The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  Celia turned to him, incredulous. “What do you mean? Where is she?”

  “I got here at twelve. She and José were not here and they have not been here. José mentioned yesterday that he had a meeting at the American Interest Section, so I called there. It was difficult to find out anything, but I leaned on them a little and finally learned that he had been there for his appointment and then left.”

  “Left to where?” Celia demanded with an irritation that suggested she thought he was deliberately withholding information from her.

  “I do not know. José told Mamá before he went out last night that he was going to Pinar and he would be back today and she could expect him for supper.” He took a breath. “And we know from Liliana that she was with him this morning.”

  Celia’s fingers encircled the stair’s metal railing, gripping it so tightly that her knuckles were white. Luis laid his hand on hers. “You know how José is about promptness. Maybe he didn’t get back in time to bring her home. Maybe he took her with him and had her wait in the car while he did his meetings.”

  Luis remembered how in Varadero José had objected to leaving Liliana in the car and felt certain that was not what had happened. Even if José had told her to wait, he doubted that Liliana would have stayed put. But the scenario offered Celia hope. He felt her hand beneath his relax a little. “They didn’t expect you to be home, Celia, so they would have been in no rush to get here. It’s almost suppertime now, and if José told Mamá he would be there, he will. We should wait for them there.”

  • • •

  There was no waiting. The Daewoo was parked in front of the house when they arrived. As soon as they stepped into the apartment, Luis knew something was amiss. Alma and José met him and Celia at the door. Two pairs of eyes asked two pairs of eyes the same question: “Where is Liliana?”

  Celia looked at José. “I thought she was with you.”

  José shrugged. “I thought she was with you. Or at your place. That’s where I left her.”

  “You did not!” Luis challenged angrily.

  José gave him a glance of dismissal and addressed his response to Celia. “I dropped her off out front, a little before twelve.”

  For a long silent moment the four of them stood there in the once-elegant, now-truncated room with cherubs peering down at them from the dim recesses of the ceiling.

  “Are you sure of the time?” Celia asked quietly.

  “Yep,” José responded promptly. “I had an appointment at the American Interest Section at twelve. I checked my watch while she was getting out of the car and had fifteen minutes. I figured I could just make it.”

  They all looked at Luis. Luis looked at his feet. José’s explanation made him feel as if he had been caught out in a lie. Yet he had told the absolute truth. All he could do was tell it again. “I got there at twelve sharp. She was not there.”

  “How did she happen to be with you in Pinar in the first place?” Celia asked.

  “She was in the car when I came out of the Tropicana. I don’t how she knew I was there.”

  “I told her,” Alma said. “She called about eight o’clock and asked where you were.”

  Celia looked back at José. “Why did you not bring her home last night?”

  José spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness that Luis judged to be totally fraudulent. “I was in a hurry. It was late and I wanted to get some sleep. I just thought—”

  “Thought it would be okay for a sixteen-year-old girl to spend the night in a hotel with a man she barely knows, without her family knowing?” Luis exploded.

  Luis barely had time to register the movement before José had him by the collar. “Goddamn it, Luis. If you want to make an accusation, how about we step outside so Mother’s apartment doesn’t get trashed when I kick the shit out of you!”

  “Hijos! Por favor! ” Alma shrieked.

  José released Luis’s collar and stepped back. Luis glanced at Celia to see her reaction. Alma had her hand over her mouth, but Celia’s eyes were fixed on José as if nothing had happened. “So at 11:45 you let her out in front of the apartment. Did you see her go inside?”

  “No,” José replied. “She was standing on the sidewalk.”

  “On the sidewalk,” Celia repeated. “The one along the street or the one leading to the apartment? Was she headed for the building?”

  “Now that you mention it—” José hesitated, and Luis had the satisfaction of seeing that he, too, felt caught out, as if he had given inaccurate information and now had to backtrack. “I think she might have stepped off the curb. Like she was going across to the beach.”

  There was another long silence. All four of them looked away. Luis supposed that each was seeing a variation of the same scene: Liliana walking across the street and down the path to the waterfront. Perhaps she had wandered off along the shore. To the harbour? Or the other way, toward Cojímar?

  “Possibly,” Alma said hesitantly, “she was across the street when you arrived, Luis. Might she have seen the social workers? If they were in uniform, she might have been frightened and—”

  Alma got no further. Celia spun on Luis so fast that for a second he thought she was going to physically attack him. “What social workers?” she hissed.

  “He didn’t tell you?” Alma asked in surprise.

  “You said you were going to talk to her! Nothing about the authorities!”

  “Oh shit,” José said under his breath.

  Luis didn’t need that, his brother’s favourite expression when he wanted to convey the opinion that he, Luis, had screwed up. He was already aware of it. Nothing to do now but to stand his ground, even though the ground, already quaking, would be crumbling beneath him before this day was done.

  Luis stared the woman he loved straight in the eyes and said, “I didn’t tell you because you would not have agreed, Celia.”

  “Re-education camp? No! Never!”

  “Come on,” he pleaded. “You are a doctor! You know what happens to girls like her once they start!”

  “You were going to have her taken away!”

