The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  In the few seconds she and Liliana held each other, Celia felt health and vitality radiating from the young body and from herself a responding surge of affection. She pushed back Liliana’s dark brown curls and openly examined her niece. Her eyes sparkled. She was anything but sick. So why wasn’t she at school? Celia might have asked but preferred to wait and let Liliana explain, as she was sure she would.

  “The conference was fine, and I enjoyed seeing Franci and Philip. I am tired, though. The train broke down twice so the trip took hours longer than it should have.”

  Liliana sprawled across Celia’s bed and looked her up and down. “You don’t look tired. You look like—did you get a haircut or something?”

  “No.” Celia felt suddenly self-conscious. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Younger.”

  Liliana’s intuitive recognition of something Celia felt but had assumed did not show caused her to catch her breath. She covered it with a laugh. “I doubt I got much younger in four days. What about you? What have you been up to?”

  “You won’t believe it when I tell you. You are going to flip out.”

  Celia flopped across the bed next to her niece. “Go ahead,” she challenged. “I have not had a good flip-out all day.”

  Liliana smirked. “I went to Varadero with your two fiancés.”

  “Liliana, I only have one.”

  Liliana held up two pink-tipped fingers and pointed to them as if teaching a pre-schooler to add. “One past, one present, which makes two. And I had lunch at La Casa de Al with both of them.”

  “La Casa de Al?” Celia was shocked.

  “Tío Joe paid. The check was more than Tío Luis makes in a month!”

  “Ay! That José!” Celia exclaimed indignantly.

  “And he bought me a T-shirt. Wanna see?”

  Before Celia could reply, Liliana was off the bed and into her own room. Celia waited uneasily. It was no surprise that José would have played the big spender. But why was Liliana with them? Luis, in telling her he planned to go to Varadero with his brother, had not said anything about taking her along.

  “And then,” Liliana called from the next room, “we went dancing.”

  “They took you dancing ?” Celia cried. “Where?”

  “I knew you’d be jealous.” Liliana’s voice wafted from her room in a sing-song tease. “At SuperClub Puntarena. There was this great band playing poolside, and you should have seen them go at it. Tío Luis is an awesome dancer, you know. The kind other dancers stop to watch.” There was a pause, and Liliana called, “But Tío Joe is more fun.”

  Celia stood abruptly, opened her travel case, and began flinging things into various bureau drawers. All good fun, she told herself, but what she felt was closer to anger. What might have kindled that emotion she could not have said. Certainly not jealousy. Perhaps it was the image of her adorable niece gyrating on a dance floor encircled not by teenaged peers but by lecherous, half-drunk foreigners—not to mention two men old enough to be her father who were not altogether immune to lechery themselves.

  “Ta da!” Liliana pranced into the room, snapping fingers and jerking her body to a rhythm only she could hear.

  “Stand still,” Celia laughed. “Let me read it.”

  Liliana stopped and stuck out her chest. Overlaying Liliana’s firm young breasts was the face of a member of the Cuban women’s volleyball team. Celia read the caption: “She walks like a girl, she runs like a girl, she serves balls at one hundred kilometres per hour like a girl.”

  “You little minx!” Celia laughed.

  “Like it?” Liliana moved to the mirror to admire herself. “I picked it out myself.”

  “Cute. But I intend to have a word with your ‘uncles’ about appropriate outings for a girl your age. Not to mention taking you out of school.”

  Instantly the oomph went out of Liliana’s posture. “Please don’t,” she said in a small voice. “Tío Luis is already mad at me.”

  Such mood swings were not unusual for Liliana. The needy little girl she had been when she came to live with Celia eight years earlier had gradually evolved into a sassy adolescent. However, in the blink of an eye the adolescent could, and often did, retreat into the child. Celia actually liked both. She felt tender toward the child and thought the sauciness boded well for Liliana’s future independence. Liliana had always insisted that she wanted to grow up to be “just like Tía Celia,” but Celia hoped that she would be different in some ways: less compliant, less easily manipulated. What she looked for in Liliana, and was just beginning to glimpse below the sass, was the independent spirit and courage of the girl’s mother. Those qualities could cost a person’s life, perhaps had cost Carolina hers. But they were qualities that could also save one’s life. They were qualities Celia wished she had more of, and treasured when they surfaced in Liliana.

