Noose? What noose? “He died of an infection,” I say, but Mireya shakes her head and closes her eyes against me, as if I am too difficult to bear.
We have been speaking off in a corner, and when Mireya moves away from me, Estrella, ever cheerful, cries out, “Another story from our lector!”
“No more,” I tell them. “Not tonight.”
“Ah, we’ve tired her out,” Estrella says. “I have one then,” she says, and proceeds to tell a tale about her own youth, one involving roller skates, a steep hill in Havana, a deep sewer, and a bout of ringworm. I tune her out eventually, though the others seem to be laughing, including Mireya.
It’s good for them to laugh, I think. Estrella’s story breeds another from Rosalia, which is similarly ridiculous, involving a sailor in Havana with a tattoo of Mickey Mouse on the inside of his thigh. Then Susana tells the story of a student who locked himself in a cabinet with a lit bottle rocket in his hands. By the time the sun has gone down, the women have grown quiet again, though none claim to be sleepy.
“A story for us imprisoned women,” Mireya says, and I know she means for me to begin again. “I’m tired of laughing, María Sirena. I’m unused to it.”
I feel six pairs of eyes on me, and the weight of a story yet untold, and so I speak again.
13.
Another Kind of Imprisonment
It was dark before I reached for my clothes again and slipped them on blindly. I laid a hand on Mario’s chest. His sternum rose and fell sharply, prompting me to check his forehead for fever. Just before falling asleep, Mario had mumbled something about the abandoned bohío being our house now, just the two of us, husband and wife. His words were broken up by lazy smiles, as if we weren’t reconcentrados, half-starved already, doomed to end up as buzzard food.
“Of course,” I’d told him then. Why not pretend? Lulu could have her house, we would have ours, death would come or it would not.
But it seemed I’d awoken with a new kind of lucidity, and as I buttoned my shirt, my tender nipples aching against the material, my legs trembling like leaves in a storm, I’d already made a few decisions about the future, the first of which was the determination not to die in La Cuchilla.
I kissed Mario lightly on the lips, and left the bohío, marveling as I walked at the profound heaviness I felt between my legs, the dull pain deep within, and the sense that I had been disassembled from within and could no longer be put together the same way again. What girl hasn’t wondered, after her first night with a man, whether she not only feels different but looks different, too? The village seemed empty at night, and only the screech-screech of frogs broke the silence. The sound was loud, and close, almost as if the creatures were within me, somehow. Every once in a while, I’d disturb a toad in the middle of the road, and it would hop away, making a wet, thudding sound. Later, I’d learn that in the early days of La Cuchilla’s reconcentration, people began to eat the toads, and that it went very badly for some. It turned out that the toads’ green pustules and glassy eyes were thick with poison. By the time we were taken to La Cuchilla, there were no more cats to hunt the amphibians, and even birds of prey were avoiding the place, abandoning it to the carrion eaters. So, the village was overrun with toads, as if a biblical plague was happening right there in eastern Cuba.
My senses were sharp in the night. Beyond the shrill sounds of small, slimy creatures I began to hear human voices coming from within modest homes. I heard a great deal of coughing. I smelled sulfur, the result of outhouses overflowing. I sloshed through dark, thick streamlets that stirred up even more of a stink. Here and there, the piercing cry of an infant would jolt me, making my eyes prick in sympathy.
When I passed by Lulu’s bohío, I heard nothing. Peering through the door, I saw her sleeping shape. I watched for her back to rise, for a breath to enter her body, and when it did, I released a breath of my own. She’d laid out a dozen dresses on the rough wooden furniture of the place. There was the calico she’d been working on before, here and there were broad skirts in dark blue shades, and crisp white shirts. The trunk that had held the clothes was open and turned upside down on the floor. Who knew it had held so much? All of the clothes made the place look a bit like a shop. I walked into the bohío and drew close to Lulu. She was clutching a spool of hibiscus-yellow thread in her sleep. Some of the thread was wrapped tightly around her pinkie like a tourniquet. I unwrapped her finger while she slept, and watched as the blood drained from the tip, the color of her skin fading and becoming rosy again. It was like watching a sunrise in miniature. Lulu stirred, mumbled something that sounded like my father’s name. At my back, the dawn broke, and I could feel my neck heating up in the shaft of sunlight that entered the room. I backed away from my mother, vowing to come back later with Mario, to make things right between the three of us, because we were all that we had.
