The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  “Five-five-six, seventy-two hundred?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Chau.” He turned and jogged off in the direction of the Velódromo. Almost out of earshot, he paused, turned, and yelled, “Ask Magdalena.”

  Celia raised her arm to wave. “Going there now,” she yelled back.

  THIRTY-SIX

  CELIA stopped next to a waiting taxi parked across the street from Magdalena’s house and studied the place. It was a flat-roofed bungalow from the 1950s, surrounded by a chain-length fence. A second storey had been recently added, with an outside stairway. A blue triangle sticker on the front door advertised the fact that the owner was licensed to rent rooms to foreigners.

  The upper storey slightly overhung the lower one, creating a covered front porch with two wrought-iron rocking chairs. But they were empty and the place did not look friendly. It looked, Celia thought, like the sort of place where, when you’re walking past, a large dog flings itself against the fence, barking furiously and scaring you out of your wits. But she saw no dog or any reason why she should not go to the door. So she did.

  The door was opened by a skinny girl with spiked, metallic-orange hair. She held an open bottle of nail polish in one hand, brush in the other. Looking past Celia she said, “Sorry. No rooms. We’re full.”

  “I am not looking for a room,” Celia said, wondering why on earth the girl had mistaken her for a foreigner. “I just wanted to talk to you. If you are Magdalena.”

  “Oh! I saw the taxi and I thought . . .” Magdalena’s mouth stayed open but empty, revealing that she had not actually thought anything beyond the fact that the taxi across the street must have brought Celia, which must mean she was a tourist.

  “I cycled over.” Celia motioned to the bike, which she had leaned against the fence just inside the gate. “I am Liliana’s aunt. Celia Cantú.” She smiled, waiting for the information to register. “May I come in?”

  Magdalena lowered her eyes and carefully screwed the cap back on the nail polish bottle. “Sure.”

  Celia had never been in a home with so many consumer goods on display. A television, of course, but every Cuban home had that. This set was the largest she had ever seen, with a VCR. There was also a computer, a CD player, and astonishingly large collections of CDs and DVDs. Family photographs and cheap prints in gaudy frames covered the walls. Heavy furniture left barely enough room to move about, and every surface was crowded with knick-knacks.

  “Go ahead. Say it.” Magdalena had taken a seat on the sofa behind a coffee table littered with cosmetics, including bottles of nail polish in vivid colours. Her posture was casual, even sloppy, meant to convey unconcern. But Celia noticed bright spots on the girl’s cheeks that, along with wary eyes, indicated unease if not outright fear.

  “Say what?”

  “What you’re thinking. That we’re rich, or have rich relatives in the States, or how lucky we are to have all this.” She gave a dismissive wave around the room.

  “Actually I was thinking about whether you were going to ask me to sit down.”

  The spots on Magdalena’s cheeks turned a brighter pink. “Claro,” she said quickly, jutting her chin at an overstuffed chair. She picked up first one bottle of nail polish, then another, pretending to examine the colours. “So what’s with Liliana? How come she wasn’t in school this week?”

  “That is what I came to ask you.”

  “How would I know?” Magdalena snapped.

  Celia sighed, not at Magdalena’s rude retort but at her own ineptness. To a girl already expecting to be accused of something, the question could only have sounded accusatory. She should have approached her as one would any nervous child, turning the focus elsewhere and giving Magdalena time to realize that she intended her no harm.

  Celia sat down on a footstool across the coffee table from Magdalena and looked at the array of nail polish. “Which one are you going to use next?” she asked.

  “I was thinking black.” Magdalena smirked.

  Celia picked up the bottle of black. “Will you clean the red you are wearing off first or apply it over top?”

  Magdalena studied her nails. “I think I’ll put it on over the red.”

  “Have you ever done designs?”

  “Designs? Like what?” For the first time Magdalena looked directly at Celia.

  “Oh, a dot or a diamond or something.”

  Magdalena frowned at her bright red nails. “I’m not that good an artist.”

