The Distant Marvels

by Chantel Acevedo

  It seemed the women were on tour. There were about twenty of them, as far I could tell. It was early, and the women were yawning, their fingertips fluttering before their open mouths, their well-trimmed nails white like seashells. I could hear the soldiers explaining daily life in La Cuchilla, how and when food was distributed, the role the village had played in supporting the Cuban rebels, the recent battles nearby, Butcher Weyler’s return to Spain, all of the news of the last few weeks exchanged easily, as if these things were happening elsewhere.

  “There are women and children in the village?” one of the women asked. She had a tender voice and wore a straw hat with a red ribbon tied around it. The ribbon trailed down her back. She spoke with a Spanish accent, lisping delicately around certain words.

  “Even the children helped the rebels, sneaking out food to them and such,” the taller soldier said. The woman who’d asked the question sighed and tilted her hat over her eyebrows, then clasped her hands together at her waist. Her lips were moving, and I thought she was muttering a prayer.

  Her sympathy sent a surge through me. There was a chance here, I thought, and once my mind fell upon it, I seized the moment. When the group had turned their attention away from where I’d stood, I ran for Lulu’s bohío, my feet pounding the dirt.

  “Mamá,” I called, “wake up, wake up!” Lulu rose from her bed unsteadily, blinked at me, and rubbed her eyes, like a child. The gesture unnerved me for a moment, and I launched myself upon my mother, hugging her so hard that I thought I might hurt her.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, patting me all over as if she might discover an injury on me.

  “We’re leaving,” I said. “Quickly, are there clean shirtwaists here?” I asked, looking around the room at the clothes strung all over. I explained my plan as I searched, plucking a hat from a hook on the wall and undoing a belt that was looped around a bolt of oilcloth. We would change into better clothes, approximating the look of the women on tour, and then, we would simply join the group, blend in. What would two more women be in such a large group? Surely, Lulu and I had not yet taken on the look of the reconcentradas. Surely, we weren’t that far gone.

  As for Mario, perhaps if he lingered by the gate, pretending to scavenge in the weeds for something to eat, if he timed it just right . . . These were my frantic thoughts as I pulled dresses from the lines strung across the room.

  Lulu dressed me, taking my old, worn clothes and folding them carefully as if she meant to keep them. There was no mirror, but I could tell we’d cobbled together a passing outfit. The straw hat on my head had no ribbon, but perhaps no one would notice.

  “Now, your turn,” I said, and began to look for clothes for Lulu.

  Lulu shook her head. “You’ve a better chance of going alone,” she said.

  “Mamá—”

  “Look at me, María Sirena,” she said, and I looked, for once I really looked, and I saw that my mother’s eyes were dark and bottomless. In them I saw haunted shapes; in the flit of her eyes, darting from side to side as she watched me watching her, I saw nocturnal things sprouting and growing tendrils. A ferocious oblivion had overtaken my mother, and I saw that she no longer cared to live even outside of La Cuchilla.

  “Go, mi’ja,” she said.

  “What about Mario? I can’t leave him,” I said.

  Lulu shook her head.

  “I can say goodbye, at least,” I said, desperation beginning to nip at me. Fate was sharpening its blades, I could feel it. “An hour then. Just an hour with him,” I begged.

  “Mi vida, no, it’s . . . ”

  “Five minutes, Mamá!” I cried, thinking of all the places Mario and I had littered with kisses and sweet words, and of the baby that would grow strong in Mario’s presence, the way I had grown strong.

  “Enough!” Lulu said, pinning my arms down at my sides. “You have a chance now, and you must take it. One day, you’ll look upon this moment and all you have suffered in this war as a series of distant marvels, and it will only hurt a little to remember them. You will think, ‘I was lucky and blessed to get out of that place alive,’ and the sting of goodbye will be gone.”

  I shook my head, closed my eyes and moaned. “That will never happen.”

  “It will. I promise you, mi amor. Save yourself and your baby. Go.”

