The Ladies of Managua (15 page)

As she had so often in our childhoods, Dolly spoke so that I wouldn't have to. “I thought we agreed, Isabela,” she said, “that you wouldn't give up all of us, all our life, for someone we barely know.”

“You know me, Dolly!” Mauricio extended his arm as if to reach for me or her, but finally settled his hand on Cristian's shoulder.

“I know you as a boy who is pleasant to talk to on weekend excursions in between exams. I don't know who your family is or what your prospects are or what kind of husband you would be for my sister.” She had kept her eyes on the aisle runner as she spoke, but now she glanced up at him and said, more quietly, “I'm sorry, Mauricio. It's my job to protect her.”

“How did you know?” I asked, because as terrible as this moment was, if we all stayed focused on it, if it never ended, I wouldn't have to begin a future without anyone in this church.

“Connie walked into the Walgreens.” Dolly shrugged. “She assumed you were with me, I thought you were with her. Then I remembered the note you left me this morning, and I got worried. We checked the sign-out at the gate and your name wasn't on it, so I knew there was only one person who could have helped you leave school. The same person Connie said had helped you before.”

Betsy looked down at the floor, but before she could speak, Connie stood in front of her. “If you'd trusted me,” she said, then stopped, short of breath, and I realized she was crying. “If you'd told me what you were up to, I could have helped you. But you didn't.” Cristian stepped over to hand her his handkerchief, but she pressed her wet face into his clean lapel instead, muttering,
“I
would have trusted you.”

“Isa,” I heard Mauricio's voice behind me. “Tell your father what you want to do.”

“Come with me,” Dolly pleaded, grabbing my hand. “We've been together this long and had a swell time so far. I don't want to live the next part of our lives—the best part—without you. Why don't you want to live it with me? Have I been such a bad sister?”

She reached out and swept her hand across my cheek; I must have been crying, too.

“Come back with us and we need never speak of this again,” my father said, stepping closer to us, putting his arm around Dolly, the daughter who had yet to disappoint him. “No one in Granada will know what happened here. We'll say you and Dolly chose to return together and that you're finishing your classes by correspondence. That's what we'll tell the mistress general and the Reverend Mother, too; no one at Sacred Heart has to know. If word of this got out, the school's reputation would suffer as much as yours—what parents would send their daughters to a place where this could happen? Come home and you can have your own room, your own life. Come home and the negrita can keep her job.”

I felt Mauricio's hand on my shoulder. If he had been standing in front of me instead of behind me, if I had been looking at him, maybe I would have been strong enough to do what I knew was right. What God wanted. What I wanted. But he was behind me and in front of me were Dolly, Papa, Connie, and Betsy, each with eyes wide with anger or pain or fear. I wish I had been looking at him, but I was looking at them. I was looking at them, and when Papa turned his back toward me and started walking out of the church, walking away from me forever, I took a step forward and I followed. With Dolly holding my arm, I walked back up the aisle I had just come down, toward everything I knew and away from everything I wanted.

 

18

Ninexin

FRIDAY, JANUARY 9, 2009

We have a deal, Celia and I. She tells me what beauty products a woman of our generation should use, and I buy them on my trips to the U.S. The putty-colored lotion I put on my face this morning is supposed to do three things: hydrate my slowly desiccating skin, even my blotchy tone, and smooth my ever-deepening “fine lines.” I know all this because if a product costs more than I think it should, she gives me its r
é
sum
é
, telling me how and why it's the most incredible cosmetic invented and the only one we could possibly use. But I think that I might have to start doing my own research. Because when I looked in the mirror by the door as I left the house this morning, I saw an old woman. Not old like mama, a survivor, someone with stories to tell. But tired. Beaten. Someone who had given up. I configured my features into the blank stare I find so useful at conferences but I still didn't look strong, just sour. Maybe this is what happens when a parent dies. Your generation moves up in line, one step closer to death.

