by Mary Morris
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I just can’t get this paperwork through.” Major Lorenzo seems embarrassed by this, sorry that he must disappoint me again. “And I’m afraid Jamaica is out of the question. The only place you can go is back to where you came from.” As I contemplate the thought of being flown back to the frozen north, I notice once again that Major Lorenzo does not look me in the eye and I wonder if it is because he is ashamed or because he is lying. I almost would prefer it if Major Lorenzo were mean, not kind. At times it seems it would be easier with the colonel with the dead eyes, but he is long gone. Now, however, as I look at Major Lorenzo and realize that he too will not look at me, he reminds me of the colonel from the airport.
“Of course,” the Major says, “it will straighten itself out. We are looking into various solutions.” But I am no longer listening to him.
“I think,” I speak hesitantly, “that I really must contact my lawyer or an embassy official. I need to let someone know what’s going on …”
Major Lorenzo frowns, looking hurt, as if I have doubted him. “Oh, that isn’t necessary. Not at all. We’ll have this matter cleared up in just a few days.”
“But I still think …”
“Oh, you Americans.” He throws up his hands. “You are in such a hurry to get things done.” He rises to leave and smiles now, shifting his tone. “By the way,” he says, “how is your daughter? Have you spoken to her?”
“She is fine,” I tell him. “She wants me to come home.”
“Yes, well, probably you will see her soon. They grow up so fast, don’t they?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I tell him. “She’s only five.”
“Oh, you’ll see, you blink and they’re gone.”
He looks wistful, as if he is remembering something far away, then says he’ll be back in the morning, hopefully with my passport and plane ticket home. For the time being I remain like the people of la isla. With no passport; with no way out.
Later, when I go upstairs, I stand on the balcony of my room and I see the lines—people queued up for rations, for pizza, for ice cream, for the cinema. A throng waits for a bus and when it arrives they swarm like ants. For a while they hover, buzzing, while a few manage to shove their way on; then the bus drives away. The throng remains on the street, bewildered, and slowly I watch it disperse.
Thirty-four
ROSALBA sat chain-smoking in the lobby of my hotel, waiting in a yellow dress, prim and starched. When she saw me, she clasped my hands. “I don’t have many options left to me now,” Rosalba said. She had called to say she needed to meet with me. I had planned to finish my walk of the old harbor that day, which would complete my update for the city, but when Rosalba phoned she sounded so nervous and distracted that I agreed to meet her that afternoon. “I can’t thank you enough,” she said when she saw me. “I know how busy you are.”
“Oh, it’s nothing … You seemed to want to talk.”
“Well, it means a great deal to me.” Rosalba ordered another coffee and one for me. Then she lit another cigarette, her hands shaking as she smoked it. “I’m sorry. I’m not very well. I’ve been so worried about my daughter.”
“The one in America?”
“Oh, no, she is fine, in a manner of speaking. No, Isabel. You are a mother, you can imagine what it would be like. To watch your daughter destroy herself this way.”
“Yes, I imagine it is.”
Rosalba took a long drag. “Of course, you are a mother. You can understand. It is a terrible thing.” Rosalba said there wasn’t much time. “You must help me,” she said. “I have only one daughter now. The other was taken from me long ago.” And now Isabel, she said, was just wasting away.
Umberto Calderón’s sister, Rosalba told me, lived in Biscayne Bay, and one December Umberto decided to take Serena there for Christmas. Rosalba packed her daughter’s bag. She included the special things her oldest daughter loved—a polka-dot dress, a tattered teddy bear, a book of fairy tales she liked to read, a deck of cards with animals on the back. In a small zippered compartment of Serena’s suitcase, Rosalba slipped in an envelope that contained a photograph of herself, one of Isabel, and another of Mercedes. She scrawled a note: “So you’ll have something to remember us by.” Rosalba tucked the envelope into the compartment, zipping it shut. It would not be until years later, as Serena was getting ready to go off to college, that she would find this envelope with the photographs and her mother’s note hidden in a side pouch of one of her suitcases. This would only confirm Serena’s belief that her mother had known all along. She knew that her daughter would not return, but instead would clasp to her the objects her mother had so carefully packed and would weep into the night. She’d weep until she could weep no more and then she would grow into a woman who would spend her life in department stores, shopping for things she did not need. Or that Umberto Calderón would never practice dermatological medicine again, but instead would sell small parcels of the Florida coast.
