The Distant Marvels

by Chantel Acevedo

  Ada turns, walks out the door, and slams it closed behind her. A little puff of air strikes me, and it carries Ada’s violet perfume with it. I will miss her. Most afternoons, Ada comes over with her crochet needle and yarn, and sits on the porch with me, her fingers turning purple with the tightness of her grip as she makes delicate rosettes for fabric corsages, which she wears on Sundays. I love listening to her stories, how her voice harmonizes so well with the soft murmur of the sea.

  Lately, Ada has taken to talking about her childhood. It has been a nice turn from talking about the news, and the new revolution, and those bearded men, the Castristas, in charge of everything now. She and I had watched the executions of Batista’s supporters on her television for only a few minutes when I begged her to turn it off. “Didn’t we see enough of this during the war?” I said, meaning the War of Independence, to which Ada replied, “I don’t remember a thing, Sirenita.” She was only eight when the American ship, the Maine, exploded in the harbor in Havana, but she liked telling me an old family story about her elder sister, how the boom had shaken her inkwell right off her desk, how the ink had splashed her white leather shoes, and how her mother had beaten her that night with a switch of palm for ruining them. Apparently, they told the story at Christmas every year in Ada’s family, and she laughed in the telling, as if it had been a great joke. I still feel sorry for Ada’s sister, though the woman is long dead.

  My memory of that day is altogether different. Just turned seventeen years old, I spent that winter day in 1898 holding my son and nuzzling the soft fuzz of his hair. I can smell it still, that baby smell, and my throat clenches at the memory.

  The sky has blackened again, and the clouds are round and heavy and so dark that it feels like night. But it is still early in the morning. The neighbors are busy taping up their windows, marking the glass with big Xs out of duct tape, in the hopes that shattered glass will not get too far. Some have managed to find sheets of plywood, and are busy covering up windows, bringing in potted plants, and standing at the bus stop with their things in suitcases and plastic bags, waiting for a ride to the shelters in Santiago.

  I watch them from my spot on the porch. My house, which sits catty-corner at the end of the street, has a partial view of the sea, and a partial view of the rest of the neighborhood. The original owners, who I never knew, planted the house in such a way for unknown reasons. Now here, in Maisí, the easternmost corner of Cuba, I am the first to greet the dawn. Of everyone on the island, I feel the sun first, and my house is positioned in such a way that the light falls across my face when I wake, and it feels like a blessing. Perhaps that beam of morning light is the reason the house sits at such an odd angle. I like to imagine the old owners in bed together, their cheeks warming at daybreak, turning to one another and saying, “Buenos días.”

  This morning it is too dark for the sunbeams to penetrate the gloom. The storm is coming our way, and my little house, on the very edge of the island, does not stand a chance.

  I go about my day, ignoring the wind whistling through the pines now, making a mournful sound I have not heard before. After breakfast, I read from the Song of Solomon for a while. It is my favorite book in the Bible. There are no murders in it. No beheadings. No godly fury. There is only a boy and a girl, and it reminds me of the soap operas on the radio and of other, sweeter days in my life. I read until my eyes start to cross, and then I nap.

  I wake to the sound of shattering glass, opening my eyes just in time to see the lace curtains in my bedroom flapping wildly, like a tethered bird, just a second before the curtain rod falls off the wall. The wind has sent a conch shell through the glass, and it has landed near my bed, its pink interior glistening with rainwater, its rough carapace snagged on the rug.

  “Carajo,” I mutter, and bend to pick up the shell. How heavy it is. I turn it over and water pours out. Outside, the surf is roaring. I put the shell to my ear and hear the sound magnified a thousand times. Slowly, I shuffle around the room, taking picture frames off the dresser and tucking them inside the drawers. The doctor’s prescriptions have already fluttered away, and they float in the air like dry leaves. The wind whips about my hair, which I still keep long and which I usually pin to the top of my head. I tie it all in a knot, and go on putting the photographs away, aware that the rain is coming into the room quickly and that my housedress is already soaked.

