The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  Celia and Franci knelt down to help, at last understanding what Josephine had said back in the car. Her father had to be buried, and the grave must be covered with rocks to prevent the dogs from getting at it.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  CELIA, Franci, and Josephine reached the top of the hill as the last ray of sunshine lit the bronze head of Frank País. They passed by the statue, Josephine again crossing herself, and descended the long stairway down to the parking lot.

  “Do you think,” Franci asked as they were driving back, “that she might have caught whatever it was he died from?”

  “She might have,” Celia admitted. “If she develops fever or diarrhea, you will get her to a doctor, won’t you? One you can trust with her real history, insofar as you know it. She may need to be tested for diseases not common here in Cuba.”

  Celia was aware that she was speaking as if the child would remain with Franci. She probably had known the second Josephine laid her hand in Franci’s back in Philip’s office that this was how it would turn out. Perhaps they all had known.

  Josephine was quiet on the ride back. She had taken nothing from the hut, nor had she asked where they were going. She lay limp against Franci, as if where they went or what they did now could not possibly matter.

  “What do you propose doing with her?” Celia asked.

  “Feed her, of course. My mother’s right, you know. She is half-starved.”

  “Clean her up first,” Celia said as they pulled into the drive. “Wash her hands and yours with soap and water, plus alcohol if you have any, before touching anything.”

  Josephine showed no reluctance going into the house but clung so tightly to Franci’s hand that Celia wondered if the two could be pried apart long enough to be washed. Celia went into the kitchen for water, and when they came out of the bathroom, she handed a glass to each of them. It had been a blistering hot day and all three of them were dehydrated. Then Celia placed a mandarin on the table in front of Josephine.

  “That’s not enough!” Franci exclaimed, heading for the refrigerator.

  Celia laid a hand on her arm. “Wait, Franci. I have never seen a case of malnutrition this serious but I have read about it. We have to be careful not to overload the system. The mandarin will pick up her blood sugar level. Then—let me think. Philip’s seafood bouillabaisse would be perfect, or a light vegetable broth.”

  “Surely she needs more—”

  “Much more,” Celia agreed quickly. “But pay attention, Franci, to what I’m telling you. Go slow. No fried foods or anything heavy.”

  Josephine consumed the mandarin and licked the pink undersides of her small brown fingers. Noticing the short fingernails, some of which were cracked vertically, Celia said, “She has a calcium deficiency too. Do you have any yogourt?”

  “No, but I can fix—”

  “You bathe her. I am going to the pharmacy to see if I can find some vitamins and”—Celia opened the refrigerator and scanned its contents—“fresh vegetables. I’ll make a soup.”

  As Franci held out her hand to Josephine, Celia said, “You are going to have to watch the mothers like a hawk. Yours will want to stuff her and Philip’s is a sugar addict. Josephine should have no sweets for a while. Everything she puts in her mouth should be nutritious. And no big meals. Just small amounts through the day. Can you manage that?”

  “Claro,” Franci called over her shoulder as they headed for the bathroom. “I’ll just tell them not to feed her and they’ll sneak it to her bite by tiny bite behind my back.”

  Celia drove to the nearest pharmacy for what she needed there, then stopped at a farmers’ market and got carrots, a tomato, a few green beans, boniato, and garlic.

  When she got back to the house she found Franci on her knees beside a tub so full of bubbles that Josephine’s small head was barely visible above them. Celia set a package on the bathroom sink. “Have you shampooed her hair yet?”

  “Nope,” Franci replied. “We’ve done fingers, and now we’re doing toes.”

  “Use what I got at the pharmacy.”

  “Why? I have some lovely coconut—”

  “This is for lice,” Celia interrupted.

  “What?” Franci spun around on her heels. “Who said she had lice?”

  “A precaution,” Celia said firmly. “You saw the conditions they were living in.”

  “I don’t even know what a louse looks like!” Franci wailed.

  “Look in her hair for nits—the eggs. If there are any there you will see them.”

