The Distant Marvels (20 page)

Lulu put a
pistola
in my hands. It was the same one she'd always kept with her, the one that had once belonged to Aldo Alarcón. She said nothing about my clothes, or about our fight that morning. Instead, Lulu took hold of my hand and led me outside with a group of other women. She ducked back into the tent and emerged a few moments later with a fresh shirt and skirt for me, which she put gently into my hands. “We will defend the tallér,” she said as we formed a line in front of our home.

We stood there for the better part of the day. The sounds of the battle being waged close by seemed to amplify in the valley. Vibrant green parrots were rooted out of the trees every so often by gunshot, and their bodies would blot the setting sun. Even then, with the cawing noises overhead and the slap of rifle fire that shook our bones, we were silent, crouched low in our long skirts, our pinned hair coming lose as the day wore on, so that we looked like wild women.

I grew impatient. I was, after all, only fifteen. I said prayers for Mario, and for Agustín, too, and when that bored me, I began to think of kissing. A warmth would flood my body then, startling me, so that I would begin to pray again. So it went, back and forth, for a long time. When Spanish forces finally broke into the valley, we were tired. Some of the women had sat on the ground and fallen asleep.

What came through the brush was a force of only twenty or so men. At the head of them was a man atop a black horse. What I remember most was the placidity of the man's eyes. For a moment, I thought he would greet us warmly, perhaps ask for our assistance, as so many men had done in the past. He held a gleaming saber in one hand, the reins of his horse in the other. Golden tassels hung from his shoulders, and these twitched in the breeze. Bushy sideburns grew on his cheeks, like moss on the trunks of trees. He was not an old man, but he seemed ancient like a tree, as if men such as he was had always existed on the earth and he was only the latest in that long, familial line. His uniform was un-mussed, even after the battle. The pistol in my hand felt cold. I wasn't sure my bullets would find their mark if I shot the gun. The man seemed that impenetrable to me. The men with him pointed their weapons at us. One was a boy, younger than I was. He hoisted a Spanish flag on a short staff and waved it slowly, as if on parade.

The man on the horse pointed his saber at us. “Viva Cuba española,” he said, then, he waited. We were supposed to respond in kind, pledging our loyalty to a Spanish Cuba. The women of the tallér said nothing.

“¡Viva Cuba española!” the man yelled. This time, when we did not make a sound, he lowered his saber in a swift motion, and a single shot rang out, hitting a woman named Luisa in the head. The bullet made a cracking sound as it struck her. I cried out, and tasted her blood on my lips.

“¡Viva Cuba española!” he said again. This time, a few of the women answered the call, though weakly. Again, the saber came down, and once more, a woman was shot. This time, death came to the left of us. A woman named Leonora, who was especially good with a needle and thread, gurgled as she lay dying, saying her children's names a few times before she could no longer speak.

“¡Viva Cuba española!” the women began to say without prompting, weeping as they spoke. Again and again they said it. I began to chant the words, too. “Say it, Mamá,” I was screaming in between phrases until finally, Lulu spoke, crying the entire time, holding me awkwardly, trying to shield me from the guns.

Though we didn't know it yet, we were in the presence of our greatest enemy, Governor Valeriano Weyler, the man they called “The Butcher.” Later, we would learn he was on tour of the island, and had not intended on engaging in battle. His small retinue had surprised Mario's regiment, who'd settled themselves on an abandoned sugar plantation very close to the tallér. Weyler's men had set fire to the barn in which the regiment had hunkered down, and so, though they were few, the Spanish, with Weyler on horseback, were able to come away from that battle mostly unscathed.

Now, Weyler surveyed us, the women of the tallér. Our weapons, which we had not fired, were taken from us. As for my mother's pistola,
 
it was wrenched from my grip and we never saw that gun again. Weyler ordered his men to scour the other tents. “Bring the traitors here,” he'd commanded. The women and children were brought to where we stood one by one. Then came the weapons we'd been working on, dumped in a pile in front of the governor. Finally, the goats and horses were shot. I heard their grunts and whinnying, their dying bellows, and I wept. If this is how they treated our animals, I thought, what would they do to us? Then I thought of Mario.
Dios mío
, what would they do to him?

