Love and Ghost Letters, page 18
Mi Hija,
The rural districts have changed little since the time I first arrived in Cuba. The people have always been poor and ignorant and superstitious. The women bear children in the fields, then sling them onto their backs and continue to harvest sugar. In the rural districts of Cuba, it feels hotter and stickier than anywhere else on this Earth. I hate to think that you live this way.
When your uncle and I first arrived, we followed a man who called himself Toledo. I still do not know if that was his real name, but the men in the Army of Liberation called me Navarro and never Antonio. Francisco did not like my using our father’s name, and he told me so, though with a weakness in his voice that was unlike him. The tropical heat had made him weaker, less the bully and more the persecuted. He no longer invented complex roles of adventure for us to play. I often thought, and think still, that the change did not come from the heat at all. It was Olga Maria who had given my brother strength. Without her, he was so small …
It never bothered me that these men and young boys were out to kill my countrymen, to obliterate my beautiful Spain from their tropical paradise. I accepted the offer to impersonate a Cuban and join the rebels, to kill Spaniards, because I saw the wretched Olga Maria in those Spanish faces. The soldiers taught us to speak without a Spaniard’s lisp, which could get us killed in the rural country. I learned quickly, happy to be more like these muscular young men with their foul mouths and moist, ever present dangling cigars. Francisco only lisped harder. That was his one act of rebellion while in the Army. The men we were with hated Spaniards, despised that country so far across the sea, wanted nothing more than a free Cuba, a Cuba without a king.
We did very little, militarily speaking. Every day we marched through the village roads, stopping at random houses for meager lunches, or baths, or head shavings by kind women to keep the lice away. Always, always, Toledo cut stalks of sugarcane for us, and Francisco, who took up cigar smoking, too, had lost three teeth by the time we were fourteen.
I might have stayed with the Army of Liberation right into the Second War of Independence. I probably would have been shot right off of my pony. But Francisco’s lisping, his quiet, baffling mutiny would clear another road for me.
Keep your windows closed, Josefina. When the wind changes from night to dawn it brings with it bad luck, straight off the ocean. Regla always said so. I will write soon.
Tu Papá
23
Lalo had begun going to Sunday Mass with Soledad, “to watch over her,” as he told his parents. They, in turn, were happy that he had stopped taking long walks and crying out in his sleep. Soledad’s interest in church was solely in meeting with Camila afterward, and it was also a place for her eyes to take in vast amounts of wealth and beauty—enough to last her through the week until the next Sunday. Lalo’s purpose, too, was anything but churchly. His thoughts during the week percolated with images of Camila. It was on Sundays, when Soledad and Camila spent time under the shady trees of the garden, that Lalo would perch on one of the limbs and watch Camila and listen to the girls talk, while Doña Amparo, who did not like Lalo any more than she had the day of their first meeting, sat on a stone bench opposite him. On one particular Sunday, Lalo overheard something that pleased him very much.
He had woken very late that morning, so Soledad was allowed to walk to church alone. When Lalo did finally wake, he dressed and rushed to the church, because his weekly turns of being near Camila were now quite a habit for him. Lalo sometimes sat with them at Mass, and sometimes sat on the pew behind her, to watch the gold in her hair catch the candlelight. This day, Lalo found them in their usual place in the garden. He slid quietly into the heavy parted limbs of the tree and listened to their chatter. Doña Amparo, too, noticing the absence of Lalo that day, had gone home early, kissing Camila on the cheek and reminding her to come straight home. Lalo was overjoyed in knowing that, for today, Doña Amparo was gone and that he was invisible to the girls, and thus, their speech was freer.
Camila, who was now fourteen, spoke animatedly, her legs draped delicately to the side, her hands loosely grasping the toes of her leather boots. She had, as of late, lost the roughness of girlhood, a fact that enticed Lalo all the more. He listened to them almost dumbly, stiffly, so as not to rustle the leaves.
“Come on, Camila, you promised you’d let me know today,” Soledad said.
