The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  José laid a hand on her arm. “Do you want another mojito, Celia? Or wait for the wine? Our food should be here any minute.”

  Luis twisted around in his chair to look in the direction Alma and Liliana had gone. “I wonder what is taking them so long?”

  “I’ll go get them.” Celia rose and wended her way between tables of well-dressed diners. At this early hour most were still drinking rather than eating, lifting glasses that caught and refracted shards of light spilling down from glittering chandeliers.

  She was three-quarters of the way across the room when the strap slipped on one of her high heels. The shoe flopped on her foot, almost causing her to trip. She paused next to one of the Parthenon-like pillars, put a hand against it for balance, and lifted her foot to readjust the strap.

  Blinding light struck her like a blow, followed by a noise that seemed to shatter the world. Blackness closed in around her and she fell . . .

  . . . was falling, while simultaneously watching from afar, the falling silver plane, bodies flung out into space, too far away to see the faces. Was her father among them? Bodies young and beautiful, glints of gold hanging from their necks, the blue Barbados sea rising up to swallow them. For all the sacrifices made, the other side had won. Cuba’s children were dying. They and she were drowning in smoke, drowning in the sea, drowning in a noise like no other.

  EIGHTY-EIGHT

  CELIA emerged into a hell she could not have imagined. Screams sliced into eardrums already ringing from the explosion, mingled with crashing chandeliers, breaking dishes, falling plaster. What had been cool clean air was a fine whiteness that she could barely breathe and burned her eyes like salt. People were running in every direction.

  Celia stumbled toward where the ladies’ room sign had hung, only to encounter the remnants of a blown-out wall. Shoes lost, feet slashed and bleeding, she clawed her way to the top of the rubble. Beyond, where the restroom should have been, lay a gaping hole. The room below was strewn with shattered toilets and other debris, drenched by water gushing from broken pipes.

  “Liliana!” she screamed.

  Arms closed around her waist and pulled her back.

  “Let me go!” she shrieked. “Liliana is there!”

  “No! She’s below. She’s okay!” shouted José.

  Impossible! She could not be down there and okay! “Let me go!” she screamed.

  He did not release her but half-carried her through the rubble to the stairs, which were packed with people flowing downward, some walking, some supporting those who could not. Luis passed them carrying an unconscious woman in his arms.

  “Get out!” he shouted. “The ceiling’s caving in. Celia, Come! You’re needed!”

  José gripped Celia’s chin with one hand, forcing her to look at the people stampeding down the broad, curving stairway. “Look! There!”

  Celia saw Liliana then, just two steps below, fighting against the downward wave of people, trying to get up to the dining mezzanine. Luis shouted at her to turn around and go down, but she was almost at the top and kept coming until she was in Celia’s arms.

  “Tablecloths!” Liliana screamed. “We need the tablecloths!”

  “What the hell—!” José exclaimed. “Are you crazy?”

  Liliana dove into the choking dust and Celia, wrenching herself away from José, followed. Liliana grabbed every napkin and tablecloth that came to hand and Celia, comprehending, did likewise. Arms full, Celia started for the stairs but Liliana pulled her to the railing and pointed. “There! See Tía Alma? Throw them down to her!”

  Celia could not see Alma but Liliana let go her armload of white cloths and she did the same. José pushed both of them toward the stairs. Then turned aside to move an overturned table that lay on top of a waiter, pinning the man down in a pool of blood.

  The stairway had become less crowded, allowing them to move swiftly down. At the bottom Liliana drew Celia away from the mob now trying to jam itself all at once out the front door. She pointed to a lounge area where some of the injured were being placed on sofas and carpet. There might have ten or a hundred, impossible to tell as friends and relatives milled about and those wanting to help tried to get to the most seriously injured.

  “Over here, Celia,” Alma called. “Liliana, bandages! Hurry!”

  Celia knelt next to a person whose neck artery Alma was holding shut as best she could. Liliana stood over them and with a steak knife she must have picked up in the dining room began slashing a tablecloth into strips.