That same night, they lined us up by size, the shortest of us in front, so that the soldiers guarding the governor's back could see us all in one glance. In this way we marched all night, without stopping even once, until we reached the town of La Cuchilla. I had to carry two children, who'd fallen and would not stand. One was a small girl whom I held in my arms, and the other was a gangly boy of about eight, who climbed onto my back and held me like a vise, his skinny arms choking me. In the end, all the able women were carrying little ones. To their credit, the children did not cry or fuss for food, though our stomachs growled as we walked. The Spanish would not let us stop even to relieve ourselves, and so by the time we reached La Cuchilla, we were all covered in urine and excrement from the little ones, whose diapers were soaked through.

La Cuchilla was barricaded all around with a tall fence of spiked posts. Guards stood at the single entrance to the town. I'd heard of these camps, where Cubans were forcibly concentrated in order to keep villagers from assisting the Liberation Army. People in the camps were called the
reconcentrados
. It was Agustín who had first described these places, cut off from food and fresh water, where Cubans were dying by the thousands of disease and starvation.

“Basta, you're scaring María Sirena,” Lulu had told him after she'd heard the story, though it was evident she was frightened, too.

“She should be scared,” Agustín had said then.

Now, we were thrown into the camp that was once the village of La Cuchilla. What I would have given for a
cuchilla
of my own, I remember thinking. I would have cut my wrists with it before setting foot into the camp. Already, the effects of the isolation and deprivation were evident. The trees in La Cuchilla were stripped of their bark. Though the fruit trees outside the fenced perimeter were laden with fruit—mango and papaya, guayaba and ciruellas—the trees inside were bare, the fruit having been picked and eaten even before they were ripe. Later, I'd come to learn the tricks of survival—how to eat the seeds of fruit, and how to trap small rodents and skin them, being careful not to pierce the intestines and taint the meager meat. I learned how to follow after horses ridden by Spanish cavalry, picking up grains from their feedbags that had fallen to the ground. And though the Spanish authorities tried to keep us from doing so, we ate the remains of animals that had died of unknown causes.

There was death in every
bohío
, cries of grief coming from every hut. As the Spanish marched us through the village, I caught a glimpse of a female corpse, recently dead, for there was still some color left in her gaunt cheeks, and a baby of about ten months of age, desperately nursing from his mother's exhausted breast. I broke the line trying to reach the baby, and was hit on the back of the head with the side of a rifle barrel.

“Adelante,” the soldier commanded me, forcing me to keep marching onward.

They took us deep into La Cuchilla, and then we stopped. “Sit,” the governor said, and we fell in worn-out heaps to the ground.

“Now drink,” he said, motioning for his men to pass a clay jug of water around. We gulped, water sloshing down our necks and drenching our shirts.

“
Bien, bien
,” Weyler said. I stared hard at him, wishing a seam would open up in the earth and swallow him whole. The truth was, I'd been raised believing in Spanish oppression the way one believes in God. It was unseen, but real. Beyond Aldo Alarcón, I'd had little experience with the Spanish. Here was the face of the enemy, his eyes like black marbles, his hairy hands strong and veined. The saber was back in its sheath, but he kept one hand on it as he spoke.

“I'll need the names of your husbands, as well as their last known locations,” he said. I'd expected silence. I'd expected more shooting, and for those to have been my last moments on earth, my life winked out like a candle. But one of the women, a young girl of barely twenty, began to speak.

“There is Roberto Sorral, and Luis Casimiro, and over there is the wife of Agustín Alonso, there is Ignacio Quesada's mother, and . . . ” On and on she went, listing the names in a quavering voice. No one moved to stop her, though those near her scooted away as if from a poisonous plant. The girl, whose name I do not recall, did not last more than a week in La Cuchilla. She was found dead one morning, and no one seemed to know how it happened.

The boy with the Spanish flag wrote the names down inside a leather-bound book as quickly as he could. By the time the recitation was done, the sun had pierced the horizon. Weyler turned on his horse and his men followed him. Out the gate he went, and guards closed rank behind, so that we were barricaded in La Cuchilla.

