beneath was shredded, too, reminding me of butchered animals.
“Mi vida, help me,” he said, before losing consciousness in my arms.
“Papá!” I cried, staggering under Agustín’s weight. But my father did not move from my mother’s side. His eyes were on the pistol that had fallen from Agustín’s hand.
“Mi pistola,” my father said. Then again. “Mi pistola.” Disbelief was plain on his face—his mouth was open and his eyes were wide as he looked from me to the gun again and again.
“Papá, I can explain,” I began, but my father was upon me, shaking me hard so hard that my brain rattled in my skull and my mother was yelling at him to stop. My father pushed me away in disgust.
“Helping the enemy,” he muttered, and left my mother and me alone in the room. Without a word, she helped me drag Agustín into the shop.
“What do we do?” I asked her, meaning about Agustín’s injuries. My mother said nothing, and left the room. I laid my head on Agustín’s chest and listened for his heartbeat. It knocked away reassuringly. Still, he was bleeding all over the floor, and his lips were starting to turn purple.
My mother returned with a bottle of rum, and a needle from my father’s toolkit. The needle was slick, a clear substance dripping from the tiny tip. It smelled like rubbing alcohol. She took my hand and forced it open, then dumped the needle, already threaded with fine, waxy string, into my hand.
“I can’t,” I said, shaking all over.
“This is your mess,” she said. “Your father and I did not choose this boy for you. You chose him.” She eyed me steadily. “You want him? Then save him.”
My mother must have known what I was capable of. After all, my father had taught me to have a steady hand, to make neat stitches so that a shoe would not fall apart anywhere—not on limestone, not in swamp water. I took a few deep breaths and poured some of the rum on Agustín’s wounds. They looked like bites, and indeed, once the blood was washed away, I plucked a yellow incisor from his calf.
Agustín moaned, and his back arched off the table. “Calma, calma,” I said, repeating my mother’s mantra. Cupping the back of his head, I had him drink some of the rum. I waited until he grew sleepy again. His eyes stared towards the ceiling, but it was as if he looked past it.
“Even their dogs are cruel,” he muttered, and tears fell onto his cheeks.
“I know,” I said, and shushed him, running my hand over his lank hair. Then I gave him the rest of the rum.
“All we want is liberty. It is the right of every man,” he said, groggy now. He smacked his chapped lips together slowly, savoring the drink.
“I know,” I said again. “I feel that way, too,” though I didn’t really understand what I was saying at the time.
“Mi vida, you and I will see a free Cuba. Our children will be free,” he said, his eyes half-closed.
My heart beat faster. I steadied my hands. “Of course,” I whispered. When he finally slept, I began stitching him up. Every so often, Agustín would wince, but exhaustion and rum had worked their magic, and he slept through the worst of it. When I was finished, I put my head back on his chest and fell asleep, too.
In the morning, I woke with a pounding headache, and Agustín nowhere in sight. I looked around and wondered if it had been a dream. But there was the leather sheet flapping against the window. The empty bottle of rum lay at my feet, and my hands were rusty from blood.
“Mamá,” I cried out, afraid to call for my father. But it was he who emerged from the back room of the shop, trailed by Agustín, who limped carefully.
“You have a choice, Illuminada,” my father said. He was a soft-spoken man, and there was no edge to his voice. “This man wants to marry you.”
I couldn’t catch my breath. I didn’t even know his name.
“You may go with the traitor if you wish,” my father said, and now there was an edge in his voice.
“Manolo,” my mother said, calling my father’s name in warning. She was in the back room, and she peeked her head out.
“He’s a rebel,” my father called back to her. “He is not what we wanted for Illuminada.” All the while, Agustín stood by, his eyes narrow and perceptive.
My headache intensified, and my vision grew strange—everything was limned in a thin black line, like a drawing. The floor swirled beneath my feet, and I found myself falling. Agustín was at my side at once, running his knuckles tenderly across my cheek.
“So, it’s settled,” my father said, angry with me I knew, though I hadn’t said a word.
Agustín’s eyes glittered as he looked at me. “Do you believe a man can fall in love in an instant?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It seems so in fairy tales.”
“You saved my life. Those bullets, the ones you urged me to put in my pocket, killed the dogs that attacked me. One bullet for each savage dog. Then, you sewed me up, better than any surgeon could have, not that any of the Spanish doctors here would have treated a rebel like me. Courageous. Skillful. Beautiful. Men have fallen in love over lesser qualities in a woman.” Agustín sat back on his heels, wincing, holding my hand.
I could feel his pulse through his skin and imagined that my own was racing to meet it. My mother had her hand on my father’s shoulder, and I could see him softening. He, too, was a romantic, leaving fresh flowers for my mother, usually gardenias, on his pillow when he left for the zapatería early. He called her “mi belleza,” even though deep lines marked the contours of her face, and her belly had gone soft and protruding. María Sirena, how I wish you’d known your grandparents. But they died within a month of one another—Papá from a cancer of the throat, Mamá from a failure of the heart. They loved each other so much they could not bear a life apart, and I believe that is the kind of love they wanted for me.
They thought I’d found it in Agustín. After all, I’d never disobeyed them before, and this—handing my father’s revolver to a rebel—seemed to suggest an intensity of feeling on my part. They weren’t wrong. Not at first.
I closed my eyes and nodded my head. “Sí, I’ll marry you,” I said to this boy, a stranger to me, though his blood was still caked under my fingernails, and I could hear his heart thumping in my ears still. Already, a part of him was left in me, and, I’m certain, a part of me was bound to him.
“Bien, bien,” he said, kissed my forehead,
and held me.
I cleared my throat, felt my headache start to fade, and asked, “Pardon me, but what is your name?”
4.
Requiem for a Poet
We woke up to the clacking sounds of rifles being loaded and cleaned. We heard shouts all around the camp, and the heavy thump of footfalls around our tent, as men ran to and fro. Lulu and I looked at each other sleepily. Her story had taken much of the night to tell, and I had stayed awake for all of it, trying hard to imagine my father being chased and attacked by dogs, my heart aching for the grandparents I never knew. I would hear the story again, many times, but I would always remember this first version, which was so full of longing for those days. My father’s handprint, which had been so red and angry on my mother’s cheek last night, was now just a blush of color. Her other cheek looked wan in comparison. Lulu touched it tenderly, and I knew it still hurt.
Agustín burst into the tent suddenly, his skin drenched in sweat already, though it was early in the morning. “They’re here,” he was saying breathlessly. “The Spanish cavalry. Ambush!”
“Here?” my mother asked. “Here? Now?”
He gripped my hand and Lulu’s. “A mile away. We don’t have time to get you to a safe house. You’re to stay in the tent, you understand?”
Lulu shook her head. “How many? Are we outnumbered?” Agustín nodded. “Then let me fight,” she pleaded.
“What about María Sirena? Would you have her carry a machete to battle?” my father asked.
“She’s old enough,” Lulu said and I gasped. My mother gave me a forlorn look, making me feel very much unwanted, like a breathing obstacle to her desires. But she hugged me suddenly, fiercely, and the feeling vanished. “Of course not,” she said at last. “We’ll stay here.”
Agustín leaned over and kissed my mother. His lips parted hers and they held each other a long time. It seemed as if he were saying goodbye. When they separated, my mother’s face was wet with tears.
The Distant Marvels Page 10
