Suspicion of Deceit
Page 9
"They're looking forward to it. The opera or Thomas Nolan will not be mentioned. I promise." He picked up his mug from the end table.
"I've wanted to talk to you all week," she said.
"If you would make up your mind about a house," he said, "we could get married, and then we could talk every night."
"Me? Make up my mind?" Gail smoothed her hand down the front of his collarless black pullover, tucked into pleated gray wool slacks, which were belted with snakeskin. "Anthony, tell me about Nicaragua."
"Why?"
"You said you would." "Did I say when?"
"Stop acting like a defense attorney," she said. "I talked to Rebecca Dixon Wednesday. She said it was horrible. She saw bodies. Bones rising from the earth. That's awfully grim."
Anthony sipped his coffee. "Yes, it was. I don't want to ruin our evening with it."
"What was Rebecca talking about?"
"We saw dead people. I told you that. It's a long story."
"Just give me the short version. Ten minutes."
"Gail, please. Not tonight."
"How long do you plan to avoid it?"
The sharpness in his tone startled her. "I am tired. I did not come here to get into a discussion about events that occurred twenty years ago, that do not matter to me, to you, or to anyone. I am not in the mood."
Slowly she sat up straight. "Fine. Then leave if you're in such a pissy mood."
They stared at each other. Color flooded into his cheeks, and his lips were pressed together so hard they turned white. Then he gave a shrug and stretched his arm toward the end table.
"If you put that coffee cup down, I swear to God I will break it over your head."
The mug hung suspended. He said, "Okay. I'm not leaving." It clunked softly onto the table.
"Dave and I—" Gail took a shaky breath. "Dave and I stopped talking to each other. It didn't happen immediately, and at first we hardly noticed, but then it became a habit, and one day our marriage was over. I don't want that to happen to us. I refuse to allow it." Anthony was frowning at the mug, positioning it just so. "It isn't Nicaragua I care about. It's you. Whatever you saw there had an effect. It's part of you, and I want to know what happened."
After a long silence, Anthony began to speak.
"Seth Greer knew a priest from Nicaragua who had come to the U.S. to do fundraising and recruit volunteers to help build schools and clinics. He passed through Miami and we spoke with him. He was a sincere and charismatic man, and we decided immediately to join his movement. Seth wanted to bring social justice to Central America. I wanted to strike a blow against Yankee capitalist oppression." He laughed softly. "That was the view I'd grown up with in Cuba—what my father taught me. I breathed it in the air.
"After the semester was over, we took a flight the next day for Managua. The city was still in ruins from the earthquake in 1972—a very poor city surrounded by slums. Whoever was to meet us at the airport never snowed up, so we had to find our own way to Los Pozos, about a hundred miles north into Jinotega province."
As she listened, Gail remembered things Anthony had already told her about himself. His decision to work in Nicaragua could not be understood otherwise.
Anthony had told her that he had grown up believing that he was part of a great change in human history.
Luis Quintana, a decorated hero of the revolution, had told his son that there would be no more inequality between the races and the sexes. No discrimination, no poverty. Teachers poured into the countryside, educating the peasants. Clinics were built. People referred to each other as compañero—comrade. There were ration coupons, but no one minded. For the first time, Cuba would be free. But always on the horizon were the exiles, backed by the Americans, preparing to invade. "I remember the missile crisis in 1962. Everyone was terrified that we might die in a nuclear explosion. My sister Marta watched the sea with binoculars. The entire country was mobilized."
In the Young Pioneers Anthony learned to take a rifle apart and put it back together. He marched .With the other boys, he jeered at the non-communist teachers expelled from the school. At twelve he went willingly to the countryside to do agricultural work, slept in barracks on jute mattresses, rose at dawn, and ate bread and sugared water before going off to the fields. He missed his father and sister, but was too much of a man to complain. He heard some of the others crying at night.
