The Distant Marvels

by Chantel Acevedo

  “Sirena?” I repeated, stuck by the sound of my real name. It had been months since I’d heard it.

  “Sí. We’re like the lost sailors in stories, the boys out there and I, and you’re la sirena that draws us in, keeps our hearts beating. The other nurses have faces like horses. But you, ay, sirena,” he said, and clapped a hand against his breast and pretended to swoon. It wasn’t too far off the mark, as Gilberto already looked close to fainting anyway. There were dark circles under his eyes and that steady little cough. Suddenly, I thought he might not live.

  “Go rest,” I urged him.

  “Where is your husband?” he asked, leaning forward a little now.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. How I wanted Mario with me now, instead of this young man, however sweet Gilberto was turning out to be. That would be my next step—retrieve the baby, and take him to Mario and Lulu. We would be a family again, even if it meant being reconcentrados.

  Gilberto began to cough violently. His chest heaved, and he fell off the stool. I clambered out of bed and went to his side. He gripped my forearm and squeezed, then vomited a thin trickle of black fluid. “Here, here,” I said, pulling a corner of my bedsheet and wiping his chin.

  “Perdón,” he kept saying, and I told him it wasn’t anything, that we’ve all been sick before.

  “I plan on seeing the end of this conflict,” he told me. I didn’t know if he meant the war or his illness, and I wondered whether I had triggered something brave and stubborn in him with my pity.

  “Of course, Gilberto.”

  “Call me Gil, and after this war, should you need a friend, find me in Placetas. My father owns a cigar factory there. Torres Reál Cigars. Don’t forget, promise?” He extended a shaky hand and I took it and told him yes.

  “Good. Good. I’ll leave you to your adventures, sirenita.” Then, he rose and walked slowly back to his cot among the other sick soldiers.

  Three more days went by quickly, while I stayed in that little space. I was not put to work, but I could not rest. My mind reeled with possibilities, and every question I asked about my son, about my future, went unanswered. Once, a pigeon flew into the hospital, and it roosted in the beams above my bed. I watched it for days as it hobbled to and fro on the thick wood, the violet feathers on its cheeks and neck picking up the light like glass. I grew to feel a kind of kinship with the bird, so that when I awoke one day to see it had gone, I lost my breath and felt as if I were going to choke to death, or swallow my own tongue.

  It was in this distress that Andromeda found me. She gasped, dropped her scribbling pad, and shook me hard, so that I sucked a great gulp of air. We stared at each other for a long moment. Something shifted in her gaze, I thought, as if she were seeing me for the first time. “Get up,” she said softly, and handed me my nurse’s clothes, the ones they’d assigned me when I first came to the field hospital. “Dress,” she ordered, more harshly this time. Then she left me to do so.

  It is a wonder what clothes can do. In bed, I had felt achy from the birth of my son. My limbs were heavy like mallets, and my head felt as if someone had shoved cotton into my ears and nose and mouth. Everything was dull, and I could focus only on the pain in my body and the piercing sorrow regarding my son. But dressed and standing, the physical hurt seemed to diminish. As for the other injury, the one to my heart and soul, there was no remedy.

  “Bedpans today,” Andromeda said. “After lunch, laundry.”

  “Sí señora,” I mumbled, taking note of the bruise on her neck, faded but still there after two weeks, just beneath her ear. It looked like a pale green orchid, flowering out of the dampness of her skin.

  “In the evening, General Gasco is coming to tour the facilities, see the soldiers,” Andromeda said, touching the bruise on her neck lightly with two fingers. “I’m certain he’ll want to speak with you, Carla.” Then she smiled. For the first time since I’d been in the field hospital, Andromeda smiled. She had bright, straight teeth, which were large and square. The top and bottom rows touched, so that there was something simian about her grin that frightened me.

  “Sí, señora,” I said again.

  “You are not my prisoner, Carla,” Andromeda said. “If you are able, I expect you to work.”

  I nodded and worried my fingers against my stomach.

  “Did you notice,” Andromeda asked, her back turned to me as she wrote a bit in her notebook, “the bird that was trapped in the hospital?”

