House Arrest (2 page)

Probably I should not have come back at all. Lydia, my sister, told me not to come. Astrologically, the signs were inauspicious from the start. She warned me that the alignment of the stars on the day of my departure was the same as it had been the night of the Playa Negrita invasion. She called me at one in the morning to tell me this. “I looked it up for you,” she said as Todd lay beside me, shaking his head in disbelief.

Just last week Lydia and I stood on the banks of a frozen Hudson River, where we found shredded pieces of a Bible. Bits of Psalms, the Book of Job fluttered in the wind, stuck to the snow. I picked up a torn and burned fragment and read her these words: “Ye shall travel to a distant land and will find nothing there and ye shall not return.”

I’d laughed because it was a joke, but Lydia has never had much of a sense of humor. She foresees bad whereas I see good. Not good naively, but I just don’t expect bad things will happen the way Lydia does. She has a grim view, and at times I wonder how it is possible we came from the same family. In her more cryptic moments, Lydia says we did not. “You take things too seriously, Lyd,” I told her. That was the last thing I said to her before I left.

I’ve never had an airport all to myself before The quiet is unsettling. Airports are noisy places, filled with the bustle of comings and goings. But here there are only distant sounds—music,
voices, footsteps. A television is on somewhere inside. I can hear a generic announcer’s voice, shouting when a team scores, giving the play-by-play. The men in the back give brief cheers, break out in laughs.

The airport maintenance people arrive to wash the windows, scrub the floor. With squeegees the men rub the windows clean, making sweeping motions. They are meticulous in their task, careful to get every spot. I am impressed with their work as they reach high into the corners, coming down straight. No drips. Then they sweep the floor, making sure to get under my feet. Politely they ask me to raise my bags to the seat, which I do.

When the maintenance people leave, they lock the doors. For a long time I don’t see anybody. There are things I would like to ask for. My head is throbbing but I have no water to take some aspirin. In the hours I’ve been sitting in this hard, plastic chair I’ve begun to have a longing for simple things—a bed, a home-cooked meal.

There is an art to keeping people waiting, and these bureaucrats have perfected it. It is nothing like keeping someone waiting in a doctor’s office or at a bus stop. Because you know that eventually the doctor will take you, the bus will come. And I know that sooner or later they will explain to me what the problem is. But it feels as if they could keep me here forever, as if they have nothing but time.

In the middle of the night I am escorted into a small office where the colonel who is now overseeing my situation explains that they are trying to decide what to do with me. He is an unpleasant man with dead eyes. Eyes that never look anyone in the face. Eyes set on the paper in front of him. He has the kind of eyes that make you understand that one human being can actually pull out the fingernails of another.

He will not explain the problem, but refers to it as my “case.” He says that they are looking into my case, never taking his gaze off the floor. He informs me that it is the decision of the head of customs that I will not be allowed entry into this country. He says that this has not been up to him. It comes from a place much higher up. I will be returned, he tells me, to my port of embarkation when the next flight leaves.

“And when will that be?” I ask in my best Spanish, my voice trembling. Though he will not look at me, I stare at his face. He has smooth skin, the color of olive oil, and his lips are fine and red. Perhaps if I cry, he will take pity on me. Or perhaps he won’t.

“In six days, but we will make every effort to expedite your departure.”

“And what will I do until my flight leaves?”

He shrugs. “That is being decided.”

“Can you at least tell me what the problem is, sir?” I add
sir
, hoping this will make him think I am respectful and polite.

“No,” he says, “I cannot.” He suggests I take it up with their embassy when I am returned to my place of origin. I am surprised by this construction. One thinks of oneself as returning, but not of being returned. Lost keys, stray dogs, bodies are returned.

“Are you a journalist?” he asks.

“No,” I tell him, “I am not a journalist.” Of course, I am a journalist, of sorts. But I am not the kind that they should concern themselves with. A technicality that happens to be true, though probably they would consider it a lie.

By profession, I do updates for travel guides. Often my
updates take me to places where travelers’ advisories are in effect. But the travelers’ advisory has been in effect here for almost three decades, and it is the belief of my editors at Easy Rider Guides, the aging-hippie travel-guide service for which I work, that
la isla
, as the people who live here call it, will be opening up soon.

