The Ladies of Managua (35 page)

“I was trying to protect you,” I say, starting with excuses, already trying to justify myself, my choices.

“What, Mama?”

“I never told you about the night your father died because I thought no good could come from you knowing the details.”

Mariana's soft laughter floats over to my chair. She doesn't seem to be understanding what I'm saying. “Madre, there's this thing called the Internet now,” she says, and her voice sounds less sleepy with each word that follows. “You and Bela always shut down the conversation when I asked about my dad, but I know everything about how Papi died; I have since grad school. I know he was the one guerrilla killed in the takeover of Memo Paredes's house, the one casualty besides fat Memo himself. I've seen floor plans of the mansion. The list of demands the guerrillas made in return for releasing everyone safely. Pictures of them boarding the flight to Cuba after the siege ended, all smiles and sideburns. I'm filled with so much information about that night, I used to dream about the takeover, as if I were there. Such clear, specific dreams that I'm sometimes convinced I was there, in a weird way, that a memory of that night is floating through my veins, a legacy from Papi.”

She stops speaking and I'm trying to figure out how to begin again when her voice floats through the darkness, a little softer than before, as if she worries someone is listening. “It used to bother me that those other guys were so happy when Papi had just been killed. But I think I understand now. They were young and vital and working to overthrow a dictator, and it was starting to look like they might actually succeed. They really were changing the world. One compa
ñ
ero down, even one who left an infant behind, is pretty minor in the scheme of history.”

I picture Mariana at twenty-two, pushing thick bangs off of her forehead to stare at a computer screen, at the faces of all the young men, and the few young women, who survived when her father didn't, carrying hate for them around with her among Miami and Managua and New York, a heavy, unwieldy inheritance, and one that I unwittingly gave her. I should have told her long ago. I thought I was protecting her by not burdening her with this horrible legacy, but now I'm starting to suspect that anything would have been better than not knowing.

“He didn't suffer.” I can give her that comfort, anyway, and it's true.

“Mama,” she says softly. “I know he was shot in the stomach. It must have been awful: such a protracted, messy way to die.”

“Not at close enough range like that. Your papi died instantly. Almost.”

I can hear Mariana's breath, slow and heavy, over the sound of the geckos shrieking at each other. “I don't want to be cynical,” she says, “but that's the kind of thing you tell a young widow with a baby. That her husband died instantly, with her name and the name of their baby daughter on his lips. That he felt no pain.” She's been carrying her vision of Manuel's death with her for so long, she isn't ready to let it go yet. But I have to make sure she does, even if the reality is more painful than the gruesome end she'd envisioned. She's been living in her imagination long enough, with a distorted image of a father who ran from her straight into waiting gunfire.

“He didn't say anyone's name, not yours, not mine. He just lay where he had fallen, looking so, so shocked.”

“Mama,” she says in a too-patient voice.

“I know what I'm saying is true, Mariana. I know because I was there.”

Even the geckos are silent. I hear the grass rustle as something hops or slithers or crawls through it, and then there is quiet again.

“No,” Mariana says, not bothering to add the “Mama” anymore. “You're not in the pictures of them boarding the plane to Cuba. Your name isn't on any list.”

“But I was there in Memo Paredes's house, hija. I couldn't go to Cuba—I had a husband to bury and a daughter to raise.”

“That's even less believable.” Her voice sounds less shaky, stronger than before. “That you'd stop playing soldier long enough to take care of me.”

I can tell from the sharp edges of her words that she's starting to believe me now, even as she insists she doesn't. And even though it's what I hoped for, what I undoubtedly deserve, I wish I could take back the last few minutes and return to where we were before, with her pitying my na
ï
vet
é
and calling me “Mama.” My tea is cold now but I drink it anyway, in one gulp, as if it is medicine that might somehow save me.

