This actually started as a response to one of Angela Goff’s Visual Dare prompts; I can’t even remember which one, now. I may continue to revise it, since I rather like the concept behind it. It’s very much influenced by my reading of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits earlier this year.
In the old days the Calle de las Rosas, which was broad and straight and lined with rosewood trees like temple columns, had always seemed to her like a street of heaven, so brightly sunlit in the long subtropical afternoons you could see the heat rising in shimmering waves off the white-washed walls and red tile roofs. In the warm blue nights the street glowed richly gold as El Dorado, lit all over by lamps and by tall candles in open arched windows. In those days she hadn’t read Marx or heard the revolutionary ballads on the radio and she hadn’t yet seen the compañeros gun down her político father before the white-washed walls of his own house. In those days she was a girl and she’d played with a dark-skinned boy named Tomás in the shade of the rosewood trees.
Much later the Calle de las Rosas went to hell like all the rest of the world. She was thirty-three years old and she heard the blast when they bombed the presidential palace and the endless spatterings of machine-gun fire when they stormed it and killed everyone who remained inside and she saw her father die in the street before his own white-washed walls which by then were red with blood and political graffiti. They bombed the clinic too, which seemed pointless and a waste, but she knew it was because Padre Gutiérrez had insisted on treating compañeros and Guardia Civil indiscriminately which made him un enemigo del pueblo and contra-revolucionista. He was in fact very revolucionista but not in the things which seemed to matter to the compañeros who bombed the clinic.
Anyway she hadn’t been at the clinic when it was bombed because she’d worked all through the previous night and in the morning Padre Gutiérrez had sent her home to rest a while and she had seen the bombing over her shoulder as she went home up the Calle. She hadn’t been scared before, because there’d been no time for it, but she was scared then and she began to think maybe she would leave the city after all—if the clinic were bombed there wasn’t much point in staying—but when she reached the white-washed walls where her father had died there were compañeros waiting for her, six of them under the command of a seventh man whose name was Comandante Tomás García Gonzalez.
She sat in the heavy clawfoot chair in the sala which was the one thing in the house that revolutionary fervor had not been able to destroy or even damage very badly: they’d looted the house after shooting her father but the chair had been too heavy to carry out and too well-built to smash easily and so it remained a lone relic of days gone by. Her heart was hammering against her ribs and her mouth was dry but she sat very primly on the edge of the chair as though it were a throne and she looked at Tomás García Gonzalez, who was a comandante now and who fought in the name of the People.
The Comandante said of her father, “He was a fool not to send you out of the country.”
“It wasn’t his foolishness. He couldn’t make me go.”
“Neither could your husband?”
She said, “I never married, Comandante.”
His face was blank in a studied way. “Then you stayed because—?”
“For my work. The clinic.”
“The clinic?”
“I’m a doctor at the clinic,” she said. And then she said, “I was,” and she felt a strange and bitter urge to laugh.
She thought he might laugh too, as all the male doctors had done that first day. She’d been the first woman in the country to come through medical school. Secretly her father had been proud of it but of course he couldn’t say as much in public because he was staunchly tradicionalista and so too had been the men who put him into office each election.
The Comandante didn’t laugh.
“I didn’t think it meant so much to you,” he said.
She’d told him once, in the old days under the rosewood trees when they’d had such secrets between them, how she intended one day to go to school for medicine. She had supposed he’d forgotten. In an off-handed way it pleased her he still remembered but now that the rosewood trees had been ripped to shreds by shell fragments and the bodies of the Guardia Civil were hanging from the utility poles she didn’t see it much mattered.
She said, “Is that why you said what you said? Because it meant nothing?” Her voice was very calm but also cold and hard as winter and she was proud it was so.
She’d been fifteen, and he two years older, when he had told her he loved her. She had supposed he’d forgotten that too. They’d said a great many things under the rosewood trees in those days and she couldn’t be sure now which of them were foolishness and which seriousness, because the things she’d taken to be all seriousness at fifteen were less concretely so at thirty-three, the world having come apart in the interim.
The Comandante said, quietly, “I meant every word.”
And she said, just as quietly, “I, too.”
There was silence between them. The bitter laugh was crawling up the back of her throat. When it burst out suddenly between her teeth, loud in the silence, the Comandante’s chin snapped up in reflex as though he were startled.
She said, “Qué tontos. We were honest with each other. It only took a revolution to make us realize.”
The Comandante said, “There have been revolutions fought for worse reasons.”
Then he said, “I know a man in the American embassy who can get you out.”
She said, sharply to hide the tremor in her voice, “My father couldn’t make me leave, Comandante, and do you think you will?”
“They bombed the clinic this morning.”
“I know,” she said, “I saw.” She shrugged. Her heart was pounding very loudly now against her ribs. “So you see I’m needed here—more now than before.” And then, drawing a breath: “Tell them to send the wounded here. There’s space enough, and good light. Tell them to send the wounded—and any medical supplies, anything you can find—”
He looked at her long and silently. Then he nodded once. His mouth was tight. “I’ll do what I can,” he said.
She watched him go out from the door and up the path to the gate where his compañeros stood with their rifles slung over their shoulders, smoking while they waited. In the bright afternoon sun the heat rose heavenward in shimmering waves from the walls and the red tile roofs all along the Calle.