Blog 40-Arrecife Casino

Just as the healing story circle was almost over Anacaona showed up with a young woman I hadn't seen, fresh from la Capital or Arrecife, or even the City. Patria motioned to them to join us and they sat together, paired up, on the floor close to where Patria and I were sitting, and close to Tanama and her drummers, who were their age. “We're telling stories of infidelity, betrayal, times we hurt others or were hurt.” Patria paused, let Anacaona and the other woman take in this information. She smiled. “You can use the listening time however you like.” Patria took first Anacaona and then the other woman in her arms and held them close. “We can sure use the listening time, but we're here because los muchachos want our help.”
After we were done with the tellings, as Patria was leading the closing, Anacaona raised her hand and said we had to hurry. Patria nodded to Tanama who led us in a chant, “Completely blameless for oppression, Fully in charge to end it, We have the power.” As we chanted, the drummers began to play, building and building until Tanama led us in a victory Grito. I was beginning to learn how to move my throat so I could ululate! Anacaona told us what los muchachos wanted from us. We were ready.
Rosa the school teacher and several of the Señoras stayed behind with Taina and the other children. As many as we could fit piled into two borrowed yipis. I rode in the one Patria was driving with Julia, Anacaona and her friend, Guada. "Look at Guada," Anacaona said. "Do you know her?" I looked hard and I reconized the long, dark Taina face, the oval eyes, the long black hair pulled back. "Little Lydia! Little Lydia, Adela's second cousin." Patria laughed. "My son Tomas' wife." In the second car behind ours Tanama drove Elba Luz, Beatricita, Inaru and unimaginably to me, Raquel.
Neither Julia nor I had ever been to Arrecife. Patria hugged the mountain wall as the narrow road along the very edge of Karaya curved around places where the cordillera central dipped its toes in the sea. Julia screamed at the turns, exclaimed at the amazing views of the water, the giant waves, and now and then, groups of surfers. She asked what the barriers placed all along the road were for, green and red in the colors of the Karaya flag. Patria said, “The Cayo Karaya Grand Prix. Marquito Palomo is racing day after tomorrow. This year the race is making the whole circuit around both Karaya and Ventura.”
Anacaona pressed my hand, “Do you see in the distance, always watching, those City Navy ships? Doesn't the way they hover on the water remind you of barracudas?”
We parked in the underground garage of one of the luxury condos of Arrecife's Casino Row. Our car was the first to arrrive. Tanama's car arrived as our group was getting in the elevator. We gathered and rode, saying nothing, keeping our faces down, hidden from the cctv cameras.
Anacaona let us into an apartment on the 20th floor. We gathered on the balcony. Far out on the sea the lights of two ships glowed in the mist. One festooned like a Christmas tree must be a cruise ship. The other barely visible, belonged to the City Navy, one of the barracudas. The lights of the seawall outlined the crescent shape of the Arrecife coast line. High waves pounded the seawall across from the condo. Tourists in fancy evening gowns strolled along it, or stood looking at the water not bothering to duck the spray. Three limousines pulled up across from the condo. From the middle car some personage in a tuxedo and a woman in a long red gown, stepped onto the wide sidewalk by the wall. Ahead of them, behind them, on either side, men in suits lined up. Anacaona leaned over the railing. “Marquito Palomo, mira mira Marquito Palomo y Viviana. They're here for the gala before the race."
She motioned us inside, straight to a master bedroom with a giant bed and an enormous window with a view of the sea. Anacaona, Tanama and Inaru took evening gowns from the closet and spread them across the bed. There were the right number of gowns and the right sizes. Mine was purple and made of something tight but stretchy so that I found I could easily move. Julia's was navy blue and gauzy. The younger women wore very short dresses. For a few minutes we were young girls playing dressup, making each other up, braiding each other's hair, trying on earrings and glittering necklaces. We had our roles explained: Impersonate tourists from La Capital. We memorized our spots on a diagram of the casino. We were to be standing there when the time came for whatever it was. We had our cellphones in our tiny, shiny purses. Our one exception to our gambling lady disguise was our shoes. Anacaona insisted we wear flats, shiny and full of rhinestones, but snug on our feet and grip soled for running.
