The Ladies of Managua (22 page)

She looked back at me now. “I chose you. You were religious. You were respectful. And even at a young age you seemed to know that life has its disappointments. Marriage is hard work. I could tell you'd be good at it. And I was right.”

I have to admit, I felt flattered. It was as if Sister Dunphy, the strictest nun at Sacred Heart, had given me a
Tr
è
s Bien
ribbon. But that night, I made Ignacio take me for a walk and I told him I knew all about Flor. I demanded to know if he'd seen her, been with her, since we were married. “Isabela, you're being silly,” he told me. “A man doesn't want two wives. It's twice the headache, not twice the fun. If a man seeks a little excitement outside the home, that's exactly what he wants: excitement. Mystery. Youth. Flor and I had fun together when we were kids. We might have gone on having fun with each other, under other, different circumstances. But then I wouldn't have had the girls. Or you.” He pulled my arm through his and started guiding us home.

“A good man wouldn't go looking for excitement,” I said. Because even though I knew everything was going to be fine, and that's what I wanted, I was worn out from the emotions of the day. I wanted him to suffer a little, too.

“I can say this.” Ignacio didn't slow down, he kept walking, with my arm in his, so I did, too. “I've never wished I was married to someone else. I don't think you can say the same to me.”

In the darkness, I couldn't see his face. And I didn't need Padre Juan Cristobal to tell me that lies are a sin. So I didn't answer.

*   *   *

“Isabela, after all this time!” Flor takes my hand, and I won't give her the satisfaction of pulling it away. That would make me the rude one. “I haven't seen you since you moved.”

“The girls were already in school by then,” I say. “We had no need for baby clothes.”

“My deepest sympathies to them, and to you.” Flor looked right at me, bold as brass. “Ignacio was a good man. Now he's in a happier place.”

“Don't worry, Flor. Ignacio was perfectly happy in this place, too,” I say as I pass her hand over to Ninexin and turn to the next mourner.

The confrontation with Flor gives me a little burst of energy. But then she's gone, almost everyone is, and I'm still here, sitting in a chair at my husband's funeral, a widow. And so very tired again. I want to ask Ninexin if she sees anyone in the distance, or if this interminable receiving line is finally truly over and we can join the relatives for a simple, subdued, but elegant meal at La Gran Francia, and then return home to our beds. I feel I could sleep for days. She's standing behind and to the left of me; she'll be able to see far enough to spot any stragglers. As far as I can tell, the graveyard has emptied out, at least as far as the people aboveground are concerned. But I can't get Ninexin to catch my eye; she's focused on something or someone a short distance in front of me, and as I turn to see what dog or bird or person has her attention, I hear a man clearing his throat and I feel a hand on my arm. The hand looks vaguely dirty, as if its owner hasn't washed well enough, and it's at odds with his expensive white shirt, the kind that requires cuff links, which Ignacio was always leaving in hotel rooms. I had him buried wearing the pair I gave him for our tenth anniversary; silver
X
's, the Roman numeral for ten. It's a little joke between us, our last little joke. He asked me about a year ago why, whenever Mariana e-mailed letters for him, and Ninexin printed them out, “XOXO” was typed at the bottom? Was this a Basque word he didn't know? I told him it stood for hugs and kisses, and he was as delighted as if he'd learned a whole new language instead of just a silly shorthand used by busy young people when they're too grown-up and far away to offer real hugs and kisses. After that, every time he spoke to Mariana on the phone he would say, “XO, mi corazón. XO.” So I sent him to his rest with two kisses on his wrist: one can be from Mariana, and one from me. Ninexin gave him the tie he is wearing and Celia the tie pin. Since we raised Mariana like a third daughter, all those years we were living in Miami together, the cuff links can be a reminder of all the things the three of us learned together, all the little delights we shared.

“Mama,” Ninexin says from beside me, louder than I think she really needs to, given the setting. But of course, she means to point out that I'm ignoring the silent owner of the hand on my arm. So I look up into two caramel-colored eyes that immediately wrinkle at the edges. “You must be Bela,” he says. And I know this man has to belong to Mariana, because nobody else calls me that.

