Blog 43-Taina and Yuissa Meet

I walked slowly to the shore, slipped off my sandals, and walked barefoot on the packed wet sand. The sky was pinking as the sun fell into the sea, now flat, calm, but this day I remembered its other face, the giant waves and ravenous undertow that had almost taken Machi when he was Taina's age. I never got around to asking him if he remembered almost drowning. I looked away. To the right in the far distance I made out the high fence, the coiled barbed wire at the top, of the outer perimeter of the Base. I longed to pierce through it, see the prison hidden deep within. Paradise and hell side by side. Was Ori really there? Was the wizened figure curled on the narrow cot I'd seen in the surveillance video screen really Ori? Had I really seen the birthmark on his shoulder? I felt my mind try to make room for him, for thoughts of him, for his proximity. Machi had made me come to believe Ori was alive, held at the Camp. Just for this moment I let myself believe that whatever they had done to him, there would still be enough of Ori left in Ori that I would find him when I found him.
I stood with my feet in the surf watching my son and Taina walk toward a little girl barely dressed in a small top and shorts, exposed skin burnt 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 Machi 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 a second, shallow hole alongside the deep one she was digging. Taina pushed her hands deep inside. She looked up at Machi. "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." She brought her head close to Taina's. “My Papi's Desaparecido.” Taina hugged her new friend. “Mine was too. He got found.” Taina dropped her voice. “But then he always disappears again.” The girls stood and twirled all the way to the water, fell in, splashed, rolled on each other, laughing.
That night Taina made our pod move camp next to her new friend Yuissa's, who turned out to be Patria's grandchild, daughter of her desaparecido son Tomás and his wife, Adela's little cousin Lydia (the one who'd taken Guada for her Taino name). They'd been my neighbors twelve years ago. Guada and Yuissa were in Palenque for Grito Day, staying in a tent pitched behind Patria's casita. When Marina and her pod showed up at her casita Patria said, “Sooner or later you were meant to move to Las Casitas but it took a five year old to lead you to roll up your tarps, pull up your stakes and carry your duffels through the maze all the way here. Not too soon, either. We're coming into storm season and you don't want to be living in a tarp when it's time to roll out the storm dome.”
It took Machi, Lagarto and David much less time to rebuild our shelter than it took to build it. They found an open stretch of ground close to a sea pine a few yards beyond Guada and Yuissa's tent. The spot was exactly big enough for the lean-to Machi shared with David. Julia and I moved our duffels and sleeping bags inside into a room in Patria's casita she was letting us have. Julia offered me the narrow bed closest to the window. "Para ti, porque no duermes. You can count the stars during your insomnia."
Lagarto was expert at piercing stakes into the ground and angling the tarps against rain and wind. Today I could really see he was tall, thin, and yellow skinned like the lizards he was named for. Patria, Guada, Julia and I cooked fish over the fire pit. Young men stood around boom boxes in the commons behind the casitas drinking beer.,
Patria had insisted Julia, Taina and I take one of the bedrooms in her house and let the young men have the lean-to. But Taina let us know she intended to sleep in the tent with Yuissa. When the work was done Lagarto bartered Machi's matches for beers from the boombox men. "In Palenque the party starts at seven at night and goes until seven in the morning." Lagarto offered Machi one of the beers. He glanced at me and waved the beer away. "Later. Maybe later."
Anacaona and her sister-in-law Guada sat outside their tall canvas tent at a wood plank picnic table hand stitching the seams of black hoods. She bent her narrow brown face over her sewing. With her long black hair pulled back into tight, high pony tail she resembled the somber, too wise little girl I'd known as Lydia. "I'm still amazed that you're Adela's little second cousin." Her usually serious face opened into a grin. "And, Anacaona's sister in law, Tomas' wife." She pointed me to a an orange mameluco on the table. I picked it up and threaded a needle. "I like the sound of the name Guada. It suits you." She handed me a thimble and showed me how to use it to get the needle through the stiff fabric. "I wanted a name that didn't remind me of struggle but of winning. So I picked something I do to live as if we'd already won. Guada means garden."