  “Ugh!” Franci grimaced with distaste. “What have I got myself into?”

  They looked at Josephine, or rather at her close-cropped black curls. Sensing something negative in their expressions, she paused in the act of blowing a handful of bubbles, holding the breath she had just sucked in.

  “Oh, just a child.” Celia grinned.

  “Very funny, Doc!” Franci swatted at Celia’s ankles with the washcloth. Josephine let her breath out in a whoosh, sending iridescent bubbles floating into the air around them.

  Celia put a pot of water on to boil, threw in spices, and minced the vegetables. While the soup simmered she wrote out a list titled Instruciones de la Doctora. It detailed the kinds of foods Josephine should and should not have and how much of which vitamins. She also advised Franci to get the girl tested for internal parasites as soon as possible.

  The telephone rang. “Get that, will you?” Franci called. “It’ll be Philip.”

  “I just got in,” Philip told Celia when she picked up the receiver. “How did it go?”

  Briefly, Celia told him what they had found and what they had done.

  “How terrible! I suspected he was sick, and Franci—and you—I was relieved to see you, Celia, because if he was sick you’d know what to do.”

  “We did,” Celia assured him. “Or I should say, Josephine knew what she had to do and Franci knew what she wanted to do. I was just along for the ride.”

  “How is Franci?”

  “Well . . .” Celia teased him with a long hesitation. “Right now, Philip, your Franci is wearing the happiest smile and the dirtiest shorts I have ever seen on a grown woman.”

  When Celia returned to the bathroom, Franci had Josephine out of the tub and was towelling her dry. A lump filled Celia’s throat as she recalled drying Liliana in exactly that way when she was small.

  “It was Philip,” she said when she could speak. “He will be here shortly.”

  Celia returned to the kitchen. On the back of the instructions she had listed for Josephine’s care, she wrote, I’m sorry, I should have told you sooner, but I can’t stay. I have to be—she hesitated, trying to think where she might reasonably say she had to be, then wrote—somewhere by morning. I will call when I get back to Habana.

  FORTY-NINE

  CELIA wondered, as she drove out of the brightly lit city and into the dark foothills of the Sierra Maestra, what exactly she would have told Franci if circumstances had allowed her to tell her anything. Details of Liliana’s flight and the conflict with Luis that preceded it, of course. Plus her own fear that if she brought in the youth authorities they would accept Luis’s recommendation that, once Liliana was located, she be sent to a re-education camp. Or perhaps they would come to that decision on their own, depending on what they discovered when they investigated Liliana’s recent history.

  But Franci, she knew, would dig deeper. She would want to know what Celia herself wanted to know: Why had Liliana not trusted her? Why had she run away rather than coming to Celia—or even to Franci—when she felt threatened?

  She could almost hear Franci saying, “That is a significant change, Celia. When did it come about?” And her whispered answer, “I do not know.”

  Franci would look down, then, to keep her from reading anything judgmental in her gaze. But not before Celia would have seen astonishment in her dark eyes, a look that said, clearer than words, “You don’t know ?”

  Franci, well-trained professional that
she was, would sit quietly as Celia explained the double shifts she had been working and how tired she was when she got home, how Liliana had become so much more social this year, away at school three weeks out of the month and much of her week at home spent at the beach. How she had encouraged that because it seemed to her that it was a good thing that Liliana had lost the clinginess that had characterized most of her childhood and was choosing to be among friends her own age. Good kids they were, and a well-run campismo it was where they spent most of their time—the very same one where she and Franci and their friends had partied, played loud music, danced, and swam when they were in their teens. It had all seemed . . . so right.

  All of which would explain why Celia had not noticed, but would not explain why the change had taken place. So Franci would back up and come at the mystery from a different direction, asking another question Celia had already asked herself repeatedly: when did the change come about? At that point in their conversation, had there been such a conversation, Celia would have broken down and wept, “I do not know. My child went away and I did not see her go! Did not even miss her until her body disappeared too.”

