The Distant Marvels

by Chantel Acevedo

  Every so often, Lulu would cough lightly, and a few times, she asked that we stop so she might rest. A thin line of sweat ran over the top of her lips, and she refused the food we brought with us, but seemed to drink more water than our horse. “Is Mamá sick?” I asked Agustín, who did not even turn to look at her.

  “She’s fine,” he said, though later he forced her to ride the mare even when she wanted to walk.

  By the time we reached the tallér, I was happy, and loath to part from my father. I knew would not see him again for a long time.

  The tallér was hidden in a valley made shady by towering trees of all kinds. Tucked between the trunks were tents, which had been draped with palm fronds and other green detritus. Camouflaged this way, the tallér wasn’t easy to spot. When Agustín tied up the mare, I thought we were only stopping to rest or eat, but my father led us down a steep, rocky path and right into the first tent in the tallér.

  Hanging lamps lit the large tent inside. Women and children worked at tables, on the ground, or standing. In their hands were all kinds of weapons in different states of repair. The soft clink of tools filled the space, as did the murmurs of those working there. The place smelled of iron and chicken shit. A few moments later, a dusky hen scurried past me.

  Agustín spoke quietly to a thin woman wearing a calico kerchief. She watched us as he talked in her ear, and nodded every so often. When she came over, she extended a hand to Lulu, saying, “Me llamo Bernarda. Welcome to the workshop.”

  Lulu did not shake the woman’s hand. Instead, she wheeled on Agustín. “I am not staying here,” she said between her teeth. Her cheeks were brightly lit as if from a fire within.

  Agustín tipped his hat, a broad-brimmed, floppy hat made of straw, saying, “I’ll be back soon,” and just like that, without even a kiss to my cheek, my father was gone, and we were left in the tallér among strangers.

  Lulu ran after him, and I followed. By the time the two of us reached the top of the hill, all we could see of Agustín was the back of his head, high atop the mare. “He took the horse,” Lulu said, disbelief in her voice. “He took the horse.”

  Back down the hill we went, hand in hand, and into the tent. Lulu looked around, clicking her teeth together. Her hand crushed mine. Before I knew it, Lulu was sitting on the ground and weeping openly. Then, she beat her fist into the earth. Slowly, the tallér grew quiet as the women and children stopped to look at her. Even the chickens, which were allowed to wander the place, ceased their clucking. When Lulu began to scream, the women closed in like a human blanket, wrapping their arms around my mother, helping her to her feet and away from the tent. I heard her screams diminish as she went, then it was my turn to fall to the ground, afraid and alone.

  The women were all gone from the tent. Only the children had been left behind. There were three girls, all a bit older than I was. Two were twins, and they wore their hair in long braids that touched their waists. Another was a very blond child, the kind of blond I’d seen infrequently, white as the sun. A smattering of boys, including a few in diapers that sagged, sopping wet, as they chased each other, occupied the space, too. They didn’t seem to know what to do with me, and so they stared for a long time.

  “My name is María Sirena,” I said at last. My scalp was itching, but I would not scatch it, not now, in front of all these people.

  “Stupid name,” one of the boys said.

  “Fausto!” one of the twins reprimanded him.

  “I’m Marcela,” the other twin said. “She’s Graciela,” she added, pointing to her sister. “That’s Fausto, she’s Veronica, but we call her Blondie, the little ones are Luís, Carlos, and Leopoldo, but we call him Polo.”

  “I’ll never remember all of that,” I said, and the children shrugged and shook their heads.

  Then, another voice spoke out from the mouth of the tent. The figure was hard to see in the glaring sunlight, but I could tell he was a boy about my age. “You forgot to introduce me,” he said, stepping into the tent. “Me llamo Mario,” he said, and reached me in two quick strides. He held out his hand and lifted me to my feet.