As we walked to the elevator I whispered to Julia, who was speechless with terror, “When I breached the Base with Franz, after awhile enough adrenalin washed right through me that I felt no fear at all.” I laughed, “At least not until I got home and shook for an hour as I sat on my dune, pretending to write, not able to crawl into the lean-to and sleep.” Anacaona put a finger to her lips. I needed to learn to shut up, but I wanted to reassure Julia who looked almost faint from panic. We crossed to the paseo along the seawall and walked the few feet from our condo to the Casino. Like the other strollers we didn't duck the spray from the huge, crashing waves. When we reached the Casino we crossed the avenida. We approached and climbed the wide, lit up staircase meant to look ancient and roman. We laughed and joked like we imagined real gambling ladies from La Capital or the City would, a bit tipsy from wine with a good dinner, ready to try their luck.
Julia and I were in Inaru's group along with Beatricita. I knew Beatricita was Franz' girlfriend and we had in common that we both loved that guata Guardia. I barely knew Inaru. I'd seen her at the Comedor a few times and playing drums with Tanama. I liked to watch her drum but whenever we women gathered I went quiet in the face of her confidence and Taina cacica beauty. She was tall, with strong arms, and a smooth skinned oval face. She almost always wore a perfeclty constructed crown of black braids threaded with red and purple ribbons. She and Beatricita understood each other's glances, arched eyebrows, particular smiles. I thought it made no sense to team us up until I saw how calm she and Beatricita were, completely confident, relaxed, at ease, perfect to shepherd novices like Julia and me.
We stood close to a one armed bandit and Inaru demonstrated how to play. I could barely make myself pretend. Gambling was the most impossible addiction for me to understand even long enough to play-act. I decided to imagine I was Inaru's mother trying to save her from herself. (That role I was familiar with!) I tugged at her arm and whispered, “Nena no juegues...dijiste que vinimos para la gala y el show del cabaret.” Inaru's eyes smiled even as she shook her head and said, “Mami siempre me quieres controlar y yo quiero perder control.” Later, when I admired this she told me she was an actress, practitioner of Teatro del Oprimido, and taught improvisation classes in La Fabrica for anyone, but especially for los muchachos. "But it's not acting, it's rehearsing for life."
Everywhere security people lurked, dressed up like gamblers and tourists just like we were dressed up. I was getting a better nose for them. That woman in a tight black sequined dress who had taken the slot machine next to ours, she must be wearing a government issued body shaper. Bulletproof? I was dying to say my joke out loud to Inaru, especially when she looked up from the slot machine to see why I was laughing to myself.
Just then, los muchachos, in full black, invaded. There were so many of them swarming I couldn't find Machi, or Lagarto, or Robles, or David among them, not with their faces half covered in black cloth. I couldn't see what they were doing. Although I was here I half prayed my son wasn't. For all the contradiction to oppression Machi got from direct actions, I couldn't stop my terror of him being captured, imprisoned, tortured. I thought of Ori. I'd heard from Capitan Ojeda through Franz that, mercifully, after they'd declared the hunger strike victorious, he'd accepted intravenous feedings and he should soon be able to eat solid food, was at the Base hospital (according to what Ojeda had told Franz), and soon would be recovered enough for el rescate. I hoped that by being here, escalating my exposure to terror, I was training myself, steeling myself, for the rescate operation. (Unless I myself was caught and ended up at the Camp).