  “My friends and I used to put tape on our fingernails with tiny cut-outs, so you could get a two-coloured design. Like, if you were to cut a diamond in a piece of tape and stick it on your fingernail, then paint over it with black, when it dried, you’d pull off the tape and there would be a black diamond in the middle of your red fingernail.”

  Magdalena dark eyes sparkled, then went flat. “No tape,” she said sourly.

  “I have some,” Celia said. “In my bicycle basket.”

  Without waiting for a response, she got up and went out to her bike, returning with the roll of tape. “I had this for posting notices asking if anyone has seen Liliana,” she explained. “But none of the hotels would allow it. Most of them said they would show the notice to their employees, though. Do you have nail scissors?”

  Magdalena produced a pair of scissors and watched as Celia snipped off a small piece of tape and cut a tiny circle out of the middle of it. She handed it to Magdalena, who pressed the tape onto the nail of her forefinger. Then, with black polish, painted over it. Celia noticed that the high colour on her cheeks had faded to a more normal pink.

  “Think it’ll work?” Magdalena asked, staring fixedly at the newly painted nail.

  “If you wait till it dries. I used to get impatient and pulled the tape off too soon. If you do that, it smears.”

  “How come Liliana doesn’t know how to do it?” Magdalena asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “I guess I never thought to show her. She mostly uses clear or pale pink. Designs show up best with bright colours.”

  Magdalena slid to the end of the sofa and held the painted nail in front of a fan. After a minute or two she touched it, and deciding it was dry enough, pulled off the tape. “Cool!” she exclaimed, holding the finger for Celia to see. “Can you do other designs?”

  “One of my friends used to do stars,” Celia said, thinking of Franci’s beautifully manicured nails spangled with stars. “But all I ever learned to do were diamonds and dots and hearts.” Celia snipped off a fresh piece of tape and cut a tiny heart-shaped hole in it.

  This time Magdalena held out her hand for Celia to apply the patch. The small gesture told her that despite Magdalena’s prickly behaviour, she was no different from most Cuban children in that she automatically anticipated kindness from adults. Celia had wondered, given the family’s apparent focus on material acquisitions, whether they might have neglected their youngest child. But Magdalena’s quickness to trust made it obvious that the attention of affectionate adults was something she took for granted.

  Celia stuck the tape on Magdalena’s pinkie finger and chose a pearl polish to go over it. “The more contrast, the better it shows up,” she explained. “Neutral colour over a bright one, or vice-versa.”

  Again Magdalena dried the freshly painted nail in front of the fan, peeled off the tape, and leaned back on the sofa to admire the results. “You’re right. The more contrast the better.” She pointed to the red nail with its tiny pearl-coloured heart. “Liliana would like this one.”

  Knowing that Liliana would like that one, that she had never thought to show her, and now she wasn’t here to do this silly girl-thing with them, caused tears to spring to Celia’s eyes. Maybe Magdalena saw them, or sensed the sadness in Celia’s silence, because she said, “Lili likes living with you, you know.”

  Celia recognized it for the indirect compliment it was intended to be, but it only deepened her pain. “I thought so. Until she disappeared. She was afraid, you know.”

 
“Yeah.”

  A single word, yet it told Celia that Magdalena had seen Liliana. The question was when and where. “I was not going to punish her for skipping school on Friday,” Celia said. “She makes good grades, so if she needed a break, no harm done. She might be a better student for it.”

  Magdalena gave a snort of humourless laughter. “I wish my parents felt that way. But they’re more like the guy Liliana calls Uncle Luis. Your fiancé.” A sly look crept into the girl’s eyes. “Or one of them, right?”

  “Actually not.” Celia murmured.

  “Not?” Magdalena’s voice echoed surprise. “You dumped him for his brother? Lili said she wished you would but she figured not a chance.”

  “No,” Celia said. Without really thinking about it she laid herself open, using her own angst to lure the girl in. “I broke up with Luis because he frightened Liliana. By threatening to send her to a re-education camp. That was why she ran away.”

