Queen of the Underworld (34 page)

The Dalai Lama ruled out any direct negotiation with the Reds because, he said, he feared they would go back on their promises. He said mediation was possible only through a third power.

The crew-cut Dalai Lama said that almost daily reports of the “suffering and inhuman treatment” of Tibetans by the Reds compelled him to level the series of indictments against the Peking regime.

“The time has manifestly arrived when, in the interests of my people and religion, and to save them from the danger of near annihilation, I must not keep silent any longer but must frankly and plainly tell the world the

Continued on Page A2

I’d get to the jump page later. God, twenty-three was five years younger than Alex, and only a year more than myself. There seemed to be an epidemic of usurpations spreading around the globe.

Having checked as soon as I sat down in Howard Johnson’s to make sure Stella was in today’s
Star,
I now turned to B9 to read through her obit word for word, as Paul would do.

Stella Rossignol, Perfumer

Services for Stella Rossignol, 66, of 15 Espanola Way, Miami Beach, will be at noon on Monday at Fisher’s Funeral Home. Interment will follow immediately after at North Shore Cemetery. Miss Rossignol came here in 1942 from Paris, France, where she worked for Guerlain up until the German Occupation. By 1948, she had become a much-in-demand perfumer who would create custom scents for such notables as Arthur Godfrey, Xavier Cougat and his wife Abbe Lane, and Morris Lapidus. She is survived by a nephew, Paul Nightingale, of Miami Beach.

Though severely cut—as I had feared—by the copydesk, Stella’s was the lead obit, with a half-column head shot of her. I hoped this would redeem me a few notches in Paul’s estimation.

In other news, Miami’s rainfall had already topped the all-time record for June; Secretary of State Christian A. Herter held a lunch in Geneva for Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko “at which neither man backed down an inch” on the Berlin crisis; in Chicago, a five-year-old boy playing hide-and-seek was found suffocated in a discarded icebox; Italy’s oldest retired admiral had committed suicide at ninety-eight by jumping out a window in Turin; and Elvis Presley, an Army jeep driver on furlough in Paris, confided to a UPI interviewer that the thought of returning to television in eight months gave him “the shakes.”

“Aw, Dry Up!” was the rubric for today’s weather: temperature in the eighties, partly sunny with intermittent showers.

B
Y THE
time I got back to the Julia Tuttle, the sun had disappeared behind a solid cloud cover, but there was not a soul in the pool area and I decided the time was ripe for my inaugural swim. The longer I put it off, the more self-conscious I was going to be about crossing the lobby in my unorthodox beach costume. Before I could talk myself out of it, I hurried into my faded St. Clothilde’s suit and Bass Weejuns, wrapped myself in Paul’s black silk dressing gown, stuffed my bathing cap and comb in the pocket, draped a towel casually across my shoulders, and headed for the elevator.

I was happy to find the lobby at an all-time-low intimidation level: Luís was occupied at the switchboard and the dominoes players were either at church or out to lunch.

Where was Alex? When Tess had delivered me to the Julia Tuttle a week ago today, Luís had told her Sunday was Alex’s bridge day. Had he managed to elude his mother and assert his Bartleby-ness by slipping across the bay to lose more money to his charming friends?

Had I been sure of total privacy, I would have taken my own sweet time lowering myself down the ladder at the pool’s deep end, acclimating my anatomy in gingerly stages to the 15- to 20-degree drop in temperature. But on the off chance someone happened to be watching from the hotel, I executed a shallow-entry racing dive into the chilly waters, did a fast-bobbing breaststroke until I stopped shuddering, then lapsed into my languid long-distance crawl. Back and forth, back and forth, with an open turn at each end: approach, rotate, push off; approach, rotate, push off. Not counting laps. This was a Sunday swim, not a competition.

I was proud of my swimming, it was the only sport I could do. Mother had taught me to how to float and dog-paddle in the shallow end of the municipal pool. A Girl Scout counselor later talked me out of my terror of depths and cheered me as I thrashed and flailed across a narrow branch of a freezing mountain river. For the rest of the camp season she coached me in a proper crawl.

