“Still, you wonder why.”
She half-turned so that her clean brown-skinned features were profiled against the white marble. In a husky smoker’s voice he did not recognize, Celia said, “She wanted it this way.”
TEN
CELIA was aware of José chattering cheerfully beside her as they walked back to the car. She may have made appropriate responses, but the visit to the cemetery had left her feeling oddly alone. She paid no attention to which way he drove when they left the parking lot and did not notice her surroundings until they drove past the sentry post at the end of Calle 11. Looking out the car window, she saw a soldier in the kiosk. The soldier frowned. Celia remembered him from when she had last passed this way; remembered because that was the instance of her first hallucination.
It had been a Sunday afternoon. She and Liliana had lunched at the Lagos. Afterwards Alma and Liliana went across the street to visit a neighbour. Luis wanted to use their few minutes of privacy for lovemaking. Celia, while not saying no outright, had been nervous, fearing that they had not enough time and might be interrupted. Luis had become annoyed with her. Not verbally abusive—he was never that—but stonily silent.
Celia, feeling both guilty and resentful, had gone out for a walk.
About twenty blocks from the Lago apartment she had passed by the street where Celia Sánchez lived during the last two decades of her life. The apartment Sánchez once inhabited was not visible because of the big trees lining the sidewalk, but gazing toward it, Celia had imagined herself inside, looking out the window through a screen of leaves.
She had of course been in Sánchez’s apartment, but only once, as a child. Perhaps she had even looked out the window, although she could not recall doing so. In any case, what happened in her head just then was not as an incident remembered. She had felt herself in the apartment, looking down…
The jeep barely stopped at the curb before long legs were thrust out, a nod of dismissal to the driver, his athletic stride across the sidewalk, a quick glance up at the window, at her—these details telling her he would stay the night; that they would wait, together, for the invasion. Despite his having been awake almost forty-eight hours, despite the morning’s long oratory at the funeral of those killed in Saturday’s bombing raid on Ciudad Libertad, they would not sleep but would lie in each other’s arms until the call came. They would not speak of those who died yesterday or the ones who would die tomorrow, but of how that battle would be waged—her throat tightened at the thought—without her by his side. While he ensured that the main invasion force did not establish a beachhead—he believed it would be at the Bahía de Cochinos but was not certain enough to go there yet—she must remain in Habana, at Punto Uno, so close to where Saturday’s bombs fell, to coordinate the defence of the rest of the island. This she knew already, and what assurances he would need of her before he left. She turned at the sound of footsteps as familiar as her own and moved toward the door.
Celia had unconsciously turned, as if about to walk down the tree-lined street toward Sánchez’s apartment. That had brought a soldier out of the kiosk.
“No pase!” he said brusquely, even as he gave a nod of permission to another pedestrian, a man pushing a pram.
Celia, having grown up nearby, was not surprised. She knew that only residents were allowed on the short street. No explanation had ever been given to the public, but the rumour was that it remained a restricted area because even now, twenty-some years after Sánchez’s death, Fidel often spent hours alone in the apartment that had been hers.
Looking past the soldier to the leaf-laden trees that screened the building from view, Celia had said, “You can’t see Celia Sánchez’s apartment from here.”
“No,” he said, without turning around. “Move on, please.”
“Those trees must be at least fifty years old. They never prune them, do they?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said and gestured with one finger, like a traffic cop, for her to continue on in the way she had originally been going.
She had complied, of course. Her attempt to engage him in conversation had not been meant as resistance. She respected the Cuban military, without which she did not believe Cuba could have remained as independent as it was. She was only trying to fasten on some solid detail that she could legitimately claim to remember from the one time she had been in that apartment—something to explain away a vision that had occurred in broad daylight when, as far as she could tell, she was in full control of all her faculties.
But she could not, so she had hoarded the hallucination, secretly bringing it to the surface when she was alone at night. On the pretext of trying to understand it, she had in fact tried to relive it. Although she remembered the details, as she remembered details of the two more recent ones, she had been unable to evoke the accompanying sensation: that of she herself, but not herself, a participant.
“Weird,” she murmured and started when José spoke.
“What’s weird?”
She thought, Weird I forgot you were here. But what she said was, “Roaming around Vedado like we did ten years ago, as if nothing has changed.”
“Nobody had a car then. Or if they did, no gas. I’d call that a change.”
“Cuba has barely enough gasoline now,” Celia said tartly. “Not enough to be wasting it in aimless driving. I thought you wanted to go shopping.”
José grinned. “I was waiting for you to direct me to one of the new malls.”
“The closest is Juan Carlos II, on Avenida Salvador Allende.”
José made a U-turn and headed back through the residential area toward Centro Habana. When they passed Calle 11 again, Celia looked in the direction of Sánchez’s apartment but felt nothing, magical or otherwise.
ELEVEN
JOE was amazed how, once they reached the crowded Juan Carlos II shopping plaza, Celia seemed like a different woman. Or, rather, she became the quiet, task-oriented woman he remembered from college and as he imagined she now was at work. After two hours, she stuffed his list into her shoulder bag and said, “That should do it.”
“Good. Let’s grab some lunch.” Joe had in mind taking her to a good restaurant, possibly the one next to that old fort on Río Almendres. Back when they were dating they couldn’t have afforded a cup of coffee there. Celia probably still couldn’t. But before he could propose Restaurante 1840, as he now remembered the snobbish eatery was called, she motioned him into a hole-in-the-wall diner. He was too hungry to protest.
They ordered pizza, although Joe should have known better, life in the States having taught him, if nothing else, how extraordinarily inferior Cuban pizza was. It arrived shortly, two plate-sized slabs of hot baked dough gooey with tomato sauce and melted cheese. He did not voice his opinion aloud, though, and was pleased to see Celia eating with gusto.
When she finished, she took the shopping list from her purse and began ticking off items. “Cooking oil, toilet paper, laundry soap, bed linens, towels, toaster, blender, rice cooker, juicer. I have no idea where she is going to put all these small appliances, and with the rolling blackouts…” She shook her head.
Joe visualized his mother’s minuscule kitchen and shrugged. Cuba’s energy shortages and finding places to put things weren’t his problems. “She’ll manage.”
“I suppose.” Celia signalled to the waitress for water.
Joe watched her lips curl around the rim of the glass as she tilted it back and drank. Perhaps it was the sensuality of her parted lips that impelled him to ask, “You aren’t seriously planning to marry Luis?”