Outside, the villagers were stirring. Many folks were out on the roads, holding tin cups and ladles. They were forming lines at the eastern entrance to La Cuchilla. The sun blazed up before them, and the people squinted against it. The brightness made it so I couldn’t tell what they were standing in line for. I walked past those waiting, drawing a few jeers. “Oye, muchacha, the line starts in the back,” they were saying, in gravelly voices that held no threat. Finally, I saw what they were waiting for. Two Spanish soldiers were filling the tin cups with a mealy substance that, even from a distance, smelled like rot. The soldiers wore wide-brimmed hats and crisp white uniforms. They served the villagers without speaking, two at a time. They held their heads to the side, as if the smell of the gruel offended them.
“How often do they come?” I asked a woman who was next in line.
She looked up at me blankly, and her moist eyes reminded me of the toads I had seen last night—green and dull. “Only in the mornings,” she said, then held out her cup for the soldier on the left. He sloshed the food into her cup sloppily, and some of it landed on her wrist. I watched as she licked the food off her skin until there was nothing left and I was sure she was just tasting the salt of her own body.
My stomach rumbled. My mouth watered. The stuff smelled awful, but my body was betraying me now. I ran back to Lulu’s bohío because it was closest, and grabbed three porcelain cups off of a shelf. Lulu did not stir. I waited back in line, and when it was my turn, presented all three cups.
“For my family,” I said to the soldiers. “There are three of us.”
Calmly, the soldier on the right took all three cups from my hands. His hands were soft when they brushed mine, and I marveled at their smoothness. Then, in one swift motion, he threw all three cups to the ground, where they shattered. Then he stomped the shards of porcelain into powder.
“One at a time,” he said in a voice that was oddly musical and sweet. He even smiled. “Try again tomorrow.” I was too shocked to move out of line. When a young woman behind me pushed me hard between the shoulder blades, I cried out, and, in shock, pushed her back.
Before I knew it, she and I were on the ground. My hair was tangled in her hands and she pulled and pulled. I threw my knees into her stomach, yanked at her ears. She slammed her forehead into my nose and teeth accidentally, and we parted from one another in pain. The woman cursed me and held onto her forehead, which was streaming blood. My front teeth felt loose, and my nose was tingling. There was an iron taste in my mouth, and I realized with disgust that the blood wasn’t my own.
The soldiers packed up the gruel, though the line was still long and their pot was still heavy with food. They said nothing at all, but it was clear that La Cuchilla was being punished for our behavior. The people in line called out to the soldiers, begging.
“My daughter is starving, on the point of death!” one woman screeched.
“Por Dios, be merciful.”
“Come back, come back, please,” a few pleaded.
Then, when it was clear the day’s allotment of food had ended, the
people in line turned like a single body to the two of us, still sprawled on the floor. I scrabbled backwards like a crab. A tin cup flew at my head. That was all it took. I was off running, a comet streaking through La Cuchilla. Behind me, I could hear the woman I’d fought yelling, her voice reaching a single high note, an “Aaaayyyyy” of pain, and then going silent.
No one chased me. They couldn’t have caught me if they’d tried. I was new to La Cuchilla, not yet diminished by months of reconcentration. My body was young and strong still. I ran until I reached the bohío I shared with Mario, which was on the western edge of the village, as far from the fiasco at the other end as I could go. I tumbled into the house and collapsed on the ground, crying in jags. The world went blurry for a minute, then, I felt Mario’s arms around me. He was saying, “Ya, ya,” and petting my hair. After that, I don’t remember much. He later told me I’d fainted, and that while I slept, I’d talked in my sleep about fighting off sharks in deep water.
