The Ladies of Managua (36 page)

“Brigida hated her father,” Mariana interrupts. And she's right, of course.

“Manuel and the others did all the planning. He tried to keep me out of it. But I insisted that this was something I could still be involved in; there would only be a month of training, and they could give me the least dangerous jobs. I could be the one who let the maids and waiters go, for example, or went through the coats to collect the guests' IDs. I didn't care what I did, but now that I had passed on the plans and put the mission in motion, I wanted to be a part of it. I needed to feel that way again—the way I had in Matagalpa when Manuel and I each had our missions and he'd go off to train or do whatever it is the men did that was kept top secret, and I'd give lectures or teach the women how to read, and afterwards we'd meet to swim in the River of Dreams. I wanted us to share something like that again, to be working on something important together.”

“More important than taking care of me?”

It takes me a minute to answer. A year from now, I hope, Mariana will understand, will judge me less harshly. But if I say the wrong thing now, she might walk away from me for good, and I'll lose the chance to have her understand me. And worse than losing her will be knowing that in her eyes, I was the one who ended our relationship. If I make a mistake now, she'll feel that I rejected her all over again.

“Not more important. Never more important. Just different,” I say finally, hearing how weak the words sound, especially after all the time it takes me to summon them. “You were only four months old, I hadn't slept through the night since you were born; my life was breast-feeding and burping. Being involved in this—being instrumental in this—reminded me of who I was, of who your father and I were before. I missed you every minute we weren't together. But I missed him, too. He got to play with you and wonder at you and still go off to training and meetings. He was still a revolutionary and I didn't feel like one anymore. It felt like Manuel was changing the world and I was just changing diapers. Like he was leaving me behind.”

There is silence.

“Do you understand what I'm saying?” My voice is so small I don't even recognize it.

“Why don't you just tell me about the night my father was killed.” In the darkness, Mariana's disembodied voice is unnaturally even, devoid of all inflection.

And so I do. I tell her about how we came up through the back patio, because Brigida promised us that she'd convince the guard stationed there to go meet her at a nearby disco. I tell her how we dispersed through the house, how I went straight past the pool area and through the living room, where the rest of our team had already disarmed the startled guards and were organizing the partygoers into groups, men on one side, women on the other, hands visible at all times. I tell her that I was banished to the spare bedroom behind the kitchen where guests' coats were kept, where I went through the pockets of the wraps, mostly silk opera coats the women had sauntered in wearing and then discarded; it was too warm for the men to need anything over their suits.

“I was separating the IDs of the wives of the most important guests when I heard a door slam shut,” I hear myself say, but the voice sounds far away, as if I were listening to a radio program. “I felt something seep onto my shirt and for a minute I thought it was a gun I'd heard, and that I'd been shot, but it was just breast milk; it was almost midnight, when I would normally feed you. At his parties, the general always made a toast at midnight, Brigida told me, which was the signal that the event was winding down and the guests were free to leave. The plan was to ambush him during his toast, which would be any minute now. Then I heard another slamming noise, from the back of the house, where I knew Brigida's room was located. I had this terrible feeling that maybe she'd been waylaid for some reason and hadn't left for the disco by the appointed time. We hadn't given her any information about what would happen, so that there was no risk of her accidentally revealing anything to her father; the less she knew, the safer it was for her. That's what we'd thought, but maybe we were wrong, maybe we should have been in better communication with her. I hated the thought that we'd put her at risk. So I slipped out of the bedroom just to make sure she wasn't in danger.”

I stop to take a sip of my tea, but there is none left. It doesn't matter; a parched tongue isn't going to make what I have to say any worse. “You know the floor plan of the house.”

“Two big squares around interior courtyards, one for the public areas, where the party was held, the second the family's private apartments. Where Papi and Memo's bodies were found.”

Mariana sounds as if she is reciting the times tables. When she speaks again, her voice has more urgency. “Memo had gone into his study to practice his speech, the articles said. That's why there were no guards around him—everyone was in the living room with the guests.”