As soon as they disappeared, I tore through the village in search of the baby with its dead mother. When I reached that hut, the baby was gone. The woman lay there, her face a rictus of pain, her eyes open. I looked up. There was a small wasp's nest stuck in the thatched ceiling. A solitary wasp circled it, building its new home. So this was the last thing she saw.
Dios santo
, I whispered. Another villager must have taken the baby, and for that, at least, I was grateful. Though I wasn't sure the baby, having drunk whatever poison had been in his mother's body, would be saved. I bent down to close her eyelids when a hand caught mine in midair.

I turned and saw Mario. “Don't touch her,” he said. “God knows what she died of.” He pulled me close and held me tightly, breathing hard into my hair.

“How?” I began to ask him.

“I saw the Butcher's horse, and then, the line of women from the tallér. I followed from a distance. The guards at the gate were too busy saluting the governor to notice me slipping into the camp.” Mario held my hands against his chest as he spoke. I could feel his heart pounding a strange, fluttery rhythm.

“Now you're trapped here, with us,” I told him.

“I couldn't leave you,” he said. He gazed at me for a moment, then asked, “Are you allright?”

The question, asked so gently, robbed me of my composure, and I started to cry.

“You aren't hurt, are you?” Mario asked, looking me up and down.

I was about to tell him I was unhurt when I felt a tickle on my ankle, and jerked my leg, turning to stare at the corpse. I'd had the horrible idea that she had touched me. I went cold, and my body shook. Then, I saw that it had been the wasp, flying in lazy circles around our feet, sniffing us out. It landed on the woman's forehead; its long hind legs mingled with her eyebrows.

“Ay,” I cried out, and buried my face in Mario's chest. He led me away from that
bohío. “
You're making a habit of saving my life,” I murmured against him.

“Quit trying to get yourself killed,” he said in exchange.

We wandered La Cuchilla for a while. The residents stared woodenly at us, as if we were just another part of the wasteland they looked on each day. Here and there, a person would nod at us, affirming our existence, and in those people I could still see an aura of hope. At first, we were afraid the Spanish guards would spot Mario, sensing that he did not belong. But they did nothing at all when they rested their gazes on us. To them, Mario was just another man in La Cuchilla, and I was just another woman, both of us trapped.

When we found Lulu she was trying to organize the women of the tallér. She looked like an insolent queen, pointing her finger at this woman, then that one, assigning duties in a tense, determined voice. Spotting me out of the corner of her eye, Lulu spoke without looking at me: “María Sirena, I want you to keep track of the guards. When do they change shifts? Who's in charge of them?”

Tears welled in my eyes. So we weren't giving up! I tried to compose myself as I listened to Lulu giving orders. When she was done, the women of the tallér held their shoulders back. Those who had been sobbing dried their faces. The gestures consoled me, made me feel stronger, though there was a prodding tickle in my throat and a suspicion that this was all an exercise in creating some sort of solace for us, and not a way of saving ourselves. Lulu was keeping us busy, I knew. Perhaps, this was her way of saving us after all. I thought of the residents of La Cuchilla, the ones with the hope in their eyes. I wanted to be like them.

When the women and children dispersed, each to find a soul who would let her stay in their
bohío
, Lulu addressed Mario and me at last.

“You disappear with my daughter for hours. She returns to me undressed, with a bruise like an orchid on her shoulder, and I am supposed to greet you with what? Gladness? Lárgate, Mario,” said Lulu.

“I know,” Mario said, surprising me. “It wasn't the way I wanted it to be. I didn't hurt her. I wouldn't, ever. But you must know, Señora Alonso, that there isn't much I won't risk when it comes to your daughter. I know all you see is
un
negro
—”

“Bah!” Lulu said, waving her hand in the air as if swatting away flies. “
Eso no importa.
But there are decent ways of courting a young woman, and hiding with her in the woods is not one of them.” Lulu's eyes flashed in anger. “Consider yourself fortunate that Agustín knows nothing of this.”