House Arrest (9 page)

“Oh, it is here. It will be all right. The head of immigration just wants to ask you a few questions.”

We pass buildings in disrepair, crumbling. Others appear to be abandoned. This does not seem like the place where the head of immigration would have his offices. We park in front of one of the cinder-block buildings, surrounded with razor wire. “Looks just like my neighborhood,” I say with a nervous laugh, thinking of the city where I live, but they don’t get the joke. At least, they don’t seem to.

Major Lorenzo looks at me without expression, as if I am not really there, as if he can see through me. I want him to tell me where we really are and what I can expect, but he looks away. “We’ll get out now,” he says. His aide leaps from the car and opens my door, then they usher me quickly inside.

The building has a doorway with no door and windows with no glass. No lights are on inside. It is stifling as a cave
when we go in and I am struck by the odor of bodies, a thick smell like what I imagine a men’s locker room would have. In the foyer a man in uniform sits at a desk, nodding when Major Lorenzo enters. With a turn of his head, he motions us to one side, where there are two chairs.

“Maggie,” Major Lorenzo says, touching my arm for the second time, “why don’t you sit there?”

It is hot and I almost collapse onto the folding chair. We wait for what seems like a long time. Several minutes, in fact. I fan myself with a newspaper I find lying on the floor and Major Lorenzo fans himself with his hat. “Would you like something cold to drink?” he asks.

“Yes, that would be very nice.” Is this the way you really are? I want to ask him. At night alone with your wife and kid? Do you bring them ice water? Do you take your wife’s arm as she steps off a curb? Or is it just for people under house arrest? As he asks for a glass of water from one of the soldiers standing around, I think to myself that I like him. I can’t help it. I don’t want anything to come between us. I allow my arm to rest against his. I feel the sensation of cloth against cloth, and he does not pull his arm away.

Before the glass of water arrives, a door opens and another man in uniform motions for us to come into the room. This room is windowless with a large metal desk in the middle. The calendar on the wall hasn’t been changed in the past three months, which depresses me more than anything else. Several folding chairs are against the wall and Major Lorenzo and the man who opened the door for us take seats there. They motion for me to take the folding chair in front of the desk.

I almost expect to see the colonel with the dead eyes from the airport sitting at the desk. Instead I find myself facing an
overweight man with greasy skin. His blue guayabera is mottled with sweat; wet circles are under his arms. “We’d just like to ask you a few questions,” the overweight man says. With his round face and small mustache, he reminds me of John Wayne Gacy, the murderer of boys who dressed like a clown. “You speak Spanish very well, I understand. Where did you learn?”

“In the street,” I say, then realize this may not be the right response. “In Mexico. I’ve traveled around.”

“Well, we just want to know something about your activities, about what you are doing here.”

“Yes, of course.”

There is a door behind him and it opens. I expect to hear the cries of torture, anguished pleas. Someone begging for mercy. Instead a coffee pot and cups are produced on a tray. So this is to be a social visit, after all. A soldier walks around, pouring. Major Lorenzo takes his with sugar. I ask for mine with milk. He obliges us. This is very civilized, I tell myself, for an interrogation.

“We’d like to know what you are doing here,” the overweight man says. “Who are you working for?”

I take a sip of my coffee, but immediately feel hot and shaky. I wish I hadn’t worn a dress, because already I feel my thighs sticking to the chair. “I’m working for a travel-guide company, Easy Rider Guides. I go to countries and revise the guidebooks. That is what I do. You can call my boss and ask him.” He smirks at this, as does the man in uniform sitting next to Major Lorenzo. These are men who are accustomed to having their security violated, their meetings infiltrated. Disinformation is nothing new to them.

“Yes, but you have been here before, haven’t you?” the overweight man says. Leaning forward, I notice that he has a
thick file in front of him. Somewhere in the building a door slams, and I jump slightly in my chair. Everyone puts their cups of coffee down. “What was the purpose of your visit that time?”

“It was for my work. I was updating our Caribbean travel guide.”

He nods, leaning his arms on the thick file. “And that’s all.”

“Yes, that’s all.”