His mother had taken the two youngest children, leaving Anthony and Marta behind. His father said, She abandoned you. Caridad was a gusana, una traidora—a worm, a traitor—and her father Ernesto Pedrosa was a monster.
At fourteen Anthony would have been admitted to the Young Communist League—if he had not been attending junior high school in Miami. If he had not been tricked—or rescued—out of Cuba. Which was correct? The boy soldier kidnapped and imprisoned far from home, or the young prince saved by the king? They could not both be true. Or perhaps they were—depending on who told the tale.
Why had he boarded that DC-6 to Miami? Because he wanted to ask his mother why she had left. This had never been explained, since Luis had destroyed all her letters. Perhaps Pedrosa had forced her to go. In that case, Anthony would persuade her to come home. If she refused, then he would confront her with her selfishness. Luis, hospitalized for old wounds, knew nothing about it. Anthony had been told he would be on a return flight within a week.
He knew, walking out of customs at the Miami airport, seeing his mother run toward him, weeping, that his father had lied: She had never stopped loving him. In the next moment he saw the other lie: They had never intended to let him go home.
Anthony said, "When I was young, I thought my father was a hero, but he was only a man. Not a hero. Patriotic, yes, but he turned in his own brother for selling food on the black market He cheated without remorse on my mother. He said to me, a man isn't a man unless he has women. My grandfather was not that way. When I was fifteen he took me into his study and lectured me about women. His ideas sounded so old-fashioned. You must never betray your God, you? country, or your wife. I might have laughed if he hadn't spoken with such sincerity. He was—is—a man of great strength. Unfortunately, like my father, he can see only one side of things. "
This was the same study where late one night, passing by with a sandwich, Anthony had heard men's voices through the heavy door. He listened. They were jubilant about having blown up a radio transmitter in Pinar del Rio.
Expulsion from this house sent him not back to Cuba but into limbo—an outcast among the exiles. He found shelter with two friends, Seth and Rebecca.
"We took a bus to La Vigia, then hitchhiked the rest of the way. Los Pozos is a small village in the hills, very remote. The tops of the hills are covered in mist and rain, and the earth is red. Tremors are common, but after a while you get used to them. The weather is similar to ours in the summer. The sky is very blue, then it fills up with heavy gray clouds. The foliage is tropical and green, except where the farmers have cleared the land."
Gail could see the countryside as if looking at a series of snapshots. Dirt paths winding up the hills to tin-roofed shacks. Men in straw cowboy hats tending thin cattle. Women with long black hair. A little girl in a ruffled dress, no shoes. In the town, dusty streets and decaying red tile roofs. Banana leaves drooping in the rain.
"The organizer of the volunteer effort showed us what to do, then pretty much left us on our own. Seth and I were expecting to build a school, but there wasn't much to work with. We paid for lumber ourselves, expecting to be reimbursed. Rebecca worked in the clinic, which had no doctor, only a nurse. It was one room with six iron beds in it, no screens on the windows, and hardly any supplies or drugs."
For a while Anthony was silent, the empty mug in his hands. He leaned over to put it on the coffee table, then sat with his elbows on his knees.
"There were four of us, not three. A girl named Emily Davis came with us. I had met her at the university. We were dating."
"You took your girlfriend along?"
"We lived about a mile outside Los Pozos in a house that belonged to the church. It had a tin roof and concrete block walls painted turquoise, but the paint was faded and mildewed. The beds were folding army cots. On the wall was a framed print of Mary and one of Jesus with his heart in flames. Roosters would crow every morning outside the window. We had no plumbing, but there was a well. 'Pozos' means 'wells,' so at least we had plenty of fresh water. Anyway, it was not what we had expected, but we did the best we could, and for a while we were happy with our efforts. The people appreciated it. That helped.
"But I didn't go there to pick up a hammer. As soon as we had settled in and knew who was who, I sought out the rebels. I was twenty-two years old, bigger than most of the men there, in excellent physical condition, and very sure of myself. In Miami I kept a rifle and a revolver in my room, and I knew how to use them. I had studied Che, Fidel, Fanon, Marx, Lenin, the American and European leftists. Freedom would only come about by force—so I believed at the -time—and I was ready to join in the fight.
