by Mary Morris
When I go on these junkets, I do pretty much what I want. That is, whatever happens, happens, and we don’t talk about it. Not that so much has ever happened. I’ve had a few late-night rumbas, a groping hand or two. Moonlight infatuations at tourist resorts when I grow weary of my checklist; scenic walks can grow tedious alone. But what I really like is to rent a car and drive around a place where I’ve never been. Outside of Prague I went from castle to castle. The last time I was here, I rolled down the windows and drove across the country and back. I only stopped for gas and to drink orange juice at roadside stands.
It’s not that Todd can’t get away; it’s that he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t like to be away from what he knows. I don’t really fault him for this, though I wish it wasn’t so. But Todd is content, playing suicide—a game whose name confounds me and rules defy me—with Jessica in the backyard, or skating in the park. For a hobby he repairs the gas streetlamps on our block, but mainly he is an architect and a good one at that, and despite the recession he has work in the office, jobs he says he can’t afford to lose.
It’s not that I blame Todd for what has happened. It is just that if he had come with me—if he wanted to come when I travel for my updates—then I wouldn’t have met Manuel. If I hadn’t met Manuel, I would never have met Isabel. Or rather, I might have seen Isabel, but I would not have known who she was. And then I wouldn’t be here.
I met Manuel a few days into my first visit to the island, at the bar of the Hotel Miramar. I had come to sample the malted milks, which I was told were the best on la isla, and to visit the old casinos, untouched since the days of Meyer Lansky, who had built a few here. Once renowned for its posh backroom gambling and spectacular vistas, for its high-stakes poker and call girls with blue-black hair, the Miramar is now known for its malted milks and its peeling murals of almond-eyed girls bent back in the arms of swarthy men.
Manuel was sitting at the table across from mine. In front of him an ashtray was heaped with butts of Marlboros, one of them still burning. He nursed a glass with a faint brown liquid in it and tapped his foot to the tune of “Sueño Tropical,” an old Pico Rodríguez hit from the fifties. Everything about him seemed to be moving. His fingers, his feet. He beat his hands on the table as if playing the bongos, though the rhythm he tapped out had nothing to do with the music.
After watching me for a few moments, Manuel picked up his drink and walked over to my table. He was a small man with a compact frame, and long white fingers, which I noticed as he pulled back the chair with a single movement, inquired if he could sit down, and seated himself. “Do you have anything to sell?” he asked—jeans, watches, toothpaste, nail polish, canned food, soap.
As he leaned forward, his open shirt revealed a chest of coarse hair. His smile made all his features turn upward as he asked if I wanted to change money. I replied no and told him I had only come here to update a travel guide, and he said, “That’s too bad.” He had come to the Miramar, as many people do, to look out to sea. He told me, joking over a rum collins, that he was waiting for his ship to come in—the one that would literally take him away. He said, if I wanted, he’d show me around.
I unpack. It is important to get organized, to put things in their places. To know where everything is. The few dresses I’ve brought are wrinkled, but they’ll straighten out in the closet or freshen up with my steamer. I check my case of adaptor plugs, tuck blouses and T-shirts into a drawer.
Then I take a shower, spending a long time, letting the warm water course across my body. I’m in the shower so long that I find myself staring at the shower curtain. It is an old plastic curtain with herds of antelope bounding across it, heading for pine groves.
As I am drying my hair, it occurs to me that there are no antelopes on la isla; no pine trees either. Palmettos and, once, parrots, yes; even pirates and buried treasure. But antelope and deciduous pine, no. These are northern scenes, from latitudes above, so I can only assume that—like the cars and the TVs and the airplane I came on—the shower curtain is Soviet-made, circa 1960.
I stand on the balcony, brushing my thick, damp hair, the color of pennies, which takes forever to dry in the humid breeze. In the plaza below children play with hoops. Men in lime green and eggshell blue guayaberas sit on benches, smoking cigarettes. A black woman passes, dressed in spotless white. Her dress clings to her basketball buttocks, her torpedo breasts, and the men turn their heads and start whooping. One of them applauds, but the woman in white doesn’t turn around.