  Alma continued triage, directing help to the most seriously injured. “Liliana, bandages!” she called again and again. And, “Celia, here! This one next!”

  “Fidel.” The word rippled across the room, like an echo coming from every direction. “Fidel. Fidel. Fidel.”

  Celia heard Liliana say, “Look, Tía! It’s Fidel!”

  But Celia did not look. She was staring down into the face of the old mulatto waiter. His crinkly black hair that she had noticed before had a few grey threads was now white with plaster dust, and his white jacket was scarlet with blood. She knew even as she opened the jacket that there was too much blood; too much. His eyes said he knew it too. Legs stopped next to her, tan trousers she saw from the corner of her eye without really seeing, because she was trying to find buttons beneath the ruffles of the sodden shirt.

  “Comandante,” wheezed the waiter, blood bubbling out of his mouth as he spoke. Celia could not imagine how he found the strength to lift his arm, but he did.

  The legs next to her bent. A long-fingered hand, pale and age-spotted, enclosed the dark one in its grip. Celia looked up and found herself staring into brown eyes flecked with gold, eyes that she had supposed, from having seen them only on television screens, were much darker, but which in her hallucinations had always been exactly this colour. They seemed to be asking, How could this happen? Where is their humanity?

  Hers answered, Don’t ask. Just carry on. We have no choice.

  His eyes widened, but whether in comprehension or because at that instant they both felt the old man’s body give up life Celia would never know. Castro folded the hand gently onto the blood-soaked chest, stood erect, and moved away. Celia turned to see which patient she should attend next.

  “Look!” Liliana shouted. “They got them!”

  Across the lobby a knot of police prodded two handcuffed men toward the exit, one a young Latino tough, the other a short grey-haired man. When the captives glimpsed Fidel, the younger man tried to lift his hand in an obscene gesture, only to have it knocked down by the barrel of a policeman’s pistol. The older prisoner spat at the officer and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Fuck you, Castro, and the horse you rode in on!” then, “Chinga tu madre, Pendejo!”

  The crowd roared and surged toward them, forcing the police to form a cordon around the captives for their own protection. On the opposite side of the lobby, Fidel’s security people pressed him toward the exit.

  Celia turned back to the injured. She was about to bandage a child’s leg when Liliana appeared beside her. “I can do that,” she said. “You take care of her.” She pointed to a woman whose eyeglasses had imploded into her face.

  “Oh God,” Celia said under her breath, “I need—”

  A pile of items rained down beside her—bandages, antiseptic cream, scissors, and more. She sorted through them and found tweezers, which was exactly what she needed. Behind her she heard Liliana ask, “Where did that stuff come from?”

  José replied, “The boutique. Nobody was around so I helped myself.”

  “Santa María, Madre de Dios, Gracias!” Celia heard Alma exclaim. Seconds later she understood the reason for such fervent thanks. Teams of paramedics descended on them like a flock of white birds. Celia and other medical people who had been first on the scene fell back, letting the newly arrived professionals take over. The injured were eased onto stretchers and carried out, friends and relatives trailing behind.

  Celia went down on her knees again next to the
old mulatto waiter, who, being so obviously dead, had not been moved. It was pointless to close his eyes but she did it anyway. There was nothing else to be done

  She felt a stabbing pain in one foot and gave an involuntary shriek.

  “Be still,” Liliana said in a soothing voice. “I have to clean your feet. They’re bleeding all over the place. There’s a piece of glass in this one.”

  There might have been more useful things for Celia to do just then, but she did not look to see what they might be. She lay forward on the carpeted floor, next to the old mulatto, and allowed Liliana to practise all the medical skills she had learned in the past thirty minutes.

  When Liliana finished bandaging Celia’s feet and informed her that she could get up, Celia sat down on a nearby sofa and looked around. Most of the people remaining in the lobby were in uniform, police or hotel employees. Luis was talking to the police. A hotel employee was coming their way.

  Alma said, “Those were the terrorists. I know. I saw their shoes.”

  “Their shoes?” Celia said blankly.