  It was the first time I had ever touched a black person that I could remember, though I didn’t think of it until later that year, when the shade of Mario’s skin became a threat to us both. “I was new here once, too,” Mario said, his head cocked to the side as he spoke to me. His hair was uncombed, and his shirt was missing the two top buttons. He gave the impression, at once, of a boy without a mother. But his eyes were quick and bright, and turned up at the corners just a notch. His ears poked out a little from his head. On his chin was a deep scar, which I at first mistook for a dimple. When Mario smiled, the scar flattened to nothing but a patch of shiny skin. When he frowned, it became a tiny well.

  “Come with me,” he said, still holding my hand. I followed him out of the tent and around it. There, I saw that the valley was little more than a hollow, and that there were only three tents in total, plus a small enclosure for a couple of horses, both of which walked slowly enough to suggest that they were hurt animals. A pair of goats wandered among the horses; there were chickens everywhere.

  “It isn’t much,” Mario said. “There are other talléres much bigger than this. They’ve taken over sugar plantations that the Liberation Army have burned and razed. They’re proper factories for weapons. But this place? This place feels like home.”

  “You’ve seen those places? Those other talléres?” I asked.

  “Sí. My father left me at one in Matanzas before coming here.”

  “Matanzas? My mother says that’s where the fighting is fiercest,” I said, leaving out the other things Lulu had said, how she’d begged Agustín to head west, to Matanzas, to the thick of the battle, and how it had frightened me so much.

  “She’s right,” Mario said. “My father is Ricardo Betancourt. He’s the captain of a company. He’s in Matanzas province now.” Mario bent down to pick up a hen that had hobbled up to him. “Brinquita, I call her,” he said, and held out the hen’s left leg, which was mangled, like a dried bit of grapevine.

  “How’d she get hurt?” I asked, petting the animal that had snuggled up against Mario’s chest.

  “Hawk,” he said. “She’s my pet, now.” The chicken cooed in response. It would be like that always with Mario—animals seemed to respond to him. The horses were his to tend, as well. This he told me with pride, and said he wanted to lead a proper cavalry one day. “Negros like me are in charge of companies and battalions in the war, like my father is. Once we win independence, you’ll see María Sirena, that there will be no more negro o blanco, just people.” Mario had a faraway look in his eyes, and so I said nothing, but I thought of how Lulu and Agustín had referred to los negros mambises, the black insurrectionists, with such pride to have them fighting on our side, and I thought that perhaps Mario was right.

  “So your father is a captain,” I said, and whistled. “What about your mother? Is she a mambisa? My mother wants to be one, but Papá won’t allow it.”

  Mario was about to answer me when I heard Lulu scream from inside the other tent, the one I hadn’t seen yet. I ran as hard as I could, drew open the flap, and watched in horror as my mother brandished a machete and swung it to and fro at the women of the tallér.

  “Illuminada,” one of the women called my mother’s name, her hands up in front of her. “Basta, basta. We won’t force you to stay. But consider leaving the girl. A war is no place for an innocent.”

  Lulu screamed again. She caught sight of me and beckoned me to come to her. I stood still, unable to move even a toe in her direction. “María Sirena,” she said, a warning in her voice, “we are leaving. Ven.”

  Still, I did not move. What was she thinking? A garbled noise came from my mother’s throat then, and she pointed the machete to her stomach. “Even my daughter abandons me,” she sobbed, closing her eyes. Her knuckles went white as her h
ands gripped the machete handle. I launched myself towards Lulu, but Mario held me back, and did not let go, even when I kicked at his shins with my heels.

  Luckily, the women in the tent, watching this horror show, were quick. They subdued my mother, and before I knew it, had her bound to a cot with rags knotted together. They even muffled her mouth with a blue bit of cloth. She eyed them wildly, like a nutría in a trap. Her hair hung limp and wet around her head, long swaths of it wrapped around her neck like a noose.

  Mario managed to drag me out of the tent, and dumped me in a slender stream that cut through the valley, for I was hysterical now, and it was said that cold water could sometimes help a person in shock. The coolness of the splash did the trick. I shut up at once, and looked at Mario standing above me, his brow tight in concern. “Are you well?” he asked.

  “She’s mad, Mario. My mother has gone mad,” I whispered, as if it were a secret, as if everyone in the tallér hadn’t seen her lose her mind.