  “Sí, señora.”

  “It flew away, you know. It found a way out. Finally, after so many days. I’d thought it was a very stupid bird, but I was wrong,” she said. Then, Andromeda left me alone.

  Perhaps it was an invitation to be like that bird, I thought. It was possible that Andromeda was warning me, in her way.

  I searched for Blanca Lora. If I was leaving, I was taking her with me, and she would have to take me to my son. She wasn’t among the soldiers. She wasn’t in the kitchen, or outside among the nurses who were washing linens in tin tubs with lye soap. “Have you seen Blanca Lora?” I asked a few nurses, and they shook their heads. I grew desperate as the day wore on. I overheard talk among the soldiers about General Gasco’s visit, and once, when passing his cot, Gilberto gripped my wrist and said, “You must leave, sirenita. Leave today. Now,” and then his eyes had rolled back, revealing yellow orbs without an iris, like twin suns. I checked his pulse before leaving, felt it strong and galloping, then proceeded to the back of the field hospital. On my way, I stole a small handsaw from a table in the operating room. It was still rusty with blood, but it was compact and fit under the waistband of my skirt.

  I would find my son even if it meant I had to kill someone.

  I was nearly to the back entrance of the field hospital when I heard someone call my name. I froze, afraid to turn around.

  “Carla Carvajál, come with me.” It was Blanca Lora, wearing a travelling jacket over a long brown skirt. The hat with the red ribbon was back on her head. She clapped a hand on my wrist and tugged me across the road and just past a stand of flamboyán trees. The trees were not in flower, but the giant seed pods hung, dry and clacking in the wind, just above our heads. The noise rattled me, and I kept glancing at the entrance to the hospital, unaware that Blanca Lora had been saying something.

  “Listen, will you?” she said, pinching my face between her thumb and forefinger. “I’ve received a telegram from my editor. They’re stirring up for war back home. I’ve been assigned to Havana, to meet the American consul.”

  I swatted her hand away from my face. “You promised you’d take me to my son,” I said, afraid that she was abandoning me for the city.

  “I’ll do better than that,” she said, and led me on a rocky path parallel to the road until we could no longer make out the hospital. “Up here,” she said, moving through the trees and back onto the road, where a carriage waited, hooked up to a giant black horse covered in scars, as if someone had whipped it. The wounds appeared old, and the animal snorted at us when we approached and showed its teeth.

  “Apocalyptic, isn’t he?” Blanca Lora said before ushering me into the carriage. A slender man in a white shirt and dark pants spoke to Blanca Lora in rapid English. Then, he drove us away, clipping the tortured horse with a short whip so that it galloped as fast as it could go. We bounced on our seats inside the carriage, our heads hitting the velvet ceiling every so often.

  “Where are we going?” I shouted over the noise of horse hoofs and the clatter of wheels.

  “Another hospital. This one is run by the Liberation Army. Used to be a tallér of the sort you remember.”

  “And my son is there? He’s well?”

  “He’s there. So is your mother.” Blanca Lora went very still when she said all of this, and I should have understood that something was wrong. Instead, I wept joyfully into my hands.

  “Where? Where is this place?�
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  “It’s north, in San Agustín,” Blanca Lora said, only her lips moving as she watched me.

  I felt like leaping from the carriage and running the rest of the way. San Agustín, my father’s name-saint! My father was watching us from above, I was sure, guiding our little family, reuniting us. Such were the thoughts I had as we rumbled through the war-scorched countryside, passing burnt sugar fields and ragged men marching through swampy pine forests. I’d forgotten that I had given thought to my father in the afterlife already, in the months after his death, and had decided that he was likely not in Heaven.

  “Carla, your mother—” Blanca Lora began.

  “Ay,” I said because I knew at once that something had gone terribly wrong.

  “She’s ill. Very ill, darling.” Blanca Lora did not look me in the eyes as she spoke, but instead, looked at a spot at my collar, as if I had a stain there.

  “Is there hope?” I asked.

  “I am not certain. I’m not really a nurse, you see,” she said, and smiled just a little. She reached out and held my hand, and we traveled the rest of the way like that.

