The Distant Marvels

by Chantel Acevedo

  “After today, Dos Rios will be ours, I swear it,” he said.

  “Be careful,” she whispered.

  He eyed her reddened cheek and nodded.

  Agustín hugged me next, kissed the top of my head and said, “Se obediente,” and I nodded, promising I’d do whatever my mother asked of me. Then he left, and we watched him and the rest of the insurgents go on their skinny horses, their rifles slung across their backs.

  The poet was the last to leave. He turned his horse around, a white stallion, and waved at Lulu. He was radiant in the rising sunlight, and seemed full of purpose, as if he were just now realizing the man he was meant to be—a warrior poet destined for greatness.

  My mother blew him a kiss, and the poet smiled, then he kicked at his horse and trotted away. Lulu sighed softly beside me. “Now we wait,” she said, and lay back down, her eyes staring at the top of the tent, her teeth worrying her bottom lip.

  The heat of our nerves made us sweat. Outside, the woods were cloaked in silence. Not even the sinsontes were singing. After a while, Lulu and I left the tent, our ears primed to hear returning voices, or, worse, gunshot. Twice, a rustle in the woods sent us scrambling back inside the tent. When I said, “I thought you weren’t afraid of them,” meaning the Spanish, my mother grew bold, her eyes flashed with life, and we stayed outside of the tent for the rest of the morning. The pistol she’d used to end Aldo Alarcón’s role in our lives rested on her lap, and it gleamed in a patch of sunlight as if it were coming to life.

  We stayed that way the better part of the day, eating leftover stew for lunch. It had gone cold, the fire having gone out, but was still good. Later, I explored the campsite. The men had taken nearly everything they owned on their backs, in case they were stranded in another part of the woods. In one place, I found a box of matches. These I shoved into my underwear, for my dress had no pockets. There was some beef jerky in a mess of blankets. I rolled up my sleeves and hid the dried meat in the fold. Stumbling across an old nest, I picked it up and put it in my other sleeve. The nest would make good tinder, I knew. I made my long hair into a bun, and tucked a sharp letter opener I found into it, holding the bun in place. Lulu would recognize the letter opener as belonging to the poet, the initials J.J.M. on the handle.

  “With you, we can survive anything,” Lulu said to me as she appraised my small hoard. She laughed a little and held me close, rocking me. I was too big for it, of course. Still, I snuggled into her neck as best I could, trying hard to remember the days when this was easy for us. It was, I believe, my first moment of nostalgia, and perhaps the most painful instance of it. When Lulu peeled me away, she noticed my tears and asked, “¿Porqué?” In answer, I only wept harder for my mother, loving her so very much, knowing, for the first time, that we wouldn’t be together always; one day, I would be too grown for even these kinds of embraces, too big to live by her side.

  This was how my father found us—holding one another and in tears, for Lulu had picked up on my burst of emotion and began crying, too.

  “You heard already? So many tears for the poet?” Agustín said harshly, his lip torn so badly that he was slurring his speech.

  Lulu looked up and put me aside gently. She moved slowly, as if through deep waters. “The poet?” she asked. “Did something happen to Martí?”

  Agustín nodded, and his eyes began to glisten. Martí may have been a rival for Lulu’s attention, but he was the father of the insurgency, the one who had brought together a dozen disparate groups under one banner—that of Cuban freedom. And now, before the war had really begun, he was gone. Agustín knew all of this, and I could tell that the loss was like a punch in the gut. He could barely stand straight as he looked at us. Thick tears ran down his cheeks. He looked like a boy in that moment.

  “Ven,” my mother said, and guided him into the tent. There, she cleaned his lip and saw that the injury wasn’t as bad as it looked. Agustín was tired. Even as she assessed his hurts, his eyes were closing. He looked at her, heavy-lidded, for a long moment before waving her hands away.

  “I have a safe place for you both. Not far from here,” he slurred before falling asleep. I noticed that his front tooth was chipped, and his tongue touched the jagged edge as he slept.