  Had Franci been in the car instead of back at the house falling in love with an orphan girl, she would have tried to console Celia. That would have been a waste of time, Celia knew. Some things you try to do must be done right the first time because there are no second chances. Some things, when you lose them, you will never get back. All one can do at such a time is move on. If only she knew where to go from here.

  Suddenly the physical exertion and emotional drain of the day caught up to her. Celia felt as if she could not keep her eyes open one moment longer. She pulled off the highway onto an unpaved side road and cut the engine. As she sat waiting for the vibrations of the car to leave her body, she saw the smokestack of a sugar mill like a black cutout against the star-whitened sky. At this midnight hour the old centrál was silent. There was no odour of crushed cane, nor did the smell of burned fields and dust from tractors bringing fresh-cut cane hang in the air. Maybe it was too early in the season. Or maybe this mill was a relic from a bygone era and had been decommissioned. She got out of the car and walked to the fence. The cavernous building, sheathed in rusty metal, seemed a familiar place. She saw it not from the outside, but from the inside, and not in starlight, but by candlelight . . .

  Fidel and his commanders hunched over a map spread on the desk, Fidel pointing to Santa Clara, captured by Che yesterday. His finger moved along the Carretera Central to Habana. Mañana, he told them, New Year’s Day, Che and Camilio will be in Habana, and we will be in Santiago. He glanced up at her, read her mind, and backtracked.

  He could not actually read her mind, but she did believe that until much later, when, laughing, he told her how facial expressions give her away. A steady gaze said, You are right; we are of one mind. A slight frown: I have a doubt; let us discuss this. A deep frown: No, that will not work; we must find another way. Now Celia was looking across the map with a deep frown, wondering if he did not remember what she had said earlier about how they should not enter Santiago on New Year’s Day, but should wait one day more, until the garrisons at Camp Columbia and La Cabaña had surrendered, and Che and Camilio had taken control in Habana. He did remember. He lifted his finger from the map and said, No, not mañana. Mañana we rest. Then we take Santiago, and the war is won; Cuba will be in our hands.

  They were all weary, drained, and pained from the battles they had fought and the compañeros lost in the ten weeks since leaving La Comandancia. When Fidel finished describing what was likely to happen in Habana mañana, and in Santiago the following day, his commanders went out into the main part of the mill and curled up against burlap bags of sugar, to dream or sleep dreamless in the sweet truth that a just war has been won.

  Only Celia remained in the office, taking off her boots as Fidel took off his, loosening the laces and placing them just so, so the boots could be pulled on in half a second should an alarm be sounded. They spread bedrolls on the rough wooden floor and lay down, although she could tell by the brightness of his eyes in the instant before she extinguished the candle that he was far from sleep. He was probably formulating what he would say on Radio Rebelde in the morning; the ultimatum he would give the Santiago garrison, to surrender or be attacked. This time there would be no slaughter of idealistic students, this time no defeat. This time, Moncada would fall.

  Celia, for all her bone weariness, was not swift to sleep either. She was aching for the compañeros who died in the final days of battle, and the ones before that, whom they buried in the sierra. She was aching for the sierra.

  She did not miss the bed. She learned long ago to sleep on the ground, the floor, in the back of a truck, anywhere. Here in this black, windowless room, foul with the smell of fermenting cane juice and rat droppings, what she missed was the openness of their small room at the Comandancia, its wooden flaps lifted to let in cool air at night and bird songs at dawn. She missed the silence.

  She missed those things in the same way she missed the compañeros who had fallen, the way one misses someone or something that will never be again. As she missed Fidel, although he lay next to her at that very moment.

  As if in response to her profound loneliness, he turned on his side, folded one long leg across her hips, and wrapped an arm just below her breasts. As close as they were, it was not so close as before. Now they slept with the fabric of his and her uniforms between them, sleeping in their clothes as soldiers must, not as lovers, each wrapped tight in the skin of the other. Again, someday, perhaps they would. Or perhaps, never again.