“Did you meet any people while you were on
la isla
?”

Now my whole body is suddenly warm, my skin prickly. Sweat breaks out under my arms, between my breasts. I long for something cold to drink, but what would they bring me? Orange Fanta, tap water. “I met a few people, the way you do when you are traveling.”

“Yes, of course. And do you remember who any of those people were?”

There is a rustling in the room as this question is asked. I hear legs shifting, sighs. I am trembling as he asks this because I have never been very good at lying, but now I must look him in the eye and do just that. “Not really, I don’t remember anyone in particular. You know, I was working very hard …” The room is stifling now and I find myself growing dizzy, weak. Though I have never fainted before, I wonder if I am going to now.

The overweight man lights up a cigarette and begins to smoke. “Of course, Miss Conover, we know that you work very hard. And, of course, it is in our interest that you see our country in the best possible light. But some people would have you see us differently. Now please try again. We are not in a hurry. In fact, we have plenty of time.”

The room is quiet, as if there is no one else in here except
me and this fat man. Now he shuffles his papers, packs them like a deck of cards. Then he leans forward, smiling slightly at me. “Now why don’t you try harder. If you’d like, you could have some time alone.” He takes a drag, then puts out his cigarette. He looks back at me but he is not smiling now. “There must be someone you remember.”

T
HERE IS A ROAD that twists along the sea on the south side of the island that leads from Puerto Angélico to some of the most beautiful, remote beaches of the world. But almost no one goes there because they are so far from the National Highway that cuts straight across the island, dividing it in two. There are no gas stations along this road, so unless you carry extra gasoline you’ll run out of fuel. Isabel didn’t seem to mind. She’d brought a pair of blue jeans and some Spam. “We’ll barter for gas as we go,” she said.

She drove her blue Chevy, circa 1955, full speed ahead. The car was a mass of handmade spare parts held together with chicken wire. The battery connection was made with the head of a coat hanger, and the floor was plasterboard. The bodywork had been done with poster paint. The windows were permanently rolled down. But it drove.

As she had instructed me, I’d brought a basket of cheese, crackers, peanut butter, and olives from the tourist
tienda
—none of which Isabel could get with her ration card. One
chicken and a dozen eggs a month, a quart of milk a week. The jeans and Spam came from the black market. “I don’t know how we survive,” she told me.

We zoomed along the highway devoid of cars, lined with orange groves, mango trees. Her car made sputtering noises and sometimes she talked to it. “Come on, baby,” she said, “don’t break down.” Fruit trees were everywhere. Cane fields burned. Dark swirls of smoke, like oncoming storms, rose. We cut off the main highway and headed toward the sea. Hitchhikers lined the roads, but Isabel shook her head. “Too many people know me,” she said. “It’s better not to stop.” I watched an old woman with a milk pail try to flag us down.

She was taking me to Playa Negrita. Little Black Beach. The place of her father’s biggest victory, of his enemy’s biggest defeat. I was just a little girl, she said, but I remember how all the people danced in the street.

“Everyone who comes to
la isla
,” Isabel said, “wants to know about my father. People who come here to see me—journalists, writers—all want to know about him. But I cannot talk about my father because I don’t know him. I never saw him. When he came to the house, he patted me on the head, but after I was eight and he came to dance with me, he didn’t come any more.”

The man I called my father, Isabel said, who was my mother’s husband, could never look me in the eye. He had a way of casting his gaze so that it was just around me or over me. But he never looked at me. If I crawled into his lap, he had a way of slipping out from under me. I could watch Serena stay in his lap, laughing, telling him stories, but the
minute I came near, he had a patient coming. He heard footsteps at the door.

It was like my body smelled. Like I had the plague. I remember once Mercedes took me to church and we knelt and prayed for the poor lepers and afterward I asked her what the poor lepers were and she said people whose bodies are rotting. For weeks I searched my body for sores. If I came near him, he’d sneak out of the room. I asked my mother once why he did that and she said, “You can’t do anything about it. It’s just the way he is.” But, of course, I adored him. It was just my luck to adore someone who was always trying to get away from me.

