Rosa Jordan - The Woman She Was

Franci peered around a pile of books on her cluttered desk. “Well, how did it go?”

“Marvellous. When we broke for lunch they filed out, smoked up all their cigarettes, and pelted me with the empty cartons.”

“Lucky you didn’t suggest they give up tomatoes.” Franci’s forced humour matched Celia’s, but her eyes were worried. “Ready for lunch?”

“I—” Celia shook her head. “No.” This was going to be harder than she thought. The plaque on the door reminded her that Franci held a responsible position at the medical school. She felt uneasy about confessing that she was about to play hooky from a conference she was attending at state expense.

“No, what?” When Celia remained silent, Franci took off her reading glasses and gave her the once-over. “Well? Are you going to tell me or do I have to guess?”

Celia doubted that Franci could guess, but the possibility alarmed her. So she did something that by her own ethics was despicable. Without lying, she told a truth that would throw Franci completely off the scent. “José is back.”

Franci tilted back in her chair, causing it to squeak alarmingly. “Ah. You didn’t mention that this morning.”

“I—I am really confused. With Liliana and work and, well, you know.” Celia took a deep breath, as if about to go off a high dive. Which in a way, she was. “I need a time-out. I want to skip the rest of the conference and go spend a day or two in the mountains. Maybe take a bus up to El Saltón or somewhere like that.”

El Saltón was a rustic mountain resort about two hours from Santiago, a place Celia knew because Philip and Franci had taken her there on a previous visit.

Celia could see disappointment written all over Franci’s face. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it? It’s not like we’ve ever kept secrets from each other.” Her eyes were warm, inviting trust.

“Of course I want to talk to you about it,” Celia agreed quickly. “It’s just that right now I am at a loss. How can I know what I feel when I have had no time to feel?” Her voice took on a pleading note. “I am simply desperate for some solitude, Franci.”

Franci responded instantly to the pleading. With wisdom gleaned from a decade of psychiatric experience, not to mention her essentially practical nature, she took charge of the situation with an alacrity that left Celia speechless.

Franci stirred in her handbag and extracted a ring of keys. She took the one to the Fiat from it and thrust it into Celia’s hand. “Get ready to roll, girl. You’re out of here. Oh, and since you’ll have to stop by the house to change and pick up your bag, grab whatever you want for lunch. If you’re not hungry yet, you will be, so take something,” Franci came around the desk and wrapped Celia in a strong embrace. “It will be okay, mi hermana. What your instinct is telling you to do is exactly what you should be doing. I’m just glad you got here before all those feelings you’re repressing blew up in your face.”

“So am I,” Celia whispered. One thing she had not considered was that what she was hiding might, as Franci had put it, blow up in her face. The very thought filled her with dread. “It never would have come to this if I could have got some down time.”

Franci smiled wisely. “Down time is all normal people usually need to get things sorted out in their head—or heart, as the case may be.”

Celia hugged Franci long and hard. “Down time and a friend like you,” she murmured, knowing as she said it that she was not making full use of what Franci had to offer as a friend. Nor could she any longer consider herself a “normal” person.

CELIA felt comfortable in the borrowed Fiat, or as comfortable as she ever felt at the wheel, given how infrequently she drove. Except for the colour, it was exactly the same as Luis’s car, which was the one vehicle she did drive from time to time. She took Avenida de las Américas out of the city and curved along the Carretera Central into the foothills of the Sierra Maestra. She had been this way twice before, once on the weekend trip to El Saltón with Franci and Philip three years earlier and once on a school field trip to visit historical sites when she was eleven or twelve years old.

The historical sites were still there. From a long way off she saw the Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Cobre, where a four-hundred-year-old effigy of Cuba’s patron saint, the Virgen de Caridad, resided. The church itself was overshadowed by a monstrous slag heap from copper mines that had been in operation since the days when Hernan Cortéz was governor of the province. She passed El Cobre without stopping and farther along took no notice of historic markers indicating where men and women of previous generations had died fighting for the island’s independence from Spain.

Three times she passed turnoffs to El Saltón, but she did not take any of them. The mountains of the Sierra Maestra remained in the distance as she continued along the main highway through rolling ranch lands and citrus groves.

She stopped just past Palma Soriano to buy a string of mandarins from a roadside vendor, a small man with sun-dried skin. He took the coins she poured into his hand with a beatific smile and waved her on with the ancient formality of vaya con Dios still common among older-generation rural people.

Celia glanced at the gas gauge and saw that she would need to fill up in Bayamo. Recalling its shady main square, she briefly considered spending the night there. In Bayamo she had one close friend who, like Franci, dated back to childhood. Joaquín had followed in his father’s footsteps, first as a member of the national fencing team and now, with a speciality in sports medicine, as one of its doctors. Joaquín’s father and Celia’s had died together in the 1976 plane crash that had claimed the lives of the entire Cuban fencing team as it was returning victorious from the Pan American games in Venezuela. Joaquín’s dad had been one of the coaches, Celia’s merely a civil servant travelling with the team to deal with visas, hotel reservations, and the like. Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban expatriate working with the CIA, had been arrested in Venezuela and charged with the bombing that downed the airliner. Posada spent nine years in a Venezuelan jail before anti-Castro Cubans in Miami bribed him out. He had immediately returned to the CIA fold, working for Oliver North on the Contra resupply operation. Celia and Joaquín followed Posada’s well-publicized career as a government-backed terrorist up until the bombing of several Habana hotels in 1997. At about that time, Celia, having recently assumed the responsibility for Liliana’s care, recognized the debilitating nature of her hatred for the man and determined to put him out of her mind.

Driving along a near-empty highway lined with citrus groves, her hands lightly atop the steering wheel peeling a mandarin, thoughts of the tragedy that killed her father brushed her mind but she did not allow them to alight. Instead she thought of her father. For the first time, she realized his resemblance to Luis: a tall yet unobtrusive bureaucrat deeply dedicated to the political aims of the Revolution. Celia recalled him holding her, then a pre-schooler, in his arms as he danced to music from a crackling radio. As far as she could remember, it was only when her father danced that he became playful and revealed his natural athleticism. In that way Luis was very much like him. Except for being danced around a crowded living room in her father’s arms, Celia’s memories of him were indistinct, with no recollection of his features apart from those preserved in a few faded photographs her mother had left her.

By the time Celia reached Bayamo, she knew that she would not visit Joaquín. For one thing, it would be impossible for them to not discuss the deaths of their fathers and the fortunes of Luis Posada Carriles. Celia did not want that—not now or ever again. Furthermore, if it was the comfort of old friends she was seeking, she might as well have stayed in Santiago, for she could not have done better than Franci and Philip.