House Arrest (19 page)

Clarita’s mother had begged her not to marry him. That man will make you miserable, she said. I do not know this first-hand, but I have been told that she lived in a small, dingy apartment with no electricity or hot water and she waited for him while he was fighting in the hills.

But once he came back, once he saw me again, he could not stay away. Not that I wanted him to. There was no one else he could talk to the way he could talk to me. Clarita listened but with that blank stare of a woman who loves a man unconditionally, though she may not understand him. We scraped the money together to rent a tiny studio on the top floor of an apartment building near the Prado. I siphoned off money from my weekly allowance to pay for it.

It had an entrance off an alleyway, so it was easy for us to sneak in and not be seen. This was especially important for him because already he was getting well known. We furnished it with a simple bed, a small table, and two chairs, some dishes we found on the street. But I tried to make it nice. I brought yellow cotton sheets from home, sewed curtains out of an old floral fabric. I went to the
botánica
around the corner and bought votive candles, which we would burn in the light of the late afternoon. I bought statues of Santa Barbara and the Virgin Mother to protect us, and these I put over the mantel. When he came in, he kissed them first, then he kissed me, though no one would believe this if I told them.

At the
botánica
I also bought Desire Come bath oil and Nothing Can Go Wrong and Make Him Want Me floor washes. These, of course, I hid under the sink, where I knew
he would never look. I always arrived before three o’clock and waited for him. While I waited, I bathed in the oils I’d bought, or scrubbed the floor on my hands and knees. I am not a superstitious woman, but for him I did these things. I arranged flowers, made tea. The things my housekeeper did at home.

Then I would lie upon the bed where the sunlight streamed in and listen for his boots on the stairs. Some days he would not come. Then I would leave, dejected, at five o’clock, returning to my life with my husband and Serena. Other days he would come and make fierce love to me for our two hours together, hardly saying a word. He would make love with a fury as if it were our last time together and often I feared it was. He is, as you know, a huge man and I am slight and sometimes he would hurt me, though I do not think he meant to.

There were times when he was preoccupied and just wanted to talk. Then I would pour glasses of iced tea and serve him little cakes, as if he had come for tea, and we would talk, but never about little things. He would not discuss his family or his personal life and he did not want to hear about mine. He wanted to talk about Tolstoy and Napoléon, about poverty and illiteracy. He made promises to me that he said he would keep for the whole country. If he won his revolution, he said, everyone would be able to read and have a place to live and work to do and food to eat. These are not small promises, but he made them to me and he kept them.

I loved his touch. There is no other way to say it. It wasn’t that he was so skilled with women or knew how to touch them, it was more that he touched me in such an odd, tentative way. He’d lie on our bed, his hand just resting on my shoulder. Have you ever seen a child who wants to pet a dog
but is afraid that the dog will bite? That is how he touched me. No one knows how vulnerable and afraid he is the way I do.

I think Clarita would have stayed with him if the letters had not gotten mixed up when he was in prison. You see, no one writes to his wife and mistress on the same day. That just shows how arrogant he was. He wrote to me and he wrote to Clarita. But he had his share of enemies and the letters were switched. I didn’t mind getting her letter. I read how she was to enroll their son in the Jesuit school and how she was to handle the small amount of money that was left in the bank. He told her not to put the lights on at night and not to buy more than one chicken a week. He told her he wanted some books and an extra pillow.

But I can only imagine the letter she received. One in which he longed for my body to lie beside his. How his lips groped for mine in the nights, his hands reached for my breasts. How he lay awake at night, pretending I lay beside him.

That was the last straw for Clarita and she filed for divorce. Of course she lost her son. I don’t think she would have anticipated that, but in the custody battle she lost him. It wasn’t that El Jefe wanted his son; it was that he didn’t want anyone else to have him.

