The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  Not withstanding the fact that Liliana had just given away everything she’d bought for herself in the past six months, there was, he knew, a strong current of acquisitiveness in her nature. And from what he had seen of Magdalena’s home, her family was extremely possession-oriented. Yet none of them brought up the subject of having or buying. The theme—if there was a theme to their chatter—was people. The athletes exchanged views on how well others at their workouts had performed, or would perform in upcoming competitions. Magdalena went on at some length about the intrigue involved in keeping Liliana’s surprise party secret and a guy in the hip-hop band she had dated since. Liliana went off on a thread about the school secretary, of all people, saying how Emily knew who met whom at night and stayed out past curfew, but you could trust her not to pass on things that might get you into trouble.

  After half an hour Joe’s interest in Liliana’s friends flagged, so he took them to the bus stop, drove Magdalena to her house, and dropped Liliana back at Celia’s. Then he headed home to dress for what he privately called Liliana’s “maiden voyage” dinner.

  But all the way back to Vedado he kept thinking about kids. Or more particularly, his kids and what it would be like for them to spend time on this side of the Florida Straits. It was not the first time he’d had such thoughts. However, in the past he had envisioned them at their present age, even though getting them over here anytime soon was a near impossibility. Now he found himself thinking of what Cuba would seem like to them, and they to other Cubans, if they were Liliana’s age. Try as he might, he could not quite wrap his head around that.

  Amy and Keri weren’t athletic; not that they were old enough to exhibit talent in a particular sport, but Vera would certainly have them both in tennis lessons within the next year or so. Plus piano, plus dance. Then what? What did kids do, anyway? Whatever his kids learned to do in the course of their carefully controlled, thoughtfully guided, expensively purchased activities over there, would those activities translate to the relaxed, hang-out-on-the-beach and dance-till-dawn, make-your-own-fun activities he had enjoyed as a teen and that still seemed to be the norm for Liliana and her crowd?

  Joe shook his head and decided to give it a rest. By the time his girls were Liliana’s age, Washington’s political razor wire would have come down and within five years of that Cuba would be culturally interchangeable with south Florida. The issue wasn’t whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. It was simply—or not so simply—the world his girls would grow up in.

  EIGHTY-SIX

  JOE found Luis sitting on the bed half-dressed, holding a shoe in one hand. Considering the poor quality of the shoe, Joe could understand why a man might look glum, but he suspected that in Luis’s case that wasn’t the reason. He said hello and headed for the shower. When he came out ten minutes later, Luis was still sitting there, the only difference being that now the shoe was on his foot.

  “Been sucking on a lime to get yourself in a party mood?” Joe needled as he pulled a dress shirt out of the cramped wardrobe.

  “What, am I supposed to be happy with this crap you and Liliana cooked up?”

  There was no answer to that that Joe could think of, so he put on his shirt and started buttoning it. Luis watched his fingers as if he was trying to figure out how his brother managed so complex a task. Luis seemed like a man betrayed, and when he spoke again, that was how he sounded. “You think that with Liliana in Miami, you can get Celia there to marry you.”

  “Yeah?” Joe countered. “Maybe you helped with the visa because you figure that with Liliana gone, Celia will get lonely enough to marry you.”

  Luis looked so ashamed that Joe took pity on him. He sat down on the bed opposite. “Ah, quit guilt-tripping, Luis. You know that’s not why you did it. Not why I did what I did either.”

  “Then why ?” Luis asked in a tone that Joe found just short of pathetic.

  Joe sighed. “We already went through this out on the boat. We did it because we don’t know what’s in the kid’s head. If she did off herself, we’d spend the rest of our life thinking we might’ve done something to prevent it.”

  “But it was set up for México! Why didn’t you leave it at that?”

  Joe considered carefully how to answer that question. He never lost sight of the fact that Luis could bring the whole thing to a screaming halt. What’s more, he could do it in such a way as to make it impossible for him to do business in Cuba, ever. Finally, giving it his best shot, Joe said, “I did it because I think Liliana’s past saving and Celia’s going to ruin her life, or at least her career, trying. Or haven’t you noticed how much time she has missed from work in the past few months?”

