“And Papa?”
“Papa is gone.”
“Where?”
“We don’t know. They took him in the night.”
“They? Who’s they? Castro’s men?”
“Yes.”
“Where did they take him?”
Danita throws up her hands. “God only knows.”
I do not understand how these scrawny young men, lounging in our front yard with stubbly facial hair, are defeating anyone. President Batista is powerful, the Rural Guard a force to reckon with. His chief of police, my father, is a fighting man. Manuel Rodriguez’s ferocity and loyalty date all the way back to the day he slapped Mamá in Batista’s defense. Since then my father’s years of service as a military officer, his alliance with Batista during his elected presidency, and after during the overthrow of President Prio, have all earned him the title he carries today.
“What’s happened with Bebo and Manuel?” Even as grown men, our brothers still follow Papa in all things, their loyalty as officers to Batista unwavering.
“They left three weeks ago for Miami. Papa insisted. He arranged it but refused to go with them. I didn’t know what else to do besides send for Mamá. She’s the only one who could have convinced him and Sergio to leave.”
“Sergio wouldn’t go, either?”
“I begged him, but he’s as stubborn as our father.”
“What of Mercedes’s and Oneila’s husbands?” Through Papa, all of my sisters’ husbands are connected to Batista.
“They were smart enough to leave with Bebo and Manuel.”
“Why didn’t all of you go with them?”
“It’s not easy to uproot a life.” Danita holds two fingers to her temple and makes the motion of a gun going off. “They’ll shoot our husbands and brothers in the head or string them up and gut them like pigs, but they’re not going to kill us. Haven’t you heard? Fidel and his brother Raul are decent men. They don’t go around killing women and children. They want what is best for the people.” She spits out the words, and it strikes me how bitter she’s become.
“And where is Sergio now?”
“They took him with Papa.” Her tone is cold, unemotional, as if she’s frozen this unimaginable reality for her husband into a tight corner of her heart. Outside, the light dims, and shadows dance across her face.
“Oh, Danita, I’m so sorry.” I take a step toward her, but she raises her hand to stop me.
“Papa never believed it would come to this. He told me that when Batista defeated Castro we’d all go to Miami and bring the boys home. He said that if Sergio insisted on staying, he’d keep him safe. He promised.”
“Do you think they’re all right?”
“No, I do not.”
“They might be. Maybe they’re negotiating? Don’t countries trade prisoners in war? Batista is still in charge. He can do something.”
Danita gives a twisted smile, throwing her arms out and shimmying her hips as she whistles. “Estelita, always looking on the bright side of things. Shall we sing and dance to a wartime romance? Or maybe we can seduce those men outside into giving away their secrets, like a good Hollywood story, yes?”
Stress always made my sister mean. She sashays over to me, her smile collapsing as her arms drop to her sides. Her apron has shifted out of place, and there’s something about the crooked frill across her chest that makes her appear to be completely unraveling. “I don’t go through husbands like you do,” she says. “For me, it has only ever been Sergio.”
This hurts, but I am not going to fight with her the first hour I arrive home, so I say simply, “Sergio is a good man,” and take her hand despite her resistance. “I can help, Danita. I’ll get word to my manager. Or Uncle Duke. I know people who can help us. We’ll find him.”
My sister softens a little, her shoulders sagging, and I think she might say something kind when Mamá strides into the room, Mercedes and Oneila right behind her. They perch on the sofa like birds on a wire, alert, focused. The rebel soldiers are right behind them, stomping their boots over the rug. One of the soldiers settles into a chair; the other two drop to the floor and sit cross-legged as if they’re boys around a campfire.
“Is it that time already?” Danita asks perky and sarcastic, striding over to the shell-pink, Westinghouse radio on the bookshelf and clicking it on. Static crackles into the room. Danita fiddles with the dial until there is a moment of silent, dead air before a smooth, male voice booms out, “Aqui Radio Rebelde, the voice of the Sierra Maestra, transmitting for all Cuba on the twenty-meter band at 5:00 and 9:00 p.m. daily. I’m Station Director Captain Luis Orlando Rodríguez.”
