The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  Maybe the guy was her husband—but no, hell, it was his brother, Luis! The everything-is-black-or-white brother who had snarled at him when he was leaving that if he cared a whit for their mother he’d never try to contact them, to spare her painful reminders of having reared a gusano son. Joe knew it wasn’t true, but it had offered a convenient rationale for avoiding incessant pleadings for him to come home. The last thing he needed in those first years of near-daily humiliations was the suck of family pulling him back. He had considered re-establishing contact after the kids were born, but it was obvious that Vera’s determination to distance them from their Cuban heritage was an in-law war in the offing. Given how soon the marriage turned into a war within, he could think of no good reason to launch another, especially one where he’d be a hostage staked out in the middle and used as a shield against missiles launched from both sides.

  Joe instantly saw that whatever his brother had been up to during their decade-long separation had put him on a fast track to middle age. The grey hair was why he hadn’t recognized him from the back, that and the way Luis’s broad shoulders had hollowed out and become slightly stooped. He might have known that once Luis stopped playing baseball he wouldn’t keep himself in shape. Joe had, of course: regular workouts being virtually obligatory in the medical supply business in order to project a healthy image. He was not entirely surprised that Luis had come to meet him, but Celia—why was she here? Maybe she wasn’t married? Or had been and was now divorced? Kids? Well, maybe that would be to his advantage. A protective barrier, so to speak. Even as Joe’s mind was scrabbling for ways to maintain a safe distance, his gaze never left her face and his feet carried him directly to her. Without so much as a glance at Luis, he dropped his bags and wrapped his arms around her. “Celia! You haven’t changed at all!”

  She slid out of his embrace and moved close to Luis. “Hola, José. You’re alone?”

  “All by myself,” he said in a tone of hearty good humour more feigned than felt. He turned to his brother and, as Luis had not extended his hand, Joe thumped him on the back. “Luis, man, you’re looking great! I can’t believe I’m here.”

  With a resentful glance at Joe’s expensive bag, Luis said, “I hope you don’t have more luggage. The Fiat is quite small.”

  “No problem. I got a rental car. Didn’t expect you to come all the way out here to meet me.” Joe tried to catch his brother’s eye, to convey appreciation that he had.

  Luis refused to meet his gaze. “It was you who broke off contact, José, not us. As far as Mamá is concerned, we are still a family.”

  Just what I figured, Joe thought. You told me not to write, I didn’t, and you haven’t forgiven me for it. Mother will, of course, and Celia’s neutral. Or pretending to be. He shifted his gaze to Celia. “How about riding back with me, Celia? Fill me in?”

  “You know the way,” she snapped.

  “No I don’t,” Joe grinned. “If you recall, I didn’t leave by air. I don’t think I’ve ever driven from the airport into the city. I might get lost.”

  Celia folded her arms. “Maps are sold inside the terminal.”

  Luis laid his hand on her shoulder. “Go ahead, Celia. Ride with him.” To Joe he said, “Mamá and I will be waiting for you.”

  Joe noted the look that passed between Celia and his brother. Although Luis, tight-jawed, had urged her (given her permission?), she was reluctant. Her eyes remained on his face, warm and worried.

  Luis spoke in a low, firm voice. “It’s best for you to go with him. Really.”

  Celia turned to Joe, gaze level and cold. “All right, José. Let’s go.”

  He located the car and she got in, leaving as much space between them as was possible in such a compact vehicle. She gave directions for getting out of the airport complex and onto the highway. “The quickest route is the Primer Anillio, the freeway that circles the city.”

  “Quicker to where?”

  “Habana del Este, where I live. You can drop me off, then zip through the tunnel and take the Malecón to Vedado.”

  “Mother still lives in Vedado? In the same apartment?”

  “Naturally.”

  The way she said it reminded Joe that spending one’s entire life in the same home was the norm in Cuba; something he had completely lost sight of in the States, where frequent moves were expected of everyone. A sudden image of his diminutive mother in the apartment where he had grown up gave him the first pang of nostalgia.

  “How is she?”

  “The same.” Celia paused. “It is a shame that you came alone. Seeing your children would have meant a lot to her.”

  Joe took a deep breath. Might as well get it over with, he decided, and told her about the divorce. “I had a good lawyer,” he explained. “He worked out a deal where support payments go straight from my account to hers. That way I don’t have to have personal contact with her or the girls. I figured that was best—a clean break, you know?”

  Celia said nothing. They drove in silence, except for Celia’s indication of the entrance onto Primer Anillo, and a few kilometres later, one leading onto the Vía Monumental. After a lengthy silence, Joe asked, “Did you stay in medicine?”

  “Sí. Pediatricas. I work there.” She pointed to a large hospital, and at the same time indicated the Habana del Este exit. He followed her directions along the edge of an apartment complex that sprawled over several blocks and along a waterfront street. Four-storey apartment buildings faced the sea, separated from the rocky shoreline by the street and a strip of windblown weeds. Celia indicated her building and he pulled to the curb. It was one of the older buildings in the complex, probably built by the original micro-brigaders back in the 1960s. Some windows still had the original wooden slat shutters. Quite a few were broken or hanging awry.

