The Distant Marvels

by Chantel Acevedo

  As Mario worked in that furnace of a place, Marcela and Graciela, the twins, would loiter to watch, sweat collecting on their upper lips and under their arms. It was worth it, they’d said to me, to watch the boy work, shirtless, whistling as he labored.

  “What are you talking about?” I’d asked them.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Graciela said. She was the rough-tongued one, often in trouble for cursing. “He’s a beautiful specimen.”

  “There’s no one else worth looking at,” Marcela added. They were sixteen that summer, and had outgrown their girl-sized dresses. Graciela had become, overnight, all hips. And Marcela, who was her fraternal twin, was all chest. I’d overheard one of the boys say that each was half a woman. I’d blushed and run away from the conversation, understanding what the boy meant. I didn’t need to learn about sex from the older children, or at least not the mechanics of it. My mother had shared her bed with Julio Reyes for years while I had tried very hard to sleep. And yet, discussions about boys among the girls in the tallér suddenly gathered a different meaning. Bodies became something I noticed—who was hairy, who was fit or fat, whose hand I wanted to hold.

  To hear the twins talk about Mario in this way, to know that they dreamed of doing things with him in the dark, caused a curious feeling in me. I was unsettled around the girls. Once, I pulled a chair out from under Graciela just as she was about to sit down. She rose and slapped me hard for the prank. When her mother asked me why I did it, I could only shrug. I had no idea myself. I would try to make it up to the twins by picking flowers for them, or offering to braid their hair, but then I’d see them eyeing Mario and it was like a small furnace had been lit in my chest, and I’d pull their hair too hard while I braided, yanking out a strand at a time until I was slapped again.

  Lulu arched her eyebrows at the twins whenever she saw them sweaty and breathless, returning from a trip to Mario’s smithy. “Have some pride,” she’d said to them once in the middle of a history lesson, when she’d caught the twins writing their names alongside Mario’s, encasing their fine calligraphy inside hearts.

  It all ended when their mother, Bernarda, learned what the girls had been up to. “¿Un negro?” she’d shouted again and again, her voice growing shriller each time. She’d dragged Marcela and Graciela away by the hair, a twin in each hand, and we could all hear how she beat them, and how they screamed, “¡No, mamá!”

  Later, the women would sit down with Bernarda and reprimand her. They would say that the spirit of the revolution was one of equality, that Mario was one of them, despite his color. But when Bernarda turned on them, saying, “What if one of your children took up with a negro? I don’t believe you’d be so idealistic then,” the others said nothing.

  As for Mario, he seemed not to have noticed any of it. At first, I thought that perhaps he was slow. I remembered the story of his mother, and I wondered if that sad past hadn’t affected him in some way, so that he lacked perceptiveness. How could he not have noticed the twins, the way they prepared his plate during mealtimes, presenting it to him as if it were some terrific gift, when all we seemed to eat was eggs and white rice, with an occasional bit of chicken and a glass of goat’s milk?

  Later, I realized that he had not paid attention to the twins because he was busy watching me. I learned this the day he was brought to the tallér half dead. He’d gone off to war the day of his sixteenth birthday. We’d said goodbye in the morning, outside of the tents, by the river. It was a long, dark moment for us, for I was imagining Mario shot and killed, and he read the anguish in my face at once. “Don’t worry,” he’d said. “I’ll be back. I’m fast. I’m good with a gun, you know that.” I’d nodded, and he’d pinched my cheek playfully, then was gone, disappearing into the thick woods in search of a regiment he might join. He’d return several times that year, and with each return, he seemed more grown, the contours of his face hardened a bit more, the veins in his forearms more distinct. I noticed all of these things simply at first, the way one notices a change in the weather—Look, it’s raining. Or, look, Mario’s hair has been cut. Later, I noticed the details of his face and body with a consuming attention. Lulu always said that a person in love loses her appetite, and that was the first indication to me of the condition of my heart. When Mario was in the tallér, meals made me nauseous. The very smell of that rare bit of meat cooking, which once would have made me shake my hips happily and dance around the kitchen, now made me clutch at my stomach. Mario was all the food I needed, and I fed my eyes and ears with the sights and sounds of him. At night, I dreamed about him, so that I was exhausted at all hours and my mother began to suspect that I’d caught dengue fever. She’d hover around me, clamping her palm to my forehead to check my temperature every so often, forcing me to down glass after glass of manzanilla tea, the fragrant plant growing in abundance in our garden.

