The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  Celia had already forced herself to accept what that might be and knew very well what the risks were and were not. If she was with a man she would almost certainly be at a hotel or in a private home licensed by the government to rent rooms, so there would be others nearby if she felt threatened. Unless she contracted HIV, sex with a stranger wasn’t going to kill her. But such thoughts did little to ease Celia’s mind. She knew from her own medical practice that when children violated the norms of society, they often judged themselves much more harshly than the adults around them. A sense of self-respect could take a very long time to rebuild. And what of Liliana’s lack of trust in her? How could she, Celia, regain it when she didn’t even understand how it came to be lost?

  THIRTY-FOUR

  JOE hung about the apartment waiting for Luis to leave for work and various neighbours who popped in to pop out again so he could speak to his mother alone. She was alone now, her back to him, washing dishes. She held a single plate, washing it over and over with an automatic motion as she gazed out the back window into a patio animated by flapping laundry. He did not have to see her face to know that she was thinking about Liliana and that her eyes were probably filled with tears.

  “Listen, Mamá. I need to talk to you.”

  “Talk. I’m listening.”

  Joe lifted the overwashed plate from her hands and put an arm around her shoulders. “Let the dishes go for now. Come, this is serious. I need some help.”

  Alma dried her hands and replaced the ratty dishtowel on a cheap metal rack, then let him guide her into the living room. He pushed her into a wooden rocker and pulled up the other one to face her.

  “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows in a way that usually made her smile. She did not smile, just sat there, large dark eyes moist and sad.

  “The good news is that I’m leaving.”

  Alma’s eyes widened, stricken. Before she could speak, Joe hurried on, “The bad news is, I’m coming back. And the really bad news is, I’m probably going to go back and forth from now on.” He caught one of Alma’s tiny hands, still damp from the dishwater, and squeezed it. “Think you can handle that?”

  Her eyes overflowed. “How can you leave with Liliana still missing?”

  Joe shrugged impatiently. “Look, she’ll come back when she’s good and ready. The one I’m worried about is Celia, who doesn’t want our help—obviously, since she blames Luis and me—and doesn’t want to call in the authorities, why I don’t know.”

  “Because they could, well, they might . . . send Liliana away,” Alma choked.

  “Right. So she’ll try to find her on her own. I’ve thought of something that might help. That’s what I want to talk to you about. I’m going to buy a car. Today.”

  Alma gave him a bewildered look. “A car? You can’t buy a car just like that.”

  “Of course I can! I know I can’t take it out of the country, but they sell old cars in the street; I’ve seen them all over. And that’s what I want—not an import like Luis’s Fiat, and certainly not a piece of junk like that Daewoo I’ve been driving. I’m going to buy one of the old classics, if I can find one in decent mechanical condition.”

  Alma began to rock in an agitated way. “How is that going to help?”

  “Well, for starters, I won’t have to pay an arm and a leg to rent a car every time I come back.” Belatedly, Joe realized that he had given his personal financial reason first, before explaining how it might help Celia. To cover his blunder he spoke optimistically, with more assurance than he felt. “But the main reason is that when I fly out tomorrow I plan to leave the car with Celia. She can use it to find Liliana.”

  Alma nodded, then suddenly tipped forward so that her forehead struck hard against his chest, and sobbed and sobbed. Joe sat still, except for a hand patting her back, until she quieted. Then his mother did as he himself would have done. She marched to the bathroom, washed her face, and came back with her purse, ready to go.

  They spent all day wandering up and down the street where cash-strapped car owners displayed antique vehicles that they could not sell for anything close to actual market value. Private owners were not allowed to export their treasures. If he, Joe, had wanted to take one of these cars out of the country it would have been a complicated rigmarole whereby its owner first sold it to the Cuban government for pesos. The government would in turn sell it to him, for dollars, at its actual market value, hundreds of times more than what the original owner had received. Car owners could sell their vehicles within the country but few Cubans had the tens of thousands of dollars a well-maintained pre-1960 classic was worth. However, by selling on the street an owner might get, if not what the car would have fetched on the international market, at least some part of the purchase price in US dollars.