Now she turned off the main road onto a dirt road surrounded by dense vegetation. Mosquitoes suddenly filled the car and we swatted them away. “Is he still this way with you?” I asked as I scratched at my arms, watching them turn red.

“Oh, no. He died. Anyway, he left the country when I was still a girl. He took Serena with him. So after that, it was just my mother and me, but my mother, well, I hardly saw her. She loved the man and she loved the revolution. For her the two things were one.”

I felt uncomfortable, asking her about this, but, like her mother, Isabel seemed to want to talk. In fact, it seemed as if she had to talk. “And your real father, the one they call El Caballo? You never saw him, he never came to you again?”

“Oh, he greeted me at the official functions my mother dragged me to. I used to stand in front of the television, listening to his speeches. Really that was the closest I got. I was just another person in the crowd, until I became an embarrassment.”

“An embarrassment?”

“Oh, yes. I did things. I talked to people I shouldn’t have talked to.” I must have looked at her askance. “Oh, I don’t mean people like you. I talked to the press. I gave interviews. I told the world what I really thought about this country and the way he runs it.” She wrinkled her brow as if she had to catch herself from what she was saying, but I heard that bitterness come creeping back into her voice. She sighed and grew silent as the car dug into a deep pothole, bouncing out again. “This must seem strange to you. You probably come from a normal family. You send cards to one another; you visit for the holidays. Your mother cooks a turkey.”

“I think I understand what you’re talking about,” I told her.

“Do you really think you can?”

I thought about this for a moment. “Yes, I think I can.”

When I turned fourteen, Isabel went on, my father came to claim me as his own. I had only seen him a few times over the years, when he came to see my mother. Once or twice he held me by the shoulders and said that I’d grown. He never mentioned the letter I wrote him or the night he came to dance with me. Now he sent a team of lawyers to the house and they demanded to see me.

My mother began to scream, thinking they had come to take me away. No, they explained, I was being adopted. You see, my father himself was the offspring of an illicit union, his father having impregnated a fourteen-year-old girl who was the family maid. In the end she bore the old man six children, but he never married her. So now my father had come to save me from his illegitimate fate.

I hovered in a corner in a pink dress, listening as a white-haired lawyer with a red poppy in his lapel read a letter from my father, stating that he intended to legitimize my birth and
acknowledge his paternity. He had made arrangements to nullify the paternity of Umberto Calderón, who had divorced my mother a few years before and was living with Serena in southern Florida. The lawyer wept as he read my father’s letter. I felt like a bride whose hand was being asked for.

I had not seen my father in six years, since the night he had come to dance with me. My mother looked at me, pleading, as I told the lawyer that I was happy to accept my father’s offer. But I had two requests: I would like my father to pick out a gift to commemorate this occasion and I would like him to deliver it himself.

The lawyer stared, confused, unsure of how to respond. What gift would you like? he asked.

He can decide, I told the lawyer. He could bring me a silver cat with marble eyes or a bird in a gilded cage or a German bicycle or a stereo so I can play my rock and roll; he can send me a dress made out of Chinese silk or a small painting of the sea. Whatever he wants to give me would be fine; but he must bring it himself.

The poor man looked at me horrified because he knew he could never deliver such a request. Nobody tells El Jefe what to do. Nobody expects him to do that.

Or you can tell him that he is a
pendejo
and he can go fuck himself. Tell my father if he wanted to adopt me, he should have thought of that years ago.

We arrived at a truly black beach, the volcanic sand as dark as night, the water a brilliant turquoise blue that blinded me. The sky seemed to melt into the sea. In a burst of fuchsia and lemon, ice plant carpeted the porous lava rock that rose from the shore. The air smelled of jasmine and the sea. A beautiful
place for an invasion, Isabel said. Once there were red-footed birds and others shaped like scissors that dive-bombed straight into the sea. “Now,” she said with a shrug, “they have gone.”

She parked the car on the sand. Before I knew it, she had stripped down to a thin, black bikini, pulling off her sundress, flinging off her shoes. She left her clothes in a heap, then dashed straight for the water, her small feet kicking up sand. She plunged into the crystalline waters and disappeared beneath the waves.