“I’ll tell you this much,” she said, “he is not very tall, and his eyebrows arch, like this,” she pointed at her own brows, “and when I see him, he watches me in the oddest way.”
Soledad could not suppress her joy at the thought that her friend had a secret admirer, because Soledad, too, was growing up, and boys had begun to draw her attention. Lalo stared at the girls like a feral cat that is suddenly approached by a person intent on catching it. Could it be, he thought to himself as he heard the conversation below, she will be so easily led away? He tried to imagine this other fellow with the shapely eyebrows and wondered at his age, his background, his true intentions for this girl. The existence of another wasn’t a possibility that he had dismissed altogether. He didn’t even want Camila, he told himself, but this information, the giggling that went on below him, was painful to hear. And the pain was quite real, beginning deep in his chest and rumbling there, then moving up to his throat in a surge of sour bile. He wanted to open his mouth and relieve himself of the pain and the hot liquid in his throat, but to do so would reveal him, so there was little else to do but swallow hard and listen.
“And where does he live?” Soledad asked.
“Not far. He goes to school here in El Cotorro.” Camila’s blush had now managed to cover every inch of her face, including her eyelids. Lalo, who had noticed the progression of the blushing, also heard the fact of this boy’s location. He could only be a student at Lalo’s school, and he vowed to find him out.
“Please tell me his name, oh please, please.” By now Soledad was itching with anticipation.
“I can’t,” was Camila’s timid reply.
“His initials then.”
“Well, very well. They are E and M and C,” she whispered and looked at her friend with very wide eyes, waiting for the moment when Soledad knew who he was. Meanwhile, Soledad, who prided herself on knowing the names of the boys who went to school with Lalo, could not find any matches to that particular combination of letters. As for Lalo, the whispered letters were spoken too softly to be made out from the heights where he sat, and so he fumed in frustration, willing his sister to make a guess of it so that the culprit might be revealed.
“That does not help, Camila, and besides, it’s not very fair.” Soledad’s irritation nearly equaled that of her brother.
“Come, you know who it is,” Camila said, “you know him very well.”
And the way she said this last, tugging at her friend’s wrists, Soledad suddenly knew that Camila spoke of Lalo.
“My brother?” she asked, not really wanting to believe that it was true. And when Camila said yes, Soledad felt her face change into a sullen mask, stiff and pale. She had come to know her brother in the past months better than she did before. She didn’t know whether her perceptions had matured or whether his behavior was odder than it had been in the years past, but she did understand that he was not for Camila.
Up in the tree, Lalo had a different reaction to the news. The pain in his chest was overtaken by a nervous itch, the effect of which was still the same. He tasted the bile in his throat that swelled upward at such a pace that Lalo found himself jumping out of the tree and running out of the garden, vomiting the last of his breakfast onto the exposed roots of an aging palm.
The sudden noise frightened the girls. Though they did not get a good look at the figure that ran out of the garden, they were both keen enough to know who it was and why he had run off so quickly. This knowledge turned Camila’s rosy face into a pale mask, much like Soledad’s, and so they parted with kisses, and both went their separate ways.
* * *
Camila stopped running when she reached the Avenida Madero, a broad road filled with the youth of Mar Lindo, buying ice creams for each other and making plans for the next holiday. She wiped at the black scuffs on her shoes and tucked loose curls behind her ears. Despite her run, she still looked as if she had just come from her home after hours of primping before a mirror. The thought of how Lalo had found her out crumpled the easy spirit that made her good looks all the more pleasing to the eye. She walked at a brisk rate down the avenue until she arrived upon the quiet park that marked the center of Mar Lindo. Within its confines, one could stroll past rows of imported maples, their growth stunted by the heat, or watch the children, each one dressed in a sailor’s outfit more expensive than the next, being pushed on swings or down magnificently polished slides by their nannies. It was the latter pastime that Camila chose—to sit and watch and catch her breath.
