23. Clauvell y Papi

The park lawn was covered with yellow daffodils and Marina and Myra lay stretched out on a blanket Myra kept under her stroller. Lisa was asleep beside them. Machi had gone into the jungle with David, another secret assignation. The afternoon after the rescue of the wallet Marina got back late from her job interview at the Central Community Board, raced to Elena’s to pick up Machi, and ran into a thin long haired smiling light skinned woman with a baby in a stroller. “You must be Myra!” The woman nodded and extended her hand. “You must be Marina! I recognize you from your driver’s license!” Marina hugged her. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I was a hair away from losing my mind. It was like that wallet was the last string between me and sanity.”
“I’ve lost my wallet three times in the City, and three times I’ve gotten it back. I even lost it once on the train.” She paused. “I’m new in the neighborhood….”
“I’ll show you around. Take you to all the good kiddy parks.”
“How about tomorrow?”
And here they were, talking on the grass.
“Your father actually knew Clauvell?”
Marina wasn’t sure how she had jumped to intimacy with this City born woman she’d only just met. Not since Julia had she caught herself talking about the secret stuff. She pushed away the thought of how badly things with Julia turned out. Whenever Machi and David played together she was half watching from the corner of her eye for Julia to turn up and dramatize a public rage.
“My Father played a small role in history before he stepped off the stage. He smuggled the money raised by the underground in Ventura to the Venturan insurrectos in exile in Karaya, money to buy the boat they used to invade Ventura at the Puerto Palmivilia. When he delivered the money to El Mandatario, he wasn't called that yet, at the vacation home of wealthy Venturan exiles where he was staying on the foothills of El Pico, Clauvell was also there, planning El Doble Golpe, a simultaneous Landing at Boca,what we know now as the Grito del Pico. The Venturan and Karayan revolutions were intended to be one. But Ventura's was triumphant and ours in Karaya...”
Myra laughed and touched Marina’s arm. “I’m ashamed to say I don’t know what those names mean.”
Marina looked at Myra, shook her head. “Those names are pillars in my mind. It never occurs to me that there are people on this planet whose minds aren’t completely organized around the existence of Clauvell, for whom the Landing at Boca and the Grito del Pico are not…
“Events that pierce the fog, break the veil, suddenly make sense of all the confusion…”
Marina felt her heart rush. Maybe Myra was the one, her best friend. She reined herself in. She was still longing for the perfect person that would erase the need for anyone else.
“What did your father do?”
“He was an evangelist and he traveled all over Latin America for these huge campaigns. He was scheduled to preach in a big stadium in Karaya and a young man he knew in the underground asked him to deliver the money raised in Ventura for the Doble Golpe.”
“Why didn’t they just kill Clauvell when they had him in jail?”
Marina shifted onto her side so she could get a better look at Lisa.
“I’ve asked myself that question hundreds of times. Considering how they had no scruples about killing, it’s hard to understand why they didn’t go ahead and kill him.”
Myra turned onto her side, face to face with Marina. “Do you think some people have an inner power, some kind of presence that protects them?” She straightened Lisa’s blanket and stroked the hair of the little girl sleeping between them.
Marina raised her eyebrows. “It’s one of those mysteries..”
“Yeah, like are there ghosts inside the air? Right now, are Clauvell and your Papi watching us?” The women laughed.
“Besides being asked to deliver the money Papi was commissioned by some of the protestants in the underground…he was like their pastor…He once told me they came to him to pray. They were religious young men. Papi told me they had a lot of moral anguish over what they would do if they were in a position where they had to kill.”
“These young men who collected the money for el Doble Golpe thought that Papi was not likely to be searched. He was respectable and had a known good reason to be traveling to Karaya for an evangelism campaign”
“And he actually met both El Mandatario and Clauvell?”
Lisa stirred and let out a soft moan. Myra raised her blouse, made a shield with Lisa's blanket, undid her nursing bra and helped the baby find her breast.
“Enjoy that.” Marina moved closer to shield Myra. “Notice as much as you can when Lisa’s this age.”
“Just in case these turn out to be the best years of my life!”
“My Papi delivered the money to an old mansion. He met both leaders and several others who were not yet heroes of the revolution, some who didn't survive the two invasions. Papi’s young men had also asked him to ask Clauvell if it was true he was a communist. Papi asked Clauvell and he told me Clauvell said what he was for, radical transformations in land ownership, housing, education, work. He said he was anti-imperialist. He explained why there would be summary trials and firing squad executions, to avoid bloodshed by the masses. He never answered directly yes or no but my father took his words to mean that he was not. My poor father had no real idea what a communist was but he'd been formed intellectually by City missionaries. He'd been able to get an education only because the church paid for it. He was beholden, owned...”
“But wasn’t Clauvell a communist?”
“That came out much later, after the insurrectos in Ventura halted the City’s Army, stopped them from retaking the Territorio Libre in El Pico and it was clear the Venturan Revolution was won, Clauvell announced he was and had always been a Marxist Leninist. My Papi felt personally betrayed. He’d been indoctrinated by anticommunist missionaries and the word alone scared him the way the devil scared his mother. He felt because of Clauvell’s misdirection he’d sent young men to their deaths.”
There was screaming at the edge of the shrubs, Julia emerged with David by the hand. She dragged him up the hill to where the women sat talking.
“What kind of adult are you? What kind of adult allows a son to defy his mother?”
Marina cringed. Her impulse was to save herself, to lie, to say, 'I didn’t know they were playing.' She'd lied to her own mother too. Lies didn’t stop the beatings, they made them worse. She looked at Myra. Lisa had stopped nursing and was looking for the source of the screams.
Then Julia was gone. David looked back, grinned, waved, and gave Machi who knelt behind Marina shielding himself, a thumbs up.