  Joe paused, just long enough for Luis to calculate the weeks, then continued. “You cleaned up after Liliana this go-round, but what about the next time? Celia’s career’s not the only one on the line here, you know.”

  “José,” Luis said, giving Joe a look that stopped his spiel in midstream. “Don’t try to con me. You do not give a damn about Celia’s career, let alone mine. So I ask you again, why did you do it?”

  “You want the truth?” Joe asked, as if that wasn’t what his brother had been asking for all along. “I did it because I plan to be going back and forth a lot from now on. I don’t want to step off the plane into family shit every time. It wrecks my concentration. Liliana’s antics could become as much an embarrassment to me as to you. Celia doesn’t need it, you don’t need it, I don’t need it.”

  “De veras!” Luis exclaimed, and Joe knew that he had finally got through.

  “So let her get a bellyful of Miami. I live there, man. It’s a toxic culture. If she can handle it, fine. Then that’s where she belongs. Me, I can handle it, and no, I do not wish I had stayed in Cuba. Maybe she will feel the same way. Or maybe she won’t. But you know as well as I do that Celia is not going to follow her. Honest to God,” Joe said again, only this time, he was lying, “I did not arrange for Liliana to go there in order to bait a trap for Celia.”

  Luis was quiet for a minute or two. Then he started lacing his shoes. “How did you arrange it? I thought the only way Cubans could get into the States was as so-called political refugees and all that caca.”

  “I paid six hundred bucks for a Mexican passport, which is what she’ll be travelling on. As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, she will be another upper-class Mexican girl whose graduation present from her Florida relatives was a trip to Disney World.”

  “A sixteen-year-old?” Luis looked skeptical.

  Joe clicked his tongue. “Use your head, Luis. If she’s travelling under an assumed name and an assumed nationality, naturally she’ll be travelling under an assumed age. I wasn’t about to go through the red tape necessary to transport a minor across international borders.”

  “You think she’ll come back? Stay a week and go home like an ordinary tourist?”

  They stood face to face there in the small room they had shared for all but ten years of their life. Face to face and eye to eye, because physically, they were the same size. And, Joe conceded for the first time, perhaps equally intelligent. With that in mind, he did tell the truth, as he knew it to be.

  “I have no idea, Luis. All I know is that Liliana thinks this is what she wants. She might be wrong about that, but she’s right about one thing. It is her life.”

  “Ours too,” Luis said quietly.

  “Yeah.” Joe pulled on his jacket. “But this is not a replay of the Elián story.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re not a divided family.”

  Luis picked up his own jacket from the back of a chair and stood there with it dangling from his fingers. Finally he said, “Elián and his dad did come home.”

  Joe took the jacket from his brother and held it so Luis could slip it on.

  “So did I,” he said.

  EIGHTY-SEVEN

  CELIA expected the Lagos to arrive together to pick up her and Liliana, but José came alone. Celia wondered if Luis was so
angry that he was not even willing to ride in the same car. However, when they reached Hotel Mundo Nuevo, Luis and Alma were waiting at the bottom of the broad steps. Alma, wearing a perky red scarf and a navy dress she saved for special occasions, saw them first and waved gaily.

  “Oh, look!” Liliana cried. “Tía Alma’s all dressed up. They both are!” She rushed forward and gave Alma and Luis each a huge hug. It was only then that Celia grasped how much it meant to Liliana that they were all here to celebrate her first trip abroad; that for her this might well be the equivalent of the coming-of-age quienceañero party she had not had. That was probably why Liliana had been so insistent that Celia dress up, even to high heels, which she rarely wore.

  Celia embraced Alma and they climbed the steps to the main entrance. Liliana linked arms with Luis and José as if both were her escorts, and followed. They were halfway up the steps when Celia heard José ask, “Where did she get that?”

  And Liliana’s reply, “I don’t know. I never saw it before.”