  Whatever Magdalena knew about Liliana, her astonished expression showed that she had not known this. “Ran away? Like, where to?”

  Before Celia could answer that she did not know, Magdalena said an entirely unexpected thing. “This Uncle Joe guy—did he take her back to Miami?”

  A decade of medical practice had taught Celia to conceal surprise from her patients. She needed every bit of it now to maintain a neutral expression as the bombshell Magdalena had just dropped exploded in her mind.

  “Liliana barely knows her ‘Uncle Joe,’” she said quietly, reviewing their relationship more for herself than for Magdalena. “They met on Friday. She saw him again on Sunday evening. He brought her home Monday noon. That was when she disappeared. He is still here. At his mother’s house.”

  “Oh.” Magdalena frowned, then tried to justify her assumption. “When I stopped by to see her on Saturday, she was talking about it.”

  “About—going to the States with him?” Celia’s voice trembled.

  “Well, just kidding around.” The wariness returned to Magdalena’s voice.

  Feigning nonchalance, Celia picked up a bottle of pale pink polish. “May I?”

  “Sure,” Magdalena said. “But let me shape them first.” She fished for an emery board in her manicure kit. “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but your nails are a mess.”

  “I guess they are,” Celia said meekly and held out her hand. She waited until Magdalena was engrossed in the manicure before asking, “Do you know why Liliana went to Varadero alone in the first place? On Friday.”

  “You won’t tell my parents?”

  “No, I promise.”

  “We planned to go together. Only my dad didn’t work that day. I told him I was sick, that’s why I’d come home from school. But he stayed home all day, and since I was supposed to be sick, I couldn’t get out of the house. Lili hung around awhile, then decided to go to Varadero alone. I guess that’s when she met up with your fiancés.”

  “But you talked to her later,” Celia pressed, thinking, Otherwise she would not have been able to tell you that José was here and Luis was angry with her for having skipped school. “Was she upset?”

  “Totally bummed out. I couldn’t talk her into going back to Varadero with me on Saturday, or to Playa Jibacoa. That bummed me out because I’d been stuck here at home all day on Friday. So when she decided to stay home Saturday, I went without her.”

  “Did you see her Sunday?”

  Magdalena gave the nails a quick once-over with the emery board and blew away the dust. “She came by Sunday evening but I wasn’t back yet. She was trying to call this ‘Uncle Joe,’ or at least find out where he was. Or so my sister said. By the time I got here she was gone.”

  “And you have not heard from her since?”

  Magdalena shook her head. “No. And school was the pits without her. That’s why I only stayed two days, then came home. I figured this time I could get out of the house, and if I could touch base with Liliana; I mean, I thought she might be sick, or—” She paused and frowned at the pale pink polish Celia had selected. “Wouldn’t you like something brighter?”

  “You pick a colour.”

  Celia grimaced when the girl selected hot pink. But what did it matter? The polish remover she would have to buy later was a small price to pay for information she could not get anywhere else. “Where do you stay when you overnight in Varadero?”

  “We’ve never done that,” Magdalena said quickly. “We go during the day, for the beach and, well, dancing too. But we try to be back at the campismo by dark because that’s where our friends are. There’s this one boy Liliana’s pretty sprung on.”

  “Danilo,” Celia supplied. “But I’m not sure Liliana wants him to know that yet.”

  Magdalena chuckled. “Yeah. She’s cool that way. More than me.”

  “More than me too,” Celia said, thinking not so much of Liliana’s coolness toward Danilo as all the things Liliana had coolly kept from her. “But Danilo has not heard from her.”

  Magdalena, focused on painting Celia’s nails, frowned but said nothing. Celia had the impression that she was thinking about who Liliana might have called or why she might not have called anyone. She waited, but when the girl spoke all she said was, “It’s quick-dry polish. Only takes a couple minutes. You want something to drink?”

  “Water?” Celia stood and waved her hands in the air to dry the gaudy polish. “Then I had better be going.”

  Magdalena disappeared and returned with a glass of water. “Has anybody heard from Liliana this week?”