“I wish we were meeting under happier circumstances,” he continues. I'm just glad to be meeting him at all. Even in death, Ignacio is full of surprises. Because the reason this man is here, that I finally get to see him, is thanks to my husband. “I'm Allen Knox, Mariana's friend.”

“Charmed, I'm sure,” I say, proud of myself for remembering the American phrase.

“Wow.” The man laughs. It's a nice sound. “I knew you lived in the U.S. with Mariana, but I didn't realize your English would be better than mine!”

“My mother was also educated in the States, long before my parents moved to Miami,” Ninexin says, inserting herself into our conversation. “She went to high school in New Orleans.”

“I know all about Sacred Heart.” The man smiles. Like all Americans, he has nice teeth. “I've seen the painting.” When I don't respond, he elaborates, “Of the grammar textbook flying through the air.”

“I don't know that one,” Ninexin says, and of course she doesn't; Mariana is so private about her art. She shows only me, really. Me and this stranger, I suppose.

“She's so talented.” Allen had been leaning forward a bit to talk to me seated in this wooden folding chair but now he straightens up so that he's face-to-face with Ninexin.

“Zach's wrong about them being too whimsical. There's a market for humor in contemporary art; look at Roy Lichtenstein, or Jeff Koons. Maybe Maria's paintings aren't right for his gallery in terms of subject matter, but the quality is there, definitely. I really think he was prejudiced, that he expected them to be more forceful and conceptual, more abstract.” Allen shrugs. “More like my work, I guess. Which isn't fair. The joy in Maria's paintings is what art needs more of, what we all need more of.” He's been talking so fast he seems almost out of breath. I look at Ninexin; the truth is, I understood only about half of what the gringo said. Maybe less. That he thinks Mariana's paintings have joy in them—of course they do. As well they should. So why is he so agitated?

“Listen to me, rattling on about the art world, when I know you all have somewhere to be.” He runs a hand through his hair so that it now stands up in ridiculous tufts. “I just wanted to pay my respects.” He grins, a smile that all three of us can tell most women he meets find irresistible. But the spiky hair is ruining the effect. I pat my own hair to my scalp, although I had taken great care to spray it before leaving, and smoothing it now is undoubtedly doing more harm than good. But he doesn't notice my subtle hint, or if he does, he doesn't care. He's busy looking around. “I was hoping to give Mariana my sympathies, too, but I don't see her.”

Ninexin grabs the scarf at her neck and scans the cemetery a little too frantically. They're both like that, Ninexin and Mariana: anxious when the other one of them isn't around, but arguing half the time when they are in the same place.

“Mariana is in the car,” I say in English.

“She is?” Ninexin asks.

“She is.” The gringo nods as if I have just said something very wise. “My purse was heavy and in the way and she brought it there,” I say, switching to Spanish. “She said she needed to escape for a while.”

Ninexin's hand falls from her neck and she reaches out and takes the gringo's hand. “Allen,” she says, infusing the word with wonder as if he is a long-lost relative or a celebrity she has read about for years but is only just now meeting in person, someone both familiar and longed for. “Why don't you give my mother your arm and we can help her out of her chair? Then we can all go to the car and find Mariana.”

I know what Ninexin is up to: she wants to see how Mariana will react to seeing Allen. Will she melt into his arms, thrilled that he is here for her to lean on? Maybe they're secretly engaged, and she'll tell us that they have an announcement they wanted to make, but had agreed to wait to do so until the funeral was over. Or maybe she won't be as excited to see him as he is to be near her.

Whatever Mariana's reaction, now I desperately want to see it, too. Not out of curiosity or boredom; I'm not turning my granddaughter's life into a telenovela for my own amusement, of course not. But because when I see them together I will be able to feel it, I will know. Is he her Mauricio, or is he Mariana's Ignacio? Because he's definitely a person of some importance, at least in his own mind.

I turn to the gringo and speak to him in my best Sacred Heart voice. “Allen,” I say. “You simply must join us for luncheon.”