This Rodriguez is not related to us. I glance from the soldiers to my sisters, the men lounging, the women tense. Danita folds her arms, her heavily rouged face held in straitlaced obedience. Mercedes rests plump hands over her knees, her teeth clenched around a half smile, and Oneila tilts her head as if the rebel news is of great interest. Mamá’s face is placid, her chest stilled as if she is holding her breath.
I listen, standing at the far end of the room wishing I could lie down. My legs are weak, and I am terribly thirsty. The last thing I had to drink was the fruity cocktail on the plane, but I don’t dare excuse myself for a glass of water. The dark-pitted eyes of the soldier who took my papers and drove the jeep are on me. His hair sticks out from under his beret, curling thick around his ears, shiny and brushed, his mustache trimmed down to a thin beard that circles the bottom of his chin. He stares at me with intrigue as the station director reports a successful attack on the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities carried out by rebel leaders and the rural underground movement. The man nods, smoothing his lips together as we are given a detailed description of the gunning down of three of Batista’s secret police and the capturing of a fourth before the announcer’s satisfied voice snaps off, and a female singer begins an upbeat song about love under a coconut tree.
I glance out the window to the ficus, its roots like a hundred snakes slithering to the ground. Under them it is dark with shadow, and I can no longer see you.
* * *
That night I lie with you pinned under my arm. Mamá sleeps in the bed next to us, Oneila and Danita are in a second room, and Mercedes with her three small children—the youngest of which, I am told by Oneila, wakes screaming with night terrors—in a third bedroom. You begged me to let you sleep in the room where Josepha and Oneila’s two teenage daughters sleep, but I said, No. I want eyes on you.
Despite how little sleep I’ve had, I am wide-awake. It was a mistake to come. A horrible miscalculation. If I miss the costume screen test for Rio Bravo, they’ll recast my role. I can fix this, I think, rolling over to face the breeze from the window. I will get word to Ed or Duke. I will get us out of here. All of us. I can’t let Mamá face this alone, or my sisters. Besides, I have missed the company of women, these women, my sisters. Even Danita’s anger is a comfort. We always fought, and I like that she still treats me as a sister and not a friend. I have enough friends; family is different. There is spit and fight and love between us. There is loyalty.
Outside the wind picks up. The palms slap their leaves together, and the air through the window smells of rain. It is typhoon season. As a child I loved typhoon season. With the doors bolted and windows latched, I would watch the wind tear up the earth and the rain slam it back down. I always knew I was safe, the house around me still and quiet and solid as rock.
I do not feel that way now. The walls have become porous, the armored men who have bolted us behind our own doors mightier than the wind.
You stir in your sleep, and I roll back over and rest a hand on your forehead remembering my nanny Farah, how she danced at the foot of my bed, how much I loved her. I never saw her again after the day the fields burned. For years I’d look for her on walks into town or when we’d drive to Havana, search the dark faces of women washi
ng clothes in the river or bent over outdoor fires. When she’d worked for Mamá, she was a young woman with no children. Where is she now? Fighting with the rebels or fighting at home to protect her family?
Low, male voices float through the window, and I wonder if they are directly under it keeping watch. I can’t hear what they are saying. How stupid I’ve been. News in the United States reported Fidel Castro as an uncontrollable dissident hiding in the hills with underfed men and makeshift weapons. How did we not know what was really going on? I had watched the black-and-white clips, miniature soldiers marching across the television screen to thematic music, the announcer’s voice declaring that, after President Batista deployed ten thousand soldiers to get rid of three hundred rebels, the US now saw Batista as a corrupt and brutal dictator and would no longer back him. Mamá had slammed a fist into the arm of the sofa. “Disgusting, suspending assistance to a country they have reaped the financial benefits of for years.”