  “The war is over,” he whispered into her hair. “Now La Revolución can begin.”

  “Sí,” she whispered, holding back the rest. It was only to her heart that she said, Our time in the sierra is over. That place where I alone was all you needed—lover, sister, mother, nurse, cook, critic, confidant, challenger, commander, and more—is no more. Tomorrow begins La Revolución. I will hold on to as much of you, for you, as I can, and perhaps, a little for me. But in the end, Cuba will have us both. It is the only way to make a revolution.

  Celia Cantú stood at the gate of the old sugar mill, fingering a padlock. She could not go inside to see if burlaps bags of sugar really were piled about, or whether there was a windowless room at the back with a scarred wooden desk stained by candle wax. Those things might or might not be real. The greater reality, it seemed, was this feeling of, just moments ago, lying on a hard wooden floor next to a body warmer than her own.

  In the distance a dog let out a single yap. A bat swooped past, soundless. She walked back to the car, wondering how far from the main highway she had driven. She wondered if she would reach the Sierra Maestra before dawn.

  FIFTY

  IT was a little before four in the morning when the Chevy chugged up the final steep section of concrete highway leading to the Comandancia trail head. Celia parked and got out. This time she had no flashlight, but the trail felt familiar to her feet. She moved slowly and did not stumble. The moon, just a night off full, was very bright.

  She had not looked for landmarks on her previous trip and feared she might miss the narrow path leading to Miguel’s cabin—which in fact she did. She realized that she had walked too far only when she turned around for a view of the sky, which had gone from black to pearl grey with just the faintest tinge of pink. That was when she saw a thin curl of smoke coming from a cottage lower on the mountain.

  She retraced her steps along the main trail until she found the path. Winding narrowly through the forest, it was crisscrossed with dew-covered spiderwebs. There were so many that she wondered if they could have been built in one night, or if Miguel had a special appreciation for webs that caused him to walk around the more elaborate ones rather than brush them aside.

  There was no clearing around the cabin. Celia was almost upon it before it came into full view. It looked to be a single room with a thatched roof that extended out over a porch about t
wo metres deep. The windows had wooden shutters that lifted like those in the Comandancia cottage. The shutters and the front door were wide open.

  Miguel stood with his back to her, cooking. He was wearing jeans, unbelted, low on his hips. The lack of shirt and shoes and the way hair tousled about the nape of his neck suggested that he was not long out of bed. A coffee pot simmered on one burner. He lifted the skillet, flipped something into the air, and caught it coming down.

  He turned toward the table and saw her standing there. As when he had first seen her at the Comandancia, he stopped mid-motion, suddenly so still that he seemed not to be breathing. It must be a skill he had taught himself for his work, Celia thought; to freeze like that when he sighted a wild animal so as to not startle it.

  “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I have interrupted your breakfast.”

  “Not to mention my life,” he said with a smile, setting the skillet down on a table.

  Only when he walked toward her with his hands held out in welcome did Celia realize how wrong this could go. “I did not come for what you think,” she said quickly.

  The welcoming smile became mocking. “What I think ?”

  “I am not—that is, things are different now.”

  “You mean you’re not Celia Sánchez? I’m not Fidel Castro? We’re just ordinary Cubans?” He turned back to the stove and picked up the coffee pot. “In that case, may I offer you an ordinary cup of coffee?”

  Celia stepped inside the cabin, arms wrapped around herself, feeling foolish. What in God’s name had possessed her to come? Why had she not foreseen how awkward it would be? She might explain how she was searching for Liliana, how she had left notices at beach resorts and given them to people to distribute in every city between Habana and Santiago. But how could she explain why, when she reached Bayamo, she had not continued west, back to Habana, but had veered south for a two-hour detour to the trail leading—exactly here?

  He shoved a stack of books and papers to the back of the table, poured two cups of coffee, and sat down without looking at her. Celia hesitated, but sitting seemed the only civil thing to do, so she sat.