“It’s the name I’ll use when I write your story.”
“Gracias,” I said.
Years later, the name Carla Carvajál would return to me in the haze of smoke when I told the cigar rollers my life cloaked as fiction. She was the author of the tale, I told them, as if it were all a fantasy. In my heart of hearts, I wished it really had been untrue.
16.
Of Small and Significant Persons
As Blanca Lora promised, the others stayed far away from me, afraid that I’d caught some kind of jungle disease. Some of the nurses were Spanish, and for them the island represented a final frontier. They were the upstart daughters of wealthy families, unwilling to allow themselves to be married off, seeking their own paths in the world. Most of the nurses were Cuban-born, and sympathetic to the Spanish cause. They, too, were the kind of young women that did not fit the typical mold, who nurtured romantic natures (though of the monarchic kind). There were, at the time, parallel field hospitals in other places around the island, staffed by American and Cuban nurses, run by a woman named Clara Barton, who’d garnered some fame for herself as a wartime nurse and volunteer. Her name, among others, fell from Blanca Lora’s lips as if she knew these people, and for a long time, I thought she regularly consorted with Theodore Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan and Fanny Brown.
Blanca regaled me with stories of New York City, but more than that, she asked questions. A thousand questions or more she put to me as I “rested” in a bed in a curtained corner of the field hospital. She wanted to know about La Cuchilla, of course, and whether I knew the names of the soldiers in charge of the place (I did not), and how many in the village had died (I wasn’t sure. “Many” was my answer), and all about life in the tallér (which I described with such longing for those days that Blanca sobbed at my bedside and told me I was a born storyteller.)
Once I recovered, Blanca introduced me to the other nurses. My backstory as a Santiaguera with a rigid father was swallowed like a juicy bit of fruit, and when Blanca revealed my pregnancy, explaining that my condition was the product of a violent rape by a vengeful Cuban rebel, the others treated me like a glass figurine, giving me the smallest of jobs to do and bringing me food all of the time—buttered slices of bread, figs and a glass of milk, mashed bananas and rice—so that I fattened up quickly, my cheeks filling out in time with my belly.
Blanca’s story had angered me, though. She’d applied a sensational gloss over the narrative my expanding body was telling, which was, in truth, one of love and devotion. How I missed Mario. And Lulu, too. At night, I dreamed they were with me at the field hospital, that we’d switched sides in the war and that Mario now spoke with a Spanish lisp. I would dream him up beside me, conjuring a vision so real and pleasurable that I would wake gasping and shuddering, afraid that the other nurses would notice the way love possessed me, even in the dead of night.
There was this, too: when Blanca spread the story of how I came to be in such a condition, more than one concerned nurse asked me, in tones hushed and deliberate because I was a creature to be pitied, whether my assailant was un negro, one of the dreaded mambíses, those machete-wielding warriors that the Spanish soldiers feared, the ones who threatened to take this paradise of a colony and turn it into another Africa.
“Sí,” I told them, and their faces would freeze, their worst fears confirmed. What was I to say? The baby would be born in a few months’ time, and he would not be fair. He would be like Mario, and these women would loathe him for that.
Were they capable of hurting my baby? Of taking vengeance on my behalf? I thought so, though I also thought them gentle, especially when tending to the wounded soldiers. Their hands were like butterflies hovering over gashes and split skin. Their mouths made only shushing sounds, and some of them hummed softly, soothing hurt men the way infants are soothed, by filling their eardrums with a continuous sound, mimicking the rush of the womb.
Would they hurt my baby? I wasn’t sure. They never referred to him as a baby. The child was “it” and “my complication,” and the head nurse, a woman named Andromeda, called him “the issue” with an arch of her eyebrows. Andromeda was aptly named, as there were constellations of moles up and down her arms, in strange patterns. So, I made plans to leave a month before the baby was due. My strategy was only to head back through Oriente province, in the hopes of stumbling upon another tallér somewhere.
I didn’t tell Blanca Lora my plans. Anyhow, she had moved beyond me as her pet project. She would travel with medical units to the reconcentrado villages every chance she had.