A voice, electronically transformed to resemble el Gobernador's, blared through the casino's sound system. “This money you are wasting in your vapid alienated display of excess, we want you to voluntarily donate it to la causa. Bet on the future, yours and all of ours, el futuro de todos, this game we all win or we all lose.” I didn't recognize the actual voice. Some patrons appreciated the humor of making the voice sound like El Gobernador's and laughed. Several, but not all, of the hundreds of gamblers placed money and jewelry in a sack passed like a church offering plate to them where they stood, motionless. And then los muchachos were gone into the night, strangely unpursued. I wondered in a whisper to julia if the whole world consisted of rebels and guatas. She asked me with her eyes what the hell a guata was and I whispered back, “What los muchachos called guardias who are secretly on our side.” Julia told me it was the Taino word for lie and laughed.
Later when we were all sitting in the balcon of the condominio looking out at the sea, I asked Anacaona why, and what it was we were there for? She just rolled her eyes. Elba Luz and Raquel, who were standing close together, talking quietly, looked our way and laughed. (I could barely believe my eyes, after their rumble over Jodeda in El Comedor). Raquel turned to me. “It's porous between us and the other side,” Elba Luz walked toward me and sat on the arm of my chair. “More porous than anyone realizes.”
Inaru walked into the the living room and turned up the volume on the television set where a City action film about superheroes was interrupted for a news flash. We crowded by the huge flat screen on the wall. CCTV footage of los muchachos in black swarming the stairs into Last Domino cut to a commotion of young men in black in the casino lobby, swarming a man heading to the Bar with his hand on the elbow of a tall young woman in a long red gown. Inaru pointed to the pair. “Marquito y Viviana." As the image flashed I saw two young men were with him shoulder to shoulder. I could swear the third man behind him was my ex-lover Jimmy, one of my first political mentors. What was he doing there? I saw the woman in red yanked away by one of the young men. The news reader said, “City Force confirm Marquito Palomo was abducted.” Now the image showed Gobernador Travieso in his press room. “The Cayo Karaya Grand Prix will go on as scheduled. We do not capitulate to swarming.” So our tax collection had been a distraction. That much effort for such a brief occupation of Last Domino now made sense.
There was a loud banging on the door, two fisted, and then as if with a hammer, not stopping. Patria pushed us into the bedroom. “City Force?” Anacaona shook her head. We looked at each other, at the bedroom where there was nothing to indicate we were anything other than vacationing women. The diagram of the Casino had been disappeared. Just as Anacaona reached for the door a key turned in the lock and a woman in a red gown stumbled into her arms. She flailed against Anacaona's tight grip, pulled herself away and stood there, tear smeared black eye makeup ringed her eyes, striped her cheeks like war paint, hair fell from what had been, earlier in the night, a professionally built knot of braids. She had her transparent silver heeled shoes in her hands, heels out. She lunged into the room, threw herself onto her knees on the plush white carpet and banged at it over and over with her heels.
'”You're staying in my place. You're wearing my dresses, and all the fucking while you were coming for him, for Marquito.”
She began to slowly turn, looking into each of our faces where we stood, in a circle that we tightened around her.
“You know where they have him and you are taking me to him.”
Anacaona stepped toward her. “Viviana, listen to me. We'll let you go on with your eruptions in a minute because we understand you need to erupt for awhile before you can think again, but tell us first, where are your people? Marquito's people? Do they know where you are? Do City force know you've come here? How long do you think we have before they think to come for you here?”
Viviana shook her head and didn't answer. She tried to hit Anacaona with her shoes, and Inaru and Beatricita pried the shoes from her hands and, along with Tanama, they restrained her, by making a frame with their arms that she could push against. Anacaona let the young woman push into her hands and whispered, “Viviana, presente, Viviana presente. Tell me where your people are.” The woman thrashed and flailed in their firm grip, and screamed, spitting, squirting tears until fury, terror and grief were spent, at least this eruption. “I'm asking the questions here. You betrayed me.” Anacaona looked at each of us. “We have to assume your people, or even the City force, are on their way and be ready to be gone.” Patria and Julia set to gathering the cotto make up swabs, the tissues in the trash, the protein bar wrappers. We undressed, hung the dresses and put on our jeans and T-shirts. Viviana watched us entranced, silent.
