The Noise of Infinite Longing (29 page)

him. So why go back? I hardly ever thought of it, hadn’t even visited since mother had moved to Texas. Father came to see me in Char- lotte once, brought his wife, in her spandex pants and tight tops, her hair bleached. She hardly said a word but put up with him, cooked all his meals. That was the visit (I could see him so vividly in his brown suit, always wore a suit when he came to the States), when he offered me money, ten thousand dollars, if I got married. I sat in my porch in Charlotte listening to this, hurt, furious, and glowered at him as if he were someone I didn’t know at all. I would never again have anything much to say to him.

Sitting on the empty beach inTela, I was remembering that scene, when Angeles’s maid interrupted me. Your sister wants to know if you want a beer. I looked up into the sun and shook the sand off my shorts and went in.

A few days later, after Tela, Guillermo drove us to Copán, high in mountains that border Guatemala, Mayan country. The telegram reached us there, in Santa Rosa de Copán, at a hotel of Spanish vin- tage, a relic from the nineteenth century. Mother had known where we were staying and sent the telegram. Sara was getting married.We were shocked, but she’s only eighteen! She’s not finished high school. We knew mother was beside herself, but her telegram put the best face on it—Rick is a good boy, good family, they are so in love. The usual mother things.

That was the excitement of Santa Rosa de Copán. I can’t even remember the ruins.

So on our first night inTegucigalpa, afterTela, after Copán, we had to discuss Sara’s decision. Nothing happened in the family without hours of inspection, introspection, and analysis. Sara has always wanted a husband and children, even when she was a little girl, I said. Remember how she was with dolls? Angeles had put on her disap- proving look, so familiar, pressed lips and raised eyebrow, but she

shook her head and wondered, I can’t see it, can’t see how they’ll last. A few people, university students mostly, came to Angeles’s apartment, usually in the evenings, and they sat on the floor, on cush- ions, on the Mexican rug, rolling cigarettes, passing them around, talking about the situation. “The situation,” in quotes. Somoza came up, but I didn’t catch on. I didn’t know then that Angeles’s apartment was a safe house. She was secretly keeping up a collaboration with anti-Somoza forces in Nicaragua, a collaboration that lasted for seven

years, until the Sandinistas took over and she moved to Managua.

She was, in those evenings, the quietest of all. Drinking and jok- ing and humming to the Beatles, and swaying to the music (she danced in her sleep) but she said little, moving forward to listen closely to something that pricked her interest, then moving back, offering no comment, when she had heard it.

When I was with her, that August 1972, she seemed indestructi- ble, I thought, watching her with her friends, with Guillermo, see- ing the circles that formed around her, as if she were the center of gravity. She had such command in her voice, in her face. And she was radiant, holding Jose in her arms, lifting him above her head. Her attention, if it had ever been fixed on Guillermo, had now shifted. Now it was on Jose.

One day she said to me, I told Guillermo when Jose was being born and the doctors were so worried that I wouldn’t make it, that if anything happened to me, he had to give the baby to you.

Maybe she didn’t tell me that right there, in Tegucigalpa, maybe it was later, another time, another moment, but when she said that, she was giving me everything she could give me.

S

even years later, in August 1979, a month after the fall of Somoza, when the Sandinistas came to power, hailed as heroes

around the world, received with a standing ovation at the United Nations and celebrated in the most exclusive salons of New York City, adulated like rock stars in a frenzy not unlike that for Castro in 1959 (Daniel Ortega’s fatigues, aviator glasses, and guerrilla mus- tache treated as sex symbols), Angeles was arriving in Managua— Angeles, Guillermo, and Jose.

Managua lay flat, flattened, impossibly hot, in ruins on top of ruins, the debris of war, broken buildings, bombed-out homes, streets that ran out of pavement. Nearly destroyed by the earthquake of 1972, Managua was now a vast hellhole, too dry or too wet, its life sucked by dictatorship and bullets, and what was left, well, nature took care of that.

Angeles fell in love with it—the way one falls in love with a place, not for its beauty but for its very ugliness, its roughness, its desperation.And there was hope then—that idea—that this country, this cave within the greater cave of Central America, corroded by corruption and pain and futility, that such a country could be saved, resurrected (had it ever truly lived?), its greatness or its insignifi- cance, either, lying just below the surface.

