The Ladies of Managua (37 page)

Curling forward into her lap, I rest my head on top of our hands because I'm tired, so tired. And because I don't want her to realize that I'm crying, too. I'm crying for Madre, because her life has been so sad. I'm crying for Papi, because he died so young and so confused. And I'm crying for myself because I've spent my life missing my father. And now I've lost him all over again.

 

38

Isabela

Walking down the hall in my slippers, I remember the one other time I ever snuck out of my bed and tiptoed down a long corridor: the night I met Mauricio and Father Antony to plan our marriage. Our attempted marriage, I should say. I was so much more agile then, tripping down the passage, though it was fear of being caught that made me so fast, fear and youth.

Now I have nothing to be afraid of: I'm a paying guest in this hotel, I have a right to be in its public spaces, even if my housecoat is a questionable choice of attire. But I can't help but feel embarrassed, and that, along with my age, and, it has to be said, my weight, slow my pace, keep me shuffling down the hall. His room is only two doors down from mine and even now, as I'm standing in front of the brass knocker, my hand raised, it's not too late to turn around, return to my bed, wrap my dignity around myself like a blanket and go to sleep. I'm about to do just that when I hear a voice that isn't his. A woman's voice. Now it's not a question of my dignity but Mariana's happiness, so I thump the knocker as hard as I can, imagining the confusion, the shared horror on the other side of the door.

“Just a minute,” Allen says, as I knew he would; he must be rushing the girl out onto the balcony. But her voice isn't getting any softer, and then the door's open and he's standing there, pulling a T-shirt down over the top of his baggy athletic pants.

My mouth is already open in outrage, but when I follow the sound of the incessant voice I realize it's coming from the television. And even though Allen can't know what I was thinking just now, it makes me feel all the more ridiculous, standing in the middle of a strange man's room in my housecoat, having barged in as if he were the housekeeper and I was going to ask him for a midnight snack. I'm not even wearing lipstick.

Luckily, Allen hasn't noticed my lips; his gaze has followed mine and we're both staring at the TV, where the chattering woman talking straight to the camera has been replaced by a harrowing live skeleton of a man with ragged dyed black hair and slits for eyes. “Who—what—do you watch?” I ask. I'm truly curious, but I also hope to deflect Allen's attention from me to this stranger on TV, who looks even worse than I do. Clearly, it was the wrong thing to say, because it has somehow inspired him to sit—plop!—at the foot of his unmade bed opposite the television. He is patting the mattress next to him; I do believe he intends for me to settle down there. There's a perfectly good armchair in the corner to the right of the bed; I make my way over to it and sit behind him so we can both look at the TV, not each other.

“Keith Richards, Bela!” Allen says, and the name does sound familiar although I can't quite place it. “I know, hard living, right? Makes me regret the scotch with dinner. Almost.” He points the remote device at the television, making the sound stop although the picture keeps flickering, images of a past that is not my own I've always cared more for royalty than rock stars, even though, now that I see him standing next to Mick Jagger, I finally recognize the skeleton. Of course I do.

“The thing is, I can't sleep,” Allen's saying now, as if it's an expected nocturnal occurrence for me to drop by for a chat. “I can't concentrate enough to read or answer work emails; the words start dancing around. I'm tired, I close my eyes, but without Mariana, it's impossible. Where is she? Why is she there? Nothing drowns out the questions, not even Keith Richards. The only time I managed to stop fixating on the fact that she's missing was when you were reading me Mauricio's letter. What a story.”

Now I know I was right to creep down the hall like a common criminal; Allen wants to talk about this just as much as I do. I open my mouth but he's already yammering again. “So I turn on the TV, and who's on it but Bianca Jagger. I mean, she was only on for a minute or two, it's this Rolling Stones retrospective. But I had to watch, because I'm in Granada and Bianca Jagger's on TV. How can I not watch? She was the only Nicaraguan I'd heard of before I met Mariana. And, you know, seeing the pictures of her back in the day, she reminds me of Ninexin. I mean, they don't really look alike, except for that sort of defiant, observant stare.”

I wish I could grab the remote out of his hand and turn off the images on the screen and his inane running commentary at the same time. “He's a beautiful woman, but she look nothing like Ninexin,” I tell Allen. “His mother sold fruit on the steps of the court, but she manage to get out, to France, for an education.”

