Going After Ernesto SHORT

Just like tourists they stood in a row at the rail of the Isla Caiman ferry watching the dolphins jump out of the turquoise water into the brilliant air. Silvia stood close to her seventeen year old son Che, Cheito, her shoulders squared to protect him, although he was by far the stronger, two heads taller than she. With her short brown hair and small body she looked like a strange boy. Hanging on to Che's hand Taina, just turned six, jumped up and down counting dolphins, her long black braids bouncing, her body barely able to contain her joy. A few feet behind the girl, her grandmother Julia stood gripping a plastic chair bolted to the deck, her short bleached hair wind blown in clumps. Silvia wondered if she looked as scared as her friend Julia did. How had Silvia come to be at the front of the line, in charge? She never knew what to do. Anything she did might be wrong, could cost lives. Her indecision might already have cost her husband Ernesto his. She looked up at her son's face, his eyes were fixed on a distant point in the water. She could hardly believe Cheito was with her, that he had come home. Her indecision had almost cost her any connection with him. It might still lose him again to the street.
She turned her gaze to the right and here was the first glimpse of Isla Caiman, a distant yellow and green crescent. Maybe Cheito was right and Ernesto was there, renditioned there. Maybe Julia was right and her son David was there, had disappeared himself in the encampment that had sprung up outside the Camp.
There were people who always knew what to do and if they made mistakes they either didn't notice, or didn't care or knew how to make the most of them. Cheito was like that. He'd come home from a year in the Moon Park mushroom town, built up and strong. Almost a man's body. She let out a long breath. Ernesto was like that too. He and Cheito had taught themselves not to know they were afraid. Ernesto trusted his mind and was probably using it well, figuring out whatever hell he was in, probably doing better at the Camp, if he was at the Camp, than she was doing, probably more free in prison than she could ever be anyplace. When there was no one there to attack her she attacked herself, her mind its own autoimmune disease.
"Otro mas." The two women turned to watch Taina pull Cheito toward the stern, where dozens of dolphins were playing in the wake. They followed the young people for a closer look. Huge, blue, big snouted. The wondrous sea mammals who liked to chase boats belonged in the water, rejoiced in the water the way Silvia longed to feel that she belonged on land. Had she ever? Did Taina? She remembered how in her first years in exile when she was just about Taina's age, the only way she survived moving through her days in the City, on the unyielding, geometric asphalt and through the unlit canyons of concrete, was to pretend that she was underwater, that the air was the sea.

Silvia and the others looked at the dolphins leaping, this fenomeno de la naturaleza, just as if life were good. Taina had gotten to 23 counting dolphins. Silvia wished their little group was a fenomeno natural, a human pod, at home on the land. Only last month Silvia had pushed herself back into the life of her old friend Julia from the Partido days. Although they lived in the same barrio they'd barely spoken since their boys were just about Taina's age, just over a decade ago. A force field of unspeakable blame sprung between them after they nearly lost their boys on the subway on the way to a march against the war. Were dolphins also always on the verge of losing their young? Silvia and Julia had found their way back to each other, pushed by their need to find their sons, maybe truly lost for real this time, to the street, to oppression, to repression.
Most phenomenal of all, she was standing right beside Cheito. She had to keep looking at him to remember, to believe, that he was back inside her life. She'd found him just last month after losing track of him, not even a sighting on the street for a year. Found him only because Julia's son David was running from the cops, his face on wanted posters all over their barrio. Helping Julia look for David in the Moon Park mushroom town she'd found Cheito. Or he had found her. He'd appeared beside her, emerged from the maze of shanties as she sat on a bench on the top of Moon Park Hill, not knowing which path among the shacks to take. After an entire year there he was running toward her, bursting out of the smoke that always surrounded the shanties. She rose to meet him and they fell into each other and sank down onto the bench arm in arm. Cheito picked up their conversation where it had broken off the night a year ago when he had punched through his bedroom wall and said, "I'm going to go find Pa even if you are not." He looked into her eyes. "I heard you're helping Julia look for David. He's gone to the encampment in Isla Caiman. And now I'm sure they have Pa in the Camp. I'm going and you can come with me if you want." And so she'd followed.
Taina jumped, still hanging onto the railing, and called out, "Venticinco." Cheito squatted beside her. Silvia saw he stuck to the little girl because she was young enough to remember life was good. Taina screamed with joy. Silvia took in a breath and then found herself in tears. She herself was six years old, the bad guys had won in Ventura and so her father had to go into exile. Only later she learned through Ernesto those bad guys were the good guys. She saw Cheito glance at her, at her tears, and turn away, back to Taina. When had she turned into one more sad and angry woman?