“I left the room to walk across the courtyard to Brigida's bedroom,” I continue. “But when I stepped outside, I saw her arguing with a man in front of her door. She was blocking him from view, but when she shook her head, I caught enough of his face to realize that it was Manuel.”

“Papi?”

I shiver, although it isn't cold. Mama would say someone walked over my grave, and normally I would mock her for it. But in the darkness, at that moment, it feels like Manuel is stepping out of his, called forth by his daughter to defend himself in death as he wasn't able to in life.

“They hadn't seen me—I was directly across the courtyard, and I was about to call out to them when Brigida stepped toward your father, put her hands on his chest, resting them on the ammunition he had strapped across himself, and kissed him. I was moving my mouth, trying to call to them, but no words came out. I heard a faint rolling noise to my left, turned and saw a fancy, Japanese-style door on the wall perpendicular to me slide open, and a fat hand holding a pistol stick out. Then the general peeked his head around the corner.”

I haven't spoken of that night in years. No, I haven't spoken of it ever. But as I tell Mariana what happened, I can see it all so clearly, can feel the warm milk dripping down my stomach, can smell the yeasty, slightly sour smell. My voice is constant as I speak, and I realize that I'm crying only when a tear splashes onto my bottom lip, a moment of relief I don't deserve.

“Memo saw them and called his daughter's name. He wasn't screaming, but his regular speaking voice was chilling enough. Brigida turned to her father, breaking away from the kiss. I'm not sure exactly what happened next, because everything seemed to happen at once: the general rushing across the courtyard toward them, shooting, Brigida screaming, and Manuel collapsing. I closed my eyes! After all that training, all that target practice, still I closed my eyes. I heard another shot and when I forced my eyes open, I saw the general fallen on his side and Brigida holding Manuel's gun.”

“But the article said Memo Paredes died of rounds of fire from machine guns,” Mariana whispers, still trying not to believe, still using his full name as if we are talking not about a real person but a character in a film or a historical figure—although I suppose he is a historical figure, now.

“Two compa
ñ
eros rushed in when they heard the gunshots and opened fire. Who's to say which killed him? The commandos wanted the credit. I suppose Brigida didn't want the blame. After the funeral, she returned to Houston. She got married later that year, to an American. We kept her name out of the papers. We even paid the guard she stood up to say she'd been at the disco with him.”

“Did you ever see her again?”

“Brigida? No. She sent me a letter before her wedding saying that she'd been meeting with a priest in Houston as part of her Pre-Cana, and that she had forgiven herself for that night. She had been put in a difficult situation and gotten caught in the cross fire; she wrote that phrase in English, ‘caught in the cross fire.' She said that she had forgiven herself for her part in what happened and was moving on, and she wanted me to know that she forgave me, too.”

“Forgave you?” Mariana sits up in her chair and turns to face me. “How is her kissing your husband, murdering her fat father, and pretty much making sure mine got killed, too, your fault?”

She's so angry. And, for once, it isn't at me. I want to reach over and take her in my arms, I want to take advantage of this moment, of this absolution that I don't deserve, to start over, to build a new life with her and my grandchild. But I can't lie to her anymore.

“But she was right, Mariana.” Somehow, now that I am done reliving all that violence, the steady voice that I've been so proud of is hiccupping, catching and gasping to match my tears. “The whole time I was standing there, watching everything that happened in the courtyard unfold in front of me as if it were a horror movie, I didn't say a word. Memo Paredes was a child abuser and a murderer, and still, that monster, he called out to Brigida before shooting. He saved the life of the person he loved most. And I just stood there, watching the whole thing, seeing Memo open the door and slither out of it. I should have screamed! I could have yelled and our compa
ñ
eros would have come running, or at least Manuel would have heard me and reached for his gun or ducked or even run back into Brigida's room. I could have saved your father's life and I didn't. I'm the one who took your father from you, not Memo, not Brigida, and not Manuel himself. I should have screamed but I stayed silent. And I'm so, so sorry.”

