House Arrest (14 page)

Lydia kept asking if she were good enough, but it would be weeks before she got her dolls back again. I asked him if he’d take something of mine, but he said, “No, Maggie. Nothing matters that much to you.”

He was always threatening to leave. He’d say, If you girls do this one more time, I’m out of here. Sometimes he threatened to leave when our mother was at work, and that was the most frightening. Lydia would howl and beg.

Once he actually left. It was during a snowstorm and he said we’d been bad and he wasn’t going to stay. There was a blizzard outside as he headed out to the garage. I put on my coat and boots and chased after him, but the snow was so deep I almost lost my way. I found myself literally following in his footsteps, placing one foot carefully into the impressions he’d made. But when I got to the garage, he was gone.

T
HE BEAUTICIAN’S NAME is Olga and she asks me what I’d like to have done. She has a lacquered beehive, the kind I haven’t seen since the sixties, and painted-on eyebrows. “I’d like you to do my nails,” I say. I extend my brittle, bitten fingers and Olga winces, turning away.

She is finishing up a client and apologizes for the wait. “That’s all right,” I tell her. “I’m not in a rush.” The beauty shop is all windows and I can sit in this kind of glass fishbowl and watch for Major Lorenzo here. Olga suggests I look at the colors. She hands me magazines with assorted designs. The woman in the chair is a German tourist and is having one of those designer manicures—green and orange swirls, pearly tips. Black glitter is sprinkled on. I wonder if I dare go this far; would Major Lorenzo think I’ve gone off the deep end? Would Todd think I’d lost my mind when I came home?

The last time I got my nails done was for my wedding. My mother set me up with her beautician, a dour woman named
Corinne. My mother told me that you can judge a woman by her nails. Corinne filed mine to claws and told me to go catch my prey. I had a friend named Esther who had perfect nails. They were amazing—long, perfect, ruby red. Esther began doing her nails when her mother was dying and Esther lost her job. She said she found she couldn’t do anything to take care of herself, but she could do her nails. After that she decided to keep doing them. As long as my nails are done, Esther told me, I know I’m hanging on.

Olga works intently on the tourist’s nails, which seem to take a long time. I imagine fairy tales recounted into her tips—Hansel and Gretel again comes to mind, Little Red Riding Hood. Woodsy stories in line with current modes. As Olga works away in an intense silence, I leaf through the local couture magazine. Neo-cavewoman seems to be the latest thing. Women in furry fringe, tiger suits, shaggy, torn fur. In a country where there are no imports and no exports, the theme seems to be back to the woods. Or for women, at least, back to the cave.

Though I can’t remember seeing a motorcycle on
la isla
, a model stands before one on a dirt road. Leafs and twigs hang from their hair, her face is covered with soot, and she has a dead look to her eyes. She looks as if she has just been gang-raped on the soft shoulder. I look more closely until I see through the leaves and twigs and dirt and realize that the woman standing in front of the motorcycle is Isabel. She is all made-up and her hair falls wildly around her, but there is no mistaking those dark features, the distant look that gazes beyond the page. I check the date on the magazine and it is from two years ago and I have not laid eyes on her in just as long.

The German woman holds up her nails, smiling happily.
She blows on them in short, hearty puffs, displaying them for me to see. There are no fairy tales here, just swirls and sprinkles in black and red. She tips Olga in deutsche marks and the beautician pockets the money, discreetly checking the amount.

Hastily I close the magazine as Olga motions for me to sit down at her little table. As I wait while she changes the towel and the water, I feel strangely disoriented, as if I have been awakened suddenly and don’t know where I am. She brings a small plastic tub with fresh warm water and soap and again motions for me to stick one of my hands in and I feel powerless to do anything other than what she commands. In her dark red claws she picks up my other hand. She stares with a look of disdain at nails broken, chewed down, brittle, the result of years of worry and work. I chew anything I can—pens, gum, carrots, my nails.

“Tsk, tsk,” Olga says. “You should take better care of your hands.” My hands, my hair, my body, my head, my heart, the whole thing, I want to tell her, but who am I to confide in her?

“So,” she says, “are you enjoying it here? Do you like your visit so far?”

