The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  “Luis Lago.” They reached across the table and shook hands. “Always?”

  “I was born here. My father worked on the estate that is now Parque Josone.”

  “Really!” Luis exclaimed. “They say the owner was so fanatical about privacy that he built a tunnel under the road so he could walk to the beach without being seen.”

  “It’s true,” Madera smiled. “Although that was well before my time. Back when the whole peninsula was owned by a few rich families.”

  “You must have seen Varadero through a lot of changes!” Luis sipped his coffee and looked at Madera with interest.

  “More than you can imagine. When the Revolution triumphed, I was in secondary school in Habana. I volunteered for the campaign to eradicate literacy. We were sent here for teacher training. My group was housed in Cuatro Palmas.”

  “Batista’s own villa!”

  Madera laughed. “If you don’t think that wasn’t a change! Of course, it was later turned into a tourist hotel. Which it still is.”

  Luis leaned forward. “I considered going into teaching. Did you like it?”

  “Very much. I spent a year in Guantánamo Province, then came back and taught at the Universidad de Matanzas until retirement.”

  “Then switched to tourism?” Luis prompted.

  Madera gave a wry, sideways smile. “Given what happened to the economy in the early nineties, it was that or a gardening co-op. I don’t have much of a green thumb, and I do speak English, so . . .” He gave a self-deprecating shrug. “Here I am.”

  Seeing that his host was about to rise, Luis quickly rose too. “Thanks for the lunch. It hasn’t been an easy day. Problems like this—” He gestured toward the flyer.

  Madera glanced again at Liliana’s pictures. “I understand. Sometimes I wonder if we have done the right thing, going the tourist route. It is contaminating them, you know. It flaunts what they don’t have and causes them to overlook what they do.”

  “I know,” Luis agreed. “We all know. In government, that is. It is debated every day. But what can one do?”

  “What can one do?” Madera echoed.

  Rather than return to the parking lot where he had left the Fiat, Luis walked along the beach until the sand gave way to rough diente de perro. Just before reaching the rocks, he sat down. Little by little, the late afternoon sun turned the hard anger that had fuelled him through the day into something softer, more digestible.

  He had often sat here, perhaps in this very spot, back in the days when they had spent weekends at the now-disappeared campismo—he and José and Carolina and Celia and Franci and Joaquín and all the others from their Vedado neighbourhood. Sometimes, tired of chasing each other like puppies across the sand and into the surf, he had walked to this far end of the beach alone. What tired him more than their games was watching girls he liked as they paired off with other boys. Celia had been the last to do it. Perhaps because she seemed more serious than the others, he had fantasized most about her. But of course, it was José who bedded her in the end. The only mercy was that she had not given in to José then, but later, when they were in college and Luis was already at the ministry, involved with work he deemed important.

  Having completed what he set out to do that day, Luis no longer needed to think about his appearance. He removed shoes and socks and lay, belly down, on the beach. How often as a boy he had lain just so, imagining the soft warmth beneath him to be Celia’s body. Some long time later, it was. Now, again, it was only sand.

  FORTY-TWO

  CELIA returned to the autopista and stayed on it all the way to Santa Clara, then drove south over the Sierra Escambray, on a road much rougher than she remembered. A previous trip along this route, made with other medical school students, had been to a spa high in cloud forest. It was part of the government’s medical tourism program, aimed at giving the students a sense of what Cuba had to offer foreigners.

  “A health holiday,” their instructor had said. “In return, Cuba gets hard currency and an international reputation for our doctors. Given the necessity of tourism to rebuild our economy, medical tourism will be the cleanest, the least corrupting to our youth.”

  Being only twenty-something herself, Celia did not understand the reference to tourism as a corrupter of youth. Now, recalling the promise of “clean” tourism, she was saddened that that earnest effort had not earned enough foreign currency, and Cuba was compelled to turn to recreational tourism to keep the economy afloat.