  Without looking at him, Celia said, “How sad.”

  Assuming she meant the divorce, Joe said, “That’s life. Nowadays anyway. Hell, even Fidel got divorced. And there was that long custody battle for his son.”

  “But not his daughter.”

  Joe shrugged. “If she was his daughter,”

  “I don’t understand how a father could walk away from his little girls.”

  Joe realized that it was that, not the divorce, she had meant when she said it was sad. He muttered, “Fidel never jumped through hoops to see his.”

  “If she was his.”

  Joe noticed with mild amusement that Celia had switched sides, but he was tired of the conversation. “Yeah, well, when it gets to be a hassle, what’s the point?” He looked up at the building, which was as bleak as modern function-over-form architecture could make. Although some nearby buildings had recently been painted, hers was a mouldering grey. “This is it? Which apartment?”

  She pointed to the top floor. “The one with red geraniums on the balcony.”

  “Looks like a Miami slum. Public housing gone to seed.”

  “Oh? Since when do the Yanquis put low-cost housing on waterfront property?”

  He thought of Miami’s bleak, crime-ridden public housing and conceded the point. “You do have a good view. Prime location.”

  “Wasted on the working class?” she asked sarcastically.

  Joe laughed. He had remembered her face and figure but had forgotten that quick ironic wit. “Are you trying to pick a fight? Forget it. Let me take you to dinner.”

  “I am working this evening,” she said and promptly got out of the car.

  He caught up to her on the sidewalk. “I’ll pick you up at the hospital after work.”

  “No, thanks. I always ride my bike.”

  “At night?”

  Her eyes flashed contemptuous. “Día, noche, no importa. Habana no es Miami.”

  “You are trying to pick a fight. And I’m warning you, you’d better lay off or I’m going to kiss you.” Joe tried to slip his arms around her, but she peeled out of his embrace even quicker than she had at the airport and stalked up the sidewalk.

  “Wait!” Joe moved
to mitigate her annoyance. Or her pretended annoyance. In his experience women were never all that upset to discover that a man found them attractive. “Just one question?”

  Celia stopped and half-turned, warily.

  “A personal one. Do you live alone?”

  “No. Carolina’s daughter, Liliana, lives with me.”

  “Don’t tell me that crazy sister of yours made a career of the army and dumped her kid on you!”

  “Carolina was with the Cuban armed forces in Angola. With her husband. They were both killed there.” Celia’s voice was low and unemotional, but there was something in her eyes that said that she liked slapping him in the face with such harsh news, that it served him right for being flippant on subjects he knew nothing about.

  Joe had a fleeting image of Celia’s vivacious older sister, so full of bold laughter at parties and equally bold indignation at anything she perceived as a social injustice; that pretty, busty body lying in the mud of some distant battlefield. He promptly erased the image and did what he did best: focused on the moment, on the living woman a few feet away. “Oh Celia! That must’ve been terrible for you.”

  “Sí, terrible.”

  Images of Carolina must have been in her head too because there was a pained silence before she added, “But raising Liliana has been a blessing. She is sixteen already.”

  “You’re not married, though? No children of your own?”

  She gave him a cool, altogether knowing look. “No more personal questions from you, old friend. You have been gone too long.”

  She turned and walked away, this time not looking back.

  SIX

  RATHER than returning to the Vía Monumental for the twenty-minute drive to his mother’s apartment, Joe followed the waterfront street a little farther, then veered off onto a dirt track that wound through a brushy area. Sandy paths leading down to the beach were imprinted with bicycle tracks, evidence that the undeveloped area was as much an unofficial playground now as it had been when he and Luis were kids.

  Although he had felt prepared for a family reunion on the flight over, Celia’s being at the airport had thrown him off balance. He needed a drink and time to put it into perspective. A few kilometres from Celia’s place, the dirt track terminated at the parking lot of El Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro. Joe had never been to El Morro when the fort wasn’t overrun with students on field trips. Maybe it was still like that during school hours, but now, nearing sunset, only foreign tourists milled about.

  Joe parked the car, crossed a drawbridge over the moat, and circled around to the side of the fort that faced the harbour. How many times had pirates passed this way to storm and sometimes burn Habana? How many times had he and Luis re-enacted those battles, sometimes casting themselves as defenders of the city, sometimes as the pirates?

  In ancient times a chain running from fort to fort, this side of the harbour mouth to the other side, was raised at nightfall to keep out pirate ships. How much could such a span have weighed in sixteenth-century iron? How many slaves would it have taken to raise and lower that clanking monster? Fewer, certainly, than the thousands it had taken to build this and all the other forts surrounding Habana’s harbour, not to mention the city wall that alone had taken two hundred years to construct. One thing for sure, he and Luis had never imagined themselves as slaves. He had got a taste of slavery, at least in its modern sweatshop manifestation, only after immigration to the States.