“Oh, yes,” I tell her. “Everything is wonderful.”

“And what have you seen?”

I make it all up. The churches, the fortress, the zoo. Why do I suspect she is being paid to ask these questions? How could this nice woman doing my nails be an informer? But I feel certain she is, like everyone who works in the hotel.

I decide to call her bluff. “You know, back home, in the United States, people say that you don’t have anything here. That you can’t get goods; that you are not free.”

“That is not true. No one is starving; we can work if we
choose. You have people who sleep in your streets; you have people who die of the cold.”

“Yes, but we are free,” I tell her.

“Free to do what?” Olga asks, filing my nails a little too briskly. At any moment I expect them to bleed.

“So you are happy.”

“Of course I am happy. I love it here,” Olga tells me. “I love our leader. I hope he lives for twenty more years.”

“Why do you love him?”

“Because he has given us everything—I have food, a place to live, a job. People who say otherwise are just lazy. They don’t want to work for this country. They are spoiled children who only know how to complain. They don’t realize the gift they’ve been given.”

“Where do you live?” I ask her.

“Oh,” she says, with a whirl of her hand, “it is far away.” This is what people from
la isla
say when they want to make sure you won’t come to their house. I smile at the irony; don’t worry, I want to add, you can’t take me there, even if you wanted to. “What color?” she asks.

There are only three or four colors, outside of the green and orange and black. There’s a pearly pink, which seems too muted, given the circumstances, and a nice copper, if I had a tan. In the end I can’t choose so I let Olga decide for me.

She picks out ruby red. I watch as with a sure, even stroke she paints my nails red as blood.

Major Lorenzo can’t be more than ten years older than me. I wonder what he thinks as he enters the lobby of the hotel. He waves as if he is glad to see me. I wave back, thinking this will help my nails dry more quickly. As I approach, I am hoping he has some news.

He extends his hand to shake mine, but I point to my nails. “Manicure,” I say with a grin and he laughs, finding me amusing. I wonder what he really thinks. Does he see an attractive young woman in her prime or an enemy of the state? Would he try to sleep with me in another moment under other circumstances? Or am I just a problem he has to deal with? Paperwork. A person to process, then get on to the next thing.

I am not a counterrevolutionary, I want to explain. I’m not even a journalist. I am just a travel writer. My work is to appraise the worthiness of a meal, the firmness of a bed. I run my finger over the tops of dressers, I ask desk clerks to perform impossible tasks (to get me a car when there are none to be had, to provide a box lunch when the kitchen is closed) in order to see how accommodating they can be. Mine is not a job of conviction, but of details. Departure times, the costs of rooms, the distance between things.

Whatever I became involved in here, I want to tell him, has nothing to do with my feelings for the state, but everything to do with my feelings for a person. However, Major Lorenzo does not care about such things. He has come to inform me of my options—options that will produce more red tape. He leans forward as he speaks, his arms resting on his knees, though his gaze is out the door, toward the street. For a moment I look that way too as if someone we both know might walk in the door. I hear him explaining why he doesn’t think he can send me to Jamaica. “It is not customary to send you to another place. What we normally do, our policy, is to return you to your point of origin.”

“Yes, but if I provided the money, the cash …,” I offer.

“Well, that might help.” I stare at him for a moment,
wondering when Major Lorenzo stopped looking me in the eye. I don’t remember when he began glancing at sheets of paper, gazing at the floor, out into the plaza, and this reminds me of someone, not anyone very close, but someone who frightens me.

“Let me go make a phone call,” I ask him. “Maybe I can clear this up …” I excuse myself and go to my room, where I place a collect call to my editor, Kurt, at Easy Rider, and, of course, as I assumed it would, this call goes right through. “Maggie,” Kurt says, accepting the charges, “it’s not the same around here without you.” Kurt has been trying to get me in bed for years, though I think it’s more like a dog chasing a car. What would the dog do with the car if he caught it?

