The Distant Marvels (32 page)

I settle in. The driver is a man. His uniform is pressed well, and the creases stand out on his thighs like tiny mountain ranges. It speaks of his devotion, I think, or else, of his wife's, proud of his rank and station in life. He does not flip on the radio, even when a few of the women ask for the distraction. He simply puts up one finger and shakes it at us, as if we were a caravan of children accustomed to being pointed at, made obedient with a single gesture. I do not like his face. Every feature offends me. If Mario and Gil's faces were softly painted visages, in muted colors, made blurry by my affection for them, then this man was carved out of granite. He is all pale angles.

“What's your name, hijo?” I ask out of curiousity.

“Cresencio,” he says after a beat. Even his name is a sharp thing, and I decide that it is best to nap, and to ignore this soldier who will never be one of us.

It is early in the evening when we drop off Mireya. Her house has weathered the storm well. The windows look to be intact, and only a palm tree has fallen in her yard. I remember her house with such fondness. Those were the days, when I could show up unannounced, and she would greet me with a hug, a cup of coffee, and a morsel of savory gossip we might chew on like dried meat. I wonder if our last few days in Casa Velázquez have returned Mireya to me, if, perhaps, I might visit her again.

“Bendito séa Diós,” she utters as the bus comes to a stop and her house comes into view. “Adiós, todas,” she says, addressing us all. The tumult in my throat as I see her begin to go surprises me.

“Mireya,” I call out, my voice hoarse for reasons unknown.

She turns, walks up to me swiftly, as if she is about to do an unpleasant thing and wants it over with quickly, and lowers her pale face towards mine. An unexpected kiss against my cheek, and then, her soft hands around my own, undo me.

“Ay, Diós, I've made my friend cry,” she says, laughing quietly.

“We'll see each other soon,” I say.

Mireya leaves the bus, shuffling towards her front door. The driver does not wait for her to enter her house, which is bad form and everyone knows it. We turn in our seats and watch Mireya's tiny figure recede in the distance, fumbling with her keys. Susana's eyes are better than anyone else's and she announces, “She's inside,” and the rest of us exhale in relief.

This happens again and again—the driver drops off one of us and drives away in a rush. The rest of us turn to watch, to make sure of one another's safety. This is how we tend to one another, I think. We are old. Should one of us need a new roof on our house, for example, we are helpless to do anything. But this watching, training our eyes on one another until the last moment, this we can do. What if I am the last one on the bus? It is likely, considering the location of my house at the end of the world. I am used to the feeling of going untended. It will be fine. I will get into my broken house, or else I will stand in the ruins until I can no longer do so. And then? There has always been an “and then” in my life. Today will be no exception. I can feel it in my stomach, where the pain is, and in my heart and mind that this is not my last day.

We're at Rosalia's house when I realize I haven't been keeping track of where these women live. I would have liked to stay in touch with some of them. I have more in common with these women, I realize, than I do with anyone else in the world. We are bound together by fear and memory, fastened by the common mysteries of motherhood, made familiar to one another in the shadow of a monstrous storm. Before disembarking, Rosalia says, “Mis amigas, que Diós las cuide,” and we thank her. She rushes to her front door, which has been blown open, and she straddles an upturned urn in the doorway, one that once must have held a fern or a boniato plant. Rosalia waves at us as we go.

Estrella and Celia, mothers to twins, live on the same block. The discovery that their homes are still standing sets them panting with joy, and they disembark together, twinned themselves. They point at one another's houses, which have been spared the worst of the storm.

Dulce lives nearest me, in Maisí, and we're headed to her house next. The town is in tatters. We drive the roundabout in the plaza, and I realize that the statue of Cristóbal Colón is missing. Then I spot him, thrown off his pedestal a few yards away, having rolled onto his face.

“His hand, look,” Susana says, pointing at a broken part of the statue—Colón's hand, still gripping a rolled map, lies in the grass.

“Ay, Maisí,” I say.

