Joe glanced over at Celia, who had not spoken since they left the apartment. “Where’s the nearest shopping centre?”
“Turn here,” she said abruptly.
He swerved into the left lane and headed down Avenida de los Presidentes until she directed him to turn right on La Rampa. He did as he was told, although he recalled that the commercial part of La Rampa was the other way, nearer the Malecón.
Celia appeared to have her mind on other things, as her fingertips lightly caressed the petals of a sunflower. “Who’s the bouquet for?” he asked.
She gave no sign of having heard. Joe thought, uneasily, It’s as if she’s not here.
“Celia!” he said more loudly.
“What?”
“I asked you, what are the flowers for?”
“Her grave.”
“Whose?” To his exasperation, a bus had stopped ahead, making it impossible to pass or to escape the noxious exhaust.
“Celia Sánchez.”
Surprised, he asked, “Why her?”
“Is there something wrong with remembering her?” she asked testily. “Or does one have to have a beard to be a hero of the Revolution?”
He thought, What’s wrong is that I thought we were going shopping. But all he said was, “Nothing. It’s just—”
“Fidel would never have survived in the mountains without her. Let alone the next twenty years. She was the one who got things done.” Celia’s voice dropped so that he barely heard the last sentence. “If I could be like her…”
Joe laughed aloud. “You? Like her?”
Celia gave him a poisonous look. “What is so funny?”
“She must’ve been hard as nails. A commander in the rebel army—”
“She was more than a commander. A true leader! But hard? No! Not before the war, or during, or after! It was to her the people always turned when they needed help. She was the very soul of the Revolution!”
Celia’s declaration reminded Joe that the woman he considered little more than one of Fidel’s paramours was honoured in Cuba as the island’s equivalent of the Blessed Virgin. Having read several published-elsewhere histories of the Cuban Revolution, he felt confident in stating, “History doesn’t seem to remember her that way.”
“You think she wanted any credit?” Celia cried passionately. “She devoted her entire life to making things better for ordinary people on this island. At least we have that in common!”
Although he could not have said why, the subject made Joe uncomfortable. But at least he now knew where they were going. “I take it she’s buried at Cementerio Colón?”
They were nearing the big midtown cemetery that dated back to colonial times and contained some of the world’s most unusual memorials. If they could find a parking place, dropping the flowers off shouldn’t take long. She’d owe him for the favour, which might make her a little less fractious.
They had played in the cemetery as children, he and Luis and Celia and Carolina and other kids, delighting in the more outrageous statuary. A favourite had been the tomb of an old lady, who, for her love of dominoes, had been memorialized with a slab in the form of a giant marble domino. Luis, who took baseball seriously, always paid homage to the life-sized statue of a muscular baseball player, naked to the waist. Celia, Joe recalled, spent a considerable amount of time puzzling over why the families of plane crash victims felt it appropriate to top their tombs with marble aircraft zooming toward infinity.
As they walked along the cemetery’s shady paths he felt Celia slip into a mellow mood. She even smiled and nudged him to draw his attention to the statue that had always given them the giggles when they were kids, a larger-than-life hermaphrodite angel.
“Celia’s tomb is farther back, in the Armed Forces mausoleum,” she told him.
“You have to wonder why El Lider Maximo chose her, when he could have had anybody,” Joe mused.
“Not anybody. His wife left him.”
“True. When a man gets jailed for trying to overthrow the resident dictator, I guess you can’t blame his wife if she figures he hasn’t got much of a future.” Joe recalled something he had read and snickered. “Did you know that the first woman Fidel got involved with after his divorce—not counting that one-night stand with Natty Revuelta that she claimed gave them a daughter—was a Mexican debutante?”
Celia gave him a disbelieving look. “How would you know that?”
“It was in a book written by an American. He discusses the women in Fidel’s life.”
The skepticism in Celia’s voice turned to disgust. “Don’t you find that distasteful? Pawing through people’s personal lives just because they happen to be public figures?”
“I don’t see anything wrong with it. It sheds light on the man.”
“And the woman?”
“Sure. Not that anybody cares who she was. Just some eighteen-year-old he fell for when he was living in México. She broke it off. Apparently Fidel came calling one day and found her by the pool in a bikini and went right out and bought her a one-piece suit. She probably lost interest in her dashing revolutionary when he turned out to be more fashion-conservative than her mother.”
“I have never heard anything about it.”
“Because they don’t have tabloids here. Anyway, that must’ve burned him out on the young and restless, because a year later he was back in Cuba, shacked up with Sánchez, who was what—five years older than him?”
“Shacked up?” Celia flung the phrase back at him as if it were a personal insult. “Is that how you see a relationship that lasted twenty-three years?”
“Sánchez certainly wasn’t the only woman in Fidel’s life,” Joe countered.
“She was the one he loved,” Celia said, as if that settled it.
Suppressing a skeptical retort, Joe dropped behind Celia and ran his eyes over her firm buttocks. “I can see that. She was about your age when they met. She might’ve been kind of cute in a bikini too.”
Celia either second-guessed his intention or remembered the habit because as his hand moved to pat her on the behind, she deftly caught it and flung it aside.
“Or maybe he was looking for something more in a woman.”
Joe grinned. “Like brains? Could be. Smart women always turn me on.”
Celia gave him an exasperated look and picked up her pace. Near the back of the cemetery she turned into an open-air mausoleum reserved for the Revolution’s most notable military leaders. Joe would have laid bets that if Sánchez wasn’t the only woman whose remains were interred in this company, she was one of very few.
Marble vaults lined the mausoleum to a height of about two metres. Celia stopped before one with no name, its polished white surface interrupted only by the number of the vault and a bronze handle. Stuck through the handle was a bouquet of wilted red roses. Celia removed them and inserted the sunflowers.
It struck Joe as unseemly that a final resting place would be without an identifying name, even if it was that of the president’s mistress. “If Fidel thought so much of her, why the unmarked vault?”
Celia shrugged. “Everybody who cares knows where it is.”