One morning a few months after he was back from prison I woke and knew I was pregnant. It never even occurred to me that it could be Umberto Calderón’s child because for years our lovemaking had been reduced to an obligatory Saturday-night intercourse, the raising of my nightgown to my waist, a quick, futile spurt that enabled him to sleep without the use of soporifics and rum with lime. My husband knew that it was not for him that I put on the almond creams and
jasmine soaps, the oils scented with orange blossoms. It was for El Caballo that I put on the dresses of silk imported from China that lifted easily over my head. Though no matter how I scented myself, what permeated my flesh were the smells of his cigars, his rum.

I was a woman with Spanish eyes and aristocratic airs who lived in a house by the sea, whose cane furniture had been brought from Spain when
la isla
was still a colony, while El Caballo’s great-grandparents toiled an inhospitable Galician soil. He had walked through my parent’s house, filled with paintings of blue-eyed, fair-haired people who held their chins high, and this dark peasant had to have me. Everything about me, even my history, had to belong to him.

In that rented room in the late-afternoon light as we lay in bed, he told me that he saw a country where everyone had food and a roof over their head. Where children did not run naked through open sewers, but were in school all day long. He said, “Come with me, Rosa, and we will change the world.”

I felt the child within me start to grow and I told Umberto Calderón that it was his. He nodded and seemed to accept it was so. He was a dour, dull man, the son of a local bureaucrat and a missionary. He was a decade older than I was and never comfortable with my fiery passions, my temperamental ways. Nor was he passionate, as I was, about the plight of the impoverished, the misery of their island. He just thought everybody needed to work harder.

One night I served Umberto
chicharrones de pollo
and
arroz con plátanos
, I served him
ropa vieja
. And then I gave him his coffee with cream and sugar. He stared at me in disbelief. “I have never eaten these things,” he said. That night as he lay beside me, he said, “This is not my child.”

I pleaded and tried to convince him that it was otherwise, but I knew it was useless. “I know whose child it is,” he told me, “but I will accept it as my own, in name at any rate, as long as you do not humiliate me.” It was not that I did not love Umberto. I did. I loved him the way you love anyone to whom you are indebted. I was patient and loyal, grateful that he paid the bills, gave me a home, and cared for me. But it was not a great love. It was not a passion.

When I told El Caballo about the child, he seemed happy. But when I told him I could not go with him, I could not join him in his struggle because of my children, he turned away from me. Slowly I watched him slip away. He could not forgive me for wanting my children more than I wanted his revolution. People have misunderstood him; history may not be kind to him. But he has always been true to what he believed. He never came to me again after Isabel was born, though I have waited for him all these years.

When Isabel was born, I could not bear the thought that I might lose this child, the way Clarita had lost hers. I convinced Umberto to recognize her. I promised him that I would stay with him and no one would know. So he gave Isabel his name, but never his heart. It was the best he could do.

Her birth came, as they often do here, during the great storm. It was hurricane season, and though the moon was full, the seas grew wild and the sky turned yellow. As the storm tore the island apart, I felt my daughter being born. My husband turned his back and would not take me to the hospital, so Mercedes drove as the wind blew us across the road. The sea pulled back, then roared again to the shore.

As wind struck, the mangrove forest that had lined the beach for a hundred years was twisted and ripped to shreds.
Toothpicks of trees remained and a strip of beach never seen from the apartment houses a half mile away was suddenly in clear view. The roof of the Sheraton was blown into a parking lot and a row of beach houses was leveled. The wall of a house across from ours was ripped off and one woman found a sofa belonging to someone else in her living room. When the waters receded a whale was found, bewildered and flailing, in a neighbor’s pool.

In the hospital I labored in the dark to the sound of shattering glass. Patients screamed in terror as palm fronds crashed into their rooms. The child was upside down in my womb and the doctors could do nothing for me. I screamed in agony until Mercedes forced her way in, shoving aside an orderly and two nurses who were pinning me down, and she lay her trembling hands on my womb. Inside me, I felt the baby turn.

In the darkness my dark child was born, shiny and slippery as a fish. In her black eyes, I saw two stars, shimmering there. I do not know when it was that those stars went out, but I have looked for them over the years.

