The Distant Marvels (12 page)

Yet, the poet was of a different sort. On the days when we'd ridden our horses to exhaustion, and were forced to camp, the poet isolated himself with sheaves of creamy paper and filled them, line after line. Only once did I approach Martí. It was out of boredom, honestly. The others had no interest in me, and, more often than not, shooed me away. It was a point of contention among our group. Every few days, the insurgents would demand that Lulu and I be taken away for good. Always, Agustín's eyes would flare with anger, Lulu would say something about patriotism and courage, and the poet would raise a slender hand and say, “I'd like them to stay.”

Why my father wanted us around, even as he seemed to ignore us at every turn, was something I did not understand. As for Martí, his attachment to us was equally mysterious. On the day I spoke with Martí, the first and only time I exchanged words with him, I asked him directly why he came to our defense, time and again.

The poet did not answer my question, and I wonder now if that's the way with poets. Instead, he redirected me, made me think of other things, occupied my imagination so thoroughly that I forgot what I'd come asking for in the first place.

Martí drew a sheet of onionskin paper from his pile. It crinkled prettily as he lifted it. So thin and glossy, the paper reminded me of moth wings. I longed to throw the sheets from a height to watch them flutter down to earth. However, Martí laid the paper over a book he was holding and handed me a carbon pencil.

“Do you ever tell stories?” he asked softly, and watched as I made circles and sharp angles and a crescent on the page. When I was done, I'd drawn a giant moth. “It can speak,” I told the poet. “And it will answer any question you ask of it. The moth is so large it can carry small children across the island. It chases the moon from one side of Cuba to the other, with children on its back so that they can enjoy the nighttime without having to sleep.” My understanding of astronomy and geography was limited, of course. Cuba was my entire world, and though Lulu told me often of my birth, of how the coast of a place named Georgia could be seen on the starboard side when I was born, I could not yet imagine anywhere but my island.

“Little storyteller,” Martí said, gave me another sheet, and sent me on my way. I climbed the nearest tree, folded the page in half, and dropped the paper, quenching my desire to see it fly like a moth. I did this again and again until the page tore on a branch. As for the moth, it was the first story I remember telling.

 

Once, Lulu and I stayed a week at a bohío very close to the Cauto River. The river's murmur helped me sleep, and I hoped Agustín would not return. But return he did, with a limp and his knee swollen as big as his head. We left the peaceful little hut only to return to a camp whose numbers were cut in half. Rojo had been killed, and El Blanco mourned him with great sobs that resounded through the woods. The brothers, Antonio and Francisco, were gone, too, though when I asked my father about them, he shook his head sadly, and said, “Don't ask, don't ask,” so that I knew that either one or both of them was dead.

That night, the mood in the camp was solemn. Lulu and I stewed a jutía that one of the men had trapped in a snare. I watched my mother through the glassy waves of heat coming from the fire. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes were locked on something beyond the edge of the camp. I turned to follow her gaze. There, in the moonlight, stood the poet, his hands locked behind his head, his eyes turned up to the stars.

Lulu rose and handed me a wooden spoon dripping with hot stew. She whispered, “Keep stirring,” and picked her way around the resting men until she reached Martí. The two of them talked a long time. It was not the first time Lulu and the poet had talked in the moonlight. I had never been privy to what they'd said to one another, but the two had always chatted out in the open, though at a distance from the others, and always when Agustín was away from the campsite. That night, I noticed the way pine needles poked out of her hair and her dress hung crookedly on her frame. The effect was charming, as if my mother were a wood nymph, and could, at a moment's notice, bolt into the forest never to be seen from again. Once or twice, the poet would point at the sky, and my mother would lift her chin and gaze at the stars. I could tell from the way her shoulder blades moved that she was taking big, deep breaths, and I, watching her, began to breathe in the same way. So it was that I didn't notice Agustín until he was right behind me.

“Where is your mother?” he demanded, an empty bowl in his outstretched hand.