  Celia turned in time to see José cast a questioning look over Liliana’s head at Luis, and heard Luis’s sullen response: “She told me she didn’t like jewellery.”

  Liliana called out, “Where did you get the anklet, Tía Celia?”

  “Do you like it?” Celia asked, smiling down at Liliana.

  Liliana hesitated. “It’s a little old-fashioned. But it looks nice on you.”

  “My namesake, Celia Sánchez, wore one like this,” Celia said and turned away from them to enter the hotel.

  The Mundo Nuevo was one of Habana’s newer hotels and not one Celia would have chosen, although she saw immediately that it would please Liliana. A broad curving stairway led to the dining room on the second floor—a mezzanine, really—that overlooked an enormous lobby. Massive chandeliers glittered and there were pillars at intervals across the dining room that Celia supposed could have supported the roof of the Parthenon.

  They were shown to a table on the far side of the room. Alma, unpretentious woman that she was, sat down as calmly as if at her own table. Liliana pretended to the same calm, but her high colour showed that for her this was no ordinary outing. Celia kept her eyes lowered to prevent them from revealing to the others that the place represented everything she detested.

  What kind of people built palaces such as this while children lay dying of hunger all over the world? How in Cuba of all places could such a hotel be built, while at the hospital they scrounged for basic necessities? Oh, she knew the answer: that without world-class facilities the tourists would not come, without tourists the dollars would not come, and Cuba would not be able to have the medical system it had, which for all its limitations was the best in the whole of the developing world. All that Celia knew, and still she hated this place.

  As the others gazed around, commenting on this feature and that, she kept quiet and was grateful when a drinks menu was placed before her so she could keep her eyes lowered without seeming sullen. They ordered mojitos all around, even for Liliana. Celia did not protest because she saw José’s surreptitious signal to the waiter beneath the level of the table, where Liliana could not see his hand, that her drink was to be weak.

  The mulatto waiter, who looked to be in his sixties, suppressed a smile and murmured, “Perfecto, Patrón.”

  He replaced the drinks menus with food menus and moved away. Liliana entertained herself by reading the food menu aloud. “Can you believe these prices?” she exclaimed. “And in US dollars too!”

  “Not for much longer,” Luis smirked. “By November the convertible peso will be our currency, and pegged to the Euro, which will give Cuba an advantage in—”

  “—trading with the States?” José chortled. “Come on, Luis. You know Fidel would give his beard to see the blockade come down and free trade—”

  “You guys!” Liliana complained. “Can’t you shut up about politics for five seconds?” She signalled the waiter, who was at her side in seconds.

  “Yes, compañera?” the old man inquired solicitously.

  “We would like to order now,” Liliana said imperiously. “My tíos are much nicer to each other when their mouths are full of food.”

  Alma chuckled from behind her menu. “You wondered why I always nag you to eat, hijos? Now you know. Liliana has revealed my secret.”

  It took a long time to order, as Liliana had not yet completed her tour of the menu. The waiter described the entrees and Alma volunteered her opinions as to which dishes Liliana would like. By the time everyone had made their choice Celia was bored out of her mind and felt truly sorry for the old waiter, whose patience seemed limitless. She knew that employees in such establishments grew wealthy by Cuban standards on the tips they earned. It was said that restroom attendants at big hotels earned more from hard-currency tips than the minister of tourism earned from his peso salary. Still, watching the old mulatto in his stiff white jacket standing for long minutes while an overexcited teenager grew dizzy from so many choices made Celia feel bad for him and impatient with Liliana for her insensitivity. She ordered chicken cordon bleu, sipped her mojito, and gazed about the room. It had been almost empty when they arrived but now was beginning to fill with other diners.

  “By the way,” Luis addressed Celia. “Joaquín is in town. He phoned just as we were leaving. I invited him to join us but he and Sylvia had other plans.”

  “Too bad!” Celia exclaimed. “I would like to have seen them. Did you tell him Liliana and I are leaving for México in the morning?”

