The Distant Marvels

by Chantel Acevedo

  Now, Weyler surveyed us, the women of the tallér. Our weapons, which we had not fired, were taken from us. As for my mother’s pistola, it was wrenched from my grip and we never saw that gun again. Weyler ordered his men to scour the other tents. “Bring the traitors here,” he’d commanded. The women and children were brought to where we stood one by one. Then came the weapons we’d been working on, dumped in a pile in front of the governor. Finally, the goats and horses were shot. I heard their grunts and whinnying, their dying bellows, and I wept. If this is how they treated our animals, I thought, what would they do to us? Then I thought of Mario. Dios mío, what would they do to him?

  That same night, they lined us up by size, the shortest of us in front, so that the soldiers guarding the governor’s back could see us all in one glance. In this way we marched all night, without stopping even once, until we reached the town of La Cuchilla. I had to carry two children, who’d fallen and would not stand. One was a small girl whom I held in my arms, and the other was a gangly boy of about eight, who climbed onto my back and held me like a vise, his skinny arms choking me. In the end, all the able women were carrying little ones. To their credit, the children did not cry or fuss for food, though our stomachs growled as we walked. The Spanish would not let us stop even to relieve ourselves, and so by the time we reached La Cuchilla, we were all covered in urine and excrement from the little ones, whose diapers were soaked through.

  La Cuchilla was barricaded all around with a tall fence of spiked posts. Guards stood at the single entrance to the town. I’d heard of these camps, where Cubans were forcibly concentrated in order to keep villagers from assisting the Liberation Army. People in the camps were called the reconcentrados. It was Agustín who had first described these places, cut off from food and fresh water, where Cubans were dying by the thousands of disease and starvation.

  “Basta, you’re scaring María Sirena,” Lulu had told him after she’d heard the story, though it was evident she was frightened, too.

  “She should be scared,” Agustín had said then.

  Now, we were thrown into the camp that was once the village of La Cuchilla. What I would have given for a cuchilla of my own, I remember thinking. I would have cut my wrists with it before setting foot into the camp. Already, the effects of the isolation and deprivation were evident. The trees in La Cuchilla were stripped of their bark. Though the fruit trees outside the fenced perimeter were laden with fruit—mango and papaya, guayaba and ciruellas—the trees inside were bare, the fruit having been picked and eaten even before they were ripe. Later, I’d come to learn the tricks of survival—how to eat the seeds of fruit, and how to trap small rodents and skin them, being careful not to pierce the intestines and taint the meager meat. I learned how to follow after horses ridden by Spanish cavalry, picking up grains from their feedbags that had fallen to the ground. And though the Spanish authorities tried to keep us from doing so, we ate the remains of animals that had died of unknown causes.

  There was death in every bohío, cries of grief coming from every hut. As the Spanish marched us through the village, I caught a glimpse of a female corpse, recently dead, for there was still some color left in her gaunt cheeks, and a baby of about ten months of age, desperately nursing from his mother’s exhausted breast. I broke the line trying to reach the baby, and was hit on the back of the head with the side of a rifle barrel.

  “Adelante,” the soldier commanded me, forcing me to keep marching onward.

  They took us deep into La Cuchilla, and then we stopped. “Sit,” the governor said, and we fell in worn-out heaps to the ground.

  “Now drink,” he said, motioning for his men to pass a clay jug of water around. We gulped, water sloshing down our necks and drenching our shirts.

  “Bien, bien,” Weyler said. I stared hard at him, wishing a seam would open up in the earth and swallow him whole. The truth was, I’d been raised believing in Spanish oppression the way one believes in God. It was unseen, but real. Beyond Aldo Alarcón, I’d had little experience with the Spanish. Here was the face of the enemy, his eyes like black marbles, his hairy hands strong and veined. The saber was back in its sheath, but he kept one hand on it as he spoke.

  “I’ll need the names of your husbands, as well as their last known locations,” he said. I’d expected silence. I’d expected more shooting, and for those to have been my last moments on earth, my life winked out like a candle. But one of the women, a young girl of barely twenty, began to speak.

