The Ladies of Managua (2 page)

After what the doctor had said on his last visit to Miami, Abuelo's death was no surprise. I was sad that he's gone, but it was a selfish sadness, for myself, not him. “It's okay, ni
ñ
a,” he'd said at Mt. Sinai, staring out at Biscayne Bay, after he told me he'd decided not to have another procedure. “I'm ready.” And I knew he wasn't talking about going to lunch.

What's shocking is that I still feel surprised. By the normalcy of it all, the way my Bela's voice sounds the same on the phone, the way Managua still looks oddly, impossibly green as the plane swoops toward it. And by the timing, that he got me to come when my Bela wanted me here, despite my determination to have my own, uneventful holiday, followed by my own, quiet crisis.

At least Abuelo waited until January. With the holiday parties over, I'll be spared my mother's colleagues' tipsy reminiscences.

*   *   *

Do I sound callous? Making light of my grandfather's demise? Mocking people who are friendly when they see me standing alone at a party, whose only sin is wanting to relive their courageous youths? I don't mean to make fun of them, not really. When my college friends and I get together we rattle on and on about our younger days, too, even though it's only been a decade and change. In our case, we're yammering on about boys we'd kissed and shouldn't have, trips we took, lies we told. I admire my mother's friends and colleagues, I do. I don't know many people my age who would literally risk their lives to fight for something they believed in; I may not know any, really. But still, it would have been nice to have a mother whose world orbited around me occasionally. And to have had a father at all. I know it's selfish. But I'm tired of pretending that I don't feel that way. I do. Knowing more about where I came from, about the man who helped create me, it might help me figure out what to do now.

Occasionally my Bela will offer some scrap of information about my papi—that he's where I got my dark hair, when I could have been “even more beautiful,” she'll say, “with chestnut-colored hair like your mother's.” I know what he looked like from the few snapshots I've seen: Madre in a long dress like something out of
Little House on the Prairie,
and Papi luxuriously mustachioed, her clutching a Rojita and him a glass of whiskey at their wedding reception in my grandparents' yard.

“Don't raise your eyebrows at me; it makes you look just like your father,” my Bela said once, when I was silently questioning her mandate that you can't wear shoes made of fabric during the day. “As if you think you know something I don't.” That was interesting, because I wasn't aware I had raised my brows at all; it must have been an involuntary tic, a genetically coded response brought out by repressed skepticism.

It's from my Bela that I've managed to get all the basic information over the years—where my papi went to high school; that he had one sister who now lives in Honduras; that, even though he was an economics major at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua, he once won a prize for an essay he wrote about Rubén Darío's poetry. But whenever my Bela and I are finally alone, when I visit from New York and am sitting on her bed next to her while she strokes my too-dark hair, and I ask her straight out, “Tell me something I don't know about my papi,” she always has the same answer.

“Your papi was a revolutionary,” she says. “And revolutionaries make bad husbands.”

They don't make great mothers, either, I want to answer. But I don't.

 

2

Isabela

Revolutionaries make bad husbands. That's what I tell my granddaughter, my beautiful Mariana. She doesn't like it when I say that, she thinks I'm criticizing her papi, her mysterious, martyred papi. But to me Manuel was just a greasy-haired, black-eyed boy who charmed a stubborn girl and married above himself. My advice has nothing to do with her papi. Or, at least, not quite as much as she thinks.

Like all my advice, that warning comes from the knowledge I've gained over the course of my life. And my Mariana's the only one who wants to hear my hard-won wisdom, such as it is. Ignacio, God rest his soul, he never wanted to hear it, perhaps for good reason. And even if he had, it's too late now. It's thanks to him that I'm sitting here in the backseat while Don Pedro circles the airport, waiting for Mariana to appear like a vision, like the angel to the shepherds keeping watch over their flock in Bethlehem.