This would leave him a wealthy but broken man who had expected that at any moment during the last years of his life he would return to the house by the sea. Even after he learned that Rosalba had long ago given the house over to the Department of Public Works, he dreamed that he would go home, and he died with the keys in his pocket.
Serena carried the envelope with the pictures everywhere she went—and in it she held on to her rage. This envelope assured her that as her mother packed her bags she knew her daughter would grow up to speak a language that was not her own and go to Disney World and cruise Calle Ocho. That they would meet years later when Serena began to make her annual visits and find themselves face-to-face with little to say to each other, except that Serena would take out the envelope and photographs and hold it in her mother’s face and say, “You knew, Mother, didn’t you? You knew we were never coming back.”
“No, I really didn’t.” Which Rosalba swore was true.
“You are a liar,” Serena said.
After Serena was gone, Rosalba knew that El Caballo had come to see Isabel. She had not noticed it before, but now she knew because there was only the two of them in the big house by the sea, except for Mercedes, who was old now and slept most of the day. Isabel would dance, twirling dreamily through the empty rooms of the big house, and Rosalba was certain he had come to try and take this child away as well. Rosalba had put up with his insomnia, his useless cures of valerian root and mullein, his late-night pontificating to the maids, his erratic comings and goings. She had even put up with all his other women. But what she could not put up with was the thought that he would try and take her child away. She would have nothing left.
She went to the small apartment where she had once waited for him in the waning light of the day when the sun would burn orange through the window. She put on the radio and listened to his voice as she packed the silken sheets they had once slept on, the coffee cups they had sipped from. She put into boxes the magazines she had read while waiting for him and the negligees she had greeted him in. And then she packed the radio and dragged the boxes, one at a time, down to her car.
She left the door open with a note on it that this apartment had been abandoned and that she hoped a family would settle in. Months later she would stop by the old apartment that had been her love nest. Two dark children would answer, snot running from the noses, the smell of cooking oils coming from inside.
She packed up the big house as well, having relinquished it to the Department of Public Works, which would turn it into administrative offices. She took only what she needed, leaving the rest behind. The upholstered sofas and damask curtains. She took the porcelain from Spain and the silver that had been in Umberto Calderón’s family for centuries in case he ever came back and asked for his mother’s silver. She took the paintings that framed the entryway and two suitcases of clothes for herself. Two more for Isabel.
The personal effects that belonged to Serena and Umberto Calderón she left behind, putting them into boxes
in the basement of the great house. If they ever returned, they would find the boxes there, though once she returned and found they had been mostly picked through and carted away. She only took keepsakes—a brooch she had received as a wedding gift, Serena’s christening gown.
Then she put Isabel in the car, kissed good-bye a weeping Mercedes, who would return to relatives in the eastern provinces she had not seen in years. Isabel sobbed and pleaded, throwing herself at her mother’s feet, but there would be no room for Mercedes. They were going back to live with Rosalba’s mother in the same house where Rosalba grew up in the Miramar—the house that the revolutionary housing authorities had divided into four small apartments. For many years, until Isabel had a family of her own, the three women lived in the apartment that had once been their living and dining rooms.
Rosalba knew that if she went to El Caballo, if she begged him, he would let her leave. But she could not do this because when she was a girl, her mother had taken her out to the sugarcane plantations in the east and she had seen a boy with coiled limbs crawl toward her and beg. He lived in a row of cardboard boxes and tin-roofed shacks. On one of the tin roofs a woman lifted her skirts and spread her legs, begging to be paid.
