House Arrest (7 page)

I wanted to ask about her father, but her bitterness surprised me and Isabel seemed agitated, almost angry. “It’s hard to imagine. I’ve always been free …”

“Of course you have. How could you know, but it’s all I want, you see. To get away.” She sighed, gazing out to sea.

“And you can’t …”

“Oh, no”—she laughed a nervous laugh—“he’ll never let
me go.” Isabel paused. “Believe me, I’m a prisoner, as surely as if I were behind bars.”

As we sipped our water in a deserted café off the Miramar, Isabel told me that she had once lived in a house of many rooms that opened onto the sea. Its wide doors were never shut, except during the most violent storms; its windows let in the breeze. At night she was lulled to sleep by the surf pounding the shore, and every morning she awakened to the same sound, and it became the rhythm of her days and her nights. Even now, years after she moved into the ground-floor apartment, over a mile from the sea, she still thinks she wakes to the sound of the surf.

In the house where she grew up, there were yellow curtains in her room and yellow flowers in the vase. She had a yellow cat named Topaz who slept at the foot of her bed in the pools of golden sun that poured in. Fruit trees bloomed outside her window and some mornings Mercedes—the ancient nanny who had come to the family when she herself was not more than a child to care for Rosalba and had stayed with them all these years—plucked tamarind and papaya ripe from their branches. Each morning at seven Mercedes brought her a tray of warm milk and almond biscuits, a boiled egg, and fresh-squeezed juice while her parents ate alone downstairs.

The man who called himself her father was a small man with blue eyes whom her mother had married when she was just a girl. Umberto Calderón always wore a black suit and smelled of antiseptic soaps and lingering disease. He was a dermatologist who specialized in skin ailments of the tropics. But his patients were mainly the wealthy of
la isla
who wanted him to cure their age spots, the dark blotches and moles that blossomed in the relentless sun and made Dr.
Calderón’s medical practice flourish almost as much as did the business of the island’s only abortionist (whom the Calderón women would visit from time to time).

Isabel’s older half sister, Serena, had her mother’s and father’s blue eyes and soft brown hair—the genetic vestiges of the Spanish aristocracy that once ruled. But Isabel had dark eyes and dark hair, and when she looked into the face of the man who called himself her father she knew that she was looking at a stranger. Umberto Calderón, also, had no doubt as to his daughter’s parentage. He informed his beautiful wife, whom he adored, that as long as she did not humiliate him, he would accept the child, giving her his name, but never his heart.

One day a Portuguese freighter, filled with sailors, crashed into their seawall, and the sailors had to stay for a week until their ship was repaired and towed out to sea. During that time the sailors taught Isabel how to tie knots and do a dance in which she clapped her heels. They let her wear their hats and told her stories of monsters they’d seen rising out of the darkest seas.

When the sailors left, Isabel begged them to take her with them but they laughed and gave her a hat to keep. She wore it around the house for years.

She was miserable when Umberto came home from his trips to the outer ends of the island, where he tended the needs of wealthy
finca
owners and ladies who guarded over the sugarcane plantations that their fathers had purchased in Spain. He returned with gifts for Serena, but nothing for her. She missed the Portuguese sailors and held on to dreams of stowing away. She did not see why when there was an outing to the beach she would be left behind to wander the rooms of
the big house with Mercedes in tow. And then one day she understood.

Mercedes got her up early and told her she had to dress in her prettiest clothes. Mercedes put bows in her hair and fluffed up her skirt. And then Mercedes took her downstairs. Her mother sat in the living room with a man who looked familiar to her, though she did not know from where. He was tall and his eyes were black and shiny as polished stones and he wore a soldier’s uniform. “So,” he said as Isabel was brought in, “this is the child.” And for a moment Isabel thought that she was going to be taken away from everything she knew.

Rosalba said, “Come closer, Isabel, come here.”

Tentatively Isabel walked toward him. She smelled his cigars, the rum, and she smelled her mother’s perfume. He towered above her, more like a monument than a man, and she tilted her head back in order to get a better look, and this made him laugh. Perhaps there was a statue with his and other soldiers’ faces on it at the Plaza of the Heroes of the Revolution (there was not). Or perhaps she had glimpsed him on television, pounding his fists during late-night harangues as her mother listened, spellbound.

