The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba - Chanel Cleeton Page 0,57
looked in on Isabella. Gave her a kiss while she slept. Will you tell her . . .”
His voice trails off; he has to know it is no easy task he gives me. How do I explain to our six-year-old daughter that her father is gone and might not return?
I nod, not trusting myself to speak.
In all the sadness filling me, there’s also a dart of anger that he is the one leaving—however noble the cause—and I am left to pick up the pieces after he is gone. I am the one who will be forced to break our daughter’s heart and tell her she won’t see him for a while. It will be my responsibility to hold her when she misses him, to assure her that he will come home even when I don’t believe it myself. I will be both mother and father, be the one to keep our home going while he is away fighting.
Over the near decade since we first wed, I’ve learned what it means to be a farmer’s wife, traded the wealth and privilege of my family’s life in Havana to something all my own. And still, the task he leaves me with, the responsibility for providing food, safety, and shelter for me, Isabella, and Mateo’s mother Luz who lives in the house beside us, feels daunting when it is to be undertaken alone, particularly in these difficult times.
How will I keep us safe in a time of war?
When Mateo’s sword is fastened, he leans over the bed once more, and I clasp his face, drawing him down to me.
I cannot unravel the emotions coursing through me—fear, pride, anger, grief, love—so once again I say the only thing I know how to, which seems to encapsulate all of them perfectly.
“I love you.”
The words come out on a sob.
“You are my heart,” he whispers, and I know that even as this is true, Cuba is his blood, and for now she will have all of him.
I wish he didn’t have to leave. I wish I could go with him. I wish everything was different and that the cost of our freedom wasn’t so high. What would it be to live in a world where your energy is reserved for things other than liberation?
Mateo holds me against him tightly before releasing me, gazing at me as though he is attempting to memorize my features even as I do the same to him.
Will I ever see him again? What chance do we have of winning a war where farmers become soldiers in an attempt to defeat one of the most powerful militaries the world has ever known? Even in decline, Spain is a formidable foe.
Are they all simply marching to their death?
“Viva Cuba Libre,” I whisper to him, the cry for a free Cuba forever in my heart.
“Viva Cuba Libre,” he echoes fiercely.
Mateo releases me, and I sink down to the bed, watching him walk away, until he is gone and I am alone in the house where we were to spend our lives together, the house that is now mine to care for.
A cry breaks out in the middle of the night. Then another.
The sound of the door closing when Mateo left must have woken Isabella, because I hear her calling for me—
“Mami, mami, mami.”
I rise from the bed and walk into my daughter’s room, my heart heavy.
“I had a bad dream,” she whispers, her eyes wide.
I go to her, revolution momentarily forgotten, and I wrap my arms around her, stroking her hair and rocking her, singing a song my mother sang to me when I was her age as my tears begin to fall.
* * *
—
For a moment, I think I might faint.
My husband stands a few steps away from me in the hallway of the Hotel Inglaterra.
He’s alive.
“What are you doing here?” I ask as my knees buckle, and I sag against the wall for support.
A door opens at the end of the hallway.
Mateo takes a step forward, and then he freezes in place, his gaze darting from me to the open door, and back again, and I can see that he’s working out the precariousness of the situation, favoring discretion where I cannot summon mine.
My husband. My love.
He is alive.
Mateo looks nothing like I’ve envisioned. He’s clean-shaven, his hair recently shorn. His clothes are laundered and well mended. It’s obvious, though, that he’s lost a great deal of weight since we last saw each other. While his clothes fit him, albeit a bit