The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  It was not at the Comandancia that Sánchez and Castro had met. It was months earlier, near Manzanillo, beard so scraggly, younger than I expected, never seen eyes so bright, double-bright in the half-light of dawn. Sánchez had gone to let him know that Matthews, the reporter from The New York Times, had arrived. Who had told her that story—her mother perhaps, who had got it from Vílma? How Fidel had stayed out in the farmer’s field with Sánchez and other rebel leaders twenty-one hours of talk talk talk he understands everything organizes nothing; no matter, I can continue with that while they follow him he knows what must be done while Matthews cooled his heels in a peasant’s shack palm fronds like black cutouts in a sky white with stars, sleepy, sleeping, Frank País next to Fidel, Fidel next to me, Haydée and Armando together, Raúl and Vílma, Faustino, Guillermo, my people my family.

  Sánchez had gone back to Manzanillo to expand her network, had smuggled more weapons and supplies to the guerrillas, and brought in more journalists. There was the CBS television crew she and Haydée took in two months later and stayed on, right through the battle of Uvero. Oh God the blood I spilled to kill who can say and what would my father say? When does killing to save my country become blood on my hands ? It was after that battle, needing a permanent base for a field hospital, that Sánchez had found the perfect hideaway. While Castro kept engaging Batista’s troops, moving from place to place, she remained at La Plata to oversee construction of the Comandancia. Look, Fidel, how hidden the buildings will be beneath the trees, how the land falls away on all sides; with one hundred soldiers you can stop ten thousand of theirs without such losses as we suffered at Uvero yes, you will have hundreds more I promise!

  Sánchez returned to Manzanillo and in two months had recruited enough soldiers to double those under Fidel’s command, Celia’s mother among them. Thank God for my women where would we be without them? Shooting, sewing, nursing as needed how can men be so inept at taking care of themselves how can he command an army when he suffers such toothaches?

  Sánchez had gone to Santiago next, recruiting and fundraising until Batista’s henchmen started closing in. Then she returned to the sierra, this time to stay. Springtime, the smell of gunpowder, the smell of blood, splintered trees toppled amongst alpine flowers, eardrums aching long after the bombs, silence.

  Sensations more powerful than facts stormed Celia’s body, making it impossible for her to attach actual dates, places, and events to Sánchez’s time in these mountains. How much did she know anyway? The history of the Revolution was the history of los barbudos, “the bearded ones,” men’s big histories recounted in big books. Sánchez’s story, what little of it had been written, was told only in children’s books. She herself was given a copy of Celia Nuestra y de las Flores for her ninth birthday and in high school had read Celia, La Flor Más Autóctona de la Revolución, but what had those sanitized tales told her of the real woman?

  Celia tossed fretfully, tangling the sheets and swatting at the odd mosquito. Why was it never stated that Sánchez began armed struggle in the sierra five years before Fidel arrived? Why wasn’t she celebrated for having found the Granma’s twelve bedraggled survivors and gotten them to safe houses, thereby saving them from being murdered like the other sixty Fidel had brought from México? Why was it never explained that she had decided that Fidel would command her troops, seasoned fighters who knew the sierra, so she could return to the city to recruit more, raise funds, and buy the weapons they needed? Why was it never acknowledged that it was Sánchez who chose the site of the Comandancia, brought Fidel there, supervised the construction, and integrated women into the rebel force? Why was it not said, simply, that in that time and place, Celia Sánchez had the most workable ideas as well as the final word on almost everything?

  Celia’s mother had known this. So had all the others who’d served with them in the sierra. During gatherings of old compañeros in their home when she was a child, Celia had heard them speak admiringly of Fidel as their courageous commander but of Sánchez as the decision-maker and infallible strategist who guided him and inspired them. This was what they had witnessed during those years in the sierra. Yet not a word of that made it into those children’s books or into any of the museums that memorialized her. Like those portraits at Parque Lenin, history had preserved her in honey, as la flor autóctona, the sweet native flower.

  Not a flower, Celia thought as she drifted into sleep. A woman who knew exactly what she wanted. If I find the woman, I will find . . .

  FIFTEEN

  CELIA woke from dreamless sleep to a darkness that felt familiar. She knew without looking at her watch that it was near dawn. She dressed quickly, not in the shorts she had taken off the night before but in the jeans she had worn on the train and a white shirt she had bought for Liliana that Liliana had not cared for so it had ended up in her closet. She double-knotted the shoestrings of her runners, and out of habit stuck a pen and notepad in the pocket of her shirt.

  She hoped, as she started the car, that the sound would not disturb anyone. As there was only one road leading uphill, it should be easy to find the trail head. The important thing was to get past the park entrance before the staff came to work. She was only planning to do what dozens of tourists did daily; the difference being, she did not want to be accompanied.

  She had barely cleared the villa when she came to a barricade, several sawed-off tree stumps rolled into the road to block traffic. The small building on the left would be the park office where visitors were expected to pick up a guide. At this hour, though, it was as dark. Celia swerved around the tree stumps and continued up the road. It was even more steeply pitched than the one she had come in on. It ended abruptly in a parking lot that, according to a large sign, was nine hundred and fifty metres above sea level. No wonder the Fiat had grumbled so. In five kilometres it had climbed more than seven hundred metres!