Taina stood on tiptoes leaning forward, her head pushed against the bars of the rail. Cheito had her by the hand. He didn’t leave her side. When he was six years old, the year Silvia left the family for that fool affair with the cad whose name she couldn't bear to say out loud or even think, Cheito liked to play this game: He would take hold of Silvia's hand and close his eyes and tell Silvia to keep walking, navigating the Avenue crowds, making sure he didn't hit anyone or anything. Now she was following him, eyes closed.
Julia took Silvia’s hand and walked her to the other side of the ferry. “You’d think we’re tourists from the look of us.” She pointed to the rise of yellow and green. “Is that Playa Caracol?” Silvia remembered coming here with Ernesto when they were first together, and with Ernesto and Cheito when he was six years old. "That's the beach where Cheito nearly drowned." All those catastrophes had succeeded each other that same year: losing the boys on the subway, Cheito nearly drowning in Playa Caracol, Silvia's fool affair. Taina came running after her abuela. She pulled Cheito by the hand. "Are we going to that playa? Is this where my Papi went to hide? Where's my Papi?" Cheito shushed her. "Where's my Papi?" He repeated her words under his breath. He took hold of Silvia's arm and pointed to the harbor in the distance. “That's the navy base, just beyond it is the Camp. But you can’t see the Camp from here.”

The carro publico stopped by what looked like no place, a barren dune and left them standing with their duffels piled on the sand. Cheito had made the rule, one small bag apiece was all they could bring. He stood in front of them, their 17 year old leader, their little pack's alpha dog, looking. He pointed to a plume of smoke. It wasn’t hard to follow the smoke to the cluster of tents and makeshift wooden shelters. Among the shacks built of wood there were many more tents than Silvia had imagined, a few real tents, most of the others leantos made from palm fronds, tarps, plastic table cloths, shower curtains. Taina ran ahead of them calling out, "El circo." Where had she ever seen one? Cheito kept up with her. There were enough tents to get lost in. All these people refused to move, to be moved, for as long as it took, until their loved ones were released from the Camp. People joined them because they wanted to end the war. People came because this was a good place to hide. For others this encampment was better than home, or better than a mushroom town, a different kind of mushroom town with a cause. People came and went and some stayed. Some had been here for years. At first glance it was a happy place. Lots of music. Different music. They passed three men building a frame from two by fours between two other wooden shacks, in a narrow space where Silvia would not have seen the possibility of shelter. AQUI
A few yards from where three men played dominoes on a table made from crates they found an empty spot under a seagrape, set down their duffels in a little circle and sat on them. What time could it be? The sun was halfway to the horizon. Silvia looked at her watch and it was just past four. The beginning of their new life. How long could they last here? She had some money but couldn't imagine [how to predict the cost of living here]. She'd asked for her 11 vacation days and then for unpaid leave. [How could the world of her office and this one be on the same planet?] Taina stood motionless. Silvia saw her fix her eyes on a small iguana with a crest. "Un dinosaurito." Taina moved her hand to grab it and the iguana vanished. She dug her hand into her duffel. "Where's the Playa?" She pulled out a blue bathing suit and stripped and changed behind the seagrape. Cheito reached for her hand. "Let's find the playa." Julia waved at them as she spread a thick cloth on the ground. She lay on it, with her head on Taina's duffel for a pillow. Silvia jumped up before she lost sight of them and followed Cheito and Taina into the maze of huts and tents. He took a path along a dune toward the roar of the surf, everpresent beneath the cacophony of music, the [shards] of conversations and radio voices. The path turned onto a white sand turquoise beach. Taina screamed "la playa" and ran ahead. Cheito caught up to her. She kicked off her sneakers and raced into the water. Cheito ran in after her, wearing the shorts he'd traveled in.

Silvia walked slowly to the shore, slipped off her sandals, and walked barefoot on the packed wet sand. The sea was flat, calm, but she remembered its other face, the giant waves and ravenous undertow that had almost taken Cheito when he was Taina's age. She looked away. To the right in the far distance she made out a high fence, coiled barbed wire at the top. The Camp. [Paradise and hell side by side.] Was Ernesto really there? She felt her mind reach to make room for him, for thoughts of him, for his proximity. Cheito had made her come to believe Ernesto was alive. Just for this moment she let herself believe that whatever they had done to him, there would still be enough of Ernesto left in Ernesto that she would find him when they found him.
Silvia stood with her feet in the surf watching her son and Taina walk toward a little girl barely dressed in a small top and shorts, exposed skin baked dark brown, short curly hair scorched by salt water and reddened by sun. She dug with fierce concentration without looking up from a deep hole in the sand that had begun to fill with sea water. Taina was a few feet ahead of Cheito pulling him by the hand. She threw herself onto her knees beside the little girl who had shifted her efforts to patting into shape a row of sand columns, molding them with her hands. She smiled and Taina moved close beside her. "Soy Yuissa. You can dig there." The girl pointed to the hole she'd stopped digging. Taina pushed her hands deep inside. She looked up at Cheito. "I like sand. It's like dirt but it doesn't get you dirty." The girl pointed to a row of narrow seed pods and dropped her voice. "Los desaparecidos. We'll put them in the hole."

