And then they’re gone.
* * *
I had wondered if the other one was going to take his turn. I had waited, my eyes closed, willing the moment to end. Praying. Held in all my sobs. Clenched my gut tight so maybe I’d collapse inside myself and they’d find me the next day: just a splash of blood and regret across the dirty floor.
And now they’re gone. Maybe my prayers worked or maybe the other one figured there wasn’t much information to be harvested from this broken skeleton of a girl, this corpse. Or maybe they’re biding their time. In the darkness, the new silence, no shearing blasts of pain, no chest hair, no demands, just my empty body and this empty room—I finally let my family back in. They don’t trickle or tiptoe, they flood, the memories.
There we all are on the first day of primaria, Nilda looking smug because she’s already been there a year, Mami shooting her a wary glance, Isabel smiling in that distant, sad way, Papi with his most serious face on, one hand around Mami and the other on my little shoulder. My best dress, the one I didn’t want to stop wearing even when I got too big for it, with flowers and shoulder straps and little fake pearls inlaid in it. The last time I cherished something so girly, my tiny uncomfortable pantyhose, shiny little shoes. There we went driving in Tío Pepe’s automobile, the whole of La Habana swishing past like a real-life movie in full Technicolor, all the glory of the ocean as we speed along the Malecón and the buildings towering above us and the whole city around us, so many people, so many stories. There’s Nilda and me, arguing in the kitchen while Isabel rolls her eyes and tries to study. There’s Papi getting older, Mami’s back leaning forward, her old hands curling around themselves, their two sad bodies creasing into defeat.
Someone is sobbing in a cell near mine. No, it’s me. It comes out in sharp, raspy heaves. At first I’m afraid a guard will hear and then I don’t care. I can’t stop it anyway, it just surges out of me, from a heave to a wail and the wail carries all the dashed hopes all the pain all the fear all the awful of what’s just happened and all that lies ahead.
* * *
In the worst moments, I repeat the mistake over and over and over.
Standing outside my own window like a ghost. I could’ve turned, could’ve walked away.
Enrique was right.
I endangered everyone I love.
I lie here, the endlessness of time defeats logic and none of the good reasons I had for lying there make sense and if only, if only. And then what if, what if, what if: an unending cascade of better outcomes, impossibilities, fantasy. They weigh me down, pin me to this pathetic mattress. I can’t move, because the possibility I could’ve somehow done something different is a heavy demon sitting on my chest, laughing at me.
When I do rise, I leave pieces of myself behind; scraps of skin peel off and remain in bloody flesh streaks on the mattress. I stagger to the wall, blink away the pain as I collapse against it. Sweat pours down my forehead, stings my eyes. Maybe tears too. I want to be strong. I don’t care if it gets me killed, I want to fight back, or at least have the possibility in my arsenal. Anything to make this constant berating of myself stop. I take a wobbly step away from the wall, my knees buckle, and I’m a pile of limbs on the hard floor, pain pulsing through me.
I lie there, breathing my regret.
* * *
My teeth.
In a quiet moment, I run my tongue against them, find they are still sharp, and smile. It’s strange to smile. My muscles haven’t moved that way in a long time, so it feels like some crud comes loose from the cracks in my face. It’s a sudden and secret thing, this smile. It is all mine.
Gently at first, and then harder, I clench my teeth against my tongue. A dull ache becomes a throb, then a piercing shriek of pain erupts as I cut through. The acrid taste of blood floods my mouth and I smile, I smile, because I have a plan now, a plan and a weapon.
Some blood dribbles out of my mouth and down my chin.
* * *
They come back.
I don’t know how much time has passed since the last time. Maybe days, maybe months. One stands blocking the shard of light cast by the slightly open door. I am again at his mercy, a bag of bones to be tortured and tossed aside. And I am a little deader inside, since the last time; a little more my own enemy.
