House Arrest (5 page)

T
HE HOTEL is at your disposal, Major Lorenzo said, and I have taken him at his word. I spend my first few hours acclimating to the place. Seeing what I can do with my time. There is a rooftop terrace where I can sun on plastic lounge chairs in the afternoon and drink rum-and-Cokes from four o’clock on or stay for the pig and lamb roast in the evening, when they set up the stereo with speakers that blast salsa, mostly pirated from Miami, across the rooftops of Puerto Angélico, the name by which the inhabitants still refer to it.

In the lobby there is the bar open twenty-four hours a day where prostitutes and tourists mingle and there is the restaurant open during meals. I can get my nails done or have a touch-up for about five dollars U.S., eat a plate of spaghetti, and shop at the tourist
tienda
. I wonder how much of my update I can do by phone, though Kurt would probably fire me if he knew.

Easy Rider Guides won’t accept a tourist brochure as gospel
I have three walking tours to do—old Puerto Antonio, the Miramar where the castle is, and the Monuments of the Revolution. I have done these before, but Easy Rider wants me to do them again. I’ve argued that a five-hundred-year-old colonial fortress probably hasn’t changed much in the last two years, but Easy Rider wants it all checked out—the walking tours, the dates of historic churches, the costs of meals on the budget plan, if all-inclusive includes sports equipment and snorkel gear. It makes a big difference to people if they have to rent everything they need. After all, a package is a package, and à la carte is à la carte.

But it looks now as if any work I get done will be from the lobby of this hotel, so I order a cup of coffee, which Enrique brings right away. He looks at me as if he wants to say something, but he seems to think better of it. As he turns to wait on another table, I think to myself that he must know the circumstances under which I am here. I take a few sips, but the coffee is tepid and weak. With a sigh, I sit back, gazing around the room, thinking how empty it feels.

This is a room where Isabel and I sat many times. It is one of the places where we made our plan. So it is odd to be here and know that she is gone. I have not heard from her in these past two years. Every day I’ve thought that the phone will ring, a letter will arrive. I will receive word. But I never have. Somehow I thought she would get word to me of her whereabouts, but it is as if she has fallen off the face of the earth, evaporated into thin air, and I almost believe she has. And that she planned it this way.

I take a few more sips of the coffee, then put the cup down. There isn’t that much to do in this hotel except sit at the bar and sit on the roof. I opt for my room and decide to try and make phone calls from there. First I call Todd. To my
surprise the connection goes right through. I hear the answering machine with Jessica’s voice on the other end. “Hello, we can’t come to the phone …” I’ve never really listened to my daughter’s voice on the message, but now it sounds tentative and unsure, as if she is doing something that embarrasses her, as if we’ve pushed her too far. Jessica begged to let us put her voice on the answering machine, and then when we let her, she was so shy. Her voice seems brittle, as if it could break.

The answering machine cannot accept a collect call so the operator tells me I must call back. Instead I give her my father’s number. I’m not sure why I call him, but I do. I could call Lydia, but she’d never accept the charges. Or she’d just freak out.

In two rings my father answers. When he hears it is from me and I am calling collect, he accepts, though not without hesitating, and asks in his gruff voice where and how I am. His voice is heavy, as if he’s been asleep. CNN is in the background and for a moment I try to catch the news, to hear what disaster he is listening to, as if this can somehow bring me back to what I left behind.

When I hear his voice, my hands start to shake, not because he is my father, though there is some of that, but because I am sure someone is listening in. Why would it have taken so long to prepare this spartan room? Looking around at the twin beds that have only sheets on them and four little towels in the bathroom, I see that there was so little to prepare.

“Daddy, I can’t really talk. I just wanted you to know that the weather is bad,” I tell him, glancing out at the clear, blue skies, “and I’ll be coming home soon.”

“Oh,” he says, “I’m sorry to hear that. It’s nice here. Very
warm; lots of sun.” Since my mother’s death he has lived in a condo near Sarasota. His apartment is somewhat inland and it is very muggy there. Once he saw an alligator, jaws spread, in a ditch by the side of the road. He is dating a woman whom Lydia and I have never seen nor spoken to, whom he refers to as Flo.

“Well, where I am the climate is bad.”

“So that means you’ll be coming home sooner than you planned?”

