Queen of the Underworld (39 page)

“She recruited them after Mass at the Catholic church yesterday. They get room and board in return for whatever work they do at the Julia Tuttle. Alex says the new housekeeper was the head of the millinery department at El Encanto, and the man on the front desk was the maître d’ at the Havana Hilton.”

“I don’t see the owner of the sugar mill. Perhaps it is his night off. Well,
señorita,
may I accompany you to the beverage table? What will you have?”

“Just a Coke, thanks. I’ve got to keep my mind clear, especially tonight.”

The dental surgeon laughed. “I also must stay clear.
Entonces: dos Coca-Colas por la claridad.
”

“How do you think things are going in Cuba, Dr. Rodriguez?”

“
Calamitoso.
Pure and simple. What a deceiver! He has betrayed everyone, including himself.” He absently stroked the white carnation. “There is that old Spanish proverb, I think I told you.
‘El que espera desespera.’
He who waits will despair. We must be organizing plans of our own now, not just sitting around waiting for the American government to act for us.”

I
TOOK
an aisle seat in the air-conditioned dark of the Tivoli, wishing I’d brought a wrap and already regretting the hot fudge sundae after my Howard Johnson frankfurter and beans. (“There are no subtitles,” the girl at the box office had warned me in accented English, to which I had coolly replied,
“Gracias, señorita, pero no importa.”
)

A desert chase on horseback was in progress, shots rang out, the rider in the black mask bit the dust, pulling his horse down on top of him. (I hated when they did that. How many movie horses had to be put out of their misery without ever knowing their riders were only stuntmen and the chase that broke their legs hadn’t even been necessary?)

Then a close-up of the victor trotting off in the opposite direction. Against a background of swelling guitar music a dark-haired beauty on a balcony anxiously squinted into the distance until it became clear that her man had won.

End of
El Enmascarado de la Muerte.
The dim lights came on. About half the audience, mostly under fifteen, got up to go, noisily racing each other up the aisles. A few rows ahead of me, a good-looking man in a row all by himself stood up, raised his arms in a luxurious masculine stretch, exchanged comments in Spanish with a couple of teenage boys who stood aside to let him pass, laughed indulgently at something they said, and then swaggered out of the theater, head held high, as though he owned the world. Only after he had passed my seat did I realize it had been Enrique Ocampo, the ousted sugar heir. He had not seen me.

El Dolor de las Hijas
opened with a close-up of the father, a dour corpse with melancholy profile, in his casket. Unless there were flashbacks to come, that was the end of his role in the movie. The tensions between the mother and her three daughters blossomed at once, prompting me with hopes for emotional understanding without the aid of subtitles. The mother was a black-eyed termagant with a mean mouth and forbidding posture. (I was reminded of Don Waldo’s
“feróz”
great-aunt from Bilbao who died without ever touching her back to a chair.)

Power was clearly the mother’s forte, with a dose of sadism thrown in for good sport. She missed nothing, and everything in the drab, boring village referred back to her. She was definitely a
menos mío
type, like Lídia. The daughters were no match for her, the eldest being
una solterona,
the old maid and family slave; the middle one an ineffectual, dreamy beauty; and the youngest a religious sadist in training. In the cortege from the funeral to the house was a young male cousin, just back from some war. He had eyes only for the ineffectual, dreamy beauty, and she only for him, but tradition dictated that the eldest sister must be married first, so he allowed himself to become engaged to the old maid. You definitely got the impression the mother knew exactly what was brewing. And when the married couple took the middle sister to help them set up their house in a neighboring village, you felt she had instigated this, too. Now there were the two women left, mother and daughter sadists, sitting upright in their chairs and mean-mouthing each other.

Where could this story go next? Unless this was a very short movie, this couldn’t possibly be the end.

It wasn’t. Another war breaks out and the young husband departs promptly with his fighting gear. His wife and her live-in younger sister, the ineffectual beauty, are left alone together, both seemingly happy with their shared life. Each glows privately as she goes about her chores, smiling to herself a lot, until the termagant mother comes for a visit, the termagant daughter having entered a convent. The sharp-eyed mother ferrets out at once what no one else, including us moviegoers, has noticed: the wife is in the early stages of pregnancy. When the mother announces this, the married daughter admits it is true and the ineffectual beauty goes off and hangs herself.