  However, Liliana’s impudence often put her and Luis at odds. He submitted to discipline and believed he was a better man for it. He did not understand Celia’s tolerance for her niece’s increasing independence, manifested in occasional disobedience. Celia was absolutely certain he would not have pulled Liliana out of school to go to Varadero.

  “How did you happen to go to Varadero with them anyway?” she asked in a neutral voice.

  Liliana fell onto the bed as gloomy as if expecting to be condemned to a lifetime of house arrest. “I didn’t exactly go with them. I was on my way there when they picked me up.”

  Celia turned away and began refolding already-folded underwear in her bureau drawer. Liliana always talked more openly when she wasn’t being questioned. This time it was a full minute before she continued, a pause that Celia found ominous.

  “Tío Luis got so mad I thought he was going to hit me. He said when we got there I’d have to wait in the car, but . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “They invited you to lunch, bought you a T-shirt, and took you dancing,” Celia finished with just a hint of irony. What she was thinking was, They did not do that. Damned José did that. When I get my hands on him!

  Liliana watched her anxiously. “Please, Tía, don’t be mad.”

  With effort, Celia kept the irritation out of her voice. “I’m not.”

  She stood there a moment longer, looking at the folded underwear. Three pairs of white cotton panties, three white bras. The spartan intimate apparel of a nun. “I am going to take a shower,” she said finally. “Would you wash those dirty dishes in the sink?”

  “Claro,” Liliana said in a small voice.

  Celia closed the bureau drawer and set the travel case in the closet. She stripped down to bra and panties and went into the bathroom. There she took them off, to be washed in the shower. It was a habit she had developed during the Special Period when underwear could not be replaced, having disappeared from regular Cuban stores and for a time being available only in stores requiring dollars, which she did not have.

  She stepped into the shower, the first since the one she had taken at Franci’s to remove the scent of Miguel’s lovemaking. She had not wanted to take that shower, had not wanted to lose that smell. But it had been necessary; otherwise Franci surely would have noticed. Now, too, the hot shower was a necessity, not to wash away evidence of past passion but to wash away tension caused by a feeling of imminent danger.

  Not danger, she corrected herself. Just something to be dealt with. Liliana might have been exaggerating, but if Luis was as angry as she said, it would not have been for hitchhiking, which was common among Cubans of all ages. It would have been for cutting class and—Varadero? What was that all about?

  Celia turned up the temperature of the shower and absorbed its stinging heat as if to cleanse herself to the bone. To the brain. Above all, she must be clear-minded. No matter how many calming possibilities suggested themselves, she was pretty sure that whatever Liliana had done was no casual indiscretion. She must have crossed some kind of line. She turned off the water in time to hear Liliana call out, “Come in.”

  The
clatter of dishes revealed that Liliana was still in the kitchen and had not come out to greet whoever was at the door.

  “If you’ve come to rat on me,” Liliana yelled to the visitor, “don’t bother. I’ve already told Tía Celia everything.”

  Then Luis’s voice. “That you cut class to go to Varadero? How you were dressed?”

  Celia did not take time to dry off but pulled on a terrycloth robe and hurried out to interpose herself between them. “Hello, Luis.” She kissed him lightly on the lips.

  “Did she?” he asked. “Tell you what she did the minute your back was turned?”

  “I got the gist of it,” Celia equivocated. “I will have a talk with her.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.” Liliana called from the kitchen, emphasizing her point with the slam of pot against metal pot. She had taken off the new T-shirt before starting on the dishes and changed back into the white shorts and red-striped top she had been wearing when she first came in. Perhaps it was seeing so much of that perfect figure exposed that gave Celia her first glimpse of looming disaster.