  There is a daguerreotype of my parents, Lulu and Agustín, set in a crystal frame. In the picture, my father’s hair is short, and his dark beard and mustache are also neatly trimmed. He wears a sack coat, and a dark waistcoat, and he stands behind my mother, who sits in an upholstered armchair. Her deeply set eyes and brows are dark, a shade darker than her auburn hair. Lulu’s face is a touch blurry in the picture. She must have moved during the long development stage of the photo. Had the image been sharper, I could have seen the freckles that dotted her nose and cheeks. She once said it looked as if San Pedro himself had splattered her face with mud before she was born, but I disagreed. The freckles made my mother’s countenance sweeter somehow, as if she never grew into her adult looks at all. I sorely regret having inherited my father’s smooth, pale skin. Lulu wears a white, high-collared dress with mutton sleeves in the photograph. Her hair is parted down the middle, and soft curls gather at her temples. I tuck the daguerreotype in my underwear drawer, under three layers of girdles.

  There are a few photographs of my husband, Gilberto, may he rest in peace, and my daughter, Beatríz. In one picture, Beatríz is a toddler, standing on Gilberto’s open palm, held high over his head. It was a terrifying trick, one they knew I hated very much. Up so high, Beatríz would call out to me, “¡Mamá, Mamá!” Meanwhile, Gilberto’s arm would tremble with the weight of our daughter, who was always large for her age. A formal portrait of the three of us is framed in an ornate brass frame. My hair was short then, in the style popular during the First World War, and Gilberto was in his military uniform. Beatríz was about a year old in that photo, and held a teddy bear against her chest, her small mouth a fierce scowl.

  There is one more framed picture, of course, which does not go in the drawer. This one stays with me, come what may. I tuck the small frame into the pocket of my housedress. The picture was lost to me once. I won’t let it happen again.

  Rain blows in horizontally, splattering the walls and drenching my bedcovers. I leave the room and close the door behind me. In the living room, another window has blown out. A seagull, dazed by the wind, has taken cover on my sofa. It looks at me with one dark, marble eye, and then turns its head, as if to say that it can’t concern itself with the well-being of an old lady. Curtains flap all over the house, and it reminds me of sails at sea, swollen and full of life. On the wall, paintings rock on their nails.

  4.

  Compatriots in Grief

  At first, I mistake the knocking on the front door for another shell, or some other debris, smashing into the house. But then I hear a voice calling, “¡Señora, señora!” I’m afraid it is one of Maisí’s fishermen, caught outside and now stranded. I don’t want one of those men in my house. Fishermen always smell like dead things, and they talk about the weather as if they are kin to the rain and the wind, and their certainty about everything bothers me. Maisí is crawling with fishermen.

  But what can I do? Let the man be swept out to sea? I make my way to the front door, ducking the curtains that beat against the walls as if in panic. By contrast, I feel rather calm, as if I have swallowed the eye of the storm.

  “¿Que quieres?” I ask, opening the door.

  A soldier in olive green uniform scowls at me. Her dark hair hangs wetly in her eyes, which are heavily lined in black. Her lips are covered in a pale lipstick, the color of wheat. She wears enormous golden hoops in her ears. She is young, no more than twenty. A bright orange life vest dangles from her left hand. Without asking, she begins to wrestle me into it.

  “¡Déjame!” I yell. My jaw aches
as I speak, as if my body is tired of saying the word.

  “I have my orders,” she says in a very deep voice. She sounds like a man. Somehow, she manages to get me into the life vest. “Get the old people to safety,” she goes on.

  “I’m safe here,” I tell her.

  “Only together can we be safe,” she says, and tugs on the straps of the vest hard, pulling the air out of my lungs.

  “I’m not leaving my house,” I say, gripping the doorway.

  “That’s what they all think,” the soldier answers, grabs my wrists, and pulls me along. She is my height, but stronger than I ever was. Two thick veins crisscross on her forearms. Her damp skin gives off a lemony scent, and the fair hairs on her arms suggest vanity. This young woman douses herself in lemon to lighten her hair. I know. I once did that, too.

