The Ladies of Managua (25 page)

“She did look a bit suffocated, surrounded by all those people,” I say to Ninexin, once I finally make out the words Mariana had written. “She'll probably sit at that caf
é
she loves so much, the one with the deaf people, pobrecitos, until the lunch is over, and then she'll come find us before we're ready to drive back to Managua.”

The real mystery isn't where Mariana has gone; my granddaughter is a wanderer, she loves to set out for someplace unexpected, but she always comes back to me. The question that interests me is what is this letter she's being so mysterious about, what could Cristian Hidalgo have to say to me after all these years? Perhaps he's been going through his things and has sent me a note, maybe even including a few photos of when we were young: scallop-edged black-and-white images of such a vibrantly colored time. I would love that so! It would be a gift from God to have some unexpected happiness come to me on this day. I don't want to delay opening the letter any longer, but Ninexin is gripping it as if it were her ticket to Paradise, even though Mariana clearly left it for me.

“What about this?” she whispers, but it's such a loud whisper that it's a hiss, and she's poking at the envelope so viciously that I'm sure she's going to tear it.

“Calm yourself!” I insist. “And speak up! If this one knew Spanish, do you think he'd be talking to Don Pedro like we're living in slow motion?” I grab the envelope and study the line she was attacking with her nail; writing across the flap of the sealed envelope has made Mariana's penmanship even more uneven and difficult to decipher. “
Be kind to yourself and don't worry about me for a little while,”
I read out loud. “So maybe she's gone for a long walk, or is going to check into one of the hotelcitos and relax for a few days. Some of them have spas, you know. Do
ñ
a Chelita has a massage twice a month, the doctor says it's good for her back.”

Ninexin nods but her lips have grown small and her eyes wide, just like when she was a little girl fighting with Celia and trying not to let her big sister see her cry. I clasp her hand, which is still extended in front of her, empty now that I've taken the letter away. “She's a smart girl, a grown woman, and she speaks the language,” I say. “I promise she'll be perfectly fine. Better than that. She'll manage to squeeze some happiness out of this sorrow-filled trip! Let's just get through the lunch and if she hasn't arrived by the end, we can call her without this giant sitting right in front of us, listening to her voice come through the phone, and ask her how much more time she needs, what she wants us to tell him.”

Ninexin nods and looks out the window, but her hand squeezes mine. “You're right, this is probably something between them,” she admits. “It's not any of our business. But still—”

“You know how young people in love are, they have no concern for their families' feelings,” I say, just a little pleased that Mariana is finally giving Ninexin a taste of the suffering I went through when Ninexin was running around the poor parts of town and then clambering around the jungle with that Manuel; Mariana's always been such an easy girl, nothing like her headstrong mother. “It's not a bad idea to make a man chase you a little bit.”

“But she could have told
us
where she was going.” Ninexin turns to me. A tear escapes her left eye, but she wipes it away so quickly that I'm unsure it was there in the first place.

“And put us in the position of deciding to tell him where she went or not? And of explaining why? No, thank you,” I say. “My granddaughter knows what she's doing.”

Ninexin looks out the window again. “You mean my daughter knows what she's doing.”

We're creeping along, keeping pace behind the few mourners who are so young, so respectful, or so poor that they're walking from the cemetery to the center of town. Mariana's giant has given up trying to chitchat with Don Pedro and taken up humming instead. I think it's “The Rain in Spain.” That's probably as close to a Nicaraguan song as he can call up. Poor, lost gringo.

Ninexin and the gringo are each looking out their own window, so I take a pen from my handbag and use it to slice open the envelope without ripping apart the note Mariana has scrawled across the front flap. But despite my efforts, the pen gets stuck on the corner of the envelope, and when I pull it back, I force a corner of paper out as well.

