The Distant Marvels (21 page)

“This is why you're angry?” I asked her, unbelievingly. “Because I wasn't courted properly. Dios mío, look at where we are,” I said.

“I know where we are,” Lulu answered me, and turned to stare at the fences.

I reached out and touched my mother tentatively. She tightened against my touch as if I were that wasp I'd seen earlier. At that moment, I could have mentioned Julio Reyes, or the poet. I could have thrown them in her face and then asked her about decency. But I couldn't bring myself to it.

There is nothing more satisfying than having survived a violent experience. I was so grateful for life at the moment, so glad I was not Luisa, with a bullet in my head, or that woman in the
bohío,
her eyes dead and open because no one would close them for her. My joy at finding Mario again ran deep, and the accusations against my mother died in my throat. In fact, after that day, I never once felt that kind of burning, adolescent anger towards Lulu. I was all tenderness for her, my mother, the only one I would ever have in this world. Perhaps it was watching that baby trying to stir its dead mother. Perhaps I had aged in the span of a day, becoming the grown woman I was meant to be.

Mario's face went taut at the mention of Agustín, as if his muscles had formed knots under his skin. “
Está bien
,” I said to him, standing close to my mother still, my hand hovering over her shoulder where I'd touched her before. “He isn't here to hurt us.”

Lulu snapped her head to the right, her eyes boring into mine. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“Mamá, there was an . . . an incident . . . in the woods . . . ” I tried to explain, wondering how it would all sound to her, how Agustín had found Mario and me kissing, his hand on the small of my back, gripping me hard, and Papá's rifle going off . . .

“There's something you need to know. Both of you,” Mario said, interrupting. He spoke with a hoarseness that didn't seem deliberate, but rather, a product of some great grief.

Lulu sat down hard, suddenly, as if she were a mechanical toy that had wound down. She put her hands over her face and took long breaths, as if she knew what Mario was about to say. As for me, I was dumbfounded, unsure why he wouldn't let me tell the story. I thought he was being overly gallant, and for one insane moment, I imagined he was about to ask for my hand in marriage. I could feel my eyes glistening, and I must have looked like a wild animal in that instant.

“El Señor Alonso was killed this morning,” Mario said, taking my breath away in a few words. I sat next to Lulu. She wrapped her arms around my waist, and her head fell to my lap.

“Go on,” she said, her voice shattered and muffled by my skirt.

Piece by piece, Mario told us the story of my father's death—how Mario's company had taken shelter in a deserted plantation, hiding like rats, how Mario left his brothers in arms to find me in the river, the water closing over my head like a lid, how lightning crackled around us, striking trees with a force unlike anything he'd ever seen before, as if the fingertips of God Himself were grazing the land. He described how my father came upon us in a tender moment, how the corneta sounded, and how Agustín followed Mario back to the plantation, and into the fray without hesitation. He described a barn, where Mario's company stood their ground, emptying their ammunition at a squadron of Spanish soldiers that had amassed on the field out of nowhere. But they were too few. When Mario described the lit torch that one of the Spaniards threw deep into the barn, he traced the arc of it in the sky with his hands, so that Lulu and I might imagine the thing turning end over end as it flew. Then, he told us about my father, how he ran into the barn and stayed behind to fight even as Mario ran away from the conflagration, how the others poured out of the barn like human lanterns—arms and legs afire, torsos blazing, and how Agustín eventually staggered out engulfed in light, every inch of him ignited. He took three steps and fell to his knees. He swayed that way for a moment, then collapsed.

L
ulu lifted her head off my lap when Mario finished speaking. “Are you sure it was Agustín you saw burning?” she asked.

“Sí,” Mario said. “I'm sorry. Forgive me.”

I could feel my mouth hanging open like a door. My father was dead, and we were trapped,
reconcentradas
, left to starve, for that is what the Spanish were doing in these village prisons—cutting these places off, as if they were a cancer growing on the body of Spanish Cuba. In a way, they were. In the tallér we had depended on help from villages like La Cuchilla for supplies. Soldiers stayed in villages overnight. In humble bohíos all over the island, dissent had sputtered to life, foamed and churned, becoming a sea that was sweeping over everyone. Butcher Weyler wasn't stupid. Places like La Cuchilla were the heart of the liberation movement, and isn't that what hunters did? Eat the heart of the animal they killed?