  In her mind’s eye she saw Liliana not as a little girl clad in shorts racing about the neighbourhood with other children, but the way she had seen dozens of young women dressed, in very similar outfits but somehow less innocent: clothing that flaunted their youth, their beauty, their health, their sexual availability. She had seen them hitching along the highway, seen them hanging around Playas del Este, seen them on the heavily touristed sidewalks of Habana Vieja. And she had seen no small number of those still young enough to be classed as children in her own hospital. The unwanted knowledge that flooded her senses, combined with Luis’s interference and Liliana’s arrogant dismissal, caused Celia to lose her temper.

  “Liliana!” she spoke sharply. “Come here.”

  Liliana pulled the plug on the dishwater but did not exactly “come here.” She stopped in the kitchen door, crossed her arms, and rolled her eyes.

  “Do you have any idea how many girls are contracting sexually transmitted diseases?” Celia demanded hotly. “Here! In Cuba, which up to now has one of the lowest rates of HIV-AIDS in the world! Now tourists are bringing it in and—”

  Liliana dropped her mouth open in mock astonishment. “Gosh, Dr. Cantú, I thought a person couldn’t get AIDS from toilet seats. You think I might’ve caught it from a car seat ?”

  Luis, who had looked on with a stern but pleased expression while Celia lectured her niece, weighed in. “Cut the sarcasm, Liliana! If you won’t listen to Celia—”

  “You’ll have me put in a re-education camp?” Liliana challenged. “Forget it! Tía Celia is my madrina and she won’t let you.”

  Celia felt her emotions turn topsy-turvy. How had Luis and Liliana got to the point of confrontation before she even knew the details of what had happened? Even as the question raced through her mind, Celia guessed the answer. This was meant to be a showdown and each wanted her on their side. She would have to reassure both that their concerns would be heard and considered. But before she could speak to defuse the situation, Luis went too far.

  “The law is the law!” he shouted. “Celia may not have any say in the matter!”

  “Enough!” Celia snapped. “Liliana, if you have finished the dishes, go clean your room.”

  “I’m going out,” Liliana shot back. “So you and Fiancé Number Two can have it out.” She flounced out the door, but before slamming it, she stuck her head back in for a parting shot. “This is not about me, you know.”

  Sounds from elsewhere in the building could be heard, but the space around them seemed unnaturally quiet. Celia pulled a chair out from the dinette table and sat down. Luis moved behind her and hesitantly began massaging her shoulders.

  “Long train ride?”

  “It was.”

  “I guess from now on it will be necessary to leave her with Mamá and me when you are away. That is, unless you and I—”

  “Did you and José really take her dancing at one of those glitzy hotels?”

  Luis’s hands paused on her shoulders, then began to massage again, weakly. “More a case of her taking us. I can tell you, Celia, it was not the first time she had been there. She knows her way around and how to get into places she is not supposed to be. I looked into it. At this point, six months in a re-education camp would be the best thing for her.”

  Celia drew the terrycloth robe more closely around her. “I don’t believe that. If she was skipping school regularly, her grades would show it.”

  Luis’s hands dropped away from her shoulders and he moved around the table to face her. “No, Celia. Because she is smart enough to do both. I checked her attendance. Since January, her record shows several absences on days you were out of town. We picked her up just outside Varadero. Go through her things and you will understand.”

  “I would never do that!” Celia gasped.

  “Because you don’t want to know,” Luis accused.

  “She will tell me. She did tell me!”

  “Did she?” It wasn’t a question; it was a sneer. Luis strode into Liliana’s bedroom. Celia heard drawers being yanked open. Seconds later he dumped an armful of clothing—if it could be called clothing—on the table in front of her.

  It was cruel and tangible proof of the jinitera images Celia had banished from her imagination: spiked heels, platform shoes, lycra shorts, see-through blouses, frilly underwear, expensive imported cosmetics.

  “Tell me you bought this crap. All available, as you well know, only for dollars.”

