The Distant Marvels

by Chantel Acevedo

  The captain said, “God bless you.”

  Later that night, the captain came to the small inn where we had been put. The place was near the prison where Agustín was being kept, and a few guests milled about. “How is the baby? Is she catching a cold?” the captain asked from behind the closed door.

  Lulu jumped at the sound of his voice, and called out, “No, María is fine,” leaving out my full name again.

  “May I enter?” the captain asked.

  Lulu contemplated her answer. Could she refuse? Agustín was in the hands of the Spanish. The enemies of freedom, as she thought of them. The captain knocked once more. Lulu heard him clearing his throat before speaking: “Please, may I enter?”

  Nervous, she thought. And she recognized at once that particular, tremulous quality in his voice. The captain was besotted. Lulu knew, because she’d always been a great beauty, and because boys had sought her out even when she was very small. Her mother had noticed this about her, too. She’d watched Lulu among her friends, how they gathered around her, laughing at even her smallest jokes, seeking her eyes as if Lulu could bless them with a glance. Her mother forbade Lulu from visiting the homes of school friends who had brothers, or whose fathers were too young. “A person never knows what’s in the mind of a man,” Lulu’s mother had warned, teaching her how to tell a man whose nature was simply fidgety from one who was falling in love.

  Lulu cracked open the door, and the captain thrust his nose in quickly. It was a nice nose, Lulu thought. Long, but straight. His pores were small. He licked his lips a few times before speaking. “Are you well?” he asked. “Do you need anything?”

  The truth was, Lulu did need a few things. She was weak from hunger, exhausted from lack of sleep; her breasts ached with too much milk and her ears rang from my cries. Furthermore, she was still bleeding, and had no little cloths with her. She’d torn her petticoat to shreds and tried to use that, but the material was too thin and scratchy. Lulu felt color rise in her cheeks. How could she ask this man, any man, for help in this regard?

  The captain must have mistaken her sudden blush for coyness. Perhaps he imagined that he was well on his way to conquering the beautiful wife of the rebel. So, he treaded gently.

  “Lady,” he said in a soft voice. “Ask anything of me.”

  “Free Agustín,” Lulu said at once.

  The captain pursed his lips. A muscle twitched near his left eye. “It’s out of my hands. I imagine you will see him soon enough.”

  A flood of warmth pooled between her thighs, reminding Lulu of her immediate need. “The inn owner,” she said. “Surely he has a wife who can help me.”

  The captain raised an eyebrow, confused.

  “The baby is only a few days old, capitán,” Lulu said slowly, her eyes cast down. She didn’t dare look at the captain, but could feel his discomfort even through the small crack in the door. “A woman has certain . . . things she must attend to regarding her . . . ”

  “Of course,” he said too quickly. “I’ll send the innkeeper up to . . . ”

  “No. I’ll go to him, capitán.”

  “Aldo,” he said. “My name is Aldo Alarcón.”

  Lulu let the name sink in, otherwise she knew she’d forget it. All names became Agustín in her head. Agustín. Agustín. Like a skipping record on a phonograph she’d seen once.

  “Aldo,” she whispered, and it sounded like a sigh, so that the captain smiled and relaxed a little.

  “And you?” he asked. Still, his nose poked through the space in the door, which had widened only a little during their conversation.

  “Illuminada,” she said. The name Lulu she would keep to herself.

  “It is a perfect name. I can barely stand to look at you without shading my eyes.” Aldo chuckled at his own joke, then sighed. Lulu looked down at her feet. She began to bounce me in her arms, shushing me. I cried heartily. My face, which had been as pale as a star, grew red. “Shh,” Lulu said and I stopped to listen. The wetness below gathered close to her skin. And still, the intolerable captain would not leave.

  “I must see the owner,” she said.

  At last, snapped out of his reverie, Aldo Alarcón said, “Of course, after you,” and drew wide the door.

  Lulu walked out holding me, taking small, cautious steps. How mortifying, she thought. Then she remembered Agustín being dragged away, and the stream of blood coming from his nose and dotting the earth. A shudder ran through Lulu, so she held me tightly as she walked. Later, she told me that I had given her strength all through my father’s imprisonment. “You were like an anchor. Or the railing of a ship. Meant for steadying,” she’d said.

