The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba(46)

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 loosely, his body is slighter than I remember.

“Are you well?” he asks me, worry in his eyes. I know what I must look like, all the changes that have occurred since he left. I nod jerkily, words still failing me, and out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of Carbonell and Decker standing outside the open door.

Decker and Carbonell hesitate, before looking to me, and I offer them another quick nod to let them know all is well and to be on their way. They file past us, their heads ducked, hats pulled low, not making eye contact with Mateo.

The hallway is once again empty now that they’re gone, and Mateo takes a step toward me, and then another, stopping when we are close enough that the skirt of my ragged dress brushes against his serviceable trousers.

He tugs on my hand, leading me to the door nearest him, the room he originally stepped out of, and it is the most natural thing in the world for me to do as I have since we were children.

I follow him.



* * *



—

Mateo closes the door to his hotel room.

I can’t resist the urge to reach out, placing my palm against his cheek, the beard he’s grown since he’s been gone scratchy beneath my fingertips. My fingers drift to his mouth, tracing the shape of his lips.

“Marina,” he breathes.

Tears fill my eyes.

I’ve been holding it together for so long, trying to do my part, to take care of our daughter, his mother, to be strong as the world around me falls apart, but now the sight of him before me is my undoing.

“Is everyone else well?” he asks me urgently, his voice low. We are alone, but in Havana and throughout Cuba now, the walls have ears, and neither one of us can forget the precariousness of our positions.

“Yes. They’re both well.”

Relief fills Mateo’s expression. “And you, Marina? How are you?”

What is there to say? I can’t add to his worries by telling him the truth, how we are hanging on by a thread in the camp.