“Gracias,” I said to Blanca Lora through my tears. She touched my shoulder and patted Mayito’s head. “How did you manage it?” I asked.
“I was the one who took him from you as you slept. I’d arranged things here in this tallér just after I met you. I simply could not trust Andromeda and the others,” Blanca Lora said.
“What were they going to do?” I asked, clutching Mayito tightly.
“God knows,” Blanca Lora said, “but I wasn’t about to let them show us. I told Andromeda that I would handle ‘the issue,’ as she liked to put it.”
I kissed Mayito, and said, “Mm hmm.” Then, I kissed him again. I could not stop myself.
“She didn’t even ask any questions, for goodness’ sake. For all she knows, I threw the baby into the river,” Blanca Lora said.
I looked up, aghast. Just the thought of it made me teary, and Blanca Lora apologized, and called me “darling” as she was apt.
“It’s safe for you to take him to Lulu,” she said. “I’ve asked the nurses. As long as she doesn’t touch him, it’s safe.”
I nodded, but wasn’t eager to leave the safety of the nursery just yet. So, I sat in a rocking chair and rocked my son, singing him songs until the sun began to set.
Later that evening, I introduced Mayito to his grandmother, who couldn’t focus on him. I sniffed his head, and fed him from a bottle when he cried out. He was changed. Bigger, he curled his hand around my thumb with purpose, drawing it to his mouth as if to eat it. His eyes no longer crossed when he stared at my face, but instead, he gazed at me sleepily. His long lashes begged to be touched, and I did so, with the back of my fingers. Mayito looked like his father, and this made me cry in silence and send prayers up to guard his safety.
All the while, Lulu was restless, moaning and smacking at imaginary creatures on her body. She finally grew still at dawn. Only her eyelids fluttered upon her face like moth wings. The baby was asleep, snoring softly, his rib cage showing itself with every exhalation. The tallér had grown quiet, and in the calm I began to count Lulu’s breaths, wondering how many she had left.
PART III
1.
What Lulu Wanted
Stop that,” Lulu said suddenly, and I startled and gripped her hand.
“Mamá?”
“You’re counting. I can hear you. It’s making me nervous.” Lulu’s chin trembled as she spoke.
“I’ll stop,” I promised, and felt her face, which was still burning. I peeled the warm, damp cloth from her forehead and replaced it with a fresh one.
“I feel better,” she muttered, and tried to rise. I should have been glad to see her sudden burst of energy, but it saddened me. I’d seen it so many times at the field hospital. The spirit rallies, one last gust of life blows through, and then, the patient dies.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t,” I said.
Lulu pushed my hands away. “I want something for you,” she said quietly. She touched Mayito’s head and smiled. I waited. In my arms, Mayito began to stir.
“Mamá, you should rest.”
“No, I want something for you.” Her voice was husky. “I wish I had a dish of honey for you to taste. That way, when you think of me, you will also remember something sweet. My father, que en paz descanse, once told me that Jews gave children a taste of honey before teaching them about God. Did you know that la Virgencita likes offerings of honey?”
Lulu began to cough, and tried covering her mouth with her hands. But they twitched at her sides with the effort to raise them, and her eyes filled with tears.
“Mamá,” I cried, and rested my head on her chest. I could feel her lungs rumbling with something thick and foul. Then, I felt her hand on the back of my head. Mayito mewled between us, and I sat up. When the coughing fit subsided, Lulu spoke again.
“We kept dessert plates filled with honey next to the little statues of la Virgen in our house and in the shoe shop. Ants would often drown in the stuff, and my father would then clear the honey away, wash the dish and fill it again. He used to wear a scapular around his neck, underneath his crisp shirts. It was soft like leather, and I used to fall asleep in his arms with the scapular tight in my grip, or else, I’d pass it over my eyes and cheeks and I imagined the thumb of an angel touching my skin.