  I’ve often asked myself why I loved him so. Perhaps the answer is simple. Fausto and the other boys in the tallér were unattractive imps, always playing practical jokes and speaking in crude riddles whenever one of us girls happened to pass by. Coddled by their mothers who did their work for them, the boys became spoiled. Mario, motherless, knew no pampering. So he toiled unafraid. He was patient. He was handsome. And I was utterly lost in his presence.

  At last, Mario was brought to the tallér in a makeshift stretcher, stitched together from Spanish uniforms. He had taken a bullet in the calf, and it had bled so much that the men in his company thought he would die. The tallér was sometimes used as a field hospital when a battle was waged nearby, and on that day, we had five other men brought to us, all of them bleeding, some of them calling for their mothers, for they were very young; another raved, “whip, whip,” and twitched as if he were being lashed; and Lulu said something about the tragedy that was slavery and the courage of men in a company such as this one, made up of so many of Cuba’s black sons.

  Lulu set me to watch the men for fevers. She taught me how to lay my fingernails flat on their foreheads. “If you can feel heat through your nails, they’re feverish.” She taught me how to lay a wet cloth gently over a wounded man’s eyes, shushing him as I did so, lest he think that the sudden darkness was death coming for him. She showed me how to air the cloth so that it would cool, then lay it down again. Meanwhile, the women tended to wounds. Lulu, in particular, was good with the needle and surgeon’s thread. Around me I could hear the sound of shrapnel being plucked out of bodies and plunked onto the tin plates we used for eating. The men’s moans became background noise, the way thunder goes unheard when a storm lingers too long.

  I had not known at first that Mario was among the wounded. I did not learn of it until I’d laid my fingernails on his forehead, so intent was I on doing my job. Here was a man who felt as if he were on fire. A bloody shirt had been wrapped around his head, obscuring part of his face. As I turned to get a fresh cloth, his arm shot up, and he grabbed my wrist hard.

  “María Sirena,” he whispered, “is it bad? Do I look too terrible?”

  “Oh,” I said, and got a good look at Mario. My stomach rolled over. The shirt wrapped around his head was soaked red. His upper lip was swollen, as if he’d shoved his head into a beehive. The scar on his chin was crusty with blood, too. I gripped his hand in mine and said, “You are as handsome as ever.”

  He could not laugh for the pain, though his eyes crinkled at the corners. Then, he started murmuring something about wooden boxes and rusty machetes, and here and there he said words in a language I did not understand. Sometimes, he said his own names—Mario, Juan, Damian—and I grew afraid that the souls of his brothers were trying to claim him, to make him one of them.

  “¡Mamá!” I cried out for Lulu, who came running and began to work on Mario’s injuries at once.

  “Go, María Sirena,” she urged me when Mario bit through his lip, slamming his fists onto the table where he lay. The injured had been laid on our worktables, and in the hurry to put
them there, tools were strewn on the floor, which we tripped over getting around the wounded men.

  I was backing away when I heard Mario say, “No te vayas, Sirenita.” The anguish in his voice froze me to the spot. He held out a trembling hand, which I took. I put my head on his chest as my mother worked on his leg, listening to his heartbeat, making sure it kept pounding. Mario’s breath came out in rough gusts, and I could feel it warm on the back of my head. All along, I was thinking of the story Lulu had told me about falling in love with Agustín, how she’d mended him, and put her ear to his chest just this way. Her tender gesture had recurred with me, like an inherited thing. At one point, I noticed Lulu looking at me, and her eyes were full of tears. Later, she’d tell me that that was the moment she’d known that Mario was for me, and I was for him, and that she’d started grieving right then and there because she knew that our love would amount to tragedy.

  The soldiers were moved to a shady spot in the valley and rested on hammocks strung between thick silk-cotton trees. I would sit on the ground, my legs crossed beneath me, and read to Mario in that perpetual twilight, for the trees obscured the sun at all hours. It took Mario a month to heal. In that time, I brought him meals, and read to him from the scant books we’d acquired over the years. His favorite was a biblical story, the Song of Solomon.