At the funeral (closed coffin this time), the mother, speaking in close-up to the camera, proclaims herself a
mater dolorosa.

“But life cannot be all sadness,” she fiercely concludes, adjusting her black mourning veil and rising to new heights of posture. “I had three daughters. (
Tenía tres hijas.
) One lives as the happy bride of Christ, one will soon give birth to my grandchild, and one died a beautiful virgin. I refuse to deplore my destiny. (
Yo me niego a deplorar mi destino.
)”

The aftereffects of
El Dolor de las Hijas
accompanied me as I left the chill of the Tivoli and set out down hot and humid Flagler Street, now lit up for nighttime pleasures. I kept my stride purposeful, my eyes cast down. It was almost seven minutes before pickup time in front of the
Star,
a few minutes more than I needed, but if I slowed to a pedestrian stroll, I might be inviting another kind of pickup.

Now I wished I had stayed for the credits instead of making for the ladies’ room—there would have been time for both. Had a man or a woman written that screenplay? Was it adapted from a story or taken from someone’s experience? If the latter, who had suffered, and who had artistically avenged himself or herself? Despite the mother’s speech at the end, it
was
titled
The Pain of the Daughters.

Or was it just a cold-blooded bit of cinematic whoredom: a bunch of cynical scriptwriters sitting around with their cigarettes and whiskies, catering to the lowest emotional denominator? Yet something about the story dogged me, and encouraged me to play with it. Perhaps my emotions were not as elevated as I liked to think.

Which daughter, in such a family, would I most likely have been? Probably the termagant in training, but allowing myself some verve and wit. I had read enough about Saint Teresa of Ávila to know you could join a convent and still get away with being yourself if there was enough of a self to start with.

E
NGINE RATTLING,
the Mercedes was already waiting across the street from the
Star
in the same spot where Paul and I had parked to watch the press run my first night in Miami.

Alex stepped out of the driver’s side as I approached; he must have been watching for me.

“Perfect timing, Emma. But why are you walking in this direction? I expected you to come out of the
Star.
”

“Change of plans. Marge couldn’t make it, so I went to the movies.”

Keep the lies short and simple: complications were compounding by the minute. Still under the miasmic spell of the mother in
El Dolor de las Hijas,
I was having serious qualms about deceiving Lídia. It would be no picnic returning to the domain of such a woman after having put one over on her—and didn’t I still have to live at the Julia Tuttle?

“Will you drive, Emma? That way you’ll be familiar with the car when you return.”

Nestor slid out of the front seat and transferred to the back. After helping me adjust the driver’s seat forward, Alex went around to the passenger side.

When we were all inside, Alex introduced me to his half brother, calling him simply
mi hermano.

“Mucho gusto, señorita.”
Nestor gave no sign of connecting me with yesterday’s frowsy Emma in the man’s wet silk dressing gown when Lídia had paraded him around the pool.
“Usted es muy amable de ayudarnos este tarde.”
(You are very kind to help us tonight.)

“El gusto es mío, Nestor. Y me llamo Emma, por favor. Yo siento mucho lo ocurrido en Camagüey.”
(The pleasure is mine, Nestor. And please call me Emma. I am very sorry about what happened in Camagüey.)

“Usted es muy amable . . . Emma.”

“Emma, your Spanish gets better and better,” Alex proudly noted.

“I’ve just come out of a Spanish-language movie, that may have something to do with it. Oops,
sorry.
” I had let out the clutch with a violently amateurish jerk.

“¡Él respinga!”
said Nestor, with a good-natured machismo laugh. (He bucks!)

“This will take a little getting used to. Last time I drove a straight shift, I was sixteen.”

“Take all the time you need, Emma. I want you to get used to it. I’ll be your navigator. Go straight down to the end of Flagler and take a left onto Second Avenue. There won’t be so much tourist traffic as Biscayne.”