  Lulu and I kept watch that night, guarding the tent. I put my head on Lulu’s lap, my cheek pressed close against the pistol she still held. The stars whirled above us, the Milky Way in a different place in the sky each time I happened to look for it. I couldn’t sleep, not after such a long day of waiting, not with the possibility that the Spanish would come for us at night. As for Lulu, she was thinking of the poet, I knew, because she kept murmuring snippets of poems, like prayers. Mainly, she was trying to remember the poems, I think, picking them up halfway through, then stopping and clicking her tongue in frustration.

  “Cómo el amigo sincero . . . ,” she’d begin, looking up to the stars as if they might jog her memory.

  “Mamá,” I said, interrupting her, “what did you and the poet talk about all of those times?”

  “He wanted to hear my life story,” Lulu said.

  “Did you tell it to him?” I asked, wondering if there would have been poems about Lulu had the poet lived to compose them.

  “Some. He was a good listener.”

  “Did he tell you his life story?” I asked, thinking that Martí probably didn’t have a story like mine, including a father in prison, a mother who shot a man, or a mermaid rising from the depths to claim him.

  “Some,” she repeated. We were whispering, afraid of waking Agustín or attracting unwanted people to the campsite. So far, Agustín was the only insurrectionist to return.

  “Tell me,” I urged my mother, hugging her waist as tightly as I could.

  Lulu adjusted her shirt and sighed. A breeze kicked up around us, smelling of urine from the latrines that the insurrectionists had dug up a few feet away. She closed her eyes, as if trying to recall Martí’s voice, and it seemed as if it took some great effort. I’ve noticed this myself, how the voice of the deceased is the first thing one forgets, and I’ve often felt a double grief, for the dead and for their way of speaking, both torn from this world.

  “There is a poem I asked him about. There are two women in it—one impudent and icy, the other disgraceful in the way she presents herself to the world, all red-lipped and brazen. I asked him, ‘José, which of the two is worse?’

  As Lulu was speaking, an unpleasant image came to mind of my future self, a grown woman in a dress cut too low, too revealing, while my face was frozen, an eyebrow arched sharply, my lips red and pursed. “What did he say?” I asked, clasping my hands to my chest.

  “‘They are both accursed, because both are capable of betrayal,’ he said. A thick vein pulsed in his forehead as he spoke, so I knew, María Sirena, that the poet was angered by the question somehow. But I pressed on, because his answer did nothing but make me feel poorly about being a woman. ‘What about the man who strays?’ I asked.

  “His look softened. He sighed, took my hands, and told me a story about a woman he loved who was not his wife. She’d died young, having bathed in a river that was too cold. She’d stayed too long in the water, and they’d found her there, floating faceup on the bank. Her lungs were clear of water, but her skin was blue as the sky. The poet says he bribed the sexton to let him into the mausoleum where her body lay, late on the night of her funeral. He kissed her cold hands, and he kissed her white shoes before leaving that horrible place. He felt frightfully unhappy, he said, and still mourn the girl.

  “‘Was she that special?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘She died of a broken heart. She killed herself over her love for me.’ Ay, María Sirena, what a tortured expression he carried! Still, I can be cruel, and I pressed him further:

  “‘But what of your wife?’ I asked him, and he only said that the man who strays pays the price of his error with every breath. He said he�
��d written a poem about the girl, which helped his unhappiness a little, but I’ve not read it.” After a while, Lulu said, “I think the poet was clearing his conscience Perhaps he knew he was going to die soon.” Her voice cracked a little, and she cleared her throat.

  Lulu grew quiet then, and her hand tugged at my hair lazily. We were both lost in our thoughts, my own imagination running wild with the thought of the poet in a dark mausoleum, the walls dank and mossy, his high, white forehead pressed against a slender, dead hand. My skin broke out in goose bumps at the thought.

  Agustín sighed noisily and turned over, startling my mother. “I’ve made mistakes, too,” she said. “And I am unhappy.”

  “Mamá,” I said, and cuddled against her breasts.

  Lulu went on as if she were speaking to herself, as if I weren’t there, stealing her warmth and hearing every word. “I chose Agustín. No one forced me to take him for a husband. My decision . . . ” she said, trailing off, her hand growing soft against my head. In a short while, she was asleep, and I followed her into dreams afterwards.

