Rosa Jordan - The Woman She Was

Celia smiled and shook her head. “No thanks. Smoking kills women.”

He lit a cigarette for himself and smoked a moment in silence, studying her. “Your mother,” he said.

“Yes. And Celia Sánchez.”

“It probably kills men too,” he conceded. “But we must all die of something, no?”

Tears sprang unexpectedly to Celia’s eyes. Frank and José País shot by Santiago police. Able, Boris, Mario, Che, all tortured, all murdered. Camilio disappeared on a solo flight to Camagüey. Joaquín’s father and her own flung into eternity by a terrorist’s bomb. Haydée by her own hand. Then Carolina and her husband…

The man must have supposed the tears to be for her mother, for he suddenly said, “She was your mother. You have a right to see where she fought for us.”

“Gracias, compañero!” Celia jumped to her feet.

“Are you sure you can make the rest of climb?”

“Oh, definitely! I just needed to rest.”

“We are almost there. To the first building.” He turned and climbed so rapidly that almost immediately she fell behind. Suddenly he stopped beside a tiny thatch-roofed hut. When she caught up to him, panting, he grinned and said, “It doesn’t look like a hospital, does it?”

It certainly did not, nor did Celia think it ever could have been. The place where her mother received her battlefield training had to have been more than this dirt-floored hovel or they could not have cared for as many wounded as they did.

“Not the main hospital; it is up there.” He waved toward the densely forested mountainside above them. “This was where Che saw sick people from the area, the non-combatants. Most had never been to a doctor before. Che was the first to come to this part of the sierra. He treated everyone.”

“What kinds of illnesses?” Celia asked, peering into the tiny hut with interest.

“Everything. Many suffered from toothaches. That’s why we called this the dentist’s place.”

“The guerrillas had a dentist?” Celia asked in surprise.

“Eventually, yes. But not in the beginning. Che wasn’t a dentist himself, but he could pull teeth. See this?” The man pulled back a gum to reveal a missing upper tooth halfway back in his mouth. “Che took it out. When I was eleven.”

Celia shook her head wonderingly. “I am a children’s doctor and cannot imagine having to work under such conditions. Or pulling a child’s tooth. How brave you were!”

“At times one must be brave. Of necessity.” He glanced up at the sky, and as he did so, a large raindrop struck his nose. By the time he had wiped it away, she, too, was feeling drops.

“You want to get back,” she said. “You were on your way home.”

“True,” he admitted. “The trail is more difficult in the rain.”

“Could I stay? The guides will be here soon, no?”

He hesitated, clearly torn between wanting to get home and wanting to give her the gift of time in a place that he must presume was as sacred to her as it was to him.

“I could sit there.” Celia pointed to the hut. “And just wait. And remember.”

In one way or another, she, or perhaps her mother’s service to the Revolution, had earned his trust. “All right,” he said. “But wait for a guide. Farther up there are many trails. You could get lost.” He glanced again at the lowering sky. “Do not try to walk back alone. The trail is slippery when it is wet, very dangerous.”

“Gracias,” she said, offering him her hand.

He barely touched her fingers. “Que te vaya bien, compañera,” he said and was gone, swift as a forest animal, down the path and out of sight.

AS soon as he disappeared from view, she crossed the clearing and again entered thick forest. Other buildings appeared among the trees. One seemed to fit what she could remember of her mother’s description of the hospital. Another she thought might have been where the women’s brigade lived. Then the sense of familiarity vanished, and she was lost. She wandered for short distances along various trails, always choosing those that led higher up the mountain.

Suddenly she came upon a stairway made of earth held into place by rough logs. It climbed the mountainside for at least a hundred steps, yet was hidden, arched over by hibiscus bushes larger than any she had ever seen. Reaching to two or three metres, stalks so slender that they could not bear the weight of their own height, they flopped over, forming a tunnel through which the steps ascended the mountainside.

Celia climbed rapidly, her previous confusion erased by exhilaration. At the top of the steps, just to the left, would be the cookhouse with a tree growing up through the roof. Do not cut the trees , she heard herself saying. If we protect the trees they will protect us. Celia peered inside, to where the floorboards had been sawed short to allow the forked trunk of a huge jagüay to pass into and through the room. One fork, the larger one, was dead and half-rotted away. The smaller fork continued on through the roof, its spreading boughs still green with leaves, concealing the cookhouse from the air.

Celia did not linger in the cookhouse but followed a trail that her feet seemed to know. A thatch-roofed cottage came into view. The side from which she approached was ground level, but at the back it perched on stilts, high above a steeply sloping hillside.

She paused. On her left, against a vertical bluff hung with tropical vegetation, was a rough wooden bench. Fidel’s place to sit, think, write, talk. On the opposite side of the narrow trail the land fell away so that the view—a view that seemed as familiar to Celia as the one from her apartment balcony, was into the tops of plants that grew tall in a forest such as this: the twisted upper trunk of a great mahogany tree, and a hibiscus that would have been ten metres tall, had it stood upright instead of arching like a rainbow with the weight of green leaves and red blossoms.

Celia faced the cottage. There was no door, just a plain plank wall barely two metres high, overhung by the thatched roof. She studied the wall, momentarily confused. Not about where she was; she knew exactly where she was. But confused about how one entered because in her mind’s eye she saw that room from the inside, open to the forest.

Without forethought, she knelt, felt for the bottom of the wall, and lifted. It was heavy but came up easily, a section about six feet square. Of course; that was how it had been designed: to lock down at night and be raised like an awning by day. She looked around for a long stick to prop it open but saw nothing she could use, so she slipped inside and lowered the wooden flap behind her.

The sense of familiarity was so strong that it took everything she had to keep herself in herself. A few times in the past two years she had felt herself slipping through cracks into the past, but here she was surrounded by past. She could swallow it whole—or be swallowed by it.

“No time travelling,” she said aloud, or almost aloud. She was whispering because whispering was what they had been trained to do. Batista’s men were loud; the rebels were not. No one spoke above a whisper here, ever.

“But that was then,” she told herself, trying to raise her voice, which again came out as a whisper. “This is now. I am now.”

Perhaps because she asserted it with such firmness, the room did not claim her. It was a kitchen, not even three metres across. From where she stood she could reach the skinny built-in cupboard on one wall and the rough wooden table on the other. Directly in front of her was a small gas refrigerator, and next to it an open doorway.

In four steps Celia crossed the kitchen and stepped out onto the balcony. She touched a narrow, L-shaped bar built into the railing of the deck. “See?” she whispered. “If this was then it would be covered with her papers, or cleared to make room for their té. But there’s nothing here, has been nothing here, for the whole of my life.”