The Ladies of Managua (4 page)

But Jos
é
/Juan is steering me softly to the VIP area, his firm, gentle hand on my elbow, and this means that there will be no leaning into my Bela's warm shoulder and Shalimar-scented neck to unveil my secrets. My mother will be collecting me in the VIP and we'll glide past legions of flunkies nodding in obeisance to her as we make our way to the car. And then I'll have to sit in the middle of the backseat between my mother and grandmother, talking about my flight and my work, splitting my attention evenly between them, like a mother pouring out equal glasses of milk for her twin daughters, making sure no one cup has more than the other or there will be whining all through dinner. This afternoon will be difficult enough without me slipping and hurting one of them, giving them a smaller, sharper pain to focus on instead of the deeper loss of Abuelo.

*   *   *

There she is, looking both brisk and majestic in a black pantsuit with a pink-and-turquoise scarf at her neck. The black is for Abuelo and the pink and turquoise are for Daniel, the president; when the Sandinistas rebranded, they swapped their militaristic red and black signature colors for these friendlier, candy-colored hues my mother would otherwise never wear. It's revolution by Lilly Pulitzer, I once joked, but that was a mistake; I had to listen to hours of research that the branding consultants had delivered which absolutely proved that turquoise is the perfect combination of blue, which has a calming effect, with green, which symbolizes growth, and that fuchsia is eye-catching and would appeal to women. Okay, it wasn't hours, more like minutes, but one thing my mother hates is wasting money—or any other resource—so she did expend a fair amount of breath and energy trying to convince me that the consultants were right and the reason Daniel won the last election was thanks not to the newfound support of the Catholic Church but to the mass appeal of these pop art colors.

Although the scarf may be silly, she looks anything but, and I feel dirty and rumpled in my black wrap dress, which seemed so sophisticated when I bought it yesterday in advance of the flight. It can go anywhere, the saleswoman had promised, and I planned to wear it all weekend. I tug it straight—my mother is looking at her iPhone and hasn't seen me yet, a fact which both pleases me, making me feel as if I have the upper hand, and annoys me—after having me dragged to the VIP room, why isn't she watching for me to arrive?

Then she looks up and grins and I glance down at my bag before smiling back. When I look up again, she's staring at me with a smaller, confused smile on her face, like she used to when I was five or six and I'd wander into her office when she was on the phone, lift my arms up to her, and call out “Mama.” It always took three or four shouts before she noticed me, and although she inevitably blew me a kiss or dropped to her knees to give me a hug before putting her finger to her mouth and motioning to my Bela or my nanny or her assistant to get me, there was always a moment where she looked at me like she couldn't quite place who I was or what I was doing there.

“Thank you, Joaquin,” she says to the boy, who is not, it turns out, named Jos
é
or Juan, and I am reminded, again that my mother is a better person than I'll ever be. “Is your daughter's fever down?” He nods and grins and mutters his thanks and then she is hugging me, hard and quick, before grabbing the handle of my rolling suitcase. “Come on, then,” she says. “Don Pedro is waiting.”

And even though I'm sure I must be the first person off our flight to walk out into the humid air, I feel as if I've made everyone late, and it is all my fault.

“We'll go straight to the calling hours,” she says. “Since you're dressed for it. Mama is ready, too.”

“And so are you, Madre,” I say. And then, because even though I'm an adult woman with a life of her own, I can't help myself, I add something more: “Nice scarf.”

 

5

Isabela

“How are you holding up, Bela?” she had asked me last night on the phone, and the enormity of it all hit me again. We weren't Romeo and Juliet, it's true; no one knew that better than my Mariana, who knew all about New Orleans, and who had grown up watching us live our lives, our separate but not equal lives, as I used to joke when the children were young. Ninexin hated it when I said that, she said it was in terrible taste, but it was true. Ignacio had his life, full of money-making endeavors and tales of business coups shared with his friends, who one by one left this world until the only person left to listen to his stories of brilliant investments was Don Pedro. And now Ignacio has followed his friends into the next world. Poor Don Pedro.