“Wow.”

I meant to shut Allen up by pointing out how ridiculous the comparison he'd made is, but he seems to have taken it as encouragement; he's shifted to sit at the side of the bed so he can face me, as if I'm here to entertain him with tales of rock stars' wives and assorted Nicaraguan arrivistes. I wish he'd stop it. I have to gaze up at the ceiling now, to avoid seeing his eyes staring at me; looking upward is making me dizzy.

“If you think Bianca's pretty, you should see his sister.” I nod at the TV as if the sisters are likely to appear on it to allow us to compare their merits. It doesn't work; Allen's still looking at me.

“Really?”

“Oh yes, stunning. There were whisperings she was carrying on with Ignacio for a tiempito, but I am not so sure is this true or just it is idle chatter, wantful thinking for him.”

Now I've succeeded; Allen is so flustered by my mentioning a mistress of Ignacio's, even if she's just, perhaps, an imaginary one, that he gets up and turns off the television. Now he's standing in front of me, looking at the door and then toward—but not at—me, and back at the door again.

“Well, it is becoming late.” I lean forward in my chair, as if I mean to get up. “I just want to make sure you are feeling well; I see how nervous you feel for Mariana. You and me, too.” I put my arms on the sides of the chair as if I'm going to raise myself up and out, and before I can sit down again and ask him what I came to ask, Allen is at my side, helping me stand. I didn't think he'd be so agile, at his age.

“One thing más, Allen,” I say, taking tiny steps like a geriatric geisha. “What you say before?”

“About Bianca and Ninexin?”

How tiresome for Mariana to be with a man who can be so slow-witted! Handsome, but slow. “About how Fidel, how he should not decide.” I take a step forward, and am careful to speak and walk slowly, as if I'm sleepy and distracted and what I'm about to say doesn't really matter, as if I didn't laboriously make my way to his room to solicit his opinion, but I'm just making pleasant in-the-middle-of-the-night conversation to pass our time as Allen walks me down the hall. “Did you mean I should consider to go to Cuba? You think I should write to him back, to Mauricio? After so much years?”

He's already got his hand on my door, but Allen stops turning the knob, stops walking, and looks down at me as if he's Padre Juan Cristobal and I'm sixteen again and confessing to having impure thoughts. “Bela,” he says. “I'm divorced. The woman I love is hiding out somewhere in Central America to avoid seeing me, and I'm watching old Rolling Stones clips for solace. I'm hardly the person to ask.”

He's right. It's ridiculous that I have come to him in the middle of the night like a ghost, wandering through public halls in my housecoat to beg for the advice of a middle-aged man who is as confused as any teenager. But Mariana's not here for me to talk to, and he's all I have. He's the only person who knows my secret. And now I have two important questions to resolve: What should I do about Mauricio? And what should Mariana do about this one in front of me? “But still, I ask,” I say, because I don't want him to turn around and go back to his room and look for more interesting television programs before telling me what he thinks. “You have the good sense to be with Mariana. He is my granddaughter. Is it so strange I ask your thoughts on relations between men and women?”

He breathes hard through his nose, almost snorting like a bull in a ring, but it doesn't make him seem fierce. The breath actually seems to deflate him. “I know what they're thinking, when people see me walk into a gallery with Maria,” he says, not answering my question about Mauricio and me. “That she gets to sit at my feet, taking in all my experience, basking in the reflected glory of my talent, while I suck the youth and vitality out of her, like a vampire. That, sure, we look good together now, but that it's really a race to the finish: either I'll deteriorate faster and she'll get tired of changing my diapers and amuse herself with lovers her own age while waiting for me to die, or she'll age quickly and I'll replace her with the next hungry young art history major who falls at my feet.”

I have no idea why Allen is creating such an ugly picture, saying out loud things one shouldn't even let oneself think, but before I can defend Mariana he starts talking again. “Even my kids have said as much, although they're just passing on things they've heard their mother and her friends say at cocktail parties. And you know what? Let Taylor and her emaciated friends think it. If that makes them feel better, if that evens the score for them just a little bit, then I'm glad. Because every minute that I get to be with Maria is a minute I'm grateful and happy. I think it'll stay that way. But if it doesn't, and I end up paying for it later, I still come out a winner. I got all that joy before the pain, and those snide idiots just got the small satisfaction of making fun of me over mini–crab cakes.”

