Chapter 9

Cielo had tumbled asleep like a weary peon who had shaken off his load but when he awoke he found evidence in the tumbled bed of a difficult night; nor did he feel rested.

After a while he went along to the kitchen ramming his shirttails into his pants. Soledad stood over the ironing board looking cross, her hair tied in a horsetail with a small ribbon; he thought she was breathtakingly beautiful.

She said, “You were impossible. I had to sleep on the couch in the end. I don’t know what the children must think.”

“I’m sorry. It must have been bad dreams or something.”

“And now you have to go out again?”

“Si.”

“For how long this time?”

“I can’t say. You realize I should be up there with them all the time—I’m shirking my duty, laying so much onto Vargas and my brother.”

“When will this madness stop?”

“When the old man dies, I suppose.”

“The Dragas are long-lived—his uncle lived to ninety-four.”

“But blind and senile the last few years, wasn’t he?”

“Old Draga isn’t blind or senile.”

“Don’t nag me,” Cielo said, “you won’t change anything.”

She said, “It takes young men to do this sort of thing. He should know that. Your heart isn’t in this.”

“No, most of the time it’s not. Once in a while I try to remind myself. You know I talked to Ortiz yesterday? Raoul Ortiz?”

“You didn’t mention it.”

“Ortiz was in Cuba just a few months ago. Running guns to people in the mountains. He said it is even worse than before. The squalor and all. The despair.”

“You’re trying to pump yourself up but it all keeps leaking out again, doesn’t it.”

“Well I’d like to do something for them. You know.”

She said, “Surely, but this way? Who are you—Don Quixote?”

Cielo watched her push the iron back and forth across his black chinos. “It’s not that bad, you know. I don’t mind what we’re doing now. One day these weapons will be used.”

“But not by you.”

“No, I’m too old. I’ve turned cautious.”

“Someone will confiscate the weapons before anyone can use them. How do you expect to keep them hidden for years?”

“Bury them. Nobody looks in El Yunque.”

“It takes a big hole to bury cannons and machine guns.”

“We’ve got plenty of time to dig it.”

“Not really. The old man, Draga, he’ll get impatient soon.”

“I’ll tell him the time isn’t right yet.”

“And he’ll believe it just because you say so?”

“He trusts me.” The statement came out like a confession, shaming him.

She said, “Rodrigo—talk to me about it.”

“How can I talk about things for which there aren’t any words? Feelings—”

She smiled mournfully. “You poor thing. You hang onto this nonsense as if it was the first woman’s breast you ever sucked. You’ve even forgotten why you’re doing it.”

“I know why it’s done. But it’s just that it’s no longer fashionable to spend one’s life discussing the ultimates of good and evil. That’s for university students. The advocates of revolution.”

She said, “I remember the days when even villainy was innocent.”

“You know the CIA has received orders from the White House to stop all secret anti-Castro exile activities. We must be circumspect. Old Draga understands that—he’ll curb his impatience.”

“Those orders were issued more than a year ago, querido. Nobody paid much attention to them.”

“Just the same.”

“Is it the old Draga who worries you—or the young one?”

“Emil.” He only sighed.

“That one is trouble, since he was little.”

“You know the expression ‘trapped between a rock and a hard place,’ querida? Well the old man is the rock. All the same, I think we can control Emil. I think we’ve thrown a little respect into him. His ribs are still taped up, though he doesn’t want anyone to know it.”

Suddenly he could feel the air whistling through his own nose. He unraveled the handkerchief from his hip pocket and blew his nose.

She sighed with infinite tolerance. “Put it there with the laundry and get a clean one. Por Dios, you can’t even get out of the house in the morning without soiling another bit of cloth.”

“When the girls come home from school I want you to have a talk with them about this TV business. We should ration their hours—there are things in life besides television.”

“They would listen more closely to you than to me. It’s something you ought to take care of.”

“I probably won’t be here tonight.”

“Then it can wait until you come back. Tomorrow maybe?”

“Maybe. I can’t promise.”

“It’s a good thing I know you. Otherwise I’d think you had a woman squirreled away.”

He reached out for her hand, took the iron from it and stood it up on the metal pan; he put his hands on her shoulders and uttered each word as if he had coined it on the spot: “I adore you with all my heart and soul. I always will—to the end of my life.”

The liveliness came back into his eyes. She walked into his embrace.

He went out the back way across the rear neighbor’s yard and skirted trash cans on his way past a carport. He’d left the car two blocks away for reasons of security. When he reached it he was already sweating—the humidity was shocking, the sun ablaze; the faded stucco houses seemed to cringe. An infant was tumbling on a parched lawn watched by an old woman who sat shriveled in the shade fanning herself with a magazine. Two cats pursued each other comically up the alley and Cielo opened the deck of the Volkswagen. Last night he’d removed the rotor from the distributor and walked away knowing the car would still be there when he needed it. Now he replaced the rotor from his pocket, snapped the clips onto the distributor and unlocked the door.

Ernesto Mendez—the name on his mailbox—might be a tame lower-class surburban but Cielo had been trained in the guerrilla arts. It was this training that alerted him to the presence of a man standing in a doorway half a block distant. The man wasn’t watching him but Cielo knew the neighborhood and the man didn’t’ belong there: poplin suit, tie, the sun glinting on polished cordovan. Standing in the doorway, Cielo thought, was foolish: It only framed the man, focusing attention on him as if he were a portrait. A smart one would have strolled in the open, looking as if he had business.

Possibly it had nothing to do with him but he was troubled. He made a U turn in the potholed street and drove away watching the mirror. His alarm increased tenfold when the man turned and went inside the house whose doorway had framed him. If the man was going to a phone.…

Driving into Hato Rey he was remembering his introduction to the heroic arts: the Sierra Maestra, 1958, nothing more than a skirmish really—the rebels under Ché Guevara had ambushed the trucks and Cielo had dived out into the ditch along with the other soldiers. The rebels had used mortars and Brownings and grenades; the noise of battle had confounded and infuriated Cielo. Finally—to stop the noise—he had performed heroically. Madly. Afterward six rebels were dead and Batista himself pinned the medal on Cielo. It was all so comical. He’d had no thought of earning medals; he’d only wanted to stop the noise.

But after that he was a hero and they promoted him and he was looked to as a leader and he was too young to know better than to play along with it. The attention was too flattering to be rebuffed.

An accidental moment of madness, but it had changed and colored everything in his life since then. He had never confided this to anyone but Soledad; no one but Soledad would understand. Not even his own brother.

Still troubled by the man in the doorway, he pulled around behind an open-front cantina and parked the Volkswagen in the dust where it was hidden from the street. He went to the public kiosk and Luz answered the old man’s phone. He exchanged counterproposals with Luz and then cradled the phone and walked away—walking up the alley past the Volkswagen and on past the back doors of several seedy shops. At the corner of Avenida Hostos he turned north and walked at a steady pace, using the side mirrors of parked vans to examine his backtrail. No one was following him; he was positive of that after ten minutes. At the corner of the Calle Eleanor Roosevelt he waited in the shade until a bus came by. He rode it across the causeway into San Juan and dropped off at the edge of Santurce. He went around the block twice on foot, picked up no tail, and was waiting by the curb when the Pinto drew up. Cielo got in and the car started moving before he’d pulled the door shut. Luz, at the wheel, said, “Señor Draga is anxious to know what this is about.”