  Price didn’t matter to Joe. The main thing was something reliable, which was asking a lot from a half-century-old vehicle whose owner wouldn’t have been able to dump the kind of money into restoration that antique car buffs did in the States. Still, some of the old cars had been babied in the extreme. Growing up, Joe had known families who knocked out one wall of the house in order to park their precious car in what had been a bedroom.

  Joe’s mechanical knowledge was limited but not entirely absent. One of the many low-paying jobs he had been forced to take when he first arrived in Miami was in a garage. He hadn’t stayed long enough to develop into what the boss wanted: namely, a good mechanic with such limited English that he’d be stuck working there forever at slave wages. As soon as he got the rougher edges smoothed off his English, Joe cleaned the black grease from under his fingernails and vowed never to take any job that turned them that colour again.

  Only now, sticking his head under first one ancient hood then another, and being able to identify recently replaced parts from near-dead ones, was he glad for his brief apprenticeship in auto mechanics. Alma stood at his elbow while he checked the engine and kicked the tires. There was no need for her to be there, of course, but he figured it was something to take her mind off problems that she couldn’t do anything about. Each car he examined, he’d ask her, “Is it comfortable? Do you think it has been taken care of?” Then, drawing her aside, out of earshot of the seller, he’d ask, “Think we can trust this guy?” As if he couldn’t make such a judgment on his own.

  A 1959 Chevrolet convertible, canary yellow, particularly took his eye. Alma expressed doubts about a convertible; too easy for thieves to break into, she opined. But after test-driving it and making sure the top went up and down smoothly, Joe bought the classy old boat.

  “You drive it home,” he told Alma. “I’ll follow in the Daewoo.”

  She protested but he could tell she was pleased. She had always been an excellent driver, rare in a country where not many women did drive. Joe knew that his trusting her with the car was an affirmation of her competence. Under the circumstances, it was the most he could offer by way of consolation.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  CELIA was out at first light, cycling the small blacktop road that ran east along the coast. There was no traffic as she followed the waterfront past the Pan American stadium and into Cojímar. She rode through the old fishing village without a glance at the bronze bust of Ernest Hemingway; an artifact cast decades earlier from boat fittings donated by all the fishermen who docked in the bay where the writer berthed his boat during the few years he lived in Cuba. Just past Las Terrazas, a bar where Hemingway was alleged to have spent as much time as on his boat, the street pitched steeply upward.

  Celia pedalled hard for several blocks and arrived at the top of the hill panting. She stopped to catch her breath. As her heartbeat slowed, so, too, did her sense of the moment. She turned her head slowly to the left and saw the house, a flat-roofed bungalow perched on a corner lot with a lawn that sloped down to the street. How could she have a memory of that house? How could she not? The sense of wretchedness that swept over her, wasn’t it reminder enough?

  Air thick with
smoke from cigarettes and cigars, everyone’s nerves jangled from too many cups of coffee, not a hopeful meeting like others they’d had here in the first years after La Revolución, but one of excuses, dissention, denial. Fidel insisting that conditions in the prison could not be so bad; Raúl and Vilma showing no sympathy for the counter-revolutionaries assumed to be confined there; Che merely shrugging when she pointed out that not all the inmates had been convicted of anti-revolutionary activities; indeed, some were merely non-conformists, homosexuals, and the like. Hours she had argued the necessity of closing the umpa detention centres, until at last she had flung testimonials of abuse on the table in front of them all and demanded to know how something like this could be anything other than a betrayal of revolutionary ideals. Only then, when her own capacity to reason had dissolved in rage, did Fidel agree that the camps would be closed. Exhausted and depressed, they fell onto the bed in their clothes, Fidel still feeling so embattled that he would not even remove his boots. He slept but she had not, tormented as she was by images of the shameful incidents recounted in those letters. How she longed for the cottage in Playa Jibacoa where the surf might have lulled her to sleep, rather than this city street with the sound of traffic grinding up the hill. Was that why they never came to this house again?