  Behind her, Celia heard the apartment door ease open. “Tía Celia, Tío Luis, I’m sorr—” Mid-syllable, the contrite voice changed to a banshee wail. “You’ve been snooping in my room! Gone through all my stuff!”

  Celia turned and looked at her niece. In a voice so neutral she might have been commenting on the unwashed dishes, she said, “I think you owe us an explanation, Liliana.”

  “Go to hell, both of you!” Liliana screamed, backing out.

  Luis was after her in a flash. Liliana fled down the stairs. Celia moved to the door in time to see him catch her on the landing. He only held her by one wrist. With the other hand, Liliana beat on his chest and would have hit him in the face had he not blocked her wild blows. She shrieked incoherently. He held on, doggedly and silent.

  Liliana gasped for breath, and in that splinter of silence, Celia’s words carried clearly. “Let her go, Luis. Liliana, come here.”

  He instantly released his grip, probably assuming Liliana would respond to the authority in Celia’s voice as he had. Instead, she raced down the stairs. There was a short silence, followed by the sound of apartment doors easing shut as neighbours who had peeked out to see what was going on understood that whatever it was, it was over.

  “Oh my,” Luis said wretchedly, trudging up from the landing. “What a mess.”

  “Never mind. I can deal with her when she comes back.” Celia did not add, But only if you are not here. What she said was, “I need time to think. I need to be alone.”

  Luis stopped halfway down the hallway and stared. “You mean you don’t—”

  “I am very tired,” Celia said. She closed the apartment door quietly and leaned against it. It was a minute, perhaps two, before she heard Luis’s footsteps retreating down the stairs.

  The stillness that followed felt like the cessation of a storm. Celia knew better. This was the eye of a hurricane, those few still hours before the howling would begin anew. This storm, the path of which could not be charted, would cut a swath of devastation through all their lives.

  TWENTY-TWO

  JOE managed to feign steadiness long enough to convey to his guests, government officials and potential business partners, that he had had a jolly good time at the cabaret. Only when the last one had been seen to his car or poured into a taxi did he drop the act and admit befuddlement. Where the hell had he left his own car? Not the BMW, which he greatly missed, but the damned Daewoo.

  He spotted it near t
he end of the block. As he walked unsteadily toward it, he realized that a woman was shadowing him. He turned to size her up. She had thin legs, thin hips, full breasts, and full lips. Not bad.

  “Amigo,” she murmured. “Could you give a girl a lift?”

  He considered it, then remembered his agenda. “Chica, if I didn’t have an early meeting—” He fumbled the key into the lock of the car door.

  She stood close to him, breathing warmth onto his neck. But as he struggled to open the car door, she backed away. “I see.”

  Joe was not seeing all that well himself, not even the damned car door, which he was having trouble unlocking. By the time he got it open the woman had walked on. He was surprised that she had been so easy to shake off. Maybe she wasn’t a prostitute, just an employee at the club hoping for a lift home? He looked down the street in the direction she had gone but she was already out of sight.

  For a moment he sat in the driver’s seat wondering if he was too drunk to drive to Pinar del Río. Should he go back to his mother’s apartment? But no, he reasoned. He was barely a mile from the Habana-Pinar freeway, which at this time of night would be empty of traffic. It was no more than a two-hour drive to Pinar. He could still get half a night’s sleep. That plus a shower and he’d be plenty sharp for his morning meeting.

  “Aren’t you going to say hello?”

  The voice, coming from directly behind him, caused him to jump violently. He jerked around and found himself facing Liliana, smiling with sleepy sweetness.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “You left the car unlocked. If I hadn’t come along somebody might’ve stolen something. Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  “Not particularly. How did you know I was here?”

  “I’m psychic.” She smiled mysteriously, enjoying her little secret. “The car was unlocked.”

  Confusing as the situation was, Joe knew that this was not a product of his personal alcoholic-induced confusion. On that he was quite clear. “Look, I haven’t got time to take you home. I’ll put you in a taxi.”