“That’s right, Daddy. Will you call Todd and leave a message? Ask him to phone me.”

“I’m not sure how the weather can be bad there and nice here. Do you think it’s coming this way?”

“I don’t think so, Daddy. Listen, I can’t talk anymore. Tell Todd I’ll be home sooner than I expected. And tell him not to worry, but to call me, okay?” I hang up, wondering if my father made any sense out of our conversation. My guess is that he did not.

When I go downstairs, Manuel is nursing a Red Stripe at the bar. He looks smaller than I remember him and seems heavier, though he still has a lightweight boxer’s build. I have no idea how he knew he’d find me here, because I never told him that I was coming. And I’m not even sure how he got into the hotel, since the natives aren’t allowed in the tourist hotels, but he is sitting there. He looks up and nods and I know that he’s been expecting me.

I
SABEL’S APARTMENT was in the Miramar section, one of the nicer parts of town. But her street was blocks from the sea. Only a little breeze blew on this inland road and the air felt heavy and dusty. The front of the house, which had once been painted lemon yellow, was ensconced in a tangle of vines, bougainvillea that hadn’t been cut back in years, liana that threatened to engulf it. The air was thick with the smell of overripe fruit, and from deep within the tangle, blood red orchids and scarlet mariposa bloomed.

I trod carefully across a lawn that was mostly weeds and mud with a few greenish brown patches of sod. Holding back the dead thickets, I made my way to the stone path, where thorns snagged at my legs. It was hot and as I walked through the arching foliage, I thought this must have once been a beautiful garden, cared for and tended, but now it had gone to ruin.

When I rang the bell, I waited for what seemed like a long time. Then footsteps clicked across the floor. A woman with
clear blue eyes, almond skin, and wavy brown hair flecked with gray opened the door. She wore a trim white dress and smelled of gardenia, making me wish I hadn’t worn my gray slacks and beige shirt. Though she was perhaps in her sixties, her features were fine, her skin smooth, and I was startled to find such beauty behind the maze of vines and thorns.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” I told her as she opened the door, “but Isabel asked me to stop by.”

“I am Rosalba Calderón,” she introduced herself, clasping my hand, “Isabel’s mother. But she isn’t here.” Rosalba looked nothing like Isabel and only then did I realize that Isabel looked like her father—the one they called El Caballo, the Horse. I had not noticed it at the time when I first met her because she was so thin.

“Oh,” I said, uncertain of what to do, “she asked me to come.”

Rosalba looked confused, as if she was trying to remember something. “Oh, yes, I’m sure she mentioned that she was expecting you, but she’s out right now.” Then she smiled, pulling me into the dark, cool shadows of her vestibule. “Anyway, please, come in. She’ll be here soon.”

“Here, I brought you these.” I handed Rosalba the bag of chocolates, peanut butter, and silk stockings that Manuel had told me to bring, and she quickly looked inside. “Ah,” she exclaimed, “I love chocolate. And I love visitors, especially from other countries. We see people from away so rarely now.”

Taking my hand, she led me through a small courtyard where the terra-cotta planters had no plants, past an ancient fishbowl filled with water and bits of coral and a plastic palm but no fish. No songbird had sung in the wrought-iron birdcage for years; instead a wilted geranium, its yellowed leaves
in need of pruning, sat inside. We climbed stairs, then passed through a large doorway where the wooden door stood ajar and entered a room whose darkness was in such contrast to the harsh sunlight outside that I stood blinded for a moment. As my eyes adjusted, I felt the coolness of shuttered rooms. Smells were striking in their absence—no pots cooking on the stove, no lavender perfumes. Only a faint odor of old tobacco, as if a man had long ago lived within these walls. In the entryway was a portrait of a woman in an eggshell blue dress, pinched at the waist, her soft brown hair flowing over her shoulders. The eyes were the color of the dress she wore and I knew that this was a portrait of the woman who led me, painted some forty years before, when she was infamous throughout
la isla
for her love affair with a soldier, renowned for his virility, for his thirst for power, and for not sleeping in the same bed two nights in a row.

Rosalba led me through a maze of buckets. Holes in the ceiling revealed a bright blue sky. The buckets were half-filled with collected pools of rain; algae grew along the rims. With the shades drawn, the rooms were dim, except for the light that came through these holes in the roof. “Isabel,” she said, “has been very busy and preoccupied these days with her career as a fashion model.” It surprised me, but I could envision this gaunt, sad woman working as a fashion model.