But it wasn’t in any of these places that Isabel had seen him before. Rather, she looked up and stared into his dark eyes and found her own. “She looks just like you,” she heard her mother say.

The year when I turned eight, Isabel said, my real father came and danced with me. My mother and her husband, Umberto Calderón, whom I called Papi until the day he died, had gone to a conference in Spain, and in the evening when I was already in my nightgown in my bed, a large, dark
car pulled up. A door slammed and I heard a low whistle. Without a word, Mercedes let him in.

He wore a suit of camouflage that looked like falling leaves. He said he’d come to dance with me. I had no idea what he meant, but he put a record on the phonograph. It was a marimba band, playing mambos, and he knew the steps very well. Step together one two three he showed me as he took me into his arms. “I want to see,” he said, “if you can follow me.” He pressed me to him and I felt his arms around my waist.

I was a little girl and he twirled me around the room like a mop, my feet sweeping the floor. All the arms that had ever held me were women’s arms—pale, thin. But his were wide and strong. He hummed the music into my ears. He was a delicate dancer and I felt light as a plucked flower in his arms.

He smelled of ashes and rum, but I could see what it must have been like for my mother when she fell in love with him. Then he stopped dancing and told me he had to go away for a while and it might be a long time before he would see me again. “You are my little one,” he told me.
Mi hijita
. “The world is changing. You’ll see. Everything will change. You can join me. Your mother chose not to and that of course was her decision. But I will come back for you and together we will make the world a different place.”

When he left, he touched Mercedes on the arm and I knew she had agreed to let him come. He patted me on the head and said, “Don’t tell your mother I was here tonight. It is our secret.”

I never told my mother. After he went away, I wrote him a letter, which Mercedes promised to mail for me. “When the moon is high, I think you will come and dance with me again. I listen for your whistle, but it is always the wind. The
other day there was a fire and a dog was burned alive. I can still hear him howling. I hope you will come back soon.”

But he never answered my letter. He never came back to dance with me again. I would see him from time to time at official functions and he’d come over and touch me on the head. Sometimes, when Umberto was away, he came to our house and I could hear his voice rumbling in another room. But it would be many years before he tried to see me again. And then only by sending his lawyers to come and claim me.

Not long after his visit, when she was still waiting for his return, Isabel woke and felt a weight on her chest. The room was dark and she could not see, but something heavy lay there. Mercedes told her once that if she ever woke and found a snake in her bed, not to move or breathe. That it was only looking for a warm place to sleep. In the morning it would wake and slither outside again, returning the way it had come.

For the rest of that night Isabel lay on her back, with the snake on her chest, trying not to breathe. She did not know what kind of snake it was but she knew that the Caribe rattler, brought from Africa on slave ships, lived in the moist, sandy woods not far from the house. For hours she lay perfectly still, her breath shallow, afraid the snake would feel the rise and fall of her chest.

In the morning as first light entered the room, Mercedes came in to wake Isabel and she found the girl, immobile, staring at the ceiling with a snake coiled on her chest. Isabel only blinked as Mercedes stopped, cupping her hand over her mouth, then raced out of the room. She returned with a campesino who clutched a machete in his fist, and he nudged
the snake. Isabel watched as the snake unwound itself, raising its head and writhing on her chest. She heard it rattle.

As the snake hissed and prepared to strike, the man swooshed the blade through the air above Isabel’s chest and sliced off the snake’s head in one clean stroke.

For hours after that, though her sheets were covered in blood, neither Mercedes nor Rosalba could get Isabel to move. She had no idea how long she remained frozen there, breathing her shallow breaths.

“You see,” Isabel told me, “it’s as if I can still feel that snake on my chest. And I’m waiting for the morning when it will go away.”

I
N THE LOBBY of the hotel I have noticed a smell. The smell of bodies. This is because there is no soap in
la isla;
the people cannot bathe. There is water—cold water—but they have no soap. When the waiters bring me my coffee in the morning, I tip them with bars of soap.