I didn't give my appearance much thought at the time, but when I faced death daily, I was beautiful. There's a photo Manuel took of me in Matagalpa, napping against a tree trunk, my gun propped up next to me. Aside from training, I never did much shooting; I was more involved in outreach, talking with the local women, explaining their rights and what we were fighting for, getting them to organize, demonstrate for better conditions for prisoners, and set up safe houses to hide and protect us. I also volunteered at the local grammar school, which served as a great place to spread our message without suspicion. But we were soldiers in the mountain jungle, after all; you needed a gun for protection. I knew how to shoot and I was prepared to use the gun to defend myself.

In the picture, it looks like defending myself is the last thing on my mind. My hair is coming out of its braid, my jacket is slipping off my shoulder, and in my sleep, I almost seem to be smiling. I've never been a very good sleeper. I wake up and can't get back to sleep, and when I do, I somehow twist myself up until the bedding becomes like a winding sheet and I wake up struggling to free my arms. Mama says that as a baby, I had colic that kept me up all night; even then I didn't sleep well. But you would never know it from this photo, in which I look calm and rested and so young, like I had no worries at all. I suppose I only had one—I felt guilty for rushing off so mysteriously, so soon after our wedding, without telling my parents where we were going, or anything other than the fact that we were mobilizing, and it would be safer for them if they had no idea where we were. I doubted the National Guard would show up at their home, looking for us; Manuel and I were still pretty small potatoes in the Frente at that point. But I still felt terrible about putting my parents, and Celia, in any danger by association. In at least two cases I knew about, the parents of our friends in the Movimiento had been arrested and tortured. Manuel and I suspected—or hoped—that our fathers' status as successful professionals would protect them from that, but for how long?

These were the concerns that normally kept me alert, after I'd snap awake from a bad dream in the late night or early morning, shaking, until Manuel soothed me and told me we were doing the right thing, so that no one would ever have to fear for his or her parents or children again. The only time I really slept well was during the first trimester of my pregnancy, when I wanted to sleep all the time. But if I'm pregnant in this picture it's a question of days. I always thought that Mariana was conceived in Matagalpa. It's my own private theory. I feel that I know the exact moment, although that verges on ludicrous. I'm aware, from the population control seminars I've been to, that sperm lives in the body for up to three days. That shocked me, that you don't actually get pregnant in the throes of passion, in the honeymoon hotel room or by the banks of the River of Dreams, but that the conception can happen up to three days after the act itself; you're writing a speech or talking to a community group, and some slow-swimming sperm is diving into your egg at that very moment. And that's how we all start out. It's so prosaic as to be depressing. But it's also kind of funny. I said as much to Mariana when I got back from the World Population Control conference the year she was fifteen, but she said, “Please, not while I'm eating,” and made gagging noises into the phone. It reminded me of the time I tried to explain menstruation to her on a visit to Miami when she was ten, and she told me they'd seen a movie in gym class. She was perfectly civil about it, but she still managed to make it clear that I was not invited to visit the part of her consciousness that considered intimate topics like her body.

I abided by her boundaries. She can say what she wants to about my skills as a mother, but I did always know when to go away. I've always respected her privacy, accepted that there are vast areas of her life that she hopes I'll have nothing to do with. And so she doesn't know that I think she was conceived in Matagalpa, sometime during that same four-month stint when Manuel took my favorite photo of myself. Is it horrible to have a favorite photo that's a portrait of just you? Mariana would think it is. If I were telling her this story, that's what she would come away with, the fact that I have a favorite image of myself. But I hope she has one of herself hidden away somewhere, too. Because what I love about the photo is how unself-conscious I seem in it, how happy. It's the one picture I have of myself in which I truly look blissful.