An angel in blue jeans—that's funny. I wouldn't have thought of angels, perhaps, if the nacimientos had been taken down already, if there weren't angels and camels and wise men of all races lining the highway that leads to the airport. I'd like to take a closer look at the nacimientos, but these popular neighborhoods, they're not always safe, not like when I was a girl. The side of the highway is not a place for someone like me, with bad knees and expensive jewelry. Still, part of me envies the too-young mothers in too-short skirts holding their babies up for a closer look at the Nativity. I'd love to see for myself how each artist depicts the Virgen, staring at her Child. It reminds me of when my girls were young. Not that I am comparing myself to Her, of course not. It's just that no mother can look at the Nativity and not remember the intensity of her feelings, what it is to love an infant, a being who depends on you for everything, who gazes at you as if you were the stars in the sky. Even Ninexin, with her camouflage fatigues, and, later, her expensive pantsuits, even Ninexin softens each time she sees the nacimiento I have the housekeeper place below the tree. I know because I saw the same expression on her face when she looked at Mariana when she was a baby, when she looks at her still, although both of them would deny it.

My Mariana may not be wearing blue jeans anyway. She's so ladylike these days, ever since she started working at the gallery. When I visited her in New York, she trotted around the city in the sundress she had worn to work earlier the same day, “but with a blazer on top, Bela, of course.” I wasn't sure exactly what a blazer was, but I wasn't about to let on.

Maybe my Mariana will be wearing black, for her grandfather. She told me she couldn't come for Christmas, that she had promised to spend it with a friend. Who is this friend? I asked, but she said she had to run and then scurried off the phone. I'll find out now.

Perhaps this is Ignacio's final gift to me, that if he had to die, he was thoughtful enough to do it in January, making sure my Mariana would come back to me at the start of the new year, even though she hadn't planned to do so. The love he couldn't show me while he was alive, he made sure I'd receive it from the person I love the most, as a result of his death. And what a death! After so many dramatic problems, the trips to Miami for stents and open hearts, the agonies of worry he put me through, to have his heart stop beating quietly as he rested in his chair, simply to sleep and never wake up. It was Gladys, the housekeeper, who noticed. He normally snored so much it scared the cats who wander in from the garden, but he was suddenly so quiet that Gladys went over to look at him, and that's when she realized. It gave her quite a shock, really. Snoring aside, Ignacio died a fine death. My mother was right in the end: he was a man with dignity.

I can see that more clearly, now that I no longer have to face the sharp side of that dignity, to see him judging me every day, assessing how I've been spending his money and why, tossing my
Vanidades
magazine onto the coffee table as if he were dropping a piece of rotted fruit into a waste bin. Wondering why I couldn't be more like Ninexin, then blaming me for her stubbornness when she went too far, because I chose her name, the name of a Mayan princess. He wanted to name her Milagro, for his mother, but I lost so much blood in the birth, I was so weak afterward, he couldn't really refuse me, and I remembered the name of the princess in a book I had read long ago, back when I was a schoolgirl at Sacred Heart in New Orleans. One of the other boarders had lent it to me, Concepci
ó
n. She was from Mexico, and we called her Connie, even I did, although all of us Ibero-American girls would whisper to each other in Spanish when the nuns weren't paying attention. And everyone called Dolores, my sister, Dolly. I still do over a half-century later. So much has stayed with me from those years at Sacred Heart. I remember certain things so clearly and sharply. And not just important things! I could describe, down to the ribbons and fake cherries, every one of the hats Connie wore my first year there. She's the one who lent me the forbidden book with the princess in it. We were close then, young girls together in a city so full of postwar pride that New Orleans was even more jubilant than usual. We felt so grown-up without our parents around, despite the nuns, the chaperones, and, in my case, my older sister, watching us all the time. To be away from Granada, where everyone knew my father, knew us, knew if I stepped into the street with a ladder in my stocking or the cockade crooked on my hat, to have escaped all that, it felt like freedom.