  It was morning when the three of us woke. No other insurgents returned to camp, so Agustín, Lulu, and I packed up what we could, loaded up my father’s mare, and headed off to a new site. We walked in silence. When the sun was high, Agustín broke the quiet and said, “The poet died facing the sun.” It made my parents smile for some reason, and they held each other by the waist as we made our way through the densely wooded countryside.

  5.

  Another Poet Mourned For

  Susana slips a glass of water into my hand. It is cold, and the ice tinkles against the crystal. My throat is raw. In my days as a lector, I could read for eight hours and not feel any kind of discomfort. But I am unused to it now, and my jaw aches from talking. Still, the rest of the story bubbles in my throat, and I don’t want to stop for long. I’m afraid of losing the thread of it, and of the quiet in this place, punctuated by shouts from outside and the sloshing of water against the walls of Casa Velázquez.

  But right now it is not quiet at all because Mireya has begun to cry. She starts out softly, but her sorrow builds until she is hiccupping and gagging into a dusty doily she has grabbed off of a side table, sending plumes of grime into the air.

  “¿Qué te pasa?” the women are asking her, patting her hair and drumming her back, as if she is choking on a piece of tough meat and not on a morsel of grief.

  When Mireya answers them, I know what she is going to say before she says it. “Mi hijo, Alejandro. He was a poet, too. He died. Ay,” she says, kisses the palms of her hands, and lifts them up over her head, as if blowing kisses to the dead.

  I remember the exact day I learned of it, July 27, 1953, and how the news of Alejandro’s death had been obscured by the news of the attacks on the Moncada Barracks the day before, and the arrest of the rebels who dared defy President Batista. All over Maisí there was talk of revolution, and people asking, “¿Hasta cuando?”—how long would we have to wait for a lasting peace?

  So it was that Alejandro’s death barely registered for people, and his funeral was poorly attended. Beatríz, of course, did not even come home for it. He had been her first love, and she told me in a letter that she could not bear to see him so still, his face garishly painted by the funeral director in Maisí who was infamous for making the town’s dead citizens look clownish in their coffins, nor could she stand to look upon the hands that had once held hers folded over his hollow chest. She wrote all of this in a letter, and I thought that Alejandro would have appreciated the poetry of the missive.

  Mireya and I had grown apart in the years after Beatríz and Alejandro broke up. Yet she would stop and chat in the market when we saw one another, and offer me her cheek when sitting near me at Mass in that moment when congregants offered one another a sign of peace. We would kiss one another, say “Paz,” and return to our places on the pew, content with a cold friendship that had turned us into polite acquaintances.

  At Alejandro’s funeral, however, just as I was kneeling by the coffin, observing that, indeed, the makeup on his face was not the right shade at all, Mireya sent her sister, an imposing woman who had come to Maisí for the services, to ask me to leave.

  “¿Porque?” I’d asked, confused, my eyes drawn towards Alejandro’s narrow face, lingering long on his neck, which was swollen and too fat for his body in death.

  “Mireya does not want you here. You must go. Now,” the woman said, and so I left. Later, Mireya would run from me in the market, at church, anywhere we crossed paths.

  Susana is holding Mireya’s hands in hers, and asking about the cause of Alejandro’s death. “An infection,” Mireya says, and Susana sighs, shaking her head. Her scarf is off-kilter, and her eyes glisten. I know she feels relief, is glad the man did not die of cancer, happy that Alejandro’s tale, at least, is not an example of her own path.

  “I am sorry, Mireya,” I say from across the room, because I am not brave enough to rise and attend to her.

  Her mouth tightens at the sound of my voice. “You never liked him,” she says softly. “Spare me your condolences.” But there is no fight in her tone. Only defeat.

  “He wasn’t right for Beatríz,” I hear myself saying, wishing I could stop even as I speak. What’s wrong with me? I feel like a record player that has been left on even though no one wants to hear it. “But he was a good boy, a devoted son.”

  “The best son a woman could ask for,” Mireya says.

  “Que Dios lo tenga en la Gloria,” I add.

  “Amen,” the other women say.

  Ofelia comes in with a cardboard box balanced on her hip. Inside are plates of congrís and plátanos and a jug of water that looks brown when she pours it out into paper cups for us.

