第3章

Five days after the glorious battlefield death of El Anticristo, and only one after his burial in the General Cemetery, Francisca Aparicio and her seven children fled the country. Despite the young widow's pious entreaties, the remains of he who in life had been the unappeasable persecutor of Jesuits were flatly denied what even Serapio Cruz's severed head had been granted: entombment in the Cathedral crypt. Paquita would travel by Pacific Mail steamship from Puerto San José to San Francisco, California, and then by train to New York City, now the much preferred route even in winter, when the long transcontinental journey was often impeded by snow. She would never risk, certainly not with her children in tow, the quick trip through revolution-riled Panama and the miasmal fever port of Colón, where the cemeteries were filled with the hasty graves of abruptly rerouted travelers of all nations. Who could forget the time her late husband's Vice-Minister of Works had disembarked at Colón with three Yankee teachers and a butcher, expert in the latest slaughterhouse methods, whom he'd recruited during a trip to New York? They were delayed when heavy rains interrupted the running of the trans-Panama trains, and by the second morning all but one of the New Yorkers was too ill to leave the hotel. One teacher subsequently recovered, but the healthy one succumbed, was the first to die, and the third teacher, widow of the first, perished next. After ten days in Colón, the German-born butcher declared himself convalesced and the reduced party finally traveled across the Isthmus to Panama City, where they boarded a Pacific Mail steamship sailing up the coast, and two nights later, in the suffocating quarantine berth to which he'd been confined by the ship's surgeon with a diagnosis of scarlet fever, the butcher also died, and was buried at sea off the coast of Nicaragua, wrapped in the Stars and Stripes of his adopted country. The following evening another Yankee passenger, a four-year-old girl, the favorite of all the first-class passengers and officers, a little songstress with a prodigy's ear and memory for popular melodies and opera alike, suddenly fell ill; she breathed her last before dawn, and the solemn funeral rites were repeated, this time with a ship captain's hat laid upon the child's tiny breast and to the accompaniment of a sailor's accordion playing a romantic ballad she'd performed on deck on her last night of good health—and thereafter, the young Vice-Minister of Works later recounted to Paquita, that voyage was pervaded by a most pensive and poetical gloom … All in all, a tragic end to the good work of the Vice-Minister of Works, and a blow, pues sí, to the Supreme Government's efforts to lure immigrants. Never before had their country's name been so vehemently shouted and defamed by the army of newsboys in the streets of New York, bawling perverse scenarios of foul play into the infernal air as if trying to incite the homeward- and saloon-rushing male masses into rioting for war—insinuating blame even for the death of the little girl, though she'd been traveling with mother and siblings to join her father, a mining engineer, in Sonsonate, El Salvador. (But who cabled the information to the newspapers? Justo Rufino suspected the diplomatic agents of certain European powers, trying to inflame Yankee fears of the coveted Isthmus's native treacheries.)

As if in New York people never perished from fevers or unintentionally contaminated foods! As if there were not miserable swamps of contagion even in the heart of that great metropolis, which Paquita had come to love as much as she did her own native Quezaltenango. So that you can see it with your own eyes, Monsieur and Madame President, she and Justo Rufino had been taken one summer night on a carriage ride through the swarming neighborhoods where poor immigrants lived, the stifling heat so noxious, so like an Indian market inside a lidded chamber pot that they'd had to take turns holding her perfumed handkerchief over their noses just to breathe!

Nearly a decade later Paquita was still encountering New Yorkers who, as soon as her nationality or status as Primera Dama was introduced, ungraciously recalled that notorious episode of the dead married teachers, the little girl, and a butcher. She always replied, with appropriate sincerity (are you watching, mi Rufinito? This is how you conquer those who think themselves superior to you) and never apologetically, lightly grasping each of her interlocutor's forearms and looking directly into their eyes: Yes, that was very sad, and such a terrible loss, which my husband and I remember every year with candles and prayers. But you know, corazón, many of us no longer take the risk of traveling the Panama route, and we encourage visitors to avoid it as well. Though I am sure you will be happy to learn that the one teacher who did survive that tragedy, Miss James, decided to continue her journey, and now she is the headmistress of the Instituto Nacional de Se?oritas, located in our former Convent of Nuestra Se?ora de Belén, where I myself was once interned as a student under the rule of nuns. Miss James has lifted up our little secular school in her own hands in order to hold it closer to the sun, except that sun is inside of her, and its radiance is the Yankee can-do spirit, and the progressive educational philosophies that formed her.

Another New York butcher, Mr. Henry Koch, was also eventually lured to La Peque?a Paris, and so prospered that now there was not another butcher in the city who did not have to buy meat from him, or rent his butcher's stall in the market from him. Even her husband's Chief of Police, Colonel Pratt, was from New York, and one of her governesses, Jane Pratt, hired to tutor the children and herself in English, was his niece.

Earlier in their marriage, during an official visit to the United States, Justo Rufino had purchased a five-story mansion in New York in his wife's name, situated on a newly fashionable stretch of Fifth Avenue, facing Central Park. Ever since, Paquita had spent as much time there as her husband and her duties as "La Presidenta," the beautiful, refined, and fertile spouse, mother, and symbol of the young Liberal Republic, had allowed. Paquita's father was still living and doing business in New York as well.

The entourage accompanying Paquita out of the country that day included María de las Nieves and her seven-year-old daughter, Mathilde (who shared her mother's surnames). No one associated with the slain dictator in despotism, plunder, or even family connection was safe from wildest vengeance now. But the former novice nun had long dreamed of going to live in New York. In her luggage that day she carried her copy of a document that scholars and others have long believed to be lost forever, or at best to have been misplaced, buried, and forgotten—in the diplomatic archives in Madrid or in the archives of the old Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, or in some other archive or private collection in Spain, the United States, Cuba, somewhere.

At the train station, before boarding her private presidential railroad carriage for the last time, Paquita turned to address the crowd and military guard that had come to see her off. Vigorously shaking out the long black trains of her mourning dress like a haughty Andalusian dancer, she shouted in her grief- and fear-flayed voice:

"Do you see? Not even this country's dust or dirt will I take with me!"

Not the dust or the dirt, María de las Nieves would in later years relate, but all the country's pisto—pues, eso sí! Incredibly, Paquita believed, or seemed to, that it was money her husband had honestly earned, in the mighty spirit of the times, like a Central American Carnegie or Gould, even as he'd increased and spread through personal example and bold governing the country's prosperity generally, waking it from centuries of Spanish-Indian torpor, wealth that was now most rightfully hers, considering all that she'd contributed to his reign, and all that she'd endured.

At the last moment Dr. Joaquín Yela rushed onto the train to press a sealed porcelain jar into the young widow's black-gloved hands, gravely announcing that it contained her late husband's heart preserved in alcohol. Standing next to Do?a Paca was a brown-skinned woman in a dress of black percale fitting loosely over her thin frame, a dark-eyed, solemn little girl leaning back into her skirts; despite the woman's murky stare, slashing black brows, rust-hued hair worn in a lax chignon, the bearded physician did not recognize in her the fourteen-year-old novice nun whose allergy to wool he'd diagnosed more than a decade before on a visit to her convent infirmary.

When the train began to move Paquita gave the porcelain jar to the broken-toothed servant Josefa Socorro to hold and sat with her youngest children enfolded tightly against her, as if all were trying to squeeze within the frame of a photographer's portrait. Miss Pratt, the governess, sat with a ceramic bowl in her lap, peeling green oranges with a knife and handing pieces to the children. María de las Nieves absently stroked her daughter's head through her hair and stared in sullen fixation at the jar cradled in the Josefa Socorro's fleshy arms. Could there be a heart more unlike Sor Gertrudis's beloved, flaming, pulsating Sacred Heart of Jesucristo than the one floating inside that jar? As they descended toward the coast, the train filled with the heavy, fragrant lowland heat and the drifting smoke of burning sugarcane. María de las Nieves fell into a nodding, sporadic sleep, and kept finding herself back in the choir, before a radiantly gem-festooned golden altar, praying to a heart boiling in a thin, scarlet, poisonous broth inside a clear glass bowl, slowly strangling on its fumes.

The scattered and remote lights of Puerto San José and the torches on its pier were still visible through the bilious green-yellow twilight when Paquita carried the porcelain jar to the rail and dropped it overboard into the frothing waves churned by the steamer's bladed wheel. María de las Nieves shouted to be heard over the rancorous clanging of the machinery:

"You should have opened it and fed his heart to the sharks."

Paquita, hands on the rail, went on staring at the dimming coastline of the country she would never see again, her hair in the wind like a distant shadow of the long black cloud pluming into the darkening sky from the smokestack. Then she turned with a tolerant smile, her cheeks moist with spray and flecked with cinders, and took hold of María de las Nieves's arms, only to see her friend avert her eyes from her own earnest, tearclouded gaze.

"Ferocious fool," said Paquita, leaning closer. "He had everything but God's love, which this last and greatest ambition of his was not likely to have won."

ándale, chuladita, thought María de las Nieves. Keep up this pretty show, Paquita, I know you can't believe your good fortune. She felt nauseous with inexpressible ill will.

El Anticristo had died in the very first engagement of his campaign to reunite all of Central America into a single federal republic by force under his rule. Anticipating the failure of the French efforts to build the canal across Panama, and knowing that the Yankees or even the British would end up putting one through Nicaragua regardless, Justo Rufino could not allow that country to subsequently become Central America's wealthiest and most dominant, his own reduced to a beggar's role on the margins. Possessing the military might to prevent that, wasn't it his right, his obligation and destiny to do so? His Central American Republic, with the long-dreamed-of canal connecting the oceans running through it, would be a nation of consequence in the world long after he was gone. Except he'd failed even to lead his troops across the border into bellicose and treasonous little El Salvador, shot off his horse by sniper fire, his panicked, disconsolate army routed—well, that was the official version, and María de las Nieves and Paquita still knew no other. The Kentucky-bred stallion, Relámpago, which had borne him into his last battle that day, was also traveling with them to New York; there was the horse, white mane streaming in the hot wind, a humiliated Pegasus, wearing blinders, penned and tethered beneath a tattered canopy on the foredeck among crates of poultry.

Soon Paquita would be a regular sight in Central Park, out riding, sidesaddle, atop her late husband's thoroughbred war horse. Enveloped in such an aura of exotic romance and wealth, it was no wonder that the beautiful young widow would rise so swiftly to the peak of Manhattan society. Despite his self-styled image as a Garibaldi-like man of the people, her husband's fortune had grown so immense during his twelve years of absolute power that at the time of his death there was six million dollars in his New York accounts alone, willed solely to his widow, along with his many properties and businesses at home and abroad. In New York, titans of North American industry and politics and their wives would come to Paquita's lavish but tasteful entertainments as equals, crediting their lovely hostess with having introduced into their society a discerning Latin warmth and hospitality.