Kurt, who is approaching fifty faster than he would like, started Easy Rider almost three decades ago. His first guidebooks were to Central America and Bali and he claims to have started it all—hippie travel, backpackers. The stick-out-your-thumb kind of travelers. He takes full responsibility for the Galápagos and ecotourism. Of course, his readers have grown up with him and now they have kids and thinning hair and they are less inclined to go where they can’t eat the salad. Now we publish a survivor’s guide to Disney World and a Europe with kids, which lists every safari park and water slide on the Continent, and Todd keeps threatening, once we’ve got a few more house payments under our belt, to go, though so far we haven’t.

About once a year, for all the paying of my dues, Kurt hands me a plum. Jessica and I did Galapagos last year, where blue-footed boobies walked right up to her hand. Sardinia. A barge tour along the Danube. He sent us to Jamaica a few years ago, where it rained the whole time and Todd kept
staring out the window, looking for the sun. Go with the flow, I told him. I didn’t mind being inside, curled in damp sheets with paperback novels, watching Errol Flynn on TV. Now I’ll tell Kurt he owes me one. A four-star restaurant tour of France, the Dolomites. “What’s wrong, Maggie?”

“What’s wrong is that I’m in some kind of trouble and I want you to guarantee me a ticket to anywhere.”

“Are you serious about this?” he asks.

“Kurt,” I tell him, “I am completely serious.”

“Then I’ll do what I can.”

I gaze around my room. It feels small, sterile. Cobwebs have appeared in a corner. “You have to do better than that,” I tell him. “You need to promise that you’ll get me out of here.”

“Maggie, there are no foreign journalists in jail there.”

But I am not being kept here as a journalist. I am being punished by someone in a rage. That is what is starting to become clear to me. An enraged man whose daughter has denounced him, that’s what is keeping me here. When I hang up, I find that I am shaking, as if someone had just walked in and startled me. My body shakes as I long for things that are far away. I miss Todd and I miss Jessica and I lie back on the bed and weep. My pillow, my dog, the room where I sleep. The sound of familiar footsteps in the hall. I miss talking on the phone and not wondering who is listening in. Am I supposed to tell someone something? Is there something they have to know before they’ll let me leave?

But the truth is, I know nothing, except that Isabel is gone and perhaps I helped her depart. Perhaps I did not. I know nothing of what happened or became of her after the last night I saw her, though, of course, this was our plan.

I press my face into the pillow and try to smell who has
been there before. I sniff for a scent of perfume, oil, the odors of human intimacy. But there is nothing there, not a trace. I sit up, thinking that I am supposed to confess. That when I go downstairs and see Major Lorenzo, I’ll tell him all I know. A confession, that is what they want out of me. I’ll tell him and he’ll let me go.

Somehow relieved with my decision, I splash water on my face and go back downstairs. Major Lorenzo and his aide are still sitting on the wicker settee in the lobby. I decide that I will go up to Major Lorenzo now and tell him all my secrets, whatever it is he thinks I know. That she’s hiding in Jamaica, that she’s living in Madrid, that she never left
la isla
. That I could love my family more and my intrigues less, that my restlessness is the source of all this trouble, but I am not an enemy of the state. I am prepared to say this and more. It has only been three days, but I can easily imagine the defeat of the coerced confession, the empty hole that true confinement must be.

As I walk toward Major Lorenzo with Isabel’s name on the tip of my tongue, I notice Manuel sitting at the bar. He seems to have this sixth sense about me, about when I’ll show up. Or perhaps he is just always here. I think I see Major Lorenzo and Manuel exchanging glances, but I cannot be sure. But there is something about Manuel’s presence that fortifies me. I feel a seismic shift. I know nothing; there is nothing to tell. The matter has all been misconstrued and the essential thing is for me to leave.

I go up to Major Lorenzo and inform him that I have spoken with my boss and he has guaranteed me a plane ticket anywhere out of here and Major Lorenzo nods. “So,” he says, “we’ll see what we can do.”

“Have you been to Jamaica?” I ask him.

“Yes,” he says, getting up to leave, “it is a lovely place.” Then he looks at me rather coldly. “But we have very nice beaches here.”

After he walks out the door, Manuel motions for me to join him at the bar. “I’ve been thinking about your calling Rosalba, because perhaps she could help you,” he says after our coffees arrive. “But I don’t think it is a good idea. In fact, it is a bad idea. But I have some friends and they are trying to see if we can’t get this matter cleared up.”