  Celia’s voice held a pitch of fury that Luis had never suspected she could call forth, although later it occurred to him that this was probably the kind of rage she had turned on José when he told her he was emigrating to the States.

  Luis’s own voice, although not entirely steady, remained measured and reasonable. “Six months in the mountains, tree-planting or whatever, is exactly—”

  “Without consulting me!” Celia shrieked.

  “Because you are against it,” Luis raised his voice. “And you are absolutely wrong!”

  He was vaguely aware that Alma, behind the hands covering her face, was crying. He also registered that José had walked to the couch and sat down, distancing himself from the conflict, from the family. As if he wasn’t into both up to his turncoat ears.

  Celia pointed a finger at Luis’s chin in a way that made him glad it was not a gun. “Liliana is not your child. She’s mine!”

  Still Luis did not flinch. “She is Cuba’s child, Celia. The care of our youth is a collective responsibility.”

  “You frighten my child into running away and think you can absolve yourself with clichés about ‘collective responsibility’?” she cried.

  It was her putting the entire blame on him that caused Luis to lose it. He shouted, “All right, I had a responsibility! Don’t you think your niece’s behaviour reflects on me?”

  “Why on you?”

  “Because, damn it, you’re my fiancée!”

  As suddenly as Celia’s voice had raised, it dropped, stone hard. “Not anymore.”

  “Celia, dearest, no!” Alma cried.

  The slam of the door was the answer to everything, spoken and unspoken. José started after her but Alma, closer to the exit, got there first and blocked his way.

  “She doesn’t need us now.” Alma shook her head so hard that the tears streaming down her age-spotted cheeks flew off in all directi
ons. “She needs her child.”

  “She needs a way home,” José protested. “The car—”

  Luis moved to the window. Nightfall was near. The street was crowded with people coming home from work, some walking, some in pedicabs, some getting off a bus at the corner. Small children were hanging on front porches to greet their parents while older kids tried unsuccessfully to confine their energetic games to the sidewalk.

  “She doesn’t need a car either,” Luis said. “She just boarded a bus.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  CELIA got off the bus in Habana del Este and cut across the housing complex, taking the shortest route to her building. She walked swiftly at first, but as the apartment came into view her steps slowed. The jalousied windows were open as they almost always were to catch the breeze. The rooms beyond were dark.

  The ache in Celia’s heart suffused her body so completely that climbing the three flights of stairs to the apartment was as difficult as if she were an invalid. As she reached her own level she encountered two boys, Federico, who was one of those who had borrowed her bicycle to go for candles, and Tomás, who lived in the apartment next to Celia’s. They were racing in the hallway but skidded to a stop when she appeared and shouted, “Hola, Doctora.”

  “Hello, boys.” She took a deep breath and asked, “Have either of you seen Liliana this afternoon?”

  “Isn’t she in school?” Federico asked.

  “I—don’t think so,” Celia said, hoping he didn’t hear the catch in her throat.

  Tomás peered at her keenly. “Is she still mad at you?”

  The question jolted Celia like an electric shock, but she instantly realized that he, along with everyone else on their floor, would have heard Liliana’s shrieking outburst at Luis the evening before.

  “I hope not,” Celia said simply. “But she isn’t home yet. Would you boys mind asking the other people in the building if they’ve seen her today?”

  “Ask who?” Federico queried.

  “Everyone. Every apartment.”

  The boys looked at each other, their eyes sparkling with excitement at being given such a responsibility. “We’ll start on the ground floor,” Federico decided. “And ask everybody.”

  “If they’re home,” Tomás agreed, and they were off.

  Celia let herself into her own apartment and went from living room to Liliana’s bedroom to her own bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen and back to the living room, looking for the child she already knew was not there.

  The revealing clothes Luis had found in Liliana’s room still lay on the table. Celia was as loath to touch them as if they were poisonous—which in sense they were. With a shudder she swept them up, carried them into Liliana’s room, and dropped them on the bed. Dresser drawers still hung ajar from Luis’s ransacking. From them he had taken these things that bore no relation to a schoolgirl’s life or to any Liliana she knew.

  Celia sat down on the bed and stared at the pile of inappropriate clothes, baubles, and cosmetics, guestimating costs. By the standards of any Cuban, let alone an unemployed student, the total was staggering. Gifts from foreigners? With or without sexual favours? Luis said her attendance record showed absences since January. And what about the week at home each month, when Liliana often spent a day or two at a time at a campismo (so she said) with her friends?

  The awareness that there had to have been occasions when Liliana lied to her cut like a knife. The knife became two-edged with the realization that her blind trust had made it easy for Liliana to deceive her without resorting to lies. Celia recalled Liliana lying in bed, the headphones of a portable CD player nestled in her hair. “Where did you get that?” Celia had asked, and Liliana had replied, easily, “From a friend.” Such an innocent response, now so ominous. Celia pushed the trashy clothes away and looked around the room. To which girl did it belong? The one who bought and wore such things for reasons she could not yet bear to contemplate? Or the one she thought she knew so well, just emerging from childhood?

