The Distant Marvels (29 page)

“No. He wasn't famous.”

“Why was he in the newspaper then?” she persists.

“I don't want to go on,” I say, and mean more than just answering Estrella's questions, more than just the story. “I'm tired,” I say. “Let Mireya tell us a story. Come, my friend. Please.”

Mireya shakes her head. I start to protest, but Mireya shakes her head again.

“Hurry up,” she says. “We don't have much time left.” The waters have been receding, and already, we hear a different kind of noise from outside. Hammers are pounding away, and car horns are honking. The roads must be clearing. She's right. We won't be here, together, not for much longer.

“Not much time at all,” I say, and finish what I've started.

I
fell asleep shortly after Lulu died. Blanca Lora happened to walk by and saw us, like a Renaissance sculpture—my head on my mother's stomach, the baby nestled in the crook of my arm, and Lulu's face, as white as marble. Mayito cried when I shifted him, and I squeezed my eyes tight

In the days that followed the women learned that I already served as a nurse and they put me to work in the tallér. They heard, too, of my time in that other tallér in Dos Rios, which had become well-known after General Weyler's attack. I did not realize it then, but one of the women had escaped from the tallér in Dos Rios, and had watched as Weyler ordered the deaths of our compatriots, then marched us to La Cuchilla. She told the news of our capture and the story had spread like pollen on the wind.

“Tell us what happened, María Sirena,” the women would ask me, and I would repeat the story for them. This happened each day, so that Mayito, whom I carried in a sling across my chest like an Indian, would settle and go to sleep once he heard me describing the scene of our ruin. That story was his first lullaby, and I am sorry for it. I now wish I had filled his ears with a different kind of story, one full of hope instead of despair.

 

I lived in that tallér for five months. Mayito was a big baby, his thighs fat like sponge cake, and his smiles were shiny, easily given things. He was sitting by himself by then, too, and I thought him the most gifted of children for that skill alone. “He's beautiful,” I bragged at every turn, “and not just because he is mine,” I would add, qualifying the boast.

I thought Mayito and I could go on this way indefinitely. The tallér was safe, the work was satisfying, and there were always plenty of other women around to watch the baby for me while I worked. He was the doll of the place, and more than once, I'd discover that someone had dressed him like a girl, or put ribbons into his curls, or set him on a large, friendly dog that lay about the place waiting for scraps, just to watch the baby riding the gentle beast. Mayito was loved, and I was happy for the first time in an age.

The news regarding the war was good, too. We had nearly beat the Spanish, and the Americans, having joined the fight, had sounded the death knell for the Spanish cause. Now, American soldiers came and went in the tallér, and Blanca Lora was among them often, though they called her Blythe Quinn, or Miss Quinn. She had a way with those blond boys, making them laugh and clip her chin with their knuckles playfully. They'd sneak peeks at her notebook, and steal her pen, and she would chase them around the beds, which were mostly empty now that the winter was here and the cases of typhoid and yellow fever were diminished.

It only took ten weeks for the Americans to finish what we started. We celebrated our independence only briefly. Already, there was talk among the women regarding the interference of Washington in Havana affairs. Wasn't this our war? Why were the Americans deciding what happened next? They had fought for ten weeks. We had fought three wars over decades.

I tried explaining this to Blanca Lora, but she shook her head and told me I didn't understand.

“You have bigger problems,” she said. “The tallér is going to be shut down. Where will you work? Who will take care of Mayito?”

I hadn't given it a thought. I was only seventeen, orphaned, husbandless.

“Perhaps you can come to New York? There's work to be had. Opportunities abound, Carla!” Blanca Lora said.

“I can't leave Cuba,” I mumbled, though I could not come up with a reason why. After all, hadn't I been born at sea? What claim did the island have on me? I had nothing left. True, my mother was buried not far from the tallér, and Agustín's ashes, for I imagine his body having burned down to cinders, floated on Cuban breezes. Only God knew what had become of Mario. Corpses, and a loveless future, were all I had left.