“My father’s last words were, ‘My scapular, my scapular,’ which a doctor had removed from him during an examination, and which, my father believed, was a token that guaranteed entrance into Heaven. I remember putting the frayed ribbon around his neck, and arranging the images of Christ and his Mother on his heaving chest. He fingered the leathery squares blindly, having to grope for them before catching them in his weak grip. Then, he began to scream. My father died screaming, a hoarse, screeching sound, like a rodent in a trap. What kind of payment for a lifetime of devotion is that?”
A nurse came and took my mother’s temperature, glanced at the reading, then gave me a frown, the expression spreading across her face rapidly. Everything felt as if it were moving too quickly—facial expressions, the ticking of a clock on the wall, my mother’s breaths. It was as if the shock of her death had already happened, and the world was trying to catch up to it.
With effort, Lulu touched Mayito’s cheek. “The baby’s father—” she began. A frown spread slowly across her face.
I felt a space open up in my chest, a hollow feeling. “What about Mario?”
Lulu swallowed hard, then said, “He gave up his freedom for me. They promised I could go if he joined the Spanish. But they put a uniform on him and swallowed him up, leaving me to die.”
“He’ll find a way out,” I said to Lulu. “He’s smart, and strong. He’s—” But Lulu shook her head.
“I saw him when he went. He was already half-dead with sadness. A broken man has no business fighting a war.”
The pale moon of her face was very still and her dark eyes unblinking. “We’re all dying,” she said. “Even the stars and the sun. They’ll wink out one day. Nothing a human can think up can stop death when it comes.”
“Mamá, don’t talk that way,” I said.
“I want something for you,” she told me again.
“What is it? Tell me,” I urged her, but her fingers began to flutter rapidly, and the convulsions began. Nurses ran to join us, and they held my mother down, gripping her in their strong hands. Lulu’s gaze was fixed on the ceiling, and I looked up too, asking for a blessing. “Pray, Mamá, pray,” I whispered, thinking that if she joined me in this, if we both asked jointly for a miracle, then our prayers might be answered.
In the end, Lulu neither cried nor struggled much. She trembled a bit after it was all over, then was still.
2.
A Story New to Me
I’ve come to the part of my story I cannot tell. All confessions come to their decisive moment, the part of the tale where one can choose to lie and save face. It is like standing at a precipice. One need only take a single step into nothing and then, the fall just happens. There is no stopping it then.
I tell the women, “I’m finished. I can’t go on.” They don’t say anything. Dulce is drying her eyes with the collar of her housedress. Susana is staring at me with her mouth wide open, revealing three dark metal caps on her back molars.
“Of course you can go on. It’s what we do. We go on. Learn how to live with the suffering we’re dealt,” Rosalia says in that squeaky voice of hers.
She and her healthy twin sons can go to hell, I think, and I am about to say something along those lines when Mireya says, “Isn’t that the point of all of this, to share your story with us? So let’s hear the rest of your great, tragic tale.” She watches me with a single arched eyebrow.
There have been only a few moments in my life when I have been so blinded by anger that I seem to have lost possession of my mouth. Once, when Beatríz was fourteen, she called me una estúpida because I had refused to buy
her a dress with a coveted pink crinoline. Right there, in the middle of the third floor of El Encanto Department Store, I launched into a ten-minute declamation about the abuses of daughters, the impunity of fourteen-year-olds, ingratitude, selfishness, and ugly fashion. There have been other times, but I have not felt this way, the words pushing past my lips in an angry torrent, in a very long time.
I tell her, “Let me say what I’ve been meaning to say for the last ten years, ridícula—all of your dramatics and for what? Some invention of your addled brain,” I say. “My Beatríz left your son ten years before he passed. A decade. What did that break up have to do with his death? Nada. Nada. God only knows why He took your son. An infection can happen to any of us. Rosalia talks of living with our suffering, but you, Mireya, have not lived in it. You have wallowed in it, consumed it, let it get you drunk with stupidity and self-pity.” I open my mouth to say more when I feel someone physically shove me back into my seat. Had I been standing? I realize that yes, not only had I stood up, I’d looked down on Mireya as I’d raged, my finger wagging in her face. Now, Mireya is sobbing, and Ofelia (it was Ofelia who pushed me down), is saying, “¡Basta! ¡Basta! We have to be good compañeras to one another. You’re behaving like children, all of you!”
