The Ladies of Managua (17 page)

*   *   *

Once I was ready to go, I checked on my Bela. She was tucking a fresh mourning handkerchief into her purse as I opened her bedroom door, and looking elegant in her black suit with a white camellia pinned to its lapel. She knows how to handle a funeral. And a wedding. And a baptism. She embodies the phrase “rise to the occasion.” It's like she lives for these turning points, which unhinge those of us who are less well prepared, because they allow her to exercise all her carefully honed social skills, to say the right thing, do the right thing, wear the right thing. I know it annoys Madre, my Bela's fastidiousness. But it gives my Bela such comfort, knowing how to act in every situation. And I find it soothing, too; my Bela knows so many rules, it makes me feel as if the world is an orderly place governed by them. A false sense of security, but still comforting.

After sitting with her for a bit, I went to get Madre. I didn't mean to creep up on her; I hadn't realized she didn't hear me walk in until it was too late to say something, and I could tell that she was startled to find me suddenly sharing the mirror with her reflection. She had been holding up her right eyelid with the ring finger of her right hand. It does droop, I guess. But not any more than any other woman's her age. Probably less. What was more disturbing than the drooping of Madre's eyelid is the fact that she's aware of it, and bothered enough by it to want to see what it would look like if it didn't hang quite so low. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see my Bela in that position; she's always pulling her face this way and that. Every night she briskly rubs her hands under her chin, one after the other, one hundred times, to prevent jowls from forming. (She's a little late to that party, but who knows, maybe she's less jowly than she would be if she'd never done it? On the theory that it's better to be safe than saggy, if I'm sleeping alone and I remember, I do it myself.)

But Madre is different. She was never concerned with what I wore growing up. She never commented on my weight, like Beth's mom did when she gained a few pounds freshman year, never suggested I put on some lipstick or pluck my eyebrows. I had my Bela for that. Maybe we just weren't close enough for Madre to feel that my appearance reflected on her, especially since most of the time we were in two different countries. But I also never heard her say that she herself was on a diet. She seems to be above worrying about looks in general. If she's preoccupied with aging now, there has to be a reason beyond simple vanity.

I asked her, flat out, “Are you okay, Mama?”

She ignored my question but grabbed my arm as if she were about to stumble on her way to the bathroom. I pointed out there was a bathroom much closer, in the kitchen, and just like that, she switched from a worried middle-aged woman who looked as unhinged as she must feel after losing her father, right back into her brisk, efficient, no-nonsense self, and informed me that it was the staff's bathroom. Which just made me crazy, because, really? This great Sandinista heroine has to use a separate bathroom from the housekeeper? Because social equality is so important to her that she'll risk her life for it, and hand off her daughter to be raised in a different country, but she still considers herself above sharing the liquid hand soap with the employees?

In that moment, I forgot that I'd been worried about her, that she had just lost her father. I forgot it all and I said, “Isn't that why you fought a revolution? So that people wouldn't have to use separate bathrooms?”

She dropped her hand from my arm and looked at me for what seemed like a long time, so long that I started to worry about her again.

“Really, Mariana,” she said finally. “The revolution I fought had nothing to do with bathrooms at all.”

*   *   *

We've been riding in silence, following the hearse. But just now, halfway through the trip, Madre sighed as we passed the Masaya roundabout, curving around the fabulously garish statue of the G
ü
eg
ü
ense. If it had been my Bela, I might pat her shoulder, or ignore it altogether; my grandmother is one of the world's champion sighers. But it's so uncharacteristic of Madre.

“You're sure you're fine, Mama?” I look out the window so that she won't have to face me with the answer.

“I'm sad.”

“I know.” Now I turn to her so that she can't avoid facing me, and put my hand on hers. “But you're okay, healthwise?”

She looks at me. “Of course, Mariana.”

“Then why did you faint last night? Was it because you saw me fighting–”

“I fainted because I was tired and upset and felt claustrophobic,” Madre interrupts. “You know I don't like crowds, social events.”

Of course I know that she hates parties. But the calling hours hardly qualified as a celebration. “You were fine all night until Allen showed up,” I point out. For the first time, I wish I had told her something about Allen, that she had some idea of who he is or what it could mean that he followed me to Managua. She doesn't even know his name. “You know, until I started talking to that tall guy.”