  As Celia turned into the parking lot her headlights picked out a small sign made of wooden arrows that pointed toward trails leading off in various directions. Pico Turquino she recognized; all Cubans knew it to be their island’s highest peak. La Placitas and Humanities she could imagine; tiny mountain hamlets of four or five families, accessed by trails rather than roads. The bottom arrow read La Comandancia.

  She parked the car and from her bag took a pencil-sized flashlight she always carried because one could count on electricity going off just about anywhere in Cuba at any time. It was nearing sunrise and should have been light, but massive thunderclouds kept it, if not quite pitch-dark, then close enough.

  The trail leading to La Comandancia was on the opposite side of the road from the parking lot. She followed it into a forest of ancient mahogany trees, each one bearded with long grey strands of Spanish moss. A wire gate barred the path. Swinging her light along the wire, she saw that there was a person-sized gap in the fence at the end of the gate. She squeezed through.

  For a short distance the path was more or less level, smooth and easy to follow. Then it became less even. Where it pitched up or down, rain runoff had turned it into a trench just the width of the trail, sometimes ankle-deep, sometimes knee-deep. Rocks rolled treacherously underfoot.

  It was not yet sunrise but getting light when she reached what appeared to be an uninhabited farmhouse. As she approached she saw a large thatched-roofed, open-sided room and guessed that it served as a visitor’s rest stop. The trail seemed to end there, but she was sure it did not. She switched off the flashlight to save batteries and instinctively turned right. Once around the old farmhouse she saw that the trail dipped into a small rivulet, then continued upward.

  Occasionally the heavy forest of mahogany and strangler figs fell away, giving breathtaking views across a labyrinth of deep ravines that sliced between the most rugged mountains she had ever seen. Everything seemed familiar, and at the same time astonishing. Celia had not known that such wild areas still existed in Cuba.

  Red light spilled across the landscape with startling brightness. Turning to look back, s
he saw that the sun was a red ball balanced in a narrow slot of clear sky between earth and leaden clouds. As it moved upward and behind the thunderheads, it became half a sun, then none. The landscape faded back into shades of grey, although lighter than before. Celia turned to continue uphill and gasped. While she was watching the sunrise, a man was watching her.

  “Compañera,” he said sternly. “It is prohibited for visitors to walk this trail without a guide. Didn’t you see the sign at the park entrance?”

  “I—it was dark. There was no one there.” Celia’s distress was not feigned. To have come so far, only to be stopped! Her knees, already shaky from the climb, seemed to give out entirely. She leaned against a boulder and finding it not adequate support simply sat down.

  The man knelt beside her. Higher up the trail, looming above her, he had seemed tall. In reality he was a small man, scarcely as tall as herself.

  His face registered concern at her sudden collapse. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I—I just need to rest a bit.”

  “No hurry,” he said. “I will wait with you. You were going to La Comandancia?”

  As if the trail led anywhere else, she thought, but nodded politely. “I have never been there, and this morning—this is my only chance.”

  “I see. Unfortunately the guides do not arrive until eight.”

  It occurred to her that it would be better to go with him than not to get there at all. “But you are here.”

  “Well, yes. But I am not a guide.”

  “Are you from Santo Domingo?”

  “I am. Did you visit the museum?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “It was my home. Before the war.”

  “Really?” She gave him a second look. “You were here then?”

  “I was born here. Already ten years old when the war reached this area. The soldiers forced us out of our home, that house where the museum is now.”

  Celia was shocked. “The rebels did that?”

  The man laughed at her confusion. “The rebels? No! Batista’s troops. Our house was a very nice one. Four rooms. The commander, he had his men cut a hole in the floor, right through the strong boards my grandfather had shaped by his own hand from trees such as these.” He flung out his arm to indicate the forested slope.

  “More than two metres square this hole was, and two metres deep. He had them lower a bed into the hole, my parents’ bed it was, and he got in that bed and stayed there night and day. That’s what kind of coward he was. He said he had migraines and perhaps he did, but I think it was his cowardliness that made him sick. That and the terrible things he did. He had a terror of a mortar attack on the house so he hid in that hole while his troops perished and messengers brought him word of one defeat after another.”

  “You were here!” Celia was so thrilled by this human connection to the past that her disappointment was momentarily forgotten.

  “Yes. I was a guerrilla.”

  “Surely you are not that old!”

  “I told you. I was ten years old when the rebel army made their headquarters here.” He jutted his chin toward the Comandancia. “I was one of them.”

  Perhaps taking Celia’s silence for skepticism, which in fact it was, he went on to give details that, Celia suspected, he had recounted many times. “All the men in the village were already with Fidel. Or dead,” he added gravely. “My papá, because he protested when Batista’s men put us out of our house, he was shot. And others.”