“I wish I hadn't been there. It's why I asked that my name not be released to the press. The compa
ñ
eros had reasons to agree; I wasn't the only one being protected. And the truth is, no one wanted me there, least of all Manuel. You turned four months old two days before, you didn't even sleep through the night yet. The comandantes, they said women and men were equal, but we still ended up doing the soft jobs, mostly, community-building, literacy. Cooking for the male soldiers. Manuel said you needed me more than the commando unit taking over the house did. But I insisted on coming. And he died because he let me.”

Mariana moves in her chair and I hear a thud. Her mug must have fallen off of her lap.

“He died because he was there,” Mariana said. “And you could have, too, and I wouldn't have even had you.”

Her voice is soft but shaky; I've already hurt her by revealing that both of us chose to leave her that night. And there's so much more I still have to tell her. “Listen to me, hija.” I turn toward her in my chair, although it is too dark for me to make out anything but the outline of her face. “I insisted that they let me come, and they agreed. They had to, because I was the one who got them that floor plan in the first place. Memo's daughter, Brigida, had gone to school at La Asuncion. We had been friends since third grade, when I invited her to my birthday party after Mama said I had to. She felt bad for Brigida, growing up without a mother; hers had died, it was rumored of alcoholism, when we were just little kids. Also, she said I had to invite all the girls in the class, because that's what nice young ladies did.”

“That sounds like my Bela.” At least she is listening. If Mariana understands I am telling the truth about Brigida and my birthday party, maybe she will let me get the rest of it out.

“We were never that close; Brigida always made me a little nervous. She had these stunning green eyes that somehow made her look sneaky, like a cat. But, I included her, which most people didn't.”

“Because my Bela raised you to be a nice young lady.”

“Also because, eventually, I felt sorry for her, too. By high school, she used to spend most of her lunch hours in the library. One day I was walking behind her on the way to check out a book, when she tripped on a step and fell forward. Her skirt flipped up; they made us wear these itchy blue pleated skirts which looked demure but blew up like balloons every time there was a strong wind. Anyway, when I helped her with her skirt I saw the backs of her legs were covered in welts. I gasped—I couldn't help it—and she said, ‘Don't worry; he doesn't usually notice me much.'

“I asked what happened. Maybe it wasn't polite, but I asked before I could think about it, and Brigida said her father didn't like her report card. I knew she got good grades; they published the class rankings at the end of each term. ‘But not the best,' Brigida said. ‘My dad's pretty competitive.'”

“What a jerk.”

My eyes have gotten used to the dark and I can see that Mariana has pulled her feet up onto the chair and is rubbing the backs of her own thighs. I had the same reaction when I saw Brigida's legs; I felt the skin on the backs of my own legs rise, and I wanted to reach out and try to soothe her welts. I felt I owed Brigida something, because at that point, violence was still so shocking to me and clearly so commonplace to her.

“More like a monster,” I say. “He was a general in Somoza's army. Everyone knew that if Somoza—or anyone in the dictator's family, really—hated someone, that person disappeared. But what we weren't sure was true or not was the rumor that our president for life had them dropped into the lava-filled mouth of the Volcan Masaya from one of his helicopters. When people whispered about this, they said that Brigida's father did the dropping. That's why most of the other parents were afraid to have his daughter in their homes; it was safer just to avoid notice, and to avoid her, too.”

Mariana wraps her arms around her knees and I start to wonder if I hadn't been right in the first place, to keep this story from her. What I've told her so far is nothing, really, compared to what she still has to hear, things she might later wish she still didn't know.

When I was pregnant with Mariana, Manuel used to sing to my belly, describing anything beautiful we saw—an orchid twining around a tree, a parrot flying out of a cliff side. To make up for all the brutality in the world around us, he said, and so that the baby would hear happy thoughts and sounds, not just talk of war. I'm sure Mariana wants the same for her baby, an atmosphere of calm and security, of beauty. And now I'm ruining all that.