Within minutes we were done and Anacaona helped Viviana change, then led her to the bed. "You know, as well as we do, about need to know. You know there is no way we knew they were coming for Marquito. There is no way any of us here need to know where he is so we don't know.” They were now collapsed on the huge bed. As Inaru cleaned off Viviana's face with cotton balls and cream Viviana repeated,“Need to know.” She sat up. “Marquito knew. Did Marquito know? I saw him offer no resistance, wave his guys off. Far as I could see he went with them of his own free will, leaving me standing there in the middle of the swarm. Nothing he'd like better than to blow off the race and have himself a season in the Territorio or even Ventura.” She laughed and the laughing escalated into a second, lesser eruption of flailing, pummeling, shaking, sweating, screaming, laughing, tears. "That hijo de puta. When I get my hands on him." Afterward she sat up on the bed, leaned against the headboard. She called out to Patria who was scanning the room for any remaining signs of our presence. “They're not coming, my guys are already here in the common balcony at the end of the hallway, contemplating the sea, waiting for me.”
Soon enough the young women were laughing together on the bed. We elders left them. Back on the balcony Patria told Julia and I that Viviana had spent several months at Palenque in the spring, tracking her mother, who was desaparecida during the Segundo Presidio sweep, gone as long as Ori was gone, only to get word she'd been rescatada to Ventura. She tracked her mother there and met Marquito who was in Ventura for rest and recuperation. Viviana and Marquito were never apart since then. Maybe later she would tell us the story. I remembered having seen photos of her with Marquito dressed up and glamorous at casinos, and premieres, and on romantic strolls at beach resorts, for all the months their whirlwind romance was the cover story of La Mirilla. Never once did I read they first met in Ventura!.
Tanama came to us elders on the balcony and announced, “There's no sleeping now.” The young women, Tanama, Beatricita, Inaru, Anacaona, Guada from la Capital, and especially Viviana, were adrenalin wired and wanted to go out. It was only then, when we gathered on the balcony, that Anacaona's friend Guada and I first remembered together the days when I'd known her as Adela's little cousin Lydia she'd known me as that odd woman from the City with a wild little boy.
When Anacaona was Tina Lydia had been her best friend. Adela had taken her in after Lydia's mother eloped with “El Asesino”, what her father called her much older prometido Domingo behind his back, unable to get past his having killed a man in self-defense in a bar brawl when he was young. Guada was the wife of Patria's Desaparecido son Tomas and had come to Palenque for the Grito Day Convergence Wade-In. I remembered little Lydia as a waif with uneven bangs and a scraggly pony tail. I didn't tell her I used to think of her as Little Match Girl, because she was so thin and so sad.
Tanama led our procession to Arrecife old town. The young women were looking for a place to dance and marched ahead of us women elders, and the three close cropped, muscular young men waiting outside Viviana's door whom she introduced as Tirso, Fausto, and O.
I saw right away the elder man with them was indeed my old lover Jimmy. In seconds we were hugging and crying. I could see he was in better shape than when we parted. His nearly black skin was tight on his bones, not puffy from hard drinking. Our gazes held for a moment and we smiled, Jimmy and I, always close. He called over the shortest of the young men, who called himself O. “Here's my son Osmani.” He was dark brown, much lighter than Jimmy and had the thin lips and pointed nose of his white mother. When he smiled I saw the four year old I'd known close to 20 years ago.
Jimmy and I walked together, arm in arm, for all the world a vacationing couple happy who had won at the slots.“I told Viviana she doesn't need to worry herself over Marquito. Believe me the City force isn't going to bother with this. ” He could read my mind, as always, and he answered me before I asked. “Marquito grew up with me. I took the place of his desaparecido Dad, one of my comrads from Reparations Movement, who was drafted to the Island Wars and never came back. You probably met him as a boy. I took him in, all of us in Reparations did. But I was the one stood in for his Dad. He was good friends with Osmani so after awhile he lived with us. And when his racing blew up he took me on as his manager.” I raised my eyebrows and he laughed. “Viviana does all that, the administration part. I'm the visionary.”