  Aldo led her to the inn’s modest lobby—an airy place, though the tiling on the floors and walls was dark and intricate. A man in a cream-colored coat and matching waistcoat and trousers manned the front desk. His clothes were wrinkled all over, and the man’s thick neck bulged at the black tie, as if tiny hands were strangling him slowly. On the wall above the man’s head was a landscape painting of the mogotes in the Viñales Valley, all steep, round-topped hills that suggested another world. The painting was lovingly framed and kept dust-free, unlike the rest of the lobby. The man eyed Lulu and Aldo Alarcón nervously.

  “La señora requires the presence of your wife,” the captain said a bit too loudly. Lulu suppressed a sigh. Why did such men find the need to shout when giving commands?

  The man, who happened to be the inn owner, stood up at attention. His lips worried over his teeth for a moment, then he stuttered, “I-I-I h-have no wife, capitán.”

  Aldo Alarcón slammed an open palm against the table in a show of frustration. Lulu was sure it was just a show. He’d wanted to startle everyone, impose his authority, but the wood was so thick that the sound was muted, and laughable. Besides, Lulu was fairly certain the captain had hurt his hand.

  “Perhaps you have a sister?” Lulu asked, interrupting. “I require the help of a generous woman. I have heard,” she said, calculating, “that the people of the Viñales Valley are the kindest in the world.”

  The man brightened. “It’s t-t-true,” he said, “Jesucristo should have b-b-been born in Viñales, not Bethlehem. Every home would have opened its d-doors! I’ll fetch my niece at once.” He disappeared through a narrow door.

  The captain drummed his fingers on the desk. They were red and cracked, like salted fish. He scowled at Lulu. “No wonder all the sailors on my ship were sad to see you go,” Aldo Alarcón said. “You were too kind to them.”

  “Only as kind as human decency requires.” Lulu bit her tongue. She’d overstepped herself, saw Agustín again in her mind, bloody and limp, heard the captain’s whistle, remembered where Aldo Alarcón’s loyalties rested.

  The captain had been leaning on the front desk. Now he stood away from it, drawing up to his full height. “Decency,” he said, “What does a rebel’s woman know of that?” Then, he ran his pinkie finger down Lulu’s cheek, let it linger on her chin for a moment, then patted my head. “Sweet baby.”

  Lulu tried very hard not to huddle over me, but instead, she met Aldo Alarcón’s eyes steadily. She could feel the cold wake of his finger on her cheek. This was not the kind of man who would kiss the inside of a wrist, or draw a woman in softly, a thick, protective hand on the small of her back, and nibble at an earlobe. Lulu knew because Agustín was not that kind of man, either.

  The owner of the inn interrupted at just the right moment, halting what must have been Aldo Alarcón’s dangerous thoughts in that instant—Should this woman be free? What threats does she pose to Spanish Cuba?

  As for Lulu, she’d been thinking—How far can I get if I run?

  “My niece, F-Fernanda,” the manager announced, dragging a skinny girl in a baggy blouse and pleated skirt. Like her uncle’s clothes, hers had the look of many wearings. The pleats were sad, flattened things, and Lulu’s fingers ached to
fold them down.

  The girl approached Lulu confidently. Despite her clothes, she cut a figure far different from the inn owner’s. Her hands rested on her slim hips. She eyed first Lulu, then me, and said, “My Tío Julio says you need a woman to help you.”

  Lulu nearly laughed. A woman. The girl before her was still a child, her chest flat. Did she even know what little cloths were for? “Fernanda,” Lulu began, then stopped. “Is there anyone older about?”

  “When was the baby born?” Fernanda asked, all business.

  Lulu paused. There was something authoritative in the girl’s voice and in her eyes, which seemed to patrol the room every so often, stopping on Aldo Alarcón for only a second each time.

  “Less than a week ago.”

  “Do you have luggage? Any supplies at all?”

  “Confiscated.”