And poor me, too. We weren't Romeo and Juliet, but still, we lived together for over fifty years—worked together, him in his law practice, always with some about-to-change-our-lives investment on the side, while my business was raising our daughters, an impossible task when one of your children is as headstrong as Ninexin. And then came Rigobertito and Mariana, our grandchildren, and, more than that, our family's future: the next generation, a new crop to love and lament and worry about and gloat over. At Mass once in Miami—it must have been Christmas or Easter because Ignacio was with me—we bumped into an old client of his, another one who had sold his cattle ranch before the Sandinistas could force him to gift it to the war effort, and moved to the U.S., but not before acquiring a new wife, younger than his first, just a few years older than his daughters; the youngest one had made her debut the same year as Celia. The new wife—Ignacio recognized her; she had been the secretary who had done the books at the man's cattle finca—was holding a little boy by the hand, and the man had a little girl in his arms, one you'd assume was his granddaughter unless you knew better.

“With my older kids, I was always so busy,” the rancher told Ignacio when he thought I couldn't hear. “I never knew parenthood could be so much fun.” As if he were recommending a restaurant:
Parenthood—try it, you'll like it!

Ignacio had other women, too. I knew it. They all did in those days. But his work was his great passion, so none of those women really mattered. We knew at our wedding ours was not a love match. And that helped, knowing where we stood. At least I thought it did. It helped me know what to expect, to accept that at twenty, my best years were behind me. Still, I don't think Ignacio ever quite forgave me for knowing that.

No, we weren't Romeo and Juliet, but we shared the same space for fifty-five years. His was the face I saw every day. And now I won't anymore. And what will I do instead? I know what I'll actually, physically, do, on a daily basis. I'll oversee the staff in the kitchen, in the laundry room. I'll have lunch with my friends during the day and I'll call my Mariana at night. Rigobertito will visit with my great-grandchildren, and there will be Christmases with him and my Mariana, and Easter sometimes, too. If I feel up to it, I'll visit my Mariana. Not all the way to New York again, but maybe we'll meet in the middle, in Miami, where that sweet girl she lived with in college has settled, and where my Mariana attends more and more art shows each year. In between there will be distractions, my telenovelas,
Vanidades, Ser, Hola!
Princes and princesses will keep getting married, actresses will keep wearing less and less. The world will continue without Ignacio, as it will without me someday.

I know what I'll do on a daily basis. But what will I feel like? What will my life be like? Some widows expand. They glow like they were supposed to as brides. But others wither and shrink once their husbands die, and soon they're gone, too. And it's never the ones you expect, you can't tell what will happen to whom.

Imagining the future frightens me. I won't be able to avoid it later, at the calling hours, or tomorrow, at the funeral. But for now I don't want to think about it. I want the car to fill with color and light and youth. I want my Mariana here now. Even though Ninexin called and told me the plane had landed, and I know it is just a matter of time before she is in front of me, one of the ironies of my life is that the older I get, the more impatient I become.

 

6

Ninexin

I was watching through the glass panel in the door of the VIP lounge. I saw her stride in, rolling her own bag, slowing her gait a little so that poor Joaquin could keep a hold on her elbow, like he was an escort at the debutante balls we used to have at the club. I never had a coming out; by the time I was old enough I was too wrapped up in the Movimiento to consider such a thing. But I remember my sister's, how the boys glowed with pride as they held her elbow to steer her to the dance floor, the bolder ones rubbing their thumb on her bicep where her flesh was visible, just above her long glove. Celia was stunning that night, but she was just as lovely every night of my childhood. She could have stayed that way with a little discipline, but it was as if she gave up after Rigobertito was born and the doctors said there could be no more, as if knowing she would have no more children convinced her she should look like she'd had dozens, like a proper, round matron. Or maybe it was all those years in Miami, all that Cuban food, the neighborhood parties, too-sweet cortaditos and pastelitos for breakfast. Rigobertito is starting to put on weight but he's still handsome, he still looks like Celia did when she was young.