I’ve had my share of dubious assignments. Paying my dues, Kurt, my editor, calls it. I’ve wined and dined my way through the Czech Republic, feasting on potato stew. When the couple sent the postcard from Honduras to say that the ferry from La Ceiba to Roatán hadn’t run in years, I was the one who was sent to find the rotting dock on the mosquito-infested coast to verify that, indeed, the ferry hadn’t run in years. I did a five-day stint in Haiti last year (where I would have been happy to have never left the hotel) because my editor told me, You’ll see, any day now, Haiti will be opening up too. All I saw were shantytowns, open sewers, and naked children playing in mud.

Certainly a country that is trying to promote its tourist industry shouldn’t be detaining a woman who updates travel guides. If they’d just let me explain, they’d know how foolish this is. I could show them the checklist I have in my bag. I have to confirm that you can eat for under five dollars at El Colibrí or fly to Cayo Grande for twelve dollars. I have to rent a car and drive from one end of the island to the other and note all the places where you can use a coupon and get some gas, where you can buy a cheese sandwich.

Mostly I am to go to Puente de Juventud and visit the new joint-venture hotels being opened by Canadians and Swedes, sleep in the new beds, get copies of the activity sheets. Do they have banana-eating or beer-guzzling contests? Can you ride a glass-bottomed boat? I need to check on the snorkeling.
See if they have a day camp, pony rides. Do kids under twelve eat free on the all-inclusive? How good are the security guards?

Now the colonel looks at me in such a way that I understand our conversation is over, but I don’t want it to be. I want an explanation and, more than that, as I stand there shivering, I want a blanket. It seems like such a small thing, but it is suddenly so essential to me. I’m not sure how I’ll make it through the night. Todd is the warm one, but I am cold. Even in the heat of summer, I need a cover over me. I hesitate, thinking better of it; then I ask if I could have a blanket, and the colonel looks at me with neither rage nor compassion. Rather, he looks at me with indifference. “This is not a hotel,” he says.

I’ve noticed, I want to reply. But it seems better to say nothing at all. I think that at any moment he will mention Isabel. He’ll say, “Why don’t you tell about what happened the last time you were here.” Instead he starts shuffling papers on his desk. “Anything else?” he asks abruptly.

“Yes, I have to go to the bathroom.”

He signals to one of his guards. The stone-faced guard with a gun in his hand accompanies me down a narrow corridor. To my right is the bathroom and straight ahead is the door outside. It has been left ajar and a warm, tropical breeze blows in. I hesitate, smelling the salt, the sea, a hint of jasmine in the air, and for an instant I think I could dash through the opening into the night, but the guard motions with the butt of his rifle. The bathroom is gray and there is no mirror. There is also no toilet paper.

I am taken back to the immigration waiting room, where it appears I will be for a while. I try to stretch out across three
plastic chairs, but the armrests press into my sides. Tossing a light jacket over my shoulders, I arrange myself better, resting on my duffel, the way I have seen pictures of travelers stranded by snowstorms in Denver, strikes in Milan, though I have never been a stranded traveler before this night.

Just when I feel as if I could doze off, as if I could actually sleep with my head resting on my palm, one of the guards, a pleasant enough man with a nice face, informs me that I am to be moved upstairs, where I’ll be more comfortable. He hoists my duffel as I follow him up some winding steps into a departure lounge. The lounge, lined with vinyl-covered benches, smells of grease and beer and does not look like much of an improvement, except that the guard tells me I can stretch out on the benches. He also tells me that there are no more flights until Tuesday so I could actually live in this lounge until they find a flight for me.

I sit down, trembling. Though I have my duffel with me, the only warm things it contains are a few cotton sweaters, an extra pair of jeans. I pull on a sweater, but still my teeth chatter. Travel light, Todd told me, but take a sweatshirt. You never know, he said. He’s practical about this sort of thing, but somehow I don’t listen. My bag is heavy with a blow-dryer and a clothes steamer, but no sweatshirt. The windchill was fifteen below when I left home; I handed Todd my winter coat at the airport when I kissed him good-bye, knowing he’d be waiting at the same place upon my return.