Lalo, who had followed her at a distance, felt that the nannies were far too much like Doña Amparo. They were gruff and overweight, and each looked after her own charge sternly, careful that no other child went too near. These women made Lalo feel as if he was being watched, even here. He stood between the malformed maples for a few moments in which everything around him seemed to slow, as if he was drunk and his eyes were playing tricks on him. He took one more long look at Camila’s back before the trembling overtook him again, and he ran away.
Camila, who had been watching Lalo’s reflection on the polished metal slides, turned to see him disappear out of the park and toward El Cotorro. She was sure now that Lalo had an interest in her. Satisfied, with the blush returning to her cheeks, Camila walked to her own home, assuring herself that she would have to spend more time visiting Soledad from now on.
When Lalo finally arrived home, he found Soledad waiting for him in their stifling little bedroom. Rivulets of sweat ran down her cheeks, and Lalo could tell that she had run home in order to get there before him. In her anger, she forgot to open the windows to let in some fresh air. The way in which Soledad stood there mutely, her hair in little girl ribbons, made the pain return to Lalo’s stomach. This child, this baby, is Camila’s dearest friend, a fact which makes her a child, too, Lalo thought. He swallowed thickly and pushed passed his sister.
Soledad, who had a similar pain in her own stomach, spoke before Lalo could throw himself on the bed. “Do you love her? I mean, the way she says you do?” she asked, and the question was more a plea than a demand.
“Be quiet, Soledad,” Lalo said as he finally did drop down on the bed, rolling over on the hot sheets.
On this rare occasion, Soledad was not to be quieted. “If you do love her, I will tell her to run far away!” She screamed the last into Lalo’s uncovered ear, which rang and buzzed as if to confirm that the threat was a real one. At this, Lalo sat up and watched his sister, who quavered in spite of her own will not to. “And I will tell her that if she doesn’t run, then you will sell her away like a whore, like you did before to the other girls.”
At this, Lalo wanted nothing more than to cover his sister’s mouth, to stop her from speaking to him or to Camila. She always knew it all, as if someone had come in the night and told her, keeping her up late with scandals and chatter. There was no way that Lalo could think of to alter what Soledad already knew. Realizing that she was still a child who could be tricked, Lalo found that his only resort was to lie.
“I do not love her,” he said, trying very hard not to grimace. “She’s a terrible liar. Now be quiet and open the window, will you?” Lalo lay on the bed once more, curling his spine into a U to ease the pain in his stomach and to calm the retching in his throat the lie had caused.
* * *
But Lalo did not fall asleep. Instead, he lay there until late in the afternoon, listening to the movement of the family outside the room. He heard when Lorenzo arrived from work, shouting at his mother because the meat she had packed for his lunch had been raw. He heard when Josefina dropped a kettle and noted the extent of the splash, and so he imagined that the soup, or broth, or whatever it was, had doused the parlor. All of this he listened to, each new sound interrupting a different version of his morning in Mar Lindo’s park with Camila. He might have walked up to her, saying that he understood her affection for him, but, she’d understand, it could never be. Or he might have run to her instead and lifted her from the place where she sat to hold and kiss her and link arms with her. And it was this vision that lingered the longest in his mind, only to be suspended by another sound from the noisy house.
The front door had been thrown open, the knob thudding against the wall loudly, and a series of voices mumbled and rose in pitch until the talks were now shouts instead. Of all the voices, the clearest was that of Doña Amparo. It was her grating voice to which Lalo was most attentive. He lay still and held his breath to hear all that the old woman was saying.
“You will be so kind as to tell me, señora, what your son intends for my niece,” she said, and Lalo could barely make out the blundering retaliation of his mamá before Doña Amparo continued. “My niece arrives home and her skin is flushed and I ask her, ‘Mi niña, what is wrong?’ and she tells me that all is well. And at dinner she does not eat her food, and I ask again, ‘What is wrong?’ and again she tells nothing, but you see, I know well that a lost appetite is a signal of lust, and so I say to her, ‘It is the Concepción boy, isn’t it?’ and her cheeks burn red again, and I know that it is so. Look at her,” she says, and Lalo understands that Camila has been brought to the house, too.