“Oh, I didn’t know …”

“Yes, she’s in all the fashion magazines. You didn’t think we had fashion magazines, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, we do and Isabel is in them quite frequently. She hopes to be going to Paris next year to model the spring line.” This seemed odd since Manuel had told me that Isabel could not get a visa to leave, but I thought it best not to say
anything because Rosalba seemed so proud of her daughter’s achievements.

Rosalba paused in the living room, which was furnished with a wooden settee and cane armchairs that appeared to be hand-carved and very old, and she made a gesture as if she wanted me to sit down. I saw that the armrests were carved into lions and dragons, but the seats were hollow, devoid of their cane. “Shall we sit?” Rosalba said, wrapping her fingers around the wooden frame, as I gazed into the empty center of the chairs.

“Oh, not here.” She laughed. “On the patio. We never sit here anymore.” But neither of us moved. “My grandparents brought this furniture with them from Spain,” she said, stroking the wood. “My grandmother died on the passage and my grandfather arrived with just my mother and these chairs. They lived in this house as I did when I was a girl. You used to be able to sit on them on this porch and smell the sugarcane burning across the Miramar. There was nothing but banana groves and tobacco and sugarcane fields here when I was small.” She extended her hand toward a neighbor’s house of battered walls and peeling paint.

“The first time El Caballo came to this house,” Rosalba said, as she led me to the kitchen, “he sat in these chairs.” She made us a tray of lemonade and two glasses that did not match and carried the clattering tray down the stairs and onto the patio. Motioning for me to sit, she poured the lemonade into the glasses. When he came to see me, Rosalba went on, the chairs had their cane. And my mother was a young widow and I was just a girl. He could as easily have become her lover as mine. You cannot imagine what he was like when I first met him. He was the biggest man I had ever
seen. Here on
la isla
the men, except for the Africans, are not known for their size. But he was huge and he had those piercing dark eyes.

But what drew me to him wasn’t any of this. It wasn’t any of the things you’d think. I won’t talk about him in bed, but it wasn’t that either. It was the way he talked, it was what he said. He just looked you square in the face and he talked. Or he listened. His gaze made you feel as if you were the only person in the world and there was nowhere else that he ever had to be, though, of course, especially for El Caballo, this was hardly true.

My father died in a boating accident when I was six. A storm at sea. His body was never recovered and some people suspect that in fact there was no drowning, but that he escaped to another island and another life. Years ago I heard a rumor that he was living on Saint Lucia with a black woman from Mozambique. But whatever the real story was I never saw him again after I was six and I never had a man sitting across from me, listening to what I had to say.

So when El Caballo sat across from me, leaning forward and looking at me with that fixed gaze, I would just open up to him, more than I ever did with anyone, more than I ever did with him in bed. Stories poured out of me about my grandmother who was buried at sea and my father who was lost at sea, about my bereft grandfather who rode across the cane fields from dawn until dusk, and about my mother whose solitude only matched my own.

He was just a bookkeeper then who had come to help my mother with her accounts, but there was something about him, I must say, that made me believe he would do more than just balance our books. And in his own way he has. He has done what he set out to do. You must admire him for
that, for whatever else he may have done. He was a dozen years older than I, but that did not matter. I knew him as well as I knew myself. We would still be together today, but, you see, in the end there were things we could not forgive.

He was gone for many years. When he returned, I was a grown woman, married to a prominent physician, and we had a young daughter. But I could not keep El Caballo away. Not that I wanted to. In fact, all my life I have never wanted him to stay away.

I never knew when he was coming, but I would listen for the car in low gear without its lights on that would pull up in front of the big house by the sea where I lived with my husband. When it became too difficult for us to meet in my home, we rented a small apartment in the center of town. Our love nest. Whenever I could I went there and waited for him to come. Some days he did and some days he did not. While I waited for him, sometimes I decorated or cleaned, but mainly I read—mostly history and the biographies of great men. I read until the cabinets and shelves of the little apartment were filled, dreaming that someday I would be in a book someone wrote about him. It seemed that I was always waiting for him. And probably I still am.