  There was no point in trying to coax her. Lulu had never been the kind of woman one could cajole, anyway. “I’ll come back for you,” I promised, defeated. We were talking as if my plan would work, and I was glad for the pretense. Otherwise, I would have faltered.

  I told my mother that I loved her, and she held me and wept into my hair.

  “Begin again,” she sobbed. “Begin your life anew, mi vida.”

  “Tell him I love him,” I tried to say, though the words sounded mangled.

  “He’ll know it, I promise you.”

  “And if I’m caught?” I asked, trembling all over. I have never shaken so hard in my life, not even when Butcher Weyler was shooting women to my left and right. I felt closer to death in that moment, saying goodbye to Lulu, than I ever had.

  “You won’t be,” she said, and it was as if I were a little girl again, being told a lie by my mother, one I believed wholly and without dispute. It filled me with courage, and I closed my eyes and imagined that I was Lulu, the woman who had traveled to New York City and met with rebels there, who had married a man she did not know for his principles, who killed another and suffered no nightmares afterwards. What was courage made of? I wondered at this, peering at Lulu, who tucked my shirt in and straightened my skirts. Just thinking about all my mother had done made me feel braver. The girl I once was felt nearer to me, as if I could reach out into the past and stroke her cheek.

  Lulu followed me as far as she could. I drew close to the touring women. When they rounded the corner of a small plaza at the center of the village, I folded into the back of the group, adopting their shuffling steps. The women were nurses, it turned out, and they’d been brought to tend to the reconcentrados. News of conditions in the camps had gotten out, I heard one soldier say.

  “There’s talk of the Americans entering the fray,” a woman near the front of the group offered, and the tidbit rippled through the women, until they were all commenting on it. They walked in pairs, arm-in-arm, making me think of braids, rope, and other knotted things.

  The one with the red ribbon, whom I’d found and stuck close to, was the only solitary woman. I held my breath, slipping my arm behind her elbow as if it belonged there. She allowed it, and turned to me, saying, “The Americans are agitated. I read it in Ecos. Have you seen the latest edition?”

  “No,” I said, and kept my face hidden in the shadows of the hat. I hadn’t seen a newspaper in over a year. I shouldn’t have said anything at all, because the woman turned her face sharply, her nostrils flaring. While she smelled like flowers, the scent coming off of her in the morning heat in mighty wafts, I could only imagine what I smelled like. My last bath had been in the Cauto, on the day that Mario saved me from drowning. It felt so long ago, as if that day belonged to another time before this one, or as if Mario and I were merely characters in a historical play.

  “Say no more,” the woman whispered. I halted, making her stumble. “Walk. Can you walk? Look at your feet. You are ill, do you understand? This heat is too much for you.”

  I nodded, and leaned into her, stared at her hands linked with mine. My dirty nails beside her trim, pink ones shamed me, so I curled my fingers to hide them. My heart pounded and I could hear it above all the other sounds of La Cuchilla as the village rose from sleep. The woman must have heard it, too. She whispered, “It’s nearly over,” patting the top of my hand.

  But reason can abandon even the calmest head in moments when death is nearest. When the woman said, “It’s nearly over,” I had a mad thought that she was going to turn me in, that I had given myself up as
an escapee before ever having escaped. So, I began to unstitch myself from the woman, struggling to get my arm away from her.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she whispered through clenched teeth. I saw that she was trying to smile as she spoke, and that her eyes were fixed on the soldier before us, who had stopped talking all at once.