  As she drove the last steep bit up to the village of Topes de Collantes, she passed a flock of foreigners in matching blue jogging suits that bore the name “Kurhotel.” The spa was now famous for post-operation recovery, as well as for fitness programs to lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of heart attack. She waved as she passed. Whatever these middle-aged foreigners were about, at least they weren’t lying around with a drink in one hand and a Cuban girl in the other!

  Because she was watching the joggers as they and she climbed the hill toward town, Celia failed to notice that the temperature of the car was also climbing. Only when she came around the curve in front of the massive seven-storey Kurhotel did she glance down and see that the temperature gauge was well into the red. She pulled to the side of the road, wondering what she should do. Regardless of the spa, Topes was like most small Cuban communities in that it had no commercial centre, gas station, or garage.

  A boy of ten or so walked slowly by, his gaze caressing the convertible.

  “Hola, amigo. Is there a garage in town?” Celia asked him.

  He came to the drivers’ window. “No, compañera.”

  “What about a mechanic?”

  “For this máquina? Oh sure!” The boy’s eyes lighted with anticipation. “Want me to take you to his house?”

  “That would be great.” Celia opened the passenger door. “What is your name?”

  “Simón,” he replied, closing the heavy door so delicately that she had to reach across him to slam it harder.

  He studied the dashboard gauges. “She has overheated,” he announced.

  “I know. That is why I need a mechanic.”

  “Don’t worry. Obregón will know what to do.”

  “Is he close by?” Celia fretted. “The engine is awfully hot.” What she was really concerned about was whether this Obregón person might live up one of the town’s steep hills, which would overheat the car even more. Fortunately, the opposite was true; it was a downhill glide of only a block. Celia parked in front of the small house and started toward the door, but Simón motioned her to follow him around to the back.

  “He’ll be in the backyard, working,” the boy explained.

  The area behind the little cinderblock house was grassless but shady. Along the back of the lot was a carport that held four ancient cars. A fifth was in pieces, carefully laid out on the ground next to a man who was hammering on a piece of metal. The hammer paused in mid-air as Celia and the boy came around the corner of the house.

  He was near Celia’s age and, she couldn’t help noticing, astonishingly good-looking. He had the narrow nostrils and high forehead of Spanish lineage, combined with tight black curls and full mouth of African ancestors. His hands were jet black, but that had nothing to do with his heritage; rather, his passion for mechanics. His smile revealed dazzling white teeth.

  “Obregón,” the boy called out. “The compañera has trouble with her máquina. A ’59 Chevy.”

  He gave Celia a polite nod and asked the boy, “What kind of trouble?”

  “She’s running hot,” Simón replied seriously. “All the way in the red.”

  “A ’59, eh? At her age, you can expect that in the mountains. How long did you drive it after the needle hit the red?”

  Celia turned what was probably a fair shade of red herself. “I am afraid I was not paying attention. I noticed it just as I came into town.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  The three of them walked around the house to the car. “Nice má
quina, no?” the boy said to the man.

  “Very nice,” Obregón replied. “How long have you had it?”

  “It is not mine,” Celia explained. “A friend lent it to me for this trip. I am on my way to Trinidad. What do you suppose the trouble is?”

  “Probably a bad fan belt or leak in the radiator. I can’t check it till it cools down.”

  As they spoke, a woman, hugely pregnant, came out onto the front porch. “Won’t you come in for coffee?” she invited Celia.

  “Actually, I drove from Habana this morning and really need to stretch my legs,” Celia replied with an apologetic smile, although in fact, what she wanted to do was walk back to the Kurhotel and leave a notice about Liliana there. There was virtually no chance of her being at the spa, but Celia reasoned that employees here must know hotel employees in nearby cities and could help spread the word. She turned to Obregón. “What if I walk down to the Caburni waterfall? Would that give you enough time?”

  “Time to cool so I can take a look. After that, well, it depends what the trouble is. As long as the radiator’s not blown I can probably have her running in time to get you to—Trinidad, you said?—by dark.”