"There weren't many Sandinistas in that area— maybe fifty. The leader's name was Pablo. He was a few years older than I. He'd been in Cuba—there was a Sandinista training camp there, as well as one in Honduras. He was clever and educated—to some extent. He had a small library with books I'd studied, and we talked late into the night on many occasions. Most of his men were young and very poor. As uniforms they wore whatever they could find—usually surplus U.S. Army camouflage. Some of them carried bandoliers of mortar shells or rifle cartridges over their chests, and they put heavy weapons on burros or horses. To be a Sandinista, you took an oath of allegiance to Augusto Sandino and Che Guevara with your hand on the black-and-red banner. Patria libre o muerte. You don't even think of dying. Or you don't say so."
Gail looked wonderingly at Anthony, who still sat with his elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped. "You joined the Sandinistas?"
He laughed. "No. Pablo wouldn't have trusted me that far, but I felt like one of them. I even looked like a guerrilla." He stood up and spread his arms. "You should have seen me. Twenty-two years old, long hair and a beard, a sleeveless T-shirt and camouflage pants, and black boots. In the forest I carried an AK-47 that Felix Castillo lent me. And I smoked. What a tough guy."
She smiled up at him. "All you need is a sheen of sweat and a bandanna around your head like Rambo."
"Oh, we sweated a lot in that weather." Anthony's arms fell to his sides. "The rebels let me near them only because Felix vouched for me. I was a 'norteamencano.’ It was funny being thought of like that. I felt Cuban with Felix. We talked about home. I expected him to say it was still the paradise I remembered, but he said that if he had the chance, he would be in my shoes, living in Miami. We were both drunk when we had this conversation, otherwise he wouldn't have been so open. He told me about the prisons and what he had seen inside them. He didn't know anymore if it was right. The revolution was right, he was sure of that, but something had changed. Anyway, he wanted to get out of the country for a while, so he came to Nicaragua. I ignored most of what he said about Cuba because he was getting old and tired—he was almost thirty.
"Meanwhile our group from Miami was having problems. There were things going on among us—jealousy and resentment. Seth complained because I wouldn't take him along with me and Felix. He was older and he thought of himself as our group leader. He and Rebecca were constantly in fights. She was a feminist, and in Los Pozos a man didn't take shit from a woman. Rebecca and Emily hated each other. Emily complained about everything—the heat, the food, the people. She wanted to go home, but we didn't have the money for a flight back to Miami, and no way to get her to Managua. We expected any day to be repaid for the lumber we had bought, and I told Emily she had to wait."
He took some time putting his thoughts together. He glanced at the doorway through which Karen might come, if she were awake, but no one was there. The house was quiet. Down the street a dog barked. Then nothing.
"About six weeks after we arrived, government troops started searching the area for rebels, questioning the farmers. We found bodies of people who had disappeared. People we knew. Some had been covered over with a thin layer of dirt, others were dumped in the weeds along the road. But then things were quiet for a while, and we got on with building the school as best we could with some of the local men helping us on the project. One day we heard that the National Guard had hit the camp where the Sandinistas stored their weapons. Eleven rebels were killed, and half a dozen were captured. A few days later their bodies were dumped in the road to La Vigia. They had been tortured and castrated before being shot."
Gail closed her eyes. When she opened them, Anthony was looking at her. "Do you want me to finish now? Or later."
"No. I want to hear everything now."
He said, "La Vigia was about ten miles away. Not large, maybe two thousand people. Emily and Rebecca would go there once a week to shop, catching a ride with a farmer. Rebecca said that she had seen Emily talking to a known CIA operative in the market. These people were usually peasants who were paid to inform, and they would have informed on their own brothers, but in this case, the man was an American. It seemed clear that she had obtained information from one of us or one of Pablo's men she had talked to, then passed it to the CIA. We confronted her, and she denied talking to anyone in La Vigia. Rebecca was furious and hit her. Then Emily said she didn't know the man was CIA. By then we didn't believe anything she told us.
