The Distant Marvels (4 page)

“Cuba and her spoils belong to everyone, compañera. It's the 1960s, my friends. A new dawn is here!” the soldier says, urging Asela to pass the plate around. “Relax. We're safe,” she says, fluttering her lashes at Asela.

Seduction, I think again. Despite her youth, our soldier is an expert at it.

“This place may be safe, but Maisí will be wiped off the map,” Susana mutters beside me.

“If it is, we'll just come back here, move in, live in this palace of a place. Casa Velázquez belongs to all of us, doesn't it? Fidel won't mind,” I mock our soldier in whispers so that she doesn't hear me.

Susana laughs throatily. Some of the women turn to look at us, and I know what they are thinking, that the sick one and the crazy one are conspiring now. There is mistrust in their eyes again.

We get as comfortable as we can. There is a large table with ten chairs in front of the cabinet full of china. Most of the women settle in those seats, and they look as if they are about to eat a sumptuous meal, as if servants will come through the heavy door bearing silver platters. A pair of wing chairs takes up a rounded alcove. Between them is a marble-topped table, with a brass candlestick on it. The candle is missing. Two other women sit there. Susana and I take up a couch that has been upholstered in gold velvet. The material is thin, and I can feel the wooden frame underneath the cushion. Still, it's the most comfortable seat in the large room. Susana and I both groan as we sit.

“Look at our soldier,” I say, pointing at her. She has taken up a spot on the cold floor, just by the door. In her hand is a nubby pencil, and on her lap is a notebook. She has covered a page in intricate swirls, one after another. Her head is cocked to the side as she works. If not for the olive green uniform, she would look like any other girl lost in thought, keeping her hands busy.

“
Our
soldier?” Susana asks. The corner of her mouth is turned up.

“Don't laugh at me,” I say. “I don't know her name, that's all.”

“Ofelia,” Susana says.

I consider the soldier now, newly named. Her hair is still wet from the rain, while the rest of us have all dried up. “Look at how the water sticks to her,” I say.

“Destined to drown herself, maybe?” Susana says, testing me.

“Hm, perhaps a mad prince has broken her heart,” I say. Susana laughs outright.

“You know
Hamlet
!” she says, slapping her thigh, which quivers underneath her hand for a bit. “I taught literature here in Santiago.”

“And now?” I ask.

“Bueno,” she says, steadying herself. “There's this.” She points to the scarf on her head. “They are using chemotherapy these days on patients like me. They call it progress, but I get tired easily. I was diagnosed the day the school's directora told me I was only allowed to teach from a list of Soviet-approved books. It was the worst day of my life. Cancer gave me a good reason to quit without having to tell anyone what I thought of the new curriculum.” After a quiet moment between us, she asks, “What about you? You've really read
Hamlet
?”

“I know it by heart.”

Susana looks at me doubtfully.

“I was a lector,” I say. I remember those days often and fondly, sitting above the men as they worked, the high wooden stool wobbly underneath me. I'd read for hours, entertaining them as they rolled tobacco. “Shakespeare was a favorite in the tabaquerías,” I say.

“A cigar factory reader?” Susana says, suddenly breathless. She turns her whole body towards me, and I notice at once how her shirt hangs crookedly on her, and that she leans over what I know now is a missing breast, her right shoulder turning in, protectively.

“And you read Shakespeare?”

“All the parts,” I say proudly, the voices coming to me at once—Hamlet's vibrating tenor, Gertrude's husky whispers.

“What else did you read?” Susana asks.

“Oh, whatever the men wanted,” I say, seeing them in my mind now—the rows of men in that steamy room, their knobby hands rolling cigars, their fedoras sitting high on their heads. They were attentive listeners. “They liked Dumas,” I tell Susana.

“
Tous pour un, un pour tous!
” Susana says loudly.

I laugh, and realize it is the first time in days. “No,” I say, touching her knee gently. “They loved
The Count of Montecristo
best of all.”

“Ah,” Susana says, and a sleepy smile comes across her face, and I know that she's read that one, too. I tell her how the stink of tobacco leaves would get in my hair and clothes, and how even a good bath didn't remove the smell. “Sometimes, I think it's still on me,” I say, and lift the back of my hand to my face, breathing deeply. All I smell is the sea.

Ofelia stands and stretches then. We all watch her. Even the women chattering at the large table stop talking and wait for Ofelia to say or do something.