That night Taina made them move their little camp next to her new friend Yuissa's. They carried their duffels through the maze of households. Families cooked fish over open fire pits. Young men stood around boom boxes drinking beer. Cheito's new friend Lagarto, tall and thin and yellow skinned like the lizard he was named for, helped carry the sticks and plastic sheeting Cheito had bartered matches for. Cheito and Lagarto found a good mound of solid ground close to a sea pine a few yards beyond Yuissa's tent. They set up the lean to and when they were done Lagarto bartered Cheito's matches for two beers from the men next door. "At the encampment the party starts at seven at night and goes until seven in the morning." Lagarto offered Cheito one of the beers. Cheito glanced at Silvia and waved the beer away. "Later. Maybe later." Yuissa's Mother Mariamarta and older sister, Anacaona had a tall canvas tent and were sitting outside it at a wood plank picnic table, hand stitching the seams of black hoods. "Y esto?" Cheito patted the table with admiration. Anacaona laughed and her crown of braids danced. "Dragged it one night from the Playa Publica. Three of us went and took it late at night after one of the actions, to celebrate that for a change none of us got arrested. We decided we were entitled to some real furniture. Gracias mil." Mariamarta waved Silvia to sit beside her. "Ayudanos." We're chaining ourselves again to the Camp gate tomorrow morning." She pointed to the tent. Just inside the mesh flap covering the entrance, on top of an air mattress, was a pile of orange mamelucos. Silvia stepped inside and pulled one up. She fingered the thin orange fabric, not like anything real prison uniforms would be made out of. Taina and Yuissa went inside the tent and sat down on the sleeping bag where Yuissa's dolls were sleeping. They each put doll babies on their laps and bent over them, their heads very close.