  Whenever I read the line that went, “Do not stare at me because I am black, because I am darkened by the sun,” my voice would quiver. I was sure Mario had caught me staring at him more than once, though my stares had nothing to do with the color of skin.

  “You’re a good reader,” he’d remark, putting me at ease. It was a compliment that proved meaningful later in my life, when I made a living reading stories to men. Back in the tallér, Mario’s kind observation made me blush, and I’m afraid I went too far, offering to read to him all day. Surely, I must have bored him, but he always agreed to listen.

  Mario never once laid a finger on me, though, occasionally, he’d ruffle my hair and I would tingle all over, as if all of my limbs had gone to sleep at his touch. But when Mario was healed at last, he left to join a new company on a damp summer morning, without so much as an “adios” in my direction.

  I was newly fifteen when he returned again. It was my most beautiful year, just as the saying goes. It was always said of ugly women that they were never fifteen years old. I’d gained weight in the right places, so that I wore some of Lulu’s dresses. Occasionally, we would leave the tallér, risking riding by rail to Havana to visit the shops there. Lulu and I would return with bolts of cloth to make clothes for the women and children of the tallér, using money that Agustín and some of the other returning soldiers brought us. I began wearing shirtwaists and bell-shaped skirts, though I’d looked at the tight bodices and the enormous mutton-sleeved shirts in the shop windows with longing. I stuffed the shoulders of my shirtwaists with newspaper to create that little ruffled bump I’d seen on the more fashionable clothes in Havana. Lulu called me ridiculous, but I didn’t care. Sometimes, I stuffed my shirt, too, and I’d walk around the tallér like a peacock, my chest thrust out, my hips swinging side to side.

  It wasn’t as if I had a reason to show off in the tallér. I knew I was approaching the age at which many young women married, but there was work to be done, a Cuba needing liberation, Lulu always said. “A man will come later into your life. For now, Cuba is all the man you need.” She always uttered these patriotic sentiments with a lifted chin. Sometimes, she recited a snippet of a poem appropriate to the moment. Often, the poems were those of Martí, and her eyes would water as she recited. Then, she’d make the sign of the cross for the repose of Martí’s soul.

  I had gotten into an argument with Lulu that morning over one of these patriotic moments of hers. We’d been eating breakfast with the others when one of the children, a new boy named Sabino, complained about having to eat the same eggs and plantain tortillas we ate every day. “Where is the toast?” he whined. His mother, a small-boned young woman whose husband was a lieutenant in the Liberation Army, said nothing to reprimand Sabino. It was clear the boy commandeered his mother.

  “Toast is a small sacrifice to make, young man,” Lulu said in her haughty voice. “Imagine what your father has given up, the dangers he is facing in order to secure your liberty from the Spanish tyrants.” While she spoke, she pointed her fork at the boy, a bit of egg dangling from one of the tines.

  For some reason, that tiny speck of egg stirred my adolescent fury. How uncouth my mother was, I thought. Such patriotic airs she puts on. My whole body felt overheated. Embarrassed by her, I blurted, “Ay, be quiet for once, Mamá. No one wants to hear another lecture.”

  Everyone went silent at once. Forks and knives were set down gently. I had gone too far, and I knew it the moment that last word left my lips.

  “Do you think you’re grown, María Sirena?” Lulu asked calmly. “Do you think you know anything at all about the world?”

  I shouldn’t have said a thing. I should have apologized at once for my impudence and eaten my food in silence. But I could not. My tongue twitched with a response, my cheeks flooded with heat, and before I could stop myself, I said, “Sí, I’m grown! And I know better than to bore people with ridiculous poems and long diatribes.”

  Lulu was on her feet in a flash. Before I knew what she was doing, she’d thrust her hand into my shirt and drawn out the crumpled newspapers, deflating me on the spot. “Atrevida, who is the ridiculous one now?” she yelled, throwing the balled-up pages onto my plate.

