The Ladies of Managua (6 page)

“He managed to shake off the chaperone,” she told me after she'd returned from a stroll in the park with a certain Cristian Hidalgo. She had drawn the white curtains that acted as walls, separating the twenty boarders' beds into would-be “rooms,” so that no one passing by would see her, and was waving her hands around, acting out all the parts—the chubby, bumbling chaperone, the straight-backed, strong-armed Se
ñ
or Hidalgo. I lay on my side on her bed, propped up on my elbow, watching her. A few of the North American girls we took classes with bragged of having television sets at home, but who needed one when I had Connie?

“He said it was so hot, and she'd walked so far, wouldn't madam care to rest and we'd bring her a snoball?” Connie bowed low to demonstrate Se
ñ
or Hidalgo's elegant bearing, then shrugged up her shoulders, puffed out her abdomen, and nodded, to indicate the chaperone's response. “And I thought, this is it. Now I will finally know what it is to be kissed properly, so that it's a sharing of souls, like it says in that novel. And do you know what happened?”

I hadn't realized that an answer was expected, so I gave none, and she grabbed my hands, pulling me up to sitting. “Nothing! We walked to the snoball stand as he droned on and on about my father and what a wonderful businessman his father said my father is and what a wonderful businessman he himself is going to be someday. And then”—here Connie squeezed my hands so tightly that I pulled them away from her—“we brought the chaperone a snoball!”

So Connie remained an innocent; when it came to the mysteries of what went on between men and women, all her carefully constructed knowledge came from the diligent study of books the Church had banned. She became more than a little miffed at me that, because
Forever Amber
and
Gone with the Wind
were banned, I wouldn't purchase them for her, wouldn't saunter into the bookstore downtown, far from the school, under the pretext of buying composition books to improve my writing, and nonfiction to help me learn about this country, and slip a forbidden novel between a textbook and
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
“No one would suspect it of you, Isa,” Connie whined. “They check every parcel I walk in with.”

But a sin was a sin, even if it wasn't a mortal one. I loved Connie but I wasn't willing to risk my soul for her.

Even though the young Mexicans left Connie unaware of what really happens in a stolen kiss—where do the noses go? And can you taste what he had for lunch?—they gave her valuable intelligence of another sort: her time with them allowed her to survey all the other male specimens who journeyed in from St. Michael Military every other Friday. Most of them came on a bus, arriving sweaty and crumpled. But Cristian Hidalgo, for all his faults, had a car, a navy blue convertible to match his eyes. It may have been the car that had raised Connie's hopes. And he always let his closest friends ride with him. Most of them were older than the North American high school boys, as was Cristian himself, and were doing a post-graduate year that the universities which had accepted them required of foreign students so that they might improve their English before matriculating. These men still arrived mussed, even more so than the ones Connie referred to as “the bus-boys,” because the wind had been wreaking havoc with their hair for the entire drive. And what hair! Imagine being so young and lucky that a car with five men packed into it was guaranteed to be filled with lush heads of hair, whipping free of the confines of Brilliantine paste, with bald spots nothing but a rumor of future sorrow, one that could hardly be believed under the circumstances.

So Connie knew, when Silvia Contreras received a letter from a certain Mauricio de los Santos asking her to take a turn around Audubon Park with him the following Friday, that Silvia's parents had somehow managed to pull off a miracle. Silvia was the sort of girl who didn't read any novels at all, just in case one might be the kind the Church would have banned had it made enough of a splash to be noticed. “The pope has more important concerns; he can't possibly read every single book,” Silvia told me when I insisted that the novel Connie had lent me wasn't among the thousands of titles on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which had just been released a few years earlier; the sisters made sure there were copies for reference in every classroom. “So I like to do what I can to help His Holiness,” she explained, smiling at her own piety.