Cheito took a weathered stick and pierced the fish he'd [bartered for then cleaned and gutted]. He cooked it over MariaMarta's fire pit. He offered Taina a small piece. She put it into her mouth all the while looking into his eyes for courage. "It tastes like the playa." He handed Silvia a piece. "Taina's right. The fish tastes like sea water. I've never had better." Already they were beginning to have a life here. She'd had almost no thoughts of her City life. [The way ] she had forgotten her Venturan life when they emigrated to the City. How was it that her office and her block existed? Julia had put a hood over her face. Anacaona had convinced even Julia to wear an orange jumpsuit and a black hood first thing tomorrow morning. Julia adjusted her hood and looked through its eyeholes. "I'm not chaining myself to any fence." [Silvia laughed. "That's more demonstrating than I've gotten you to do in the fifteen years I've known you." ]
After their meal the girls ran themselves dizzy around the fire and at last Cheito tucked Taina in alongside Yuissa. They had decided to share Yuissa's sleeping bag. He kissed Silvia's cheek. "Me voy. Tengo que ir a un sitio." After he was gone Silvia lay on the air mattress on the sand. She hadn't known how cool night by the sea could be. She could hear the sea lapping against the land, and she could see beyond the branches of the sea pine, another sea of stars. She dare not let form the thought that Cheito might not come back. Might start drinking. Might find those others like himself. Con los pobres de la tierra quiero yo mi suerte echar. She didn't expect to fall asleep but next thing she knew it was daylight and Taina and Yuissa were tugging at her sleeping bag. "Cheito came back with a man. A very tall man."
Approaching her was her son and a few steps behind him was the cad she'd had that affair with [years ago]. Silvia sat up and squinted against the sunlight. What was the unnameable man doing here? In an instant she knew. The sitio Cheito had been going to last night was the office of the Campaign. He'd figured out it was the way to find a lawyer and begin at long last the habeas corpus process to try and find Ernesto. And the lawyer he had found was Lionel. She shuddered to let the name form itself in her mind. She should have guessed he'd be involved in the Campana. This was what he was good for, good at. It was the best possible use of his gift for predation. Maybe the only good use. She rose and walked toward them and put out her hand for Lionel to shake. "Otra vez." He said. "Gusto de verte." She said. She had forgotten how Lionel's owning class social skills had carried their relationship, overcompensated for her own inability to make small talk, be light; [how she had mistaken his charm for love]; what a mark she'd been; victim; prey. And how quickly this had bored him, that she chameleoned, that her colonized mind tracked his dominant mind. Maybe for him, after a while, after he was no longer blood sated and she'd been digested, she had been like nobody was there.
What was she to do now? What would a human do? She hated Lionel. But she could ride his social skills to the next place. She had devoted years of her life to hating him, to plotting her revenges, and then to living as if he didn't. For years she had managed to never once run into him, except for once, he was revolving out a bank door as she entered it and there had been no chance nor need to acknowledge each other, and for twice she'd almost physically bumped into him on a subway platform, and for thrice he had left her a drunken three am voice mail on her phone. Just three maudlin teary hellos, but she knew his voice. She had actually forgotten him. Ernesto had taken her back when she convinced him that she had been out of body, in a fugue state, a multiple virtually, when she ran off with the man. If Cheito knew this was the man she'd left the family for, the reason she was the woman who taught him to hate women, or maybe just fear them...Lionel was speaking. She wasn't listening. She asked him to repeat what he had just said. The Campana was doing some kind of mass habeas corpus petition. Legal papers were being filed in the City Court soon. That was why the others were chaining themselves to the camp fence even as they spoke. Cheito was asking Lionel could Ernesto be somehow included even now, even this late. So now she was to rely on Lionel for any hope, the first hope, of getting Ernesto out.
[Or this was another time, another need and Lionel was the person who would get her to Ernesto.] Could she start over with this man, a new relationship? Compartmentalize their past. What was important was saving Ernesto. Lionel took her hand, studied her face, looked into her eyes with his bright piercing little yellow eyes. What did he want? She no longer got a sexual hit from him. That was a relief. Was he trying for that? She pictured herself through his eyes: haggard, [not a mystery]. No. He did not want her in that old way. As they shook hands the hating receded. [It didn't matter now. Was she truly another person? What did she ever see in the man?]
Cheito led them to the picnic table. Maria Marta had taken Juissa and Taina to the beach. Julia was dressed in her orange jumpsuit and waited under a sea pine for their meeting to be done.The nearby tents were quiet. People were asleep or at the vigil by the camp. There were always people there and today there were many more, dressed in the fake orange jumpsuits. No radios were playing for just this moment. A breeze flowed from the sea. Silvia sat facing the shore. Lionel sat across from her. Cheito stood over them. "What is to be done?" Lionel had a folder which he set on the picnic table and unbound. He took out papers and spread them out. One more thing to think about, to figure out. But Cheito took up the papers before she could reach them. She let him and just watched. "These are their names?" Cheito was scanning the pages. Lionel nodded. "These are the names that we have. There are more in the Camp than we've been able to track down."
"He's here." Cheito pointed to the bottom of the third sheet.
Silvia felt nothing. Was it that she needed to be alone to feel? She looked at Cheito and Lionel. Their heads were close together. What did it mean that Ernesto's name was on the list? She asked. She heard her voice asking. Lionel looked up. "He's listed among those who have been assigned legal counsel. That means I should be able to track him down." Lionel rose. "See you at the action?" Silvia stared at his back as he walked away. How could she have ever desired him? What was desire? [Was it a form of insanity?] Wakeful dreaming. Mamapapa longings. What?
Anacaona ran up to them, dressed in orange. She handed jumpsuits to Silvia and Cheito. "I came back for you. Get ready. We're late. We've got to go." Just then Maria Marta, Taina and Juissa got back from the beach. The girls, drenched, walked past the adults barely noticing them, searched in the cooler and pulled out cartons of fruit punch. MariaMarta wrapped them both in one big beach towel and rubbed them dry. "We're going to find agua dulce." MariaMarta pointed toward the public beach. "We use the showers in Playa Caracol, the few that still work." Maria Marta and the little girls set off toward the showers and Anacaona led Cheito and Silvia toward the base, with Julia trailing behind them.
"The others have already gone. I wanted to give you time with Lionel." Anacaona looked at Cheito and their gazes held for a second. Silvia hadn't noticed them becoming friends. Maybe more than friends. Of course it must have been Anacaona who told Cheito about Lionel. Anacaona jogged ahead on the sand. When Cheito caught up to her they both took off at a full run. Silvia and Julia followed as fast as they could.
There was a swarm of people dressed in orange jumpsuits close to the chain link fence. Guards stood at three feet intervals along the inside of the fence, staring past the demonstrators. Silvia worked herself close to the metal grid, and tried to see past the uniformed soldiers, who looked as young as her son. Was she hoping to catch sight of Ernesto? She shuddered to imagine what he might look like after two years.
She got caught up in the chanting. Screaming across the fence gave her a sense of power. Free them now...She screamed until she was hoarse.