But even during the last years of Rufino the Just's reign, Paquita's Fifth Avenue mansion had already become a fashionable gathering place for wealthy and distinguished foreigners, from Latin America but also Europe and especially from Spain, despite her husband's avowed sympathy with the cause of Cuban independence. At the time, Spain was trying to crush a new outbreak of seditious conspiring and insurrection in her most precious colony, and had hired the famous Pinkerton's National Detective Agency to spy on rebel conspirators among Cuban immigrants and exiles living in the United States, in the populous cities of the eastern seaboard especially. One evening in the winter of 1881, Paquita's friend the Spanish Consul General, Don Hipólito de Iriarte, heir to the Condado de Perrogru?o, had spontaneously entertained a gathering of guests in her salon by reading out loud from the Pinkerton reports of a Yankee spy who'd managed to rent a room in the same small New York boardinghouse where an impoverished young Cuban rebel leader was living with his unlikely, elegant young wife and infant child. Eventually Paquita realized that the compromised Cuban in question was none other than José Martí, the same loquacious "Dr. Torrente" who, in 1877, had arrived in her country in order to teach in one of the progressive new schools established by her husband's government; among the many broken hearts he left behind a year later was that of María de las Nieves. She did not possess beauty, wealth, or surnames but had other qualities sufficient to have drawn the interest of a few surprisingly suitable suitors, and seemed to be returning the feelings of at least one of these until the impassioned, stirringly talkative, and learned young Cuban poet-seducer had entered her life. María de las Nieves's reputation and marriage prospects had ended up in the mud, of course, as soon as her pregnancy was noticed. Malicious tongues even linked the controversial Cuban to her baby, though she was born many months after he'd already left the country under a dark cloud (his also pregnant Cuban bride in tow), an allegation that, whenever Paquita confronted her with it, she vehemently denied. María de las Nieves could have protested that for the slander to even have a possibility of being true her daughter needed to have been conceived during Martí's final days in their country, so small was the window allowed by the settled measure of time between impregnation and birth; yet the existence of those few days could not be denied. One of Martí's most famous and perhaps most regrettable verses, composed more than a decade later, would recall a good-bye kiss and a beloved face like burning bronze. If we could know and classify what sorts of kisses have marked the conception of all children ever born since the beginning of universal human time, the offspring of good-bye kisses have probably been far more numerous than those of hello kisses.

As the Pinkerton operative's confidential report, at least those brief portions that the Spanish Consul read aloud to her friends, did not cast Dr. Torrente—the extraordinarily verbose Martí's nickname in her country, Paquita had explained to Don Hipólito, who'd responded with a knowing smile—in a dignified or enviable light, Paquita requested a copy, and told him why. Her dearest childhood companion, María de las Nieves, had paid a severe price for her mystifying folly and carelessness and had since grown hard inside her youthful womanhood; it had been years, she was sure, since Las Nievecitas had last heard words of even light flirtation, to say nothing of expressions of sincere romance from any man. Perhaps reading this report would help, a little-little, to soften that stone inside her. The Spanish diplomat said that in that case she could have it, for it was no longer needed and, at any rate, there was another copy at the legation in Washington. Surely his enchanting hostess and friend did not do him the dishonor of thinking that he would have read state secrets out loud for the amusement of her guests?

Upon Paquita's return home later that year, she gave the document to María de las Nieves. (There it was, upon the worm-eaten table at which I sat and worked, among all the other books and bundles of papers heaped there for my perusal, including María de las Nieves's extremely rare copy of Fray Labarde's Vida de Sor María de Agreda; and a London first edition of Casanova's Under the Leads, given to her on her birthday in 1899, a black velvet ribbon marking the pages where the immortal libertine narrates his own entranced reading of Sor María de Agreda's "autobiography" of the Virgin while imprisoned in a prison cell in the Doge's Palace in Venice; and, of course, María de las Nieves's own copy of the nun's massive tome, the same one she'd carried away from Nuestra Se?ora de Belén that morning in 1874; and a well-worn edition of Padre Bruno's La Monjita Inglesa; Sainte-Beuve's Celebrated Women inscribed "with fraternal affection" by "Pepe Martí"; and a copy of his Versos Sencillos, published in New York in 1891, also affectionately, if unrevealingly, inscribed …)

That night on board the Golden Rose, after the children had been put into their berths, María de las Nieves and Paquita stayed up talking in the sitting room of the stateroom suite taken by the late dictator's immediate family, the ship's most luxurious, next to the gentlemen's smoking saloon, from which came the sounds of manly drinking and gambling. María de las Nieves and Mathilde were staying in one of the small first-class cabins toward the front of the deckhouse. The two women were sipping brandy diluted with water, eating soda crackers and tinned sardines, and fanning themselves against the heat as they reminisced about their days, together and apart, in the convent. María de las Nieves was smoking paper-rolled cigarettes; the widowed Primera Dama, heeding the New York model of female comportment, had renounced that vice—nevertheless, with a pickpocket's feathery touch, she kept plucking cigarettes from María de las Nieves's fingers, bringing them to her own lips, returning them; back and forth, like dizzy fireflies, from one pair of lips to the other, went María de las Nieves's cigarritos and she didn't even seem to notice.

"By far the eeriest thing I witnessed in all my time in the cloister was Madre Melchora on her deathbed, speaking her last words without moving her lips," declared María de las Nieves.

Paquita kept refilling the other's snifter too. María de las Nieves was unaccustomed to such a steady flow of liquor, and her eyes were glassy and gay. The constant weight of melancholy and self-torment of the past years seemed to have miraculously lifted. Of course she was excited to be traveling out of the country for the first time, toward a new life, and the possibility of a happier one. She even dared to think that she was not a traveler but a true emigrant, one who might never return, or at least not for a very long time. So words were spilling from María de las Nieves, as she sat with her legs crossed, her hands clasped over a knee and that knee moving relentlessly up and down, causing her upper torso to do the same. That Japanese circus that came to the National Theater only a few weeks ago? With the sixteen acrobats forming into one kaleidoscopic tower of torsos and limbs that tipped over and ran around the stage like a giant centipede; and those two kimono-clad monkeys who conducted an extremely high-pitched and coquettish conversation via the "voice-throwing" artistry of that pigtailed Japanese girl—

"—Do you think it's possible that Sor Gertrudis knew how to do that? It's the only explanation I can think of. That la Madrecita really passed away only moments before, and what we heard was Sor Gertrudis throwing her voice."

Paquita solemnly answered, "You know very well, mis Nievecitas, that the Holy Spirit is the greatest ventriloquist of all."

"And is the Holy Spirit the explanation for Sor Trinidad's role as secret agent provocateur?" said María de las Nieves, voice rising. "You, Madame Francisca, know that we've both learned a thing or two about conspiracy in our lives, but our Monjita Inglesa was the unsurpassable master."

"Unsurpassable master!" Paquita, with an incredulous expression, pushed herself partly out of her plush chair. "That does make me laugh. Now you expose the commonness of your own perceptions, María de las Nieves. A conspiracy among nuns must be as mundane as cheating at dice. How much of a master was your Sor Gertrudis, if it took her twelve years to plot a Reform that didn't even last two months?"

"Hmm … Sí … Sí pues." María de las Nieves slapped her fan closed against her lap. "Camarón! Of course, you are right." She nodded glumly and said, "But I can't see her so clearly as you do, fíjase. When Sor Gertrudis began to hate me because she thought that I thought she'd switched the lace, you see, that, my dear Paquita, hurt at least as much as any other love I've ever lost. Including God's. So it is difficult for me to see her as you do, with your infinitely greater detachment and clarity. As you see her, Do?a Paca, with your even greater knowledge of conspiracy and machination, the poison fruit of so many years of access to the reports and lies of spies and traitors. Yes, Paquita, the poison fruit!"

Shiny-eyed with happy malice, María de las Nieves inhaled her cigarette and took a fast drink of brandy and, swallowing wrong, began to cough, lifting a hand to her mouth.

Paquita smiled thinly, like a blind woman lost in her thoughts, waiting for the coughing fit to pass. "Las Nievecitas. You know when we get to New York you can't speak to me like that anymore, not even in jest. People there won't understand our comedy. What about Dr. Torrente? Didn't it hurt even more to lose his love?"

"Pepe didn't love me. So I didn't lose it." Like many Josés, Martí liked to be called Pepe—derived from the double Ps of the biblical Pater Putativus.

"What really happened between you and Martí? Please tell me, María de las Nieves."

"There's not so much to tell. Hardly anything."

"Is he Mathilde's father?"

"Oh Paquita … please."

"Some day, María de las Nieves, you will have to reveal to your daughter who her father is."

"One can always invent a story. A story can certainly be a better father than a real one, Paquita."

"In such a case, both are far from ideal, mis Nievecitas."

"I don't know that I agree. It depends." If I were your children, she thought, I'd much rather have a story.

"If you tell me, I promise to tell you what I know about Martí and María García Granados. Half the servants in Chafandín's household were paid spies. That doesn't surprise you, does it?"

Chafandín—General Miguel García Granados, the Liberal Revolution's first President—and Do?a Cristina's daughter María was the same age as María de las Nieves and Paquita. About a year after Martí had first arrived in their city, and soon after he'd briefly returned to Mexico to marry and then come back, accompanied by his Cuban wife, to resume his teaching appointments, María García Granados had died—it was said of pneumonia or of consumption, either way a sad fate but one that could befall anyone at any time. Even before her death, the common gossip had been that the general's daughter had lost her heart to the Cuban, and that he to some degree had returned her affections, and perhaps her passionate love. Now that the whole sad episode was almost forgotten, leave it to Paquita to bring it up. It was cruel of her to want to talk about María García Granados—whom María de las Nieves had been friendly with, jealous of, whom she'd felt so sad for when she'd died after taking to her bed, coughing and coughing herself to death, as could happen to anyone—; María de las Nieves felt uncomfortable and confused thinking about María García Granados now. What right did Paquita have to be offering her these years-old secrets? The reports of informers and detectives who were just as likely to be peddling lies and secondhand gossip.

"But we're not so good at keeping our vows, are we? Vows we make to our Santísima Virgen de Socorro, no less!"

Paquita grinned speechlessly at her suddenly cold-eyed tormentor, flushing.

"What use are spies who repeat gossip and make up stories, Paquita?" Had she been obsessed with the dazzling young Cuban too? Or, apart from money, was this all that was left of power, and so she had to love it like self-love? "Tell me, why should a spy be any more credible than any other gossip?"

"Justo Rufino used to say you had to know how to listen to a spy. If you weren't sure whether he was telling the truth or not, there was always the stick."

"You're going to have to learn to listen in a whole new manner now, in a world without your husband's torturers to rely on. And without God too."

"I still have God. I'm not like you, who—"

"I meant the God that makes other people afraid to lie, squash head." Now she felt calmly restored to her familiar ill will.

"You met Martí at a party at Chafandín's house."

"Yes, that is true. And one reason I gladly went was that now that Don Miguel and your husband were enemies, I knew you wouldn't be there."

She liked poetry more than she liked stories. Ideally, she did—but how many times could one listen to the exiled Cuban José Joaquín Palma, the Bayamés Bard, recite yet another Ode to the Liberal Republic or sing about his valiant Cuba in chains? Yet of all the poets at "the Literary Society of 'the Future'" evenings of recitations—since the revolution it seemed as if every young dandy and intellectual in the city was a poet of the future—he was then the most esteemed. She'd read and listened to far better poetry in the convent. Even Madre Melchora's improvised villancicos had more charm and interest. There was La Presidenta, as always in the chair of honor, the Muse who makes the Doves of Parnassus lay their eggs. Back then, it had still made her stomach ache to be in the same room with Paquita, even with nearly a hundred other people to hide behind, so she'd left, but not before hearing José Joaquín Palma's florid announcement regarding the imminent arrival in their country of an exceptionally gifted young poet and heroic compatriot who would bring honor to the name of the Literary Society of "the Future."

"I saw you that night," Paquita said. "I still hated you too. But even hating you, I wouldn't let Rufino throw you in jail or hang you up in a net. He wanted to, because he thought you knew where Sor Gertrudis and her nuns were hiding."

El Anticristo sometimes arrested women connected to the old Conservative families or to the Church, women he suspected of knowing about conspiracies, or of spreading gossip about the President or his wife, or whose aristocratic presumptions and bearing seemed to cry out for violent humiliation. Sometimes he ordered that the women be suspended inside string nets from the rafters in the stables of the Casa Presidencial, the same nets as those the Indios carried on their stooped backs, filled with huge loads of avocados and such. For days the prisoners were left hanging, sometimes naked or nearly so, until the cords, ever tightening around the weight they held, cut bloodily into the women's skin. Salt was sometimes applied to those cords, milk cows allowed to lick at the netted load of women. Paquita had protected her from such a fate, she knew. And that had eventually helped her to forgive, or at least put aside—justly humbling, given her own compromised existence, her presence on this California-bound steamship being proof enough of that. What would Pepe Martí, with his novice mistress–like harping on purity of conscience, purity of everything, say if he could see her now?