Cuba will always be my homeland, but I have been a US citizen since I married Grant, and even if I’ve not been very politically minded, I’m a fan of Eisenhower. I figured the US president knew what he was doing. Batista’s strength in numbers spoke for itself. But now that I am here, I feel betrayed by the US. They are supposedly an ally and neighbor to Cuba. How could they let it go this far?
* * *
The soldiers keep us locked in, stationing guards outside the house. Within a week, I have lost hope of getting word to anyone in Los Angeles. By the time this ends, my film career will be long forgotten.
I sing to stay hopeful. We all do. There’s music with breakfast and lunch and dinner and most hours in between. If I’m not singing, then one of my sisters or nieces is. Even Mamá joins in, and Josepha has taught you that singing isn’t all about skill. The two of you stand arm in arm belting out notes that fold into the sounds of the instruments, guitars strummed by Oneila’s older daughters, pots banged by Mercedes’s little ones. While we cook and clean, before bed and while falling asleep, our voices soar and hum and harmonize. It keeps us partly sane. More than anything, it is the stagnation of the ceaseless days that makes me feel crazed. With no forward motion, there’s nothing to anticipate. With nothing to anticipate, life pales into a ghost of itself. And I am becoming a ghost of myself.
At least the soldiers don’t sleep here. They come for dinner, listen to Radio Rebelde and then head across the street to their barracks in the stone building Mamá’s father, Abuelo Gonzalo, built to house the slaves before slavery was abolished in 1886, at which point it housed Black people. I remember asking my abuelo what the difference was. He’d looked at me over his reading glasses and said they were paid, that was the difference, and that they could leave anytime they liked. He had Mamá’s eyes, rich and brown and reassuring, a thin, old man with great wrinkles down his neck and a white beard trimmed long and pointy over his chin.
“Where would they go?” I asked, thinking of the Blacks I’d seen washing their clothes in the river and cooking over open fires.
“Anywhere they damn well please.”
It seemed far nicer to me to live by a river than across our dusty road in a building like a small fortress. “Then, why don’t they go? Why don’t your workers sleep and eat in huts with their families like the rest of the guajiro?”
“If the Blacks eat and sleep in one place, they’ll be united and work with each other instead of against each other,” he said. “So if they want to work for me, then they live across the street.”
After they united and worked together to burn down the henequen and sugarcane fields and oust Machado, I wondered if my abuelo ever felt guilty that he’d been so right.
After the 1933 revolution, I never saw my abuelo again. He moved to Santiago with Abuela Osita and didn’t visit. Papa turned against him by siding with Batista, and Mamá turned against Papa by siding with her father. Thinking back, my parents were as young and stubborn and sure of themselves as these rebel soldiers who now sit—nightly, demanding food—at the same table we all sat at the morning our servants disappeared.
Even though none of the women in our family are good cooks, my sisters do their best to feed these new rebels. Oneila at least knows how to boil yucca, fry plantains and cook horsemeat into stew. We have little food to work with. The rebels bring whatever food supplies they have and don’t seem concerned about what we set in front of them.
Riel, I learn, is only fifteen years old. The man who led me to the jeep by my elbow, Riel’s elder brother Alipio, is all of seventeen. The third man, the one whose eyes track me when I move in and out of the kitchen with plates of poorly cooked food, is an Argentinian by the name of Ernesto Guevara, but everyone calls him Che.
Danita tells me he is Fidel Castro’s second-in-command. And I wonder why we Rodriguezes are so important to him.
I have known different versions of men like Che. Not ones who have killed, but ones who find pleasure solely in power. Whatever version—fat, red-nosed producers in gabardine suits, alluringly handsome directors in white jackets and bow ties, or angry young men in armbands and berets—they all have the same simmering look in their eyes. Drunk on ego, they believe that their power is a drug we all feed on, that we obey them not out of fear but because we desire to please them.
I wonder if they know, or care, how much hatred pours into our hearts as we smile, serve them plates of warm food and pretend we don’t notice their hands violating our thighs, the curve of our rumps and the tender skin at the small of our backs.
