The Ladies of Managua (20 page)

The old woman who ran the place flipped on a light switch as I entered and asked how she could help me. But when Abuelo came in, she lit up herself. “Ignacio!” She patted her jet-black hair; I would have bet money that it was darker than the shade she was born with, it looked so artificial next to her pale skin and wrinkled face. But when she smiled, the raven hair somehow had the effect of making her look a little like a geriatric Snow White. “I haven't seen you since you came in with those strapping grandsons of yours!”

One look at the glass display case told me that this was where Rigobertito's sons' onesies came from, although Beth taught me they're not called onesies—those are the undershirts with the snaps at the crotch—they're called John Johns because Jackie Kennedy favored them, too. That's the kind of thing Beth knows. Fine ladies have to stick together, I guess.

“The store is such a mess today, and I am, too!” Snow White continued, although her shop was spotless as far as I could see.

“Flor, you're as lovely as ever,” Abuelo said before turning to me. “Mariana, do you know you're standing in the shop of Granada's celebrated roller-skating champ?”

“Ah, the famous Mariana!” Flor gushed.

“It sounds like I'm not the famous one,” I said, although my Bela had never mentioned Flor, so she couldn't be that much of a legend in Granada; my Bela knows everybody in that town, going back several generations. “Is there a rink here?”

Flor blushed so bright it showed through her face powder. “There used to be, a beautiful outdoor rink at the edge of town. They built over it to expand the train station.”

“And you know what that means?” Abuelo said. “Flor remains undefeated. No one will ever break her record. Sixty-six spins in a row!”

“Oh, go on.” Flor flapped a hand at Abuelo. “It was sixteen,” she said, speaking to me now. “Sixty-six would be impossible. Such a joker, your abuelo! Now, how can I help you?”

We had strolled slowly over the Calzada, with Abuelo almost leaning on me for support. But after we bought a miniature wardrobe of smocked and stitched frocks for Olivia, he walked so fast back toward the square that I was practically trotting to keep up as we passed the fake Christmas tree, festooned with red ornaments and twining ribbons all bearing the name Claro, one of several competing cell phone providers. We stopped with our back to the tree, not out of any disgust at the commercialization of Christmas or the invasive nature of advertising—I actually thought the tree looked quite nice, with its unified color scheme—but because it was located smack opposite Abuelo's childhood home.

“Does it make you sad, that the house doesn't belong to you anymore?” I asked.

“Mi corazón, I learned a long time ago that nothing really belongs to us; not houses, not businesses, and definitely not people,” he said. “They're all on loan, and you have to enjoy them while you have them.”

“Way to bring down the room, Abuelo.”

“When you're my age, ni
ñ
a, seeing things you lost doesn't make you sad. It all seems so far away, like a dream. And this place, it makes me happy. I was so full of energy when I lived here, ready to see where my life would take me, what I would make of it.”

“You did good, Abuelo,” I told him. “None of us would be here if it weren't for you.”

He smiled, so I thought I'd milk it a little. “Seriously, I bet if you and Bela hadn't brought me to Miami, Madre would have married some revolutionary she met on a trip to Cuba and they would have raised me in a Siberian commune or something. I'd be working in a factory making Che Guevara T-shirts.”

Now Abuelo was full-on laughing. “I didn't do anything, hija,” he said. “But there is satisfaction at approaching the end of your life, and seeing what you're leaving behind; for me that's your mother and Celia, you and Rigobertito, his boys. I can't take credit for all of you, Isabela did most of the work there. But I'm proud of the small role I played in your existence. There is comfort in that, certainly.” He looked at the building again. “When I lived here, there was so much hope. That's the gift a young man has, and the burden, too. Everywhere he goes, a cloud of possibility surrounds him.”

I don't feel like that, crushed by my own potential. Maybe it's a male thing, to be convinced that you owe it to the world to be a star instead of just a productive citizen who pays her taxes on time and doesn't cut in line at the post office. Or maybe it's that I'm not really young anymore. At my age, Abuelo was already a father of two school-age children, running his own law practice in Managua. When he lived in this building, he was in his teens, his twenties.