“She still burns to think of him. And now she has told me everything.” Lalo could hear the murmuring of his mamá, surely apologizing out of respect for the wealth and good standing of the woman. Her murmurs went on for a long time before Doña Amparo cracked the quiet with her own rumbling voice.
“My niece will not go about public parks with small demons such as your children,” and then, as if to mark the sudden sadness of the prohibition, Camila moaned the tiniest of moans, a sound that Lalo felt pierced his breast. Upon hearing the sound that came from her niece, Doña Amparo, too, must have felt a stitch of pain, because in a lower voice she said, “If he is to be around my niece, he must learn the respect that he was never taught here, and he will visit like a gentleman on Friday afternoons between the hour of five and six in my parlor and in my presence. Come, Camila.” And the pair made their way out of the house, Josefina giving an audible sigh of relief. Lalo sighed along with her, overjoyed that his courtship of Camila could begin.
Mi Hija,
My brother, Francisco, was a Wednesday boy. He was stuck in the middle, always. The streak of rebellion he had lost when we first arrived slowly made its way back into his voice, his smile, and his very walk. He moved deliberately slowly, far behind the marching men, like a serpent in the way he swung his hips and took in the sights of the rural districts. I walked with the soldiers, and I could hear them grumble about Francisco, calling him a “dirty Spaniard,” or a “lazy woman.” And the angrier they became, the more Francisco lisped in an exaggerated Spanish way.
“What are you doing?” I asked him finally, after I watched one of the soldiers cock his fingers into an imaginary gun and fire three invisible bullets at my brother.
“I want to go home, Antonio,” my brother said, and I remember how he blinked wetly. I wanted nothing more than to stay and fight at last—to fight in the mountains that the Spanish did not understand, to swing from the vines and drop on the Spaniards like quiet rain. The soldiers would not let Francisco go freely, because he might give away our plans to the Spanish. They feared that he would turn traitor and that all could be lost on account of one small boy.
The men could taste independence. When the Americans arrived with their armies, they could see it plainly. They talked about their girlfriends, their wives, and the children they did not yet have, born in a free Cuba, a Cuba without Spaniards like my brother and me. So I begged Francisco to stay and be quiet. I pointed at the rifles slung on the backs of the ponies. My brother nodded and draped his arm around my shoulder.
The next morning the men awoke to see a small Spanish flag set around the head of one of the ponies, like an old woman’s kerchief. The animal munched slowly on the grass beneath it while the sun glared overhead, setting the red and yellow bars of the flag aglow. Francisco, wrapped in a blanket beside me, began laughing a low moan of a laugh. His mirth became louder and louder as we watched the soldiers tear the flag off the head of the pony and stomp it into the ground. Toledo himself drove a knife through the heart of the flag, then a soldier named Concepción spit on it until the flag was little more than a wet rag.
It was this same man who shot Francisco in the stomach that afternoon as we ate, when my brother wondered aloud what the King of Spain was having for lunch.
Do not imagine, Josefina, that I am angry that you share the name of a murderer. Lorenzo’s people are innocent of that butchery. There are thousands of Concepcións in the world.
Tu Papá
24
On the day Soledad turned fifteen, Josefina decided that she was somehow trapped. Little had changed in her life, except that now she looked aged, her hands were covered with so many brown spots that they did not seem to belong to her body anymore. As for her husband, he suffered from headaches that were bad enough to keep him in a dark room all day. She’d retrieve the ghost letters from the bag on the clothesline. She had been surprised when she’d found them there the first time, but the new location was just further proof that her father was watching, that his wisdom beyond the grave told her to hide the letters from Lorenzo. She and Lorenzo argued, and still she went to Soledad at night, lying down next to her and crying into her hair about Lorenzo’s infidelity. And she finally read her the old ghost letters.