In any case, I was in Matagalpa winning hearts and minds, and Manuel and his unit were there, too, training and planning various missions he said it was best I didn't know about; this way if either of us was captured we would have little incriminating information to conceal or reveal about the other. Having said the same thing to my parents, I knew he was right. We set off for Matagalpa right after getting married; in a way it was our honeymoon. I know that sounds horrible—a honeymoon in the mountains complete with guns and mud-filled boots and fellow revolutionaries. But the truth is, I felt so happy despite the discomfort, despite my guilt over worrying my parents. Manuel's gift was his ability to feel joy and passion, and I sometimes felt I was a vampire, sucking it out of him, turning his happiness into my own. But his excitement, at just being alive, never seemed to diminish. His passion was why I fell in love with him. He talked about tutoring children in the poor neighborhoods like it was the most enjoyable, most fascinating experience one could have; and he was right, in a way, although being with him was my favorite experience of all, better than family parties or a great book, better even than helping others, making a difference. But when I joined him in visiting those families, speaking to the parents, holding the babies, seeing a slow smile spread across the face of a child as she realized that she understood how to carry the one or read the three-word sentence, it really was a kind of high.

So we were in love with each other and with our cause, and then there was Matagalpa itself. It was so lush it overflowed with leaves and vines and swollen green pods holding coffee beans. It also overflowed with mud the fall we were there but to us, even that was kind of delightful, in a disgusting sort of way. Every night we would sit in front of our tent, blocked from the view of the other soldiers, and Manuel would pull off my boots and we'd laugh, watching the mud slide out of them. Then he would take one of my feet in his hands and rub the feeling back into my toes.

One afternoon when he was done training and I wasn't due in the village until that evening, when a sympathetic local priest had said he would let me speak to the congregation after Mass, I suggested we go to the river and wash our uniforms. It was November and rainy season was coming to an end, so it was a safe bet we'd have several hours of sunshine to dry the most important items. The locals called it the River of Dreams, which sounds poetic, but they used it for everything from bathing their bodies to brushing their teeth. I'd seen some other soldiers rinsing cooking utensils downstream where the river calmed a bit, but Manuel wanted to head upstream, where he said the current would be stronger, and leave the clothes cleaner. “God's washing machine,” he said, winking. It seemed less funny after we'd hiked up a cow path for twenty-five minutes; no matter how clean the clothes got, I couldn't see how we'd be able to carry them back through the brush without covering them—and us—in mud and leaves again. But then Manuel grinned and said, “Hear it?” And when I listened, there it was: the sound of rushing water. After several more minutes of hiking, the path ended and the jungle opened onto a cascade rushing into a natural pool.

First Manuel dropped one sock into the churning water. Then the other. Then I threw in the entire bundle of clothes I'd been carrying. He took off his shoes and belt, then his pants, shirt, undershirt, and shorts, and jumped into the water. I took off my shoes and belt and jumped in after him fully clothed. I was going to wash my uniform anyway, and why should I bother taking it off when he could do that for me?

That night at Mass, I mentioned to one of the women that I'd seen the most beautiful waterfall that day, and she told me that it had first been spotted by a wandering priest who described it as being as strong and pure as the tears of the Virgin Mary, and the villagers still called it Cascada Lágrimas de la Virgen. If Manuel and I had known the name, we might not have acted as we did that afternoon in the pond. But when I found out I was pregnant a few months after leaving Matagalpa, I vowed that if I had a daughter, I would name her Mariana, of Maria, for the Virgen.

Mariana's conception may not have happened that day. It could have happened three days after or two weeks before or a week later; we were in Matagalpa for four months and, although there was a war on, we were newlyweds and the abundance of trees in a jungle made it a prime spot for many things beyond just guerrilla warfare. But if the peaceful look on my face in that photo isn't due to Mariana and the hormonal storms she created, it is still thanks to Manuel, and his infectious happiness, the way he could find not just excitement, but also joy, in any setting, the way he could turn a battlefield into a fairyland.

*   *   *

I dreamed of Matagalpa last night, sleeping in the guest room of my parents' home. I'd slept over because I wanted Mama to have as much company as possible after the calling hours, and Mariana was staying there, too, in what used to be my old room. This way, we could all ride to the funeral together. When Mariana came to get me this morning, I saw her reflection before I saw her. I had been staring in the mirror that's hung by the front door, thinking how Celia's coveted cream wasn't working, and remembering the photo, and I didn't hear Mariana walk into the foyer, down the long hall from my parents' bedroom. My mother's bedroom now.