In seventh grade, the new gym teacher at St. Clothilde’s, ambitious to get us into intramural sports, made us choose between tennis and swimming “to excel in.” Somehow she had convinced the nuns to refill the indoor pool left over from the school’s days as a hotel. My choice was instant. I hated to sweat, I informed my circle of friends; moreover, propelling myself gracefully back and forth in the water while lying prone and thinking my own thoughts was infinitely more appealing than dashing about on a hard court at the mercy of someone else’s backhand. They were used to my sassy mouth, and I doubt even the subtlest of them guessed there was a third reason: that I knew I could never catch up with all their childhood hours on country-club tennis courts.

Approach, rotate, push off.

After we made intramural, the gym teacher was eagerly training us in the freestyle flip turn until Mother Patton, dropping by to watch a practice, put a stop to it. That half second when our somersaulting butts mooned above the waterline was “not in the St. Clothilde tradition.”

Lulled by my partial submersion in the watery element, and by the discipline of rhythmic breathing, my mind began to unclench and let go of its habitual frets. My thoughts lapsed into a freestyle of their own. Associations spooled out and made new contacts. Tough subjects and their interconnections pulsed with interest.

Paul was a mature and honorable man—his own man. What he already was would shape the rest of what he would be. Whatever transpired for each of us in the future, we would have affected the other’s design.

The same went for all the others involved in the writhing organism of my present life: Lídia, Alex, the Ocampos, my
Miami Star
colleagues bright and dark; Tess and her “Doctor Magnánimo,” Ginevra and her Dr. Brown. Our designs-in-progress collided, intermingled, left behind imprints, created more options, each with its set of branches and sub-branches.

I really should swim more. From now on I would get up an hour earlier and do laps before I went to work. Think of what I could accomplish at the
Star
with this agile, freestyle mind!

As I approached the shallow end, I saw a pair of little-girl legs beneath a frilly bathing skirt hopping up and down in my underwater view.

“Luisa!
¿Cómo está?
”

“¡Ay, frío, frío, frío! Emma, la piscina está helada!”
Wet up to the hips, she shivered extravagantly to mask her delight in finding me here. I had been a little girl myself once.

“You’ll never get in
that
way, Luisa. You need to have a game . . .
es necesario hacer un juego . . .
a goal . . .
un gol.
”

“
Enséñame, entonces. Enséñame el juego . . . Emma.”
She wanted me to teach her this game.

“Well,
primero,
you have to think”—I pointed at my head—“you have to make a picture of the thing you want most . . .
hace una imagen de la cosa lo te quiere el más.
”

“La cosa que quiero el más,”
she repeated solemnly.

“¡Sí! ¿Tienes una imagen?”

“Sí, la tengo.”

“And now,
ahora,
I imagine
la cosa que quiero más,
and BY THE TIME I COUNT TO THREE . . .
a las tres . . .
I must be COMPLETELY IN THE WATER.” I mimed imagining this thing I wanted more than anything, squinching my eyes shut with concentration.
“Uno, dos . . .”

At the count of three, I pinched my nose and sat down on the pool floor, sending up a noisy array of bubbles. Above the water, Luisa laughed.

“Okay, now it’s your turn.
Uno, dos . . .
”

With a shriek she sank to the bottom of the pool. I had been using this method on myself for years. It always worked if you found something to want fiercely enough. I would bet anything that what drove her under even before the count of three was the image of going home.

I floated on my back at the shallow end, sculling myself around so I could watch Luisa rock from side to side in a primitive crawl, her head arched adamantly away from the water. At least she had her arm motions. I saw myself coaching her in the late afternoons after work. I’d pull her along on her tummy and teach her to dip her head in and out of the water and coordinate her flutter kick with her breathing. If Castro blew a fuse in the next week or so, she’d have new skills to show off at her birthday party back in Oriente.

D
ON
W
ALDO
in floppy sun hat and dark glasses issued forth from the hotel, followed by Altagracia carrying a wicker tray. His faded terry-cloth shirt, which once upon a time must have been blue, surmounted the globe of his belly and then billowed loosely outside his khaki shorts. Vestiges of the dandy were still apparent in his shapely legs and small, elegant feet in their canvas espadrilles.