“There isn’t much we can do to help there,” she would report to me. “Everyone is starving. Medicine can’t cure that. I’m heartsick over it, Carla,” she would say, having adopted my new name so fully I’m certain she forgot my real one. I was also certain that she wasn’t as heartsick as she claimed. Each night, Blanca Lora would sit, poring over pages filled with figures that mimicked letters, but, upon inspection, were only squiggles and dashes. “Shorthand,” she told me once, as if I knew what she meant.
“Have you been back to La Cuchilla?” I asked her, desperate for news about Lulu and Mario. Underneath the palm of my hand, the baby squirmed, and I squeezed a little knob of flesh beneath my skin, felt the retreat of a tiny limb, then resistance again. The baby fought back each time I intruded in its space, and this filled me with joy.
“Yes.”
“Is it bad there?”
“It’s bad in all the villages,” she said, then dropped her voice and covered her pages with her hands, “but this can’t last. I overheard a captain saying that the Cubans had them retreating all over the island. The Spanish can’t fight guerillas.”
“Freedom,” I said as if it were a prayer.
“This is what 1776 must have felt like back home,” Blanca Lora said with a smile, and I returned the grin, having no idea at all what she meant.
So, the days went, with Blanca Lora talking with me in whispers when she could, and that nurse, Andromeda, following me around the hospital, reprimanding me for bandaging a soldier’s wound too tightly, or for sitting on the edge of an unoccupied bed when it felt as if my back would snap in two. Once, she eyed me for a long minute, then, asked, “Where are your parents from?”
“My father was born in the Canaries. My mother in Oriente Province,” I answered.
“Where are they now?” she asked.
“My father is dead,” I told her without thinking.
“I thought he was a landowner. I thought he sent you here to stay with us, to do your part for Spanish Cuba?”
“I meant my grandfather. My grandfather is dead,” I said lamely, keeping my eyes trained on the floor. Andromeda said nothing else, only reminded me to sweep the supply closet sooner rather than later, and to check the splint on a certain Lieutenant Torrejo two beds over.
Every few days, Andromeda would check my pulse and palpate my belly, her eyebrows forming a deep V of consternation. I would tolerate her touch only by counting her moles, which were countless. Sometimes, she spoke of “the issue” and what was to be done with it.
“I will raise him, of course,” I told her.
“Raise him,” she echoed me, but in that clipped way of speech that was solely hers. When she gave orders in the hospital, it was as if a telegram had come alive and was speaking, dropping articles and the flourishes of sentences. “Clean pans,” she would bark, and the other nurses would scurry, cleaning the pans with hands gone raw and cramped. Andromeda’s speech. Blanca Lora’s shorthand. I was living in a world of abruptness and efficiency, and so I should not have been surprised when my plan to slip away in the night, back towards Dos Ríos, in the hopes of finding a new tallér, amounted to nothing. The clock in the field hospital, it seemed, moved faster than anywhere else in the world, and my body responded in kind.
My son was born early by my count. I had carried him for eight full moons, not nine. B
ut he was big enough and screamed his first sounds while I was still pushing him out. I could say more about the pain, I suppose, but I don’t remember it. Rather, I can’t name it or describe it. I recall shoving Andromeda’s hand away from mine; I could bear no touch in that moment. I can describe for you the feeling of a needle piercing my arm at one point in the ordeal. It was like a bee sting. But the agony of birth is an artful thing—it slinks down deep into a woman’s brain, so deep it is later impossible to retrieve. It is like trying to describe the flavor of an avocado. It’s buttery texture one can name, but the taste? It escapes expression.