  We rode hard for a few hours until we came to the tallér in San Agustín, which was larger than the one I had lived in with Lulu. There were no tents, but a proper building with coral walls, bleached white in the sun. There was even a small lawn, where soldiers lounged on the grass, their wounds wrapped in clean linens.

  “How is a place like this possible?” I asked, thinking of what had happened to our tallér, how Weyler had shut us down, killed our women, moved us all to reconcentration camps.

  “The Cubans are winning the war,” Blanca Lora said. “The Spanish are in retreat throughout the east. And now, with the Americans thinking of joining the fray, talléres like this are of little concern.”

  “If we’re winning,” I said, running my hand along a sharp coral wall as we entered the tallér, “why are the Americans coming?”

  “You know that Cuban saying about picking low-hanging mangoes, don’t you?” I understood and asked no more questions. Even if I’d had more of them, the sight before me would have rendered me mute.

  “Lulu,” I said, for she was directly before me, in one of the beds nearest the entrance.

  “Wait,” Blanca Lora said, trying to stop me and failing. It was a halfhearted attempt on her part, like trying to keep someone from jumping off of a high place—she was afraid I would take her with me, plummeting into a terrifying emptiness.

  My mother was sick. My mother was dying. I heard a nurse somewhere say the word “typhoid,” and I saw at once the rosy bloom all along her neck. They’d put her in bed naked, covered in a scratchy sheet that was pulled over her breasts. Her shoulders were bare, and dotted in pink spots. The hollow of her neck was a dark, shivering pit, her pulse racing just beneath the skin there.

  “Mamá,” I said, and searched for her hands in the mess of sheets. I took them in mine and squeezed lightly. Lulu was in a fever dream, and her hallucinations had deposited her somewhere in the past, for when she spoke it was to Agustín, and she was saying, “The baby needs new bottles. She needs diapers, and gold earrings for her ears. Where are you, Agustín? Where have you gone?”

  I felt Blanca Lora’s cool hand on my shoulder. “I went back to La Cuchilla two days ago, once I knew I was leaving for Havana. I’d heard the Spanish had abandoned the village, and that the people inside did not leave. Like animals trained to love their cages, they did not leave. I wanted to surprise you, Carla. I wanted to bring them here, like I brought the baby, and have you join them. But I found Lulu in her house, sick as she is. There were clothes everywhere, hanging like curtains. I’ve never seen a thing like it. She was burning up, Carla. Just burning up.”

  “How long?” I asked without letting go of my mother’s hand. Lulu was saying something now about boots (“Put them away,” she kept crying).

  “How long?” Blanca Lora echoed me.

  “How long had you known that La Cuchilla was liberated?” I was afraid of the answer. I knew the progression of typhoid. Four weeks, from beginning to end. From the looks of it, Lulu was in the third week of the disease.

  “About a month,” Blanca Lora said. “There was no way you could travel, Carla. Not with the baby.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to forget about the saw still hidden in the waistband of my skirt. “Where is Mario? And the baby? Where is my baby?”

  Blanca walked around and sat on the other side of my mother’s bed. “Oh, Carla.”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “Mario is gone. I asked for him, and they said he enlisted with the Spanish.”

  “That’s a lie,” I said. I could not imagine it, my Mario in Spanish uniform.

  “I’m not lying to you,” Blanca Lora said sadly.

  Lulu opened her eyes and saw me. Her mouth formed my name but no sound came forth. She smiled, and I saw that one of her front teeth was missing. I wept, squeezing Lulu’s hands as if trying to pump blood into them, the way one works a bellows.

  “One of the villagers helped me transfer your mother into a carriage. He was gentle, and informative. He said Mario had struck a deal with the Spanish shortly after you left. He would enlist because their forces had been greatly diminished, and in return, Lulu would be set free. Of course, those kinds of promises are easily broken . . . ”

  What had happened while I was away? What kind of bond had Mario and Lulu forged? He, who had lost his mother so young, had found Lulu. And she, abandoned by her child, for that is how I thought of my departure now, had found a son to love. Had they taken refuge from storms together? Had they talked about me and about the baby? Had they imagined a future where we could all be together, or had they despaired? This was the story I told myself, the way I imagined them in that place while I changed bedpans and held down Spanish boys having their limbs sawed off, and delivered a baby who was taken from me.