She would never talk like this. But she did think like this.

They found a small house near a park, a school for Jose (he was seven years old), and Angeles went to work. She had laid the ground for this work in Honduras during all the years of collaboration; she was an architect, she was an organizer, she was zealous, and in her way, in her defiant way, she was a masterful politician. Now she was in charge of housing for tens of thousands. She had a title, a private office, a car; Jose was enrolled in the French lycée; Guillermo worked in the agency for planning, supervising construction. She was la Señora Directora. She tried to build and rebuild homes for the homeless and looked for money where there was none. At times, she had to leave the country on official duties, as a delegate to Vienna, to the United Nations, to

Cuba, one of the representatives of the revolutionary government of Nicaragua, traveling without passport, neither a Nicaraguan nor an American—an interloper, a foreigner, a woman about whom little was really known.

By the early 1980s, she was entrenched, something of a figure, I suppose. People crowded in her small house, cars parked all around it, queues of people waiting for her at her office.There was no end to the paperwork, to the demands, to the expectations she had for herself, but try to imagine rebuilding a whole country, she told me, in the middle of a trade and economic embargo, without international aid, without resources, and, at the same time, fight- ing a civil war.

She had to borrow clothes to wear in Vienna, she remembered laughing.You should have seen that hotel, she said years later. Here we were, a few of us from one of the poorest countries in the world, just as bad off, worse off, than Cuba . . . here we were in Vienna, like we were somebody, in this imperial hotel, incredible. My room was twice the size of my house in Managua. In Managua, I couldn’t find a lightbulb for my kitchen, there was no food in the stores, no flour, no rice, no beans, no milk, but here we were in Vienna, dining on fancy tablecloths, eating off gilded plates, drinking Austrian wine, wasting money we didn’t have. . . . That’s what happens when you become a government.

She’s doing everything, mother wrote me after she saw Angeles in Managua in July 1984, the anniversary of the revolution. Mother flew down there from Texas just for that, to see Angeles standing with the comandantes at the parade. She works night and day, mother said, she’s a little too thin, doesn’t eat enough, but she’s happy—Jose is so smart, a brilliant boy, he takes care of her, makes sure she eats. He is the only one she listens to. And Managua, you should see it, mother exclaimed (I was reading this but I could hear her voice, so excited,

in boldface, in italics). Managua es una maravilla!

What about the war, the contras? I wrote back. Those things mother didn’t mention, the war was far off, in the mountains.

But I knew, we all knew.The war was destroying the countryside, displacing more and more people, and Managua was being strangled. I was living then in Philadelphia, working at
The Inquirer,
editing for- eign news and sending reporters off to Managua, giving them my sis- ter’s name, their conduit to Ortega, I hoped, but one by one they would return to Philadelphia with a similar story. Your sister was very nice, she gave me some names, people to talk to, and she talked about the work she was doing, but she really said nothing about the war, or the problems, the corruption and the fights among them in the junta.

That was Angeles, I thought, she wasn’t about to play up to the press, she wasn’t going to give a thing away.

She told me years later, I used to go to work so hungover the floor was weaving.There was no end to the work, day and night, late into the night, all those people waiting for me, waiting for some mir- acle, and I knew I could do nothing. Of course I drank too much and I lost weight and I got sick.

I

could’ve gone to Managua. She asked me, not in letters because she never wrote, she never had the time to sit down and put her life down on paper, and she really didn’t want to do so. She had sent me books when she was in Mexico (a book of poems by CésarVallejo, I remember, “Yo nací un dia que Dios estaba enfermo” / I was born on a day when God was sick . . .). And she had sent me books from Honduras, but none from Nicaragua. Mail was a problem; the out- side world was a problem. She did leave Managua occasionally, went toTexas once a year or once every two years, to visit mother, and she

stayed a week, ten days, hardly leaving mother’s house, talking, drinking, talking. She would call me, Why don’t you come to Man- agua, why? I found an excuse—work, money, the long flight. Excuses, it’s all they were.

Managua was her dream. It wasn’t mine. I was afraid that her dream was better, grander, and that the life I had chosen was smaller, mundane and petty, and I felt small next to her. I didn’t want to go see her because I didn’t know how to explain myself, the easiness of my life in the face of hers.