  We froze in place, all of us—the soldiers, the pairs of women, and the two of us. “¿Qué pasa aquí?” one of the soldiers asked. I hadn’t noticed, but we were outside the gate now. I chanced a look behind me and saw Lulu and Mario in the distance. Lulu had her arms wrapped around Mario from behind, and he was struggling against her. When he looked at me, I turned away, hoping he would listen to my mother, quiet down, and let events unfold as they would. Fate was firmly in charge. I let my body soften, dropped my head onto the woman’s shoulder, and was very quiet. I spoke to Mario in my head, saying something like, “Please be good. I love you. Diós, how I love you. I’ll come back for you. Take care of my mother,” on and on as if I were praying to God Himself, or to the soul of a dead man. Perhaps Mario’s two deceased brothers, the Marios who came before him, heard me, because the woman at my side said:

  “My colleague has taken ill. It’s this infernal heat. You’ve spent far too long on this tour and now, look! One of our finest nurses is incapable of doing her work today.” Her voice carried far, startling the buzzards in the trees so that they began their hideous hissing. The birds had no songs to call their own, but they grunted and hissed all day long.

  “What is that?” one of the nurses asked, pointing, as the flock of birds rose into the sky and began their circling.

  “Buitres,” another nurse said, folding her hands over her mouth.

  “So many,” they began to wonder, pointing at the place in the distance where they’d begun to do their spirals. “What are they eating?”

  The shorter soldier clapped his hands three times, and the women stopped discussing the birds. “The tour is over. You all need rest before your work begins, and this one needs medical attention,” he said, pointing at me.

  My eyes closed, I felt myself being led away. “Up,” I heard the woman who’d saved me say, and I opened my eyes to see a carriage before me, big enough for just the two of us. Around us, the women were being loaded into other carriages, as well as an open wagon. “They let us have this one to ourselves. The others are afraid you might be contagious,” she said, smiling at me the way one smiles at a child.

  My hands shook, and I laced them together to still them. “You’re a reconcentrada, aren’t you?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Poor thing. Here,” she said, and pulled a small candy from her purse, unwrapping it for me and holding it up to my mouth, like a piece of communion wafer. She laid it on my dry tongue and watched as I sucked on what turned out to be a honey-filled sweet. She was observant, and I’m certain had she had a piece of paper and something with which to write, she would have taken notes on me, the way scientists observe the behavior of wild things.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  I considered keeping it to myself. I did not trust her yet. Her accent grated at me, and I’d already taken note of her bony wrists and long neck, plotting out ways I could subdue her if I needed to. “Your name?” she asked once more. “Else I’ll give you one,” she offered. “We are only a few miles from the field hospital. If we’re going to concoct a story for you, we’d better start now.”

  “Why have you helped me?” I asked.

  The woman studied me a moment longer. She drew a man’s pocket watch from the waist of her skirt, eyed it, ducked her head out of the carriage and peered down the dusty road, then sat down again. “We have some time, I suppose,” she said, and then answered my question.

  15.

  The Birth of Carla Carvajál

  Have you ever heard of New York City?” she asked me.

  I nodded. I’d, in fact, been in New York City, I told her, though I was in Lulu’s womb at the time. She laughed at that, saying, “Then the city is in you. I knew I liked you.”

  Then, I asked her if she’d ever been there. The woman laughed again. “Querida, I was born there.” When I raised an eyebrow, she twittered away in American-inflected English, and I stared at her as if she’d grown another head.

  “My mother is from Madrid. My father is an Irishman from a place called Pittsburgh. Have you heard of that city?” I shook my head. “No matter,” she said, waving her delicate hand in front of her face. “I’m a journalist, and this war is the best thing that’s ever happened to my profession,” she said.

  My left hand rose to my lips as if it had a will of its own and stayed there. Who was this woman? She seemed to be delighting in our war with Spain, as if the events of the age were a gift just for her, tied with a ribbon to match the one on her hat, or an experiment to examine so that she might bask in her findings. I was quivering now, my fear replaced by anger. My rage grew molten, and tears came to eyes.

  “Oh, now I’ve upset you,” she said, and drew an embroidered handkerchief from her purse. I took it and wiped my eyes, happy that the white cloth came away grimy. I hoped I had ruined it. “I’m on your side,” she said. “I may have been formed in a Spanish matrix, but my blood runs red, white, and blue, I promise you.”