  “He said he’d call you before you left,” Luis said shortly.

  “I’m glad he didn’t come,” Liliana said, looking at José. “All he ever wants to talk about is the crash of Flight 455. I have to listen to that at school every single year—unless I’m at home. At least Tía Celia never puts on the TV on October 6.”

  José shook his head in disgust. “After two decades the government’s still harping on that?”

  Alma sighed. “If they didn’t, people would forget. But imagine, hijo”—she glanced at Luis—“how the co-pilot’s daughter must feel. All these years, since she was a little girl, having to listen to that recording of her father’s last cries when he heard the explosion and saw they were crashing into the sea.”

  Celia said nothing. She had met the daughter of the co-pilot, who was near her own age, and knew that the annual broadcast of his final words did indeed cause her anguish. And that Fidel’s rant about the inhumanity of the men responsible and the US refusal to bring them to justice did not help. She turned to Liliana.

  “Darling, tell us what you found in the México guide book that you want to do while we are there.”

  Liliana immediately began listing the things she had marked in the guide book José had given her. “The Zona Rosa, of course, which is where the beautiful people hang out. Tía Celia says we won’t have time to do the Floating Gardens of Xochimilco, but we can go to Garabaldi Square, where mariachi musicians will serenade me—”

  “That’s only if you have a novio who pays them,” José teased.

  “Aye, plagua de Dios!” Alma grasped Liliana’s hand. “Don’t you dare come home with a Mexican novio!” She gave José the evil eye. “Or a Yanqui boyfriend!”

  “You’re kidding!” Liliana yelped. “Guys actually pay somebody else to sing love songs to their novias?”

  “That’s capitalism,” Luis smirked. “You want anything there, even a love song, you pay for it. Not like here, where if someone has musical talent the state supports him so he does not have to go begging in the parks.”

  “Oh yeah?” José shot back. “If the Revolution is so supportive of artists, how come it took Ry Cooder to get Buena Vista Social Club made?”

  “Because our focus is not about making one group or individual rich and famous,” Luis retorted. “Music, and art in general, should serve the greater good.”

  “No, hombre!” José slapped the table. “It should provide what the public wants.”

  “Like that crap
the entertainment industry serves up in the United States?”

  “It’s what people pay for! How would you like it if our waiter took it upon himself to bring you beans because it’s healthier than that hunk of beef you ordered?”

  “Silencio!” Liliana cried. “Or else talk about something interesting.”

  “I am going to the bathroom,” Alma announced.

  “I’ll go with you.” Liliana glared at the men. “When I get back you’d better be done with your silly arguments or I’m going to go tell the police that you’re both CIA operatives.”

  Luis glanced around to see if other diners might have overheard. “Don’t joke about things like that! Not when one person at this table is a Miami Cuban.”

  “A little paranoid, are we, Comrade?” José needled.

  “Tío Joe,” Liliana pointed a finger at him. “I’m warning you—”

  “Come, Preciosa!” Alma took Liliana by the elbow and guided her across the dining room toward a sign on the far side indicating restrooms.

  Celia watched Liliana walking away, wanting to scream after her, Where are you going? Is there no turning back? What will happen to us? They were the same questions that had consumed her night and day since Liliana announced her plans to continue from México on to Miami.

  Celia had reviewed patient charts, sat through meetings with her doctors, come home to dinners that, now that the school term was over, Liliana cheerfully prepared. She had lain across Liliana’s bed or Liliana across hers, discussing which clothes in her meagre wardrobe she would take, what things they might do in México (this a topic always introduced by Celia), and what Liliana wanted to do when she got to Miami (this a topic brought up only by Liliana). At bedtime Liliana had fallen asleep, often with a half-smile on her lips.

  Celia, unable to sleep, had gone out on the balcony. There she sat staring at the ocean while hallucination after hallucination played with her mind. In them she was the courageous and competent woman she wanted to be. But when the hallucination faded she was no longer the Celia of her imagination. She was the one inside her skin, who felt utterly helpless in the face of forces beyond her control.