One time she called, Christmas 1985, a horrible winter in Philadelphia. I had just broken off a long relationship, another one that had died long before it actually ended. We do carry dead loves around with us, the comfort of the familiar, the habits of mornings and nights, the routine, and then we feign surprise, shock, when we notice the carcass, the bones. I had put my house in the suburbs up for sale and moved downtown to a row house on a street of boarded- up buildings and junkies on the corner. I was leaving the nice furni- ture, the big house, the half acre of yard. One of those nights in the row house, when I was by myself, watching the news from Manila— Manila had eclipsed Managua, and now the attention of the world media, the beam, had turned to Marcos, on his last days, and I was editing those stories, living the story from such a vast distance, watching it every night, memorizing the names, the places, so famil- iar it all seemed to me, like Latin America.

At the newspaper, we were preparing to send reporters to the Philippines, and the list of reporters competing to go was long— everyone wanted the latest hot spot, the assignment that transforms an obscure city hall reporter laboring day after day under fluorescent lights into a celebrated foreign correspondent.

The phone rang that night.Angeles. Her voice a jolt, always a jolt, and I sat up straight on the edge of my chair. I lit a cigarette, I took

a sip of wine. Suddenly, I was alive, excited. It seemed so close, as if she were there, and her voice, very soft, with a touch of laughter, would take me to other parts of my life, to childhood and the island, to all those dreams we had once had.

She was recovering from a fall, she said, had twisted her arm, nothing major.

What fall? I said, startled.

We were at a party, up on a terrace, but there was no railing. I leaned back and fell to the ground....

Oh, God, I muttered.

Guillermo was leaving Nicaragua, she said, going back to Teguci- galpa to get his architecture business going. He couldn’t stand it any- more. So he was leaving.

I’ll be fine, she said, I have Jose, that’s all I need.

But I knew she was falling apart. Olga had been there, had seen her. She’s down to eighty-five pounds, Olga said, she works late every day and then goes off to the bar. Sometimes she doesn’t know when to stop. You know how she gets—she gets angry, she throws words around, she insults Guillermo (She’s like father, I thought, when he drank). The only one she never hurts is Jose. Jose never.

Olga exaggerates, Angeles said. You know she gets very upset with me when she sees me drink. I’m perfectly fine ... maybe I’m a little too thin.

So why don’t you come to Managua? she prodded, never giving up.

That would’ve been the moment, the right moment to be with her.

But I was going somewhere else. I was going to Manila.

T

wo years later, in 1987, while I was in Manila, she left Nicaragua. For a time she stayed in Puerto Rico, sorting out

her life, her marriage, her future, though by now she hardly believed in the future. She would’ve stayed in San Juan, perhaps, but she couldn’t take Jose away from Guillermo, and she couldn’t quite leave a marriage of nearly twenty years.

My life ended in Nicaragua, she once said to me, my world ended there.

She went back to Tegucigalpa and to Guillermo, and they lived in a modest apartment building for a while and built their business— Guillermo built it, she would say—starting with nothing, two thou- sand lempiras, which is to say, nothing. Slowly, they recovered, and then began to build their “magnum opus,” a house at the very top of their old hill on Calle la Alhambra. She turned the dry, rocky grounds into a garden and from that hard soil she brought forth jacarandas and bougainvillea, lime and avocado trees, guavas and mangoes, a flamboyán tree from seeds she had gathered in Puerto Rico, and dozens of flowers only she could name.They call their hill La Giraldilla.

Chapter Eleven

A Raw Passion

T

he evening was closing in, the sun had finally slipped beyond the farthest tree you could see out of Sara’s kitchen window.

Sara suggested we all go out to dinner; it was our last night together. She was looking at the leftovers, bowls and plastic bags, plates wrapped in foil—tuna salad, egg salad, a few slices of country ham, grilled chicken, macaroni and cheese, garlic mashed potatoes. She opened each bag, lifted each lid, everything looked stale, with that gelled surface that food gets in the refrigerator. We had been in and out of the kitchen all afternoon, making sandwiches, emptying the last carton of orange juice, drinking the last six-pack of beer, picking up dirty dishes and scraps of conversation.