I will just say that Mayito was born at night, just as the sun dipped into the horizon line; that I held him through the hours of darkness, examining his hands, which were like pink starfish; that the quality of his skin reminded me of my girlhood, when I played with potted aloe plants, running my fingers along the smooth, green shoots; that when Mayito’s eyes fluttered open, they were gray, and while I never liked the color, I found myself suddenly enamored with it, wishing I had closets full of gray dresses and gray shoes and hoping that my hair would turn just that shade of gray some day; that I kissed the top of his head so often through that night that my mouth hurt from puckering; that his hair was soft like cobwebs, and I imagined tiny spindles in my body, weaving the fine silk; that his breath was sweet, ay Diós, so sweet, like an unripe melon; that his mouth around my nipple was strong, and he would shake his head like a shark tearing at flesh as he drank, but I did not dare wince or make a sound, but only held him closer and clucked into his little cup of an ear, pouring into that tiny vessel the songs Lulu once sang to me, “Duérmete mi niño, duérmete mi sol . . . ”; that his nose whistled in his sleep; that the skin around his wrists and ankles was flaking off, shedding a waterlogged layer; that I called him my coconut, my little god, my small saint, my sky, my heart, my love, all in succession; that, God forgive me, I imagined the next day with Mayito, and the days after, and the two of us growing old together.
I was young. Even after all I had seen, and all I had lost, that night I believed in a future with my son. I fell asleep holding him, his round bottom a perfect fit in the palm of my hand, his head, still elongated, egg-shaped, hard and warm in the crook of my elbow. The last thing I remember is the sweat collecting between the skin on his back and the skin on my arm.
When I woke up at dawn, Mayito was gone. Andromeda sat at the foot of my bed, writing something down in a notebook with rough, brown pages.
“Where is my son?” I asked carefully. Underneath the sheets, my hands were making fists, opening and closing like crab claws.
“The issue has been resolved,” she said, then struck the notebook with her pencil, making one furious dot at the end of a sentence.
17.
The First Surrender
I remember rising from that bed the moment Andromeda turned away from me. I remember coming up behind her so quickly that she did not hear me. I can still remember the texture of her skin under my hands, the wrinkles in her fat neck, how I squeezed and screamed in her ear, and how she peeled my fingers away from her the way one peels a banana. She was calm, even then. She bent over and picked up her notebook, made a few notes there, her eyes darting to me often. She coughed, lightly, as if a piece of meat had gone “down an old road” in her throat, as we used to say. I sobbed and huffed in bed, asking, “Where is he? Where is he, please?” But now she sought to punish me, and so went mute, only writing in her damned notebook for a moment before leaving me.
I wanted to get up and find him. I listened hard for the sound of a baby’s cries. I sniffed the air for him, like a dog, and could not detect his honeyed scent in the air. “Mi niño, mi niño,” I wailed until Blanca Lora stood by the curtain that divided my bed from the others in the field hospital.
Blanca Lora rushed to my side. “Oh, I know,” she said, pulling me close so that my ear lay flat against her breastbone.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“I’ll show you. When you’re stronger, I’ll show you,” she whispered.
“Take me now,” I insisted, pushing Blanca Lora away and kicking at her.
“I hid him away for you. Somewhere these women can’t find him. You should have heard them whispering after the baby was born. They saw the way you cooed at him, and they didn’t believe for a minute the story I concocted for you. ‘She must have loved the father,’ they said. Another said, ‘That girl is a rebel, I promise you that. She stinks of it.’ They huddled together, heads down like hens picking at their own waste, thinking of the best way to be rid of the baby and you. ‘I’ll take care of it,’ I told them, and they handed the baby over to me. I have taken care of him, Carla, but you must trust me.”
I listened to her and wanted to believe every word, for in her speech there was the promise that my baby was alive and waiting for me.
“Just take me to him, please, Blanca Lora. I’ve lost everything,” I cried and fell upon her breast once more.
“I will, soon. I have to go,” she said, and planted a kiss on my forehead. “There’s been an explosion in Havana Harbor. An American ship. And here I am in Oriente province, missing it. Mark it down, Carla, President Roosevelt will swarm this island before long.” Blanca Lora was vibrating with excitement.
“My son,” I said, gripping her wrists and staring hard into her eyes.