  “Where is the baby?”

  “Next door. There are a few children here. Orphans mostly.”

  I rose at once, eager to see him, but Lulu held my hands tightly. “No te vayas,” she whispered.

  “Mamá, the baby is here. Let me see to him, and I’ll come back. You can hold him, when you’re stronger,” I said. Her eyes fluttered, and she began to pick at her arms, pinching her skin and hissing. It reminded me of one of those times when we were marching the countryside with Agustín, and Lulu had stepped on an anthill. The creatures had crawled up her legs and torso, and spread like Chinese fireworks over her arms, and she’d picked at them in just that way. Agustín and I had helped, of course, and later, had put cool compresses on the welts that formed on her body.

  But there were no ants here. Nothing crawled upon my mother but death, for I had seen such delirium before in typhoid patients, and it meant that the end was closer than I had thought at first.

  I tried to still her hands, but they jerked away from me. She clawed at her eyes and moaned. “Help me,” I said to Blanca Lora, and she held onto one of Lulu’s hands while I held the other.

  I hailed one of the nearby nurses, and she brought me water, which I tried to give to Lulu in small sips. Dehydration, delirium, a body gone poisonous—the typhoid fever was running its course and I was helpless to stop it.

  She was like one of those buildings from Cuba’s pirate age that have fallen into ruin. They’re in Havana, mostly, and their airy balconies and wooden shutters speak of another time, when there were cannons upon the walls along the sea, and men out there who made a life out of pillage. When they crumble, they’re clouded in dust, obscuring the wreckage. Foamy, like a great wave crashing, the debris hangs in the atmosphere for a moment before cresting and falling. After the air clears, the broken building reveals its treasures—copper wiring glitters in the sun, steel rods shine like swords, and the possessions of the people who lived inside become new again in the open air.
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br />   This is what it was like watching Lulu die. She was broken and ugly at the height of her illness. Feverish, red-faced, and delirious, she had become the witch she had conceived herself as back in La Cuchilla. Her hands were claws. Her feet curled in on themselves, too, as pain ratcheted through her body. But somehow, her voice grew softer and more beautiful, huskier than it once was. Her eyes, filled with tears, shimmered as if her irises were laced in tinsel. Her eyes and mouth became windows to the woman within, and inside, she was beautiful.

  When her eyes rolled back into her head, I backed away, a terrible thought crowding my head. “Mayito. I need to see him,” I demanded, thinking of my son sleeping so near this kind of infection.

  “The next building over,” Blanca Lora said, and led the way. I followed. Even when Lulu called my name, I followed Blanca Lora instead. I replay that little moment in my head often. I’ve dreamed it myriad ways—Lulu says my name while trapped in a coffin, or gurgling the syllables underwater, or mutely, from behind a thick piece of glass. Again and again I see her in my imagination calling to me and I always go towards my son. Lulu would often tell me that I would know the sum of love and grief when I had children of my own, and so it was. I know, too, that Lulu would run to me, always, no matter who called her name. This guilt is monumental, as is the certainty that I would do it the same way again, given the chance.

  I followed Blanca Lora first to a washstand, and I scrubbed my arms and neck with lye soap, my skin turning red from the harsh treatment. Then, we entered a squat building behind the place we’d just been. Inside, a few children played with wooden toys—tops and rolling carts and even a small wooden bicycle without pedals—on a tiled floor. In a crib were three sleeping babies, and lying in the center, with his legs draped over those of another infant, was Mayito.

  I lifted him up without concerns about waking him. He did wake, in fact, and howled, his face wrinkling and grimacing. I kissed his cheeks and forehead, and held him close to my body. Mayito quieted, and rooted around for the milk I no longer had. “Mi santo,” I told him. “Mi rey.” He was, indeed, like a tiny saint and king to me. Already, I was under his spell, small as he was.