by Tom Pow
And then there was Louise. Crop-headed, her hair without the luster it had once had, her body having almost retreated from the fullness it promised. Yet at the sight of the ocean her heart leaped. Her life inland in America had meant that she had never been able to quell that connection between the sea and vacation, and she felt the freedom surge through her that she always felt at the first glimpse of blue. And the freedom brought with it an optimism she realized had been missing from the depth of her love—always it had been shadowed. She had a thought: perhaps it will be possible to bring Eduardo into this freedom. It would be no stranger than what has already happened. Perhaps once this is all over and we’re both far away. But even as she thought this, she knew nothing could be more precious to her than the times Eduardo and she had spent together, holding each other against the slight cool of the night, once talking had taken them as far as talking could. What she’d liked best was how they breathed together, breathed in the salty, earthy smell of them both—she felt she’d never really had a body till then—until in the last darkness she had had to return to Martin, curled into himself in the shelter they had both made.
How she loved Eduardo! For an afternoon, letting her and the others swim, denying himself that cool water, so that no one would suspect their love. Only Martin knew that when Louise turned to the shore and bent forward, pulling slightly at a bra cup, it was a sign for Eduardo, sitting looking lazily onto the water.
The fish the old man had brought filled the air with a sweet sea smell; the plantains were buried in the ash. The fish was so fresh it crumbled in their hands, white flakes of it that they licked from their open palms. With the plantains, each would be satisfied. As they ate, the sun finally melted into the horizon. Behind them now was the black island; facing them, the silvered light that never quite left the sea.
Eduardo and Rafael finally strode into the water together like father and son. Louise was already there. Her fingers brushed the still surface of the water, then she swam through it, remembering the freedom of that first swim in the forest and him calling her in. Now it was she who had waited for him, calling mockingly, “What scares you? There are no water snakes here either!”
A ragged cloud began to drift over the surface of the moon, darkening the water.
Eduardo had not reached her when the government forces opened fire. Martin obeyed Jacques’s call and hit the sand. He saw El Taino rise and shout—though he could not be sure, it sounded like “Miguel!”—before two bullets tore out his chest.
From where she stood in the water, Louise saw Rafael, his back to her, charging for the shore. The bullet entered below his armpit and ripped through his rib cage. His blood was a smeared sunset before he fell into the water and Maria screamed his name.
Louise had reached Eduardo, thinking she would envelop him, save him; that together they would surrender. Eduardo knew the government forces better.
“No, Louise, away!”
He was trying to push her from him when there was a burst of gunfire. The first bullet bored a hole through his throat so perfectly that Louise could see framed there a clutch of stars. The second and third bullets sliced through them both. Louise twisted as she fell and pulled Eduardo down on top of her in such a way that it was impossible to tell whether they were fighting each other or embracing.
In the silence that followed, a voice rang out: “Se acabó! Ríndanse ya! It’s over! Surrender!”
Jacques took Eduardo by his shoulders and hauled him off Louise. All his strength came back to him as he cast Eduardo’s body away from her. Jacques cradled her then, his hand stroking her stubbly hair. Melanie laid her head on her daughter’s bloody chest and wept.
Maria’s arms were raised as she’d been commanded. She clasped her head between her forearms; tears coursed down her cheeks. Below her lay Rafael’s long, smooth back; his blood blackened the water around him.
Martin stared out to where Louise was held and where Eduardo floated close by. He felt a secret harden within him. Though his parents embraced him, he stared through the embrace to what he had learned and could not forget. (Much time would have to pass before, as if in the blink of a shutter he had missed, he would be able to see clearly before he’d turned away the look of imperishable relief and gratitude in his mother’s eyes.)
Mason, in his crisp fatigues, stepped over Gabriel’s body—the staring eyes, the arms outstretched, pleading.
“Jesus, what a fuck-up. You guys don’t piss about, do you? Who trained you? The fucking Mafia?”
The leader of the government forces smiled at the compliment. Now they had these new assault rifles, he knew they would have no need of these American “advisers.”
“Smile all you like,” said Mason, “but this isn’t the kind of wrap-up we wanted.”
“They’re enemies, yes, so why cry? You have all the hostages back, I think, alive. Apart from the girl. Pity, nice girl.”
* * *
Martin became aware of the distant sounds of car horns voicing their disgruntlement with the snow. He expected school would be canceled today. Perhaps none of them would have to leave the house. They’d all have breakfast together. Mum, Dad, Nick and he. He’d like that. Then he would sleep. Oh, how he would sleep. He thought back over his night’s work. Of course, he too would have to invent dialogue—he had little idea, for example, what Louise and Eduardo had talked about while he lay in the hut, counting lines of stars through the palm fronds in a hopeless attempt to quell his desire. And much else of what he knew had come second hand. Nor could he swear to the island having sixty types of mango. But for the latter there was the library and for the former, well, invention was the greater part of the novelist’s task. For it had dawned on him, sometime in the night, that writing a novel could be the best way to tell his story, while keeping his promise to Louise.
He would have to change the names, of course, but behind the names, he could do something to honor the living and the dead; to arrive at a kind of truth, where Louise could lie in Eduardo’s arms again and Rafael know that his words were answered.