“I haven’t forgotten him. He’s safe and not far, I promise you. Get strong. You’ll see him soon,” she said, and kissed me again. Then she was gone, walking so fast her backside wiggled and her hair bounced. Blanca Lora cut a springy, cheerful form as she wove around the beds of the field hospital, disappearing from my view.
In the days that followed, the other nurses treated me no differently from any other patient. They did not, of course, meet my eyes, though I searched their faces for signs of betrayal. Which woman had slipped Mayito out of my arms? Which one had first uttered the plan to do away with him? It was a good lesson to learn—evil did not make a mark on a person’s countenance. There was no wildness in the eye that spoke of mischief, there was no reddish tinge on guilty hands, there was no nervous laughter between them, nor did they chew their lips anxiously. There was only calm among the nurses of the field hospital, and when they said, “Viva Cuba española,” to one another in the passageways, there was a lilt in their voices, as if they were used to singing instead of speaking.
Andromeda no longer came to see me, and I wondered whether I had actually hurt her and whether she was now afraid. I hoped so. Every day without Mayito was like a day without a limb. I was crippled. I could barely feed myself. Sometimes, an air bubble or some other gastric movement would pinch me from within, and for a second, I would think it was Mayito, still in my womb, kicking, and my hand would fly to my belly to touch that ghost baby. It was only a second of confusion before I realized the truth, but each occasion reenergized my grief at having lost him, and I would weep in bed and pound the mattress with my fists, my cries joining the moans of the soldiers around me, the ones who lay injured just past the curtain.
I was the only female patient in the place, and so was kept in isolation. It was just as well. I detested the soldiers. All of them. I hoped that the man who had thrown the torch that set my father on fire was here, limbless, perhaps, oozing all sorts of stinky fluids, dying a slow, reeking, painful death. Twice, a soldier peeked through the curtain to get a look at me, and both times I threw a bedpan at the face. On the third try, the man spoke quickly, saying, “I heard them talk about you, the nurses. They suspect you’re a spy for the Cuban Liberation Army. Is that right?”
He was young, and his skin was yellow, like an old piece of parchment. Yellow fever had run rampant among the Spanish, and the field hospital was full of the worst cases. When the skin took on that strange color, everyone knew the case was a bad one, that the black vomit would soon follow, and most likely, death would come.
“No, I am not,”
I said to the soldier, who grew braver, and stepped out from behind the curtain. He was sick, but strong, and I thought that perhaps he was mending, and that the color would fade from his skin, soon.
“Who are you, then?” he asked. “We all heard your baby being born. We saw when that nurse took him away in the night.”
“We?”
“The other boys. All of us saw. We’re sick with the yellow fever, but we have eyes and ears, still. We know what you did to that one nurse, saw the marks your fingers made around her throat.”
“I was crazed,” I said quickly. “Not myself. I want my son back, you must understand.”
“She deserved it, I’m sure,” he said, smiling, and taking another step forward. I pulled my blanket further up my body.
“You don’t sound like a Spaniard,” I commented.
“I’m not. Cubano hasta la muerte. And fighting on the wrong side of things,” he said quietly.
He grinned at me, and I couldn’t tell whether he was toying with me or not, trying to trap me, draw me out so that I would confess who I was. Perhaps Andromeda had set him up for this. “Why are you here?” I asked, keeping the subject on him.
“My father is a Gallego. He also happens to be seventy years old. I was born in my parents’ old age, like a character out of the bible. Bueno, the old man tried to enlist. I took his place, but like I said, I’m fighting on the wrong side of things.” He coughed every once in a while into a dingy handkerchief, and wiped his mouth carefully. He swayed a little when he finished speaking.
“Sit,” I told him, and he pulled a low wooden stool out from under my bed and sat, exhaling, his shoulders slumping. “What’s your name?” I asked once he was settled.
“Gilberto Torres,” he said. “And you are Carla.”
“How do you know my name?”
“You’re our sirena, didn’t you know?” he said. Gilberto was bold. Sick as he was, he flirted without hesitation, his brown eyes fixed on my face as if he’d known me always.
The Distant Marvels Page 20