  Fernanda stole a quick glance at Aldo Alarcón again, then tapped a finger against her lips. Her nail was chewed to the quick. “You need soup for your strength,” she said after a moment. “And milk to drink. There’s a bolt of linen in the back room. I can sew. Little cloths and diapers. They’ll be ready by morning.”

  “Thank you,” Lulu said.

  “Your shirt, señora,” Fernanda whispered, and indicated with a sharp thrust of her chin.

  Lulu looked down and saw that her button shirt was partly undone, and a half-moon of swollen breast was exposed, the skin stretched and glistening.

  “Oh,” she said, shifting me in her arms to adjust herself.

  “It was nothing,” Fernanda said before Lulu could thank her. Then the girl was off again, as quick as she’d come.

  “I’d be l-lost with-without her,” the inn owner said, his eyes following his niece. He fiddled with his lapels for a minute, then turned to look at Lulu. Lulu felt a ping and snap in her chest. There was, she realized, goodness in him. Not saintly virtue, no. But a tenderness Lulu had not seen in a man in a long time. Fernanda had called him Tío Julio, and there it was, a nameplate on the desk that Lulu had not noticed before—Julio Reyes.

  He must have caught her looking, because Julio turned the little brass plate for her to see before asking, “Is there anything else I can do for you?” without stuttering once.

  10.

  Mornings and Nights

  The captain had returned Lulu’s luggage to her only after the Spanish authorities had ransacked it. Fernanda had made several linen diapers for me, as well as a few gowns of muslin, replete with a satin ribbon that tied at my feet. So, both my mother and I were well dressed for what Aldo Alarcón called our “outings among decent people.”

  Early in the mornings, when the darkness withdrew slowly from the sky, and the weak streetlamps dimmed one by one, Aldo Alarcón would come knocking on Lulu’s door. “I remember this,” she would tell me, “because you had not yet learned to sleep through the nights and I would stay up to wait for the dawn, staring out the window. As soon as the sun broke the horizon, like a fresh egg cracked open, the captain’s knock would sound.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to take a walk with me?” Aldo Alarcón would ask, and my mother would nod. The captain would close the door softly, allowing her to dress herself and me, and then she would emerge, freshly scrubbed somehow, and perfumed, too, as if in that tiny inn room was a secret, unseen bathtub for her ablutions. The truth was, my mother always looked this way—clean, her face never shiny, her skin sweet-smelling.

  At the start of day, Havana always seemed cloaked in mystery. The buildings, men setting up wares, women bustling children to school, suggested only the starkness of form, and not the rich details of that old city. This way and that, the captain and Lulu strolled. They would stop at a small bakery, and he would buy her warm bread and café con leche. He would watch her eat in silence, nodding every so often as she swallowed. Lulu said she felt a kinship with pigs and cows in those days—how it must have felt to be fed, fattened, the sound of a knife being sharpened in the distance making the food taste sour.

  Not that Aldo Alarcón meant to kill Lulu—he wanted her for himself, and hoped that food and small gifts would turn her heart. It was the small death of his presence every day that Lulu feared. After all, she and Agustín had been among the Cuban rebels for so long that now the Spanish seemed to her unreal people. They were monsters with sharp claws in her dreams; men and women with terrible breath and rattling bundles of chains in their arms. What were dreams but the mind’s way of preparing one for the day? So, Lulu hated the captain because he was Spanish, and because he, in turn, hated the Cuban rebels.

  Every day, Lulu would swallow the last bite of bread, which she’d roll in her coffee cup, and ask, “When will Agustín be released?”

  She asked it quietly, demurely.

  He would respond heatedly, his hands flying to his jaw to rub the tension there. Lulu imagined claws at the ends of his fingers.

  “The struggle for ‘independence,’” he’d say, sneering at the word, “is over. Where is Macéo, that upstart negro? They offered him thirty ounces of gold and he ran. Where is Martí? Your great heroes? Cowards, run out of the island. Cuba belongs to Spain. It’s been so since Columbus.”

  “Macéo never took the money,” Lulu said.

  “Cállate,” Alarcón said, ending the conversation.