I remember once going to a bullfight in Havana with Gilberto. I watched the bulls in their pens with fascination. Gilberto had won a pair of tickets in a raffle, and so we dressed up in our Sunday clothes, packed a meager lunch, and attended the bullfight. We even shouted, “¡Toro!” now and again, taking sides with the black beasts. How they huffed, their snorts rumbling through the stands, and blowing out plumes of dirt roiled up by their massive hooves. Theirs was incessant motion. Even when a bull was killed in the arena, the ones in the pens stamped and huffed, and bumped the door of the pen with their giant foreheads, eager to get out. That is how I feel now, I think. Like a great bull. It doesn’t matter that I am asking for the hurt that is sure to come. Mireya might as well be holding a red cape for me. I tremble, coiled in frustration as I watch her weep.
I can feel it—the sides switching. The women have surrounded Mireya, childish, whiny Mireya, and are patting her hair and telling her everything will be fine. Even Susana has joined them, and she is holding up a cup of lukewarm lemonade to Mireya’s flaccid lips. Every so often, one of them looks at me, the way Lulu did when I had been naughty and was caught.
We are quiet for a moment, only the sounds of Mireya’s sniffling breaking the silence. I am hopeful that Ofelia will choose to remove me from the room. Damn this confession, I think. These women are no friends of mine. Perhaps, if I still have a home to return to, I can tell Panchita my story. She can regale her grandsons with it once I’m dead, and they can tell their wives. One of them, I’ve heard, is a professor in the University of Santiago. She could write it all down. And the cigar rollers, they’ve heard parts of the story, with different names, of course. Perhaps my story has already been told, thousands of times, perhaps this has all been a big waste of—
“I found him. I found him,” Mireya is saying, and we all stand very still and listen.
“Found who?” Dulce asks.
“I found Alejandro hanged from an exposed beam in the kitchen. He punched through the ceiling to get to it, and he used the laundry line for rope. I found him. No one else. And I brought him down and called his name. He was alive, you see, but hurt. ‘My legs,’ he said. ‘My hands,’ he said, and I knew he could not move them. In the hospital, he caught an infection. ‘Beatríz,’ he said at the height of his fever. Her name was the last word he uttered. It was an infection. I told no lie,” she says.
Mireya looks past Susana, who is blocking her view of me, and lifts a finger to point, shakily, in my direction. “It was a decade since she left him, yes, but he never forgot,” Mireya says. “And Beatríz told him that you had convinced her of the error of loving my son. You turned her head, and he, he . . . he put his own head in a noose. Perhaps, María Sirena, you know a little something about remembering the dead. We’ve all had to listen about the ghosts of your family for some time now. We all have ghosts. And none of us forget them,” Mireya says, and for once, I agree with her.
I sit stunned into silence. The pain in my center sharpens, and I think—so little time. “We all have our ghosts. You’re right, Mireya.” I stand and go to her. I am thankful, suddenly, that she has kept this secret. Beatríz never knew, and she will never know, not if I can help it. Mireya lets me wrap my arms around her, then, slowly, I feel her arms at my back, squeezing tight. “Tell us about Alejandro,” I say. “I am so very sorry. Tell us a funny story from his boyhood. Make us laugh, the way you once made me laugh, Mireya,” I say, and realize I am weeping.
Diós, I’m tired. So tired. The walls of this room feel like they are thickening, trapping us inside as if we are in a cocoon, and outside, a creature is spinning, making the walls congeal, waiting for us to turn into some new beings at the end of our confinement, or to die and make an end of it. This is what a baby feels like before its birth, I think. Surrounded, muffled, made sleepy by the unending darkness. The word comes to me without warning—entombed. I shudder.