There are no beggars, now, Rosalba would tell anyone who asked. Look around you. We all have houses. Everyone has food. No one is really starving, except my daughter, Rosalba said.
Thirty-five
I DON’T KNOW how long Manuel has been watching, but he is amused to find me with María, Eva, and Flora. “Thinking of changing professions?” he asks. “Certainly it must be more lucrative than doing updates for travel guides.” He had watched them scatter when Major Lorenzo arrived.
“Listen,” I tell him, “I’m not sure what’s going on, but Lorenzo says there are delays.”
“Scare tactics, I told you,” Manuel says. “They just want to frighten you. Believe me, you’ll be on that flight Saturday morning.”
“I’m not so sure …”
“Maybe you need to relax,” he says, touching my brow, “take it easy for a while. Are you getting enough rest?”
“I’m getting plenty of rest,” I say, brushing his hand away.
When I get upstairs, I pick up the phone to call Jessica and tell her I’ll be home soon. I am surprised when she answers. I decide I’ll really confuse whoever is listening, carry on this conversation in code. “It’s Mommy,” I tell her, “who’s home with you there?” Of course I know that Todd is. We split everything down the middle. When I am away, he brings her home. “What are you doing there, Mommy? Have you been to the zoo? Do they have tigers?”
“No,” I tell her, “no tigers, just vultures.” I am not making this up; I’ve seen them.
Now Todd gets on the phone. “Are you all right?” he asks. “Can you talk?”
“I’m not sure,” I answer. “Probably not.”
“Look, Maggie, I checked into flights, but there’s nothing coming down until next week.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” I tell him. “I’ll be home by then.”
“Well, I’m going to call Kurt; I think it’s time—”
“Honey, he can’t do anything. In a day or two I’ll be home; there’s no need to worry.”
Sometimes at night I’ll stand in front of the mirror, examining my body for flaws. Battle scars. “Don’t you see what’s wrong with me?” I’ll ask him.
“I only see what’s there.” When he realizes this answer doesn’t satisfy me, he’ll say, “I love you the way you are.”
“Which way is that?” I’ll ask.
Thirty-six
THE CEILING FANS turned overhead, and it promised to be another warm, muggy day. I had ordered the breakfast buffet—dry toast, white asparagus, runny eggs, a slab of bacon, pineapple out of a can. Nescafé. Pineapple out of a can? Nescafé? I asked Enrique as he put it down. He shrugged a what-can-I-do shrug.
With my itinerary for the day set before me, I was just settling down to eat when Isabel came in. There was an optional walking tour of colonial architecture I planned to do and an exhibit of postrevolutionary paintings in the lobby of the Hotel Nacional. Then I was going to rent a car and check out a few beaches to the west. A small rain forest that had been given a “worth the detour” in our last edition.
Isabel did not see me, but I saw her as she rushed into the lobby, the eyes of the staff following her. There was an urgency to her movements, a need to be somewhere. She wore a pink pajamalike outfit and her dark hair was down. Dark green sunglasses. I heard the click of her sandals on the mosaic tiles. Whom did she remind me of at this moment? Mata Hari? Isadora Duncan?
She went to the desk, where she leaned forward to ask the young clerk something, and I saw him pointing my way. In another hotel in another country, I would think this was an example of good service. Instead it made me uncomfortable that they knew where I was.
Enrique was coming by to top off my coffee as Isabel waved and smiled. His face grew sullen and he stepped away. Now she stood breathless in front of my table. “Are you ready?” she asked.
“For what?”
“Don’t you remember? There is a fiesta for my twin cousins. They are sixteen today.”
I am fairly good at remembering invitations. I write them down. I don’t forget dates, events, doctors’ appointments. I stared at my eggs, which were runny, swirling in the plate. I thought about the walking tour of colonial architectural sights I was to take that afternoon. The seafood restaurant along the shore where I was to sample—and risk hepatitis or worse—local shrimp. “Just let me get a few things,” I said.