My gaze follows her as she disappears into the old city. Two years ago I walked with Isabel through those winding streets, where I first saw the dogs, roaming, glancing our way as they vanished down dark alleyways. She looped her arm through mine as we were heading to dinner.
Inside the houses, we saw women with their hair in curlers who stood ironing in front of the blue light of the television. Every house has a television, Isabel told me—the gift of the revolution to each household. Every couple gets a television when they marry; every woman gets an extra rationed nightgown. She gets another one when she is pregnant, which the women joke are the only two times in her life that a woman doesn’t need a nightgown.
As we strolled the cobblestone streets, I peered into the open doorways as the women ironed school uniforms for the next day—small girls’ light blue dresses, boys’ navy blue shirts. Teenagers danced to rock videos. There were never any lights on. They were not allowed. But they could watch television and they could iron. The mothers never looked up as they concentrated on their careful, even strokes. On the television there is only one station, and after the news and sports, after the music videos, there is always the same late-night program: El Caballo expounding on the recent achievements of the regime.
Walking through the old city, where hookers beckoned from alleyways, Isabel grimaced as we listened to the voice of the leader, and it seemed as if he were speaking from every corner, from every house we passed, and I felt Isabel’s arm tighten around mine, trembling.
Three
ISABEL never sees her father, Manuel told me after I noticed her at the airport. She does not speak to him. They do not say hello when they are in the same room, but he will not let her go. You know, it is said that he has sixteen sons, but she is the only girl. Except for one boy, they are all bastards, just like our leader is a bastard. Seventeen children, you know. ¡Qué cojones! Manuel puffed up his chest like a rooster. Our leader, he told me, never sleeps in the same bed two nights in a row.
He tried to arrange for me to meet with Isabel, “But you know, she is very busy.” Somehow I sensed she did not want to meet me. Or that he did not really want me to meet her. Whatever it was, I knew I probably would not see Isabel again, and it didn’t matter that much to me. I might catch glimpses of her at the airport or in bars, but meeting her, after all, was a digression. An interesting diversion, but not really a part of my reason for being here.
I went about my business, checking out the snorkeling on a remote strip of beach called Smuggler’s Cove, renowned for its reef. There I tiptoed across oily sand and cast-off debris to swim above undulating beds of sea urchins. The beach bar had been long closed. Smuggler’s Cove would receive a small correction in my update.
In the city a few days later Manuel accompanied me as I visited the Monuments of the Revolution. He led me slowly past the small, unlit cases of the Museum of the History of the Revolution, which begins its history not with the great liberator of la isla, as you might expect, but with the arrival of the first Spanish ship in 1472. They docked for a night and dropped off the first white man to live on la isla—Alejandro Martinez, a Spanish sailor, believed to be a Moor. He was missing his right hand and the fingers on his left, his nose, and his ears. The Taino Indians knew a holy man when they saw one and left him alone to forage and live in a cave in the hills.
For years Martínez lived in seclusion, walking the perimeters of the island, until he determined its shape to be that of a crocodile and named it Caimán, after its shape. When hi
s solitude became too much, Martínez began to greet the ships that stopped to dock there. At first they were afraid of him, but the word soon spread across the high seas that a man known for his seclusion and torment lived on an unnamed island in the turquoise sea. The sailors, too, determined he was a holy man. They brought him gifts of seeds from coffee plants and avocado trees, they brought him kittens and dogs, goats and horses, and Martínez bred these and filled the island—which had once been merely a place of parrots and howler monkeys and snakes—with the domestic animals of his own country.
When Columbus came, he killed all the Taino Indians, whom he called Carib, after the old Spanish word for cannibal. One Taino woman, it was said, escaped to the cave where Martínez lived and eventually became his wife. Martínez watched this slaughter from his hiding place in the hills, but he could read and he could write and he recorded all that he saw in a book entitled The Conquest of the Tainos on the Island of the Caimán. Except for Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s The Conquest of Mexico, it is the only definitive portrait that we know of an ancient people and their massacre.