One day, seemingly out of the blue, Paquita had even sent her a handwritten message offering her a position as governess and tutor of her children, inviting her and Mathilde to accompany them during their months-long residences in New York—María de las Nieves had bluntly refused; yet once or twice every year, La Primera Dama had repeated the offer (and only days ago, María de las Nieves had finally accepted, at least the invitation to New York). That was the same woman who'd stood alongside her husband on the balcony of the Casa Presidencial, presiding as the Muse of Massacre over the executions in the Central Plaza of all those whom her husband had accused, not in each case wrongly, of having plotted the murder of the Presidential Family.

"Did you know where Madre Gertrudis and her Sisters were hiding?"

"Not exactly. I could have found out, I think."

"Would you have told?"

"If he'd hung me up in a net, or thrown me to Rosario Ariza?" Ariza was the warden of the women's prison established in the former Carmelite nuns' convent, a notorious harpy and sadist. "Yes, I would have told! Did you think I would suffer to save Sor Gertrudis? Is it true that he wanted to put her in front of a firing squad?"

"I thought you would, yes. I thought you were still a complete fanatic, that you were just pretending to have changed. That you were just waiting for a chance! But Rufinito never said that. Perhaps in jest, he did. Execute La Monjita Inglesa, imagine! Even if she deserved it, even if she was complicit in one of the conspiracies to murder us, to murder not just the President but, do not forget mis Nievecitas, his wife and children too—oh, corazón, that would have caused many more problems than it ever could have solved."

"A crime, but a greater blunder. Didn't someone in history say that?" She lightly sucked her lip, widened her eyes, and lied, "Madame Roland."

"Back when you met Martí, you had suitors. You might have married one of them. I marvel sometimes at your serenity, María de las Nieves. Doesn't it ever bother you to think how differently your life could have turned out?"

"The only ones I was aware of were old or homely or dull or widowed or foolish or lonely or some combination of those," she answered. (Serenity! Anything but!) "And a few disreputable foreigners, the type who would even stop you in the street and try to talk to you, usually drunk. But never the handsome men, never the immediately impressive, dazzlingly vital ones. Of all those candidates, let's say lonely had the best chance to force open a slight angle of vision, through which I might judge, without anyone else knowing, the quality of light that appeared."

"O Dios, Dios mío! Grant me patience! Sor San Jorge and her eternal Jesuit sophistries!" Paquita laughed, then said, "That blond Englishman wasn't so terrible. You could have done worse than him."

"Oh? Do you even remember his name?" After a moment, she hinted, "Wehhh …"

Paquita again shook her head no.

"Wellesley." Spoken as almost three syllables (a bit contemptuously, like a foot sliding into a shoe as you're pushing up to leave). "Wellesley Bludyar. And, yes, he was lonely. He had the bluest eyes, but he was not handsome. Children even used to make fun of him in the streets, poor Wellesley, shouting at his back, El Chino Gringo!"

The parcel of land on the high Pacific slopes of the Sierra Madre, at the far eastern frontier of the Costa Cuca, which María de las Nieves had inherited from her father, Timothy Moran, she had sold only one year after leaving the convent, when she was still living in Quezaltenango with her disgraced mother and the Indian sheep farmer in his squalid family compound in Barrio Siete Orejas. She received much less for the land than it was worth, and gave half of the sum to her mother, who had left the Aparicio household to live with the sheep farmer. (But he was not a poor Indio, and grazed his sheep at several pastures within the city limits.) Though she could hardly foresee ever having the capital to begin planting coffee or anything else there, she did know it would have been wiser to have kept the land—if she'd had any way of preventing it from being stolen from her. The deed had been signed under the old Conservative regime. When she got there, it was being farmed by Mam Indians, who claimed it was theirs. From the beginning of time, they said, it had been part of their ancestral lands. But what if the Mam were lying? Her father had signed a deed. Going to the pregnant young bride of the President of the Supreme Government was out of the question. She refused to even approach the Aparicios, after the way they had forgotten about her and treated her mother. Who did she have to turn to? She, just another refugee of the historic de-cloistering of the nuns, enduring the humiliation of living with her mother in the Indio sheep farmer's compound, sleeping on a mattress of piled corn husks in a corner of their dirt-floored hut, fighting for space with chickens and mangy dogs in the smoky hut; back to nun's hours, roused out of bed well before dawn to grind corn; waging futile war against fleas and lice abounding everywhere, steaming herself in the sweat bath so excessively that her fingers and toes felt perpetually like mealy potatoes, her skin tart tasting from the vapors of medicinal herbs, her hair as slimy as if washed with algae. From an itinerant vendor in the market she bought a moldy volume titled American Popular Lessons, with which she was able to practice and improve her English, and that book became the sun at the center of her life, just as Fray Labarde's had for a while been at the center of her previous one. Finally she wrote to Padre Lactancio, and her old Confessor telegraphed her the name of a Los Altos priest, who, when she went to see him, had already begun to negotiate on her behalf with the head of a Bavarian household of laborers; the proper paperwork was prepared. Selling the land hadn't been wise but it had saved her, kept her out of danger. It was her father in heaven, his land, and being able to sell it, that gave her the life of a romantic heroine in a novel rather than of an ordinary mengala in the city, with no other escape but marriage to anyone who would take her, or perhaps a servant's job, or some other even more sordid circumstance; hers was a mystical escape as wondrous as any she'd read about in Sor María de Agreda. Her share of the money allowed her to buy a small house on a narrow callejón near the Plazuelita de las Beatas; the modest amount left over was placed with Padre Lactancio for safekeeping. She had a boarder, Amada Gómez, widow of Zeno, a seamstress with a job at a dressmaker's, who rolled cigarettes at home to earn a little more and cried herself to sleep every night, and one Indian servant from her girlhood home in the mountains, María Chon, the niece of Pakal Chon, the maker of rabbits from inflated peccary intestines. Another new phenomenon of the era: women living on their own in the city, who in order not to seem backward had to wear at least an inexpensive Parisian-style hat like an inverted flowerpot with artificial flowers, instead of a lace mantilla. María de las Nieves had recently purchased such a hat, a few secondhand, refitted French-style dresses, and other required accoutrements. She often walked unescorted in the streets, as usually only foreign women did, or any India or lower-class mengala. At sixteen, though lacking a formal school degree, she'd been hired by the British Legation as a translator. She spoke and read English, Latin, a little French, and Mam, possessed a convent schoolgirl's and ex-novice's manners and clerical and domestic skills, and was also giving lessons in Spanish to Mrs. Gastreel, whose husband, Mr. Sidney Gastreel, was British Minister Resident to the five Central American Republics (also, covertly, to the rebel Mayan Republic over the border in Quintana Roo, and to the dormant Kingdom of Mosquitia, on the Nicaraguan Atlantic coast.) María de las Nieves nearly lost her employment at the legation when the inevitable gossip finally reached Minister Gastreel, via Mrs. Gastreel, about her childhood relationship to the wife of the President of the Supreme Government. Minister Gastreel did acknowledge that Do?a Francisca was just a child, imprisoned by marriage to an ogre old enough to be her grandfather, but obviously a charming girl, and even a civilizing force on her spouse, though only slightly, but how can we be certain, María de las Nieves, and absolutely certain we must be, that you are not a spy?

On first impression Minister Gastreel looked like a farmer or woodcutter in a fairy story, with coarse steely hair, strong, knobby features, weather-roughened face, and small, alert eyes; his manner was sharp and condescending, but sometimes very kind. Also present at her impromptu interrogation that day in the Minister Resident's library was the legation's young First Secretary, Mr. Wellesley Bludyar, who looked so much like a colorless, nearly albino, tall but plumpish blue-eyed Chinaman that, in an odd echo of her former nun-mentor's popularly misattributed nationality, he really was known around the city as El Chino Gringo (or, in certain rarefied circles of La Petite Paris Centro-américaine, as Le Chinois Anglais). She told the two British diplomatists that she hadn't spoken to Paquita, not a word, since they were schoolgirls together in the convent. Her indignant eyes filled with tears. They had seen for themselves how happy she'd been over the outcome of the Consul Magee incident, when Minister Gastreel had so easily imposed his degrading terms against El Anticristo's insolent pretensions. Colonel González, commander of the garrison at Puerto San José, a boorish Spaniard, the President's friend and ally, was relaxing on the beach with his soldiers one evening when he was approached by an Englishman with a series of minor requests and complaints that he seemed to want resolved immediately, all the while holding out papers, which the irritable port commander was too drunk to read. His smoldering Iberian resentment of Englishmen instantly aggravated by this one's supercilious manner, Colonel González had him jailed and flogged. The Englishman was Mr. John Magee, and the papers in his hand identified him as Her Majesty's recently appointed consul at Puerto San José. The British Legation had then respectfully informed the President of the Supreme Government that, in order to avert the immediate dispatching of British warships, several demands would have to be satisfied. So the Union Jack was raised over the port and honored with a twenty-one-gun salute by troops of the Republic after their own flag had been lowered onto the mud; the obnoxious Colonel González was sent to prison, lashed and pummeled so severely he must have received his death as a blessing from a forgiving God; and the Supreme Government was forced to pay fifty thousand pounds in reparations, divided between the government treasury of Her Majesty the Queen and Consul Magee, converting the former British merchant sailor, overnight, into a man of means, one said to be already looking into purchasing a coffee farm.

"I rejoiced in all of that!" María de las Nieves concluded. "I am second to no one in this country in my detestation of this despot! I didn't even go to him to save my father's land. Don't you think I could have?"

Wellesley Bludyar then remarked, "We are employing the most unusual translator of any legation in this country, if not in the whole world, Your Excellency. A Yankee-Indian, anti-Liberal, anticlerical who often speaks like a Freemason yet also seems to admire the Jesuits and certain apparently monstrously gifted nuns of centuries past. O Virgin of the Snows!"

She thought, A pícaro, that Se?or Bludyar. During their idle hours at the legation, she'd let herself converse too freely and vainly.

"Like so many other young people now, I am not sure what I believe," María de las Nieves passionately responded. "So much has been torn down, and so quickly. But has anything yet replaced it?"

Hands in pockets, Mr. Bludyar stood studying the floor, his dull ivory-yellow hair (straight as a Chinaman's) hiding his eyes. Minister Gastreel wore a stopped-clock expression. She hadn't meant to cast such a mood of gravity, which she felt settling over them like a net in which the afternoon light was slowly dying.

Wellesley Bludyar looked up, and with an air of stifled mirth said, "How very superficial of you, Snows."

And Minister Gastreel said, "But no one has ever accused Mr. Bludyar of being profound. I'm sure you are right, Se?orita Moran, and that for the thoughtful young people of this great Republic life here now presents a perplexing conundrum, with only a cynical despotism and the hardly abated spectacles of popery and priestcraft offered as exemplary. What is the faith of this nominally Christian government, Wellesley? It is hard to believe they are not the enemy of all religion. I am continually telling the members of this government that if they would provide the small number of Protestants here with a church, then the people could witness a more decorous and sincere form of worship, from which might originate a true reform of this country. You will not lose your employment, Se?orita Moran, but it was not proper of you to have concealed this extraordinary personal connection."