"I don't remember how Pablo heard about it. I don't know, but late the next day he came to the house with some of his men. It was raining, and we were inside waiting for it to stop. Emily saw them and went into the bedroom to hide. Pablo asked me what she had done. I was going to tell some he, but Seth was afraid of what Pablo would do to us. For a few minutes there was total chaos. Rebecca was cursing at Seth, and I was telling them both to shut up. Pablo sent one of his men into the bedroom to bring Emily out, then he sat her in a chair and he asked her what had happened. She was crying, but he was very calm. He just asked, like a father would ask a child. She told him that she had wanted to get back to Miami, and that the man had promised that the next time she went to La Vigia, there would be a ticket waiting for her at the hotel.
"It was still raining. I remember the noise on the tin roof, and how it came off the edge of the porch in streams. The yard was muddy with red dirt. Pablo took her out there and made her kneel. Then he shot her in the back of the head."
Anthony had his forehead in his palms. Staring at the floor between his feet. Gail leaned on his shoulder.
"Oh, no," she whispered. Her lips barely moved. "Oh my God."
"They gave us some shovels, and Pablo told us to bury her in the woods behind the house. Deep, so the rain wouldn't wash the dirt away. There was one man guarding us with an M-14. The sides kept caving in because of the rain, but we managed to get it about four feet deep. Rebecca wiped off Emily's face and closed her eyes. Then we lifted her in. It was beginning to get dark. We worked slowly filling in the grave, and somehow Seth sensed what I wanted to do. He pretended to fall, drawing the man's attention, and then ... I used my shovel.
"We ran into the woods, going north because they would expect us to head in the other direction. We had nothing with us, no money, not even our passports. We went as far as we could, then rested for a while and ran again until it was too dark to see. At first light we crossed a river, and I submerged to get the dirt and blood out of my clothes and my hair. I think that was the only time I cried, and I remember thinking, Stop it. Don't do this or we won't make it out of here. It took a week to reach Managua. Sometimes we found a ride. Usua
lly we walked, and we begged food where we could. At a small hotel on the outskirts of the city I found a telephone and called Miami collect. This was the strangest thing. My grandfather himself answered it in his study. I told him where I was. He told me to wait there. Within an hour—one hour—we were picked up in a Cadillac and driven to a house in a wealthy district of Managua. We were given rooms and baths and food and fresh clothing. Three days later we were in Miami on new passports. One of my grandfather's employees met us at the airport. He dropped off Seth and Rebecca where they wanted to go and he took me home."
Looking around at Gail, Anthony said, "You know, that was the first time Miami felt like home. It did. Like you see in the movies, I wanted to fall on my knees and kiss the ground."
Gail put her arms around him. "Are you all right?"
He laughed softly. "After twenty years, I think so."
"I mean . .. talking about it. I didn't know it was so bad," she said. "I wouldn't have asked if I'd known."
"No, you would have asked. You're like Pandora."
"How did you explain Emily's death?"
"Another question. You see?"
She leaned on his arm. "I just wondered."
"It's okay. Emily had lived with her aunt. Her mother was dead, and she hadn't seen her father for many years, so that made it easier. I couldn't do it immediately because I was in the hospital for two weeks with pneumonia, but when I recovered I went to see Emily's aunt. And you know, she accepted it completely, the story I gave her. We had decided what to say before we left Managua. Emily had fallen in love with one of the men in Los Pozos. We pleaded with her to come with us, but she refused. And that was the last we saw of her.
"Her aunt said she wasn't surprised. After all, Emily had fallen for me, a Cuban, and she had been warned. It was funny, in a way. This woman's prejudice saved me. Of course we should have told the truth, but a lie was easier. It was all we had the strength for."