House Arrest (15 page)

“I’d just like to get out of here as soon as possible.”

Manuel nods. “Of course, that would be best.”

“I’m thinking I should tell them everything. I should tell them what I did, about helping Isabel.”

Manuel looks at me sternly. For the first time I think he is angry with me. “That is a very bad idea. Don’t even think about that again.”

After a pause, I glance up at him. “Do you hear from Isabel?” I ask. “Does she write to you?” I had not wanted to ask him this question because I’d never heard from her myself and I didn’t want to know, but now suddenly I do.

“Isabel is fine. Her daughter is with her now.”

“You mean he let Milagro go.”

Manuel nods again. “Oh, yes, he let her go.”

I
’VE ALWAYS SLEPT in Mummy’s bed, Milagro told me when I saw her again. I can hardly remember sleeping anywhere else, except on nights when it is very hot and we sleep outside under the
júcaro
tree. Mummy gathers those round little leaves to make our bed and the leaves smell sweet, like sap, and the air is full of the scent of the jasmine tree. Otherwise I sleep curled in her bed, but I like it best sleeping in the garden because inside Mummy wraps me tight and holds me until I can hardly breathe.

She opens the windows wide so the breeze blows in, what little breeze there is, but I wake up hot, sweaty, trapped in her arms. Even when she’s married or when a man lives with us, I sleep with her and he sleeps in the room that was mine. Only the last husband seemed to mind and this is probably why he went back to Caracas.

Sometimes Mummy goes away. She’ll be gone for a night or a week, and then I go upstairs and stay with Rosalba. But I
never sleep well alone in her closed rooms, in the narrow beds.

Mummy lets men break her heart. I’ve watched this over and over again. Of course, El Caballo was the first one to break her heart. I cannot tell you how many times she told me about the night he came and danced with her. How she still waits for him to come and take her away. Really, it was as if nothing important ever happened to her, before or since. I think she’s just been waiting for him, all these years, the way you wait for a bus that’s not going to come.

In the meantime she falls in love with all kinds of guys for a week. A month, a day. She’ll spend a weekend with one; a year with another. Once she fell in love with the man who painted our house. They became lovers while he was painting it yellow. And when he was done, she said she wanted it blue like the sky on a clear day. He said no and that was the end of that. It’s always the same. She’ll tell me, Milie—that’s what she calls me, Milie—I’ve met the one. For me there can be no other. And then six months later she won’t remember his name.

The ones she usually meets come from other places. They have a mother who’s Mexican or they are here on business. Once she spent a few months with a Russian engineer who was working in agronomy. He was the most boring man you could imagine. All he talked about was bushels per acre and irrigation systems, but she’d say, I’ll marry him, Milie, and he’ll get us out of here. But of course he never did. None of them ever will. They just come and go.

Mummy is crazy. I have to say that. She is crazy. But I don’t care. It’s not bad crazy. She decorates the house in flower petals and the pictures of the saints. She dresses all in white so she looks like a ghost, like somebody carved her out
of marble, and goes to the house of Ángel, the
santero
, where they sacrifice goats and drink blood. Rosalba screams at her that Ángel puts things in people’s heads. That what kind of a jerk drops sixteen palm-tree seeds into a tray and from this predicts the future.

It’s a bunch of crap, Rosalba says. Rosalba screams at her, Why don’t you do something useful with your life. Do something for the revolution.

And Mummy says, Fuck the revolution; it’s not my revolution. It’s your stupid revolution. And Rosalba puts her hands over her ears, shaking her head.

Rosalba has tried to get Mummy jobs. Once they sent her off to pick tobacco for two weeks and I slept upstairs in the narrow bed. When she returned, her hands were all cut, scratched raw. I dipped them in egg white and wrapped them in torn sheets. Mummy says, My father is a tyrant and this country is run by tyranny.

Rosalba rings her hands and weeps. You don’t know him, she says. He is a great man. You don’t understand what we fought for.

He is a
pendejo
, Mummy replies, and I’m afraid I do understand.