Chapter Twenty-One
* * *
Dirty Secrets
Mother,
I never knew it was possible to know so many secrets about one person. Josepha said that, even though she has eighteen other cousins, she’s never had one she could trust before.
“I knew the moment I saw you that you were trustworthy and we were going to be best friends. I’ve never had a best friend. Have you?” she says, her intense eyes probing mine.
“No.”
We sit in the grass eating the figs we’ve plucked from the branches of the ficus, warm and swollen and thickly sweet. The ground is littered with them, the air sticky with the scent of overripe fruit. Here, I speak nothing but Spanish, which reminds me of the time before Villa Cabrini Academy when I was little and we spoke only Spanish at home. When you left me at boarding school, the nuns were horrified that I couldn’t speak English. I remember the humiliation on your face when Sister Katherine scolded you for not raising me as a proper American.
After that, you and Grandmother spoke only English to me.
I bite the nubby end off of my fig and spit it into the grass. The sky is tense with low clouds and a sharp warm wind. A storm wind, Josepha says, brewing since we arrived a week ago.
“Do you think your papa will come back?” I ask, wondering how long our house arrest can last. The soldiers keep the front of the house locked and guarded, but it’s easy enough to climb out the back windows. They’ve seen us in the yard and don’t seem to care. When we first met, Josepha told me rebel soldiers took her father in the night, marched him and our grandfather from their bedrooms in their bathrobes, put them in a jeep and drove away.
Josepha brightens at the question, sucking her fig like a lollipop. Unlike me, she wears her emotions on the outside, flitting from sorrow to delight in seconds. “Of course he’ll come back. Fulgencio Batista would never let anything happen to him. My papa’s a hero, you know. He killed two men and wounded three in the attack on the Mancado barracks. Mamá says Batista should never have let Fidel and his brother out of jail and that the rebels have as good as won, but I don’t believe her. If that was true, we’d be in Miami already. Aunt Oneila says we’re here because my mamá refuses to leave without my papa, and they refused to leave her. All but your mamá. But that was different: she left a long time ago. Mamá says sisters are the best thing a woman can have, even the ones who leave you.” Josepha tosses
her fig aside and leans close to me, hugging her knees. “What is it like, to live in Hollywood and have a movie star for a mother?”
I finger the wooden spoon you gave me in my pocket. I carry it everywhere. “It’s boring. I go to boarding school.”
“No!” Josepha cries.
“I am not the movie star.”
“I suppose not. You’re too ugly, which I can say without being mean because you’re still prettier than I am.” Josepha bulges her eyes, making me laugh as she wiggles her eyebrows, which are as thick as caterpillars. “Our wicked mamás didn’t give us any of their beauty. I suppose it’s for the best. If one of us was beautiful, the other would be jealous. My mamá would never admit it, but she’s wildly jealous of Aunt Estelita. Who wouldn’t be? Your mamá is grand. Mine said the rebels keep your mamá here for political advantage: an expatriot, an American citizen and a Hollywood actress!” She leans in and whispers, “Really, they just want to sleep with her. Either way, she’s a valuable catch for the Castro brothers.”
“Then, what am I?” I ask, partly in jest and partly fearful. I imagine the soldiers trading my mother like a ring in a pawnshop.
“Useless. We both are without breasts for them to fondle.” Josepha reaches into her shirt and cups her hand around the very small rise of a beginning breast. “Wouldn’t fill a teacup. Let me feel yours.” She reaches under my shirt, her hand hot against my nipple. “Nothing.”
We burst out laughing. My eyes water, and I snort, the laughter like soda bubbles coming out my nose, which makes us laugh harder. I don’t even know why I’m laughing, but it feels intoxicating, like a sensation I’ve been reaching for my whole life.
On our backs, not looking at each other, we finally catch our breath. Heavy clouds press overhead, but I am light as sunshine. “I don’t want breasts,” I say. “I don’t want any boy ever looking at me.”
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