  “Young man!” Alma called out to the hotel employee. “Can you help me find a restroom? If there’s still one standing?”

  “Right this way, compañera,” he said, taking Alma by the arm. “You were magnificent, by the way. Are you a doctor?”

  “Ambulance driver,” Celia heard her reply. “Retired.”

  EIGHTY-NINE

  JOE had always seen Celia as attractive, but not in an eye-catching way. Earlier, though, she floating up the steps ahead of him as they entered the hotel with a breeze swirling the skirt of her pale blue dress high enough to expose tan skin from taut thighs to trim ankles, he had had second thoughts about her beauty.

  If that had surprised him, what entered his mind as he crossed the lobby surprised him even more. As he walked through the wreckage toward a woman who looked pretty damned wrecked herself, that mysterious gold chain glittering on one ankle, something in the back of his mind crumbled like a piece of plaster disintegrating hours after the main explosion. It was the notion that Celia was going to haul him out of the wreckage of his marriage. That anklet. Not from him. Not from Luis. Not something she would have bought for herself. There was only one possibility: another man. Celia Cantú was not the woman he thought she was.

  The woman she was now was a mess, hair white with plaster dust and the front of her dress as covered in blood as if she had been stabbed. She and Liliana sat, fingers entwined, staring at the old mulatto. He was one of three people, all dead, who had not been moved.

  As Joe approached, Liliana looked up with reddened eyes. “He was our waiter.”

  Joe laid a hand on her chalk-dusty hair. “He was bringing our food when the explosion happened. It must have caught him broadside. How did you manage to get downstairs so fast? Celia thought she saw you go into the restroom.”

  “We did. But those men were in there.”

  “What men?”

  “The terrorists. Tía Alma was about to go in a stall when I saw feet in the next one over. I pointed, and when she saw two pairs of men’s shoes in the same stall we got out of there fast.”

  “But you couldn’t have known—” Joe began incredulously.

  “No. We just thought they were gay guys. So we went downstairs to find another restroom. That’s when I saw Fidel.”

  “You saw Fidel? Before the explosion?”

  “Yeah. He was in a conference room with a bunch foreigners.”

  “Where the hell was his security?” Joe wanted to know.

  “They were there but they didn’t take any notice of us until I tried to peek in for a better look. A guy in an army uniform with about a zillion medals pulled me back. Tía Alma asked him where we could find a toilet. He said upstairs and pointed over our head, where we’d just been. Tía Alma gave him one of her looks, and said, ‘We prefer one that isn’t being used by perverts.’” Liliana paused and shook her head. “You know, her attitude toward homosexuals isn’t very modern.” She glanced at Joe. “But maybe they were perverts. Normal gays would use the men’s room, wouldn’t they?”

  “I don’t know. Not my area of expertise,” Joe said gruffly.

  “Anyway,” Liliana continued, “when she told him about the men in the ladies’ room they all went crazy. Two ran in the room where Fidel was. One grabbed Alma and told her to show him which ladies’ room and another one took me by the arm and dragged me the other way and—”

  She stopped speaking as Luis walked up. “Where’s Mamá?” he asked.

  “Here,” Alma said as she joined them. “Shall we go?”

  Luis took her elbow and headed for the exit. As the others followed, Liliana slipped her arm through Joe’s and asked in a shaky voice, “Is this going to change things, Tío Joe? Like make it harder to fly back and forth between Miami and Cuba?”

  “Probably,” Luis answered for him.

  “There’ll be a lot of grandstanding,” Joe admitted. “Likely a lockdown on both sides for a while.”

  They passed through the lobby door and were standing at the top of the steps when Liliana stopped. Turning to face Joe, she said, “Then I guess, I think—I don’t want to go to Miami.”

  “Wait a minute!” Joe grabbed her by the arm. “You’re saying—”

  Liliana began to cry. “I changed my mind, that’s all!”