  A car horn startled Celia. She started pedalling again, leaving behind Cojímar, the house, and memories that were not her own.

  She cycled through Alamar, said to be the largest public housing development in the world. There were clusters of people at the bus stops and children heading to school, some on foot, some perched on the crossbar or back rack of a parent’s bike. Then she left the high-density Alamar complex, with hip-hop music competing from open apartment windows even at that early hour, and entered the quieter ambience of Tarará.

  Of the Playas del Este communities she knew Tarará best. She had worked briefly at a hospital devoted entirely to child victims of Chernobyl. Children rotated through to have their permanently damaged health partially restored by eye operations, skin grafts, treatment for their many cancers, therapies enhanced by sunny hours lolling on the sand and playing in gentle surf. The hospital was directly on the beach, so even children too unwell to go out had the soothing sound and visual effects of the water. Celia had learned a great deal while working there but it had been heartbreaking too, some days filling her with a sadness that she knew was not an emotion she should be carrying home to recently orphaned Liliana. Thus she had been relieved when she finished her residency and received a permanent assignment to the hospital in Habana del Este.

  The next beach community, Santa María, was where the touristy part of Playas de Este began. With stops to leave a notice about Liliana at every beachfront hotel, it took most of the morning to reach Guanabo, the last little town in the strip. There she turned around and began working her way back along the other side of the street. A little after one, tired and hungry, she pushed her bike across a footbridge to a tiny island called Mi Cayito, which floated in Laguna Itabo.

  She ordered a sandwich and went to the restroom to wash up. When she came out, some young men were pushing together several tables for their group. Celia listened discreetly to their conversation, from which she deduced that some were Cuban, some foreign, and all gay. By the time she finished lunch they were on a second round of drinks. Screwing up her courage, she approached the table. “Excuse me,” she said softly, holding a notice out to the man nearest her. “Have you seen this girl in the past week?”

  The man peered at the pictures. “Darling, lots of cuties like this hang out on the Playas del Este, but this one—” He shook his head and passed it to the man next to him.

  The second man, a Cuban with black hair close-cropped in the back and tumbling like a pony’s forelock in front, barely glanced at the pictures of Liliana before passing the notice on with a snicker. “Sorry. Not my type.”

  As if to compensate for their companion’s insensitivity, the others studied the pictures closely. Each in turn shook his head. The last man at the table, a golden-skinned hunk with the easy confidence of those born beautiful, squeezed Celia’s hand as he passed the flyer back to her. “Don’t fret, Mamacita. Your little Barbie will find her way home. With or without a Ken doll.”

  Celia murmured thanks and headed for the cashier. Leaving a notice there, she biked back to Cojímar and the Estadio Pan Americano.

  In front of the stadium, metal sculptures depicting athletes engaged in boxing, volleyball, and other sports at which Cuba excelled were arranged around a fountain. Celia had intended to wait there, but the fountain was dry and the sun very hot, so she moved to the other side of the stadium where she could wait in the shade of a red-blossomed flame tree.

  The stadium was barely a kilometre from her apartment, but she had only been inside twice. The first time was soon after its construction for the 1991 Pan American games, when José had wangled a job as an usher during one of the track events and sneaked her in. Five years later, Joaquín had invited her and Liliana there to watch a fencing match. Between major events it was used to train promising Cuban athletes.

  It was late afternoon, the hottest part of the day, but pleasant in the shade. There were acres of open space between the stadium and the ocean. Here, as across the street from her apartment, the land along the waterfront was covered in low natural vegetation that gave an unobstructed view of the sea. The breeze was kicking up whitecaps but traffic on the Vía Monumental drowned out the sounds of the surf. She wondered if she was too late; if the bus had passed by already. Even as she wondered, she looked up to see it grinding to a stop to let off a dozen boys and girls.