“I was fine until the waiter fell with that huge crash.” She pulls her hand out from under mine, then uses it to push her sunglasses up onto her head as she turns to look out the window again. “My fainting had nothing to do with what I saw. It was what I heard that startled me, that horrible burst of noise.” She keeps looking out the window, as if she's speaking to someone on the edge of the highway. “You can handle your own discussions; I wasn't worried about you.”

 

20

Isabela

Driving into Granada is like watching my life lived in reverse. Coming from Managua, first we pass the cemetery where we'll bury my husband, where they'll bury me someday, relatively soon, I suppose. If I live twenty more years I'll be celebrated for my longevity and what's twenty years, really? Nothing.

Then we pass Xalteva, the melon-colored church where I married Ignacio. It wasn't the closest church to our house; that was the catedral. But Madre had grown up near Xalteva and she had a fondness for young Padre Juan Cristobal, so we always attended Mass there. It's across the street from a park that's eerily pretty, with vine-covered trellises that whisper as you stroll under them. Dolly and I used to hold our breath as we passed beneath them while walking to Mass when we were home for school vacations, imagining they were haunted.

But once we returned from Sacred Heart, Papa insisted that the chauffeur drive us to the church door on Sundays. Especially in the months after they whisked me back to Granada, and before I married Ignacio, I was never allowed to go anywhere unsupervised. It wasn't a rule, really; no one spoke it out loud. They were all surprisingly kind to me, trying to find reasons to coax me out of bed, to amuse and distract me, transform me back into my old self again. But someone was always with me, Dolly or Mama or little Ana Carolina, and oftentimes the chauffeur or Papa as well, keeping a watchful, masculine eye on us from a distance. I was home four months before I was able to take advantage of the chaos around Dolly's wedding planning to step out alone long enough to post a letter to Mauricio. In it I explained that while it's true I physically walked away from him, it was my body that took the steps; I could never do so in my heart or mind, where it mattered. I would always be with him. It wasn't a choice I had made, to let Dolly lead me back down the aisle, but a lack of a choice, a sin of omission. I wasn't strong enough to disappoint everyone, so I did what was easiest, not what was right. I told him how sorry I was that I had hurt him, and that I wanted him to know how much I had hurt myself, too, by walking away with everyone else.

I can't regret leaving the church with my family that day; if I hadn't, Celia and Ninexin, Rigobertito and Mariana, none of them would exist. But I still regret hurting Mauricio and I'm still embarrassed. No, it's deeper than that. I'm still humiliated by the fact that I buckled, that I chose the coward's way out. It's why I hate that Robert Frost poem about the woods and the snow and the diverging roads. Frost became quite fashionable about the time of Kennedy's inauguration, and when I heard a voice reciting that particular poem on the radio that year, it seemed like a personal reproach.

*   *   *

Granada is punctuated and defined by churches. A few minutes further down the road from Masaya comes Merced, where I wanted my wedding to Ignacio to take place, once I had accepted that it was my fate. After I waited a month to be sure the letter had time to reach Mauricio, and four more months passed without a reply from him, it seemed like the only choice open to me.

Dolly had married just a few months after our return. She met Francisco Castaneda when he came to visit Teodoro for Teo's birthday in July. Usually our brothers were at the factory all day, but Teo took some time off to entertain Francisco, so we all got to see a bit more of him and his guest. Francisco had graduated from Tulane four years prior, and he loved reading as much as Dolly did, although he veered more toward Zane Grey and Mark Twain than Jane Austen. His family business was coffee, and work took him to New Orleans twice a year. As I stood there in my floppy hat, watching their wedding, all I could think was that, if she had let me marry Mauricio, and come home herself and met Francisco, Dolly would still have been able to see me quite often. Everyone thought the tears running down my face during the ceremony were tears of joy that my beloved sister had found someone worthy of her, or maybe of jealousy, envy that she was the one in the embroidered gown, marrying and leaving me behind to move to the coffee farm in Matagalpa. I had a linen handkerchief edged in salmon-colored lace that matched my dress. It was such a pretty handkerchief that when I dabbed it to my face, it was impossible for anyone watching to think that my tears reflected the pain of a loss I still couldn't believe I would survive, a sort of emotional amputation. The object of my love was cut off from me, but I still felt him, a phantom limb. Only Dolly knew why I cried so hard.