  “It is not very far, is it?”

  “Only twenty kilometres, and all downhill.” To the boy he said, “Why don’t you walk our compañera to the trail head, then come back and help me check the máquina?”

  At the Kurhotel, Celia asked Simón to wait outside while she dropped off a flyer. She also phoned the school, the hospital, and Alma, even though it had only been four hours since her last call. They had nothing new to tell her.

  When she came out, Simón was waiting to discharge his duty as her guide. Although Celia’s thoughts were on Liliana or, more accurately, on her stupidity in having taken off as she did and getting stranded in this remote place, she tried to carry on a conversation with the boy. Simón told her that his father had been a worker at the local coffee processing plant but had recently received a grant of land from the government to grow coffee. “I don’t want to be a farmer,” he confided. “I’m going to be a mechanic like Obregón. He’s the best. Even with one leg.”

  “One leg?” Celia had noticed that the mechanic walked with a slight limp but had been too preoccupied with the car to wonder about it. “How did that happen?”

  “Banditos,” Simon replied, using the government’s name for counter-revolutionaries who had operated in the area in the early ’60s. Celia knew from Luis that the US-supported Contra War had lasted five years and resulted in three times as many casualties as the Bay of Pigs invasion, but as it had taken place before she was born and her own parents weren’t involved, she knew little about it.

  “Obregon got shot in the leg,” the boy explained matter-of-factly. “He doesn’t remember it because he was just a baby. I don’t know why his leg had to be cut off, but it was.” He stopped walking and turned to Celia. “You can see his village—not the real one but a model—in Trinidad at the Museo de la Guerra Contra los Banditos. There is a plane there too. An American bandito plane that got shot down. I went there with my class. We got to go right up and touch it.”

  Simón stared thoughtfully off across mountains that appeared and disappeared as peaks were alternately highlighted by the afternoon sun and obscured by swirling clouds. “I might be a pilot. Flying a plane would be fun. If it didn’t get shot down.” He stopped suddenly and pointed. “There’s the trail to the river. You get to the rapids first. If you want to see the falls you have to hike a little farther.”

  Following a trail through pine and eucalyptus forest, it took less than an hour to reach the river. As she stood watching water churn to white as it cascaded over rocks, the sun broke through. Her ears registered the songs of countless birds. Celia sighed deeply and sat down on a large rock.

  A tocororo on a nearby branch warbled its distinctive mating call. There followed a few seconds of silence, then, in a flash of red, white, and blue—colours for which reason it had been designated national bird of Cuba—a second tocororo glided to a bush almost within reach. Celia held her breath.

  As she watched the birds, seemingly so intent upon each other and so oblivious to her, her abdomen clenched with sexual tension. She remembered Miguel telling her how birds sometimes sat on his foot or perched on his head.

  Not a hallucination. Not the imagined words of a man who had been the lover of a woman she was not, but the words of a real man who had bedded her just a week ago. It seemed incredible that Miguel Ortega Ramos had not once crossed her mind since returning to Habana. Could it have been only seven days? Surely it had been the longest week of her life, a week spanned only by this feeling in the pit of her stomach, which for a startling instant made it seem as if his body had just lifted its weight from hers.

  Celia sat motionless, absorbed by the brilliant colours of the tocororos, their lilting song, the music of water over stones, and air saturated with the scent of pine and eucalyptus. Her breasts seemed to swell toward the warmth of the sun as, for a brief, unmeasured period of time she allowed herself the solitary pleasure of uncensored physical sensation.

  Then the bird flew and she rose, ready to resume her search for Liliana. It wasn’t that she had forgotten or lost her sense of urgency. It was simply that there were other things she sought as well—or other chimeras. At the moment Liliana herself seemed unreal—although whether it was the person Liliana seemed to have become or the girl she thought she knew so well who was the illusion, Celia could not tell.