I drop the pen and shove the folded paper back into the envelope, finally turning it over so that I can see the front of it for the first time. There's no address, just a single word: my name. And then I put it right back in my purse, only deeper than Mariana had, under my glasses' case and my handkerchief and my cough drops, so that it can't possibly creep to the top and peek out. Because the handwriting on the front confirms what I suspected—no, what I knew—the minute I saw the words on the stationery slipping out of the corner of the envelope after I tore it open. The script is shakier, the words slope more sharply upward, but even in the three letters on the front of the envelope, in the nickname that no one but Dolly has called me in decades, I can tell it's the same handwriting I once knew so well that I could describe the shape of every letter, exactly where the bar of the
t
crosses the stem, how the loops of the
g
's never quite close at the bottom. This letter has nothing, or at least, very little, to do with Cristian Hidalgo. This letter is from Mauricio, and it's the first I've had from him in over half a century. There's no way I can read it in the backseat of this car, with my daughter, mine and Ignacio's, sitting to my right, this too-tall stranger humming show tunes in front of me, and Don Pedro rolling his eyes in the rearview mirror.

“What does this Hidalgo say?” Ninexin asks.

“Trying to scan it in the car made me feel sick,” I say. “I'll read it after lunch.”

We arrive, finally, and Allen helps me out of the car before Don Pedro can make his way around, depriving the poor man of his ability to do his job. When I suggest to him, “Perhaps you'd like to refreshen up before luncheon,” my English hardly has an accent at all, and he strides obediently toward the bathroom, undoubtedly wondering what is caught in his teeth that I'm too polite to mention. I take Ninexin's arm and lead her to the hostess desk.

“Right this way, Do
ñ
a Isabela,” says a pretty young Indian-looking girl with a forehead so smooth I can almost see my reflection in it. “May we offer our condolences?”

“Thank you, dear.” I focus on the Moorish tiled floor in front of me, as if human interaction is too painful today, then lower my voice a bit to add, “Would you be kind enough to book us a room for tonight? Two beds, for my daughter and myself. I just don't have it in me to drive back to Managua after lunch.”

The sweet girl is sure there won't be a problem, but asks for a moment to confer with the manager, whose office is across the courtyard.

“Are you feeling all right, Mama?” Ninexin asks, tightening her grip on my arm as the girl walks away.

“Perfectly fine!” I shake off her hand. “I'm tired, that's all, and there's no reason to rush back to Managua if Mariana's not coming home with us right away. If she needs a few days to herself to unwind, we might as well wait for her here until she's ready to see us, relax a little bit ourselves.”

Ninexin kisses my forehead and the hostess smiles as she walks towards us, pleased that the poor old widow has such a loving daughter to support her. Mariana's giant is crossing the courtyard at the same time, carrying his hands before him as if he's a surgeon heading into the operating room. If he's one of those who never dries his hands after washing, I don't know how Mariana can stand it. He's smiling at me, too, so I feel a bit guilty, but also rather pleased with myself that neither of these fine, strong, relatively young people can tell that I'm lying. Because while I do think we should get out of Mariana's way and let her have a few days to herself if that's what she wants, I have no doubt that she'll come back to me when she's ready. And I am exhausted, but I'd be just as bone-tired in Managua, in the home I shared with Ignacio. It's a fine place to rest, but it's no place to bring another man's letter. Here, in Granada, there will be moments when Ninexin steps out to make a phone call or grab some dinner, and I will be left alone to sit in one of the inn's cool, high-roofed, tile-floored rooms, under a painting of a saint or an angel or some crusading general, and free to read this letter I've been waiting on for over half a century.

“We've reserved one of our nicest suites,” says the hostess with the smooth forehead. I nod my creased one at her in return, thread my right hand under Ninexin's forearm, and lead her to the doorway of the dining room, stepping in front of the gringo. With my daughter by my side and Mauricio's letter in my handbag, I walk into the dining room, smiling sadly at the faces of my late husband's relatives.

 

27

Ninexin

There was not one moment during the entire luncheon that I didn't spend worrying about Mariana, wondering where she's gone and with whom. I sat pretending to listen to people's remembrances, their toasts to Papa's memory, and I'm sure everyone thought that my pale cheeks and chewed lip were the result of grief for my father, not fear for my daughter.