I think I understand what he has said: that there are people who feel his relationship with Mariana is ridiculous, something to laugh at. And that he doesn't care who thinks he is an old fool. But he still hasn't told me what to do about Mauricio, and he's quiet as a church mouse all of a sudden. I can't ask again: a third time would be begging, and Isabela de la Torre does not beg.

I still don't know if Allen is the man for Mariana. But at least I know that he appreciates her. “Thank you for seeing me to my room, Allen,” I say. He helps me with the door, and when the light from my room floods the dim hall he looks so tired, so forlorn, that I want to make him feel better. I open my mouth to tell him, “You know, I like you.” But I get the English wrong, because I hear my voice saying, “You know, I envy you.”

 

39

Ninexin

I can feel Mariana's head in my lap, its weight on my legs, her warm, flossy hair in my hands. At the funeral, when she bent over to drop the flowers into Papa's grave, I noticed a couple of gray strands sprouting from the middle of her crown. My baby. With gray hair. How is it possible? She still seems so young, so fragile. Especially now, crying in my lap.

Why didn't I say, “Yes, mi amor, it was a trick of the light, that's it, that's partly why I've felt so guilty all these years, for misunderstanding what I saw, for underestimating your father”? It's not like I'm under oath here. This confession was purely of my own volition. I wanted to free Mariana, to convince her that her father planned to live his life watching her grow up, that he had no intention of dying that night. But I just muddied the issue. And her image of him. When all she knew was that he put his country above everything, even his love for her, Manuel was a hero in Mariana's mind. But now that she knows what really happened that night, I've murdered his ghost, too.

It was selfish to tell her. I meant to free her, but on some level, I wanted to unburden myself. To have someone know what I did. And to know that person could love me despite my having done it.

But in telling Mariana, I took her father's death from her. I didn't let her have him, didn't let Nicaragua have him. I always worried what would happen if she found out the truth about his death, how it would change her opinion of me. It never occurred to me to think how my story would affect her relationship to Manuel. Because even though he's dead, they are linked. She's his daughter. It is a relationship. Or was.

I cost Manuel his life, regardless of whether Mariana sees it that way or not. It's why I've never had a serious relationship since, although I've been to dinners with men, to bed with a few. I even spent a week in Paris with an American who worked for the AP. But I refused to ever build my life around a man again. It wasn't because I was worried this American might betray me, that I might one day find him kissing another woman, the way I did Manuel in those last few moments he was alive. That was devastating, but it was nothing compared to what came next. The reason I left the American, and have cut off any man I've met before he becomes too important, is because I can't help but wonder how I will let him down, too, what I will take from him, the way I took everything from Manuel. I'm the reason Manuel didn't get to live the rest of his life. And now I've robbed him of his daughter as well.

I knew Mariana would be horrified by my story, but I didn't realize she'd be so shaken by the affair; she seems more disappointed in Manuel now than I was that night. I was angry, of course, in the moment when I saw them together. But more than that, I was hurt that he was sharing a moment of excitement, of electricity, with someone who wasn't me. There had been so many harrowing nights when we cried together after friends of ours had died in prison, or Manuel would visit someone who had made it out, and then have nightmares of the holes the guards' electroshock torture had burned into our compa
ñ
ero's skin. There were so many moments of fear. This takeover of Memo's house was going to be a turning point, one that would end so much suffering when we bartered one fat general for so many young, promising prisoners of conscience who had the passion and the skills to transform Nicaragua. We weren't just going to save our leaders from further torture; we were going to save our country, too. Beyond my desire to help the movement, and the country, I knew that this operation was a shining opportunity for Manuel, the most exciting thing to happen to him since the birth of Mariana; that was why I insisted on being there, to share in his triumph. And Brigida had provided Manuel with this brilliant opportunity, she was the one who asked me to give him the plans. Maybe it was all part of a scheme to get rid of the man who made her life miserable and get closer to the man she wanted in one, patriotic move.