  Lulu would sit and stare at her hands. Antonio Macéo, that great general, was a name the rebels murmured reverently. And José Martí, the poet, had put their hearts into words, into lyric and song. But it was true—both men had been exiled after the war. In a way, it gave her hope. If such men as Macéo and Martí had been spared, perhaps a nobody like Agustín would not have to go before the executioner.

  Just then, a very dark-skinned man trundled by them, his cart filled with malangas still dusty from the ground. He nodded sharply at Lulu, then returned his eyes to his viands. “He wouldn’t have dared look at you in the old days,” Aldo Alarcón said, gripping Lulu’s hand as if trying to reassure her. “The negros are getting too bold.”

  “Even the Americans have outlawed slavery,” Lulu said. “Decades ago.”

  “Gracias a Diós this isn’t America,” Alarcón said drily.

  “When will Agustín be released?” she would ask again.

  “Didn’t I answer you already?”

  “No, capitán.”

  “Aldo. Call me Aldo. I don’t know when he’ll be released. When he has paid for his crimes, I suppose,” the captain would say, rising and helping Lulu to her feet.

  This happened nearly every morning that Aldo Alarcón’s ship was in port. On the mornings when he was at sea, sailing the Thalia around the island, or back and forth from New York City to Havana, Lulu was free to explore Havana on her own. Sometimes, she would go to the prison, stand before its façade, and peer at all the barred windows, hoping Agustín would send her a sign. And sometimes he would, thrusting his hand through the bars and waving. Or, at least, Lulu assumed that it was Agustín’s hand. She couldn’t be sure. Other days, she would spend the morning knitting baby clothes for me with Fernanda, who was always full of chatter and gossip. Meanwhile, Julio Reyes would watch from behind the inn’s front desk, chewing his bottom lip or massaging his neck, his eyes never straying too far from Lulu.

  Nights, Julio Reyes would tap gently on Lulu’s door, and she would let him in. “Forget the war,” he whispered to her on that first night. “Forget the d-dead you’ve seen. Forget that this is not really a inn for you but a kind of p-prison.”

  “I cannot forget what freedom tastes like. I have savored it. The Spanish are monsters, I can’t forget that either,” she had said. “And Agustín, he lives still,” she had told Julio, though the gentle inn owner ran a finger slowly over her knuckles. In this way, Agustín was losing his definition in her mind’s eye.

  “No, you cannot forget any of it,” he agreed.

  My mother and I spent the next fourteen yea
rs at the inn, prisoners of Aldo Alarcón. As I grew, I learned to read and write during quiet lessons with my mother, wherein she bound my left hand with a scarf so that I might not use it, saying, “We compose our letters with our right hand. It’s only proper.” She taught me to sew, making sure I knew that it was bad luck to attach the left sleeve on a dress before the right. In the kitchen of the inn, I learned to quarter a rabbit. Julio Reyes pulled my baby teeth when they came loose, and took the best-shaped one and set it like a gem in a small gold ring, which I had outgrown by the time I was ten.

  Some nights, when the inn was empty, Lulu would let me sleep in an unoccupied room, and I imagined I was a Spanish infanta, one of the beautiful, golden girls in a painting in the lobby of the inn, which I stared at often. “It isn’t an authentic painting,” Fernanda said to me once, but I had no idea what she meant. I touched the canvas just to make sure and found it to be as real as my own skin. On other nights, I pretended that the noises coming from Lulu’s room were the sounds of a zoo at night, though I’d never been to one after dark, nor in daylight. I imagined the grievances of lions, or the snoring of a rhinoceros, or the clawing of a baboon trying to break free from his cage. Sometimes Aldo Alarcón came to the inn at night, and on those occasions the zoo in my head was dangerous and swarmy, an appalling prison. When it was just us—Lulu and Julio Reyes in my mother’s room, and I, like a little infanta in her own quarters—the zoo sounded different. There was the soft padding of a gazelle’s light feet on rushes, or the sighing of rabbits in a warm warren, and other tender noises rising like balloons.

  Such was my life at the inn, and on that day when Fernanda came pounding up the stairs with two important messages—that a revolution had begun outside of Santiago de Cuba, and that Agustín was free—Julio Reyes was there, sleeping in the bed with my mother, while I watched the sky go from black to purple to pink to blue.