  As a boy wielding a wooden sword, Joe had been oblivious to the spectacular view of Habana’s skyline across the harbour, and he was more or less oblivious to it now. He ordered a mojito from the bar and leaned on the stone balustrade to watch the sunset, placing as much distance as possible between himself and a group of German tourists. Shutting out their guttural voices, Joe reviewed his plans, a review necessary because Celia’s coming to meet him at the airport had the potential to undermine his focus.

  The basic plan, he assured himself, was untouched. He knew exactly which government agencies he would visit, could guesstimate how many calls would be required to establish solid contacts, and how much schmoozing with those contacts would be needed to set the stage. The part he hadn’t worked out was Celia because she had played no part in his decision to return to the island. It had been a business decision, personal only to the extent that he wanted to put some physical distance between himself and his ex-wife. If he wasn’t going to be given access to the kids, then, by God, Vera wasn’t going to find him all that accessible either.

  But Celia’s being at the airport, not to mention how she felt in his arms, caught him off guard. Who would have guessed that at thirty-five she’d look the way she had at twenty-five? As he leaned against the stone wall, the pressure of an erection made him acutely aware of something that, if not exactly in his mind, was certainly in his blood.

  A purely biological reaction, he told himself. After all, it had been what—nine months?—since he’d had a woman. Of course there had been opportunities, both with women he had fooled around with before the divorce and ones he had met since. But something in the way Vera got her hooks into him, then extracted several pounds of flesh had put him off “nice” women. And with Dade County’s huge HIV-infected population, a guy would have to be a whole lot more desperate than he was to screw a prostitute, even with so-called safe-sex precautions.

  Celia, though, was another story. Given Cuba’s nationwide testing program and her being a doctor, she’d be safe. Sexually, anyway. But what about entanglement? Non-capitalistic society be damned, nobody was going to lay that lady for free. Not that it had cost him all that much before. But it almost had. He had almost stayed in Cuba because of her. And probably would have if he hadn’t believed until the very last minute that her anger would cool and she would go with him.

  As the setting sun transformed white cloud streamers into streaks of magenta, Joe shifted uncomfortably. He wanted to walk away, to drive straight to his mother’s house and follow all the plans he’d made, the way he always followed his plans, without looking right or left or making things any more complicated than necessary. Embarrassment, though, kept him glued to the stone balustrade, concealing his projected feelings from the tourists. But not from himself.

  Okay, so he had paid a price when he walked out on Celia. But that was because he had let himself get addicted to her sweet compliance, underscored by the incredible pent-up passion of a virgin in love with her first lover. Given a decade of lovers and water under the bridge since then, such emotional traps were unlikely to snare him now. But what if she was one of those Cubans whose allegiance to the Revolution had not lasted; one of those who, having collected a free education in the field of their choice, resented working for chicken feed and longed to fly the coop? What if she got the idea that he ought to facilitate her move to the United States in exchange for a tumble in the hay?

  He savoured the last swallow of rum and played with the scenario. It wasn’t entirely unattractive. If she chose to follow him to Miami, as she had refused to do back then, he might acquire a safe sexual partner with no sticky commitment to monogamy or lifelong support. Assuming, of course, there weren’t complications. Joe’s thoughts flashed briefly back to Vera, and his erection wilted of its own accord.

  That’s the kicker, he thought as he headed back across the parking lot to his rental car. Keep your eye out for complications.

  SEVEN

  LUIS stood at the window watching the play of sunlight until it ceased to filter through the leaves of ancient trees that formed a canopy over the street. Softer tones of sunset touched the old houses with a rosy glow. Then sunset faded to dusk and he no longer saw the street. What he saw was Celia and José alone in her apartment, his hands on her there as quickly as they had been on her in the airport, but touching places far more intimate. Luis fought an urge to retch.

  It was exactly as he had known it would be, from the moment he first learned of his brother’s intended return. Yet he had resisted, as one naturally resist
s pain, and would go on resisting until the end. Grown men don’t puke and they don’t cry. They pick up the goddamned phone and act.

  The telephone rang three, four, five times—longer than it should take Celia to get to it from anywhere in her small apartment. The receiver was halfway back to its cradle when Luis heard her breathless, “Hola?”

  In a choked voice, he said, “Celia? Ask José if he is coming for supper or if we should go ahead and eat.”

  The surprise in her voice was genuine. “Why, he left long ago!”

  “You mean . . . he isn’t there?”

  Her voice took on an edge of annoyance. “Look, I only let him bring me home because you insisted. I certainly did not invite him in.”

  Abashed, Luis stuttered, “Yes, but, well, I thought he was coming straight here.”

  “So did I. But he didn’t say and I did not ask. Look, I have to go or I will be late for work. I was already out in the hall when the telephone rang. You barely caught me.”

  “Oh, sorry. I suppose he will turn up eventually.”

  “I’m sure he will. Chau.”

  “Hasta luego, mi amor.” But she had already hung up.

  Luis held the receiver a moment longer, reinventing images of Celia. Now he saw her alone in the apartment, changing into hospital whites and crepe-soled shoes. He saw her going out the door, swiftly down the stairs, getting onto her bicycle for the short ride to the hospital. And José?