House Arrest (23 page)

The fiesta for the Jiménez twins, Alivira and Eduardo, for their sixteenth birthday, was taking place in the town square, where music screeched over speakers set up on rooftops. Old men drank beer on the steps of the houses that lined the square. On a rickety picnic table sat a pink cake, decomposing in the sun. A few children sat around the picnic table, but no one played. Their eyes lit up when we put the box of
candies, procured from the zoo and the funeral parlor, in front of them.

It had taken three weeks to get the cake, Isabel told me, because you must go to the special office for birthday cakes; and then there is a special ration store for sodas. The balloons were a gift from the Chinese, who had sent a million condoms, too small for the men of
la isla
, but perfect for use as birthday balloons.

I walked past a broken-down carousel—its ancient horses toppling over—and rows of inflated condoms, painted with poster paint. Over the loudspeaker salsa music blared. A Beny Moré tape played in another house. The Jiménenz twins danced together to a slow waltz like lovers in the corner. Their mother, a very large woman, danced with an older son. Their father had been in jail for fifteen years; they saw him at Christmas and on his birthday.

“You see how we live,” Isabel says. “This is not what you’ll find at your joint-venture hotels. This is not what they’ll let you see anywhere. You want to see a cigar factory; they’ll take you to a model cigar factory. You want to see a hospital emergency room; they’ll take you to a model emergency room. But if you want to see how we really live, then you must come here.”

Men and women milled about. No one seemed to know what to do. I was a curiosity, so several came up to me. One young blind boy touched my face. “American?” an old woman asked in disbelief. I was handed a plate of potato stew with some chicken bits floating in the sauce. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate it anyway.

“Come on,” Isabel said. “I want to take you somewhere.” There was a hill that rose behind the town square and on the
top of that hill was an old fortress, overlooking the sea. “I want you to see the view.”

We climbed slowly through the ragweed and thick grass until we reached the ruins of the old fortress. “You see, it was from here that the country was defended during the Spanish–American War. You know, the war when the Americans came to help us, but then somebody made a mistake and they flew your flag. That was the beginning of the end for my country.”

Then she took me by the hand and led me through a passageway that smelled of urine and rum. We went down several broken steps where creatures scurried away. When we came out, we stood on the rise of a cliff jutted out over the sea. “It was near here,” she went on, “that my second husband drowned. He was a
balsero
and I watched him build his raft. I told him he was crazy and he told me he’d send for me from Florida. Pieces of his raft drifted ashore just a few hours after he sailed and I came here with a
santero
, who floated candles on the sea. The
santero
followed the candles until they stopped a few miles up the shore. That was where his body washed up the next day.”

The fortress had a musty smell; its walls were covered with moss. Isabel led me up a small crumbling staircase until we reached a parapet with a view of the sea. We stood there, the wind blowing in our faces, the sun burning our skin. “Whenever I come here,” Isabel said, “I think I know what it is to feel free.”

We stood on the top of the cliff and Isabel set her eyes to the north. She looked beautiful, in her pink pajamas, the breeze blowing through her hair. The sea breeze filled my lungs.

Once when we were girls, Lydia and I took our walk
through the woods and went farther than we had ever gone. Lydia kept wanting to turn back, but I urged her to keep going. We followed the stream behind our house until we came to a bluff high above a lake that we didn’t even know was there. We stood amazed at the vast expanse of water before us and I suddenly knew that there was a world larger than any I had envisioned and it was not that far from where we lived. I thought that I could just take Lydia and we could go off across that lake and if we wanted we could get to the other side. But then Lydia squeezed my hand as she always did when she was ready to turn around, so after a little while we made our way home.

“I want to help you,” I told Isabel as we stood at that cliff overlooking the sea. “You must tell me what to do.” She put her arm around my shoulder and pulled me to her. She kissed me firmly on the lips. I could taste her lipstick, which had a strawberry flavor, and smell her perfume, which was too strong and perhaps stale.

