Chapter Five #3
If Ignacio knew that she wasn’t loyal to the revolution, if Ignacio knew that she was hiding exiles’ books rather than allowing the state to inventory and seize them, would he turn her over to the authorities?
She didn’t know.
—
Pilar climbed the stairs to her apartment, a stack of books in hand.
After her conversation with Ignacio, she’d been unable to concentrate, fear seizing her throughout the day.
In the quieter moments of her day, afternoon rain driving their patrons away, Pilar had distracted herself by searching the stacks for any books she could find on Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century and any mention of the Cuban contingent of teachers that had traveled to Harvard.
She’d searched for Eva Fuentes, too, but as far as she could tell, A Time for Forgetting was the only thing she’d published, and she hadn’t been able to find another copy.
There hadn’t been much in the way of information, but their neighborhood library lent itself more to fictional works than the kind of research materials she was looking for. A trip to the National Library was in order on her day off.
Pilar quickened her steps as she bounded up to the next floor, already eager to return to the quiet comfort of her apartment, her fingers itching to turn the pages of A Time for Forgetting .
Working at the library both enervated and exhausted her.
There was nothing she loved more than conversing with readers about books, recommending titles that she thought they would enjoy, matching their personalities and needs with the perfect reads even as the busy days tired her, her personality ill-suited to the constant talking and performing that came with greeting customers.
It was a vocation of sorts, and sometimes, when she felt like a very small grain of sand in the vastness of life, in a world where the stakes were ever changing and impossibly high, she was reminded by the smile on a patron’s face, the relief in another’s, that what she did mattered.
Two of her neighbors—one of whom was Mrs. Padilla, the recipient of Zenaida’s newer refrigerator—were huddled together on the landing whispering.
They stopped as soon as they saw Pilar.
The other woman—Mrs. Sandoval—was less familiar to Pilar, but she had seen her hanging her clothes out on the line and they had smiled at each other in passing.
The look they both gave Pilar sent a ripple of foreboding through her.
She’d always had an active imagination. As a child, it had kept her busy—she could have been sitting anywhere, but in her mind, she was always off having adventures. Reading had only expanded the reach of the possibilities she conjured. But now—
“Good evening.” Pilar forced herself to smile as she struggled to keep the tremor from her voice even as her mind immediately jumped to all the things that might have gone wrong since she had left for work this morning.
The two women regarded her with something akin to matching expressions of pity and fear.
She immediately thought of Enrique. Pilar would know if her husband was dead, wouldn’t she? She would feel it somewhere in the vicinity of her chest, near her heart, as though the tether that had connected them since the first moment they met had been irrevocably severed.
“Is everything alright?”
She closed her eyes, bracing herself for the news.
“Zenaida is gone,” Mrs. Padilla said quietly.
Pilar opened her eyes. “What do you mean ‘gone’?”
Gone? Or Gone ?
Not Zenaida.
Mrs. Padilla shook her head, reaching out and gently resting her arm on Pilar’s forearm as though she realized how close she was to breaking and was trying to steady her.
Over the years, they had exchanged little more than the barest of pleasantries, but in this moment, the world crashing down around her, the sensation of Mrs. Padilla’s hand on her arm was the only thing anchoring her.
“No—sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. Not gone like that. She left. The building. Havana. Cuba.”
Relief flooded her.
So, Zenaida had gotten out. Good for her. Pilar also appreciated that apparently Zenaida hadn’t told Mrs. Padilla about going to see Pilar last night, about the book or any of it.
“They’ve already gone through her apartment,” Mrs. Padilla added.
That was fast. Had they found something incriminating? Did that explain the worried looks on their faces?
“We have a new resident,” Mrs. Padilla continued.
Surprise filled Pilar, but then again, she had been several steps behind this entire conversation from the moment she saw the two women standing on the landing.
She’d been distracted by Ignacio’s announcement that a man had come looking for her, her mind racing with the possibility that he might return.
“Someone has already moved into Zenaida’s apartment?” Pilar asked. “So soon?”
Truthfully, with all that had happened, she hadn’t even had the opportunity to contemplate getting a new neighbor. It was no longer Zenaida’s apartment, of course—the state took everything—but the swiftness with which Zenaida’s home had moved to another was more than a little unsettling.
Both women glanced up the stairs, as if searching for the new neighbor.
Whoever it was, Pilar had a feeling it wasn’t going to be good.
These women ran the building. Quietly, but everyone knew that they had lived here the longest, seen the most, and there was a deference that the residents paid to them. Zenaida had been part of their triad, but now that she was gone, there was a void of sorts.
It was a good building. It was a good apartment, a nice location. For someone to have moved in so quickly, they must have some sort of connections, must be someone important in Fidel’s regime. Ordinary people didn’t get prime apartments in Havana so easily.
“And the new tenant?” Pilar asked.
“It’s a man. A single man,” Mrs. Padilla replied, her voice dropping to little more than a whisper. She glanced up the stairs and then back at Pilar. She hesitated, a loud silence swirling around them.
What wasn’t she saying?
“He’s a military man. A major in the army, I believe.”
A wave of nausea assailed her.
Was it a coincidence? Was she so unlucky that it just so happened that one of Fidel’s majors needed a place to live at the exact moment Zenaida’s apartment came available? Perhaps. Life had a funny, horrible way of twisting itself in surprising manners.
If Pilar was, say, a person with a fanciful imagination, she might worry that it wasn’t a coincidence after all. That more likely this building was on a list somewhere, she was on a list somewhere because of Enrique, and that when an opportunity had presented itself, the vipers had struck.
If she was a person with an imagination that tended to run wild, she might be terrified that this major had been tasked with spying on her, monitoring her comings and goings.
Was this the same man who had come by the library asking about her?
Was he here because of Enrique’s actions? Or something else entirely?
She wished she knew.
After Pilar exchanged her goodbyes with the two women, when she forced herself to take the steps one at a time, to put one foot in front of the other, feeling as though they were weighed down by lead, she swore she heard a whisper rise to meet her.
Whether it came from one of the women or the recesses of her mind, she couldn’t say.
Be careful.