“With the poet,” I said, dipped the spoon into the stew, and drew out a full serving to give my father. But he was gone before I knew it. I watched as he walked up to Martí, his brimmed hat in hand as if he were approaching a priest. My mother jumped at the sight of him, then she composed herself, straightening her dress and crossing her arms. I could not hear what they were saying, but the conversation was short. They took their leave of Martí. Agustín and Lulu strode past me quickly, he gripping her upper arm and she taking short steps, unable to keep up with him. I stole one glance at the poet, who had his back turned to us all, his hands back behind his head, stargazing once more.

For a moment, I watched as my father led my mother deep into the woods. Then, I realized what was happening. They were leaving me alone with the insurgents! Fear gripped me quickly, and I abandoned my post at the fire and trailed after my parents. My feet caught on something on the ground at the edge of camp. I bent down to take a look. A machete in its sheath had been dropped there, and I picked it up and held it with two hands before me, sheath and all, as I followed my parents into the thick of the trees.

They walked fast, and at first, I could only hear their murmurs. Then, they stopped. Dawn was fast approaching, and weak sunlight was seeping in through the canopy, dressing my parents with a ghostly luminosity, so that they appeared unreal versions of themselves. I crept as close as I could to them, longing to be safely near them, and also afraid of what was going to happen. Agustín's face was a mask of anger. Lulu's was one of terror.

My father peered into the woods, looking past me. He seemed to be making sure he and Lulu were alone. Swiftly, he lifted his hand and brought it down hard against my mother's cheek. She clutched her face and bent low. The only sound she uttered was a single, high-pitched, “Ay!”

“You think the poet wants you? Like that stuttering innkeeper did?” Agustín asked her in a fierce whisper.

Lulu was quiet. She did not move from the position she'd placed herself in—hands to her face, bent at the waist.

“Did you hear me?” Agustín asked. When my mother did not answer, he forced her to stand and pushed her up against a palm, growing spindly and ugly in the dense, lightless woods.

“Don't take me for a fool, Illuminada. From now on, you stay where I can see you,” Agustín said through gritted teeth. He'd held her close to the tree with his knee and a single arm barred across her chest. He fumbled with his belt.

Of course, I knew little of jealousy then, and of the ways between some men and women. Agustín nearly had his heavy belt undone. All the while, my mother stood quite still, her eyes closed and her cheek pressed against the spiny bark of the palm tree. Imagining that Agustín was going to strike Lulu with his belt, I bolted from my hiding place, raised the machete in the air, and shouted, “¡Basta, Papá!”

He froze, and my mother's eyelids fluttered open.

“Don't you dare,” I said out loud, mimicking what I'd heard him say to me when he thought I was about to do something naughty. “Don't you dare,” I repeated, waving the machete.

Agustín released my mother. He approached me slowly, as if he were really afraid that I might strike him. When he was before me, he wrenched the machete from my hand.

“Little rebel,” he said, unsheathing the knife and handing it back to me. “Do your worst.” He closed his eyes and waited. I waited, too, for a few seconds that felt much longer. “Mátame,” he commanded, his eyes closed.

I dropped the machete.

Agustín did not laugh at me, as I thought he would. Instead, he held me by the shoulders and said, “Save your killing for the Spaniards.” Without looking at Lulu, he said, “María Sirena, take your mother back to the camp. Don't sheath that machete until you get there.” Then he left, buckling his belt again.

As for Lulu, she'd slid down the length of the palm tree and drawn her knees up to her chin. She cried silently for a long time before I could coax her up and back to the fire and the stew.

 

“How hard it is to hate a person you've once loved,” Lulu remarked to me later that night. She and I slept apart from the men, under a makeshift tent of muslin. I always slept cold while she ran hot, and so she placed my cool hand on her cheek to alleviate the sting of my father's slap.

“I cannot hate him, María Sirena,” she said, meaning Agustín. “In loving him, I've left pieces of myself behind.”

“Like when I caught my dress in that trap the other day?” I asked, having done just that earlier in the week, tearing one of my only dresses in a spring-loaded trap I discovered in the woods. I'd been lucky not to lose a finger or toe.

