Rosa Jordan - The Woman She Was

Joe had a fleeting image of Celia’s vivacious older sister, so full of bold laughter at parties and equally bold indignation at anything she perceived as a social injustice; that pretty, busty body lying in the mud of some distant battlefield. He promptly erased the image and did what he did best: focused on the moment, on the living woman a few feet away. “Oh Celia! That must’ve been terrible for you.”

“Sí, terrible.”

Images of Carolina must have been in her head too because there was a pained silence before she added, “But raising Liliana has been a blessing. She is sixteen already.”

“You’re not married, though? No children of your own?”

She gave him a cool, altogether knowing look. “No more personal questions from you, old friend. You have been gone too long.”

She turned and walked away, this time not looking back.

RATHER than returning to the Vía Monumental for the twenty-minute drive to his mother’s apartment, Joe followed the waterfront street a little farther, then veered off onto a dirt track that wound through a brushy area. Sandy paths leading down to the beach were imprinted with bicycle tracks, evidence that the undeveloped area was as much an unofficial playground now as it had been when he and Luis were kids.

Although he had felt prepared for a family reunion on the flight over, Celia’s being at the airport had thrown him off balance. He needed a drink and time to put it into perspective. A few kilometres from Celia’s place, the dirt track terminated at the parking lot of El Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro. Joe had never been to El Morro when the fort wasn’t overrun with students on field trips. Maybe it was still like that during school hours, but now, nearing sunset, only foreign tourists milled about.

Joe parked the car, crossed a drawbridge over the moat, and circled around to the side of the fort that faced the harbour. How many times had pirates passed this way to storm and sometimes burn Habana? How many times had he and Luis re-enacted those battles, sometimes casting themselves as defenders of the city, sometimes as the pirates?

In ancient times a chain running from fort to fort, this side of the harbour mouth to the other side, was raised at nightfall to keep out pirate ships. How much could such a span have weighed in sixteenth-century iron? How many slaves would it have taken to raise and lower that clanking monster? Fewer, certainly, than the thousands it had taken to build this and all the other forts surrounding Habana’s harbour, not to mention the city wall that alone had taken two hundred years to construct. One thing for sure, he and Luis had never imagined themselves as slaves. He had got a taste of slavery, at least in its modern sweatshop manifestation, only after immigration to the States.

As a boy wielding a wooden sword, Joe had been oblivious to the spectacular view of Habana’s skyline across the harbour, and he was more or less oblivious to it now. He ordered a mojito from the bar and leaned on the stone balustrade to watch the sunset, placing as much distance as possible between himself and a group of German tourists. Shutting out their guttural voices, Joe reviewed his plans, a review necessary because Celia’s coming to meet him at the airport had the potential to undermine his focus.

The basic plan, he assured himself, was untouched. He knew exactly which government agencies he would visit, could guesstimate how many calls would be required to establish solid contacts, and how much schmoozing with those contacts would be needed to set the stage. The part he hadn’t worked out was Celia because she had played no part in his decision to return to the island. It had been a business decision, personal only to the extent that he wanted to put some physical distance between himself and his ex-wife. If he wasn’t going to be given access to the kids, then, by God, Vera wasn’t going to find him all that accessible either.

But Celia’s being at the airport, not to mention how she felt in his arms, caught him off guard. Who would have guessed that at thirty-five she’d look the way she had at twenty-five? As he leaned against the stone wall, the pressure of an erection made him acutely aware of something that, if not exactly in his mind, was certainly in his blood.

A purely biological reaction, he told himself. After all, it had been what—nine months?—since he’d had a woman. Of course there had been opportunities, both with women he had fooled around with before the divorce and ones he had met since. But something in the way Vera got her hooks into him, then extracted several pounds of flesh had put him off “nice” women. And with Dade County’s huge HIV-infected population, a guy would have to be a whole lot more desperate than he was to screw a prostitute, even with so-called safe-sex precautions.

Celia, though, was another story. Given Cuba’s nationwide testing program and her being a doctor, she’d be safe. Sexually, anyway. But what about entanglement? Non-capitalistic society be damned, nobody was going to lay that lady for free. Not that it had cost him all that much before. But it almost had. He had almost stayed in Cuba because of her. And probably would have if he hadn’t believed until the very last minute that her anger would cool and she would go with him.

As the setting sun transformed white cloud streamers into streaks of magenta, Joe shifted uncomfortably. He wanted to walk away, to drive straight to his mother’s house and follow all the plans he’d made, the way he always followed his plans, without looking right or left or making things any more complicated than necessary. Embarrassment, though, kept him glued to the stone balustrade, concealing his projected feelings from the tourists. But not from himself.

Okay, so he had paid a price when he walked out on Celia. But that was because he had let himself get addicted to her sweet compliance, underscored by the incredible pent-up passion of a virgin in love with her first lover. Given a decade of lovers and water under the bridge since then, such emotional traps were unlikely to snare him now. But what if she was one of those Cubans whose allegiance to the Revolution had not lasted; one of those who, having collected a free education in the field of their choice, resented working for chicken feed and longed to fly the coop? What if she got the idea that he ought to facilitate her move to the United States in exchange for a tumble in the hay?

He savoured the last swallow of rum and played with the scenario. It wasn’t entirely unattractive. If she chose to follow him to Miami, as she had refused to do back then, he might acquire a safe sexual partner with no sticky commitment to monogamy or lifelong support. Assuming, of course, there weren’t complications. Joe’s thoughts flashed briefly back to Vera, and his erection wilted of its own accord.

That’s the kicker, he thought as he headed back across the parking lot to his rental car. Keep your eye out for complications.

LUIS stood at the window watching the play of sunlight until it ceased to filter through the leaves of ancient trees that formed a canopy over the street. Softer tones of sunset touched the old houses with a rosy glow. Then sunset faded to dusk and he no longer saw the street. What he saw was Celia and José alone in her apartment, his hands on her there as quickly as they had been on her in the airport, but touching places far more intimate. Luis fought an urge to retch.

It was exactly as he had known it would be, from the moment he first learned of his brother’s intended return. Yet he had resisted, as one naturally resists pain, and would go on resisting until the end. Grown men don’t puke and they don’t cry. They pick up the goddamned phone and act.