Lulu touched my chin gently, and the shock of the moment dissipated, leaving behind goose bumps all over my body that would not go away for a long time.

“You left your company to see my daughter,” Lulu told Mario in a tired voice. “And they were ambushed. My husband was killed.” Mario seemed to crumple right before my eyes, like balled-up paper left in the rain. “You are just a boy. You had no business fighting in a war,” Lulu continued. “What are you, seventeen? A child, I don't care what others say.” Her voice began to rise, and I could see her anger hardening like amber. “Men are at least twenty years old before they even know how to clean themselves properly. In fact, I can see the dirt on your beardless face.”

“Please—” he began.

“
No hace falta
,” Lulu said, waving him away. “Little boys playing at manhood owe no explanations. You are who you are. Years from now, if we live to see enough days after this damned war, you'll recall your foolishness, how you let your urges rule the day and many men died, including my husband. And what's worse, you involved my daughter in it all. She shares your guilt. All her life she'll have to bear that weight. Her father's death is on her head as much as it is on yours.”

“But you don't understand—”

“I understand stupidity. You'll outgrow it, I hope.” Lulu turned to me then, and said, “This is finished, María Sirena. Come with me,” and she took hold of my wrist. Her hand felt like the strap doctors used to cut the blood off from a limb. My fingers tingled. I was afraid to turn and have a last look at Mario. It was a fear born out of my mother's fury, which was transcendent in that moment. I imagined turning and seeing Mario reduced to ash. I swear I felt his eyes on me, though, like light coming through a magnifying glass—a piercing, damaging pin of light on my skin.

As I stumbled behind my mother, who was sobbing now as she walked, her shoulders heaving and twitching, I thought of what I'd seen at the bottom of the River Cauto. I remembered the mermaid's dry scales, the glint of something golden in them, as if she was once a shiny, new thing that had tarnished. Lulu's hand around my wrist seemed to grow rough before my eyes, as if she were wearing armor. Like a fish, I thought, and gulped the hot air of the afternoon to keep from suffocating on dry land.

Lulu stopped suddenly, and I fell into her, biting my tongue hard and drawing a little blood. “Ay,” I shouted, but Lulu shushed me. She ran her fingers through her hair and smacked her lips. With the inside of her shirt collar, she dried her eyes. She fussed with my hair, too, and pinched my cheeks very hard.

“Mamá,” I complained, and pushed her hands away.

“Cállate,” she whispered at me. Then: “Follow me and say nothing.”

I watched as Lulu walked over to a Spanish soldier by the eastern gate. He was leaning against the fence, picking at his nails with a metal file. She approached him so quietly, so catlike, that he did not notice her until Lulu laid a hand on his shoulder.

The young man leapt, startled, and held out his file like a knife.

“No need for that,” Lulu said softly. He had a hard time keeping his eyes on her, it seemed. He would look over her shoulder and she would cock her head to the side, catching his gaze again, summoning him to her. Still, he wavered, as if Lulu were the sun itself, burning his vision.

“Look at me,” she said at last. “Look at us,” she said, including me, and then the soldier did look, and his eyes were small, coal-like, and utterly disinterested. “We obviously don't belong here,” Lulu purred. Such confidence! I mimicked her without thinking, holding my hips to the right a bit, as if one of my legs was shorter than the other, letting one arm hang limply along the side of my body, a pinkie raised ever so slightly, my chin bowed, my eyes up and large. Lulu's posture was one of exhaustion, it seemed to me, wilted and overheated like a flower at midday. And still, it all came together to suggest a kind of ease and that romantic notion of a woman half-sick with love.

“There's been an error, and I believe you can help us correct it,” Lulu said, and her left hand twitched and rose in the air, as if pulled by strings, and landed lightly on the soldier's chest, butterfly-like.

The soldier's eyes, black and tearless, finally fell upon Lulu's. I'd hoped to see the same kind of wide eagerness I'd seen in Agustín's eyes, in Julio Reyes's swallowing stare, in the poet's sparkling contemplation of Lulu. Instead, the soldier's eyes looked burnt-out, as if he'd stared at the sun at last and found it damaging.