That night after the demo Cheito took off. Silvia didn't know if he was with Anacaona or with Lionel or if he'd found himself some other [targeted for destruction young men].Had he found David? She lay in her sleeping bag looking through the branches of the sea grape at the stars. So many stars. As many as she remembered in her childhood Venturan skies. A depth of them, layers of them, seas of them, swirls of them. She understood why the ancients had found patterns and named them. She wondered what the Tainos had named the stories they divined in their stars. [Her eyes found stars to form a noose, to form a woman hanging from it, a woman curled to shield herself from blows. She laughed. Her mind assumed its familiar beaten woman pose, battered woman pose. Waiting for a man. All her life she'd been waiting for a man...father, then lovers, then husband, now son. Nothing was as hard as waiting for a son.]
When he came home he was drunk. Drunk again. She couldn't live knowing her son was a drunk. He passed out on the sleeping bag she'd lain out for him. How had it come to pass that the little boy who sat on her lap, clung to her neck, took long walks with her, closed his eyes and gave her his hand and made her guide him blind along the avenue, charged her with keeping him safe...had become someone who got drunk every day..every day of his life, sometimes a little bit drunk, other times very drunk. She couldn't live. She couldn't bear to live. She curled up into herself and sobbed. She made her hands into fists. She writhed. She could not bear this pain. She had not kept him safe and oppression had taken him. Oppression had taken her son and she couldn't save him. She could never cry for Ernesto like this. All her losses converged here. Her little boy, sitting on her lap, clinging to her neck...Running and playing and climbing her to nurse whenever he felt the need. Clinging to her in his sleep. This little boy lay here on his belly dead to the world from drink. This was the way he lived when he wasn't with her, night after night after night. And now he was showing her, doing it when he was with her as well. She could not live for having seen this with her own eyes. How could she help him? Surely there was some way she could get Cheito back from hell. But what was the way? Every way she tried made things worse.
She wanted to die because her son was a drunk. She remembered him on her lap, hanging from her neck. The memory was tactile. She could feel his small, bony body, the strength in his arms. She sobbed. She writhed. How had this come to pass? Why couldn't she go back in time and undo whatever harm she'd caused him that made him come to this? Her little boy. She remembered when he almost drowned, pulled by the undertow in this very island, on this very beach. Three beach boys had come in, skipping into the surf, to pull him out. Where were the people now to help her save her drowning son? Somebody help me. Somebody help me. Everyone drop everything and come help save my drowning son.

Did she sleep? She felt the sunlight through her eyelids and awoke nauseated from terror, her mind scanning for what the bad thing was. Cheito. Drunk again. She couldn't bear it. All her life marked by drunken men: B who shot off his own head with a shotgun; J who drank because he couldn't get a job and couldn't hold a job because he drank; H who went from drunk to sober and back to drunk again on a dime; Ernesto who white knuckled himself to sobriety but drank around Cheito for most of the years Silvia was gone. Nothing prepared her for the helplessness of watching Cheito be a drunk.
He sat up on his sleeping bag as if her thoughts had wakened him, staring straight at her with the surly morning after look she dreaded, a look she now saw he'd had every morning he'd been back. Had he been drinking and she'd chosen to not know it?
"What are you looking at?" She turned her face away, fixed her gaze on her bare feet. The toenails needed polish. Her little toes were curved and calloused. Her toes were too long, like fingers.
"I get drunk every day of my life. You should know that. It's tribal. I do it because my tribe does it, because all tribes do it." He lost steam and when she said nothing he stood, bent over her. "That mother fucker I got drunk with last night after the action, that mother fucker I beat up last night, is the man you left my Father for? You left me for?"
She shuddered and felt her body go cold. Lionel told Cheito? What had Lionel told Cheito? It never once crossed her mind that he might.
"You want to know why I drink? You want to know why I rage? I do it because you went away. I do it because you left us."
She couldn't think of what to say. She felt tears run down her face and knew that she was crying. She stood and faced him. "O my God Cheito. If I'd known then what I know now it wouldn't have happened. I regret it. I apologize." They stood inside a pool of light, shadows formed by the flat sea grape leaves moving softly in the sea breeze. "What did he say?" Cheito turned his back, made fists, growled and brought his right fist to his mouth, he bit. "What do you care what he said? He said enough and I filled in the blanks. He thought I already knew. An ego like his couldn't imagine you had never told me. That in our family he was a blip, that his name went unmentioned. So he told me man to man and I punched him in the face."
She said nothing. Half the time with Cheito she didn't know what to say. Then some words surfaced, she remembered that it mattered if she said something. "I'm sorry. It doesn't make it not have happened, but I'm sorry."
"I've heard it. If you knew then what you know now.." His hatred, the face he made when he was hating her, reminded her of her own raging face. Was this what he had seen on her? What she had seen on her mother? What she had seen on the faces of the guards at the camp? What Ernesto must be seeing every day?
"Can't we decide to make it stop?" Maybe his face had softened, but maybe it hadn't. So many times before she'd thought after one of these exchanges with Cheito things had changed. But here he was again, drinking, fighting, blaming her. Try as she might to change her own face, she couldn't change the raging face of oppression that gazed constantly upon her son. He got up and walked toward the beach. She considered going after him but didn't. For men there was always the public sphere to go to, even for men as targeted for destruction as her son, [as marginal to the wheels of empire], there was the corner. Here he had already found his corner men. In the encampment they were all corner people. Before he made the turn around the dune he saw Anacaona catch up to him, put her hand on his shoulder and then they both disappeared. Maybe Anacaona could save him. Maybe she could get close in ways Silvia could not.