A
T NIGHT there are noises in the room next door. A party is going on. I hear drinking, laughter, voices rising. I try to sleep, but it is useless. I put the pillow over my head. Finally I can’t stand the noise. I decide to go knock on the door and ask them to please be quiet. I go into the hall, but there is no one there. I put my ears to the doors of rooms, but no sound comes. Manuel is right, I tell myself. I am losing my mind. I am suffering from captive’s syndrome. Everything that is happening I am making up.

I ask the operator to make a collect call to the States. It is the middle of the night, but Todd answers the phone. Maggie, he says, what is it? Are you all right?

This will really get them, I think, if they are listening in. I’m fine. I’m sure I’ll have my papers in the next day or so. I’ll be home by the weekend. This is just a misunderstanding. It will be cleared up soon. Listen, I tell him, do you remember when we were living in separate cities? You were in Boston that winter. Do you remember what we did? There is a
palpable pause on the other end. I hear Todd clearing his throat.

“I want you to make love to me on the phone. I want you to tell me what you’d do to me if I were there.” Of course, if I were there, we’d probably be sound asleep, like children nestled in each other’s arms, because we are so tired from our lives that making love has become a luxury. But now my hand moves over my breasts, between my legs. “Where would you put your hands? What would you do with your tongue?”

“I can’t do this now …,” Todd says, but his voice is breathless, faint.

“Then I’ll do it. I want you to suck on my breasts, I want to feel your tongue between my legs …” I try, but it isn’t working. It isn’t working not because I know someone is recording this call, but because Todd doesn’t seem to want to. I don’t really think that Todd is seeing Sarah, that woman from his office, but at this moment, just at this moment, I think that he is. Though this could never happen to me, I imagine that my husband isn’t alone. That someone else is there.

Suddenly I picture Lyle Nashe’s suitcase open and in his miniature crime scene I see my dishes, my furniture, my dog. But who is the masked man, peering into the window? Who is that masked man, coming up the stairs?

N
OW, MRS. CONOVER, let’s go back to the beginning,” the fat man says as he sits on the edge of his desk, his legs spread. I cannot bring myself to look at him or to look up at his thick legs, down into his round, bulging crotch. I am afraid that the wrong move, an unsure gesture, an indiscreet glance will be misconstrued. I am back in the same gray cinder-block room where Major Lorenzo first brought me. The same barbed-wire-surrounded building. Once again Major Lorenzo waits for me outside.

Except for a secretary, taking notes, I am alone in the room with this man. “Can you describe for me the circumstances under which you met Isabel Calderón?”

“I met her at the airport and a friend introduced us.” “But she left with a passport and a ticket and you reported yours missing …”

“I believe it was stolen from me. Or somehow I lost it.” The fat man sighs, rubbing his face. Sweat covers his brow
and when he takes his hands away, his skin glistens. Behind me there is a rustling of papers. The room is stifling with a smell of bodies that makes me think of tawdry encounters, unmade beds. “Why don’t you tell us,” he says, “what you are doing here. And then you can go home.”

“I’m working for a travel-guide company, Easy Rider Guides. I go to countries and revise the guidebooks.” I repeat the phrases as if I have memorized them by rote. And what is Easy Rider Guides? A cover for what or whom? “Beaches, hotels, restaurants,” I tell him. That is my beat.

“And the first time you came here …” He leans forward, resting his hands on the file in front of him. “What was the purpose of your visit that time?”

He has asked me the same questions dozens of times and we go around in the same circles. Even now as I talk to him, I am vague about what really happened. Did my papers just tumble through the rocks and off into the sea? Or did someone retrieve them as we had planned? I’m sure whatever I did was purposeful, yet it feels like an accident as I sit here now. This confusion brings me to tears and once I start crying I find I cannot stop. Like a flood that has opened, I weep and weep. “I’m sorry,” I manage to say. “It’s just that I feel as if I’ve been away so long. I miss my daughter.”

“We understand,” the man says. “This is a country where many people miss their daughters. You’ll be able to go home soon. Now, shall we go back to the beginning?” he says. “I assure you we have plenty of time.” He takes out a cigarette and offers me one. I am tempted, but somehow I know this is not the moment to give in. I quit, I tell myself. I have quit many things. “You have been here before, have you not, Mrs. Conover?”

“Yes, I have …”

“And what was the purpose of your visit that time?”