Blanca Lora shook her head and gave me a soft kiss on the cheek. “Think on it,” she told me. “I'm leaving in a week.”

Seven days later, I let her leave. It was hope that did it, kept me pinned in place. Soldiers often appeared in the tallér, boys who were once thought lost resurrected. And we witnessed reunions that would move a statue to tears. Mothers embracing their sons, wives their husbands, children their fathers. Perhaps there was hope that Mario would return to me.

Blanca Lora hugged me hard and said, “Remember my name, Blythe Quinn, should you ever find yourself in New York City.” She handed me a piece of paper with her name and a foreign address printed in neat letters and numbers.

“María Sirena Alonso, not Carla Carvajál,” I told her, and she laughed and said of course she would remember the real me.

Then, she was gone, and letting her go was my first mistake. I watched her slim figure board a carriage bound for Havana. She thrust her arm out of the window and waved her straw hat at me. The hat's red ribbon trailed in the breeze for a long time like a flag of surrender before she disappeared from sight.

S
oon, it became clear that the tallér would be closed for good. There were no more soldiers to tend to, no more work to be done. I spent the days with the other women, learning to crochet long, sloppy chains of yarn while the baby slept, and trying not to think of Mario, or Lulu, or of anything but the needle in my hands.

Then, a soldier stumbled into the tallér, dragging his left leg behind him. We rushed towards him, happy to have something to do. He let us take care of him, allowed us to discover his wounds. I mapped them out on his body, like a cartographer, drawing lines with a damp sponge across a scar behind his ear, connecting that to a fresher scratch on his collarbone, stopping for a moment at a coin-sized wound on his chest, soothing a flowering bruise at his hip, and ending at his leg, which was full of shrapnel. I thought of a globe that used to sit atop the dresser in Julio Reyes's own room, back in the Havana of my childhood. How I used to make it spin. How I dug out the island of Cuba with a sharp pencil, and how Julio Reyes had pretended not to notice, to spare me the punishment Lulu would surely mete out. The world was small and hollow and covered in paper when I was a child.

“What's happened to you?” I asked him in a quiet moment.

“I don't want to speak of the war, señorita,” he told me, and he said the same to any of the women who asked him.

But over the course of that first night in the tallér, the soldier's wish was proving difficult. He awoke from what must have been a hellish nightmare, screaming. Once, he sat upright and shouted, “To the wall! To the wall!” then he stopped, looked around, and fell asleep as he sat.

In the morning, over breakfast, we sat around him as he ate, and he told us about the reconcentration camps all over the eastern end of the island, of the skeletal children who haunted his dreams, and the twisting bodies of vultures over each camp, like flags marking the place where the soldiers of the Liberation Army were to go next.

“I am the very last soldier, I think,” he said. “The last. All the rest are well at home, their uniforms hanging in their closets, or they are dead.”

One of the nurses patted his arm. Another took his breakfast tray away. I sat very still, registering the impact of what he had just said.

The last soldier. The others all dead, or safe. And me, alone in the tallér, waiting in vain.

There was no hope for Mario, I thought. For days I repeated this to myself and my body always tensed when I thought of it, of never seeing Mario again. I would imagine him in a field, his dark eyes somehow pale and lifeless. I thought ceaselessly of shallow graves, and of his strong forearms withering away to the bone. I would tremble and swallow hard to keep from crying. After a while, the bouts of trembling ceased, and a weakness of my body took over.
Perhaps there is a chance
. . . I would think for a moment, then grief would come and I would avert my face if anyone was nearby. My nature once leaned towards hope, but no longer.

In the days that followed the soldier's appearance and recuperation I felt somehow more alone than I had ever been. The tallér would soon close. I had nowhere to go. I imagined the island like a map. I let my mind wander over the hills and valleys, down the snaking rivers, through jungles and onto open beaches. Then, in that space between wakefulness and dreaming, I shot out over the ocean, north, following the trail my parents had made sixteen years earlier at my birth, past lighthouses and rocky shores and arriving at New York City, with those buildings I'd only seen in sketches in the newspapers, and men and women in long coats.

