“Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s true. I know he loves me. His eyes have told me so.”
I could picture Enrico’s dark eyes shining out of his very dark skin. He was quite beautiful, but he smiled at everyone, not just Maria.
“He was very happy when I showed him the picture of us you took.”
“Really?” I was beginning to sound like a broken record, but I didn’t want my friend to be hurt. Her idea of Enrico’s love seemed to me more like a fantasy spun out of wishful thinking than reality. Reality was live insurgents roaming the forest — and dead ones lying in the bush.
It was not until I had dropped Maria off and was on the way home that I realized that I hadn’t told anyone about Dunia’s triumph. What kind of brigadista was I — thinking only of my own safety and not of my students?
I didn’t say anything to Luis and Veronica about what had gone on at the meeting. I didn’t want my fear to spread like a contagion to my farm families, because by now, they were my family. But they knew, somehow, about the new danger. That night when it was time for class, Luis said, “We must move our studies to the back room.”
“There’s no table in there,” I said.
He lit the lamp in the kitchen. “Show her,” he said to Veronica.
“Come with me, Maestra,” Veronica said, taking my hand and leading me out of the house. We went across the fields and into the trees beyond. “Do you see?”
From far away, even through the foliage, I could see the brilliant light of our lantern hanging from the rafter, and beneath it, the form of a man and the heads of two children bobbing about inside. “You see? A man with a powerful gun could shoot anyone from this distance,” she said.
I shivered at the thought.
To my surprise, the Acostas came that night. They did not question the move. We sat on the mattresses next to the sleeping little girls, and the students wrote on their laps. It was awkward, but no one complained.
I wrote my own family in Havana every week, but mail was seldom delivered into the mountains, so I had received only one letter from home since I’d left Varadero on April 28. My one letter came from my mother after I’d been in the mountains about three weeks, asking me how I was, what sort of toilet facilities were available, in short, if life in the country was too hard for me.
So you can imagine that I never included in my own letters any fears or frustrations I might have. Yes, I said, life was different, it took getting used to, but it was a challenge, and they all knew how much I loved a challenge. (I stopped writing when I wrote that sentence. Should I erase the part about their knowing I loved a challenge? Did any of my family think I loved a challenge? Well, I did like to study hard subjects. And I had dared to join the campaign. Surely they would recognize those as challenges. I left it in.) I was learning so much, I said. Could they believe that I could milk a goat? Boil coffee? Wash clothes on a rock? Cut corn with a machete?
And the Santana children were darling. Luis and Veronica were like an older brother and sister to me, etc., etc., etc. I was simply a fountain of cheer. In my weekly letters home, that is. But this week, I wasn’t sure what I could write after Esteban’s grim warnings.
The next morning after breakfast, I took off my beloved uniform and dressed in the one blouse and skirt outfit I had brought from home. My only shoes now were my boots, but I had to have something on my feet. Without my uniform and beret, I felt strangely bare. But Esteban had forbidden us to wear boots outside the house. I sighed and gathered the clothes that needed washing, put them in the basket, and started out the door. Veronica stopped scrubbing Isabel’s face and looked at me. “Where are you going?”
“The washing . . .”
“Not today,” she said. “We can do it another time.”
“It’s all right. We can’t let them stop us.” I think I even tossed my head. “I’m not afraid.” Which of course was a colossal lie.
“Well, I’m afraid,” she said quietly. She took the basket from my hands. “Please . . .”
Perhaps I should have argued, but I didn’t. I wasn’t that bold.
“Rafael is eager to write his name,” she said. “He wants to be like his papi. Would you teach him?”
“Of course,” I said. “When?”
“Now is a good time.”
I went out and found Rafael squatting between two rows of tobacco plants, pulling bugs off the leaves and dropping them into a cup of kerosene. Luis, usually busy in the fields, was nowhere to be seen. I remember thinking that he must have gone to the Acostas’ for something.
Rafael was delighted to leave his messy chore to have a private lesson with the grown-ups’ teacher. We went back into the house.
“Sit at the table,” I said. “Your mama said you wanted to write your name. You have a long name with many letters. Can you do that?”
He nodded vigorously.
I fetched my diary and two pencils from my rucksack. Then I sat on a stool next to him, tore a page from the back of my diary, and carefully wrote his name on it.
“See?” I said. “You have a very hard name to write.”