One night soon after, Wellesley Bludyar escorted María de las Nieves, outfitted as a pirate in seaman's clothes borrowed from the legation, to a costume party at the home of General García Granados, the former President. Bludyar was astonished at the warm welcome María de las Nieves received from Do?a Cristina—but the former Primera Dama and enthusiast of intrigues, whether political, conventual, or romantical, was fascinated by the former novice's personal connection to the current Primera Dama, and knew about her conflictive relations with the vexing and now clandestine Sor Gertrudis as well. In keeping with Chafandín's aristocratic, Liberal, and "bohemian" sensibilities, his parties were always eclectic gatherings: government ministers and members of the old Conservative elite, fashionably libertine poets, ambitious young military officers, the diplomatic corps, eminent clergy, the impresarios and performers of whatever opera or drama company happened to be installed in the National Theater as well as those from visiting circuses and bullfights, political exiles, coffee planters, foreign travelers and adventurers, the occasional low-born young dressmaker dazzling the city with a just-cresting perfect beauty, or any character at all who captured the interest of the general or of anyone else in his family. Chafandín's house was the only place in the city where María de las Nieves could have mixed with such people. On other nights, the social life of the wealthy and powerful went on as usual, much of it revolving around public adoration of the dictator's beautiful young wife.

In the elegant sala, ablaze with chandeliers and Venetian mirrors full of golden light, a slight, curly-haired young man with flashing almond eyes was declaring that Napoleon's officers at the Battle of Waterloo owed their uniform's brilliant scarlet coloring to cochinilla dye (cochineal, in English) from this country.

"So do our small, weak countries participate in the great historical events of even the most powerful nations," he said. "As blood circulates through the heart and brain through the extremities and back" (pronounced in his softly Antillean-accented, liquid, yet precise diction, the recollection of which, as María de las Nieves sat consuming brandy and sardines and talking with Paquita in the stateroom of the steamship, still could make her feel as if a feather were being drawn lightly back and forth over her skin). "Of course Le Rouge et le Noir, the title of Stendhal's celebrated novel, refers to the red of those same French officers' uniforms, as le noir does to the cassocks of the clergy," the eloquent young stranger continued. "So even the title of one of the most notable novels written in Europe in our century has also been steeped in our … cochinilla … our"—he swept his hand before him, as if everyone listening was a cochinilla cultivator who now had reason to feel pride in his connection to an important work of French literature—"in that same native Central American red in which our resplendent quetzal first dipped and dyed her feathered breast …"

The stranger smiled quietly, as if not completely satisfied with his peroration, while his eyes beamed like those of a bemused, intelligent child's, seeming to confide that he couldn't help himself from talking this way, though he eagerly awaited a sympathetic response. His listeners, women in costumes and men who mostly were not, did not immediately provide it. Who was Stendhal? Why was he mixing up cochinilla and the ancient legend about the quetzal and the slain Mayan cacique Tecum Uman's blood? Who wanted to think about cochinilla, evocative now only of lost fortunes and livelihoods?

"And the philosophers who conceived the French Revolution," he added, more softly, turning his palms up as if he'd spoken these words many times before, "might not have done so had not our coffee, our own divine American nectar, been present to illuminate their thoughts and quicken their ardor. According to Voltaire—"

Was this, wondered María de las Nieves, the very Cuban so lauded by the Bayamés Bard? Most of the women simply stood there, intrigued behind their masks and fans by such loquacity, and by this slender young man with a philosopher's broad pale forehead, a poet's dramatic gaze and swept-back black mane, and the effortless good manners, dashing mustache, and electric energy of a true metropolitan. The men, less sure, looked around, seeking some signal in each other's darted glances to tell them whether to feel derisive or impressed. But some had already heard that the young Cuban had been imprisoned by the Spanish for revolutionary activities in Cuba, and that later in Paris he'd been received by Victor Hugo in his own home, and so they were regarding him accordingly, as if they could already sense that his mere presence among them meant that fate (as one young poet and future diplomatist among those men expressed it years later) had unexpectedly laid a path down amid their obscurity leading into the sunny foothills of greatness; one by one, most of the other men began adjusting their own expressions to match those of the knowing few.

Of course the worldly young foreigner's strange claims were actually plausible, because in the time of the Napoleonic Wars their country had been one of the world's leading cultivators and exporters of cochinilla, the tiny dye-producing beetles cultivated on the broad leaves of the nopal cactus, meticulously harvested and then baked in clay ovens. But the invention of aniline dyes in Germany had finally put an end to the once enormously profitable, if always uncertain trade, to which María de las Nieves owed so much: when they had first come to this country her father had worked as the administrator of a cochinilla plantation in Amatitlán, where he'd saved the money to buy his own plot of land for the new enterprise of growing coffee.

So it had been María de las Nieves who spoke first, unconsciously imitating his maddeningly infectious intonations even then: "I grew up on a cochinilla plantation. And then I was a novice nun in a convent. So I come from two worlds that are now obsolete. Two ways of life that have vanished from our Central American … our … Well, I mean to say, these are two things we no longer do here. We no longer cultivate cochinilla, and we no longer imprison our women for life in convents."

The stranger paused to politely exchange introductions—José Martí, he said, at your service—before adding with a smile: "From a nun to a pirate—let's hope that doesn't prove to be the characteristic transformation of our epoch, Se?orita Moran."

"What should I have transformed into instead?"

"Into a schoolteacher, no? That too is a sacred calling."

"Oh! I've had quite enough of sacred callings, Se?or Martí." Flustered, she murmured, "I was being trained to become a teaching nun."

"Our times also require martyrs and ascetics, but of a new kind—"

But at that moment a man standing behind her interrupted in a strong voice: "So she's part bug, part nun—that's a new kind of something."

"—willing to give up everything," Martí continued, while María de las Nieves turned to look at the man of rude voice and words and found a sturdily built, thick-necked young Indio in a frock coat, grinning at her as if he expected her to be overjoyed to recognize him. She was sure she'd never seen him before. Something about his preposterously eager face was like a big rock you instantly want to pick up and hurl into a pond. —Willing to give up everything for what? But when she turned back the young Cuban was being pulled off into another conversation.

María García Granados made a late entrance costumed as Cleopatra, her long, bare arms decorated with bracelets, her low-cut satin tunic exposing her pearly collarbones and the yellow-gray shadow of her cleavage, and her long ebony hair silkily opulent; but María de las Nieves did not notice that night's fateful first meeting between Martí and the former President's daughter. Also that night, Wellesley Bludyar, witnessing how María de las Nieves had lit up before the garrulous Cuban, and the evident strain of her effort to impress him, felt an all too familiar dread and a novel bewilderment as he realized that she was as capable of devastating his starved heart as any English girl had ever been. That night María de las Nieves also had her first encounter with Marco Aurelio Chinchilla, the brash Indio "nunbug" interrupter. So it was a significant party in more ways than one, as has been certified by history.

Later, she read the very book the Cuban had mentioned, as she would try to read any book she could find that he praised, and in it encountered the impressive "Mathilde."

"Ay Paquita, I'm tired and you've made me drunk; I am going to bed."

"But you've told me nothing at all, desgraciada! I already knew that, about how you met him."

María de las Nieves went to bed; and her story—much more than she would ever confide to Paquita—went on sailing up the night-obscured coast without her.

RUMORS THAT JOSé MARTí left behind at least one illegitimate child during his year in Central America have always centered on the subject of Poem IX of Versos Sencillos, one of forty-six untitled, often overtly autobiographical poems that the future hero of the Cuban Revolution against Spain published as a single slim volume in New York in 1891, during his decade and a half of exile there. That famous poem's tragic "ni?a de G—" is known to have been, or to have been inspired by, María García Granados, the daughter of the first President of the Liberal Republic, and of Do?a Cristina, the late Madre Melchora's most devoted former student and patroness. María García Granados passed away at the age of seventeen on May 10, 1878, from pneumonia and/or tuberculosis or, as the poem suggests, from the debilitating, wasting effects of a devastating heartbreak, which, of course, could have provoked the mortal onslaught of either illness or both together; unless, as claimed by rumor and legend, she died in childbirth; or even from all four phenomena combined into a single fatal cataclysm, if she really was heartbroken, and pregnant, the Koch bacilli dormant in her lungs, and, as the poem explicitly, perhaps metaphorically, suggests, threw herself into a river one afternoon and caught a deathly chill (the River of the Cows, winding through the Valley of the Cows); or else, as according to the skimpiest biographical record, she caught that chill by visiting one of the popular hot spring baths outside the capital on a Sunday afternoon when she was already running a slight fever, exposing herself to the fatal evening air on the way home. She and María de las Nieves really had known each other and were even, somewhat, friends. (But who outside the closed circle of the García Granados family, her mother and sisters especially, ever knew what truly occurred between the love-smitten girl and Martí, if even they did? Spying household servants? The Cuban poet José Joaquín Palma, such good friends with both Martí and María García Granados? But the golden-bearded Bayamés Bard was totally in love with the general's ethereal and willowy daughter himself, so perhaps neither would have told him anything.) María de las Nieves knew as well as anyone how much you could get away with hiding even in the small, joyless, informer-infested world of La Peque?a Paris. Yet thirteen years after "la ni?a's" death, when the incident was finally fading into the past and no longer inspired gossip or speculation and few outside the García Granados family ever spoke of it anymore, Martí would be the one to bring it up again, this time so that it would never be forgotten, in his appalling poem of tortured remorse and confession and morbid longing, sung like a fairy-tale song about a sad little princess who dies of love.

An entire long lifetime later, in 1959, indeed, the very faraway year of our heroine's death, the Cuban-American actor Cesar Romero, famous for his "Latin lover" supporting roles in thirties and forties Hollywood movies—though his greatest period of popular stardom was actually still ahead, playing the Joker on the sixties hit television series Batman, followed by his role as the debonair, elderly costar of the seventies prime-time melodrama Falcon Crest—appeared as a guest on the Jack Parr Show, that week televised directly from Havana, Cuba, in the aftermath of the romantic revolution there, and confided to the American nation that José Martí was his grandfather; though for that to be true, Romero's mother, María Mantilla, born in 1880, near the beginning of the fifteen years during which the "Cuban Apostle" made New York City his home, would have to have been Martí's illegitimate daughter. Hagiography, exalting, puerile, and prudish, is what most of the biographical literature about José Martí consists of. Now the subject of the "Husband of Cuba's" secret offspring was, for a while at least, more or less openly and widely discussed, though before long the official guardians of the hero's idealized image on both sides of the Straits of Florida would again intimidate scholars into the new-old attitudes of restrained and silenced speculation, at least so far as that specific event in Martí's private life was concerned. Some accused Romero of a cynical publicity stunt (as if having learned from television that he was grandson to the Cuban patriot-martyr, Americans would now clamor to see Romero in starring movie roles!). "The only paths to the luminous inner fountains of my grandfather's immortal verse," Cesar Romero insightfully told the pioneering talk-show host that day, "are the winding, hidden ones of his amorous history, which can only be explored with the torch of compassion held high." The actor also quipped, "Of course my grandfather, whose statue is all over the place in Cuba, was himself no statue." (Addressing Romero by his inside-Hollywood nickname of "Butch," Parr asked that he recite some of Martí's verse, but all the actor offered was the well-known fragment, Yo soy un hombre sincero / De donde crece la palma, in a native New York accent nearly as strong as Sor Gertrudis's.) It was Martí himself, one of the founding poets of Hispanic American modernism, who in his seminal prologue to Pérez Bonalde's Poema de Niágara, regarded as a kind of manifesto of the movement's poetics (which Cesar Romero is not likely to have read, though some publicity agent or literature professor pal, preparing him for his appearance on the Jack Parr Show, could certainly have summarized for him) wrote, in these times, with personal life so full of doubt, consternation, questions, unease and battle-fever, life—intimate, feverish, unanchored, impulsive, clamorous life—has come to be the principal theme and, along with nature, the only legitimate subject of modern poetry.