“That was my bedroom,” Abuelo said, breaking the silence. He pointed to the corner balcony on the second floor. “I used to stand up there and throw flowers down to pretty girls.”

I thought that might make a nice painting, a man on a balcony in the upper left corner of the canvas, a woman with an upturned face in the bottom right, and in the middle, an oversize rose or calla lily. No, something brighter. Maybe a single, ridiculously enlarged bougainvillea bloom. But I didn't say as much to Abuelo, who, supportive as he tried to be, did once ask me why nothing in my paintings is the same size as in real life. Instead, I said, “You and my Bela must have had quite a courtship.”

Abuelo laughed. “Mariana, Mariana.” He patted my arm. “You don't throw flowers at the kind of girl you're going to marry. Flirting is about possibility, imagining all the wonderful things you could be. Marriage is about reality, accepting that it turns out you're not so wonderful after all.”

“Maybe I'll never marry then.” I shrugged. “I prefer the flowers to the ring.”

Abuelo laughed so hard he started coughing and had to sit on a bench on the pedestrian walkway that now borders the house, staring up at his old bedroom. I wonder what he would think of my predicament now; if he would still find my words quite so amusing.

*   *   *

The Funeraria Monte Santo is just a few blocks down from Abuelo's old house. Years ago I took a picture of the sign in front, I thought it was so funny, the dead man jumping out of his coffin. It reminded me of a song, “Zombie Jamboree,” that Beth's a cappella group used to sing in college. When I showed my Bela the photo, she shuddered and covered her eyes, not wanting to acknowledge that funeral parlors, even ones with surprisingly chipper corpses, exist.

Still, I'm pretty sure that my Bela is the exception to the rule; the sign is, empirically, funny. Even Beth cracked up at the photo—she had me tape it to our dorm room door in college—and she's not exactly one for dark humor, as the a cappella group membership indicates. I wanted to cheer Madre up, to let her know that I felt guilty about the separate-bathrooms comment, so I pointed out the sign to her this morning, when we arrived at the funeral home. She got it, right away; she erupted in uncontrolled laughter. And then she grabbed me and started crying.

And soon, I was crying, too. Because I'm not used to seeing my mother, the comandante, in tears, and because as terrible as I feel the loss of Abuelo is, she loved and relied on him for two decades more than I did. I know what it is to miss a father you never had. But I'm realizing it just might be worse to lose one you adored. I've spent so much of my life obsessing about how my mother felt about me, trying to calculate exactly how much she loved me, or if she, who has spent my whole life walking away from me, was capable of loving me at all, if I even crossed her mind on the days that she was in Managua, meeting with world leaders, and I was in Miami, learning how to divide fractions. It never occurred to me to think for a minute about how much she loved anyone else. Her father. My father. Anyone.

I had been trying to comfort her, pointing out the amusing sign. But somehow we ended up with Madre, who had stopped crying, rubbing my back, still holding me and whispering terms of endearment. “We'll all miss him,” she said more clearly.

I took a long, shuddering breath through my nose and wiped my face with the back of my hand. After weeks of worrying almost single-mindedly about Allen, our future, and what I should do, my thoughts had been all over the place all morning. But now, having cried, I felt cleaner, lighter. I could concentrate on Abuelo.

*   *   *

“In a place of light, in a place of green pastures,” the priest intones, as the coffin is lowered into the ground. I like the phrase, love imagining Abuelo in a place of light, in a place of green pastures. It makes me think of the time he took me to Bill Baggs State Park to teach me how to ride a bike; I can hear the sound of my laughter as I finally rode off, wobbling, and the look of triumph on his face when I closed the small loop around the very tip of the park and rode back toward him, pumping his fists up and down with the palm trees and sea grass behind him, the sun sending shafts of light bouncing off the ocean.

People are stepping forward to drop their flowers on the casket. I take two, an imported rose and a local hibiscus, one to thank him for being the only father figure I had growing up in a city where I didn't quite belong, and one for being my grandfather, a man so tied to Nicaragua that his love of the country fueled mine. I step forward and lean toward the casket, dropping in the hibiscus, then the rose. I want to throw in all my other concerns to be buried as well, so that I will be left with nothing but the hollow sense of loss, and the love I had for Abuelo, which remains to fill the void.