Days went by and nothing, no word from Lionel. Maybe, after the fight, he'd do nothing. Cheito was gone every night, came by in the afternoons for Taina and Yuissa. Silvia sat on the picnic bench with Maria Marta and Julia watching the stars, listening for the surf under the blasting musics, so many different kinds. [She tried to listen to them as one]. Maria Marta was repeating what she'd said. "Todo attacked again last night. Set fire to an army van parked in the plaza." Anacaona nodded. "Todo cut a hole into the side of the Camp. How do they cut electrified wire?" Julia looked from one woman to another. "David came to see me last night. A stealth 2 AM visit like always. I saw the palm of his hand, the T tattooed into his lifeline, almost invisible."
"Let's go walking." Anacaona rose. Only Silvia followed. The younger woman walked fast, along a path she knew that Silvia couldn't see among the leantos tents shacks the gathered crowds. "I knew only you would come. You're the one I want." They'd reached a hill. Silvia did what Anacaona did, she sat close to a bare rock and looked down. Young men in a circle moved toward the center and away. Two men were in the center. Singing, talking. Silvia saw two others bent over a boombox calibrating the beats. The women sat and watched in silence as the group, there must be at least 50 of them, circled and moved in and out, the men at the center changing. Then it was Cheito and David. "Beautiful, isn't it?" Anacaona had taken Silvia's hand. "There's no denying that." There was something benign here. This was what Cheito meant by his tribe. "They somehow use the alcohol and weed to release this beauty." Anacaona was rising now and pulled Silvia up by the hand. "But at what price?" They walked back a different way, closer to the water and stood on the beach watching the tide come back. "You know you've just seen Todo." Silvia said nothing. Her mind couldn't hold one more thought.

Lionel was walking toward her. What had been her need for having sex with powerful men? She could barely remember when their relationship turned sexual. Next minute there she'd been having sex with him. She sat down on the bench of Anacaona's table where he motioned her to sit. He had his folder and he opened it on the rough wood surface. She'd never noticed the splinters just waiting for her hand. "The Camp authorities asked me to approach you about talking to Ernesto." She didn't understand. After three years they were now acknowledging he was in the Camp. Lionel put his hand over hers. Was he having sex with her? "You would get to see him. They would expect you to persuade him to want to talk. Or even if you don't say anything to him about naming names they would expect that simply to see you, to remember life outside, would make him see reason. Reason from their perspective."
She pulled her hand away and rose and walked as fast as she could around the dune, to the water. She could feel him walking behind her. What was she to do? What would Ernesto do in her place? Already she could feel her mind moving toward the decision that she would see him. She would do anything to see him.

She sat on a plastic chair in a small waiting room with other silent women, many women. Silvia didn't want to count them. More than she could see when she looked straight ahead. She was sitting in the middle of the middle row, the only empty chair she found when she arrived, too early, but later than hundreds of others. She was afraid to speak, and the others were also afraid. Was the window to their right as they faced a long brown formica table, one way glass? Were they were being watched, for some sign. Every now and then, at unpredictable intervals, a deep male voice through a speaker on the wall called out a series of names. Silvia wondered if her own name had been called and she had not heard it. Could she show one face to the Camp authorities and keep her own face, her own mind? Was this yet one more acid bath to corrode her? Had she kept her face while putting on the mask of burocrat? Most of the time she thought not. But Solly said she had. "You keep us honest." What did she mean? It was a job she didn't want, to be the conscience of the literacy group. She laughed. She was a beta human. Not alpha enough to survive, to hold on to her mind. But nothing happened.

After the action Silvia crashed, went numb, into the fishbowl. She sat at the picnic table, facing the dunes, listening to the sea beyond, trying not to seem to watch Cheito talking intensely with Anacaona by a sea pine close to the path. She was pulling her body from him, he was leaning his body toward hers. Anacaona knew things Cheito didn’t know. Silvia had one instant of fearing for him, for how Anacaona would hurt him, simply by being better than he was, having found herself to a better lock of the canal, a better pen, [a better pride]. Another instant of fierce hope. Could Anacaona turn out to be the strong woman her son needed, that Ernesto got to have in her, that men of his father’s generation managed to hold onto? What had happened to mating between humans? She felt bewildered, desperately let down, completely alone, lost. Was this what waiting for Papi to come home had been like? She was flooded by the memory of sitting alone inside the house in Ventura after her father had decided they must go, while all her friends were off in the mountains in the literacy campaign, she'd lived as if under house arrest, history flowing around her, exploding around her, people engaged, part of things, while she was alone, lost, waiting, [making all of reality out of her own thoughts]…

She rose and headed for the beach. As she passed Cheito and Anacaona she caught her laugh, throaty, pheromonal. “I’m not ready. We’re not ready…” Anacaona had moved closer to Cheito so that their shoulders were touching, but she looked away from him. Neither of them noticed Silvia pass.