He steps inside, nods at another soldier in the hallway, and turns around to close the door. It’s a small thing, showing his back to me, but it lets me know he has total confidence in his power. I have long, filthy nails and dangling arms. I have knees, but I’m so weak they’re not much good for ramming.
He turns back around and considers me, takes a step forward. He is middle-aged, a little younger than Papi. I fight off the onslaught of family memories that threatens to crush me beneath it. He is clean shaven except for a thick mustache and his teeth are unnervingly perfect. There’s not much to him; he still wears those months of living jungle to jungle fighting dysentery and diarrhea; it’s all over him like a cheap cologne. Those eyes gaze out from sunken valleys, mostly in shadow, and his clothes hang loosely.
A surge of hatred wells up inside of me, this pathetic beast with his hands on his hips, his head shaking. In this moment, if I could become fire and end us both I would do it in a second. I would laugh while his feeble flesh blackened and disintegrated amidst the crackles and screams. I would crow to the night sky for my victory, even as I succumbed to my own flames. I would disperse.
When he takes another step forward, my fantasy shatters and I hate him even more. I pray for a knife, a machine gun, an ax. I pray for mercy, for a seizure, a sudden flood or earthquake. Instead, there is nothing. With all my effort, I stand. And then I fall.
* * *
Padre Sebastián once told me if you imagine something happening it makes the reality of it bend that direction. I asked him if I imagined myself taller, would it work, and he smiled and shook his head at me, but then he shrugged. Sure. But you can’t expect it to work right away. The universe takes its own time.
But then how will I know if it was my mind making it happen or it’s just me growing?
What’s the difference, really?
But I was going to grow anyway!
That’s where faith comes in.
I scrunched up my face. What fun is making wishes if you gotta wait?
But the padre was a wise man. He might not have had this in mind when he said it, but the world has taken many wicked turns since that day. Tied to the chair again and soaking wet this time, I imagine my teeth stretch forward and thicken until they stick out of my mouth like a saber-toothed tiger’s.
¿Dónde? is the one-word incantation of the day, the one that’s supposed to make me divulge some magical rebel hideaway in the Escambray.
As if I could just describe it: the third tree on the left and straight up the hill. As if we didn’t break camp every day and restart anew somewhere else.
As if it mattered.
¿Dónde? And something sparkling and fierce lashes across me, sends searing explosions of pain along my face, neck, and shoulders.
The pain whisks away all rational thought for a few breathless moments, it whites out the whole world.
¿Dónde? And I brace myself for another blitz of agony.
That doesn’t come.
¿Dónde?
My teeth grow and grow. I retrieve newly fabricated memories of my teeth gnashing through steel cans, machinery, tearing small animals limb from limb and crunching bones. My teeth kill. They were made for this, billions of years of evolutionary mutations have given them special powers and I will bring death with them.
The soldier moves and before I can wince, the wire fizzles across my vision and everything is on fire. There’s no air in my lungs, only pain searing from my skin.
Gasping, I tell him to come closer.
He raises an eyebrow—curious. Aroused maybe. I don’t care. I can see that soft distended line where his vein reaches diagonally down his neck and as he leans in toward me I open my mouth as wide
as I can.
Ay, a gruff voice demands from the doorway. ¿Y qué carajo está pasando aquí?
The soldier whirls around, snaps to attention. No, n-no, he stammers. Es que—
Untie her, the voice says, suddenly calm, magnanimous. The soldier does, his rough hands freeing mine, and then he’s gone and I’m left soaking wet and panting and gnashing my giant useless teeth that wouldn’t have done a damn thing anyway.
Are you okay? the man wants to know.
I’d forgotten he was still there.
He sounds like he actually wants to know, which doesn’t even make sense because I’ve just been tortured, of course I’m not okay. I shake my head, not making eye contact, just seeing his boots and dark green trousers between the dangling strands of my hair. He stands there for a very long time, staring at me, I presume. Then finally he sighs, turns away, and closes the door gently behind him.