Ofelia twists to the left, then to the right, and we all hear her spine crackle. One of the women says, “Ay,” and the others laugh. Ofelia looks up then, realizing that everyone has been watching her.

“I'll be right back,” she says, and leaves the room.

“Ten cuidado, m'ija,” one of the oldest women calls out to Ofelia, and I smile at her worry, thinking that we've all grown fond of the girl. I wonder how many of the women here have daughters like her. The pain in my stomach feels like intense hunger, but I know that eating will not bring relief. I let out a weak sigh.

“Are you okay?” Susana asks.

“Sí,” I say, and wave my hand at her, as if I could erase this sickness from the air between us.

Susana nods, understanding. She looks back at the door from which Ofelia left the room. “How old do you think she is?” she asks.

“I'd say she's twenty-three or four.”

“Ah,” Susana says. “I'm twenty-nine. Yesterday was my birthday.”

“Felicidades,” I say, and touch her knee again. I'm not sure why I'm taking such liberties with Susana, who is a stranger to me. Perhaps she reminds me of my Beatríz.

“Every birthday's a gift. I suddenly want to be old. I want to be as old as you,” she says. Her cheeks redden. “Perdó­name,” she says, chastened.

“I am old!” I say. “I wish you old age, Susana, and time for the years to knit, then unknit themselves.” Her eyes fill with tears, and she wipes them away roughly. I close my eyes against my own foolish sentimentality. Such language! Time unknitting!

“Tell me more about the cigar factory,” she says after a moment. “What else did the cigar rollers like to hear you read?”

I don't answer right away. It feels as if Susana is very far away, suddenly. I tune my ears to the storm, and it is raging now, the rain pounding the roof of Casa Velázquez like rocks being thrown from heaven. I tug at my housedress, flattening the wrinkled fabric with my hand as I listen. I'm still wearing slippers. My sensible black shoes are in my house in Maisí. Are they still where I left them, under my bed, or are they floating in the middle of the room? Perhaps they are already at the bottom of the sea.

“Sometimes,” I tell Susana at last, “I would only pretend to read to the cigar rollers. There I would sit, high in my lector's chair, five feet over the heads of the men, with a worn copy of something or other on my lap. Maybe a Jules Verne novel, or a copy of Cervantes, or some such thing. I would say, ‘Now, I'd like to read a story from a not-so-famous writer. Perhaps you've heard of—' then I'd give them a false name, ‘Carla Carvajál. She is stupendous!' I'd rave, and the men would nod, never looking up from their tobacco leaf, or their fat, brown fingers. Then I'd pretend to read from this so-called Carla Carvajál, but what I was really doing was telling my own stories, true stories, about my life.” I say all of this in a rush. It is the first time I've ever told this to anyone. Not even Ada knows the extent of my vanity, for that is what I think I was doing—indulging my vanity.

“And they believed you?” Susana asks, incredulous. I nod slowly, my eyes closed. I can see them, sighing at all the right moments, wiping tears from their cheeks as I pretended to read, making sure to flip the pages of the book in my lap every so often, allowing my eyes to scan back and forth.

They would tell me that Carla Carvajál was a maravilla. “A woman, too!” they would exclaim, and I would smile at them and say, “It's a wonder the world hasn't heard of her yet.” The men would nod, their teeth gripping new cigars.

I notice that someone has brought in a pitcher of lemonade and some sugar cookies while we have been chatting. Susana sees them, too, and she's up quickly, filling a plate with the treats, and clutching two full cups, which she holds deftly in one hand.

“Sustenance at last,” she says, then, gulps down her drink. “They say that tumors love sugar. That they eat it up and grow larger.” Susana shrugs, her eyes growing wet, and takes a monstrous bite out of a cookie. “You'll have to tell me one of the stories,” she says, her mouth full.

I drink the lemonade in sips, in between pauses, as I tell her the story of my birth, of the mermaid that appeared to my mother, claiming me. I tell her that my parents were rebels, and how my father fought in all three wars of independence. I tell her of my connection to this house. I tell her about vengeance, and the tragic life of slaves, and a story about pirate's gold.

L
ulu always said Agustín's rage was inherited. An inherited rage! My mother suspected its source was an old family story about pirates and hidden gold.

