El Mar Entrepáginas

Thomas let herself plummet onto the sofa and stared out the windowed wall to the whole of Miami as it lied uncovered beneath, her hands fidgeting with the battered, black notebook. She bent and squeezed it before carefully placing it inside one of the many front pockets of her shirt, then reached for the TV remote and let whatever was on voice over the inevitable cascade of memories—all the while caressing the fabric under which she felt the curves on the water-damaged leather.

Eighteen years was a long time lived, but in the confines of her mind, eighteen years was right around the same corner the blond woman had emerged from, walking down the old meadow home. The one at odds with the impenetrable wilderness.

Tomasín (for she wouldn’t be Thomas until later in life) watched her come from the slits between the palm timbers that made up her kitchen wall as she mindlessly rinsed the dishes on a big nickel pot. She had been looking at her for quite some time in the rhythm of her chore, seeing her first as a bright red spot shaded by a multicolored dome, before the wandering shape, made amorphous by the heat of the midday sun, became the white woman in the business suit and colorful parasol whose presence she would later grow accustomed to.

But when she saw the stranger stand by what remained of their gate, and look in her direction as if ignoring the wall between them, Tomasín had walked to the house’s portón, drying her hands on the makeshift apron and shooing away the chickens pecking at the dry soil floor. She looked at her mother, who sat quietly on the centenary rocking chair, smoking whatever cigar scraps she’d found littering her way back from town, and who answered with the disinterested shrug of someone who knew all the ways of the world and understood their banality.

Thomas was startled by the sudden shift in volume as a reporter from the news yelled over the boisterous traffic. She muted him just as he wished the viewers a

“Buen día,” Tomasín had said, looking at the woman dressed all in incandescent sharpness with squinting eyes that highlighted the creases stubbornly there at twenty-five.

The stranger smiled—pretty, blood-red lips adorning a pale, feature-full face—and handed her a gift bag, something Tomasín had not seen since ‘95 but reflectively accepted.

Peeking inside, she found a cellular phone, like the ones in the pictures, and looked at it dumbfounded as it rang. The woman mimicked a phone with her empty hand and took it to her sculpted face just as Tomasín, mirroring her, flipped open the device and listened in.

“Carlos Menrique,” said a voice on the other side. “Ocho.” And before she was allowed a second to respond, or perhaps two to contextualize what had been said, the line went dead.

The woman had then reminded her, in a voice devoid of music and personality, of the other two items left in the bag: a pen and a little black notebook, which Tomasín opened to a list of scratched names, numbers, and dates. Fast on the uptake, she wrote down the name and number spoken to her through the phone, and beside it, following the format, the date and time displayed on the cellular phone.

The alabaster woman of the festive parasol described it as a book of wishes.

“¿Míos?” Tomasín had asked with badly veiled sarcasm. The woman had chuckled all in red and told her that hopefully not. Were they then the wishes of those whose names were blacked out in its tight margins? To this, the nameless newcomer had looked into her eyes and answered “Raramente,” before parting ways.

“¿Gringa?” her mother had later asked, chewing the last of her tobacco.

This time it was Tomasín who shrugged, before going back to the infinite doings of their house.

They lived alone, her and her mother—the animals they sheltered coming and going as hunger and need arose and allowed. Back then, permanency was a luxury only reserved for those things they could have better done without: like their big, empty house; its claustrophobic isolation; and the void in their stomachs.

Tomasín had married once, in her teens, and spent most of her early twenties trying to give the house another inhabitant with whom to share its misery; not only failing to do so multiple times over, but ultimately depriving herself of an exhausted husband, and returning once more to the familiar apathy of their perpetual summers.

If she thought back to those days of hope—of enthusiastic optimism—Thomas could almost see the golden honey that had once poured down her skin on the setting sun shining through the glass panels, and hear her mother’s hoarse voice as she blew over her the rancid smoke of cigars to dispel mal-de-ojo.

The dead spoke of Yemayá’s displeasure, and how much she resented having one of her daughters stranded in the pastoral fields of Omaja, so far away from the sea she called both body and home; and how, for that alone, she would allow Tomasín no child of her own, so that she felt in flesh the pain goddesses felt only in contingency.

That evening, the phone rang again, breaking the silence reigning upon the dinner table. She left the night’s flavorless soup and picked it up.

“Carlos Menrique, hecho,” spoke a different voice (as they would go on to be from then on).

Tomasín had then looked at the name she’d written on the little notebook, and at those above it.

The instructions are clear, she thought back then—if anything, that would forever remain true—and scratched the name.