“I wish you could be happy for me,” she said the next day before she left, first for the Pacific coast, where Francisco's family had a beach house, and then for Matagalpa. “But I know it's too much to ask. I know it's my fault you're here, that you're so despondent.” It wasn't all her fault; I was the one who walked away from Mauricio. And I knew Dolly had believed she was doing the right thing. I might have done the same if the situation had been reversed, if I had felt I'd be losing her forever. But I didn't tell her that; let her feel guilty, I thought. Let her feel a fraction of the guilt I suffered every minute.

“Francisco and I, we're not like you and Mauricio, I won't pretend we are,” Dolly said. “But now that I know what it's like to plan a life with somebody, to dream up a future together, I can understand, a little, how horrible it must have been to give up all that. I didn't know at the time. I never thought you would still feel so sad.” I felt anger, too, of course; it was just buried so deep under the sadness that by the time it rose to the surface, it seemed of little consequence.

“But, even though it's selfish, I'm still glad you didn't stay in New Orleans, Isabela.” Dolly clutched my arm, standing at the gate of our house, watching Francisco and the driver pack the car. “I couldn't imagine getting married without you here.” I pulled my arm away. “I'm not saying that to make you feel bad.” Dolly grabbed me again, my shoulder this time. “It's just that I want us to share this part of our lives. To raise children together.” She pulled me to her and I must have been crying because teardrops stained her pink going-away suit. “I know you'll feel better. You'll see this was the right thing. When you meet someone, when you decide to get married, you'll see it's like the old saying: One key replaces another. You'll build a home, and then a family, and you'll be so busy and happy, you'll forget all about New Orleans. It will seem like something that happened a million years ago. I promise.” She hugged me even tighter and whispered, “I love you so much, Isabela. Can you still love me? Even just a little bit?”

I had kept my arms at my sides at first, but then I hugged her back. Even though I was hurt, and angry and sad, so many emotions that it all just added up to me feeling numb, I still understood that there was no point in losing another person I cared for deeply. And maybe Dolly was right: there were so many years of life left, something had to fill them, something besides pain.

So when Ignacio proposed—or rather, followed up on his mother's proposal—a few months after Dolly's wedding, I decided to take her advice. I knew I wasn't going to love anyone as much as Mauricio, so what was the point in trying to find pale imitations? Ignacio was familiar; his family were our neighbors. I had come back to Granada, to this life, and he was so much a part of it. It seemed like a good idea to throw my future in with his, instead of some other man's who lived farther away from my family, some man we didn't know as well, and who still wasn't Mauricio. Besides, I had to get out of our house. My sadness seemed to be infecting everyone in it, wafting contagiously from room to room. Every time Papa saw me, he cringed. I thought it was because I had disappointed him so deeply, but after our wedding, as Ignacio and I were leaving for Paris, Papa kissed me on the forehead and said, “It hurts every time I look at you, to think I'm the reason you haven't smiled for almost a year.”

I smiled at him then, but he shook his head; he could tell what was real, initiated by joy, and what was cosmetic, born out of politeness. “Ignacio is a good man, from a fine family,” he continued. “And so robust, so energetic! I know he'll always provide for you. And I hope he'll make you smile again.”

My father was half right. Ignacio gave me our daughters, and they made me smile. And he himself could be charming; all of us young people admired his ability to do imitations, of the priests with their fire-and-brimstone sermons, the ladies gossiping in the back of the church, their husbands leering out the church windows at the young women selling fruit in the square. But halfway through Paris, where he loved the restaurants and the nightclubs and the bookstalls along the river, and I might have, too, if they hadn't reminded me of New Orleans, he turned to me and said, “I've never had to work so hard to make a girl laugh.” The next night I told him I wasn't feeling well, and he should use our theater tickets anyway, and I pretended to be sleeping when he stumbled in at 4:00
A.M
. and fell asleep with his good shirt still on. I wonder now how our lives would have been different if I'd sat up waiting for him that night, told him that returning at this late hour was unacceptable, screamed at him, showed him that I noticed that he'd been out all night, and I didn't like it—no, more than that, that I wouldn't allow it. That I cared about our marriage and how we were going to treat each other. But it was easier just to lie there.