I’ve never been very good at being awake when everyone else is asleep. At home I want to wake someone up to keep me company. I’m not one for cleaning drawers or counting sheep. When I was younger, I used to drink a little brandy, though I never felt right the next day. I try to lie down on
the narrow benches, but as soon as I start to doze, I feel myself slipping toward the floor.

The fluorescent lights are on in the duty-free shops that line the departure lounge, and I get up and walk around. One shop displays a giant lizard, stuffed in attack position, and a weird chess set that appears medieval in origins. The pawns are belly dancers as if out of a harem; the rook is a real castle; the knight, a knight on his rearing horse. I wonder where this chess set came from and what it is doing at the duty-free shop in the Aeropuerto Internacional.

There is a display of wood carvings and giant spiders with wire legs that I try to envision on coffee tables in Munich and Amsterdam. Do these spiders really exist on
la isla?
There are ceramics—bowls that look as if they’d disintegrate with water in them, brittle-looking plates, perfect for hurling in domestic battles on Spanish-language soap operas, but I can’t imagine serving food on them. The ceramics have squiggles and shapes on the sides in an attempt to appear indigenous, but the natives were wiped out centuries ago.

Books line the counter. Propaganda mostly.
The Revolution from Columbus to the Present. The Diary of a Guerrilla Fighter
. Leafing through a volume of contemporary poetry, I glance up and see the woman. She is lying flat on a shelf, her skin pasty white, her dark hair perfectly coiffured, red lipstick, a sheet pulled up to her chin. Slamming the book down, I dash back into the darkness, my hand pressed to my mouth, because I am certain she is dead. Then I notice that the airport is full of these women, lying on pallets, wrapped in sheets, on the floor. They are workers on the graveyard shift, but they all look dead. At any moment I expect them all to rise up. Overhead Muzak plays “Guantanamera.” Innumerable flies
and mosquitoes buzz around my head; I swat blindly at the air, slapping myself in the face.

As I stand here, I realize that it was in this room that I first saw Isabel. Or rather first noticed Isabel, because my sense was, even then, that I’d seen her before. But it was here in this departure lounge that I noticed her darting eyes, caught her furtive glance. I saw her the day I was departing on an excursion to Puente de Juventud, the Bridge of Youth, a beach resort twenty minutes’ flight away. Manuel was waiting with me in this same airport where I am being detained when I noticed the young woman, close to my age. She was hugging people who were leaving, greeting others who were arriving. Her laughter echoed through the lounge and everyone seemed to know her, even the guards and officials.

The jeans she wore were too big and the navy blue sweater was too heavy for the season. It seemed as if she was wearing clothes borrowed from a man with whom she was intimate. But it was her black eyes that caught me as they skitted from person to person, from face to face. She gazed across doorways as if she was involved in contraband or some form of espionage. I’d seen things like this at airports before. But she seemed to be searching for someone she’d lost in the crowd.

It was Manuel who told me who she was. Of course, the moment he told me, it was as if I had already known. Everyone who’d been to
la isla
knew who she was. And then he said, If you like, I’ll arrange for you to meet her. He was a distant relation, a cousin by marriage, but they were the same age and had grown up together. She likes to have visitors, he said. As you know, he told me, though I didn’t at the time, for years she has been trying to leave.

My heart pounds in my chest. Once I captured a baby
rabbit in the woods and its heart beat this way in my palm. My mother said it died of fright. Now I curl up on the bench in a little ball, teetering on the edge. A driving rain falls, hitting the picture window. Outside three jumbo jets sit idle, waiting to take people away.

T
HE POLICE CAR speeds along the outskirts of Ciudad del Caballo. Though it is a Monday afternoon, the beige, nondescript car does not need its siren because the streets are empty, as if everyone is asleep, as if they have decided to stay home. Teenagers ride bicycles in the middle of the road, ignoring what little traffic there is. A whole family rides on a single bicycle like a circus act. Dodging potholes, they wave as we pass.