  “That’s all ?” Close to two thousand bucks he’d spent to get her out and she’d changed her fucking mind? Joe lifted a hand. He wanted to slap the flaky little snit from here to breakfast but settled for a finger in her face. “Listen, if you’re afraid—”

  “So what if I’m afraid?” Liliana blubbered. “Who wants to live where kids carry guns to school to shoot classmates they hate and grownups go around blowing up—”

  “Goddammit, Liliana! You don’t judge a whole country by its lunatic fringe!”

  “I know! I’m crazy! But they’re crazier! They tried to kill us!”

  “No!” José yelled. “We were just there. In the way!”

  “Enough!” Alma admonished José. “Can’t you see she’s upset?”

  As if Alma’s diagnosis gave Liliana permission to abandon the calm she had maintained through the crisis, she suddenly and completely fell apart.

  “Don’t you get it?” she shrieked. “Tía Alma went off to show that security guy what toilet those perverts were in and there was the explosion and stuff falling all around us and I thought my whole family was blown up!”

  Celia’s arms closed around her. “It’s okay, Preciosa. We are all here.”

  Luis said, “I don’t see a doorman, José. Shall we go get the cars?”

  Walking toward the parking lot, Luis placed an arm across Joe’s shoulder. Joe could never remember him making such a gesture before, but somehow it felt right. For the first time in his life, he was glad to have a brother.

  NINETY

  CELIA, wet-haired from the shower, was cold. Rather than go to her own bed, she got in with Liliana, who had showered first and was already asleep. Liliana slept soundly in the way of exhausted children and did not stir when Celia lay down beside her.

  Celia was exhausted too, but the adrenalin in her system had not abated. After a while she got up and headed for the kitchen to make herself a cup of cocoa. As she passed the telephone on the table at the end of the sofa, it rang. She picked it up. “Hola?”

  Joaquín’s hysterical voice came over the line. “Celia! Oh my God, is it really you? I can’t believe—tell me it’s you!”

  “Calmate,” Celia soothed. “It is me and I am okay. We all are.”

  “Luis said you were going to the Mundo Nuevo for dinner! The dining room—I’m looking at it now, on TV! So many injured!”

  “I know. But we were on the far side. We were not—”

  Joaquín was sobbing. “Let him go to trial. Burn in hell! But if you had been hurt I would have killed him with my bare hands! Oh, but they got him. This is a miracle!”

  To Celia, it sounded more like a
total mental breakdown. “Joaquín,” she said sharply. “What are you talking about? Got who?”

  “Luis Posada Carriles! Don’t you have the TV on? Turn it on, for God’s sake!”

  Celia started toward the set, holding the telephone to her ear. But the cord was not long enough to reach, so she stood where she was, listening to Joaquín.

  “Look, they’re showing his picture now! It’s him for sure!”

  “You mean the man they captured, the older one?” Celia, although staring at a blank television screen, dredged up an image of Luis Posada Carriles from a photograph that had appeared in Granma at the time he claimed credit for the bombing of other Habana hotels back in 1997.

  “See? For sure it’s him!”

  She could not speak.

  “Celia? Celia! Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” she whispered. “Are they actually saying the older one is Posada?”

  “Not yet.” Joaquín admitted. “But you can tell! Look at the eyes! That’s something that never changes!”

  “What about the other man, the younger one?”

  “A Salvadoran, like those who helped him before. He’ll be convicted same as they were. But Posada, the old devil, he always got away. Not this time, though!”

  Celia’s hands were shaking, causing her to wonder at the unpredictability of her own body. She had remained steady through all that had happened, but now this—a fragment of unsubstantiated news—made her tremble. She felt as if she had fallen through the roof of her own nightmare into a place she never expected to be: a world where the spectre of her fathers’ killers, still on the loose, no longer haunted her.

  “Thank you, Joaquín,” she finally managed to say. “When I get back from México we will get together. We will celebrate. Now let’s just . . . watch the news.”

  However, when she hung up Celia did not turn on the television. She went into the kitchen and with unsteady hands, made the cocoa. How ironic it would have been if the man responsible for killing her father had, over a quarter-century later and by purest chance, succeeded in murdering his only surviving daughter and granddaughter.