My father lives in the center of town and I see him every day. He’s an artisan and makes ceramics in a little shop. He comes over or I take a bus to his place. He makes me a cup of tea or we have a soda together. Sometimes he will scramble an egg, but mostly he gives his rations to us. His parents named him Ernesto, after Che. Do you have any idea how many people here are named Ernesto? He only lived with my mother for a few months after I was born. Mummy really doesn’t want a man around the house. She says she does like their smell and they take up too much room.

I don’t always go to school. I don’t go because there are often no buses to take me and once I arrive there are usually no pencils or books or teachers, for that matter. I don’t like what I learn. About how to be a good revolutionary and serve the state. How to put government before personal goals. The history of
la isla
is a history of throwing off the yoke of oppression. And the kids tease me. They say I bet you have enough chickens to eat. You have enough eggs. It is true that we aren’t starving, but we aren’t exactly well-fed. I’ve never seen a lobster except in the sea.

I saw my grandfather once. He came to address my kindergarten class. He said he didn’t want to bore us with a long speech, but we said, Oh no,
líder
, you won’t bore us. So he talked for three hours about dialectics and his enemies and what we can do for the revolution, and we made paper airplanes and slept. Afterward when the teacher introduced me to him, he tapped me on the head like he wanted to hear if there was something in there.

When I don’t go to school, I go down to the sea. This is where we like to hang out, my friends and me. My friends all have nicknames like El Gordo and Chichi. Chico is my boyfriend and we hang out on the seawall and do things. A lot of my friends go into the park at night and two of them had babies last year. But I just let Chico stick his hand in my blouse while we get wet from the ocean spray. Mostly we sit and think about all the things we want to have. It’s like we’re making our list for Santa Claus. I want Rollerblades and a CD player and a trip to Disney World. I like to chew gum and smoke Marlboros and draw pictures of the sea. But if somebody asks me what I want to be when I grow up, I say I want to be somewhere else.

Mummy wants me to have everything. I want to give you
the world, she says. Then she weeps because I don’t even go to school. Everybody here just hangs out because there’s nothing to do. Who cares about things, I tell her, I just want you to be happy. Mummy is so thin that when I hold her I think she will break in my arms. It is like hugging a bag of bones.

Rosalba screams at her. You don’t eat and you don’t do anything. So many nights I wake and feel Mummy’s tears running down my neck. I want Mummy to go. Even if I have to sleep alone on the little cot in Rosalba’s apartment, I want her to go because I know that if she goes, then I will follow. It may take a while but Mummy will find a way to get me out of here.

And then maybe I’ll get to sleep in my own bed in a house with her. Maybe I’ll be able to breathe again.

B
ANANA TREES, stripped of their fruit, lined the Carretera Nacional. In the median strip, bushes of primrose bloomed. We were the only car on the highway, except for the pickup trucks carrying workers to and from the fields where they picked the oranges that never found their way into the stores. Because there was no traffic, the highway was ours. Isabel had bartered some extra gas rations and I brought the picnic—cheese, Spam, crackers, dried fruit. What was available at the tourist
tienda
.

She had been coming to my hotel, saying there were things she wanted to show me. For Easy Rider Guides I had a tight schedule, a carefully planned itinerary of things to do. There were walks I needed to take each day, restaurants where food needed sampling. There were seventeen colonial churches in Puerto Angélico alone that I was supposed to visit. But Isabel told me there were little villages tucked away where no one ever went, and cigar factories miles from any town. “If you want to know how this country works,” she
said with a laugh, “you should see the cane-processing plants.” And I knew we were going to the beach.

We drove for an hour before we ran out of gas. Isabel banged on the gas meter, which read full. Damn, she said. It was blazing hot as we pulled off to the side of the road. We’ll never get out of here, I thought. But it wasn’t long before a car pulled up. A man in a blue polo shirt and polyester pants asked if he could help. He offered to siphon gas out of his car to get us to the station, which was about ten miles’ drive. I was impressed with the generosity of this stranger in a country so short of gas, but Isabel took the gas without saying a word.

In the car she was silent, morose all the way to the gas station, for which there were no signs. “It’s his job to follow me,” she said. “You see, my father likes to know my every move. He monitors me, though, of course, he never sees me. Isn’t that unbelievable?”