Though Martí was only twenty-four when he came to Central America, his life was already following a path that, from the perspective of his heroic martyr's death in battle eighteen years later, would seem as predestined as any saint's. Barely into his adolescence, he began authoring anti-Spanish tracts in the Cuban separatist clandestine press (and attempting translations of Hamlet and Byron, his English self-taught at home from a book of American Popular Lessons—the same manual that the fifteen-year-old María de las Nieves, living with her mother and the sheep farmer in Quezaltenango, would immerse herself in). Imprisoned by the Spanish authorities and charged with treason at sixteen, he served a sentence of hard labor in the notorious San Lorenzo penal quarry under the infernal Havana sun, with a heavy iron chain running from his waist to a shackle above his ankle, causing festering sores and abrasions. Martí's prison experience ruined his health forever, leaving him with, among other ailments, a recurring inguinal infarction and strangulated testicular hernia, caused by the constant pull and friction of prison chains against groin and infected wounds, which would require several apparently ineffective surgical operations over the course of his life, and which must have been the cause of considerable intimate discomfort, for years later he wrote that with those chains his jailors' had left him damaged in his decorum as a man. (An autopsy performed by Spanish authorities on Martí would plausibly record a missing testicle; in that era removal of the testicle was a common though futile surgical procedure for a testicular hernia.) From Cuba the teenaged rebel was deported to Spain, where he studied law and literature, wrote poetry, enjoyed his first passionately requited loves, and made speeches that among his fellow students and exiles won him the nickname "Cuba Weeps." In Paris he called on Victor Hugo, and before the visit was over the epoch's incomparable literary giant and universal champion of freedom had presented the young exile with a copy of his book of poems Les Filles to translate into Spanish. Martí's parents and sisters had moved from Cuba to Mexico City in the hopes of better economic circumstances; joining his family there, he found them living in humiliating poverty and grieving over the death of his beloved younger sister, Ana. In Mexico Martí wrote journalism as well as poetry, published his translation of Les Filles, enjoyed another precocious literary success with the staging of his romantic light verse comedy Amor con amor se paga, conducted love affairs (consummated and not) with actresses and the city's most notorious muse fatale, made speeches, and took part in public debates over the most polemical issues of the day (spiritualism versus materialism, during which he argued for a position in-between.) He also became engaged to marry a young woman from an aristocratic and wealthy Cuban family temporarily residing in Mexico, whose lawyer-businessman father was opposed to the match. Having become embroiled in Mexican political tensions, needing to prove that he could earn a living on his own, drawn to and curious about the Liberal Revolution in the little country to the south, and stirred by ardent ideas and visions of Pan-American liberty and fraternity, Martí decided to go there, promising his beautiful young fiancée that he would return to marry her and bring her back with him as soon as he was well established in the Land of the Quetzal. In a letter to General Máximo Gómez, the military leader of the Cuban rebel army that had been waging vicious and doomed war across the island since the "battle cry of Yara" nine years before, Martí, referring to himself as el mutilado silente, wrote that he was sick with shame that his weak health prevented him from fighting.

Martí landed on the Central American coast at Livingston—named (he wrote in his diary) for the jurist, not the explorer, but an honor to both!—in the spring of 1877, continuing inland via Izabal and Zacapa, following the same route an equally young Sor Gertrudis de la Sangre Divina had traveled thirty years before. Like the famous Monjita Inglesa, Martí also crossed the lush valley plateau atop a mule and, seeing the church and monastery towers and domes rising into view like fantastic minarets against an indigo twilight horizon of darkening volcanoes and mountains, knew that he was being carried toward the gates of a city of fate. Like the Yankee former Novice Mistress and Headmistress General, he was a visionary educational reformer; like her, he would be a teacher there. Martí's voice would also penetrate deeply into María de las Nieves's memory and heart and stay forever. The poem in which Martí dreams of a marble cloister at night and of speaking by the soul's light to the immortal heroes reposed in the divine silence is one that might have stirred Sor Gertrudis's own feeling for martyrdom. One could go on listing similarities between Martí and Sor Gertrudis, though, of course, a list of their differences would be longer.

On that inland trip, Martí had an encounter with a lithe but voluptuous Indian girl who emerged like a crowned Venus from the crystalline tropical river in which she was bathing, unself-consciously displaying herself to the thirsty traveler, who drank in her charms, his senses awakening to a new idea of American beauty; writing about the incident a few years later, Martí would confide that he loved and was beloved that day, before continuing on his way. What did he mean? That their eyes locked, until she shyly lowered them—and noticing in her physical manifestations of attraction and excitement corresponding to his own, he stepped closer to her? She did not splash back into the river, or run away, but allowed herself to be embraced. Her skin was sweet with the smell of her youth and the river water, which did not completely erase the traces of cooking-fire smoke in her hair, the sharp tang of tobacco on her breath, while he, scratchy shirtsleeves closing around her waist, was overripe with the stench of long, hard travel. Where were his guides or traveling companions and their mules? Did this occur in Izabal, before catching a river steamer, when he took a walk, following a stream into the jungle? She laid a quick bed of broad palm or banana leaves over the mossy, mud-oozing ground, and there they lay, ignoring or spared the fiery bites of ants. Or did he mean love in a transcendental sense, two sets of yearning, curious eyes, black and brownish, Amerindian and Spanish, there in the jungle shadows, chastely loving and desiring each other's youth, loving and discovering perpetually virgin America yet again? But who is to say that an anonymous child was not engendered in that fleeting encounter, one whose ancestors, perhaps Mayan-featured but with the striking forehead of the Cuban Apostle, shaped like a swollen heart, or like the upturned buttocks of a diving neoclassical nymph, are now, at this moment, living somewhere on this earth, in that country or, just as likely, given the migratory nature of these times, in this one, oblivious of their encoded heritage, yet feeling strongly stirred by some vague or wordless recognition in a photograph or illustration in a history book—or perhaps not wordless at all; perhaps they say, "Hey, my forehead is just like that!"—or by a bronze or marble bust mounted on a pedestal in some obscure park or courtyard or gloomy hall anywhere in the Americas or even the world, or by the enormous equestrian statue at an entrance to Central Park in New York, depicting a mild-looking man of wide forehead and flapping three-piece suit in the final moments of his life as the first Spanish bullets hit, tumbling him from his rearing horse. On the secret side of his death, Martí eternally rides a "question statue" too.

It was only years later, when the myth spawned by his death began to spread over the Americas like a hemispheric cloud of pigeons looking for statues to land on, that those who'd known both the general's daughter and the young Cuban exile understood that the poem about the girl who died of love and its author were now linked in immortality. But what if it was all just a fiction, a story, dressed up as a poem of tragic love and confession? A lie told for the sake of art, but with the consequences of a real lie. A poem that tricked you into hearing a confession when maybe it just wanted to be a poem. Or did Martí want something else from that poem? For example, to cruelly confront his wife with it. Why write it if not to wound her? Or, while she sat sobbing with the sheaf of his treacherous, soon-to-be-published verses in her lap, did he kneel at her feet babbling, "But it's a poem, mi querida, it lies in order to finds its way to another truth …" In another poem he mentions a woman with black brows and dark aquatic eyes, but not with so much feeling and with a different kind of regret, which is one of the ways María de las Nieves could tell that he sometimes wanted his poetry to lie. But that night, when she and Paquita conversed on the California-bound steamship, that poem did not yet exist, it was not yet María de las Nieves's invincible rival; that poem's ascension was still far in the future, when Martí became Martí, and his crucified love—for that is how he portrayed it—his perhaps fictional love, was resurrected, in order to become, forever and ever, throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, a love poem memorized and chanted by schoolgirls. And an unending source of rumor, scandal, and indignity. Even that scented silk pillow mentioned in the poem, into which she'd wept her brokenhearted tears, the one she'd embroidered herself and given him as a going-away present so that he could travel up to Mexico to marry his wife with his "ni?a's" fragrant pink-and-yellow silk pillow tucked under his arm, that same lachrymal pillow, more than a century later, is displayed in the museum to El Héroe Nacional in Havana, a silly teenaged girl's pillow worshipped like the relic of a saint!

IN THE PARQUE de la Concordia, where there was now a flower garden in one corner, cultivated roses in another, and jungle plants around a little lagoon in the shade of a thirty-year-old African palm tree recently transferred from La Sociedad Económica's experimental farm, all protected from "the nervous excesses of curiosity" by wood and iron fences—the fencing in of plants being a widely remarked and controversial novelty—four kiosks had also been erected. One of these, the largest, open to the air, was to shelter musicians such as Colonel Dressner's military band, which performed twice weekly in the afternoons. Another housed the park's guardians. A third, yet to open, would offer a buffet, fresh desserts, and drinks, as well as selling toys for children and other such articles. The fourth kiosk was a "reading room," with two sturdy writing desks, wooden chairs, and a box for posting letters. Originally there had been writing implements and stationery, but these had been stolen and not replaced. Steamship schedules for the ports of San José and Champerico were posted on the walls, though these were not always current, along with shipping rates, customs fees and tariffs, coffee prices, and other announcements. There was a bookshelf, but the only book it held was Táctica de guerrilla, used by the cadets at the new military academy in the former Convent de la Recolección, the vast garden where the nuns had cultivated their famous cabbages now converted to parade ground and shooting range. There was also a rack with portable sticks for holding foreign newspapers, the latest to have arrived aboard the steamships that now called at their ports from all over the world. Local newspapers were stacked atop one or the other of the writing desks, and María de las Nieves did like to read these whenever she stopped into the reading room in the mornings on her way to the British Legation, which was just across the street on the southern border of the park. Minister Gastreel and First Secretary Bludyar were not fluent readers of Spanish and were often impatient with the local newspapers and she knew they were grateful, however much they concealed it, for the information she provided without their having to ask.

The reading room was not a disreputable place, but it was generally perceived as a gentlemen's sanctum, though not so strictly as El Jockey Club, which was where such men, if they were members, went if they were really interested in reading newspapers; there, or La Sociedad Económica. No longer a novelty, the reading room kiosk was usually deserted. From their windows across the street, her employers could see directly into the park. A well-bred, respectable dama never walked alone through the streets, as María de las Nieves usually did; nevertheless, she knew it made a proper impression for her to arrive at the legation every morning accompanied by her servant. Most mornings María Chon went with her to the reading room as well, and then dropped her off at the legation door and continued on to the market.

A well-bred, respectable dama was never to return any male greeting in the street either, no matter how polite, for even a lightly tipped hat was a flung-open door to scandal and much worse. She would never sit alone with a foreign umbrella mender in his little shop for hours, as María de las Nieves liked to do. Nor could she eat garlic, onions, limones, chilies, or anything sharp, tart, or spicy enough to stir or heat the body and awaken lust. Having gone to such strident lengths to separate God from his Virgin Brides, the ruling Liberals seemed to want to keep women—but only their women—as strictly cloistered as before, and were as suspicious of their wives' and daughters' innate licentiousness and sinfulness as the most zealous novice mistress or confessor priest.

Yet since returning to live on her own in the city, María de las Nieves had yet to do anything that could cause her much social harm, or even anything that she was too ashamed of. She considered herself pure in her heart and in her body—even more so than she had as a nun, now that she was no longer required to regard her own incarnate self as a poisonous swamp and she wasn't so addicted to sneezing anymore either (there was no bristling Indio blanket upon her bed now, so if she wanted to sneeze in the old way, she had to pluck some wool from her boarder's or María Chon's blankets, risking great embarrassment if she were caught). She knew that her own circumstances excluded her from being counted among the well-bred respectable anyway, despite her convent education, and regardless of how sincerely her well-bred respectable compatriots professed to believe in the new democratic principals of la revulución (the fashionable pronunciation). And so she also understood—in the vague yet burdensome manner by which such unpleasant and rarely voiced knowledge is received and stored—that she was not really required or even expected to be "pure" by society generally, or by those whose eyes fell on her when she walked alone in the streets. There were many dangers she was not immune to, but so far she had been adept and nimble enough at deciphering and moving among them, even when she did not really comprehend what it was she was so instinctually avoiding. Los Gastreel y Bludyar, perhaps blind and deaf to these local nuances, certainly seemed to regard her, at least in comparison to other local se?oritas, as well-bred and respectable enough!