From the time of Columbus the islands and its sea and the people who came to live there became known as the Caribbean, and for four hundred years the Spanish ruled la isla. They brought with them tobacco and sugarcane. They also brought with them slaves whose ships carried spiders the size of fists that nestled in the banana groves, and rats and snakes and cholera.
At the end of the nineteenth century a Spanish landowner, Andrés Ortiz, freed his slaves and indentured servants and led them into the hills and the rain forest to begin la isla’s first war of liberation. The Americans would join Ortiz and his growing squadrons in what came to be known as the War of Liberation from Spain. When the victory was complete, the American Marines at the fortaleza were told to fly the flag of the liberation. They flew the Stars and Stripes instead.
More than fifty years later a lone soldier would flail about in the hills with his band of followers, fighting a protracted guerrilla war. He would crawl, holding his breath, through burning fields of sugarcane, set afire to smoke him out. No one really knew who he was or where he came from, and rumor spread that he was the first Spaniard and his Taino wife. That he was born of a holy man and a martyr as well. But in truth this soldier who they came to call El Caballo was the bastard son of a Spanish peasant who ran a finca in the eastern provinces.
He would spend years in prison, where this man famed for his incessant speaking—for keeping his brothers and fellow soldiers up all night—would never speak, and his guards came to refer to him as El Mudo, the Mute. And eventually he would become president of the republic, chairman of the Socialist Party, prime minister, director of the congress, and head of the armed forces. And on the day he became president, the flag of la isla flew in the wing-shaped harbor of Puerto Angélico for the first time.
After our visit to the museum, where I made notes for the “Brief History” section of the guide, Manuel invited me out for pizza. We stood in a line that snaked around the block, in which old women in cotton dresses with aprons shifted from hip to hip, arms akimbo. “You see,” he said, “once we had hopes; now we have lines.” Children dashed up and down the line as their mothers called to them. Men who looked bored leaned against the wall as the line inched forward. When at last we purchased a greasy slab of bread with cheese running off it, Manuel said, “Everything here makes me sick. Why do tourists want to come? All we want to do is leave.”
We wandered over to the seawall to eat our pizza. On the way he did a little mambo step, a spin on his heels. The wall was populated with young couples—girls in school uniforms sat as boys in work clothes arched their groins into their girlfriends’ backs. Others nestled, arm-in-arm, sleeping on each other’s shoulders. Manuel and I sat, swatting the flies and eating our lumpy pizza. Oil slid down my wrist.
“You aren’t working today?” I asked him.
He shook his head. Because of rationing, there was no electricity in his office and he could not use the computer. This happened about three times a week. So really there was no sense for him to go to work more than a day or two a week. “So I come here,” he told me, “and watch the sea.”
Manuel worked as a statistician in the Ministry of Agriculture. “I know it sounds impressive,” he said, “but what I actually do is fix numbers so they add up right. Per capita necessities, labor hours, production costs, profits. The goal of my job is to make it look as if we are ahead. Of course, we will never be ahead, but I just need to make the numbers look as if we are.”
Manuel shrugged and smiled, which made his whole face turn upward like a child’s picture of a smiling sun. It’s not that hard, he said, to make the numbers look right. It also helped him to know what the shortages are, and if he knows what the shortages are, he can anticipate them. And this is good for black-market sales.
“The black market is about the only thing I can count on.” Then Manuel began to complain about everything. He complained about the food he could not eat, about his pointless jobs and dead-end love affairs, the synthetic fabric in his clothing, the lines in which he had to wait to buy rum, the furniture he wanted to order from catalogs, the things he couldn’t afford, the heart medicine he needed for his mother, the CD player he wanted for himself.
We took a long sweaty walk along the seawall, where hordes of children banged against my thighs, begging for pencils and Chiclets. These I carried in abundance, and so as in the Pied Piper the children followed us for blocks until Manuel shooed them away.