  He paused for emotion or dramatic effect, then continued. “There were only a few old men, and they were closely watched. The women, too, for by that time it was known that there were women with the guerrillas. It often fell to children to be the rebels’ eyes and ears. It was easy for us. One minute we would be skipping stones in the stream or gathering firewood for our mother, and the next minute we would have slipped away to carry a message or food or whatever there was to be carried to La Comandancia.”

  “My mother was one of them,” Celia said suddenly. In fact, her mother had spent most of the war in the Oriente, under Raúl’s command. But she had been recruited by Celia Sánchez and was brought here first for a month of training before being sent with others to the Second Front in the Sierra Cristal.

  “She was a rebel soldier?”

  “Yes. And a nurse.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Dead, I’m afraid.”

  “Killed in the war?”

  “No. Cancer. She was a very heavy smoker.”

  The man nodded, as if Celia had just provided a detail that authenticated her claim to having had a warrior mother. “One of the city girls.”

  “From Pilón, yes. How did you know?”

  “All of those women who came from the city to fight with Fidel were smokers. As a child, this was something I had not seen before, women smoking. But those women from the city, they all did.”

  “Do they now? Your women, I mean. Do they smoke?”

  He thought about it for what seemed like a long time, long enough for Celia to realize that he must be visualizing the faces of all the women in his community.

  “Some,” he said finally. “Those who have gone to live in town, they come back smoking. Because they have money, you see.”

  “And the men?” Celia asked, although she knew the answer. “Did they smoke then? And do they now?”

  He looked at her with surprise. “Of course. Smoking is a man’s thing, no?”

  As if to prove his point, and to acknowledge that she was an outsider, an urbanite, he took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and offered it to her.

  Celia smiled and shook her head. “No thanks. Smoking kills women.”

  He lit a cigarette for himself and smoked a moment in silence, studying her. “Your mother,” he said.

  “Yes. And Celia Sánchez.”

  “It probably kills men too,” he conceded. “But we must all die of something, no?”

  Tears sprang unexpectedly to Celia’s eyes. Frank and José País shot by Santiago police. Able, Boris, Mario, Che, all tortured, all murdered. Camilio disappeared on a solo flight to Camagüey. Joaquín’s father and her own flung into eternity by a terrorist’s bomb. Haydée by her own hand. Then Carolina and her husband . . .

  The man must have supposed the tears to be for her mother, for he suddenly said, “She was your mother. You have a right to see where she fought for us.”

  “Gracias, compañero!” Celia jumped to her feet.

  “Are you sure you can make the rest of climb?”

  “Oh, definitely! I just needed to rest.”

  “We are almost there. To the first building.” He turned and climbed so rapidly that almost immediately she fell behind. Suddenly he stopped beside a tiny thatch-roofed hut. When she caught up to him, panting, he grinned and said, “It doesn’t look like a hospital, does it?”

  It certainly did not, nor did Celia think it ever could have been. The place where her mother received her battlefield training had to have been more than this dirt-floored hovel or they could not have cared for as many wounded as they did.

  “Not the main hospital; it is up there.” He waved toward the densely forested mountainside above them. “This was where Che saw sick people from the area, the non-combatants. Most had never been to a doctor before. Che was the first to come to this part of the sierra. He treated everyone.”

  “What kinds of illnesses?” Celia asked, peering into the tiny hut with interest.

  “Everything. Many suffered from toothaches. That’s why we called this the dentist’s place.”

  “The guerrillas had a dentist?” Celia asked in surprise.

  “Eventually, yes. But not in the beginning. Che wasn’t a dentist himself, but he could pull teeth. See this?” The man pulled back a gum to reveal a missing upper tooth halfway back in his mouth. “Che took it out. When I was eleven.”

  Celia shook her head wonderingly. “I am a children’s doctor and cannot imagine having to work under s
uch conditions. Or pulling a child’s tooth. How brave you were!”

  “At times one must be brave. Of necessity.” He glanced up at the sky, and as he did so, a large raindrop struck his nose. By the time he had wiped it away, she, too, was feeling drops.

  “You want to get back,” she said. “You were on your way home.”

  “True,” he admitted. “The trail is more difficult in the rain.”

  “Could I stay? The guides will be here soon, no?”

  He hesitated, clearly torn between wanting to get home and wanting to give her the gift of time in a place that he must presume was as sacred to her as it was to him.

  “I could sit there.” Celia pointed to the hut. “And just wait. And remember.”

  In one way or another, she, or perhaps her mother’s service to the Revolution, had earned his trust. “All right,” he said. “But wait for a guide. Farther up there are many trails. You could get lost.” He glanced again at the lowering sky. “Do not try to walk back alone. The trail is slippery when it is wet, very dangerous.”

  “Gracias,” she said, offering him her hand.

  He barely touched her fingers. “Que te vaya bien, compañera,” he said and was gone, swift as a forest animal, down the path and out of sight.

  SIXTEEN

  AS soon as he disappeared from view, she crossed the clearing and again entered thick forest. Other buildings appeared among the trees. One seemed to fit what she could remember of her mother’s description of the hospital. Another she thought might have been where the women’s brigade lived. Then the sense of familiarity vanished, and she was lost. She wandered for short distances along various trails, always choosing those that led higher up the mountain.