  Seeking traces of the child Liliana had so lately been, Celia’s gaze fell on a blue music box, the kind with a key one winds to make the ballerina on the top twirl. Carolina had bought the Belgian-made music box in Angola. It was the last thing she sent to her daughter before she died, and it was Liliana’s most treasured possession. Celia picked up the box and idly wound the key. The music did not play, nor did the dancer twirl. She examined it and saw that there was a way to unscrew the bottom in order to get at the mechanism. She unscrewed it, and stared, at first not sure of what she was seeing. The area around the mechanism was tightly packed with—what? With her fingernail, Celia flipped out a greenish bit of paper, many times folded into a small tight square. Money. The bill she smoothed out on the dresser was an American ten. She pried out more, and more, and still more, in all, more than two hundred dollars in ones, fives, tens, and a couple of twenties. Where could Liliana have gotten so many dollars, and for what?

  Hardening her emotions in order to free her mind to analyze, Celia considered the likelihood of prostitution. Unless Liliana had more squirrelled away, there wasn’t enough here, even including the probable cost of the clothes, to suggest that she had been marketing her body on a regular basis. But irregularly? It was the only possibility she could think of.

  Carefully Celia replaced the folded bills and screwed the two halves of the music box back together. The one thing she felt sure of now was that Liliana had not come into the apartment, that she had fled the second time as the first, with nothing except the clothes she was wearing.

  Celia rewound her thoughts as she might a videotape, to the moment when Liliana had broken away from Luis’s grasp on Sunday afternoon and disappeared down the stairwell. Celia had been distressed by her running off like that but not frightened. Clearly Liliana was only embarrassed at their discovery of her cache of sexy clothes. Celia was certain that she would phone or come home in a matter of hours. And she had phoned, first thing this morning. The only surprise was that instead of calling from a friend’s house, she was calling from Pinar del Río.

  Celia had not had time to consider the implications of Liliana’s choosing José, whom she barely knew, over one of her lifelong friends, but then, what had she had time for? She felt a renewed burst of anger at Luis for having persuaded her to go with him to Alma’s place. What if Liliana had called while she was away? Of course she would have known where Celia was if not at home, but given Luis’s actions, would she have called the Lagos? Or would she have seen Celia’s going there as proof that she supported his decision to call in the youth authorities?

  If Liliana had gone to the home of a friend, most of whom lived in the same housing complex, their parents would insist that she call—or would call themselves to let Celia know Liliana was there. Although there were more than one hundred thousand people in this and other buildings in the huge Habana del Este apartment complex, Celia was well known and well liked. Some she knew better than others, liked better than others. But there were none whom she did not trust to do the responsible thing when it came to a child; none who would let a parent worry needlessly. The trouble was that she had not remained in the apartment until the call came.

  A call did come, a little before nine o’clock. It was Tomás’s mother, Marianna, calling from down the hall. “Celia?” she greeted her. “Tomás and Federico just got back from asking people in the building if they’d seen Liliana today. I wish I’d known. I could have saved them the trouble.”

  “You saw her? This afternoon?” Celia’s heart leapt with joy.

  “Yes. I was just coming from the bicycle bus stop with my little one. I saw Liliana across the street and waved, but I don’t think she saw me. I know she’s supposed to be at school this week and at first I thought maybe she wasn’t feeling well and was on her way over to the hospital to see you. But she didn’t go through the underpass.” Marianna stopped speaking, the way a person will sometimes do when they know you don’t want to hear what they’re about to say.
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  “Was she headed for the bus stop?” Celia prompted.

  “No. She was walking up the ramp onto the Vía Blanca.”

  “Are you sure it was Liliana?”

  “Oh yes. She was wearing the same white shorts and that red-and-white striped halter top she had on yesterday when she . . . when I saw her out in the hall.”

  Of course, Marianna, hearing Liliana screaming at Luis in the hall the evening before, would have been one of those whose doors opened to see what was going on. Celia saw in her mind’s eye what the neighbours had seen, and at the same time, saw Liliana, dressed in shorts and tiny top, walking up onto the Vía Blanca, headed for—Varadero? Or maybe somewhere closer, like Playas del Este? Or the campismo at Jibacoa, hoping to meet up with friends there?

  “Thanks, Marianna,” Celia murmured. “I’m sure I’ll hear from her shortly. I’m just upset that . . . that she didn’t go to school today.”

  “I can imagine.” Marianna sounded genuinely sympathetically. “They’re a handful at that age. My oldest is only twelve and I’m ready to pack him off to boarding school already.”

  They hung up. Celia, still in her hospital whites, did not change, shower, or eat. She sat down next to the phone, listening with preternatural attentiveness to sounds from elsewhere in the building. Little by little the building grew quiet, until at last all she could hear was the silence of her own apartment. The telephone did not ring.

  Around midnight she called the hospital and said she would not be at work in the morning, that she was ill. She did not have to elaborate. The tone of her voice was enough to elicit commiseration from the person who took the message, and no further questions. Then she lay down on the sofa to wait.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  JOE stayed at the Casa de la Trova listening to acoustic music until the place closed. Had a jinetera accosted him as he left he would have gone home with her to avoid returning to his mother’s place. But none did, so he drove back to Vedado.