Connie had hated Silvia ever since she had taken a copy of
Madame Bovary
out of her room and turned it into the mistress general, saying she had seen a vision of the Virgen of Guadalupe asking her to clean out Connie's bureau and therefore her soul. It was only because the mistress general also taught French, and Connie's older brother had brought her a copy in the original language from Paris, that she wasn't suspended; the nun believed Connie's protestations that she had asked her brother for novels to help her practice her language skills and build her vocabulary, and had no idea that what he had chosen was forbidden. Still, she had clearly read enough to know what kind of book it was; there was an earmarked page well past the middle. So Connie was required to clean the statue of the Blessed Mother with milk, and, worse, was prohibited from leaving campus for the next four Fridays.

This made the idea of Silvia prancing around Audubon Park with what Connie called “the handsomest man anyone in Louisiana, or Mississippi, or all of this dusty country has ever seen” even more galling. It wasn't that she was jealous. Mauricio de los Santos was beautiful, it was true, like a hero in one of her books. But Connie's parents didn't know him or anything about his people. And furthermore, he was Cuban, and Cubans were, her father said, “a handful.”

But just because she wouldn't touch didn't mean we couldn't look, Connie insisted. So she dragged me out of the common room, where I was working on my English assignment, and into the courtyard, where we'd have a good view of the gate the cadets passed through to greet their companions and the chaperones under the appraising eyes of the on-duty sisters. Silvia was there in a dress she'd made Betsy, the maid responsible for the third floor we boarders inhabited, iron twice; the first time the pleats weren't sharp enough. It was navy and I wondered if she'd somehow had it made in time for her date, to match the famous convertible, in the hopes that Cristian would offer joyrides to his best friend's date if Mauricio really liked a girl. But that was jealousy on my part; the truth was she often wore navy, probably to offset the emeralds in the cross she always had on—her father had some mines in Venezuela.

“Mauricio de los Santos for Miss Silvia Contreras, please,” I heard a voice say, but I didn't look up. I was shy in those days, and there was no reason to look a man in the face unless he was my father, brother, or driver. Maybe a shopkeeper whose store I was browsing. But as Silvia sauntered past us, her starched pleats making a shuffling noise like the settling of an over-upholstered chair when you sit in it, Connie whispered in my ear: “Those shoes—they're so shiny you can practically see up her skirt. I wonder what the pope has to say about that?”

An image of His Holiness frowning at Silvia's Mary Janes arose before me and I laughed, louder than I should have, because Silvia turned to glare at me and when I looked up in apology, Mauricio had stepped right next to her. He took Silvia's hand, like he was supposed to, but he looked at me and said, “You haven't introduced me to your friends.”

“I'm Connie Fonseca, I'm a friend of Cris Hidalgo's, and this is Isabela Enriquez,” Connie said when Silvia didn't reply. “But you can call her Isa. Can't he?” She elbowed me in the arm, which I was holding so stiffly that it fell forward at the elbow, sending my textbook flying across the courtyard. I ran toward it, eager to escape all of their eyes: Connie's glittering with glee or mischief, Mauricio's full of curiosity, and Silvia's—it would be years before I could meet Silvia's eyes again, even though alphabetical order decreed that we had to stand next to each other in chapel once Alice Farraday left school. But when I reached the book, Mauricio was already there, holding it up for me, laughing.

“When we get back tonight, I'm talking to the mistress general,” he said. “I'm taking you out tomorrow afternoon.”

I grabbed the book and held it to my chest like a shield, like it could protect me from Silvia's glares and Connie's questions. But just before I turned around I nodded, quickly, so that he'd know I'd be waiting for him the next day.

 