Machi left Lagarto and the other young men drinking beer by his lean-to and joined the sewing women. He patted the picnic table. "Y esto?" Anacaona set down her mameluco, looked at him, tossed her head back, and laughed. Her many rows of brown braids danced and the colored glass beads woven into them shone in the firelight. "We dragged it one night from the Playa Publica of the old EcoPreserve. We were euphoric on endorphins and adrenalin after one of the actions, celebrating that for a change none of us got arrested, and we decided we wanted some real furniture. Gracias mil to the Eco Preserve."
Guada patted the bench beside her. motioned him to sit between her and Anacaona. "Ayúdanos. We're chaining ourselves again to the Base 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 waiting to be stitched. I was done with my first mameluco. She'd shown me to make two rows of big, but efficient stiches. I stepped inside, picked up a stack of mamelucos, and fingered the thin, stiff orange fabric, not like anything real prison uniforms would be made of. Taina and Yuissa sat on the other air mattress just inside the tent. They were whispering. Yuissa's dolls were napping inside her princess sleeping bag. I peered at the bag in the dim light. "Who made that princess have brown skin?" Yuissa pointed to the princess' face. "I wanted her to be Taina. I used the fabric crayons Mami gave me to make T-shirts at my birthday party. It wasn't easy to make brown skin and Mami helped me. But it was easy to make the braids be black." They each put doll babies on their laps and bent over them, their heads very close.
Machi took one of the fish he'd bartered for and he and his muchachos cooked it over the fire pit. He called Taina and offered her a small piece. She turned her face away. “It still has eyes." She put it into her mouth all the while looking into his eyes for courage. "Palenque fish always tastes like the playa." He handed me a piece. "Taina's right. The fish tastes like sea water. I've never had better."
Julia who had been sewing black hoods in silence caught my gaze from across the table. 'We have a life here. I can't remember the last time I thought of my City life."
I followed her gaze. The young men cooked over the fire, the women sewed mamelucos at the table, the girls held their small brown baby dolls. "You're right. I haven't thought about the City for I don't know how long. Just this way I forgot my Venturan life when my parents went into exile in the City. Does our block even exist, or my office? Are they on the same planet as Karaya, Palenque, the fire pit, the sea water fish?"
Julia tried on one of the black hoods, adjusted it so she could see through the eyeholes. "Anacaona convinced me to wear an orange jumpsuit and a black hood." She stood, tried on the orange suit, then took it off and trimmed an inch off the legs. "I'm going but I'm not chaining myself to any fence. I've done more demonstrating since I've been in Karaya than in all of the nearly 20 years I've known Marina." She folded the suit, put it in her sack, and reached for another hood, and sighed. “I didn't know how good it could feel to live a la intemperie, how sweet night by the sea could be."
Anacaona looked at us, away from Machi. They had been talking quietly, heads close. "Even this far from the water we get a sea breeze. When the drumming stops I can hear the sea lapping against the land. Look up. See beyond the branches of that sea pine. There's another sea of stars.”
After their meal the girls ran themselves dizzy around the fire, settled into the sleeping bag with their dolls, and were now asleep in Guada's tent, sharing Yuissa's sleeping. Machi rose from the table, tucked the girls in, then kissed my cheek. "Me voy. Tengo que ir a un sitio." After he, Lagarto, and David were gone, we sewed for hours, until we worked our way through the pile of orange suits, our stitches longer and loser with each mameluco. Done, Patria, Julia, Guada, Anacaona and I lay on Guada's air mattress on the sand where we could watch the stars. Julia took my hand. “Con los pobres de la tierra quiero yo mi suerte echar. What made me think of that Marti poem ?"
We elders rose and kissed Guada and Anacaona goodnight. Julia, Patria, and I walked into the casita arm in arm. I hadn't slept indoors on a bed for many days and didn't expect to fall asleep, but next thing I knew daylight was filtering through the shuttered slats of the small window and Taina and Yuissa were tugging at my sleeping bag. "Machi came back with a man. A very tall man."