  “There is Roberto Sorral, and Luis Casimiro, and over there is the wife of Agustín Alonso, there is Ignacio Quesada’s mother, and . . . ” On and on she went, listing the names in a quavering voice. No one moved to stop her, though those near her scooted away as if from a poisonous plant. The girl, whose name I do not recall, did not last more than a week in La Cuchilla. She was found dead one morning, and no one seemed to know how it happened.

  The boy with the Spanish flag wrote the names down inside a leather-bound book as quickly as he could. By the time the recitation was done, the sun had pierced the horizon. Weyler turned on his horse and his men followed him. Out the gate he went, and guards closed rank behind, so that we were barricaded in La Cuchilla.

  As soon as they disappeared, I tore through the village in search of the baby with its dead mother. When I reached that hut, the baby was gone. The woman lay there, her face a rictus of pain, her eyes open. I looked up. There was a small wasp’s nest stuck in the thatched ceiling. A solitary wasp circled it, building its new home. So this was the last thing she saw. Dios santo, I whispered. Another villager must have taken the baby, and for that, at least, I was grateful. Though I wasn’t sure the baby, having drunk whatever poison had been in his mother’s body, would be saved. I bent down to close her eyelids when a hand caught mine in midair.

  I turned and saw Mario. “Don’t touch her,” he said. “God knows what she died of.” He pulled me close and held me tightly, breathing hard into my hair.

  “How?” I began to ask him.

  “I saw the Butcher’s horse, and then, the line of women from the tallér. I followed from a distance. The guards at the gate were too busy saluting the governor to notice me slipping into the camp.” Mario held my hands against his chest as he spoke. I could feel his heart pounding a strange, fluttery rhythm.

  “Now you’re trapped here, with us,” I told him.

  “I couldn’t leave you,” he said. He gazed at me for a moment, then asked, “Are you allright?”

  The question, asked so gently, robbed me of my composure, and I started to cry.

  “You aren’t hurt, are you?” Mario asked, looking me up and down.

  I was about to tell him I was unhurt when I felt a tickle on my ankle, and jerked my leg, turning to stare at the corpse. I’d had the horrible idea that she had touched me. I went cold, and my body shook. Then, I saw that it had been the wasp, flying in lazy circles around our feet, sniffing us out. It landed on the woman’s forehead; its long hind legs mingled with her eyebrows.

  “Ay,” I cried out, and buried my face in Mario’s chest. He led me away from that bohío. “You’re making a habit of saving my life,” I murmured against him.

  “Quit trying to get yourself killed,” he said in exchange.

  We wandered La Cuchilla for a while. The residents stared woodenly at us, as if we were just another part of the wasteland they looked on each day. Here and there, a person would nod at us, affirming our existence, and in those people I could still see an aura of hope. At first, we were afraid the Spanish guards would spot Mario, sensing that he did not belong. But they did nothing at all when they rested their gazes on us. To them, Mario was just another man in La Cuchilla, and I was just another woman, both of us trapped.

  When we found Lulu she was trying to organize the women of the tallér. She looked like an insolent queen, pointing her finger at this woman, then that one, assigning duties in a tense, determined v
oice. Spotting me out of the corner of her eye, Lulu spoke without looking at me: “María Sirena, I want you to keep track of the guards. When do they change shifts? Who’s in charge of them?”

  Tears welled in my eyes. So we weren’t giving up! I tried to compose myself as I listened to Lulu giving orders. When she was done, the women of the tallér held their shoulders back. Those who had been sobbing dried their faces. The gestures consoled me, made me feel stronger, though there was a prodding tickle in my throat and a suspicion that this was all an exercise in creating some sort of solace for us, and not a way of saving ourselves. Lulu was keeping us busy, I knew. Perhaps, this was her way of saving us after all. I thought of the residents of La Cuchilla, the ones with the hope in their eyes. I wanted to be like them.

  When the women and children dispersed, each to find a soul who would let her stay in their bohío, Lulu addressed Mario and me at last.

  “You disappear with my daughter for hours. She returns to me undressed, with a bruise like an orchid on her shoulder, and I am supposed to greet you with what? Gladness? Lárgate, Mario,” said Lulu.

