Going for Ernesto end segment version 09 23 07

That night after they got back from chaining themselves to the Camp gate 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."