  I ran from the table, out of the tent, and past the pens where the goats and chickens were kept. It was raining, and now and then, thunder boomed. Somewhere, I left a shoe behind, like Cinderella, but didn’t care. When I reached the banks of the River Cauto, I stopped, out of breath, crying in great jags. We were both ridiculous; that was the truth. I’ve seen it before, what mothers and daughters can do to one another during those terrible adolescent years. Grief must be at the bottom of it, for what is sadder for a parent than seeing her daughter shedding girlhood drop by precious drop? And what is more terrifying for a child than to doubt her mother, to begin to see her as a human with faults instead of as a goddess?

  Mindlessly, I began to shed my outer clothes. I was already soaked from the rain, so I left my dress in a wet heap by the shore. I was so angry that I was chewing the inside of my cheek and drawing blood. I stepped into the water in only my underthings. The currents swirled around my legs, unsteadying me. The waters roiled, mingling with the rain. The drops on my head felt heavy, and it made me feel better. No one would come looking for me here, I knew. Lulu, especially, who disliked the rain, would stay indoors and wait for me to appear, contrite and pliable again. I would not have it! Convinced that my mother was at the root of all my problems, I began to catalog her sins in my head. My mother was a show-off. That was clear in the way she recited poetry all the time, as if to let the other mothers know that she would have been a teacher had it not been for the patriotic spirit that had consumed her. She was a disgrace. I could recall with precision the way her face would soften in the presence of handsome men. Closing my eyes, I could mimic the expression. It was a sleepy look, one that called to mind beds and dark places and skin smooth like the inside of an almond.

  Before I knew it, I was in the middle of the river, which wasn’t very deep in that place. I splashed my face with the cool water and tried to recall more of my mother’s faults. The thoughts wouldn’t come. The truth was, I admired Lulu a great deal. Whenever anyone suggested that we looked alike, I beamed with pride. I would purposely sit out in the sun in the hopes that freckles, like the ones Lulu had, would appear on my nose. I would squeeze lemons, rubbing the juice on my arms and head to lighten the hair on my body. Lulu was auburn-haired and I wanted to look like her twin. My anger began to fade.

  What happened next may have been a hallucination brought on by anger or injury. I loathe admitting that. But I have not seen
this vision since, nor hope to see it ever again, for it was terrifying, and yet familiar. Lulu had had a similar vision years earlier. Perhaps it was a delusion. Even as I tell it, I’m wondering if delusions, like gestures, can be inherited.

  There, in the river, I saw a flash of silver in the water. At first, I thought it might be a fish. It appeared again downriver, and I tried to get closer. Rain got into my eyes and I blinked it away. The silver thing was too big to be a fish. Perhaps it was a sunken canoe, I thought, but I wondered why the current hadn’t pushed it away. I drew closer. The silver thing, shaped like an enormous guitar, twitched then, swam farther away. Red, hairlike streamers seemed to follow in its wake. I say they were hairlike because I wasn’t sure at the moment what in the world I was looking at. It wasn’t until I remembered the story of my birth, of the mermaid who had spoken to my mother, that I had an inkling of what the silver thing could be. I swore I saw a pair of hands, white like milk, and the streamers were actually wavy strands of hair, and the silver, guitar-shaped thing was a body with a tail fin, scales sparkling in gray. She turned in the water a few feet ahead of me, beckoning me with pointed fingers, thin and crooked like twigs. I took three steps towards her, thinking that perhaps she would grant me a wish. “I wish my mother would understand me. I wish Mario would love me,” I said under my breath as I approached her. The mermaid’s face was placid, her rosy lips parted as if she were about to speak. When my feet got tangled in a net caught between a pair of heavy rocks, I fell into the water and got a good look at her. Under the surface her beauty slipped away, revealing a dry, brittle thing, like a scarecrow, like a felled tree. I screamed underwater and swallowed some. I tried to stand, coughing, managing to get my head above water. There was a great crack of light, and the sound was deafening, as if I’d been slapped with a pan. Down I went again, and this time, the mermaid was only a fallen tree, the bark coming off in long strip that scraped my face. Then I felt the burning of water in my lungs, and the water blackened around me, as if someone had poured a bottle of ink into the river that bloomed and spread, choking the air from my body.