María Chon was darker, shorter, even skinnier than María de las Nieves, three years younger, and her smile revealed what looked like two rows of perfect little milk teeth. Usually she covered her mouth with her shawl whenever she laughed or smiled, and often when she spoke, although she was not in the least bit shy. Walking in the street, market basket balanced atop her head, María Chon always had her lips hoisted into a dismissive little pout, while her intense black eyes seemed to look out at the world as if accurately weighing the good and bad in every passerby, with predictable results. It was good to have María Chon by your side when walking out: her double sniper's stare and angry little mouth unnerved people, made them careful, reluctant to be bold. Which was all a bit ridiculous because María Chon knew so little about anything—no surprise in a ni?a her age, an Indita Mam no less, whose family had lived near María de las Nieves, her mother, and Lucy Turner in the forest. City life was a swarm of befuddlements to her, and there was little consistency or usefulness in her judgments, although she was rarely reluctant to voice any of them.

While María Chon waited on a park bench, shawl draped over her head and an unlit cigar in her mouth, basket at her feet, María de las Nieves went into the reading room kiosk. That day there was only one foreign newspaper hanging in the rack, and when she lifted its damp-saturated front page to see which it was, the corner tore off in her hand as softly as if it had been floating in a pond. It was a three-week-old Panama City Star & Herald—not a newspaper that excited a sense of romance or desire to daydream herself into the life of a faraway city.

There was also a small, elevated brazier for lighting tobacco in the reading room, and María de las Nieves, before sitting down to her local newspapers, took a rolled maize-leaf cigarette from the small leather sack in her purse. The age-blackened mahogany of the writing desks exuded a humid aroma that always made her feel hollow and a bit bleak: she could smell at least a century of monastic tedium and misery emanating from those old desks as surely as if they were the ghosts of unwashed friars. That morning, as she leaned down to the brazier, instead of hopefully blowing tepid ash back into her own face, she fanned a flame from the coals with just her second breath, let out a little shout of triumph, and carried her lit cigarette out to María Chon so that she could light her cigar. Back inside, she sat down with that week's edition of El Progreso spread open on the desk before her, slowly savoring her cigarrito and thinking about Wellesley Bludyar, whose bold and obvious yet definitely uncertain wooing of her could no longer be ignored or incredulously disbelieved. He was her first ever legitimate suitor, surely a significant event in any girl's life, one requiring the most serious contemplation and examination of her own feelings—feelings that should include some discernible metamorphosis at the core of her being, or no? (Bludyar, in those days, was also spending much of his time reflecting on that bewildered courtship, sometimes even out loud and within the hearing of others; perhaps even now, on rare days when the rain suddenly tastes tropical instead of like cold black stone and mussel beard, the emerald grass growing over his grave in a Norfolk churchyard still mulls that unlikely yet persistent love; though the grass, however much it drinks, can't weep.)

"The notorious Spanish decadence began with the addiction to smoking tobacco in the Americas"—Wellesly Bludyar, just the other day, had cheerfully read that aloud from a book, the memoir of an Englishman's travels in Central America, published in London, as they sat in a corridor facing the central patio on a not atypically idle afternoon at the legation. The notorious Spanish decadence, María de las Nieves had countered, began with the betrayal of Spain's own best religious, mystical, poetic traditions. A large argument to try to make in just one sitting, especially considering Wellesley's manly Anglo-Saxon distaste for such conversation—but then, in the most disconcertingly intoxicated if quiet manner, she'd spoken for many minutes to the moon-faced First Secretary as she never had to anyone in her life about her year as a novice nun. No day passed without her having some reason to recall how much she'd despised her time in the cloister, yet here she was talking to Wellesley Bludyar as if she still loved that way of life better than any other, cherished its memory and lessons above all others—while he gazed at her with such overflowing humor and affection that it was as if she could feel her own heart filling with the sparkling blue sky of his eyes. This is not me, she'd thought, this is like having a talking foot! From which liquid words are gushing as if from a radiant fountain of truth. What is happening?

"I almost think I'd give anything to be locked away in a convent with you, Snows," Wellesley Bludyar had jovially remarked when she was finished. "The two of us rising side by side, up-up into the air, over the mountains and ocean, all the way to … where was it? New Mexico. Hahaha. Aha …" Then he'd winked at her! Suddenly and perplexingly, the ebullience had drained from her heart. A moment later, reverting to his pompous tone, he'd added, "Your Spanish mystics must also have smoked, then. That is your opinion, is it. Or were they addicted to putting snuff up their noses, and levitating on sneezes!"

When Wellesley Bludyar saw María de las Nieves's expression (as he later confided to a sympathetic Mrs. Gastreel; and many nights later, though quite inebriated, and not so explicitly, to others; and within hearing of yet others, for the city was so infested with secret police, informers, and spies that another foreigner living there at that time, who kept an eventually published diary, famously wrote here even the drunks are discreet—though not always Bludyar) he thought his little joke had impressed her as cheeky and clever, and he felt unaccustomedly and gratefully thrilled. An instant later all had subsided into a feverish chill in his intestines. Could he really be falling in love with the odd little half-breed legation translator, with her crooked, gapped, discolored teeth, and tobacco-fouled breath and tobacco-stained (nearly vermilion) fingers? He gazed at her, smiling soporifically, and imagined himself telling his mother: Yes, an American Indian girl, rather well educated, you know, in a convent … No, they do not wear feathers and war paint … Anyway, not properly an Indian, she's what some call a mess-teezah … She does walk fairly well into a room, Mother, yes, and with a little instruction and practice, I'm sure she will walk into a room splendidly … Perhaps he should never leave the diplomatic service, though with such a wife, his next posting would be an even more obscure one. What would that be like, living with her in London? He saw himself moping through the cold wet, feeling misunderstood and mocked by everyone on earth except for María de las Nieves, and eagerly rushing home to the soft embrace of her skinny naked limbs. He would know how she smelled, how she tasted, what she dreamed, what she liked, disliked, feared, her private opinions of this person or that, what she—everything! He would live only for his Snows, for her kisses and intimate pleasures, in a secret world of—in and out of the little gap in her teeth he would slide his tongue—. How long was any man expected to do without love? Bludyar felt dizzy with soaring hope. He crossed a heavy, trembling leg over the opposite thigh, grabbed the tip of his raised shoe and pulled it toward himself like an oar, and frowning down at his knee, thought, The new Minister Resident of the United States, Colonel Williamson, is married to a lady from Cuba. So it can be done. Start anew in Canada. Not Australia. Oh why not just bunk off to California—. Did they dare? He gave her his warmest, sweetest smile, as if she'd just said yes yes yes—

The surprised gape on María de las Nieves's face was really one of appalled anxiety: Was the clandestine Sor Gertrudis, from her hiding place in the city wherever that was, sending out stories about her humiliating disgrace? Or was it Padre Lactancio? But the First Secretary's look of feverish devotion convinced her that his remark must have been coincidental. She laughed, and he responded with a sweet titter of his own, blushing, nodding, looking very happy, not meeting her eyes, tucking his head down into his neck and shoulders like a giant dove. Then a giddy sensation settled over her like the vast shade of a ceiba tree on a sleepy, warm afternoon. Pues, qué cosa, what was happening that afternoon in the legation garden, what strange spell was this? That providential moment of intimate well-being might have lasted had Wellesley Bludyar not ruined it by taking up his travel book again.

"The indolent decadence of Central American women," he read out loud, picking up where he'd left off, "perched in their barred window seats, gaping out at the street, with their drooping lips, glazed listless eyes, and unwashed faces, inwardly intoxicated as drunken bees by their wanton daydreams of romance …" Bludyar stopped himself, apologized, and said, "I don't see you hanging about in a window seat like that, Snows. Do you have such a window seat?"

"Dirty faces," she said. "Sí pues." Now, why should this annoy her? It wasn't untrue.

"You wash your face, María de las Nieves, I know. Really, a lot of this book is complete nonsense. He has a theory about why Central America has so many earthquakes. Because of the equatorial region's greater proximity to the sun. The sun's rays, refracted by the ocean like a magnifying glass, you see, bore with a more intense heat into the ocean floor than at other latitudes. Thus the molten earth beneath our feet, and the steaming fumaroles of the volcanic landscapes, and such."

"That sounds sensible." All over this country, boiling water was perpetually seeping and spurting up from the mundus subterraneus.

"Yes, but Mr. Gastreel says it's all rubbish. There is some other explanation."

Dirty faces, wanton romance, she wondered, was that what the foreigners saw, framing you with their gazes in the street? Wellesley Bludyar too? How do you see what's inside a man? Look at him now, looking at me, desperate for something to say, words of his own, not from a book. Why shouldn't what we think of the foreigners matter just as much? So now respectable women no longer smoke in public, and because of the foreigners' often expressed disdain of our reluctance to splash our faces with water, many women now regularly do that also, even in full belief that a wet face is like a door flung open to sickness in our world of battling hot and chilled winds that don't have to travel very far from sweltering coasts to stony mountaintops to reach us, of blazing sun swiftly covered over by massive black clouds, full of thunder and lightning; drenching tropical rain one second and frozen hail the next, steaming mists at one end of the street and frigid fogs down at the other. They fall sick and know it's because they washed their faces and let in the hot or cold. But she had also been taught to wash her face, on sunny mornings always, by Lucy Turner. She remembered being very small and sitting in forest shade with her madre and Lucy Turner, all three smoking cigars of wild jungle tobacco (even cruder than the one María Chon is smoking now) as darkness fell, and the saraguates howled and the trees seemed to melt and swarm into the most pleasant patterns, entangling their dark branches in the glowing stars and pulling them closer to the earth. As soon as she woke, always in the predawn still-dark, her mother, before sending her out into the forest to gather kindling or fill the water jug, would make her take lung-filling puffs of her cigar, to protect her from catching a sudden fright inside: with her head so dizzily spinning, colored lights pulsing in her brain, she wouldn't even notice any malevolent nighttime spirit still out there. If she caught a fright and it stayed trapped inside, she could fall ill and waste away; that was how children died. In the forest everyone believed such things. I am also the daughter of foreigners. Half-breed mengala, by a superstitious India from the Yucatán, and a gringo who didn't know better than to shove a maldita mule from behind—

There was a pleading look in Bludyar's eyes. Asking what? For friendship? For her to understand that he was unhappy? For her to believe in him? For her love? So, twice in her life, though several years apart, she'd apparently awakened more than just a passing longing in a man—first poor Padre Lactancio, who, pathetically unable to hide his feelings, had thankfully never dared to express them, and now the young British diplomatist. A longing that looked like weakness. A desire to reach out and comfortingly stroke Wellesley's blunt nose. Yet look how he loomed over her, this hulking blue-eyed dove! That afternoon she felt confused and alarmed in a new way. So she rose from her chair and with a soft "perdón" and a lump in her throat walked briskly toward Minister Gastreel's office, as if there were a letter to translate waiting for her there, which there was not. Every day since, the First Secretary had become a little bolder with her in his conversation, while his eyes grew hungrier and sadder. It was as if he wanted her to know he was suffering—that he was suffering nobly! But why was he suffering? Just last Thursday, hadn't she let him escort her home in a carriage from the García Granados costume party? She did sometimes feel an impatient pride in her looming victory over all those who would never have thought it possible for her to awaken the love of a British Legation officer. He had not yet asked to call on her one evening, but she sensed that this extraordinary development was imminent. She'd already discussed it with her dour boarder, Amada Gómez, who reluctantly agreed to act as chaperone.

