The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Read online

  The night was cool and damp. Tents, stretching into the distance, were lit by lanterns, men shivering under blankets from malaria, yellow fever, and typhoid.

  “A drink?” asked Harrington.

  “I thank you, my friend.”

  As they sat sipping whiskey, Harrington, speaking in his slangy way, cussed the situation: “It’s just deplorable to be here, ain’t it? And for what, the goddanged mislaid plans of a bunch of loons, scallywags, carpetbaggers, half-baked politicians, and crazy, addle-brained generals?”

  Harrington spit some chewing tobacco into the fire, and flame spewed up. He leaned back on the bedding, pulled a blanket up around his neck, his boots, still spurred, cutting into the muddy ground as he spoke: “Now that son of a bitch Roosevelt, now he and McKinley and them bankers…” As Harrington continued his denunciations, the words “hellhole” and “cravenly muckrakers” shot out, occasionally penetrating Nelson’s own distracted thoughts. The moon had peeked through a break in the clouds, a swirling face, sad and solitary, playing hide-and-seek, as would a child, and so chilled up there in the sky, features wrapped in the thready tips and swirls of dark cloud matter.

  A single star appeared, faint in the heaviness of the inclement sky. He watched it cover over with clouds, then got up, a little wobbly from the whiskey, and sat dispirited on his black trunk, his stomach bothering him. He looked south, where the ridges of the mountains, covered by columns of billowing smoke, resembled, in that cluttered atmosphere, an immense altar above which vultures circled; and those vultures seemed to be everywhere, like seraphim, and it started to thunder and lightning cracked everywhere, and it looked as if the vultures were being turned into slits of fiery silver or tongues of fire above the altar of the mountains of Cuba, lightning cracking again and again everywhere.

  “Oh, God Almighty in Heaven, why have you made this world so?” he asked that night long ago.

  — Santiago —

  Rising on hills on a sea of pink- and blue- and yellow-walled houses and surrounded by mountains, the city that Nelson had entered in the summer of 1898 had been beautiful but devastated and rife with malaria. Before the American victory, the Spaniards had looted many of the better houses and public halls, stripping whatever valuables they could carry away. They had pulled down street lamps, destroyed or blocked the sewers, and smashed pipes so that even the more prominent citizens who had English water closets were reduced to the indignity of removing their bodily waste in carts and dumping it in great mounds in the alleys and streets—some impassable, there was sometimes so much debris. The poor state of sanitation had brought the American Red Cross, led by one Clara Barton, who had organized a headquarters down by the harbor and would appear, with a contingent of matronly New England ladies, twice daily by one of the food wagons in the Marine Park, in a Dolley Madison bonnet, soup ladle in hand, dispensing rice and stew to the poor. Hospitals had to be set up, for there were many sick Cubans. He saw them, poor souls, lingering emaciated and jaundiced by their windows, bone-thin ghosts, hands outstretched, begging for food, and whenever a horse and carriage passed by, swarms of children followed, searching the muck of the street for the grains that had dropped from the feed buckets. Some were so hungry and ill that the pyres, so disheartening in the countryside, burned nightly in that city for months, as people were dying from disease at the rate of some two thousand a week.

  He had first stayed in the city to rest, taking a room overlooking a courtyard in the Grand Hotel, by the Cathedral Plaza, but the desolation and hunger around him had moved his heart. Able-bodied men were needed everywhere, and so he went to work, joining the sanitation crews as they cleaned up the streets. He dug public latrines and helped to clear away the three hundred cubic meters of refuse, dumped there by the Spaniards, out of the cavernous interior of the harborside customs house. He wrapped a bandanna over his mouth and nose and wore a helmet with mesh netting that went down to his knees. Much of this was backbreaking—his friend Harrington, with whom he would have an occasional drink at the Venus Café, thought him mad—but he found his labor and the serenity of a selfless routine comforting.

  And there was something else. He must have been caught up in the promise of the future there, or perhaps he had simply enjoyed the initial bustle, the madness of troops packed in saloons and brothels, the enterprise of the ship-glutted harbor, the throngs of foreign journalists, and the energizing life of distraction. His daughters would imagine him making his way through that city—naughtily accompanying his friend Harrington, grandiose with schemes and ideas, to the brothels where the Celestinas did a rousing trade, Poppy, they were certain, abstaining. They’d see him in the Cathedral, in candlelight, listening intently to the Angelus, and afterward sitting in a café, while the heavy bronze Cathedral bells rang. Or a dove alighted on a railing, above one of the steep stairways, and he’d look out over the harbor, placing his hands on a stone head of Ceres—for that city was bursting with ornament—and watching the sun, like another dove, swooping into the sea and out, and the sky suddenly radiant, the air so clear and blue and the sea below riddled with sapphire waves and the elongated shadows of eastward-bound ships, all so beautiful.

  He’d go walking up and down the same cobblestone street, over and over again, a thick scent of roses and hibiscus and jasmine in the air, Nelson saying, “Hello,” or perhaps “¡Hola!” to one of the older dueñas peering out from behind the curlicued gate. He’d walk up and down the street, enchanted, unable to bring himself to leave, as if waiting for one of those ladies to come out and offer him a room to rent, una habitatión de alquilar.