I came back from New Orleans with more wisdom than I would have liked. I had learned things. And I don't mean music and elocution and the proper way to get out of a cab, although I learned those things too. Ninexin laughs at the idea of wasting time on such frivolous lessons; even my Mariana smirked like her father, turning up just the left corner of her mouth when I tried to show her how to exit the backseat of a car, ankles first, knees locked together. But those things are important—they tell the world who you are, how you feel about yourself.

Still, that's not the kind of knowledge I'm talking about. Now that I'm inching toward eighty, it's funny, and a little sad, to think that the most important events in my life happened in the first quarter of it. Is that why I remember those years so vividly, why I can see the bright blue of the sky and the darker blue of our uniforms when I close my eyes, hear the laughter of the children and the scraping of the local boys' shoes dancing on the street corner under our windows until the nuns shooed them away? Or does everyone remember their youth long after they've forgotten what they had for lunch yesterday? Is it that the memories are so important they're seared into our souls, or were we just so malleable then, so easily marked?

I'm not sure that I care. I just know I remember those days so sharply that it sometimes shocks me that the only place they exist anymore is in my head. My Mariana says that if I'd give her Connie's married name, she could find her on the computer, get in touch with her, that maybe I could see pictures of her children, her grandchildren. People display photos on the computer now; my Mariana has shown me. It's how she keeps track of Rigobertito and his kids, although she wouldn't have to keep track of her cousin if she visited more often. But I don't want to see pictures of Connie now. I would rather remember her as she was then—golden and sparkling. More important, I'll admit, I would rather have Connie remember me that way, too, full of the secret, surprising knowledge that the world is an exciting place. I don't need the computer to remember.

I just need someone to want me to remember. Ninexin used to love my stories of New Orleans when she was little, until she took up with Manuel and the others and became concerned with more important things. She went to New Orleans a few years ago, for a free-trade investment conference. Delegates from all over Central America were there. She liked the food, she said, but the city was almost as dirty as Managua, and it smelled worse on some streets. She wanted to take the streetcar up to Sacred Heart, she told me, but she was too busy with the conference, with her meetings, her presentations.

But my Mariana, she never stopped wanting to hear my stories. And so I keep telling her, I tell her everything I discovered in New Orleans, all that I lost when I left, and everything I've learned in the long years since. I tell her on the phone, I write her cards on the holidays, sometimes I even talk to her when she's not with me. Not out loud, of course, I just imagine what I would say to her if she were here. But now she's coming. Don Pedro is slowing down, maybe he sees her; he's nearly as old as I am but since his cataracts operation, his eyesight is almost as good as when he first came to us. My Mariana knows my wisdom is worth something; she wants to know what I think. And so I tell her everything, even the things she doesn't want to hear, even that revolutionaries make bad husbands. Not that Ignacio, God rest his soul, was much of a spouse either. I tell her because I want my Mariana to learn from my mistakes, and from her mother's. I suppose that's one thing Ninexin and I have in common.

 

3

Ninexin

“Revolutionaries make bad husbands,” my mother always says, although usually when she thinks I'm not listening. I don't know why she goes to the effort of trying to be discreet; I couldn't agree with her more. Revolutionaries do make bad husbands. Maybe that's why I never remarried. Handling foreign press for the Sandinistas, all I meet are revolutionaries. Or journalists, who would be revolutionaries if they weren't scared of physical activity. Over the years they may have shaved off their Che-like sideburns, grown a bit of a paunch, but all the men I deal with, deep in their souls, still think they're setting the world on fire. Where am I going to meet a nice physics teacher or accountant in my line of work?

Of course that's not really why I've never remarried, but it sounds good to those who worry about me, if I blame circumstance rather than crediting choice. That's what my mother would say if someone were to ask why her daughter never remarried—the fault, dear sirs, lies in her stars, not in herself. Mama firmly believes in fate versus personal responsibility, just as she believes in always depending upon the kindness of strangers. Mama's no fool, although she'd like you to think she is, if it means you'll do what she wants and that she's going to get her way without directly asking you for help or exerting any effort of her own.