  “I know,” Mario said, surprising me. “It wasn’t the way I wanted it to be. I didn’t hurt her. I wouldn’t, ever. But you must know, Señora Alonso, that there isn’t much I won’t risk when it comes to your daughter. I know all you see is un negro—”

  “Bah!” Lulu said, waving her hand in the air as if swatting away flies. “Eso no importa. But there are decent ways of courting a young woman, and hiding with her in the woods is not one of them.” Lulu’s eyes flashed in anger. “Consider yourself fortunate that Agustín knows nothing of this.”

  “This is why you’re angry?” I asked her, unbelievingly. “Because I wasn’t courted properly. Dios mío, look at where we are,” I said.

  “I know where we are,” Lulu answered me, and turned to stare at the fences.

  I reached out and touched my mother tentatively. She tightened against my touch as if I were that wasp I’d seen earlier. At that moment, I could have mentioned Julio Reyes, or the poet. I could have thrown them in her face and then asked her about decency. But I couldn’t bring myself to it.

  There is nothing more satisfying than having survived a violent experience. I was so grateful for life at the moment, so glad I was not Luisa, with a bullet in my head, or that woman in the bohío, her eyes dead and open because no one would close them for her. My joy at finding Mario again ran deep, and the accusations against my mother died in my throat. In fact, after that day, I never once felt that kind of burning, adolescent anger towards Lulu. I was all tenderness for her, my mother, the only one I would ever have in this world. Perhaps it was watching that baby trying to stir its dead mother. Perhaps I had aged in the span of a day, becoming the grown woman I was meant to be.

  Mario’s face went taut at the mention of Agustín, as if his muscles had formed knots under his skin. “Está bien,” I said to him, standing close to my mother still, my hand hovering over her shoulder where I’d touched her before. “He isn’t here to hurt us.”

  Lulu snapped her head to the right, her eyes boring into mine. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Mamá, there was an . . . an incident . . . in the woods . . . ” I tried to explain, wondering how it would all sound to her, how Agustín had found Mario and me kissing, his hand on the small of my back, gripping me hard, and Papá’s rifle going off . . .

  “There’s something you need to know. Both of you,” Mario said, interrupting. He spoke with a hoarseness that didn’t seem deliberate, but rather, a product of some great grief.

  Lulu sat down hard, suddenly, as if she were a mechanical toy that had wound down. She put her hands over her face and took long breaths, as if she knew what Mario was about to say. As for me, I was dumbfounded, unsure why he wouldn’t let me tell the story. I thought he was being overly gallant, and for one insane moment, I imagined he was about to ask for my hand in marriage. I could feel my eyes glistening, and I must have looked like a wild animal in that instant.

  “El Señor Alonso was killed this morning,” Mario said, taking my breath away in a few words. I sat next to Lulu. She wrapped her arms around my waist, and her head fell to my lap.

  “Go on,” she said, her voice shattered and muffled by my skirt.

  Piece by piece, Mario told us the story of my father’s death—how Mario’s company had taken shelter in a deserted plantation, hiding like rats, how Mario left his brothers in arms to find me in the river, the water closing over my head like a lid, how lightning crackled around us, striking trees with a force unlike anything he’d ever seen before, as if the fingertips of God Himself were grazing the land. He described how my father came upon us in a tender moment, how the corneta sounded, and how Agustín followed Mario back to the plantation, and into the fray without hesitation. He described a barn, where Mario’s company stood their ground, emptying their ammunition at a squadron of Spanish soldiers that had amassed on the field out of nowhere. But they were too few. When Mario described the lit torch that one of the Spaniards threw deep into the barn, he traced the arc of it in the sky with his hands, so that Lulu and I might imagine the thing turning end over end as it flew. Then, he told us about my father, how he ran into the barn and stayed behind to fight even as Mario ran away from the conflagration, how the others poured out of the barn like human lanterns—arms and legs afire, torsos blazing, and how Agustín eventually staggered out engulfed in light, every inch of him ignited. He took three steps and fell to his knees. He swayed that way for a moment, then collapsed.

  11.

  When the Light Fails You

  Lulu lifted her head off my lap when Mario finished speaking. “Are you sure it was Agustín you saw burning?” she asked.

