The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [14]
Why Juana? Why not me? I thought. But maybe Juana had asked to stay. Perhaps she needed to cradle a cloud-soft child and pretend that it was hers. Besides, I had to go to my room and wait for Sebastien. Surely he would know what had happened, who had been struck by the automobile.
Juana was in the old sewing room of Señora Valencia’s mother, piling blankets on the floor to sleep on. Behind her stood a four poster canopy bed that Papi had built long ago for his wife’s afternoon siestas.
Señor Pico pulled shut his wife’s bedroom door to keep out the night air. I waved good-night to Juana, who was already dozing off. Juana blew out her lamp, leaving me in the dark.
In their room, Señor Pico tried to make his wife laugh by telling her how much he had missed her all those nights when he’d been sleeping on stiff, narrow, insect-filled mattresses in the barracks.
“Is it so terrible?” she asked.
Yes, it was, he said. Even worse than that, if truth be told. Away from her, everything was like a seat on a metal bench in Hell.
The señora asked her husband if he had to return to the barracks soon. The soldiers in his charge could wait awhile, couldn’t they?
He’d try to stay through her lying-in period, he said, but things could change quickly. Had he forgotten to inform her? Where had his memory gone? The Generalissimo was spending some time with friends, not far from here. The Generalissimo’s good friend Doña Isabela Mayer was planning to throw a lavish ball for him near the border. He—her husband, could she fathom it?—had been given the task of heading a group that would ensure the Generalissimo’s safety at the border. They would also be in charge of a new border operation.
Wouldn’t this take him away for even longer periods of time? Señora Valencia wanted to know.
She was not to worry at all, he assured her. The operation would be quick and precise. To tell the truth, part of it had already started.
She didn’t sound as happy as perhaps he had wanted her to be. “Let’s not speak of you leaving again,” she said. “At least you are with us now.”
In the parlor, Papi sat alone, as he did every night, in a corner near the parlor’s accordion-shaped radio, straining to make out an announcer’s voice without disturbing the others. He was an exiled patriot, Papi, fighting a year-and-a-half old civil war in Spain by means of the radio. On his lap were maps showing different Spanish cities that he consulted with a hand magnifier as he listened. The maps were cracked along the creases and edges, becoming closer to dust with every passing day.
“How is the fighting today?” I asked. “Is your side winning?”
“The good side does not always win,” he said.
“Do you wish you were there?”
“In the war, an old man like me?”
Above Papi’s head loomed a large portrait of the Generalissimo, which Señora Valencia had painted at her husband’s request. Her painting was a vast improvement on many of the Generalissimo’s public photographs. She had made him a giant in full military regalia, with vast fringed epaulets and clusters of medals aligned in neat rows under the saffron braiding across his chest. Behind him was the country’s red and blue flag with the white cross in the middle, along with the coat of arms and the shield: DIOS, PATRIA, LIBERTAD. GOD, COUNTRY, LIBERTY. But the centerpiece was the Generalissimo himself, the stately expression on his oval face, his head of thick black hair (the beginning of gray streaks carefully omitted), his full vibrant locks swept back in gentle waves to frame the wide forehead, his coy gentle smile, and his eyes, which seemed oddly tender. Bedroom eyes, many had called them.
Papi seemed unaware of the Generalissimo’s enormous presence as he listened for word from much farther away.
“Would you like some hot guanabana tea?” I asked. “Good for sleep.”
He shook his head no.
“Amabelle, I am not a lucky man,” he declared.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“I think we killed a man tonight,” he said.
Then it seemed to