“Is this Mayito?” Estrella asks, holding up the picture frame that has been in my pocket all this time. It must have fallen out when I embraced Mireya.
“Sí,” I say, and take it back, hiding it again.
“Looks like a newspaper clipping,” she says. “Was your son famous or something?”
“No. He wasn’t famous.”
“Why was he in the newspaper then?” she persists.
“I don’t want to go on,” I say, and mean more than just answering Estrella’s questions, more than just the story. “I’m tired,” I say. “Let Mireya tell us a story. Come, my friend. Please.”
Mireya shakes her head. I start to protest, but Mireya shakes her head again.
“Hurry up,” she says. “We don’t have much time left.” The waters have been receding, and already, we hear a different kind of noise from outside. Hammers are pounding away, and car horns are honking. The roads must be clearing. She’s right. We won’t be here, together, not for much longer.
“Not much time at all,” I say, and finish what I’ve started.
3.
The First Mistake
I fell asleep shortly after Lulu died. Blanca Lora happened to walk by and saw us, like a Renaissance sculpture—my head on my mother’s stomach, the baby nestled in the crook of my arm, and Lulu’s face, as white as marble. Mayito cried when I shifted him, and I squeezed my eyes tight
In the days that followed the women learned that I already served as a nurse and they put me to work in the tallér. They heard, too, of my time in that other tallér in Dos Rios, which had become well-known after General Weyler’s attack. I did not realize it then, but one of the women had escaped from the tallér in Dos Rios, and had watched as Weyler ordered the deaths of our compatriots, then marched us to La Cuchilla. She told the news of our capture and the story had spread like pollen on the wind.
“Tell us what happened, María Sirena,” the women would ask me, and I would repeat the story for them. This happened each day, so that Mayito, whom I carried in a sling across my chest like an Indian, would settle and go to sleep once he heard me describing the scene of our ruin. That story was his first lullaby, and I am sorry for it. I now wish I had filled his ears with a different kind of story, one full of hope instead of despair.
I lived in that tallér for five months. Mayito was a big baby, his thighs fat like sponge cake, and his smiles were shiny, easily given things. He was sitting by himself by then, too, and I thought him the most gifted of children for that skill alone. “He’s beautiful,” I bragged at every turn, “and not just because he is mine,” I would add, qualifying the boast.
I thought Mayito and I could go on this way indefinitely. The tallér was safe, the work was satisfying, and there were always plenty of other
women around to watch the baby for me while I worked. He was the doll of the place, and more than once, I’d discover that someone had dressed him like a girl, or put ribbons into his curls, or set him on a large, friendly dog that lay about the place waiting for scraps, just to watch the baby riding the gentle beast. Mayito was loved, and I was happy for the first time in an age.
The news regarding the war was good, too. We had nearly beat the Spanish, and the Americans, having joined the fight, had sounded the death knell for the Spanish cause. Now, American soldiers came and went in the tallér, and Blanca Lora was among them often, though they called her Blythe Quinn, or Miss Quinn. She had a way with those blond boys, making them laugh and clip her chin with their knuckles playfully. They’d sneak peeks at her notebook, and steal her pen, and she would chase them around the beds, which were mostly empty now that the winter was here and the cases of typhoid and yellow fever were diminished.
It only took ten weeks for the Americans to finish what we started. We celebrated our independence only briefly. Already, there was talk among the women regarding the interference of Washington in Havana affairs. Wasn’t this our war? Why were the Americans deciding what happened next? They had fought for ten weeks. We had fought three wars over decades.
I tried explaining this to Blanca Lora, but she shook her head and told me I didn’t understand.
“You have bigger problems,” she said. “The tallér is going to be shut down. Where will you work? Who will take care of Mayito?”
I hadn’t given it a thought. I was only seventeen, orphaned, husbandless.
“Perhaps you can come to New York? There’s work to be had. Opportunities abound, Carla!” Blanca Lora said.
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