  “Ay,” Estrella says. “I’m not drinking that.”

  “It’s just iron from the pipes,” Ofelia reassures us. “The storm has damaged the pipes.”

  Even so, not one of us drinks the water. Earlier, we had seen a corpse floating past Casa Velázquez, facedown in the water, his clothes puffy with air. Who knows what is in the water? The rice, of course, was probably boiled in brown water, but at least it was boiled. We reason this out between swallows.

  Ofelia eats with us, still in her sodden clothes. She chews slowly, her gaze far away. “This is good,” I tell her, patting her arm.

  She comes to life a little, and smiles at me.

  It is a solemn meal, with Mireya sniffling as she eats. It has been a decade since Alejandro died suddenly of a bacterial infection, but a mother never stops grieving. I know this intimately, but I will not cry out my own sorrow and diminish Mireya’s mourning. Whatever I did to offend her can’t be undone. God knows I tried, visiting her house in the days after Alejandro’s funeral, and being turned out by her sister.

  After we eat, Rosalia sits beside me and asks me about José Martí. “We all learned his poems in school. Recitations and such. I was terrible at it. Muy bruta. What was his voice like, I wonder? Do you remember?”

  “It was a high voice. High for a man, but not feminine. Razor sharp. Precise,” I say, surprised I remember it so well.

  “Ah, I would have liked his voice to be the booming sort,” Rosalia says, disappointed in me, as if I fashioned José Martí myself.

  Estrella goes to the cardboard box Ofelia brought in and asks, “Is there more food?”

  “No,” Ofelia says, and picks up her own empty plate.

  Susana asks, “No more for lunch, you mean?”

  “Of course there is more,” Celia says. “Isn’t there, Ofelia?”

  Wordless, Ofelia goes around the room and gathers all of the empty plates. She does not look at Susana, and I take it to mean that there may not be any more food at all.

  Dulce is still eating, grain of rice by grain of rice, when she says, “Don’t wait for me to finish,” waving Ofelia off. “I eat like an infant th
ese days. Go on with your story, María Sirena.” Ofelia leaves with the cardboard box and the dirty dishes.

  “The congrís was hard,” Rosalia says.

  “Food is food,” Estrella responds. “That may be the last congrís we see for a while.” We are all quiet, save for the sound of Dulce’s fork against her plate.

  “Go on,” Susana says to me.

  “Might as well,” says Rosalia. “We have nothing else to do.”

  I look at Mireya. She swallows thickly and shrugs. Outside, someone is shouting the name “Fernando!” again and again. It is a woman’s voice, and at once I think of a small boy, lost in the storm, perhaps, or a husband gone missing or even, a large dog that has run off in fear of thunder. She is anguished in her calling, and the name Fernando gets shriller each time she says it. I pick up the pieces of the story where I left off, and her voice fades.

  6.

  The Workshop

  It’s a safer place for you both,” Agustín explained, describing the workshop in the hills where we would live and work. “There are horses to tend, guns that need repair, machetes to sharpen, clothes to mend.”

  “A tallér? You want me to work in a tallér?” Lulu asked, her voice going shrill. I knew she dreamed of battle still. And why not? We had seen them, the women fighters, the mambisas, wearing pants like men, with rifles slung low on their hips instead of babies. My mother eyed them hungrily when they made their way through the camp, and on those days, she would refuse to cook or wash, but rather would sit with Aldo Alarcón’s pistol in hand, picking dirt out of the gun’s crevices with a fingernail.

  “I do,” Agustín said. “The talléres are run by women and children. They keep the Liberation Army in shape.”

  Lulu was silent afterwards, and did little speaking in the three days in took us to get to the nearest tallér. Instead, Agustín and I chatted, he telling me stories of his childhood in Santiago de Cuba. It was on that walk that I first learned of his time in Casa Velázquez, of his mother’s gold coin, and other stories that revealed the patterns and permutations of his life. It was a good three days, and Agustín did not lose his temper once. In fact, he seemed jolly, hoisting me on his shoulders so that I could pick mangoes off the high branches for our lunch, teaching me how to kill a snake with a machete and how to use the skin for carrying water.