He slapped Lulu's hand away, and in one fierce move, took her other arm and turned it savagely behind her, so that he held her in a vicious embrace, his nose a finger's width from hers. “I should kill you on the spot, old woman, but I'll let life in the village do it slowly,” he whispered, loud enough for me to hear. Then he released Lulu. She staggered backwards, and caught hold of my hand at last after a few desperate swipes.

“Run, Mamá,” I said, and we did, our feet pounding the dry dirt. I shivered as I ran, expecting to hear gunshot. Lulu ran behind me, guarding my back, her hands pushing my shoulder blades every so often, so that I felt like a horse must feel when under the reins of an impatient rider.

For the first time in her life, Illuminada's light had failed her.

 

We took shelter in an empty house. The residents had died, a neighbor told us, of cholera. Lulu went rigid when she heard the news, and forbid me from drinking any of the water the old owners had stowed in ceramic jugs, at least until we boiled the contents. There were stained sheets in the corner of the one-room house. A brown, fetid stench came off of them, and Lulu swept the bundle outside with a broom she'd found. Then, we sat on the dirt floor, cross-legged, in silence. When I tried to speak, Lulu shushed me.

“No, María Sirena. No hables. Not tonight.” Lulu stared into the dirt as if she could make a hole with the force of her gaze. When I tried to rise, to stretch my aching legs, Lulu said, “Sit,” loudly, as if I were a schoolchild disrupting a class. So I sat. What else could I do? We spent the night this way. It should have been a proper wake, with Agustín's body in a polished coffin on a stand in the corner, friends from the tallér around us, bringing us food, plucking a fallen shawl off the floor and putting it back onto Lulu's trembling shoulders, the air stirred like a thick soup by handheld fans. At least, that's what his wake should have looked like, and what I hope mine looks like someday. Instead, Lulu and I were the only mourners, and we sat, knee to knee, and imagined ourselves in another place.

In the morning Lulu was a different woman. I woke with a creaky neck from sleeping on the floor. But Lulu had sprung up overnight like a weed, and she was busy cleaning up the house, deciding what was useful and worth keeping, and what reeked of disease. When my vision cleared, it was to the sight of Lulu dangling a calico dress before her, weighing it in her hands, then leaning forward to put the material against her cheek and ear, as if it might tell her a secret. The dress was small. Child-sized.

“What happened to them, in the end?” I asked, thinking not of living residents, but rather their corpses.

Lulu must have read me the right way. She said, “Look outside. East. At the sky,” then began to fold the dress as if she meant to keep it.

I did what I was told. There, against the blue silk of the sky, was the constant circling of buzzards. “Ay,” I said. “I've never seen so many.”

“The bodies are being put just outside La Cuchilla's fence,” Lulu said, her fingers flying over a small, open box of needles and thread, picking through it expertly, organizing the contents into some kind of order. I remembered her childhood, her years spent in a shoemaker's home. Lulu was breathing deeply, slowly. She was chewing the inside of her lip thoughtfully as she began to thread a needle with coarse, brown thread. “I went out while you were sleeping, asked around. Two hundred have died of hunger and disease in La Cuchilla.”

“Doesn't it bother you?” I asked her. I could not stop trembling. Upon sighting the buzzards, I'd had a sudden vision of being eaten alive by them, their black talons hooking into my skin, my heart in a glossy beak.

“Very much,” she said, and began mending a tear in the calico dress.

“So what's our plan?”

Lulu shrugged, pulled at the thread hard, so that it twanged like a musical instrument. There were a few needles pressed between her lips, and they trembled as she worked, like the whiskers on a cat. She wouldn't answer me, even after I asked her a few more times. I braced myself for anger. But it wouldn't come. I couldn't summon it. I stared hard at the needles in Lulu's mouth, willing myself to grow furious at her sudden complacency. But there was nothing. It was like I'd forgotten how to breathe. That is how it is with the young. They are pots that boil over quickly, and then, one day, the heat beneath them is turned off, and the anger dissipates, and what's left behind is the person they are to become.