I committed a few more clutch clinkers, and as I was making the turn onto Second Avenue, I heard Earl say, as distinctly as if he had traded places with Alex, “Now, don’t let up or she’ll cut out on you again,” and of course that’s just what happened. The Mercedes cut off and we stopped traffic in both directions.

“You’re going to be fine, Emma,” Alex said as I lurched us forward again.

“Bueno . . . ha domesticado el caballo,”
said Nestor from the backseat when at last I found my rhythm with the pedals.

“
Sí,
Emma, you have tamed the bronco,” said Alex.

A
S WE
branched off onto the federal highway in North Miami, I thought of Mr. Charles P. Rose, still fuming over his water bill behind one of those jalousie-windowed bungalows blinking out at us through the darkness. Had his water been cut off by now, or had he broken down and paid the additional $2.06?

Do you know who’s driving by your house right now, sir?

Don’t tell me, let me guess. Miss Grant, girl reporter. What’s she sticking her nose into now?

She’s driving two Cuban men to a private airfield in Fort Lauderdale; they’re off to a training camp to take back their country. The elder half brother will teach flying, along with all the other pilots who have deserted Castro’s air force, and the younger will fight however he can to help the cause.

Why can’t they drive themselves to the airfield?

Who’s going to take the car back to his mother?

Why couldn’t his mother drive them, then?

Because she doesn’t know the young one is going to the training camp. If she did, she’d stop him.

So how the hell is Miss Grant going to explain to the mother when she brings the car back?

The car will simply be parked outside in its usual place, with the keys under the mat and a note from the son to the mother.

And how will the girl reporter get home?

She lives in the same hotel as the mother, so all she has to do is slip in. The mother thinks she’s been working late at the Star.

Now, look here, a lot of people can be fooled by deceitful wording, but some of us can’t be shunted off so easily. You know what that mother is going to say to our cub reporter?

“Nobody could be that stupid!”

Damn right. You took the words right out of my mouth. If I was that Miss Grant—okay,
Gant—
I know what I’d be doing!

What, Mr. Rose?

I’d be looking for another hotel.

“E
MMA,
I left you some of my books. You will find them outside the door of your room in a box. Some Spanish poets and writers I know you will like. It makes me happy to think of you using them.”

“Please, Alex, you sound like you’re not coming back.”

“Until I return is all I meant. Oh, and I included my Arden Shakespeare volumes, the footnotes are the best. There is
Hamlet
and
Macbeth
and, let’s see,
A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream
and
The Tempest.
I had a funny thought when I was packing the
Hamlet.
”

“What?” It was just sinking in what a large hole Alex was leaving in my life.

“Well, that Hamlet might still be alive if he had gone off to fight with those recruits of Fortinbras’s. Maybe all he needed was to get away from Gertrude. Now, you’ll want to take the first road on the left immediately after we pass the Dania Jai-Alai fronton.”

“What is jai alai?”

“It’s a Basque form of handball. The players throw a small hard ball and catch it with
cestas,
long curved baskets strapped on their arms. Besides horse racing, it’s the only other way you can gamble legally in Florida. Back there was where we would have turned off to go to Bal Harbour. I’ll miss Nightingale’s, but who knows, I may be back in Havana by the time it reopens in October.”

I succeeded in keeping my mouth shut. What purpose would it serve for Alex to know Nightingale’s went on the market this morning?

“Y
OU’LL HAVE
to stop at that little hut by the gate, Emma, for Nestor to show some papers. Then you just drive right through the grass over to that red-and-white Beechcraft.”

The man on duty in the hut spoke in Spanish with Nestor. After their animated conversation, all three men burst into uproarious laughter.

“Fill me in, please,” I begged Alex as I angled the car in beside the de Costa family’s plane.

“Well, Emma, if you want the precise translation, he said that a crop duster who took off earlier told him it only needed twenty pilots with balls to take back Cuba from Castro. Now Nestor and I will have to unload some dental equipment from the trunk, and then we’ll get you on the road home.”