The phone would ring several times that month, although, after trying unsuccessfully to explain herself to the callers, Tomasín soon resorted to hiding it under the mattress and let it ring itself out.

On the first of the next month, however, as she fed the ducks what little corn there was left, she saw once again the colorful figure of the white lady and ran to her bag in hand.

The visitor accepted her things but returned the favor with another bag, inside which there was another phone, another pen, and another small, black leather notebook.

“No, yo—” Tomasín began, but saw also an envelope, and through it the greenery of dollars. American dollars. She gasped and inspected it closely before looking up to no one there.

And that’s how it all made sense to her then. Simple enough.

The calls came, twice for each name. She wrote them down on the first and scratched them over on the second. Sometimes there were dozens, sometimes as few as five, but one thing remained constant: When the woman came, they exchanged bags, said their good-byes.

In the process, Tomasín learned that the numbers beside the names gave away their value, and if she added them up, she could predict with some certainty the thickness of the upcoming envelope. She learned, too, how hard and convoluted exchanging those dollars was; five months in, however, she already had connections in inconspicuous places who guaranteed her a good rate and advised her about keeping any income in secrecy, because whatever the regime saw, the regime wanted and took.

Good food began making an appearance on their table by the magic nature of her little, black notebook. And her mother no longer had to look down to feed her bad habits, instead carrying loose in the deep pockets of her skirt the cigars Americans themselves envied—the ones whose earthy aroma infused the air of good things.

But the house itself remained the same, and so did Tomasín, because emptiness lingered thickly, stuck to her like an empacho. The little black book became both genesis and catalyst in an otherwise uneventful life. She cared for it, fastening it to her bra—close to her heart—and grew convinced she could feel its mysterious workings on her bosom as soft kicks from inside its leather cover.

Yet, when a cold November morning received her in the mist, holding a fine suitcase of silver latches, stacks of bills neatly packed inside, she found herself unable to ignore the absence permeating every aspect of her life.

Thomas remembered that day with clairvoyant clarity. She had given the pale visitor a notebook with just one name, now wiped clean from her memory, and even told her mother the night before she expected only twenty-five dollars. A small amount, but one that would pay for a visit to her twice-widowed aunts who lived in seclusion all the way in Camaguey.

Twenty-five thousand dollars lied bare on the arid floor.

Her mother, ever so nonplussed, gave the open briefcase one pensive look before her eyes slowly rose to meet hers. “Es tiempo de ir a conocer el mar,” she said and went back to chewing the last of her Cohibas.

Tomasín fought the idea with every fiber of her being, but after waking up the next day to her mother’s empty room, she cried her cry before collecting herself, placing two bundles of cash on the dinner table, and leaving with nothing else than a briefcase full of money and the little, black notebook beating on her chest—never to return.

From Las Tunas, she made it to Matanzas, and from there to Pinar del Rio, where half of her fortune procured her a seat on a boat that came twice every week and took those privileged enough to afford a trip across the ocean.

Thomas’ cellphone rang. She let go of the past, albeit momentarily, to tend to the call.

“I’m here,” said the voice on the other side—Miel’s voice.

“Coming right out,” she answered, and stood up with the pain of a full day’s work.

It was as good a time as any to pause the skulking of her past…

She had left in company, in the cover of night, but arrived at the jagged beaches of Key West holding onto a piece of wood, with nothing but soaked clothes and the sturdy notebook she stored within. The names of those who had remained along the way, she never cared to remember.

Thomas closed the suite behind her and rolled the housekeeper cart across the hall and into the employee's closet. She then headed to the lounge, grabbed her things, and exited through the back.

Those first days in the States were now a blur. She had not only arrived alone but also two months pregnant, which made the years ahead the hardest and most fulfilling of her life.

“All ready?” said her daughter.

“Miel, what have I told you about driving barefoot?” she asked, throwing her purse on the back seats—stolen toilet paper packed inside.

“That it’s a perfectly healthy thing to do?” Miel replied. Her eyes were as blue as her skin was black. Her feet coated in sand. “Mom,” she asked as they drove into MacArthur. “You never told me what you bought with those thousands of dollars…”

Thomas had. Multiple times. But the question always circled back when her daughter had a particularly unpalatable day. It was, perhaps, a thing of the young to think of money as anything other than being; and like everything that was, it could both cease to be or be undone to no greater universal upheaval.

What did I buy? Thomas thought at first with bitterness; the sediments of years of solitude hard to dispose of. It was this bitterness, after all, what propelled Tomasín into Thomas: A new language. A new identity.

“A life,” she said, speaking, of course, of two things at once. And taking a hand to the little black notebook tucked inside her uniform, she thought of how close they both lived to the sea.