“I’ve already told you …”

“But you made contact with Isabel Calderón, did you not?”

“I met her on a few occasions.”

“And would you say you were instrumental in helping her leave?”

“I don’t even know,” I tell him quite truthfully now, “that she is gone.”

He gives me an exasperated look that I have seen in the faces of officials before. Border guards and policemen get this look. My allotted time is up and now he will decide what is to be done. He has lost interest in me, the way a dog does with a toy it has been tossing around.

“Mrs. Conover, it is our strong belief that you provided your passport and plane ticket to Isabel Calderón, thus enabling her to leave this country. That you did this knowingly and willingly and are therefore guilty of something, perhaps it is not a crime, but it is a deception. But that you helped her, of that we feel certain.”

I too have grown bored with these proceedings, but suddenly I feel as if I am fighting for my life and I have to garner every ounce of my strength to fight this battle. “Sir, if I am guilty of anything, it is carelessness. But where I come from this is not a crime.” I manage to say this without really telling a lie. I have been careless in many ways; this time it is easy to tell the truth.

He takes a sip from a glass on his desk and my mouth feels parched. “You realize that there is a flight out in a day’s time. I’m sure you’d like to be on that flight.”

“I would very much like to be on that flight.”

“Well,” he says, holding out his hands.

“I’ve told you everything I know.” Tears I cannot seem to control stream down my cheeks and he looks almost as if he believes me.

T
HERE WAS a moment when I would have done anything for you. When I couldn’t do enough. I would have lied, cheated, betrayed. When you called me a coward, I knew I would have taken any risk. When you said I was weak, I knew I would be strong. I could tell a lie. I could keep a secret. I could tell your story. I easily could have allowed your drama to become my life. Perhaps I even would have allowed you to become my life.

What drew me to you wasn’t your body or your breasts, not your laughter or your rage. It was the story you had to tell. I was certain I would see you again. That you would come and find me wherever you were. Now I can only imagine what happened next. I can only imagine what became of you after I was gone.

P
ERHAPS Isabel examined her body, naked before the mirror. She saw bones wrapped in skin, a prisoner of war who had refused all food. The veins in her legs were like those in an egg yolk when the chick has started to form. Her arms dangled like a classroom skeleton’s. Suddenly she saw herself the way her mother, her daughter, the men who still slept with her from time to time saw her. She knew this was not good. She had to prepare, to train for what lay ahead.

She ate ice cream, rich in butterfat, and pizza, which was easily had. At first she vomited the grease that slid down her throat, the richness in her belly. But then she moved on to pork chops when she could find them,
papas
and plantains, all fried. This was once a country of appetites and now hers suddenly returned. She found she was hungry again and wanted to devour everything in sight. But she was hungry for what she could not have.
Caramelo, carne asada, arroz con pollo
. The tastes of her childhood. She wanted paella, brimming with sweet sausage and lobster.
Fettucini o muerte
was the revolutionary
slogan she wrote across her wall. She contemplated a menu of sirloin, wild rice, creamed spinach. Uttering the words
charlotte russe
, a dish she had never had before, made her mouth water.

Isabel had lived on cheese and grass for years—grazing food. Lettuces, dandelion greens. Now she reveled in the fat of meat, the heaviness of potatoes. She ate tubers and felt hefty, closer to the ground. She was in training. The gringa had allowed herself to be kissed on the lips and Isabel knew that this time she would not be let down.

In the evening she waited for Milagro to return from her father’s. Isabel had an affection for Ernesto. He had been, and still was, a very good man. And she believed he had loved her. They all had loved her—except, of course, El Caballo. And so she could not love any of them back.

Isabel waited in the yard for Milagro to come home. She stood under the trees where she had slept with her daughter in her arms. She could smell the jasmine, the acacia sap. The brilliant purple blooms of the
framboyán
almost dared her to leave. This was not the garden where she had once picked passion fruit and papaya from the tree, but she could still pick tamarind and
acerola
. She caressed the exploding red flower of the weeping bottlebrush, touched the maze of the screw pine. The fishtail palm really looked like fish tails. How can I leave this place, she wondered. She had never felt wool against her thin skin. She had hardly lived anywhere except in her mother’s house.