  “Sí,” Mario said. “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

  I could feel my mouth hanging open like a door. My father was dead, and we were trapped, reconcentradas, left to starve, for that is what the Spanish were doing in these village prisons—cutting these places off, as if they were a cancer growing on the body of Spanish Cuba. In a way, they were. In the tallér we had depended on help from villages like La Cuchilla for supplies. Soldiers stayed in villages overnight. In humble bohíos all over the island, dissent had sputtered to life, foamed and churned, becoming a sea that was sweeping over everyone. Butcher Weyler wasn’t stupid. Places like La Cuchilla were the heart of the liberation movement, and isn’t that what hunters did? Eat the heart of the animal they killed?

  Lulu touched my chin gently, and the shock of the moment dissipated, leaving behind goose bumps all over my body that would not go away for a long time.

  “You left your company to see my daughter,” Lulu told Mario in a tired voice. “And they were ambushed. My husband was killed.” Mario seemed to crumple right before my eyes, like balled-up paper left in the rain. “You are just a boy. You had no business fighting in a war,” Lulu continued. “What are you, seventeen? A child, I don’t care what others say.” Her voice began to rise, and I could see her anger hardening like amber. “Men are at least twenty years old before they even know how to clean themselves properly. In fact, I can see the dirt on your beardless face.”

  “Please—” he began.

  “No hace falta,” Lulu said, waving him away. “Little boys playing at manhood owe no explanations. You are who you are. Years from now, if we live to see enough days after this damned war, you’ll recall your foolishness, how you let your urges rule the day and many men died, including my husband. And what’s worse, you involved my daughter in it all. She shares your guilt. All her life she’ll have to bear that weight. Her father’s death is on her head as much as it is on yours.”

  “But you don’t understand—”

  “I understand stupidity. You’ll outgrow it, I hope.” Lulu turned to me then, and said, “This is finished, María Sirena. Come with me,” and she took hold of my wrist. Her hand felt like the strap doctors use
d to cut the blood off from a limb. My fingers tingled. I was afraid to turn and have a last look at Mario. It was a fear born out of my mother’s fury, which was transcendent in that moment. I imagined turning and seeing Mario reduced to ash. I swear I felt his eyes on me, though, like light coming through a magnifying glass—a piercing, damaging pin of light on my skin.

  As I stumbled behind my mother, who was sobbing now as she walked, her shoulders heaving and twitching, I thought of what I’d seen at the bottom of the River Cauto. I remembered the mermaid’s dry scales, the glint of something golden in them, as if she was once a shiny, new thing that had tarnished. Lulu’s hand around my wrist seemed to grow rough before my eyes, as if she were wearing armor. Like a fish, I thought, and gulped the hot air of the afternoon to keep from suffocating on dry land.

  Lulu stopped suddenly, and I fell into her, biting my tongue hard and drawing a little blood. “Ay,” I shouted, but Lulu shushed me. She ran her fingers through her hair and smacked her lips. With the inside of her shirt collar, she dried her eyes. She fussed with my hair, too, and pinched my cheeks very hard.

  “Mamá,” I complained, and pushed her hands away.

  “Cállate,” she whispered at me. Then: “Follow me and say nothing.”

  I watched as Lulu walked over to a Spanish soldier by the eastern gate. He was leaning against the fence, picking at his nails with a metal file. She approached him so quietly, so catlike, that he did not notice her until Lulu laid a hand on his shoulder.

  The young man leapt, startled, and held out his file like a knife.

  “No need for that,” Lulu said softly. He had a hard time keeping his eyes on her, it seemed. He would look over her shoulder and she would cock her head to the side, catching his gaze again, summoning him to her. Still, he wavered, as if Lulu were the sun itself, burning his vision.

  “Look at me,” she said at last. “Look at us,” she said, including me, and then the soldier did look, and his eyes were small, coal-like, and utterly disinterested. “We obviously don’t belong here,” Lulu purred. Such confidence! I mimicked her without thinking, holding my hips to the right a bit, as if one of my legs was shorter than the other, letting one arm hang limply along the side of my body, a pinkie raised ever so slightly, my chin bowed, my eyes up and large. Lulu’s posture was one of exhaustion, it seemed to me, wilted and overheated like a flower at midday. And still, it all came together to suggest a kind of ease and that romantic notion of a woman half-sick with love.