A
MAID comes by my room and asks if I can do her a favor. “I have dollars,” she whispers to me. She says she needs two pairs of shoes from the
tienda
. The natives are not allowed to have dollars and the
tienda
where the foreigners shop only takes hard currency. From behind her back she takes out a slip of paper; it is about four inches long. “I need a pair of red-and-black shoes this size; and another pair, two inches longer.” She tells me that the woman in the
tienda
knows who she is and there won’t be any problem.

The sight of this slip of paper four inches long moves me and I go to the
tienda
for her. After passing the jeans, the T-shirts, the straw hats, I find the shoes. There are children’s sizes; tiny red-and-black shoes, white shoes, pink shoes. Little dresses. I run my fingers over them, touching them all. I try to imagine Jessica in a crinoline skirt, a ruffled blouse; socks with lace on the side. But she is a tomboy, given to sweat suits and jeans. Todd says studies show that tomboys make happier marriages, but I don’t know.

It is late in the day and I miss her the most at this time. I decide to call her and say good night. I am the one who puts Jessica to bed. That’s my job, but more than that, it is what I have to do. I don’t remember anyone tucking me in, putting me to bed. I remember pulling back the covers and getting into bed. There was never a story or a song. I don’t remember a bath or a book.

But with Jessica it’s a whole ritual thing. The bath, the stories, the stuffed animals, the songs. It takes two hours and Todd says I am out of control. Excessive. He is often asleep when I patter into our room late at night. Before I left I made a tape of all the songs I sing to her. I wonder if she’s been listening to the tape. But it’s almost as if I am the one who can’t sleep without the songs.

Just before I went on this trip, I lost my temper with Jessica. Todd had been working late and I must have been very tired. She wouldn’t go to sleep and I couldn’t get done anything I needed to. And then the dog sneaked into our room and peed on the bed. I screamed at Jessica that it was her fault and I never wanted a dog. I told her she was spoiled and never listened to what I said and if she didn’t listen I’d give the dog away.

She screamed at me, “No, Mommy, no,” and I had to go into my bedroom and shut the door. Afterward I knelt down at her bedside. I told her I wanted the dog and I didn’t know why I shouted at her like that because I never had before.

I buy the shoes and take them upstairs to the maid. She clasps them to her chest, tears in her eyes, and thanks me profusely. Then I pick up the phone and try to call Jessica to say good night, but all the circuits are busy. I still cannot get a
call through. Try back in an hour, the operator says, but in an hour Jessica will be asleep.

On the roof deck that evening Enrique appears. He orders a beer and sits down at a table across from me. I have been waiting for Manuel, but it seems that Manuel will not appear. Enrique smiles and asks how my visit is going and I tell him as well as can be expected.

Then he tells me, “You should be careful.” He strokes his chin with his hand. “Be careful of where orders come from.” He strokes his chin again and I understand that he is shaping his hand into a beard. “Don’t trust,” and he taps his hand to his shoulder. He does this two or three times, pointing to his shoulder, but I do not understand. Don’t trust anyone, he tells me, slashing his finger under his chin. I can be arrested for telling you this, he says.

I stay on the roof deck a long time, hoping Manuel will show. After Enrique leaves, I order a daiquiri, which arrives the way I like it—bitter and frozen. Couples on the deck sit gloomily under floodlights; the music blares so loud that they cannot hear each other.

I go to the edge of the roof terrace and peer down. People are lined up to see a film; others are queued up for pizza. It is so peaceful and quiet down there; it is hard to believe that anything is wrong. There are lines in New York too, after all. For everything. There is a prison not far from the hotel, and through the prison’s smoky glass I can almost see hands gripping bars. The shadows of men or women pace in their cells. Their crimes are petty thefts or perhaps writing on the wall the initials of the general who was executed a year ago on a drug charge no one believed.

I think that I would like to go downstairs and walk out of this hotel. To take a cool walk in the Ciudad del Caballo night, perhaps amble down to the sea, where lovers, or the lonely, or men who are on work rotation, sit. From the terrace I can see them, lining the seawall.