The sea was calm, or looking calm, she knew better than to believe its faces. She stepped into the water, unexpectedly cold, and waded in. She faced the horizon. There was so much she wanted, Ernesto’s freedom, world revolution, a good world for Cheito, for Cheito to stop drinking…all things she could not make come to pass. When she turned back to face the shore she saw that it was far away and when she moved toward it she saw she couldn’t. She tried to push into the force of the water, how was it she hadn’t felt the current at all until now that she tried to move against it? Time to drown. She wished the beach gigolos were bounding in to get her the way they’d come for Cheito years ago, almost drowning on this very beach. Always longing to be saved. She remembered the moment, after she and Julia lost the boys on the subway, when they forced themselves through the gathered crowd to where the Partido's contingent had rallied, and there they were, each one clasping the hand of a companera whose name she no longer remembered. But this was the time to save herself. She threw her body into the current. The water pressed against her, her muscles burned, and gave way. Was there no way? Then the thought formed, came to her like a voice, later Julia would insist she had heard god. Swim parallel to the shore. Swim parallel to the shore until you’ve swum away from the fingers of the rip tide. She turned her body and swam away from the camp, following the yellow shoreline until she no longer felt the current. She swam and stopped, and swam and stopped, pushing until her body gave up, then starting again. She didn’t know how long this went on, longer than she thought she could sustain. [But much sooner than her fear had expected.]

She reached the shore, stood and stepped onto the packed wet sand. Her knees were liquid, giving way. She climbed up the steep beach to where the sand was dry and sat down on a dune. The sky was a flat soft blue, almost bare of clouds. She felt a breeze and saw in the distance to her right a rain of leaves or a swarm of butterflies, was there such a thing?, catching the light. Tainos must have believed in rains of gold. Cheito and Anacaona came up behind her and sat. Cheito's body was warm as she leaned into it. He put his arm around her. When he touched her she felt herself tremble. She leaned her head into the hollow of his shoulder and sobbed.

"Lionel has a message from the Camp about Pa. He wants you to go see him even if the price is you have to tell Pa, or pretend to tell Pa, to talk to them." Silvia sobbed. Anacaona knelt before Silvia, cupped her face with her hands and raised her chin so that she could look into her eyes. "It's the only way that they will let you see him and it's important that you see him no matter at what price."

They left the encampment before sunrise in Lionel's rented jeep.[what does it look like?] Lionel negotiated with the guards, and drove into the Camp, as if all of this had been easy. Silvia sat in the passenger seat, looking out the window at the squat wooden buildings. The access road was almost deserted except for two young men in caqui uniforms sitting outside one of the huts. Cheito sat in the back seat tapping his foot. [How to get him in to see Ernesto was a question Lionel had not yet answered.]

They didn't sit long in the windowless waiting room stinking of cigarette smoke but empty of ashtrays as if only recently they'd forbidden smoking. The smiling officer entered from the far door and approached Silvia with his hand held out. She gripped his hand hard and watched him give Cheito a rigid charming smile. They want something from me, from us, she thought. I am not the only supplicant here. [what does it all look like? what sounds do they hear?"

Silvia had no idea what it must have been like for Ernesto to have been in the camp for two years. She was embarrassed that her images came from movies and childhood magazine photographs of tortured men and women. "Por dos anos a Ernesto solo lo vi en suenos." She had said those words to Anacaona last night. They'd sat together until almost three in the morning at the table by their shelters both of them unable to sleep, both of them waiting for Cheito and at once hopeful and afraid of finding Ernesto. She had only seen him in her nightmares.
The smiling man brought somebody in. From Cheito's sharp intake of breath Silvia understood that this was Ernesto. She was never more glad that her son was with her, that somehow Lionel had managed to convince the camp authorities to let them both see Ernesto. The man was thin and his cheeks were sunken around missing teeth. He was like a figure in a concentration camp photograph, like one of the bodies of the tortured in the cistern in x magazine. He stood perfectly motionless by the door for just a moment before he stepped into the room and walked toward her. She saw he had no idea he was unrecognizable and maybe that was a good thing. To himself he was still Ernesto. The three of them were alone in the small room although surely the smiling man and others must be watching through the one way glass. Cheito stepped between them and pulled his father into his arms. Now Ernesto was the smaller one, frail inside their burly son's embrace. Cheito's arms were crossed behind Ernesto's back and his hands were spread, enormous on both sides of the curved spine. Ernesto melded into his son, gave way, collapsed and made a sound Silvia couldn't name, between a cry and a growl. He sobbed. She moved toward them and put her arms around both of them. Ernesto was still Ernesto if he could cry. She remembered when Cheito was a boy, before their separation, how he orquestrated family kiss ins, getting them all to hug and kiss at the same time.
On the other side of the glass the watchers must be waiting for her to deliver the message. Another thing she must do she didn't want to do. Had she ever done anything other than comply? Terrible twining coils of compliance. Surely the smiling man didn't want to be smiling. What was there to smile about when you worked in a torture camp? Complying. Following the order to use a prisoner's wife's need to see her husband as pressure so that she complied with your request that she ask her husband to cooperate with what?
They called their torture interrogations.
"Como estas?" Ernesto raised his head from Cheito's chest and offered her his gaze. His eyes were huge now in the shrunken face, liquid, showing terror and confusion and still the fierceness she recognized as Ernesto's essence. She felt her shoulders ease. They hadn't killed him. They had hurt him but they hadn't killed him. He remembered her and she remembered him. He held Silvia's gaze. "They expect me to inform." His voice was not his voice coming from that reduced chest, softer, hoarser but still his voice, the words connected to the thought, uttered just a heartbeat more slowly than most.