The bus pulls away from the plaza and into the neighborhoods closest to the sea. Here the destruction is palpable. The air tastes sour and a fine grit hangs in the atmosphere. Houses have been blown off their foundations, and here and there, cars rest up on trees, having floated there when the water was high. We ride in silence and can hear the slosh of the bus tires treading through still-flooded streets. When we arrive at Dulce's house, the bus driver opens the door and doesn't help her out. Susana and I do, and watch, horrified, as the water reaches Dulce's calves. Her house is flooded, and when she opens the door, we see furniture floating inside, bobbing in murky waters.

Susana and I take turns embracing Dulce. “I'll check on you tomorrow,” Susana says, and Dulce begins to weep.

We leave her there and as we step onto the bus the driver starts to pull away.

“For God's sake,” Susana yells at the driver as we stumble to our seats.

Then, we hear Dulce shouting, “Ay!” and watch as a snake swims around her ankles, making “S” shapes and rippling the water.

“Come with us!” I yell to Dulce out the window, but the bus driver is accelerating.

“You can't leave her,” Susana cries, and he lifts a finger again.

“Lift that finger again, cabrón, and I'll bite it off,” I tell him, but the soldier says nothing. Susana yells back at Dulce that we will come for her, and she nods, holding herself.

Susana's apartment building is next, and there is a commotion here. Residents are lined up along the sidewalk, but there are two policemen keeping them away from the apartment.

“Unsafe,” we hear them say. The building looks fine, but I catch a strange smell in the air around it.

“Probably a gas leak,” I tell Susana, and her eyes fill with tears.

“I'm so tired,” she says, pulling off her scarf for the first time. She rubs her scalp, which is patchy with hair here and there. She covers her face with the scarf and weeps.

“She's coming with me,” I tell the driver, and we are off to the farthest corner of Maisí, to a place I think might have been devoured by the sea.

 

I can imagine what this place must have looked like during the storm—the rooms dark even during the day, the mango tree in the front yard lashing the windows, the waves of seawater sprinkling the house at first, like a baptism, then growing, swelling, becoming unhinged jaws and swallowing my home. There is seaweed on the roof of the house, and on the little concrete path to the front door, there is a dead fish, yellowtail it looks like, though it has gone pale and gray. In the sunlight, the windows glisten and I realize it is salt that has dried on the glass.

Though briny and foam-washed, my little cottage still stands. Susana is helping me off the bus when I see something else that surprises me—a car, parked on the side of the road, its engine humming. I squint to make out the driver when the car door opens. My daughter, Beatríz, steps out of the passenger side. She holds a flat brown purse close to her body. She fishes in it for a moment, takes out a bundle of pesos, and hands it to the driver, a man with a cigar stuck in his mouth. A bloom of smoke obscures his face. Beatríz clears the car, and he drives off, splashing mud and muck onto my daughter's legs.

“¡Coño!” she curses, then looks up at me, her face filling my line of sight. Seeing her again, after all these months, reminds me of her birth, how her tiny face saturated my vision, so that I was blind to everything but her features. It was the same with Mayito.

Now, I think, now I might just die of happiness. I feel the knot in my stomach distinctly, as if it has become a living organism of its own. It is as if the tumor, or whatever it is that is killing me, has quickened.

“Beatríz,” I say, and feel myself falling. The picture of Mayito, back in its frame now with Blythe Quinn's article, tumbles from my pocket. “Mi foto,” I say, and then all goes dark.

I
have come to. Except I have not. It is still dark, and I cannot pry my eyelids open. But I can listen, and what I hear is this—the mechanical trilling of gears of some sort, the scuffle of hard-soled shoes on tiled floors, the tinkle of metal in a room far away, the sluggish cough of another person, and a woman's voice, fading in and out, saying something about a room and a bed.

I am in a hospital. I can smell it, too, the alcohol in the air, and the scent of stale rice and beans left over from the lunch hour.

This paralysis is a curious sensation, and I'm sure of a needle placed in my hand, delivering whatever cocktail is keeping me in the dark. I test my voice, but I can manage only a little squeak. Then I feel a hand on mine, and Beatríz's voice saying, “Ay, Mami.”

“Is she waking up?” Another voice that I recognize as Susana's.

“The doctors say she will once the I.V. runs out. They ran so many tests last night,” Beatríz says.

“I'm familiar with the process,” Susana says and I can picture her face in the instant—saturated with sadness, puffy eyed, grim-lipped.

“I'm sorry,” Beatríz says.