I stop to catch my breath and lean back into my chair in an attempt to calm myself; it seems a sacrilege to be disrupting the peaceful darkness of this archipelago, startling the parrots and the toucans and the lake sharks, if any still exist. “I never wrote back to Brigida,” I say once my breath has regulated itself. “I have nothing to say to her. But I didn't deserve her forgiveness. And I don't expect yours either.”

Once I stop speaking, I realize that the archipelago isn't silent at all. Birds are hooting in the distance and geckos are shrieking and even the grass seems alive, rustling and shaking. But there isn't a human sound to be heard.

 

37

Maria

When my Bela talks about her past I see crinolines and white gloves and the kind of little bouquets people called nosegays; her stories remind me of black-and-white movies. But until tonight, while I sat listening to Madre talk about secrets she's kept buried for over thirty years, I never really imagined her past. I knew certain stories about her privileged childhood, her bold youth—of course I did. But I thought of them as drawings or photographs, two-dimensional vignettes. I never imagined her in the world of the past, a place that looked, smelled, and felt differently. I never conjured her world up around me like I do when I start a painting. But tonight, it was as if she were still trapped in the realm of the past, as if she'd never left Memo Paredes's neo-Spanish-colonial house, and its walls were closing in on her, echoing with gunfire.

Unlike my Bela, Madre has always seemed like she exists only in the present; she's so vital, so strong. I always assumed that if she thought of the past at all it was with nothing but pride. Pride and, of course, sorrow at losing her husband, the father of her child, her partner in making history. I assumed that's why I never saw her with a boyfriend: because no one could live up to my heroic papi.

All this time I thought anything good in me came from him. My impatience, my defensiveness, even the fact that I'm a bit of a loner, they're all traits that were handed down by my mother. All my sharp edges are hers. But I thought—I hoped—they were balanced by something softer that could have only come from Papi. I examined every known image of him for clues, and then I secretly tried to cultivate Papi's optimism; in every photo of him, even the ones where he has bullets strapped across his chest and some massive weapon in his hand, his mouth curls up at the edges. Sometimes, when I'm walking through the city and I look west and catch a flash of sunset reflecting off the steel towers, something soars and leaps inside me like a bird, and I always thought that something was Papi's spirit. The good in him—the hope—it's what I wanted to pass on to my baby. And in the last few minutes I felt it dying, crumpling in on itself, dissolving.

“Are you sure that's what happened, Mama?” I ask. “Maybe you thought you saw Papi and Brigida kiss, but it was a trick of the light? Or she was scared and just hugging him?”

“I know what I saw, Mariana,” she says. “Not that it matters.”

I vault out of my chair to stand in front of her, speaking too loudly for the time of night. “Of course it matters! Did Papi cheat on you or not?”

She doesn't answer but I can hear her inhaling deeply, as if she's been asked a question at a press conference for which she's not sure she has a right answer.

“I wasn't trying to make excuses for what I did, Mariana,” Madre says slowly. “Nothing about your father's behavior absolves me of any guilt. A stronger woman would have tackled Memo, saved her husband's life. But even a weak one, even Mama, she would have been screaming from the moment she saw Memo, no, from the moment she saw her husband in the hall, she would have created such a drama that he would have looked around, noticed the enemy approaching. In the end, my mother would have been the better soldier. I always thought I was so strong, but when it really mattered I froze. I froze and in doing so, I killed Manuel. It's my fault you don't have a father.”

Apparently, all these years, I wasn't the only one living with a delusion about Papi, the only one blaming myself for his unnecessary death. It would never have occurred to me that all this time, Mama was suffering, too. I kneel down in front of her chair and take her hands in mine; it's the first time I notice that my mother's hands are smaller than my own. “Oh, Mama. You didn't kill Papi.” I slide my calves out to the side so I can sit on the ground. “Anyone could have reacted that way; it all happened so fast. It's not your fault he's dead. And it's not your fault he turned out to be a jerk either.”