  He lifted me out of the stream and led me to a patch of sunlit grass. “Sit,” he said. “Dry off.” In the distance, I could hear the women talking in the tent, deciding, I’m sure, what to do with Lulu.

  “You asked about my mother,” Mario said. “I’ll tell you, but you must promise to keep it a secret. ¿Me lo prometes?”

  “Sí,” I said. Already the sun was doing its work, and I felt warm to the bone.

  “It starts with me, the third Mario Betancourt to be born,” he said, and touched the scar on his chin.

  Mario told me the story in pieces, some on the day that I thought Lulu had gone mad, more that night, my first night alone without my mother. Mario had sat by my hammock, holding my hand, whispering his sad story. He told me more of it when I learned that my mother was not mad at all, but had begun to show signs of a particular kind of meningitis, which we called “horse fever,” or la fiebre del caballo. The doctor was called, and he said she wouldn’t survive the night. I cried at her side through it all, dipping my fingers in water and letting the liquid drip into her dry, foul-smelling mouth. Many weeks later, when she had recovered, and remembered nothing of her madness on our first day in the tallér, Mario finished the story.

  I have wondered since if his story was too awful to tell all at once, or if, like Scheherazade and her thousand tales, he’d wanted to prolong the telling on purpose, to be near me. A romantic notion, perhaps, but one I cling to now, when I have nothing left.

  7.

  Of Mothers and Madness

  The first Mario Betancourt was born in a thatched hut on a sugar plantation in Sabanilla, Matanzas province. The hut, a small dirt-floor home in a section of the sugar fields no longer cultivated, housed four other members of the Betancourt family—Mario’s parents, Margarita and Ricardo, Ricardo’s bedridden mother, Lidia, and Lidia’s mother, whom they called Cuquita, an ancient woman well past one hundred years of age, who tended to her ill daughter day and night, murmuring in Yoruba, so that no one understood. She still venerated the old African gods, remembering that place, and had refused baptism, even when she was whipped for it. They were all slaves on the plantation, and were some of the very few slaves who were allowed to stay together as a family. The plantation owner, Don Peregrino Calderón, lived in the big house with his wife, the docile Doña Encarnación, who bore two children—a handsome son named Roque, and an underweight girl who could not hear or speak. It was said that Don Peregrino Calderón was too softhearted, and possibly a homosexual, despite his wife. Those were the accusations thrown at a man whose slaves lived so long—to the landowning Spanish, he was as weak as a freshly whipped meringue.

  Such were the witnesses to the first Mario Betancourt’s arrival, who died only six hours after his birth, his tiny heart fluttering to a stop under his mother’s hand. The second Mario Betancourt died the same way, outliving his brother by only nine minutes. To Margarita, it felt as if she were the only one who mourned the baby boys. Ricardo toiled each day cutting sugarcane alongside his wife. He had no energy for grief. She cut the cane with a ferocity that she’d lacked before her babies had died. But still, had anyone asked her, she would have said that she felt as dead inside as her children were. Ricardo and Margarita came alive only at night, when their rough hands would trail over one another’s bodies like blind, groping things. Meanwhile, Lidia and Cuquita were lost in their own conversation made up of the sick woman’s moans and the ancient one’s muttering. During both labors, Margarita had walked herself to the plantation house where the doctor tended the slaves (it was, he’d said, more sanitary in the big, wood-shuttered house). She had returned on her own, empty-handed, carrying the thin receiving blankets she’d taken with her with such hope in a tight bundle.

  Upon both tiny bodies, Margarita had made sure to leave a mark before the doctor came to take them away. She’d dug her nail into each baby’s chin just hard enough until a half-moon line of blood appeared. It was meant to be a physical token, a signpost, a portal, for the spirit of this child, and the one before him, to come back someday. When Margarita’s next baby was born, the third Mario Betancourt, his chin bore a bright red crescent mark that faded to silver by the time he could talk. The doctor claimed it was damage done to the child with forceps at birth, but inwardly, Margarita disagreed.