* * *
His name is David and he comes back the next day. He talks about himself in quiet, unassuming tones and apologizes again and again for what happened. I don’t look at him. From the corner of my eye I see he is younger, just a few years older than me, and he has strong, slouched shoulders and a full beard. His eyes are wide to convey openness and his hands hang at his sides like something in him has given up.
I don’t speak.
* * *
David comes back the next day and sits across from me, talking talking endlessly about his life, why he joined the revolution what happened to him out there in la selva how he almost died what scares him what he hopes for his abuela in Camagüey his cousins in Vedado his mom and dad in Villa Clara and some girl that broke his heart in Pinar del Río. He says her name with a smirk and a choked laugh, brushes some hair off his face, and sniffles a little. I wonder if he’ll cry.
I don’t speak.
* * *
The first time he touches me it’s a disaster. He’d been talking and talking and talking as usual. He sits across from me, legs curled in front of him, scratching his beard occasionally and rubbing his eyes when he comes to something sad. He’s been sitting closer and closer, and me, I just look away, so I barely notice until one day his hand is on my arm and I’m across the room, screaming and crying and sobbing and screaming. Then he’s up, panting, eyes even wider and blue, almost see-through blue. I slow my breathing and shake my head. He leaves. I sit back down, collapse really but he’s back the next day, talking again like nothing happened.
He touches me again a few days later. I don’t scream this time. I’d felt it coming. I can’t tune him out anymore, his whole presence energy voice everything are so invasive, relentless. And now that I bother paying more attention I can just make out the yellowish glow around him creeping slowly slowly along the floor toward me. So when I feel that warm, calloused fingertip on my skin I don’t startle. I just look away.
His fingers rub circles up and down my arm. Then he’s holding it. Then he rises, adjusts himself, and slides in around me somehow, wraps me in him, and I’m immersed in that man smell and the dinge of his uniform and his heavy breath.
Rebecca, he whispers, rocking me back and forth. Rebecca. He’s crying.
I don’t speak.
* * *
At first I think he’ll try to slide up inside me somehow. He doesn’t. His hands brush my breasts sometimes while he caresses me and cries but they don’t linger.
It doesn’t matter. The violation is just a different color. I don’t have any fight in me though. I’m empty. The person who had a family and life and walked outside and made friends and fell in love and railed at the sky and ran off to the jungle; she’s gone. Someone else. I’m just a cracked shell, the crinkly bodies the cicadas leave behind, clinging pathetically to a tree long after the symphony is over. I’m just four walls and the smell of decay. I’m more David than I am myself, because he’s all over me and his stories his breath his stupid world has invaded mine so completely.
I almost scream at him one day. You might as well fucking kill me, I almost yell. The thought of his reverie being interrupted, his startled face, it almost makes me smile. David stops mumbling Rebecca Rebecca for a second and looks at me. A few minutes later he starts up again.
But when he leaves, I do smile. It is more than a memory. It is a physical thing; my brain told my face to do it and it did. It reminds me of my teeth. I run my tongue along them again, painting mind pictures of tearing David’s throat out.
I smile.
* * *
And then one day when the door opens, it’s not David. It’s someone else, an older man I’d seen once or twice before they threw me in this hole. His beard is streaked with gray and his stiff posture suggests a discipline more regimented than the sloppy mountain guerrilla code. He doesn’t smile when he sees me, but that hard face softens ever so slightly.
Luz Marisol Caridad Aragones.
I wonder if it tasted dusty in his mouth from so much disuse. Still, even on the lips of my enemy, my name is a scaffolding I can rise up on. I stand, blinking in the new light of the day.
We are releasing you back in to the general population of prisoners.
I don’t know what this means at first. It just sounds like a jumble of sounds, but then he stands away from the door and I realize I’m to leave. This hole is my home no more. For a terrible second I think I might fall screaming to the floor, through the floor, and shatter, but I don’t. I straighten myself and walk slowly, carefully past the captain and into the light.