But I don't believe Abuelo is in that coffin. I feel him around me, around all of us, but I know he's not confined to that fancy box. So I straighten up to make my way back to my Bela. And as I look into the crowd I see him, standing in the back behind relatives and friends and old Granadinos I swear I've never met but who, any minute now, will come up to me and ask, “Do you know who I am?”

Allen. I see him and, at first, I feel so much lighter, and brighter, as if a cloud shifted from its place blocking the sun, and I have to shade my eyes. Here he is, a promise that losing Abuelo's love and protection doesn't mean that my life will be without joy or affection. But then I remember that he hasn't made any promises, that I'm reading into what his appearance here means. And the cloud has shifted back again, and my world darkens.

If Allen is here it's because it's finally a good time for him. He's in Granada on his terms, not mine. He hasn't honored, maybe never even considered, my request to stay in Managua. He couldn't even give me this day. Give Abuelo this day. And if his presence here isn't a promise, then it's just the precursor to another loss. He's just as likely to be here to end something as to begin it. And I'm not going to let him touch today. He doesn't get to muddy my feelings with a new swirl of emotions. Today is Abuelo's. And mine.

Allen is standing just far enough away that I can try to convince myself that my mind is conjuring him, that he's just another gringo drawn to this scene of natives participating in a sacred ritual. But he sees me notice him and smiles apologetically, ducking his head the way he does when he shows up three hours later than agreed upon, having lost his sense of time in a canvas.

There's no way he can be sure that I've actually seen him; the sun is out, we're all wearing sunglasses. I turn to my Bela, who has taken up one of the graveside chairs and is sitting with her eyes closed. I lean over to hug her for a long while, feeling her chest rise and fall with a series of deep sighs. “You gave him so much joy,” she says into my ear. “More than I ever could.”

“That's not true.” I rub her back. “You had a marriage lots of people would hope for.” I mean it; they get points for longevity if nothing else. They had each other's company all these years. For some people, that would be more than enough. It's sad that Abuelo and my Bela were too hungry, and too shrewd, to be those people. Or maybe just too damaged by the time they found each other. My Bela had already lost Mauricio, through her own actions, really, if we're being honest. And she told me once that Abuelo had wanted to marry another girl, one his mother thought was too wild, from a family not quite as respectable as his own. He never spoke of her to me and he was always so private that I was too shy to inquire, although I dropped hints. I asked him, after we watched
Casablanca
together, if my Bela was his great love. The right answer was yes, of course; I wanted to think that there were times when they didn't just coexist but delighted in each other, not just in their shared joy when I won a prize or made a painting or learned a Spanish song. But he said, “Great loves are for movies and books, ni
ñ
a. In real life, we love our families and God, and that's enough.” Maybe that was true for him. But even at eleven, I knew it wasn't true for everyone. Not for my Bela or Madre. And I hope not for me.

As I rise, my elbow gets caught on the strap of my Bela's purse, and suddenly I know that God, or Abuelo, somebody is helping me, showing me what to do. I lift the crocodile bag out of her lap and say, “Bela, I'm going to go put this in the car so you don't have to worry about it.”

People are already starting to inch their way over to shake her hand, complete their obligation, then go home to continue with the rest of their lives. “Thank you, mi hija,” she says.

“No problem.” I kiss her quickly, casually, one more time, as I pick up the bag. “I need a minute to myself anyway; it's a good excuse to escape.”

*   *   *

I sit in the backseat of the car, staring at the envelope with “Isa” written on the front in shaky script. There's so much to explain, so much that I thought I'd be able to say when I handed this to her at some imaginary, perfect moment in the future. Now I don't even have a good pen with me, just a cheap ballpoint I borrowed from a flight attendant in order to fill out the immigration form. I turn over the envelope to scrawl something across it; there isn't time to think this note through, but if I don't make this delivery now, I don't know when I'll have another chance.