Altagracia set him up at a corner table near Lídia’s new red-and-white garden and directly behind the flagpole, where he could preside over the scene without being too accessible. After adjusting the umbrella and laying out his things, which included a giant magnifying glass, a thermos, a legal pad, and writing instruments, she touched her forehead briefly to his and murmured something that made him laugh. Walking away in her narrow-waisted white dress, her hair in a thick plait trailing down her back, she could have been a girl of sixteen. Imagining bedroom scenes was impossible to resist. Should the seventy-seven-year-old bridegroom be arrested by a bout of impotence, I was sure he would meet the challenge with gaiety and aplomb. (
“Un momento, mi amor,
he is doing his utmost to become vertical. How
simpática
you are to be so patient with your old rooster who loves you.”)

A
S WHEN
Luisa and I had been filling each other’s plates at Lídia’s party, comprehension became less of a chore as soon as we let ourselves go in a mutual activity. Luisa managed to penetrate my spotty comprehension and I learned that someone had indeed been watching me from a window and that as soon as Marisa Ocampo had seen me dive and swim she permitted Luisa to come out to the pool by herself if she promised not to be
“una molestia”
to me.

After our swim, Luisa led us to the table where she had propped Tilda and Manuela side by side to guard her things. As we passed Don Waldo’s table, we circumspectly averted our faces to indicate we had no intention of becoming
molestias
to him.

“¡Ven, ven acá!”
he thundered after us. “Come and join me!”

“Won’t we interfere with your work?” I asked.

“No, I am only gloating over these precious note cards redeemed from my wife’s skirt. It pleases Altagracia to think I am out here with something to do, because she is hoping to be majordomo to Lídia’s exciting schemes. They attended Mass this morning at Gesu Catholic Church and Lídia conscripted a small platoon of new exiles from Cuba. She is mobilizing them in the kitchen, Altagracia tells me.”

“I wondered where everybody was,” I said. “Even the dominoes players have deserted their station.”

“Perhaps they have heard the news and are also seeking assignments from the benefactress in the kitchen,” said Don Waldo. “ ‘From each according to his ability, to each a free room at the Julia Tuttle’ is, I understand, Lídia’s new order of the day. And there is other news. Alex has gone to pick up one of his brothers from an airfield in Fort Lauderdale. It wasn’t clear which brother, but he flew himself over from Cuba.

“Eh, chica . . .”
He turned to Luisa, who had fetched her dolls and was arranging them side by side in a chair.
“¿Como se llaman tus amigas?”

“Está es Tilda, y está es Manuela.”

“
Majestuosas,
are they not? Rather
feróz.
They remind me of my great-aunt from Bilbao. Tía Guillerma. As a child I was awestruck. They say she died without ever once touching her back to a chair.”

The great educator’s consecutive translations into Spanish on Luisa’s behalf bore no trace of pedagogy. Don Waldo made it seem merely as though he suddenly chose to complete the rest of his discourse in another tongue.

And as Luisa explained to Don Waldo the different temperaments of her dolls, I suddenly realized I was following every Spanish phrase. While Tilda suffered the headaches and was very critical of people, Manuela had the bad dreams and was terrified of noise.

“. . . y las dos desprecian las fiestas,”
Luisa concluded in her gruff voice.

“Yes, they both hate parties,” I happily glossed.

“
Yo tambíen,
I also deplore
fiestas,
” said Don Waldo. “Not because I am
tímido,
no one has ever accused me of being a shrinking violet, but parties, generally speaking, are not hospitable to the sort of talk I enjoy most (
no soy una violeta retirada . . . el tipo de conversación que me gusta más
).”

“What sort is that?” I asked.

“It has substance but one also feels refreshed afterwards (
. . . sustancia . . . refrescante . . .
).”

“¡Hay las tarjetas!”
Luisa had spotted the note cards, stacked in several piles on the wicker tray.

“
Sí,
my memoirs. Which you ladies so graciously helped Altagracia unpick from her skirt,
muchas gracias.
And so now,
entonces
(the
en-TONTH-es
heavily lisped),
mi memorias
are preserved from the
barbudos
and I am allowing myself this tranquil Sunday to rejoice in their safety and fondle them a little. Won’t you each take some?”