"You haven't gone and had a spell cast over Se?or Gueyeslee or me, have you?" she'd confronted María Chon, assuming her most autocratic manner. "Because I don't believe in that! I would die of shame and melancholy and disgust if such a thing were ever to be the cause of my thinking myself in love or loved. Do you understand me, María Chon? If I ever learn you've been paying visits to witches, I'll have you arrested by the police. You know what can happen now to insolent servants when they are arrested by the police, don't you, María Chon?" She knew that María Chon knew; she was the one who'd first brought the terrible gossip back from the market, how Don Rufo Zarco had turned his unruly servant over to the police, and the police had put her in one of Do?a Carlota Marcorís's brothels. Thus the new epoch of Revulución, Progreso, y Orden: under the Conservatives the police would capture escaped nuns and return them to their convents, but under the Liberals they hunted down any girl who ran away from a licensed house of tolerance. María Chon, wide-eyed, had hotly retorted, "What would I pay such a witch with, mi do?acita? With money? Maybe I could steal one of your madre's husband's sheep. Qué tal? So that you can go live in England with fatty Chino Gringo."

My little love for Wellesley Bludyar is a tiny blue flame, she decided, wishing it to be larger. But who is supposed to make it larger, him or me? This image of a tiny blue flame was one she'd held inside her for days now, like a meditation point, like interior prayer after all; ponder this point: Are you going to flame up, little blue love, or be extinguished? Her fingernails dug tightly into her own palms, and she was biting her lip. Ea, what are you so afraid of? She stared down at El Progreso, without registering anything she might have read, and turned the page.

So if no European ever actually marries an India, she mused, then where did all the mestizos come from? If we are so ugly, then how can it be that this blond Englishman desires me? As if I'm the only one who is not ugly! María Chon is so pretty, with her zapayul eyes and lips as haughty as any Parisian mademoiselle's that sometimes it makes me happy just to look at her. You will say, Well, it's her character that delights you. Pues sí, she is so funny, so impossible! But it's not just that—. María de las Nieves rose again from the writing desk and went to stand in the door just to spy on María Chon smoking her cigar and sitting on the park bench, and laughed out loud when the girl returned a puzzled scowl. The first mestizos came from the first María Chons, for who could resist them—! In the mountains, even pretty girls are worn and withered-looking by thirty, but here in the city, not always. What good luck that my Maricusa works for me, and not as a servant in a house with husband and sons who doubtless would be unable to resist using her as they do even serving girls who are not one-fifth as adorable—. Disturbed by this thought, she turned back into the reading room kiosk, sat down, and turned a page of El Progreso, turned another page, and another—though only one memory of what she read in the newspaper that day would survive.

El Se?or Martí is a collaborator of the youth of our century, which in both American continents is pronounced with these words: Forever Forward. It was an account of the Saturday night tertulia at the Normal School, where Se?or Martí had apparently dazzled and which she, anticipating the presiding presence of the pregnant muse of all poets of the Republic, had avoided, staying home to play cards with her boarder, Amada Gómez, and María Chon, and a friend from Nuestra Se?ora de Belén, though she'd hardly known her there, Vipulina Godoy, the former Sor Cayetano del Ni?o Salvadór del Mundo, the young nun who'd escaped the convent simply by leaving through the front door. The article on the tertulia was followed by a small announcement:

At the Academia de Ni?as de Centroamérica, the recently arrived Cuban professor and poet José Martí will be conducting free evening classes in literary composition, that art which so elevates a woman's merit.

As if she'd just tasted some subtle flavor in the air, she felt a quiver inside her throat—and then she was holding herself very still and all her shadowy excitement fled and she found herself at the bottom of an abyss of sullen dissatisfaction, hating her own delusions and pretensions, the absurd lie of her specialness, and she sat blankly staring at the announcement in the newspaper, her clenched hand propped so rigidly on a corner of the page that it began to resemble the taxidermied hoof of a fawn. She stayed that way until a clump of ash fell to her lap from the dwindled cigarrito between her lips. Now, here was a problem. She carefully raised her thighs by slowly lifting her heels off the floor and lowered her head and blew steadily on the ash, which instead of flying off the yellow muslin all in one piece exploded into a fine gray powder that was going to leave a smudge in the fabric no matter what. With both hands she shook her dress in her lap and, averting her eyes, swept at it with the back of her hand, and stood up to go, and had hardly taken three steps toward the door when she saw a figure rapidly approaching from outside like a storm at sea—a storm that somehow cleaves a sailing ship exactly in half, port side sailing off in one direction, starboard in another—; she knew she had to turn back and tear the announcement from the newspaper and leave at once, and she had to leave at once because it was that same Indio in a frock coat who'd interrupted at the party where she'd met Se?or Martí.

Before whirling around she glimpsed him removing his hat and a flash of teeth-and-grin and heard that resonant metallic cloc-clic that lately she heard everywhere. In her agitation she tore away more than half the page of the newspaper, too big a piece to neatly fold in such a hurry, and, still holding her cigarrito, she balled it into her palm, and turned—

"Se?orita Moran—" She gasped and dropped the cigarrito and took a step backward, for he was standing right inside the reading room, with his hat over his broad chest, pomaded black Indio hair combed straight back over his large square head, showing his fleshy smile, blunt cream-colored teeth, and a steady but worried stare, and as if this was the only explanation required he proffered his hand to show her the little iron noisemaker known as a cri-cri, saying: "Good day to you, Miss Moran!" He pronounced it the original Yankee way (More-anne) rather than as everyone else did (Mor-án); even her own tongue resisted the awkward exertion and vanity of pronouncing it as her father must have (his own name).

And he quickly stooped to pluck the moist tail of her cigarrito with the thumb and index finger of the same hand clasping the cri-cri and she veered around him and walked quickly out of the reading room without another word. She was almost out of the park, by the rose garden, lifting her skirts over the muddy ground, the rhythmic rustle of fabrics like the beating wings of geese, when María Chon caught up to her, running in her clattering sandals, clutching a corner of her shawl in her teeth, both hands holding on to the basket atop her head, and before María de las Nieves could scold her for not having leaped to her side as soon as she saw that impertinent Indio approaching the kiosk, María Chon was actually scolding her:

"He wanted to give you a cri-cri! He smiled and tipped his hat and showed it to me before he went inside and when he came out after you left with ants in your underwear he showed it to me again and I said, I'll bring it to her, Se?or! That one is a gentleman!"

"That one is just a grosero jocicón from the mountains, who thinks with a little English—"

"Ah, sí pues, we're not from the mountains, vaya, how dare a jocicón try to give a cri-cri to Do?a Sholca!"—fatty-lips give a cri-cri to Do?a Missing-her-front-teeth—and there in the middle of the rough-paved street approaching the legation, María de las Nieves whirled and slapped at her little servant's face, though María Chon was so nimble she jerked backward just in time, and grinned maliciously, and María de las Nieves lunged forward and slapped at her again, this time barely scraping her cheek. But at least now María Chon looked frightened, and stammered an apology in Mam, and around them she heard the whistles and shouts of mockery, even the shrill voice of a boy bootblack calling, "Look at Queen Victoria beating her little servant!" And someone else: "Anda Indita chuladita, give it back to her, smack that uppity mengalita!" And a resonant baritone: "It's a massacre! Ayyyy, a massacre!"

María de las Nieves could see Don Lico, the legation concierge, on his stool by the front doors, watching from under the bent brim of his straw hat. Oh, don't let the Gastreels or Wellesley look out any of the windows! María Chon, lower lip pushed out like a little girl about to cry, was staring down at the little metal cri-cri in her hand. María de las Nieves said, "Ven," she didn't want to leave her outside on her own, but María Chon clucked her teeth and turned and strutted off with her basket hoisted back atop her head, through a stream of hilarity and whistles, rapidly thumbing the metal tab of the cri-cri in her hand, her trail of sharp metallic clacking answered by numerous people in the street with cri-cris of their own. Astonishing instruments! Imported from France! One day no one had ever seen a cri-cri before and the next, all over the country, one in every child's and fool's hand or vest pocket like a plague of metal locusts!

Don Lico, still sitting with his chubby legs splayed and his hands on his knees and cackling, did not budge from his stool until María de las Nieves, blinking back tears, was standing before the doors.

"Don Lico," she squeaked desperately.

"Ay chula," he said mirthfully, "we all have to be like soldiers ready to die for the patria every day!"

She walked directly through the vestibule with its polished white marble floor like the mirrored reflection of a milky cloud, through the antechamber and the wrought iron doors, into the central courtyard and around two sides of the shaded corridor hung with small bird cages and baskets of flowers and lined with slim white columns and heavy marble urns holding jungle plants, spilling trumpet vine and hibiscus, and sat in a straight wooden chair with leather-padded armrests outside the closed door of Minister Gastreel's office. She pulled the wadded newspaper page from her purse, unfolded and smoothed it out on her ash-smudged lap. The Academia de Ni?as de Centroamérica was where the daughters of the wealthy went; even an evening class there could only be for respectable damitas living at home with their respectable families. Yesterday she'd never even imagined the possibility of such a class, but look—. Now she felt like she no longer even wanted to live because she knew she was going to be prevented from attending this class offering a solution to everything tedious, choking, and small about her existence—including her own confusion and inarticulateness regarding weighty matters requiring some degree of inward eloquence and clarity of expression, her inability to decide if what she felt for Wellesly Bludyar, and he for her, was beautiful or mediocre, for example—right now she didn't even know if she adored or wanted to kill María Chon!

Although we know that, in the end, José Martí, of course, did welcome María de las Nieves into his class at the Academia de Ni?as, at that moment she could not have felt more convinced that it was impossible, and life had never seemed so unfair.

Presently Mrs. Gastreel entered the corridor opposite from the interior garden and living quarters, where Wellesley Bludyar, being a bachelor, also resided. The Minister Resident's wife (Wellesley called her "the Chiefess") was eighteen years younger than her husband, and was just showing the first signs of being pregnant with their first child. She was wearing a red-and-white striped dress, an undecorated wide-brimmed hat against the sun, and was carrying a large garden shears in one hand and a packet of letters in another, and was followed by one of her indoor servants, Chinta, her arms full of fresh-cut flowers. Mrs. Gastreel's hair was nearly as red as Sor Gertrudis's and her eyes were an even brighter shade of blue than Bludyar's.

"Hello, Se?orita Moran, a very good morning to you, I'll be with you in just a moment"—often Mrs. Gastreel liked to get her Spanish class out of the way first thing in the morning—"but look, dear, I did just want to give you these. These are all our lovely Christmas cards from this past season; there are fifty or so, many from England. I was going to throw them out and thought, Oh, what a terrible waste, and then I remembered that an excellent use for Christmas cards is to put them in a packet just like this one, you see. Then, whenever you have the opportunity, you can lend them to invalids and old people to look at. It really takes so little to cheer such people up, and I think we do forget that rather too easily. Oh well, not you, María de las Nieves, we all know that you are an angel from heaven."