  I follow, stumbling, freeing one hand at last and feeling in my pocket for the picture of Mayito. It is there, the frame’s edge poking my thigh. She leads me to a bus filled with others, mainly solitary women my age. Where are all the men? Dead, I hear a voice say, and recognize it as my own, resounding in my head. Not newly dead, I think again, and can imagine the women suddenly, each in mourning, beside a grave. It is a bus full of widows. I look at them all in turn. I can tell, by the way they sit, that there are some women here I could never like. One, who has taken the first seat by the soldier, and has leaned over to whisper to her, seems too ambitious, as if she is ready to jump behind the wheel at any moment. Another, seated next to me, is busy chewing her thumb and staring out the window in terror. I’ve never liked fearful women. Yet I can tell we all have grief in common. There is that. Also, they all wear orange vests like mine. Where in the world have they found the vests? Did the soldier’s commanding officer think a wave would wash the bus out to sea? I scan the horizon and look at the churning sea. There is one young woman among us. Her life vest rests under her feet, and she grinds her heels into it, as if she might punch through the thing. She has her head wrapped in a blue rag. I can see a slice of pale skin at the base of her skull, and it is clear she has no hair. A cancer patient, I think, and make a small cross in the air. Her countenance is angry. I have never seen such an angry face, and I can tell that she had wanted to drown in the storm, too.

  I turn to take one last look at my house before the bus pulls away. At least the lemon-scented soldier managed to shut my front door. My house is the last stop, and I wonder if Ada tipped the government off about me.

  Thunder booms fantastically, and a few of the women in the bus shriek. My heart pounds after the sound. Another flash of lightning comes on the heels of the first, followed by a sonorous crack of thunder. Again my heart beats wildly, and I rest my hand on my chest and watch the sky.

  The soldier turns up the radio. On one station, they are playing Beny Moré’s “Amor Sin Fe.” She turns the dial and finds another clear station, which is broadcasting bulletins about Hurricane Flora. The voice is tinny, but audible, and the soldier leaves the report on.

  “Five thousand dead in Haiti,” a woman behind me says, parroting what we’d just heard the announcer say. “The eye is as big as all of Port-au-Prince,” she says, repeating again. The voice strikes me as familiar. I turn to look at the woman, and my breath catches. There sits Mireya Peña, who listens as if the reporter is sitting before her. Her hands reach out as if she could touch him, and her eyes are wide, the whites visible all around her gray irises. This one, I know, does not want to drown. “Twelve foot waves, Dios mío,” Mireya says, still replicating the announcer, when, finally, the young one with the cloth covering her head turns around and shouts, “¡Cállate!”

  I am certain Mireya has noticed me, but she is pretending I am not here. She lives in Maisí, though I have not seen her this close in years. Whenever we spot one another in the market, we look away uneasily, each thinking, I’m sure, that she has bested the other in some unspoken duel. At times, my anger at Mireya runs molten. Mostly, I am filled with sadness at losing a dear friend.

  There is silence. Then comes another boom of thunder that makes us all jump. The soldier turns the radio dial again, and this time finds another Moré song, “Hoy Como Ayer.” She punches the radio once more, and there is old Beny again, singing “Como Fue.” Moré died that February, and all the stations pay him tribute by playing his songs for much of the day. With a savage punch, the soldier turns the radio off, and we listen to one another’s breathing, and the thunder diminishing as we drive inland.

  I can imagine the kind of music the soldier wants to listen to. Ada’s grandsons have records of The Beatles that they used to play incessantly on her suitcase record player whenever they visited. I would sing along to “Love, love me do” when the wind carried the song to me. But The Beatles’ music was banned by the government, deemed antirevolutionary earlier this year, and I have not heard a single note coming from Ada’s house since. The soldier seems young enough, and bold enough, to prefer forbidden music to those dusty Beny Moré songs, in spite of her uniform. I can see rebellion in the way she grips the steering wheel, her knuckles white, and the way her thumb taps the stick shift, as if she were listening to a secret song in her head. There is frustration written all over her, and suddenly, the young soldier becomes very dear to me. I think, let her take me to safety, and I close my eyes.