It's silly, I know. Mariana dutifully calls me every other Sunday or so, and if something important happens or we need to coordinate travel plans, we'll email in between. But there are days, sometimes even weeks, in a row when I don't hear from her, when I'm not sure if she's in New York or in Miami visiting Beth or even in Paris attending an art show. And while I think of her, of course, all the time, I seldom worry about where she is or what she's doing. But now that we're in the same country, in our country, or mine, anyway, and I don't know her whereabouts, all I can imagine are the ways she could be suffering somewhere out there. Was she mugged trying to take money out of an ATM? (It feels disloyal even to think that, given all the press releases I've sent touting Nicaragua as the safest country in Central America.) Is she drowning in her own grief over Papa? Or, less scary but more hurtful, is she doing the best she can to disappear, renting a hammock in some dirt-road barrio off the side of the highway just so she can avoid spending more time with me? When Mariana was a little girl, those first three or so years in Miami, each time I left she would beg me to stay longer, to stay with her for good. She'd get very quiet, watching me as I packed my suitcase, and then when it came time to hug and kiss good-bye she would start crying and cling to me, wailing into my ear, “But I really want you to stay.” I always managed not to cry myself until I got into the cab, but it was awful. Until the year she was ten and she hugged me and said, “Bye-bye, Mama. Have a safe trip.” And that was even worse. I tried to tell myself that she finally understood what Mama and I always said, that I had to leave because I had important work to do, to help all the little girls in Nicaragua. But when she waved at me, dry-eyed, it felt less like she knew I couldn't stay and more like she no longer cared if I did. As Mariana grew older, she became the one to leave early, shortening her high school summers in Managua, spending no more than a week here at Christmas. This time, now that she's gone, it feels like she might be choosing to leave for good. And I want to cling to her and say, “But I really want you to stay.”

I was running so many scenarios about what Mariana might be doing through my mind that I didn't hear what Celia said about Papa, although she was looking right at me, knowing it was a memory we must share. I smiled back at her sadly, benignly, a front to hide the emotion swirling behind it. Celia stopped speaking and everyone in the room turned to me, as she prompted, “Ninexin, whenever you're ready to share what you'd like to about Papa.”

I hadn't written a prepared speech; this wasn't another conference. But I did jot down some notes this morning to help me work through my thoughts, writing out a few anecdotes to show how Papa loved his family, and his country; how, though he had left Nicaragua for several years in body, in spirit he was always here. I wanted to say something to demonstrate how he had acted as a father to so many of us, not just to his daughters but to my daughter and to so many young people who looked up to him, both among our extended family and among the young lawyers he worked with in his practice. I had worried over that; whether I should allude to the absence of Mariana's own father even obliquely, whether it would upset her. With Mariana gone, my concern was irrelevant. But I didn't want to say any of that anymore. I didn't want to call attention to her absence. And I was no longer willing to share my father with anyone, not the lawyers, not Nicaragua, not even Celia or Rigobertito. With Papa gone, and now Mariana, too, I felt like the last kid left on the playground after everyone else has been picked up from school. Abandoned. And I couldn't help but think that if Papa were here, Mariana wouldn't have run off. He would have held us together. None of the anecdotes I had prepared seemed right anymore. So I stood and up spoke the truth. “My father is the only person who told me that I could be anything I wanted to be,” I said. “And I believed him. I will always be grateful.”

I sat down, but still no one spoke; I couldn't hear a sound, not even ice clinking in people's glasses. Then Celia jumped up and said, “Thank you all for coming?” as if it were a question, not a statement. She wouldn't mention anything, she wouldn't want to criticize, especially not today, but she clearly expected more from me; I'm the maker of speeches in this family. And Mama would undoubtedly think what I said made her sound unsupportive. It's not that she was. Well, she was, actually. She wanted another debutante for a daughter, not a soldier. And I knew my choices were putting my family in danger, causing her worry. Even before I joined the Movimiento, though, Mama was the guard who made sure society's rules were followed, or tried to; I learned early on that if I just nodded when Mama spoke, then went on and did exactly what I wanted, there would be no consequences besides her loud sighs, complaints, and tearful prayers to the Virgen, asking what she had done to deserve such a headstrong daughter. Maybe I would have been more moved by those if I hadn't recognized the same gestures and heard the same expressions in the telenovelas Mama watched in the afternoons. As I grew older, I developed the conviction that if Mama disapproved of a course of action, it was guaranteed to be the most exciting thing I could do. And I was right every time, whether it was joining the Frente or marrying Manuel, or even just cutting my long hair.