And Mariana, does she look like me? I would like to see something of me in her—whatever is in me that is best, whatever is beautiful, she can have. But all I see as I study her now, without her knowing, is Manuel. His dark hair. His long neck. Her eyes, sometimes I feel they're mine, but that might be wishful thinking, optimism bias, and I can't check now. I don't want her to notice me analyzing my first glimpse of her, watching to see how much of me she carries. So I pull out my phone and try to focus on emails from the office. If I catch her in an unguarded moment I'll see how she's feeling, and I'm not strong enough, not today. If she's tired, I'll think she's already weary of me. If she's annoyed because her feet swelled on the flight and her shoes are pinching, I'll think she's still angry at me, that she'll always be heartsick that I let her go once, my second great mistake.

I remember from a literature class I took at UNAM—one I audited without telling Manuel—that an American poet said the art of losing isn't hard to master. But that woman lied. I lose Mariana again every time I see her and I never seem to get any better at it. Thank God for Joaquin, sweet Joaquin, who will be here to ease the transition from being without her, from the hope of seeing her, to the reality of being with her again and found wanting.

When Mariana was a baby, if she wasn't screaming in pain from the colic, or spitting up from the reflux, there were light-filled moments when I would pick her up and her eyes would widen and she would smile, open-mouthed, toothless, as if gasping in surprise that someone as wonderful as I existed in the world and was lifting her off the floor at this moment. In her face I could see an emotion we don't have a word for, at least not one that I know, not in Spanish, not in English either. It's the combination of shock and joy. “Delight” comes close but it is too soft; this emotion could make her gurgle and squeal, harsh, animal sounds but so beautiful.

At other times, if she was lying quietly and I brought my face too close to hers she would look away, first with her eyes, blinking hard, then turning her head altogether. As if seeing me was too much for her, too much joy and excitement to process. Then she would look back shyly and we could begin whatever task awaited us, the feeding or the rocking or the Weensy Weensy Ara
ñ
a climbing up the waterspout.

She does an imitation of that move when she sees me now, glancing down at her bag before looking at me with the composed, adult face that says, “Hello, Mother, how are you, and how unseasonably cloudy Managua seems today,” even though she hasn't spoken a word yet. I grab her and squeeze, wanting to press my memories of her infancy into her. It's so unjust that she has no recollection of the months, the days, the hours upon hours I spent holding her, wondering what she wanted but couldn't express, as well as what she would hunger for in the future, what her life would be like. I never dreamed it would be like this. I've buried a husband and more friends than most fifty-three-year-old women, many of them lost when they were still so young that their lives had barely started. And I buried them all dry-eyed, whether from shock or from the cold comfort of knowing they had been well aware of the risks they'd taken on, going in. But I cried for two weeks after Mariana was born; every day in the afternoon, a wave of sorrow would wash over me like a tropical storm. Sometimes I cried because I was overwhelmed. Sometimes I cried because I was so tired. Sometimes I cried because she cried, and at others I cried because I knew I now had everything I wanted and I feared that someday I could lose her.

Mariana hugged me back; she always does, she's a good girl. But she doesn't linger, she doesn't luxuriate in my arms, nor does she laugh the way she does when we get to the Accord and she disappears into the dark interior, through the door Don Pedro holds open. She enters the car the way Mama taught her to, the way Mama learned at boarding school in New Orleans, where car-entering seems to have been something of a skilled sport: she sits on the edge of the seat first, tilting forward the slightest bit, then, once her backside makes contact with the upholstery, she leans back and swings her bent legs into the car, always keeping her knees together, so that the last thing anyone watching would see is a pair of lovely, slanted ankles appearing to wink at them before they disappear into the interior. As far as Mama is concerned, there's always someone watching. She taught me the move, too, although I pretended I wasn't paying attention. Still, I've found myself using it, at meetings in Paris. The French like that sort of thing and I like showing them that those of us who once fought in the jungle are equally at home sliding into a town car.