I ventured out again eventually. I let my hair loose in the hopes that I might not be recognized. If anyone in the village did spot me as the troublemaker from the morning, they did nothing about it. Perhaps I was recognized. But the heat of the day, and the lethargy that comes with hunger, dampens even the worst rages. Thoughts become unstitched in situations like that. Hunger makes even one’s memory go awry, so that by the third week in La Cuchilla, I could no longer remember Agustín’s face. By the fourth, I’d forgotten the story of how I got my name. Mario had asked me, and my mind had gone black and stormy. I reached for the story and came up empty.
“Water,” I’d said. “There’s something about the water.”
“Don’t talk about water,” Mario had grumbled. Fresh water was hard to come by. Thank God for the rainy season, and the bromeliads that caught the rain in their sturdy leaves. People hoarded jugs and other containers with their very lives. The problem was we would leave whatever cups we had out in the rain and had to watch them as they filled. If you left them for a moment, the cups, the jugs, the trays, whatever hollowed-out thing you used to catch water, would be stolen. What was worse, the Cauto River ran, loud and rushing, just beyond the fences, tantalizing and forbidden. While I was in La Cuchilla, I saw a man rushing towards the river. He’d climbed the fence and taken off. The shots came from somewhere outside the village, I never could pinpoint where. The man reached the river and took a bullet the moment his foot touched water. He fell into the Cauto limply, his arms outstretched, as if he were embracing the currents, giving the water a final kiss. Mario and I watched as his body floated away, tumbling over rocks, his arms flailing. From a distance, he looked like a gull flapping at the surface of the water. Then he was gone from sight.
“At least the buzzards won’t get him,” Mario had said, and I leaned into him and covered my eyes with his shirtsleeve.
One morning, we watched as a family prepared to baptize their infant. They’d been collecting water for days, and had informed the Spanish of their intentions. The priest arrived one morning in his colorful frocks, flanked by two armed soldiers. The family, mother, father, and grandmother, emerged from their home with a skeletal baby in arms, dressed in a long white embroidered baptismal gown. They were all too thin, and it was like watching a ghostly ceremony, something that was happening in the underworld. The baby cried when the priest poured the sacred water on her head, but she made no sound, as if her vocal cords had shriveled up a long time ago. Her tiny cheekbones caught the sun that morning, like pins of light. When have you ever seen a baby’s cheekbones? I fixated on that tiny face, and my jaw ached from clenching my teeth, to keep from crying out, or flying at the soldiers and that priest, who were all flesh and warmth and health. Most of La Cuchilla had turned out for the event, and I noticed how we’d all panted at the sight of all of that water going to waste, even as it cooled the poor baby’s head, washing her clean of dust and sin.
What made matters worse for me that morning was the sureness with which I felt that I was pregnant. I had a few weeks at most before the news would no longer be news to anyone in La Cuchilla. I told Lulu first, there in her bohío that had become her cloister.
How can I explain what that small space felt like? She’d draped the clothes she’d found on our first day in La Cuchilla all over the walls, so that the interior of the bohío looked almost like an Arabian tent I’d seen in a book once, layers of colorful fabric closing in on the occupant of the house as if to smother her. Lulu’s hands had remembered her days in her parents’ shoe shop, and she’d made good use of the needles and thread the old owner had left behind, so that people in La Cuchilla would trade meager supplies for simple repair work. She would repair a seam for a hunk of stale bread, reunite the sole of a shoe to its leather upper for a mushy mango. It was her way of surviving La Cuchilla. Her back grew curved like a moon, and lines appeared around her eyes and mouth where there were none before. Gray hair sprouted at her temples like tiny lightning bolts. Her knuckles broadened and grew stony, like a man’s. I began hearing the words la bruja con su aguja, the witch with her needle, and my heart sank when I realized they’d meant Lulu.
I wanted to yell at the people who’d said those words—“Did you know she once killed a captain of the Spanish navy?” or “Did you know that the Poet himself, José Martí, was in love with her?” I wasn’t sure of that last assertion, but I wanted to fling it at my mother’s offenders anyway, my claims a shot across the bow of their impertinence.