Inconsolada, my grandmother and Agustín's mother, was born in Spain's Canary Islands and called herself an isleña, an islander, all her life, though she never meant Cuba when she used the word. Inconsolada was a little girl, tending her own grandmother's deathbed, when the woman, whose name is lost to history, began to mutter something about gold. Inconsolada brought a cup of water to the woman's parched lips, yelled for her parents, and waited to hear more, for they had found a scratched galleon coin wrapped in a corset among the woman's belongings, and had begun to suspect that she had had dealings with Portuguese pirates in her youth.

She spoke at last in the final moments of her life. There was gold, she said, many, many pounds of it, buried in an iron chest among the coral reefs, a league or so offshore of Las Palmas. I remember the details of the treasure's location because Agustín had been made to remember by his mother. He'd written it down on a piece of paper that he kept under his mattress, his body pillowed by that morsel of bitter hope.

I say it is bitter because they never found the gold, though they searched. A bull shark in those coral reefs ate a cousin of Inconsolada's during the treasure hunt. His name was Agustín, too. Another cousin, the first Agustín's brother, whose name no one remembers, drowned on the same day. Because Incon­solada was a girl, she was not taught to swim, and so she never trolled those colorful rocks for buried treasure except in her dreams at night.

The grandmother's deathbed confession haunted Inconso­lada, and she hung the burden of this memory on my father's neck like a cross, or a curse, so that he grew up believing he'd been cheated by fate, by an old woman's poor memory, and by the force of tides that may have buried the chest of gold forever. In short, Agustín always felt like a rich boy made to suffer the life of a poor one.

Inconsolada married a laborer, a man named Eugenio. When it became clear that the sugar in the Caribbean was sweeter, and that no one wanted to buy the cane that grew in the Canaries anymore, Inconsolada and Eugenio immigrated to Cuba in an exodus of isleños in 1859. Spain, led by Isabella II, encouraged the exodus, thinking it best that islanders should populate the colonies in the Caribbean. The constitution of Spain's island folk, having been surrounded by water all their lives, was suited for places like Cuba and Puerto Rico, whereas uptight citizens of Madrid, knowing nothing of navigable waters, seemed to choke and wither in that hot, Cuban air.

That was the year Agustín was born, in Santiago de Cuba, in an inn where Inconsolada and Eugenio were staying. “Better than Christ!” Agustín would say, joking that his mother had delivered him in a room, and not a stable outside the inn. My mother, I remember, would cross herself vigorously when he said this, and then draw a rough “t” on my forehead, too. The story of the pirate gold came with them to Cuba, and Inconso­lada, who had inherited the single galleon coin, would keep the coin tucked between her breasts, where its cold, hard shape kept her company.

Eugenio was cut down in a sugar cane field shortly after Agustín was born. The cane grows high at harvest, and Eugenio was a slender, short man. Another worker, blinded by the sun at noon, accidentally struck Eugenio with his machete. The two men screamed, one in pain and the other in horror at what he had done. Inconsolada, beautiful and well-read, for her father was a bookseller back in Spain, took a job as a governess to the children of Juan Carlos Medina, the mayor of Santiago. At last she'd found her mansion in which to live, though it wasn't an easy life for her or for Agustín.

It happened during a monstrous storm, a huracán like the one heading towards us now. Agustín was still a boy in Santiago, about nine or ten years old. The coming storm had destroyed part of Havana, and the winds were ripping eastward, towards Santiago. In those days, the mayor was staying in Casa Velázquez. Made of stone and coral, the house had weathered countless storms. So, Mayor Juan Medina invited his friends—Spanish magistrates, plantation owners, and other officials—to spend the hours of the storm in his safe home. There gathered a hundred or so finely dressed Spaniards. The men wore high-collared coats, even though it was the height of summer, and women came dressed in lace and taffeta, the fabric gripping their necks tightly, whalebone corsets crushing their ribs. Their slaves came behind them, carrying pots of paella, beans, stews, and enough food to keep them full for days. The slaves set the dishes and serving trays on an enormous cedar table in the center of the house, where there were no windows. Bright marble floors lent the space a light feeling, as if the sunlight was somehow getting in. There, with his sons, wife, and friends, the mayor intended to wait out the storm, barring himself in against the howling wind and battering rains. He kept only four of his closest servants with him, and locked out the rest, including Inconsolada, Agustín, and fifty servants and slaves.