They are quiet again. I long for them to talk. Again, I squeak, and there is Beatríz's hand on mine.

“My father died when I was a little girl. He was cutting my hair, and then, fuácata, he was dead. Just like that.”

“Your mother told us. I'm so sorry.”

Once more, there is silence, and I can imagine the expression on Beatríz's face, one of surprise and irritation at me for telling stories to strangers.

“And now Mami. Look at her,” my daughter says.

I can feel them looking, and I want to shake my head, tell them both to get their fill while they still can. Anger bubbles in my throat. This desperate feeling, this anesthetized wakefulness, offends me, as if someone has slipped a quiet hand into my purse and stolen my wallet.

After a moment, Susana speaks. I hear her ask, “Does the name Mayito ring a bell?”

Shame and terror course through me. I want to weep, to rise, to clamp my hands over Susana's mouth.

“No,” Beatríz says, lifting my hand now as if she is examining it. “Should it?”

Susana laughs, high and false. “Oh, no. It's just I have a friend in Havana. I thought you might know him.”

“Oye, chica,” Beatríz says, “Havana is a big place.”

They are quiet, and I feel myself settling down. I feel like a root, underground in a dark, damp earth.

S
he comes in a dream, I think. I am in my room in my cottage in Maisí, and though I strain to hear Beatríz and Susana, the house is silent. Every light in the room is ablaze, and the bulbs sputter, risking explosion, as if her presence is a charge of energy. She herself is a ray of light, engulfed in brightness too harsh to gaze upon. But her face is a shadow that holds her features in place.

“María Sirena,” she says.

“You've come for me,” I tell her. “I kept my end of the bargain,” I say, feeling courageous now, in the end. “Tell me you've kept yours.”

Her face shifts, and now she is Gilberto, masculine, straight-nosed, as handsome as he was on the day he died. The smell of tobacco fills the room. “Let me tell you a story,” she says.

“There once was a faceless girl, one without a reflection. Neither mirror nor slow river nor shard of glass could capture her face. It would slosh about on surfaces like an ice cube. And yet.”

I feel myself nodding. Her face shifts again, and now she is Agustín, and her hair becomes a lick of flame. When she speaks, the room grows warmer. Now she is Blanca Lora, and her speech becomes accented and slippery. The pink tip of her tongue peeks between her teeth on voiceless syllables. She becomes Lulu next, and I want to speak, to yell, “Mamá,” but Lulu is gone, her mouth a trembling “O”. The face blurs and becomes Mario, who covers his eyes with his hands and disappears, too, fast, as if he can't bear to look upon me. At last, she settles on a countenance that is at once familiar and strange. It is Mayito, and he is a man approaching old age. His face is round, his cheeks dotted with freckles, like Lulu's. These appear on the bridge of his nose bit by bit. His lashes grow before my eyes, long and curly like Agustín's were. His chin is Mario's. His nose and ears and eyebrows come from places unknown, though I recognize the shape of his fingernails, which are like Beatríz's, and I wonder who that ancestor might be with the perfectly square nail beds.

“Mi hijo,” I say in a whisper. Mayito nods.

When he speaks it is in a deep voice that is strangely familiar to me.

“I will know you,” he says. “I will know you when you come to me at last, and you will be cloaked in a new countenance.”

Mayito melts away and reveals her again, brighter now than before. “I have kept my promise,” she says.

 

I wake and know I have dreamed my last dream. Beatríz hears me coughing, and she and Susana rush into my room.

“Ay, Mami,” she says, and lays her chest down upon mine. I smile at the inherited gesture. She cries without a sound.

I want to say something, to mark these moments with final words, but my voice is shattered. In the corner of the room, a small lamp burns brightly. Susana catches me squinting at the light.

“I'll turn it down,” she says, and stands.

“No, déjalo,” I manage, and Susana sits, worrying her scarf in her hands. Her cheeks are rosy, and I'm certain now, looking upon her, that she will be cured and live a long life. She is young. Perhaps she will have children. Perhaps she will tell them about my son. I can imagine her children up north, searching for Mayito; for them, he will be a legend, merely one of their mother's stories. Perhaps they will find him and tell him something about me. Perhaps he will recognize me in them somehow.