“I know it’s not the same,” I told her, “but my father used to make us stay home too … for the slightest thing.”

She gave me a smile from the corner of her mouth. “So,” she said, “then perhaps you know what I mean.”

We drove to a secluded beach where mongooses overran the remains of a beach bar and the disintegrating thatch huts that lined the beach. Beneath one of the huts, Isabel spread out our blanket and picnic. Along the beach were makeshift love hotels—blankets and tents beneath which pairs of feet protruded. In the water perhaps a quarter of a mile out to sea couples stood in timeless embraces, bikini bottoms floating close beside them in the tranquil Caribbean Sea.

“I know all the secret places on
la isla
,” Isabel said as she kicked off her sandals. “This is Playa de Paraíso. Only lovers come here. They can’t afford hotels. I’ve been here myself a
few other times.” She gave me a wink. “Anyway, no one will bother us here. I love this beach. I’ve swam with the dolphins right where the waves break. I’ve found black and salmon-colored coral. Priceless shells. I keep them in a box in my room.” She stripped down to her faded green bathing suit. “I loved a boy once,” she said, watching the blankets that lined the beach move up and down, gazing at the lovers who stood like aquatic birds along the shore. “And we used to come here.”

When I was twenty, I fell in love, Isabel said, stretching out under the thatched hut in the sand. He was the first man I ever loved and perhaps the only one. He was a student of law, just a few years older than me, and we decided to marry. We met in a café where we were both reading the same book. Lorca. So we had coffee together and started having coffee almost every day. We became great friends.

First, you know, it is important to be friends. There was so much we liked to do together. We both liked to swim. He was a wonderful swimmer and he could just stay in the water all day like a fish. And he loved to read and cook. I never ate much but I ate whatever he made. He cooked all kinds of food. He made
arroz con polio, ropa vieja
. I had an appetite then. He lived in a little flat off the Miramar and we’d stay inside—played house, really. We’d read and write poems and compose love songs to each other. We kissed and lay in bed until it was time for me to go home to my mother.

It is difficult to believe, I know, but I was a virgin on my wedding night. We wanted to wait. We thought it should happen after we’d made our vows. That’s how foolish we were. It’s hard to believe now. He was very gentle when he made love to me. He never hurt me, not once. We lived
together as a married couple for two weeks. It was the only happy time I’ve known.

I convinced my father to throw me a wedding. I had not been alone with my father since the night he came and danced with me and I hadn’t heard from him since the day he tried to adopt me. We’d barely spoken in years, but he was always cordial when I saw him at official functions. So I went to his office one day and waited several hours until he would see me. He glared when I came in, but I just said, Look, I’m your only daughter and I am in love so I want you to give me a wedding. He hemmed and hawed, but in the end he agreed.

My father had the wedding at his hunting estate in the woods about twenty miles from the city. You know, he lives in many places, though he claims he only lives in a room in the apartment of his
compañera
, where he has a single bed and a balcony with a stationary bicycle. Every day people see him on that balcony, exercising fanatically, lifting weights, riding the bicycle.

While my father has no true home, he has many houses. There is a mansion on Eighty-third Street in Ciudad del Caballo and another in the eastern provinces where he also keeps a sugarcane
finca
. He is said to preside over its harvest. There is a fishing hut at Playa Negrita and a huge waterfront home on Isla Azul. There’s his hunting estate, which he seized from an old aristocratic family. First he imprisoned the owner of the estate, though the man begged on his knees to be allowed to leave with his family. The family left but the man stayed in prison, where he died. When my father hunts, he has the air force strafe the mangroves to flush out the pheasants and quail that, of course, are raised on the property. Many pilots have crashed during this mission.

My father has a tiny island, called Cayo Doloroso, with swimming pools and bowling alleys that he saves for his special trysts with the dancers he imports from the various clubs and for special meetings with heads of state or foreign military advisers or drug lords. The island has an airport where people can be flown in under absolute secrecy. Here there are no visas, no passports. He can conduct his business in total isolation.