“I lost touch with Brigida after graduation,” I press on; it's too late to stop now. “I was dating your father, and caught up in the Movimiento; Brigida didn't move in the same circles we did. But one night when I was pregnant with you, Rigoberto and Celia had a party, and there was Brigida, home from the University of Houston, where her father had sent her to study, ‘at least until things calm down,' she said. The school was only a couple of years old, and she liked her classes, art history, mostly. But she felt bad being so far away, she said, when she really wanted to help with the struggle. I was shocked at first; her father's job was to prop up the corrupt government Manuel and I were working to destroy. But she wasn't the only compa
ñ
ero in the Movimiento who had relatives who worked for Somoza. And I knew—maybe I was the only person who did—that she had every reason to disrespect her father, to hate him, even. She had seen the depravity and decadence of the regime up close, she said.

“Brigida was home for the summer, and we became close. Closer than we ever had been in school, really. Manuel didn't want me involved in any dangerous operations as my due date approached, and I was bored. Brigida would stop by almost daily to visit. Talking to her gave me something to do.”

“Something like planning an attack on her father?”

“It was her idea, Mariana.” I can hear how defensive my voice sounds. “At first she just gave me money from her dress allowance to pass on to the compa
ñ
eros to support our efforts. It was the least she could do to help Nicaragua, she said. She couldn't risk working with the poor herself—what if someone saw her and told her father? After she went back to school in August, I got a letter, maybe two. But when she was home for Thanksgiving, she came by to see you—she brought a pink baby blanket printed with ballerinas. And when I unrolled it, there were the plans for her father's new home inside. ‘He's having his usual Christmas party early this year, on the twenty-first, to break in the new place,' she told me. I knew what she was suggesting, even though she didn't say the words. If we were able to capture him, her father would make an irresistible bargaining point: we could use him to get amnesty for our condemned leaders, rights for our prisoners, whatever we wanted, really. On top of that, he was a bully, and I'd seen enough of his kind to know that bullies tend to flail when they're put in a position of weakness. He might fold and tell us things about Somoza that would prove invaluable, insider information that could help us do so much good.

“Still, kidnapping Memo was a best-case-scenario situation, it was what would happen if everything went smoothly, and no one was harmed. But there was no guarantee that would be the case. I didn't want to be responsible for Brigida putting things in motion that might end in tragedy, things that she might later regret. I told her that although we tried to work as nonviolently as possible, there was always a chance that her father would get hurt. And she said that she knew that was a risk, but she couldn't prioritize the comfort of one man over the good of society. ‘Besides, my father never had any issue with hurting me,' she said. ‘Ninexin, there were times when I thought he'd kill me. I still have nightmares that he does.'

“I didn't like to think of how much Brigida had suffered, so I changed the subject from her father and asked if she would be there. She said the young people usually left by eleven to go to a disco. I wasn't sure what to do. I believed in our cause so much. I knew Somoza's henchmen had caused so much suffering. In theory, I had no problem with them meeting a little karmic retribution. But in practice, we were talking about a man I had met, the father of a person I cared about, someone who might later regret causing him harm, or, at best, humiliation. But Brigida said to me, ‘I risked a lot to sneak those out of my papa's office and make a copy; I'm not taking them back with me. Give the plans to Manuel. He'll think of something that will help the most people with the least amount of violence.' And she dropped them on the table and went home.

“The next day Manuel and I went to my parents' for lunch and I brought the plans with me; I thought I might hide them in my old closet for a few days while I thought things over, that they'd be safer there. Two police goons had started standing across the street from our house, watching me and your father come and go. But just as we were about to leave, I had a vision of the National Guard searching Papa and Mama's house, which they knew we frequented, of course. If those plans were found it would be enough to throw them into one of Somoza's torture dungeons. I couldn't expose them to even more risk than I had just by joining the Movimiento. I thought about destroying the plans, but that would be a betrayal of all I had done so far. Brigida was right: Manuel would know what to do. I couldn't rob him of this opportunity to affect real change, to become a star in the Movement as he had always been in my eyes.”