“They will be born and they will die again and be born again. They will never stop being born, because death is a lie.”
[POSTSCRIPT]
The woman in the yellow jumpsuit stood in the center of the small exercise yard, turned her face to the sun, and rolled her head five times one way, five times another.
The jumpsuit made her seem larger than she was, for inside its bulk she was slim and sinewy and, for all her privations, still powerful. Though flecks of gray had spread through her black hair, when she brought her head level again, her eyes—fierce, brown—burned through the mesh of wires that surrounded her and fixed on the blue open sea. Out there, they could not catch her, could not hold her. Out there, there were a million whispers, not one of which could they isolate and catch a clear sense of.
Of course they’d tried.
On and off for a year now she’d been held in freezing cages, airless cells, at times manacled and blindfolded, been bombarded by deafening music, denied sleep, threatened with snarling dogs. “Oh yes, señora,” Mason had said, “I think we’ll find somewhere better than El Castillo for you—you and all your kind.” She’d lost count of the number of times she’d been interrogated by government officials or Americans with bad Spanish about her links with political subversives or terrorists. She had endured it all and been brought again, once each episode was over, into this small yard, alone, to gaze on the perfect sea.
And even at those times when she had been denied this, her one true communion, she had found she could sit in her cell, on her mattress, and conjure up the sea around her. The walls faded, everything faded, till she was alone—but never lonely.
For if it were anywhere, that’s where his spirit was: it was the sea into which his blood had poured and the bloodied sea that washed his island now—as it had long before the first Taino people, arriving in their simple canoes, had named it Caguama, the great sea turtle. The sea would not let the isl
and forget Rafael. Of its million whispers Caguama must by now have heard every one.
Today, though, when the sea smiles, Maria smiles back, for she will soon be close to it without this wire mesh between them. A guard, realizing there is a prospect of change in the air, has brought her up to date on a rapidly developing situation.
* * *
It seems the anti-terrorist concerns, which had seen universal approval for the American-backed action against the Portuondo hostage takers, have been challenged in the liberal west. Slowly a number of independent journalists has ascertained the viciousness of the action; discovered not a military engagement but a “massacre.”
For that is the word that has been taken up by the press in general. It was a way to make the story run. Then the publication of the diaries of one of the hostages had led to a rash of linked articles and profiles. “MASSACRE” was at times in these substituted by “BLOOD-BATH.” In short, a local horror had become international.
Attention had then focused not only on the U.S. role, but on United Nickel, the American company which had, in the words of one article, “plundered the land and impoverished its people.” One investigative journalist had traced the mother of a local man who had colluded with both the guerrillas and the authorities. Her husband had been a worker at United Nickel. Now her husband and her son were dead. What had this poor, innocent woman—Pilar Ferrer—done to deserve such tragedies in her life?
General Quitano felt he had to act against “this predatory company that thinks it can ride roughshod over our people.” He would not wait for the promised commission. There followed a number of incendiary speeches, stressing his independence of judgement, his country’s rights, and their long history of independence from foreign intervention. You could see how puffed up these speeches made him feel; in the same way as you could see emotion ravage him when he mentioned the disloyalty of those within his own family.
“My own nephew,” his voice cracked, “whom I taught to pitch and to swing a bat … that he should betray me…”
A puffed-up little runt—well, Mason had always known that. But his unreliability was a more serious affair.
The orders went out to withdraw U.S. support—military and economic—from General Quitano’s government. Who did they think they were, turning on an American company like that? It was a point of principle, though not one that troubled Mason a great deal. Because it wasn’t the endgame yet. It rarely was the endgame in his experience. Already opposition to the Quitano regime was beginning to gather around the guerrilla leader’s exiled mother, Mercedes Portuondo (Quitano). The networks broadcast interviews with her in which she came across as articulate and dignified.
“The lives Pilar Ferrer and I have lived have been very different. But in two respects we are alike. Each of us has lost a loved husband and a son … and each of us yearns for peace on our island, true independence from foreign interference, and the liberty of those who have opposed the present regime.”
Mason sniffed. Paz! Independencia! Libertad! That old threesome again. Still, there was a chance, if things worked out, that Señora Portuondo would be more congenial to deal with; more reliable than her opportunistic brother-in-law had proved to be. Some day a U.S. Air Force airplane would be waiting to take her back to Santa Clara. In the meantime Mason’s bag was already packed—sneakers, snorkel, camera—for another field in Central America.
* * *
Maria finished her exercise routine with twenty-five trunk curls. Beads of sweat trickled from her armpits down the sides of her rib cage. But her breath was even. Calm. She felt her jumpsuit loose about her, like a skin to be sloughed off.
“It won’t be long now,” she whispered to the sea. “All the bad apples will fall. Soon, mi compañero … mi amor.”
The bones of the dead ask
As if in prayer
What have you done
With our gifts? The wind
Thickens in the south.
Clear your throat—
It is time you prepared an answer.
Copyright © 2007 by Tom Pow
A Neal Porter Book
Published by Roaring Brook Press
Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership
143 West Street, New Milford, Connecticut 06776
All rights reserved.
First published in the United Kingdom by Random House Children’s Books
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First American Edition May 2007
eISBN 9781466874527
First eBook edition: May 2014