  Did she mean the Cuban flag, or the American one? I wasn’t sure. Nothing made sense in the presence of this woman. Just that morning, I had been starving in a reconcentrado camp, and now I was riding in a leather-upholstered carriage, clutching a fine handkerchief, my mouth still slick with sugar.

  “I am writing a report on Weyler’s reconcentrado policy. My editor said I wouldn’t be able to manage it. He said, and I quote, ‘If you get yourself executed by the Spanish, or eaten by one of those Cubans, don’t come haunting me.’ I told him you Cubans weren’t cannibals as far as I could tell, and that I technically was a Spaniard, on my mother’s side at least. My Spanish is better than good. I had you fooled, didn’t I?”

  Yes, fooled, I thought. I looked miserably out of the carriage windows. I jumped when she touched my knee. Her face was soft now, and her eyes had lost that intense stare. She was no longer observing me the way a hawk catches a mouse with her sight before she digs her talons into its back. She was just a woman now, and her brow was creased in worry.

  “I haven’t answered your question. I couldn’t leave you there. You look so young to me. What are you, eighteen? Nineteen?”

  “Fifteen,” I said, and she sighed and patted my leg again. “Let me take care of you. We’ll say you’re a novice nurse, sent to the field by your father, an uncompromising Cuban farmer from Santiago who swears allegiance to Spain. That should do. Just make sure to say, ‘Viva Cuba española,’ every so often and you’ll pass.”

  I could feel my stomach roiling now, protesting the candy. Nausea filled my mouth with an iron taste, and I bit my tongue against it.

  “Oh, is it so hard to pretend to support the Spanish? In your heart you are still a rebel,” she said.

  “It isn’t that,” I said, holding the back of my hand to my mouth.

  “Are you really ill?” she asked, flattening herself against the back of her seat. “I’ve heard about the diseases that rage in the camps. Dysentery. Cholera. Diós mío, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Pregnant,” I said, choking, and then I really did vomit out the window. When I sat down again I felt better, and hungrier than ever.

  Now it was her turn to be stunned into silence. She scanned me again with her hawkish eyes, lingering long on my midsection, counting full moons in her head, I’m sure. “We’ll come up with a story for that, too,” she said at last.

  We rumbled along without speaking, the woman’s eyes locked onto me the entire ride, memorizing the look of me, I was certain of it. What words would she use to describe me, I wondered. Thin, I thought, looking at my elbows. Ordinary, I knew, thinking of the smooth planes of my fac
e, the shape of which was more round than anything else, and of my hair the color of an old coffee stain, and my eyes just as watery and without depth.

  After a while, she asked, “Who’s the father?” I did not speak, because the words would not come. Thinking of Mario deflated me, and I thought if I spoke I would start crying. Already, I could feel my face tensing, growing ugly with the effort not to weep.

  “No, no, you don’t have to say,” she whispered, and I knew she was imagining some ugly moment for me in a dark, muddy bohío. A rape. Incest. It was all over her face—pity bordering on fear. She was writing the story even as I sat before her.

  “I love him,” I said at last. “He’s just a boy. A rebel. He’s a hero and my husband,” I lied, and touched my stomach.

  She smiled. “Have you thought of a name?” she asked.

  It was a curious question, and not the first one I would ask of a girl in my position. “Name?” I repeated.

  She nodded.

  “Mario. Like his father. Mayito,” I said. It was the first time I’d given it any thought, and the name came unbidden, without thinking, really.

  “That is sweet. And if it’s a girl?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Again, I hadn’t given any of it much thought. Boy, girl, names, none of it seemed to matter while in La Cuchilla. But now, with the green Oriente hills outside, and the reverberation of the carriage wheels and clop of horse hooves, and in the hands of this capable woman, these things took on greater importance. “What’s yours?” I asked.

  “Blythe Quinn,” she said. “But they know me as Blanca Lora around here.” She winked at me. I told her I couldn’t pronounce her real name anyway. Then, I told Blanca Lora my name, and she said it wouldn’t do. “Carla Carvajál,” she dubbed me, and I nodded in approval.