This way. I take a step and then another behind him, down a hallway. There’s a breeze coming in from the ocean. Somewhere there’s an ocean. There’s an ocean and before that is the pine forest, and even the prison itself is alive and vibrant and teeming with new things to show me, new gorgeous things. I am terrified and in awe all at once but I keep it mostly inside and just concentrate on staying in line behind the captain. He leads me through a doorway into a dingy room down another hallway and finally into an open courtyard full of other prisoners, mostly women, some lounging around, some heaving stones out of a ditch, some chopping vegetables.
There’s a man in the corner and I don’t recognize him at first, his beard is so long and his face so tired, so sad, but when I do I almost fall over myself making my way toward him. I wrap my arms around Padre Sebastián, squeeze him as tight as I can and sob.
Part Two
VOLVER
CHAPTER THIRTY
Little has changed. Everything has changed.
I hadn’t realized how hungry I was, hungry and terrified to see this place again, to let these warm Caribbean crosswinds caress me, the smell of the ocean finding its breezy way through these decaying plaster castles and all that diesel fuel in the air. La Habana.
New Jersey, in retrospect, seems to glare from beneath an overcoating of gray. There are blues and greens, occasional reds, an orange. But over it all, the gray persists. Even on a sunny day. This is America, perhaps. The layer of dust still lingering from the collapsing industrial wastelands of the great northeast. It gets on you, inside you, taints even the faces, now grimaces, of the good people that flock there.
But here: The sun permeates all. It is unstoppable: It breaches the shade, stays on your skin, wraps around its citizens in warm browns and shining teeth, squinting eyes. It bolsters my shapelessness into something almost real, a cloud, cut through by sunlight, and maybe, maybe alive.
The sun has no shame as it casts stark, afternoon shadows along the wide avenue, the play of darks and lights describing the shifting rooftops, water tanks, and stairwells. An old man sputters past them on a motorbike, against traffic. Three piglets peer out of a cage hitched to the back; they snort suspiciously to each other, aiming their bemused little gazes at Ramón.
“¡Pero mira el camino, compadre! ¿Tú no ves?” The taxi jolts to a stop with a torrent of curse words and ancestor slander from the driver. Two young men in tank tops are stopped in the middle of the road. Between them is a wheeled cart piled high with various hous
ehold appliances; Ramón sees an oven, two rusted-out refrigerators, and an industrial-sized fan. The driver finishes his tirade, the men trudge on to the sound of squeaking wheels; the taxi grumbles off toward Miramar.
* * *
“Blah!” Ramón yells. He spits a mouthful of brown water back into the paper cup and scowls. “I thought Cuban coffee was supposed to be the best in the world!”
Aliceana shakes her head. “Not the kind that actual Cubans have to drink though.”
“Ugh.”
Ramón has his whole mouth under the sink when Aliceana walks into the bathroom. “I’m not so sure you should be, um … drinking the tap water so enthusiastically.”
He looks up, a yellowish stream dribbling down his chin. “Fuck.”
“Or at all really.”
He catches the towel she tosses him and gives his tongue a thorough thrashing. “I can feel the malaria setting in,” Ramón moans, flopping onto the lime-green couch in the corner.
Adina rolls her eyes. “You don’t get malaria from shnarsty tap water, jackass. Even I know that.”
“It’s true,” Aliceana confirms helpfully. “But dysentery for sure, or maybe—”
“Ya, okay, okay, thank you.” Ramón disappears into the bathroom and shuts the door.
“What’s up his ass?” Adina asks, pouring herself a cup of ration coffee. Probably not much, judging from the sounds coming from the bathroom. “He hasn’t been right for weeks.”
“I know.” Aliceana shakes her head. “He’s not sleeping. Keeps waking up shaking, but then he won’t talk about it. I mean, he did once, and then clammed up. It’s like he thinks if he doesn’t talk about it it’ll all just evaporate.”
“That’s actually the Cuban state motto.”
The Book of Lost Saints Page 20
