Rosa Jordan - The Woman She Was

“Ta da!” Liliana pranced into the room, snapping fingers and jerking her body to a rhythm only she could hear.

“Stand still,” Celia laughed. “Let me read it.”

Liliana stopped and stuck out her chest. Overlaying Liliana’s firm young breasts was the face of a member of the Cuban women’s volleyball team. Celia read the caption: “She walks like a girl, she runs like a girl, she serves balls at one hundred kilometres per hour like a girl.”

“You little minx!” Celia laughed.

“Like it?” Liliana moved to the mirror to admire herself. “I picked it out myself.”

“Cute. But I intend to have a word with your ‘uncles’ about appropriate outings for a girl your age. Not to mention taking you out of school.”

Instantly the oomph went out of Liliana’s posture. “Please don’t,” she said in a small voice. “Tío Luis is already mad at me.”

Such mood swings were not unusual for Liliana. The needy little girl she had been when she came to live with Celia eight years earlier had gradually evolved into a sassy adolescent. However, in the blink of an eye the adolescent could, and often did, retreat into the child. Celia actually liked both. She felt tender toward the child and thought the sauciness boded well for Liliana’s future independence. Liliana had always insisted that she wanted to grow up to be “just like Tía Celia,” but Celia hoped that she would be different in some ways: less compliant, less easily manipulated. What she looked for in Liliana, and was just beginning to glimpse below the sass, was the independent spirit and courage of the girl’s mother. Those qualities could cost a person’s life, perhaps had cost Carolina hers. But they were qualities that could also save one’s life. They were qualities Celia wished she had more of, and treasured when they surfaced in Liliana.

However, Liliana’s impudence often put her and Luis at odds. He submitted to discipline and believed he was a better man for it. He did not understand Celia’s tolerance for her niece’s increasing independence, manifested in occasional disobedience. Celia was absolutely certain he would not have pulled Liliana out of school to go to Varadero.

“How did you happen to go to Varadero with them anyway?” she asked in a neutral voice.

Liliana fell onto the bed as gloomy as if expecting to be condemned to a lifetime of house arrest. “I didn’t exactly go with them. I was on my way there when they picked me up.”

Celia turned away and began refolding already-folded underwear in her bureau drawer. Liliana always talked more openly when she wasn’t being questioned. This time it was a full minute before she continued, a pause that Celia found ominous.

“Tío Luis got so mad I thought he was going to hit me. He said when we got there I’d have to wait in the car, but…” Her voice trailed off.

“They invited you to lunch, bought you a T-shirt, and took you dancing,” Celia finished with just a hint of irony. What she was thinking was, They did not do that. Damned José did that. When I get my hands on him!

Liliana watched her anxiously. “Please, Tía, don’t be mad.”

With effort, Celia kept the irritation out of her voice. “I’m not.”

She stood there a moment longer, looking at the folded underwear. Three pairs of white cotton panties, three white bras. The spartan intimate apparel of a nun. “I am going to take a shower,” she said finally. “Would you wash those dirty dishes in the sink?”

“Claro,” Liliana said in a small voice.

Celia closed the bureau drawer and set the travel case in the closet. She stripped down to bra and panties and went into the bathroom. There she took them off, to be washed in the shower. It was a habit she had developed during the Special Period when underwear could not be replaced, having disappeared from regular Cuban stores and for a time being available only in stores requiring dollars, which she did not have.

She stepped into the shower, the first since the one she had taken at Franci’s to remove the scent of Miguel’s lovemaking. She had not wanted to take that shower, had not wanted to lose that smell. But it had been necessary; otherwise Franci surely would have noticed. Now, too, the hot shower was a necessity, not to wash away evidence of past passion but to wash away tension caused by a feeling of imminent danger.

Not danger, she corrected herself. Just something to be dealt with. Liliana might have been exaggerating, but if Luis was as angry as she said, it would not have been for hitchhiking, which was common among Cubans of all ages. It would have been for cutting class and—Varadero? What was that all about?

Celia turned up the temperature of the shower and absorbed its stinging heat as if to cleanse herself to the bone. To the brain. Above all, she must be clear-minded. No matter how many calming possibilities suggested themselves, she was pretty sure that whatever Liliana had done was no casual indiscretion. She must have crossed some kind of line. She turned off the water in time to hear Liliana call out, “Come in.”

The clatter of dishes revealed that Liliana was still in the kitchen and had not come out to greet whoever was at the door.

“If you’ve come to rat on me,” Liliana yelled to the visitor, “don’t bother. I’ve already told Tía Celia everything.”

Then Luis’s voice. “That you cut class to go to Varadero? How you were dressed?”

Celia did not take time to dry off but pulled on a terrycloth robe and hurried out to interpose herself between them. “Hello, Luis.” She kissed him lightly on the lips.

“Did she?” he asked. “Tell you what she did the minute your back was turned?”

“I got the gist of it,” Celia equivocated. “I will have a talk with her.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.” Liliana called from the kitchen, emphasizing her point with the slam of pot against metal pot. She had taken off the new T-shirt before starting on the dishes and changed back into the white shorts and red-striped top she had been wearing when she first came in. Perhaps it was seeing so much of that perfect figure exposed that gave Celia her first glimpse of looming disaster.

In her mind’s eye she saw Liliana not as a little girl clad in shorts racing about the neighbourhood with other children, but the way she had seen dozens of young women dressed, in very similar outfits but somehow less innocent: clothing that flaunted their youth, their beauty, their health, their sexual availability. She had seen them hitching along the highway, seen them hanging around Playas del Este, seen them on the heavily touristed sidewalks of Habana Vieja. And she had seen no small number of those still young enough to be classed as children in her own hospital. The unwanted knowledge that flooded her senses, combined with Luis’s interference and Liliana’s arrogant dismissal, caused Celia to lose her temper.

“Liliana!” she spoke sharply. “Come here.”

Liliana pulled the plug on the dishwater but did not exactly “come here.” She stopped in the kitchen door, crossed her arms, and rolled her eyes.

“Do you have any idea how many girls are contracting sexually transmitted diseases?” Celia demanded hotly. “Here! In Cuba, which up to now has one of the lowest rates of HIV-AIDS in the world! Now tourists are bringing it in and—”

Liliana dropped her mouth open in mock astonishment. “Gosh, Dr. Cantú, I thought a person couldn’t get AIDS from toilet seats. You think I might’ve caught it from a car seat ?”

Luis, who had looked on with a stern but pleased expression while Celia lectured her niece, weighed in. “Cut the sarcasm, Liliana! If you won’t listen to Celia—”

“You’ll have me put in a re-education camp?” Liliana challenged. “Forget it! Tía Celia is my madrina and she won’t let you.”