The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba - Chanel Cleeton Page 0,19
fact or if there’s some emotion lingering there.
“Yes. They wish for me to marry.”
Everything about this situation is impossible, but this feels like my only chance to see if he loves me, too.
“I don’t want to marry someone they choose for me. I’d rather marry someone I care for.” I take a deep breath and bare my heart. “I rather thought I might marry my best friend. If he’ll have me.”
Mateo swears softly. “You shouldn’t think things like that.”
There’s enough despair in his voice, enough of a crack in the facade to make me think I might not be alone in my feelings for him.
“Mateo, I know what I want. What I don’t know, not for sure, is what you want. If you don’t feel the same way, if you don’t want the same things, I understand. We’ll never speak of this again. We can return to being friends and nothing more. But I thought—I thought I might try.”
Of all the ways I imagined this happening, it was always Mateo on his knees in front of me professing his love rather than me flinging myself at him, but with circumstances as they are, I’ve come to accept that my fantasy doesn’t really matter anymore. I want him, and I’ll do whatever it takes, sacrifice my pride, if that means we can be together.
“I can’t offer you this life,” Mateo says. “You know that. This idea that we could be together is an impossibility. Your family will never allow it.”
He’s right, of course, but even as I fear their disapproval, even as it pains me to sever ties with the family of my birth, if they cannot see past Mateo’s background and station in life, if they cannot wish us well, if they don’t want what’s best for me, then what choice do I have? We have one shot at happiness in this life, and this is mine.
“I love you. Whatever life has in store for us, I will always love you.”
Mateo is silent for a beat that stretches on and on, so long in fact that I nearly convince myself I had it all wrong, that I overstepped, that he’s never loved me at all.
And then I hear it—
“I love you, Marina. I’ve always loved you. Always.”
I lean forward, pressing myself against him, a sob escaping my lips, feeling the warmth of the sun on his skin, and finally, a deep shudder as though he has come to terms with something he’s been wrestling with for a very long time, and he strokes my hair, his lips closing down on mine, and I know without a doubt that I’d give up everything—the gowns, the jewels, the privilege of my life as a Perez—to call him mine.
* * *
—
Weeks have passed since we first entered the camp, January turning into February, little hope on the horizon. I stare at the house in front of me, the sight of it and the sensation of standing on the familiar street in Havana carrying me back in time. When I eloped with Mateo and my family disowned me, I assumed I would never return, understood that the home where I lived for seventeen years was no longer mine. But now, standing in front of the big iron gates, someone else’s washing bundled in my hands, I feel the full weight of how much I have changed even if Havana is seemingly untouched by the weight of war.
The Perez mansion gleams in the sunlight, a bastion of wealth and privilege. The pale pink color looks like the inside of a seashell, the estate dominating nearly the entire block, sweeping palm trees shading the structure. It was built by the earliest Perez ancestor in the mid-eighteenth century, his time at sea likely influencing his desire to settle his family so close to the ocean, seeking privacy for himself and his bride away from the busier—and nosier—parts of the city.
Do my parents still live here? My brother? Or have they all moved on for parts unknown?
My mother frequently boasted of her ability to trace her ancestry back to Spain; we traveled there a few times growing up to visit family. Between their wealth and their sugar interests, I imagine my parents have sided with the Spanish in all of this.
We are a divided island despite our attempts to unify under one Cuban identity, and as I stare out at the landscape, I feel as though I am in a dream—or a nightmare.