 

24

Ninexin

He's handsome, I think, shaking Allen's hand. And he looks to be somewhere in his mid-to-late-forties, halfway between Mariana's age and mine. I open my eyes a little wider, to mitigate the sagging of my eyelids. And then I drop his hand and look down at my shoes to keep from laughing at my own idiocy. He's not a reporter, here to venerate the great lady warrior, to ask respectful questions, and then, like the guy in San Francisco, mutter to a colleague as I walk away, “Hillary Clinton wishes she could rock a pantsuit like that.”

As if Hillary Clinton and I have anything in common besides being female politicians. Although I suppose we did both marry men who struggle with impulse control. Maybe that's an unfair comparison; Manuel was only twenty-four when he was killed, still a child, really. I was in Washington at the time of the Virginia Tech shooting, and I saw a psychiatrist on a morning television show explaining that the emotional center of the brain isn't fully formed until the age of twenty-five, which is why young adults are so much more volatile: they lack emotional maturity. I was shocked when I heard that comment. I thought of myself as completely grown-up at twenty-five; I was already a widow, a mother, and a comandante. But now that I'm more than twice that age, I see how much evolving I still had to do. The girl I was in my twenties—so lonely and confused, so guilt-ridden about my child, and, at times, so exhilarated by my cause and my work—she barely resembles the woman I am now. At least I hope she doesn't. I wouldn't go back to my twenties. Except for the nice firm eyelids.

Mama's turning on her Southern belle charm for Mariana's beau, although I'm not sure Mariana would want us to charm him, or talk to him at all; she seemed rather angry at him last night. I'm trying to come up with a way to ask him, in not so many words, what exactly he's doing here, but perhaps the best thing to do is to keep quiet. It's a technique I use in meetings and negotiations sometimes: keep my mouth shut and a smile on my face and the other party is forced to ramble on to fill the silence, which makes so many people uncomfortable. It's amazing how even the most stoic politician will end up revealing something about himself or his position that he'd be better off keeping hidden. My strategy seems to be working; showing surprising restraint, Mama didn't rush in with reminiscences after he mentioned Sacred Heart. And now Allen has up and started talking about Mariana, about her art.

Whimsical? Her paintings aren't whimsical, not the ones I've seen. They're light-filled and warm, and gentle, but not in a silly, girlish way. I don't have such a large sample size to choose from; she doesn't really show me her work that much. But she does send photos of her paintings to Mama, who always shares them with me. Each time I see them, I am reminded of the words carved on the wall inside the Natural History Museum in New York, where I took Mariana once when she was little and I had meetings at the UN. It's a quote from Teddy Roosevelt speaking to the Boy Scouts. And while I have lots of thoughts about his invasion of Cuba and manifest destiny and even his hunting of large game (weren't there enough human beasts and social ills in his own country to hunt and tame, did he have to go abroad to find animals to annihilate?), I couldn't help but tear up when I read it. B
OYS,
it says,
BE BRAVE BUT TENDER
. It made me cry because Mariana was standing next to me, and I knew she was both those things, both brave and tender, and that it's not an easy way to be.

Her paintings reveal the part of Mariana that she shields from me. The softer side. That may be why she doesn't show them to me very often, or to anyone. She did have to exhibit a series of paintings in the campus gallery to get her master's degree from the School of Visual Arts, but she said that I shouldn't miss any of the World Health Conference in Geneva to go to it, that it wasn't a big deal, like graduating from high school or college. Papa's health was already starting to fail, he spent most days sleeping, and it was too far a trip for Mama to make alone, even if she had been willing to leave him in the care of the housekeeper, which she wasn't. But when Mariana sent us the graduation program, as she promised she would, all the other students were photographed in front of their work, surrounded by their relatives. She stood alone in front of a series of paintings of everyday scenes—a couple in love, a mother and child, a girl learning to ride a bike—all set against backdrops of volcanoes. Geneva was a good conference. But when I saw Mariana by herself in front of her paintings of lovers and families, I regretted attending it, even though she told me to go, and never said a word about the exhibit other than, “I passed and I didn't spill wine on anyone's paintings, so it was a huge success!”