  Celia drained the water and handed the glass back. “Not so far as I know.” She hesitated and threw out one last question that she could only hope Magdalena would answer honestly. “Do you think she could be staying with friends in Varadero?”

  Magdalena snorted. “What friends? Tourists don’t stick around and the guys who work there are only interested in foreign chicas.”

  “What about in the city? Might she have gone there?”

  Magdalena looked dubious. “Anytime I mentioned hanging out on the Malecón, she never wanted to. Lili’s more of a beach person. Besides, Varadero is closer to Playa Jibacoa. Hitching, it only takes an hour or two to get back.”

  Celia looked at her hands. “Thanks for the manicure. Next time I’ll do yours.”

  Magdalena stared into space, holding the empty glass as if she had not heard. Only when Celia headed for the door did she say, “She must’ve called somebody.”

  Celia turned to stare at her. “Like who?”

  “Like me. But she didn’t. Or she did, but that was Sunday. You said she disappeared on Monday.” Magdalena followed Celia down the sidewalk and opened the gate for her to push the bicycle through. “The thing is, Liliana’s not a loner. To not call anybody, well, that just isn’t like her.”

  “I know,” Celia said softly. “That is exactly why I am worried.”

  She brushed Magdalena’s cheek with a kiss and rode into the gathering dusk.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  JOE swore under his breath and jammed the key in the ignition. If he waited much longer he’d miss the plane. It didn’t help to know it was his own fault; that if he had called first Celia would have been here. Or maybe she wouldn’t have been. But at least he would have known beforehand and made other arrangements. Now he’d have to leave the car in the airport parking lot where, security or no, it might get stripped. No, that wouldn’t do. Better phone Luis from the airport and ask him and Alma to come pick it up.

  He glanced into the rear-view mirror and, seeing no traffic, pulled into the street. Then registered what he had seen—a woman rounding the corner on a bicycle. He slammed on the brakes. It was too much to hope for, but as the cyclist drew closer, he saw that it was Celia. He pulled to the curb and got out.

  The studied way she looked past him left the impression that she would have ridden right by if he hadn’t been standing in the middle of the walk leading up to her building. She had no choice but to stop.

  He spoke quickly. �
�Put the bike away. I need you to drive me to the airport. Hurry. I’m already late.”

  Her hostile expression was replaced by bewilderment. “Where is the rental car?”

  “I turned it in when I bought this one.” He gestured toward the ’59 Chevy convertible.

  “Bought it?” she echoed. Then, with what appeared to be a resurgence of anger, she wheeled the bike past him. “So you are staying.”

  “No, I’m leaving.” He opened the door so she could park the bike in its usual place. When she turned around he was at the foot of the stairway with a look he hoped made it clear that no damned way was she going up before she’d heard what he had to say. “But I’ll be back and forth a lot. So I bought the car. Which I’m leaving with you.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Because you know damned well that if she was in the neighbourhood, you’d have heard by now. You need the car to look for her.”

  “I have no gasoline ration.”

  “There’s gas money in the glove box. And don’t give me any crap about not using it, not if you want to find her.”

  Joe did not consider himself a particularly sensitive person, nor did he aspire to be. But with Celia standing as she was, close enough to be kissed if he had dared, he could smell the witch’s brew of pain, anger, confusion, and despair roiling in her. He had smelt it before, but he knew a little more about women now than he had then. This time she wasn’t going to scald him with it.

  “Come,” he said firmly. “We go now or I miss my plane.”

  He clasped her arm but she brushed it off, turned, and walked ahead of him out to the car. With barely a glance at the vehicle, she slid into the seat like an exhausted child.

  On the drive to the airport, he babbled about the business connections he’d made, why he needed to go to México City and Miami to keep things moving, and how this would be his pattern from now on. When her silence made it plain that she was not interested, he switched to the subject of Luis’s new position and wondered aloud whether it was a step up the bureaucratic ladder. Celia’s continued silence made it fairly obvious that she either had no opinion or did not care.