  Just then, as a reward for the thought, the pain in my stomach flares, and I have to press my fist against it for a long time until the feeling passes.

  “Where are we going, huh?” the bald woman asks loudly.

  “Casa Velázquez,” the soldier answers quietly. “You’re the last group to be evacuated.” She wipes her brow with the back of her hand. “Maisí is in the middle of nowhere,” she says. “I don’t know how you can live in that backwater.”

  “It’s on the edge of everything,” I say, defending the little town that I’ve called home for so long. It was the first thing that came to mind, and for a moment I regret opening my mouth. But the soldier shrugs, and then, the women around me seem to relax. Some of them nod at me.

  “Good one,” the young woman says to me, and for the first time, she, too, seems to relax. She rests against her seatback finally, sneaks a long finger between the rag and her skull, and scratches her head.

  5.

  How Time Unknits Itself

  I have a perfect memory. I remember nearly everything I’ve ever read or heard. When we pull up to Casa Velázquez, I know what it looks like on the inside, though I’ve never crossed the threshold of that place. I feel a cold wisp of air on my neck. The soldier has opened the bus doors, and I feel that the temperature outside has dipped considerably. Yet I can’t help thinking that Agustín’s ghost has touched me. I rise, stretch, and climb out of the bus. I feel my father’s cold palm lying still against my throat.

  Casa Velázquez is the oldest house in the island. The first Cuban governor, the Spanish conquerer Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, was the home’s resident, back in the sixteenth century. By the time he founded Santiago de Cuba, Velázquez had already sailed with Columbus, seen the deaths of a thousand Indians, and set his dark, Spanish eyes on the Mayans across the sea. In this house, he’d drunk tea and thought of gold and conquest, while all of Europe buzzed with the news that there was more to the earth, so much more. These days, the house is being converted into a museum of colonial history. The soldier lines us up in front of the building, the massive stone wall blocking the wind that has picked up again. Some of the women have thought to bring suitcases with them, and these bulge like overstuffed pillows in their arms and at their feet. I have nothing but Mayito’s picture in my pocket.

  As we enter I am struck silent with the force of my father’s memory. He spent time in Casa Velázquez as a child. My grandmother, Inconsolada, served as governess in the grand house. Here are the painted scrolls along the walls. I squint at them, and see the faces he described. “Like furry demons,” he’d said, and I see them, too, the patterns ri
sing out of remembrance. We walk in single file past enormous mahogany shutters with a thousand Moorish cutouts in them. “Like a prison,” Agustín would tell me, then show me the scars around his ankle, from the time the mayor’s eldest son had tried to use the shutters as a stockade, forcing my father’s wrists and ankles into those cutouts and leaving him there, dangling, for the better part of an afternoon.

  We are led in silence through room after room. In one place, I look up and see archways made of stained glass, above a set of dark shutters. Light pours in through them, and we step in rainbow puddles on the floor. Where in the world is the light coming from? Clouds have obscured the sun for hours.

  “Wait here,” the soldier tells us, and walks through another door, which she props open with a brick someone has left on the floor for that purpose. I can hear her talking to someone. Beyond that are the weary murmurs of others. Another round of lightning and thunder come, darkening the room. The colors fade from the floor, and at once, I hear wailing, and dozens of voices singing, oba ’ye oba yana yana. I don’t understand the words, but I understand the fear behind them. When the lightning flares again, and the room is bright for a second, they sing more loudly. OBA ’YE OBA YANA YANA. Somewhere, women are screaming. A baby in a diaper and bare feet clings to a long, cotton skirt. It raises thin ochre arms, hoping to be picked up. Hibiscus flowers, red and yellow, swirl on the ground, flapping like fish out of water. I hear a man’s voice saying, Por Dios, the storm is coming, and then, more singing. I look to the open door through which our soldier has disappeared, and I see people laughing, raising crystal goblets to their lips, unafraid of the weather.

  “Oye,” I hear very close to me. “Oye, are you okay?” It’s the bald woman. She is clutching my chin and shaking my face. “Wake up. I’ll go get help, but first wake up for me.”