When we stopped in a small tourist restaurant for lemonade, the waiter asked Manuel what he was doing inside a restaurant and asked to see his papers, but I convinced the waiter that Manuel was my guide. The waiter did not see Manuel take my hand and press it to his lips. Nor did he see me pull away as I told Manuel that I was married and my husband and daughter were waiting for me at home. Manuel shrugged with a laugh. “So what does that matter?” he asked. “Here we live in the present tense.”
“You have no one …?” I asked.
“My wife and son left ten years ago. I was supposed to join them, but it just didn’t happen.”
“I’m sorry …”
“It’s the boy I miss. I’m surprised at how much I do. He’s thirteen now and I wouldn’t recognize him in the street.” Then he sipped his lemonade in silence until the straw slurped at the bottom of the glass.
When we returned to my hotel, Isabel was sitting at a small table with a group of sorrowful women who emitted the odor of funeral flowers. They were dressed in spandex bodysuits; their jewelry clanged and their eyebrows were painted on. They were laughing as if someone had just told a very good joke. Isabel wore a pink cotton shift that made her look like a waif, as if she could just float away. She was laughing with them, smoking cigarettes. Of course, she must have known that they were whores. Certainly they knew who she was. When she saw us, she stood up. “Manuel, what a surprise! What are you doing here?” She kissed him on both cheeks.
She motioned for me to sit beside her, and someone pulled up a chair. When I sat down, she touched my hand, and I was startled by the coldness of her touch. “So,” she said, “tell me: What have you seen? Manuel, you have been giving her the tour?” Then she tossed her head back and laughed as if this was a wonderful joke. Her bony hand pressed on mine, sending a shiver through me. In her cotton dress, I could see how thin she was. I could easily wrap my fingers around her wrist. A cup of coffee sat in front of her and a cigarette burned in the ashtray. “Museums,” I told her.
“Oh, yes,” she said, in a voice filled with irony. “We have many museums.” She sighed, looking at me, and I looked back at her. “Museums and cigar factories. And, of course, our plastic-surgery hospitals. Have you seen any of our churches? The Church of the Apparitions—Manuel, you must take her there. Of course,” she said with a wave of her hand, “this is the biggest apparition of all.” She said this in English and the two of us laughed together. Manuel and the whores grinned dumbly, h
aving missed the punch line.
Her skin was as white as if she’d never been in the sun, and she smelled faintly of cheap, imported perfume. Nina Ricci. At the airport I had only seen her in a crowded room, but now, sitting beside her, I saw something I had not seen before. I suppose that in a country where people are not free to speak, the eyes tell all. Though her frail bones and gaunt features weren’t unusual on an island where there is so little food, the hungry look in her eyes startled me.
But beyond the raw-bone features, the distracted glance, I looked into the dark hollow of those eyes and saw a sadness I’d never seen before. Once I did some small-town reporting and I saw sad things, believe me. But this woman had a different kind. You could drop pebbles down, and they would never reach the bottom of that sadness.
“So,” Isabel said, speaking in Spanish once again, “are you enjoying yourself? Have you gotten a good sense of how we live?” The prostitutes snickered and looked away.
“I’ve only just arrived,” I replied.
Now she clutched my wrist and her skin was soft, but I wondered how a person could have cold hands in such a hot place and I thought this must be what a dead person feels like. “Look,” she said, “you must come to see me.” She scribbled her address on a slip of paper. “Come tomorrow,” she said, pressing the slip of paper into my hands. “You must.”
Four
THE HOTEL is at your disposal, Major Lorenzo said, and I have taken him at his word. I spend my first few hours acclimating to the place. Seeing what I can do with my time. There is a rooftop terrace where I can sun on plastic lounge chairs in the afternoon and drink rum-and-Cokes from four o’clock on or stay for the pig and lamb roast in the evening, when they set up the stereo with speakers that blast salsa, mostly pirated from Miami, across the rooftops of Puerto Angélico, the name by which the inhabitants still refer to it.