  FORTY-THREE

  CELIA rolled into Trinidad just as lights were twinkling on. Instantly the car was surrounded by boys on bicycles, all screaming at her to follow them to a casa particular that rented rooms.

  “Get away from the car!” she shouted, terrified that she would hit one of them or that one of the bolder boys, riding with one hand on his bike handlebar and one hand on the car, would have an accident. In truth, she needed a guide and would have been grateful for a single nice boy like Simón to give her directions. But how did one deal with twenty or thirty of them at the same time? She had read about problems caused by jineteros in the more heavily touristed towns, but this was the first time she had experienced it. How off-putting it must be for foreigners who did not speak the language! Still, the boys must be earning something from it or there would not have been so many.

  “Go away!” Celia yelled at the boys, to no avail. Finally she stopped the car in the middle of the street and shouted in exasperation, “I am not a tourist! I have a friend here. Angelica Salina. Do you know where she lives?”

  She did not know Angelica well, knew her only as the mother of Nanita, who had been a college classmate. Years ago Angelica had come to Habana for Nanita’s graduation, which coincided with Celia’s. The Cantús had put her up for the week she was in the city, and Angelica naturally invited them to visit her. They intended to do that, as Trinidad was only six hours by bus from Habana. In fact, they were planning the trip when Carolina was posted to Angola. Then her mother was diagnosed with cancer, followed by death, followed by news of Carolina’s death. By that time Cuba had lost Soviet assistance and gasoline shortages made getting around extraordinarily difficult. For all those reasons the trip had never been made.

  There was a moment of babble before one said, “That’s Pepe Salina’s madrina.”

  “Where does she live?”

  There was another lively discussion, from which one of the smaller boys emerged, yelling, “I know. Follow me!”

  Off he went, on a bike so tall that he had to thrust his legs under the crossbar and ride sideways in order to reach the pedals. How he did it on the cobblestone streets Celia could not fathom but it seemed to work for him and he as a guide worked for her. The other boys backed off, no longer aggressive little hustlers but polite helpful teenagers—until the next hapless stranger rolled into town.

  She had not called Angelica to let her know she was coming, for fear that it might lead to questions that she preferred not to answe
r over the telephone to a woman she barely knew. All she wanted was a bed for the night and a chance to see for herself whether Trinidad was the kind of place to which Liliana might have been attracted. Or perhaps—was it too much to hope?—that she might actually find her here.

  The boy stopped before what she took to be an enormous house, centuries old. Two tall windows overhung the narrow sidewalk, each with iron bars on the outside and wooden shutters, open wide, on the inside. Massive doors, big enough to drive a truck through, also stood open. “Here,” the boy pointed and pedalled off.

  As Celia approached the threshold, she saw that the great house was not a house in the modern sense. Four-metre-high stone walls surrounded a large compound. Directly ahead of her was a paved courtyard with three rooms opening off either side. Beyond was a larger, unpaved courtyard. Celia could imagine carriages being driven through these doors in centuries gone by, with horses to be stabled in the back with other livestock.

  “Angelica,” Celia called. “Are you here?”

  A grey-haired woman came from a room toward the back, a kitchen, judging by the pot she held in one hand.

  “Que milagro!” Angelica cried, setting the pot aside and rushing to the door. She caught Celia by both hands and gazed at her as if her appearance at the door was in fact a miracle. “Celia Cantú, I can’t believe it’s you. Why didn’t you let us know you were coming? Nanita left only yesterday for Cienfuegos. If she had known you were coming she would have waited! Did you drive from Habana this morning? How is—” She broke off, perhaps remembering that both Celia’s mother and sister were dead. “Come. You must be tired. And hungry. You can’t have eaten yet.”

  So it was at the kitchen table that they talked. When Celia asked about the jineteros, Angelica sighed. “They do bother visitors. The tourists complain all the time. But the families who rent rooms—and there are hundreds here in Trinidad—can’t advertise. The boys bring them business and get a commission. In a way it’s fair because it does make it possible for boys whose families do not own homes to earn dollars too.”