Lulu laughed softly. “Something like that.”

“I want to marry a man who is nothing like a spring trap,” I said.

Lulu nodded. She said something that I couldn't make out. Cicadas chirped incessantly outside our tent, and my ears rang a bit. It was not a night for whispers.

After a while I said, “I can't sleep,” and so my mother told me a story.

I
will tell you, María Sirena, about the day I met your father. Come closer. Así, así. Don't move that cool hand of yours an inch, bien? Bien.

When I was young and unmarried, my parents, your abuelos, decided to leave Baire and move to Santa Clara. There, my father opened a zapatería, making and selling fine shoes and boots for men and women. Working with the leather and the waxy thread, his arm would pump up and down, a shoe coming to life in his hands. Shoemaking was like breathing for my father. It was a trade he'd learned from his father before him, who'd learned from his father, and so on. Whenever someone called him a cobbler, my father would grow angry, and say, “A cobbler only patches holes. What I do is an art!” and stomp out of whatever room in which he happened to be. The shop was small but well stocked, and soon, the business was doing fine, in spite of Spanish taxes. I worked the register, measured insoles and foot widths, and took orders.

I was about seventeen years old then, and unmarried. I'd begun my studies with a tutor—an old Spaniard who smelled like cedar—and hoped to become a teacher someday. My girlfriends were all beginning to pair off. Several had babies already, sweet, chubby things I loved to hold, huffing their wispy hair and dreaming of my own children. But my father had put a stop to each and every boy who had come courting. He would show his revolver to the insistent ones, pointing out that the gun held six bullets, “But I only need one.” This he'd say meaningfully, his soft voice a whisper. Usually, the boy in question would leave, never to glance my way again. Without a single boy courting me, I knew what the neighborhood gossips were saying about me—that Illuminada Puentes would be una solterona, an old maid.

My parents kept me busy, hoping to occupy my mind with something other than young men. “There's time for all of that,” my father would say, dismissing me with a wave of a ruler, strip of leather, or whatever he had on hand.

“He just wants you to be his little girl always,” my mother would say, then, she would promise to talk with him about the permutations of my heart.

During the day, I had my hands wrapped around customers' stinking feet, the measuring tape I used coiled around my wrist like a snake. At night, I helped my mother sweep and cook and do laundry. I studied with the tutor twice a week. My hands were beginning to grow rough and thicken, like a farmer's. What man would want hands like that on his face, his back, caressing his shoulders? Not a one, I can promise you that.

So, when the first war against Spain broke out, I was happy. It meant that the shop filled with soldiers looking to resole their boots before heading out to battle. I learned their names, promised I'd pray for them, and, once or twice, wiped fat tears off the faces of these boys who had never held a rifle before. Of course, the soldiers were mostly members of the Spanish army. My understanding of the cause was minimal then, I'm ashamed to say. The fact that my parents were born and raised in Madrid didn't help the matter. Once, Spain had encouraged its citizens to leave the mother country, to spread its culture broadly, taking that Spanish lisp to every corner of the world. My parents were devoted disciples, and came to Cuba, Spain's most beautiful colony, with a mind to recreate their own little corner of Madrid amid the palmas reáles.

The truth was, I was proud to be a daughter of Spain, albeit in sentiment only. I was born in Oriente, at dawn. I was told that the midwife gave me a bit of sugarcane to suck on shortly after I was born. “For strength,” she'd said. Encouraged by the superstitious nurses, my first clothes were yellow, the colors of la Virgen de la Caridád, Cuba's patron. So you see, María Sirena, I was Cuban from the start. But at the onset of the war, I would have given up my liberty to be the wife of one of those Spanish soldiers, so much did I fear becoming a solterona.

I imagined the soldiers that came into the shop as they might look in battle, their faces a rictus of terror, eyes bloodshot, hands trembling around their weapons. I imagined them sleeping on the hard ground, their long lashes touching their cheeks. Boys are at their best when they are sleeping, and I envisioned each of them in turn, beside me in bed, clutching me, seeking solace from nightmares.