ABOARD THE GOLDEN ROSE that afternoon, in the sitting room of her opulent stateroom suite, Paquita's two oldest daughters, Elena and Luz, put on a show of handkerchief telegraphy, proceeding through the semaphoric display, which they had spent hours practicing, like well-drilled naval cadets. They wore colorful Japanese silk kimonos and glittering gold slippers that Mathilde, sitting quietly, followed with rapt eyes. Elena and Luz, directing meaningful stares toward an invisible object in the middle of the room, announced in unison: "This means I wish to begin a correspondence with you," and each slid a flowing white handkerchief across her lips as if delicately wiping away a crumb. Next each girl touched her forehead with her handkerchief, gave a sideways glance, and said, "This means we're being watched." A handkerchief held against the right cheek meant "Yes"; against the left, "No"; clasped to one shoulder, "Follow me"; rapidly daubed from one cheek to the other, "I love you"; wound tightly around an index finger, "I'm promised to another"; wrung with both hands, "Indifference!"; pressed to the right ear, "You are unfaithful"; pulled with an insolent flourish through the left fist, "I detest you!" Elena and Luz each struck a blindfolded pose and dramatically sighed, "Mamá will answer for me." (María de las Nieves nearly blurted, Very pretty, but do you expect any man worth knowing to have memorized all of that? He'll just think, What fidgety girls—but she stopped herself, and thought of Martí; because Pepe Martí was so curious about everything he probably had memorized the language of handkerchiefs, of fans and flowers too, though nowadays dandies who were virtuosos of such frippery and interested in nothing else were everywhere.) María de las Nieves did laugh out loud when each girl, biting into her handkerchief, growled through clenched teeth, "I'm jealous!" Then, draped over the head like a mantilla, "I'll see you in church"; patted against the base of the neck, "This cough has me in a bad mood"; dangled like a banner in front of the chest, "My heart is innocent"; waved over the shoes midcurtsy, "I'm going to marry a foreigner!" Mathilde, watching from her chair in the corner, face as somber as a ripe brown pear, sprang forward in short white dress and bloomer-trousers and snatched the handkerchief from Luz's hands. She dropped to one knee and flung her arms straight up, holding the handkerchief taut like a canopy over her head, and called out, "I'm going to marry a cat!" She spun agilely into a ballerina's pose, her leg and foot arched so high behind her that she was able to leave the handkerchief draped over her toe while spreading her arms, and said, with a flicker of a smile, "Mamita, someone who loves you has just woken up from a dream about you." Then Mathilde stood facing them, holding the handkerchief between her elbows and peering out through the V of her forearms, and gravely announced, "This means if you desire to speak to me, you will have to remove your head."

Luz started toward Mathilde, arm raised to strike her, lips in a sneer—but Paquita's vigorous applause and shouts of "Bravo! Bellisima! Bravo!" made Mathilde skip forward into the safety of her "tía's" embrace, leaving Luz holding up her hand as if a bee had stung it. Meanwhile María de las Nieves sat there, still only gaping at her daughter. Was Paquita a naturally superior mother, or just a more practiced one? Luz and Elena stood sulking like usurped predators until Paquita began lavishing praise over all three performers, this time with María de las Nieves obediently chiming in.

In her stateroom suite Paquita slept in a four-posted bed bolted to the carpeted floor, and there were gas lamps on the walls that she was free to burn any hour; her children and the governess Miss Pratt had berths in the adjoining rooms. The small first-class cabin María de las Nieves shared with her daughter had a glass-enclosed candle she was not allowed to light after eleven at night, a rule she ignored. But now it was nearly midnight and María de las Nieves, having just left Paquita's sitting room after another night of conversation and brandy drinking, was leaning on the ship's rail. Mathilde, she thought, has the hermetic air of a girl who might forever remain a mystery even to herself. One day, hopefully, she'll be sought and found, but the H. M. Stanley role can hardly be performed by the mother, who tends to regard her daughter as the artifact of all her own worse failings and flaws.

She knew her daughter would be lying awake now, waiting for her. Mathilde was terrified of the ocean. Boarding the ship at Puerto San José had scared her out of her wits; shamed her too, because Paquita's children, experienced travelers, the oldest so poised in their fixed attitudes of historic grief, had taken it so calmly. But Mathilde had never seen the ocean, had never set eyes on such violence: the long waves rolling in, exploding like thunderous cannonades, sun-blazed water shooting high into the air; thick swaths of foam washing in crunching stones; the debris of shattered fishing boats and the timbers of larger vessels strewn up and down the black sand beach like wreckage of war; the horrible deathly stench of tidal rot and fish. Their steamship had been waiting at anchor more than a mile out, beyond the treacherous surf. A black iron pier extended two hundred yards into the ocean and the train ran directly onto it; looking down, they could see enormous sharks swimming just outside the barnacle-encrusted iron pilings. A shed at the end of the pier sheltered infernally clanking and grating steam hoisting engines, two of which, via their pulleys and ropes, delivered cargo to the boats waiting below—including the late President General's white war stallion, strapped around its girth, eyes covered with blinders, ears and tail twitching, legs straight down in the air, its defecations inciting thrashing skirmishes among the sharks. A third engine lowered passengers five at a time inside an iron cage to the launch below, including an already weeping Mathilde. A muscular Indio wearing only a loincloth helped women and children out of the cage; they tumbled and flopped down among the coffee sacks piled into the wave-rocked launch. A slow tugboat towed them out to the steamship, the passengers blinded by ocean spray and oily black smoke, their vessel so violently pounded by the waves, lifted up and dropped over and over, that its shattering into sticks and splinters seemed imminent—. She held on to Mathilde tightly, felt her hard shivering, and pressing her lips to her daughter's ears to soothe her, heard Mathilde reciting her incompletely memorized rosary, and she joined in, reciting the words aloud for the first time in years … claro, to give comfort to her daughter … Passengers had to be hauled up one at a time inside a roped barrel lowered by sailors from the deck of the Golden Rose—one at a time, the women forced to shed all modesty, lifting skirts high while the nearly naked Indio helped them struggle into the dangled barrel and their boat rose and fell away from it, rose and fell away on the waves—. Who should go first, she or Mathilde? Both options incited wailings of panic and doom.

Every night since, Mathilde had climbed down from her bunk to sleep with her mother, despite the bed's narrowness and the heat. But right now María de las Nieves needed a bit of air. She had to admit that she liked this constant humid stickiness, this salty film of faintly rancid ocean covering her skin. Every now and then she took a little lick of her own forearm, the back of her hand; in private, she touched herself here and there, brought the small pungent smells to her nose; long-ago convent smells, really (it was inconvenient to bathe on the ship; one had to rent a little stall behind the barbershop, and pay Mr. Frank, the Negro barber, for soap, extra for hot water). Starlight foamed across the sky like butter in a cast iron skillet, and tonight the almost eerily tranquil ocean was filled with phosphorescent sparkles and flames, bursts and flickers of colored light like silently exploding fireworks as far as the eye could see. Unlike the most spectacular sunsets, she thought, these light effects don't enrapture the soul in a religious way. It was more like the nocturnal magic of a fairy story, one that was a little bit frightening. Of course it made you want to know the scientific explanation too. It was a delight, a complete privilege, to be on a ship at sea. But shouldn't she be able to derive some lasting lesson from so much beauty and surprise?—an insight into the universe corresponding with something good and necessary inside herself; something that could help her, that she could resort to during the trying times undoubtedly waiting ahead, in the cold, mysterious, frightening, thrilling, winter-dark and improbable city they were headed to? Something she would always remember and be able to pass on to Mathilde like a family heirloom of knowledge. Why was it so elusive, why did she feel so full of intelligent feeling, yet incapable of expressing the utility of any such feelings in words? Her old friend Martí had known how to transform moments like this into words he could possess and share—always in the manner of a brilliant and ardent young man, at least, dazzling himself as much as others. What would he be like now, nearly eight years later? He had reasons to be bitter, both personally and in his political passions; she knew that much from the Pinkerton detective's report. And if she managed to find him again, how disappointing would Martí judge her? He'd sometimes spoken so excitingly and exaggeratedly of the high expectations he had for her. Who else had ever spoken to her that way? Who else? Now here she was, taking her daughter to New York, to live like an opulent dung beetle off El Anticristo's plunder. Whenever she caught herself smiling like this, so confidingly and with such sad resignation to no one, she felt a wave of embarrassment and disgust. She wondered if she would always feel so alone in life as she did now, as she had for years.

In the morning, if the ship had a roll, she was going to feel horribly sick from the brandy, and would just want to sit all day. She wouldn't even want to take a turn with the binoculars watching the dolphins, the spectacularly colored schools of fish in the transparent turquoise water, or the changing geography of the coast. Yesterday they'd sailed through a wide stretch of ocean paved like a road of gleaming black stones with sea turtles.

As soon as she came into their darkened cabin, Mathilde, a sleepless grackle in her covered cage, squawked softly that she couldn't sleep. María de las Nieves pulled aside the double curtain and, regretting her warm brandy-tobacco-sardine breath, leaned in and kissed her daughter's damp cheek and said, "Do you want to come outside and see the stars and the ocean? They are so beautiful!"

"I want to pray my rosary." Paquita had given her rosary beads and now every night she wanted to clutch them and pray.

"Not now, chulita. Come outside with Mami."

Mathilde, in her sleeping smock, was still small enough to be carried, her arms wrapped around her mother's neck. María de las Nieves knew little about constellations, but she found two especially bright stars, among the lowest on horizon, looking as if they'd strayed from the rest. "Look at those two stars," she said. "Do you see them, Mathilde?" She described where to look. "Those are two little pearls my mamá gave me when I was little. She told me to put them away there, so that when my own daughter is old enough, I can take them down and give them to her."

"Abuelita doesn't have pearls. She has Indio beads and Abuelo's locket," replied Mathilde, her hot cheek pressed against hers. "Those are stars, Mamá, nothing more."

"Camarón! Whatever happened to childhood?"

The one piece of jewelry Timothy Moran had given Sarita Coyoy: a copper locket with a shamrock inside it. Lucy Turner had once explained the symbolism of the little trifoliate plant pressed beneath the glass, but if she'd ever actually spoken the word shamrock, María de las Nieves had long forgotten. One day at the legation Minister Gastreel had announced: "Today is Saint Patrick's Day, Se?orita Moran. Shouldn't you be wearing a shamrock in your hat?" Her incomprehension had invited an explanation, leading to the revelation that her paternal surname apparently revealed her father's Irish origin. But he'd been born in New York, he was a Yankee, and when she'd reminded the Minister of that, he'd jovially replied, "Well, you are noticeably lacking in the Irish sentiment, Se?orita Moran."

"Then do you want to take a little stroll with your mother, Do?a Mathilde?" That was the night María de las Nieves took her daughter up onto the hurricane deck, when she first saw the sailor who looked so familiar. The hurricane deck's long expanse was interrupted only by the ship's two funnels and masts and the gaslight-glowing pilothouse forward, and along the sides, lifeboats fastened over the rails. During the day, exposed to the harsh sun, the deck was an all but empty desert, but by night, a transient population formed, shadowy even in starlit dark, mostly composed of passengers escaping the suffocating heat and crowding of steerage and the below-deck cabins. Many lay down to sleep on the deck, stretched out with their feet toward the rail, and couples, asleep or not quite, lay in tight embraces, barely covered by their sheets and blankets; here and there María de las Nieves's gaze skipped over a bare white leg, a shoulder, some other fleshy portion. Some hung hammocks in the rigging. Negro and Chinese waiters, stewards, and kitchen workers stood along the rails smoking; boisterous Yankees with their happy-sounding arguments and quarrelsome laughter, spitting tobacco everywhere; over there a group gathered around an accordion player sang bawdy ballads in a strangely stirring cacophony of voices. Of course she, and certainly Mathilde, really didn't belong up here: she'd already turned back toward the stairs when she noticed a young sailor in white uniform and cap lounging against the rail, following her with his eyes, and her heart jumped and she stopped in her tracks and returned his stare with what must have been, she realized later, cringing, the most astonished expression. The other sailors were whites but he was not, he was a Mexican or Central American sailor, his smooth face a long oval, with high cheekbones and deep-set, flammable black eyes that lit up as if someone had just tossed a match in, and he broke into an impish grin—he didn't need handkerchief telegraphy to express himself—and, tightly gripping her daughter's hand, she resumed her walk back across the deck to the stairs.