I rose and practiced saying her name a few times—Blythe Quinn, Blythe Quinn. When the opportunity arose, I would know what I had to do.

 

The day after Christmas, a group of Americans arrived at the tallér. There were five men, and two women, who carried black books in their hands with half-filled pages. There were rows of numbers on the paper, and they scribbled incessantly in those books as the men spoke. Among them was a Sergeant Landon, who seemed too young for such a title. His hair was a brassy color, and his eyes were two blue buttons. He was very tall, far taller than Mario or Agustín had been. He wore the dark blue uniform of his rank, with a sharp-edged cap with light blue piping above the black leather hatband. He held the hat in his hands, twirling it playfully as he spoke with a chaplain who had come with the group of Americans. Sergeant Landon and the others walked through the tallér, pointing here and there at the ceiling, peering out the windows at the vast tract of land that surrounded the tallér, and avoiding the eyes of the women there, the ones who had called the tallér home and who now stood with their backs against the walls, wondering what would become of them.

I do not count myself among these women. I would not simply wait for a future to develop slowly before me like the seasons. I would force tomorrow's hand.

I had picked up a little bit of English from Blanca Lora. I heard the Americans talk about real estate, and I heard the word “tobacco” again and again. The tallér would become a processing plant, American-owned by the looks of it. I followed the men as they toured the buildings, and they ignored me. Mayito was asleep in my arms. I listened, picking up what I could, and watched the scribbling women. I had found a savior in Blanca Lora, an American woman, and I hoped for another chance, counting on kindness and generosity of spirit as a national trait among these northern creatures.

“Señores,” I called out once the men reached the courtyard. The breeze was cool and parrots squawked in the palms. I addressed Sergeant Landon first.

“New York. Blythe Quinn. We go,” I said, hoping he could string together what I meant.

“What's this?” Sergeant Landon asked, wrinkling his nose at Mayito who had woken and smiled at the blond man.

“We go New York,” I said. “Miss Blythe Quinn. Amiga mía,” I tried again. “You take. You take.”

The chaplain pressed forward and stood next to Sergeant Landon. The women scribbled furiously, and I wondered what numbers they were deriving from this exchange. Mayito tugged at my hair.

Sergeant Landon stuffed his hand into his pants pocket and drew out a piece of bread, still soft from the morning. He held it out to Mayito, the way one presents a bit of food to a wild animal, and like a wild thing, the baby snatched it fast, and stuffed it into his mouth in one motion.

“No, no,” I said, taking the bread from him. He was too young for it, and I feared he would choke.

“Hungry,” Landon said, and I pretended not to understand that particular word. I waited for Mayito to smile at Landon, which he did, darling boy. I pushed towards Landon again, saying, “Take New York. Blythe Quinn.” I had the little piece of paper ready in the palm of my hand. “Mira,” I said, pointing to the address Blanca Lora had given me before she left.

Landon and the chaplain conversed for some time, and they seemed to be in disagreement over something. All the while I repeated, “Blythe Quinn,” her real name, and, “New York City”, and I gestured by touching Mayito's chest, and then reaching out to touch Landon's. He jumped back at that, startled, and the women of the tallér who had been watching laughed. Landon's cheeks reddened.

I heard him say the word “Manhattan,” which Blanca Lora had mentioned as her home, and I smiled. It was working. We were going to leave the island, and perhaps, perhaps, the cold and the distance would sap me of affection, draw Mario and Lulu and Agustín's memory from me like a leech draws blood.

“Come,” Landon said, and reached out for Mayito. I let him take the baby. My God, I let him take the baby, who watched this enormous blond man with such interest. Landon handed Mayito over to one of the scribbling women, who took the baby and bounced him on her hip. I thought,
look, they
are
kind, these American women
. He took the paper with Blanca Lora's address on it from me. His fingers were hard and rough as they brushed against mine, reminding me of bamboo stalks. He put the paper into a pocket on his breast. Then, Landon and the rest of his retinue turned to leave the tallér.