  Their fitness was apparent even from a distance. Instead of walking, they jogged toward the stadium. Several recognized Celia and called out, “Hola, Doctora Cantú.”

  “Buenas tardes,” Celia responded. “Have any of you seen Liliana this week?”

  Their blank looks gave her the reply she did not want, even before they opened their mouths in a babble of answers in the negative, followed by questions.

  “She has gone missing,” Celia said brusquely. “Please call me if you hear from her. Oh, and which of you is Danilo?”

  Several hands lifted to point toward three boys who had peeled off the main group, headed toward the underpass beneath the Vía Monumental.

  “Doesn’t he work out here at the stadium?”

  “Sometimes,” said one boy, hopping around throwing punches at an imaginary opponent as he spoke. “But he’s a cyclist. The team meets at the Velódromo.”

  “Gracias.” Celia swung onto her bike, waved to the group, and pedalled off to catch the boys before they reached the underpass.

  As she rode up behind them she called out, “Danilo?”

  They all turned and stopped as she stopped. By the way two of them looked at the third boy, she knew he was Danilo. She probably would have picked him out anyway. He was slightly built, the dark blue slacks of his school uniform concealing what must have been well-muscled legs. But it was his face that told Celia why Emily had used the word gorgeous to describe this particular boy. His eyes were a penetrating green, framed by the longest, blackest lashes Celia had ever seen on a boy.

  She put out her hand. “Buenas tardes. I am Celia Cantú. Liliana’s aunt.”

  “Encantado,” he said shyly and shook her hand with a grip as solid as if he were squeezing the handlebars of a bike. “How is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Celia said.

  Behind him, the other boys exchanged a glance. One said, “Catch you at the gym, Danilo.” They nodded politely to Celia and were gone. Danilo stared at her.

  “What do you mean? Is she in hospital or something?”

  “She has gone missing,” Celia said.

  “Missing?” He responded to the word with a dubious look.

  “I thought you might have seen her. That you might be meeting her here.”

  “Oh.” Danilo looked down, embarrassed. “I guess she told you I asked her to. I t
hought she might, not today but when school lets out. She invited me—well, sort of invited me—to come to dinner at your place.” He glanced up quickly. “If it was okay with you. She said she’d ask. But then she didn’t come to school this week. I figured she was sick, and, well, it wasn’t definite anyway. Just an idea.”

  Celia said nothing, knowing that in silence people often reveal more than they intended, sometimes more than they thought they knew. All Danilo revealed was that he knew even less than she did. “How did she go missing?”

  “I don’t exactly know. She got caught skipping school on Friday. She thought she was going to be punished and ran off. I think it was unplanned.”

  The boy looked straight into her eyes, his own filled with the questions that she had hoped he might answer.

  “If you were going to look for her,” Celia asked, “where would you begin?”

  “A friend’s place?” Even as he spoke, he shook his head. “But not all week. And you’d know if she was with relatives, right?”

  “I would,” Celia affirmed. “That is why I am asking around. To find out if she has other friends I have not met.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said in a tone that suggested he was beginning to feel grilled. He added, almost defiantly, “She never mentioned any other guys.”

  “I don’t think there are any,” Celia smiled. “She likes being in a crowd. You know, typical only child, she wishes she had ten brothers and sisters. Or at least some cousins.”

  “Yeah. That’s what she said.” He half-turned from her, his body language begging to be released so he could catch up to his friends.

  “You had better go,” she obliged him. “Gracias, Danilo.”

  He nodded and spun away from her, only to rotate back to face her. “Is there anything you want me to do?”

  “If you hear from her, call me. Or ask her to call. Tell her she is not in trouble. Really.” Celia paused. “Do you have her telephone number? My number?”