Then the moment was over and they were outside in the bright sun standing with Lionel. Silvia's mind fought the urge to go numb. She doubled over about to vomit, her body trembling, her face hot with tears. She pushed her face into Cheito's chest and screamed, the wrenched sounds muffled against his chest. She clung to Cheito and he held her hard. Lionel stood by, looking down at them from his great height, his long arms hung limp from his oddly square shoulders and then he raised them and put one around Cheito and one around Silvia.
Silvia raised her head and looked up at him. "Is there any fucking way on earth to get him out of here?"
Lionel said nothing. She watched him think. She wanted him to fix this the way she'd wanted Papi to fix things. Papi couldn't. She was still waiting. Going back she'd sat herself in the back seat and neither man said anything. She imagined she looked too sunk, unreachable. They drove away in silence past little wooden houses with little front lawns shrunk and transplanted from a City suburb. Outside one of the houses a thin blonde army wife stood over a pigtailed toddler on a tricycle. Silvia wanted to grab her and shake her and ask her, "Do you know what your husband is doing? Do you know where his hands have been just before he puts them on you at night? Make him stop." But she said nothing. She wondered if she would ever manage to say anything again.
Cheito's voice reached her from the surface. It was Lionel he wanted. "You know my father is Venturan. Is there something you can do with that?"

Silvia proceeded along the passageway, not looking, but seeing nevertheless from the corners of her eyes,peripherally, the pens, like dog crates, and the men inside them who were turned away from her. They didn't want her to see them seeing her. This was how they were kept. The cells were cages, mesh on all sides and overhead. In some of them three or four men sat on narrow cots or stood, their heads touching the overhead grid, or they bent forward. Or they squatted. It was better not to see much. Not to feel. She followed the guard who led her down a maze of passageways, an unending series of pens. All around the blue sky and yellow sand of paradise. Now the young man approached a wooden structure, a house. He climbed up steps leading to a narrow porch. She followed him up and through a wooden door. There was a front desk but nobody guarded it. They made their way along a hallway with doors close together on both sides. He pointed to the last door on the right and stepped aside and waited. She understood and pushed the door in and walked inside.
Ernesto was standing with his back to her, facing a window. His shoulders were rounded and his spine was stooped. She didn't recognize his shoulders but she knew him. He turned toward her and she approached him and stood inches away from him. He smelled of laundry soap, the castilla soap from her childhood. His hair was wet. She looked into his eyes and drew him to her. They were face to face. She remembered having to look up at him, before. She took his hand and drew him toward the bed. Her knees were buckling and she needed to sit down. She sat and he stood beside her. She pulled him onto her lap and held him like Mary holding Christ, this person, once her husband, was skin and bones and shaking in her arms.

Silvia couldn't sleep. She sat at the picnic table facing the dunes that [blocked out the sea], surrounded by the sleeping breaths of the encampment, taking in the few moments of near silence before the encampment erupted for the day. For the two weeks following the conjugal visit she had not once slept, truly slept. Sometimes exhaustion overtook her and her eyes and her mind dimmed down, but never shut down, never stopped. Inside her own mind her eyes remained open, just like Ernesto's eyes, enormous in his shrunken face. The first few nights Anacaona and Silvia made the pilgrimage to their overlook to watch the Todo and after that sleep was not possible, and less necessary. But for more than ten nights there had been no Todo. No Cheito stumbling home. And the Todo had been attacking everyplace, everything. Or everyone assumed it was the Todo. She saw Anacaona from the beach, still wet from her morning swim. She sat next to Silvia. "The Todo are demanding a canje. And they have gotten the ear of El Mandatario."