I am sitting at the little table I have staked out for myself. It has become my place. It helps under these conditions to establish routines, create familiar things. My table, my room, my waiter, my shower curtain, my Major Lorenzo. I am trying to read the newspaper, but it is difficult to concentrate because of the sound of breaking balls.

A pool game is going on in earnest in the corner. I listen to the clacking of balls, the groans of players as they miss their shots. I get up and chalk a cue. “Rack them up,” I say to the group of Dutch boys. One of the blond men smirks as he puts the balls in the triangle, but one of the few things I know how to do in this world is play pool. My father had me racking balls on our basement pool table when I could barely
see over the rail. I notice that two balls are missing. “You break,” I tell him. And he smashes the cue ball toward the center of the triangle. The ball makes odd, sliding movements along the green felt, which is torn, and the slate beneath it is not lying flat.

The table is old, circa 1950s. My guess is that someone dug it up out of a storage room in one of the casinos, where it had been sitting in dampness for the past thirty years. The Dutchman’s break sinks one ball, then he scratches. It is my shot and I line up a combination, put a little English on, and watch the cue ball wobble across the table. No one is sure where anything will go, but the five ball sinks into the side pocket. Though I’d been aiming for the seven in the corner, everyone applauds.

“Nice shot,” a young woman says. She is wearing a short red dress and has pretty dark hair. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” she asks me. I know that I’ve seen her before too. I finish my game, though it is all hit-or-miss. I sink a few balls, but lose. When I return to where I had been sitting, the woman in the red dress is sitting there.

“¿La molesto?”
she asks me. “All the tables are filled.”

“No problem,” I tell her, “please join me,” though I notice that the tables aren’t filled.

“My friends are here too,” she says, pointing to my extra chairs.

“Them too,” I say.

Her friends also have short skirts, thick makeup on. They wear giant gold earrings, the size of door knockers. One wears a pink and black spotted jumpsuit. There aren’t many women with the body for this kind of a jumpsuit, but this woman has one. They introduce themselves. Their names are María, Eva, and Flora and they remind me of the
three birds on my dentist’s drill when I was a girl. Which birdie is singing? Dr. Yeagar used to ask as he drilled.

“I’m sure I’ve seen you before,” María, the woman in the red dress, says.

“Probably just from the other day,” I reply.

“No,” she says, shaking her head, “it was a long time ago.”

“So,” says Eva, who has red lipstick and wears a short skirt, “you just get here?” Suddenly I recognize her as the woman who was with one of the Finnish men. María, who is smiling, was with the dwarf. “Yes, just yesterday.”

“Oh, where you from?” María asks. “Canada?”

“No, America, actually.”

“America? This is America,” says Flora, in the black and pink spandex.

“The United States,” I reply.

Distracted, Flora, who is black, looks away. “Oh that one.”

“So perhaps you have things you’d like to sell? Underwear? Blue jeans?” Eva plucks at my jeans.

“I just have soap.” I hand them a few bars, which I keep in my bag. They hold them and sniff. “You can keep these,” I say, and for the moment they seem content. Flora tucks hers between her breasts. Suddenly there is a flurry of activity. A tour group from Germany has just arrived and María, Eva, and Flora stand up to excuse themselves. “Duty calls,” María says, giving me a wave of her hand, containing a bar of apricot soap. Her hips move as she heads to the counter, where a tired German traveler is just checking in.

Major Lorenzo crosses her path, but his eyes do not settle on her at all. Instead he scans the room, and when he spots me he waves. As he approaches with his aide trailing behind
him, the staff and guests all look my way. Enrique cannot miss this; neither can the prostitutes as they now move toward the bar. I receive significant stares, then everyone turns away.

“So,” he says, “how are you? Have you found everything you need?”

His asking is a formality but I assure him that everything is fine. Pulling back an extra chair, I invite Major Lorenzo to join me for drink, but with a wave of his hand he refuses. He does not say it, but, of course, this could be misinterpreted; it could be perceived as a bribe.