But the truth was, Lulu didn’t mind at all. She began to call herself a bruja instead of a woman, and I told her I hoped she really had turned witch, that she might cast a spell and get us out of La Cuchilla.
“Ay, mi’ja,” she’d sighed, a pair of needles pressed into the corner of her mouth. “Our story is over, don’t you understand?”
I have no theories as to why my mother decided at that moment to give up. Perhaps it was Agustín’s death that did it. I’m not sure. I think of the Spanish soldier who rebuked her on our first day in La Cuchilla, the one who had called her “old,” and I think that perhaps that was the final insult. Lulu’s vanity and self-possession failed her when she needed them most. It was her best weapon, and it had misfired, blown up in her face, the shrapnel of it piercing her heart.
“Mamá,” I said without preamble, “I’m pregnant.”
Lulu nodded. Her face was very still. “How did I know it already?” she mused.
“Because you’re a witch,” I said, hoping to lighten the mood. It must have worked, because Lulu laughed, the needles balanced on her tongue when she opened her mouth. I cringed, prayed that she wouldn’t swallow them one of these days.
Our laughter was short-lived, and Lulu was soon in tears. “When you were born,” she began, and told me the story of the mermaid again, and of our years in Havana, as if they’d happened long ago and weren’t a part of recent history. “From one prison to the next,” Lulu said. “My child and now my grandchild, prisoners. Diós mío,” she cried, and went back to work, mending the torn sleeve of a man’s work shirt, her moist eyes making her stitches sloppy. In the kitchen sat an untouched cup of soup. A horsefly hovered over it, deciding whether or not to take a plunge.
“What do I do?” I asked. My stomach roiled at the sight of the soup, and I wondered at the ludicrous nature of human biology, how such a small thing growing in my womb could turn my body’s clockwork in reverse. I was hungry. Why couldn’t I eat? Bile rose in my throat.
“There’s nothing to do,” Lulu said. “Pray. There’s that.”
“I could try to get out. Get us all out.”
Lulu laughed darkly. “You could try,” she said. “What about your husband?” she asked. She called Mario my husband, and I let her. Our marriage wasn’t made official either by God or country, but there was no value in documentation in La Cuchilla.
“He doesn’t know,” I said, and told her I planned to tell him soon. That night, Mario fell asleep with h
is palm stretched across my flat stomach, and I’d like to think that somewhere deep within he knew what was growing a few inches from his skin, and so I said nothing. I would tell him in the morning, I told myself. In the morning, he would know, and the next time he fell asleep that way, touching me so tenderly, he would imagine the baby we’d made together.
14.
Where Courage Comes From
I woke at dawn to relieve myself, and, as much as I willed it, my eyes would not close again when I lay down next to Mario. I went outside and stared up at the trembling firmament, pink with new light, only a few stars left in the sky. For once, the air was fragrant with something sweet and I realized that the wind had shifted and that the buzzards, always present, were gone. Roosting in the trees at this hour, I guessed, and made a promise to myself that I would wake at dawn from now on to enjoy this false pleasure. In such light, with such fresh air, La Cuchilla seemed like any other village on the island. There was promise in the air that morning, and I filled my lungs with it.
Suddenly, I heard laughter coming from the western gate. A woman’s laughter, light and crystalline, like glasses coming together in a toast. I followed the sound and saw that two soldiers were escorting a large group of well-dressed women around the perimeter of the village. I crept closer to the gate, kept my eyes on the ground as if I were looking for something. In the village we all walked this way—our gazes locked on the earth—in the hopes of finding an edible weed, or a lost trinket. Now, all the women laughed at some joke one of the soldiers told, and it was like a burst of oxygen, filling me with energy. I hadn’t laughed like that in an age.
In truth, we’d been in La Cuchilla nearly two months. But it felt like years, and my body was beginning to show it. There were hollows in my cheeks where once there were none. My elbows were growing knobby and wider than my arms. But my breasts were full, and my teeth were still white, and my hair had not begun to fall out, as I’d seen happen with other villagers.
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