  Aside from that scar, there was no indication that Mario Betancourt harbored the souls of his brothers within him, and there was no way of proving that his soul was on its third try on earth. But Margarita believed it wholly, would sometimes tell the young Mario stories set during the days of his past lives. The child would come to know three sets of birthdays, each celebrated meagerly, but with joy. He was named for the three saint days of his three births—Mario Juan Damian Betancourt.

  Margarita tried for another child in the years after Mario’s birth. Because Ricardo had told her he liked women with long hair, Margarita refused to cut hers, in the hope of enticing her husband into bed more often. By Mario’s fourth birthday, his mother’s hair reached her hips in a tangle of curls, and her dress was so torn that it flapped at her ankles, making her seem like a ghost that floated to and fro on the plantation. When a baby did come, at long last, another boy, he too died a few days after birth. This time, Margarita settled both the baby and Mario in her arms. The two of them watched as he shuddered, as a white ring developed around his mouth, and the room filled with the scent of his passing—a smell like diluted nutmeg. “Do you smell it?” Margarita asked. “His sweet soul?” And Mario had nodded, sí, mami, sí.

  Margarita wasn’t the same afterwards. She began talking to herself in the small hut, adding to the steady trickling of voices in that place. One day, a little over a week after the baby’s death, when she was still bleeding from it, Margarita disrobed and stood in the middle of the cane field, naked to all of the plantation, her hair whipping about her, Medusa-like, in the stiff sea breeze, howling like an animal in a trap, blood running thick down her leg.

  Mario watched it happen, and claimed that he dreamed of her that way, in nightmare upon nightmare. Sometimes, too, he’d dream of his infant brothers, with hollowed-out eyes and tiny mouths that chanted all of their names in a horrific chorus. But those deaths, and his mother’s madness, were not the worst of the story. The plantation overseer, a man named Rubén Oviedo, was on horseback the morning Margarita stood naked in the cane field. Mario heard the galloping horse before he saw it, and knew it could only be Oviedo, a figure who had taken on monstrous properties in his imagination. Surely, thought Mario, Oviedo had fangs instead of teeth, and that whip of his, coiled at his waist, was a stinging tail. Ricardo, Mario’s father, had urged Mario to stay away from Oviedo, and should he ever come upon the boy, he advised Mario to stare at Oviedo’s feet and check for cloven hooves, but never, ever look up at the overseer. Mario and Oviedo had crossed paths twice—once without any repercussion, for Oviedo had just trotted past Mario without so much as a glance in the boy’s direction, and a second time, when Mario ha
d been digging in a mud puddle and Oviedo, horseless this time, had snuck up behind him and said, “Take a bath in it, negrito,” then, left, chuckling at a joke Mario did not understand.

  This time, Mario watched as Oviedo swooped down and pulled Margarita by her long hair onto his horse. He’d wrapped the dark curls three times around his forearms before yanking her up, and she’d flown, it seemed, over the saddle, landing on the pommel with a thud. Oviedo paused only to look around, and his gaze caught Mario’s, who only whimpered where he stood. Then, Oviedo galloped away with Margarita, naked and helpless, deep into the cane field.

  Later that night, Ricardo took Mario with him to the house, to beg for his wife’s life. Don Peregrino himself had ushered Ricardo into the sitting room, a large space with low tables and chairs upholstered in gold velvet. White shutters graced each window, and the light poured through the slats like beams from a lighthouse.

  “We cannot have a mad woman on the plantation, Ricardo,” Don Peregrino said.

  “Sí, señor,” Ricardo answered, his eyes staring directly at Don Peregrino’s feet.

  “She’s a liability,” Don Peregrino said.

  “She’s my wife, señor,” Ricardo answered. “And the boy’s mother,” he added, patting Mario’s head.

  Don Peregrino shook his head. “She may yet recover,” he said. Ricardo looked up with eyes wide. His lips parted, but he did not speak.

  “Recover?” Mario asked, and his little voice was a like a whip cracking in the room. The adults looked at him sharply. “But she was not hurt when she was taken,” Mario persisted. That was when Ricardo grabbed the boy and clamped his hand over the boy’s mouth.