9

Ninexin

We arrive at Monte Olivos funeral home early, which is only right for immediate family of the deceased, and so that after Don Pedro drops us at the door, he'll be able to claim one of the few parking spots. It's a tiny lot, and for someone like Papa, half of Managua will turn up. The streets will be clogged for blocks with chauffeurs idling, napping in their cars or playing cards with each other until their cell phones buzz, telling them it's time to go collect the cars' owners. The chauffeurs are the experts but they're only the stewards of the cars, nannies for automobiles. They clean them and take them to the garage for checkups, coddle them when they're acting up, and they get to play with them, they get the long, slow, sun-filled hours of the afternoon to sing along to the radio or wax the cars until they shine. The cell phone has made life much easier for chauffeurs, Don Pedro told me once. Now they don't have to be mind readers as well as escape artists, sliding through jammed streets, circling the block, hoping to pull up to the door at the exact moment that the se
ñ
or—and, more important, the se
ñ
ora in her precarious shoes—step over the threshold. But the chauffeurs must occasionally wish the cars were their own, that they could earn them by caring for them so vigilantly, loving them so fiercely. Don Pedro would never admit it, but there still must be a fair amount of discomfort in being a chauffeur, the helplessness when the little se
ñ
ores stretch out their chubby legs and rest their muddy shoes on the leather interior, or a perfectly good car gets given to a teenager who crashes it while driving home from a club early one morning, and walks away secure in the knowledge that his papi will pay off anyone whose home or dog or child was injured in the process.

“Se
ñ
orita?” Don Pedro says; he's the only person who still calls me that, and only when no one else can hear. He offers me his arm because Mariana is already leading my mother in. They were giggling together in the car, I can't imagine what about. And I'm not meant to; they could have easily spoken up if they'd wanted me to hear but they got used to having jokes just between them all those years they spent together in Miami while I was here. I try to tell myself that I don't mind that, that it's good for them to have their secrets, that I'm happy Mama has some distraction today, some little bit of joy. But I'm not very convincing, so instead I take pleasure where I can, from the empty parking lot. The sight of so many long black cars circling the block still makes me nervous; it's one reason I avoid parties. These days, as foreign minister, meetings, conferences, welcome cocktails, are my natural habitat. If I'm in a hotel ballroom surrounded by thousands, I can focus on work and feel calm and efficient. Or if I'm at Celia's house, with Rigobertito and his kids, his wife's sisters, I can sit on the floor and play Matchbox cars with his boys and enjoy myself. It's the middle ground that I can't handle, the exclusive parties in private homes. I haven't attended one since the night Manuel died, and I don't plan to do so again.

Mariana thinks I'm just being stubborn each time I refuse to go with her to a Christmas cocktail gathering; her eyes get glassy, frosting over like they would when she was in junior high and I'd tell her she had to spend the summer in Managua with me rather than attending art camp in Orlando with her friends. And when she returns from a party here, she complains, “All anyone wanted to talk to me about was you.” She was cold to me for weeks after I skipped Beth's wedding at her parents' place, although Beth had always been so kind to me, always invited me and Mariana to join her family during parents' weekends. When Beth was present, the air around me and my daughter softened, life was almost like I hoped it would be, and I could tell myself that now that Mariana was older, I was the one she came to with problems and secrets, not Mama. The truth is that it was Beth she sought out, or at least I hoped so. I hoped she confided in her roommate, that she had a best friend of the kind Mama did back in convent school. Still today Mama has lady friends who will meet her for lunch to hear her troubles or celebrate her birthday. I know people, but friendship was one of the things I gave up in the Revolución. I don't say that to complain or to boast. It was my choice. But I see how much richer Mama's life is because of her friends, and it's something I want for Mariana. Perhaps the talent for friendship is one of the things that skips a generation.

I stop at the door to Monte Olivos funeral home, even though, with only the family and none of the guests here yet, the outer rooms are still empty of people. Right now they're mainly inhabited by flowers, arrangements that stand as tall as a short man, all wearing banners like Miss America would, only printed with the names of the families who sent them and words like “Sympathy” and “Condolences,” which sound so much prettier than they should, given their meaning. Soon the rooms will fill with people and those people will be even more cloying than the flowers and the ribbons; they'll smell even stronger and they'll make the added sensory assault of sound, loudly sharing memories and platitudes as they drink their Rojitas and eat their pastelitos and churritos de queso. And soon they'll forget that they're at a funeral home, not a party, and they'll start talking business or about TV and the movies or their children's universities and career plans, summer camps and vacations. And that's fine, that's fair, a reminder that life goes on, the world hasn't stopped just because it feels like it has.