Enrique looked at me sadly, as if by not finishing my breakfast I had offended him. I was wasting food; this was not a country in which to waste food. I wolfed down the egg, canned pineapple, white asparagus while Isabel went to make a phone call. While she was gone, Enrique asked me, “You know what you’re doing, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” I said.
“Be careful,” he said. This time he did not whisper.
I changed into a thin cotton dress, put my camera into a bag. Isabel was waiting for me in the lobby when I came down. She was ebullient, glowing. She wrapped her arm around me and we left, the eyes of the hotel staff on my back.
This time we took the northern road out of town, one I’d never been on before. “First we have some stops to make,” Isabel said, driving off the main road. Here the houses were more like shacks, bits of tin and cardboard banged together with slabs of wood, dirt floors. Barefoot children in tattered clothes waved at us from the side of the road as we pulled up in front of a large building, lined with bars. Were the twin cousins in jail? For a moment I was frightened, but the sign above the gate said it was the Zoológico Antiguo.
I got out and peered through the fence into cages that appeared empty, except for a lonely tapir that stood motionless, its snout pressed to the bars, and a pair of vultures that sat on a log, though I wasn’t sure if they were part of the display. “I’ll just be a minute,” Isabel said, clutching a small cardboard box.
I didn’t really want to roam through a zoo of empty cages and despondent animals. “I’ll wait for you here.” While I waited, the tapir watched me, sniffing the air, as if it had not seen a visitor in a long time.
Then Isabel returned, sweat on her brow, and handed me a box that was full of sticky candy. We got back into the car and she drove farther, until she came to a funeral parlor and once again she jumped out, leaving me holding the box, and said she’d be right back.
This time she returned with colored paper, the kind florists use for wrapping flowers. “Here,” she said, “we need to wrap the candy. It’s the least we can do.”
Though I wasn’t sure how Isabel was related to the twins, as she drove, I wrapped the candy. I tore off strips of the colored paper and picked up each sugary ball, folding the red or green or yellow plastic paper around it, packing each carefully back in the box. My hands grew moist and sticky as we drove for perhaps an hour, until we came to a sma
ll village. We turned up a dusty road to a circle of cinder-block buildings. The Juventud de la Revolución development park, it was called. “There are things you should see,” Isabel said. “They won’t be on your walking tour. They won’t be on any tour of this country. But perhaps you will find room for this in your guidebook. Perhaps you can slip this into the chapter on joint-venture hotels.”
She parked on the side of a dirt road and we walked through the rows of houses. I peered inside the one-room shacks where all the televisions were on. People sat, bleary-eyed in the middle of the day, drinking beer in front of the TVs. A soccer match was on, but from time to time the voice of El Líder spoke, urging the people to work hard for the revolution, to pick their sugarcane crop, to mine for nickel, to practice birth control, to send the children to school, to serve in the armed forces and fight for the state.
“You hardly ever see his face,” Isabel said. “Have you noticed? There are no pictures of him; no posters. But you hear him. He’s like your Wizard of Oz. I only have to turn on the television, I can hear my father. He is everywhere, like God. That is his great gift. He is everywhere and nowhere.”
The fiesta for the Jiménez twins, Alivira and Eduardo, for their sixteenth birthday, was taking place in the town square, where music screeched over speakers set up on rooftops. Old men drank beer on the steps of the houses that lined the square. On a rickety picnic table sat a pink cake, decomposing in the sun. A few children sat around the picnic table, but no one played. Their eyes lit up when we put the box of candies, procured from the zoo and the funeral parlor, in front of them.
It had taken three weeks to get the cake, Isabel told me, because you must go to the special office for birthday cakes; and then there is a special ration store for sodas. The balloons were a gift from the Chinese, who had sent a million condoms, too small for the men of la isla, but perfect for use as birthday balloons.