I told him Ori was desaparecido and Machi and I were living a la intemperie in Palenque. He drew me closer.“That's a change. I couldn't get you to even sit on my makeshift bed in that old abandoned warehouse Reparations was squatting in, remember?”
Tanama knew a spot for dancing. The wide lawn where the seawall abutted the high rock wall of the Morro fortress from Spanish colonial times, protected from development as a historic landmark, had been claimed as a people's space. Small lights were strung around and between tall ancient trees that framed the square. A small band played at the far corner with the fortress wall for a backdrop. At least 200 people danced In the open space in the middle. We added ourselves to the human garland, soon all of us, even Viviana's keepers, even Jimmy, were dancing. What a huge relief to be surrounded by bodies, moving, stomping, garlanding steps, entrancing our minds, wordlessly joining minds, as our bodies sweated out the terror hormones, integrated the surging hormones of our power.
After a long time we sat on a wide ledge at the far reach of the seawall, facing the sea, all of us women, Patria, Julia, Elba Luz, Anacaona, Tanama, Inaru, Guada and our men, Tirso, Fausto, O and Jimmy. Anacaona called out. "Telling our stories is revolutionary work. Telling our stories to transform them. There's an open space, enter it." She picked up a stone. "Our talking stone." She handed it to Jimmy. He grinned. "Well, going on 20 years ago I came over to Marina's one day to return twenty dollars she had loaned me and never left her place, never went back home to my family. How amazing that all our old joy and pain and drama now is just part of our story." He had one of his surges of joy I remembered and had loved him for and said, “We get to keep the love! I've always known sex could be free of love and now I know love can be free of sex.” We held hands. The tide was low and the wide expanse of arrecifes by the wall glistened when the lights searched, then shone black.
Viviana grabbed the stone from his hand. “Here we are, having lost everything, even our chains." . Anacaona was beside her, holding her hand. They clutched the stone together. “Yes, yes, yes. That is the beauty of Palenque, it is the place where we go when we have at last lost everything but our chains. We are free to learn at last that our true wealth, all we have, all we ever truly had, is the shelter of each other.”
I nodded, thrilled with this realization:. I leaned toward them and cupped my hand over their hands. “So this is why in Palenque we spend so much time telling each other our stories. Patria pried the stone from our hands and looked at me as she spoke. “It is as if we finally have enough information, or have gotten rid of enough error in our heads, to make sense of our stories at last.” Viviana laughed. “So much for need to know then.” Anacaona took the stone and placed it in the center. “La piedra de todos." She looked at each of us. "Well that's just it. Turns out we actually do need to know all of it, why we tell our stories.”
We told our stories until dawn. Anacaona took the stone? "Although we women most often tell our stories with no men around, we found new and different aspects of our stories as we told them with the men listening. After our entranced dance we welcomed the men's attention devoid, on this night, of domination." She lay on her back, snuggled with Viviana, looking up at the sky. “I love these moments.” Viviana sat up. “Yes, these are our little vacations in the future.”
We watched the sunrise in silence. Without directly planning to or even talking about it, we had nonetheless decided what we had to do next. Viviana spoke our intention. "We won't stay in Arrecife for the start of the race. Why bother without Marquito? We will go back to Palenque and make sure to be there on Grito day, do some tracking, and head to the Territorio if we have to. That is what Marquito and los muchachos would want."
Tanama stood up and offered her hand to pull Anacaona up with her. “I'm starving. After all that dancing I can finally tell again that we have bodies, we are in them, and they are hungry.” Patria said, “I know just the place for breakfast.” We headed toward Arrecife viejo with our escorts.