  He moved into one of those houses, with a family whose ancestors had come from the province of Asturias; they liked his gentle and quiet nature. At first the kindly Irishman, who could not speak Spanish, tried in his friendly way to get to know them, tipping his hat, patting the head of a child, ever courteous. Dining with the family, drinking in the cafés, he would end his nights by lamplight, sitting up in bed with a Spanish—English phrase book, memorizing salutations, learning verbs and the names of common things in Spanish, until slowly he began to discern something of the grammar. It was everywhere around him, and became a buzz of voices in his sleep, so that in the middle of the night he would sometimes think he was on a street corner eavesdropping on the conversations of two Cuban fellows:

  “¿Sabes una cosa?”

  “¿Qué?”

  “¡Eres un chivón, un come-basura, un come-bola, un bobo tremendo, un zángano, un pajuato, un chusma sin nada de valor!”

  “¡Sí, ay, no me jodas!”

  He did not always know or understand what he had heard, insults to be sure, delivered with a wry smile. He’d recall the conversations of servant women in the markets haggling over the price of a hen with a vender—¡Noventa y cinco centavos por una gallina! ¡Dios mío!”

  And then there were conversations about the politics of the day, the names of General Brooke, American military governor of the island; of José Martí, the dead Cuban hero-poet; Antonio Maceo, the great black general, killed in 1897; Calixto García, another general; Roosevelt and McKinley—floating in swirls of suspicion.

  Thinking that Nelson could understand no more than a few phrases of Spanish, the family spoke freely, and the young Irishman began to deduce that the Cubans were at odds about the intervention—appreciating the assistance but disliking the meddling of Washington in their affairs. “So the Americans came in on the tail end of things and helped our army to drive out the Spaniards. And now they’re telling us just who we should elect as president. Why, that would have been as if the French had told the American Revolutionaries whom they should have as their president.” Arguments of this nature, which he slowly began to understand, had Nelson, who at that time felt as if he really had no country, sympathizing with the Cubans, though he never said a word.

  He’d twist and turn under the covers, listening to the voices in his head, each day understanding a little more, and yet always behaving as if he did not real
ly know what was being said—something of an amiable spy in their midst.

  ***

  Or perhaps he stayed simply for the work, photographers being much in demand. Wherever speeches were made, wherever military balls took place, or bargaining sessions between the Spaniards and the new American military government, or between the representatives of the independence-minded Cubans and the Americans, Nelson was on hand with his equipment. He photographed them all: Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps his most famous American subject (in full battle regalia), the great man, burly and high-booted, seated beside the military governor, a long saber by his side and impatiently tapping the polished wooden floors as the nervous photographer peered out at them from the darkness of his black cloth, his assistant igniting the chemical flash. He would get jobs up at the Governor’s Mansion, photographing the guests at afternoon tea parties and banquets, at gatherings of medical professionals, social workers, businessmen, military and local politicians and their wives. Sometimes he hired a horse and wagon to take him to that part of the city, or they would send someone to bring him, but most often he would carry his own equipment, cumbersome and difficult at times, his legs growing muscular from climbing the steep hills.

  ***

  Going about his business, he had begun to find enough work as a photographer to consider opening a shop. Things were so inexpensive that Nelson, who had brought five hundred American dollars to Cuba and earned occasional wages, had spent very little of his own money. In no hurry to leave, he came to rent the shop on Bolivar Street with its small apartment in the back, his name stenciled on the window—a fifteen-minute walk up from the Santiago harbor. He was twenty-two years old and wore a linen suit and a flat-topped black-brimmed hat. As he sat in the shade of an awning, smoking a pipe, he felt very much a citizen of the city and would cordially tip his hat to passersby. He had a good business, many of his customers coming by way of the flyers, written in Spanish and English, that he had posted around. Most of them were American businessmen or bankers in Santiago to attend to their investments or to take over a new post. When they’d arrive at his studio to sit for a portrait with their wives and children, he was ever polite, leading them back into a sunny courtyard where he kept a canvas screen on which had been painted a view of Santiago Bay.

  Many of the businessmen, it struck Nelson, were a little depressed, the necessities of business having condemned them to a new life in some godforsaken, backwater country. They were nervous about disease—he would reassure them that it had been all but wiped out—and about the occasional story about rebels in the countryside. In the sunny courtyard, they would often ask him, “And why are you here?”

  To which he would calmly answer: “I like the Cubans very much.”

  As they posed, they felt comforted by the name O’Brien, and were charmed by his Irish brogue: he attracted their business because they trusted his name, choosing his shop even though there were others operated by Cubans here and there in the city, some also with Irish names. One of these was operated by a certain Diego O’Reilly, who did not speak a word of English, let alone have an Irish brogue, but was as Cuban as Cuban could be. And there was a street called O’Farrill and in another shop he had seen the name Guillermo Haley stenciled on the window.

  Off they would go to take control of a shipping line, to set up a telephone system, to manage a sugar mill: some would remain in Santiago, living in mansions with four and five servants, jobs being scarce and labor cheap. He had seen them making their way north through the jungle and on the dirt roads, their New York suits caked with dust, and the ladies coughing delicately as their carriages went lurching and rocking forward. If they seemed quite distressed, he would urge them to enjoy the country, “beautiful as a dream,” he would say. Sometimes he would show them his photographs of the Cuban countryside, taken during occasional excursions out of the city with his assistant, a Cuban boy whom Nelson had found homeless—two- or three-day journeys to the big sugar mills, where he would photograph baptisms, weddings, birthday celebrations, and other family gatherings. Among those shots: a mist of clouds over the mountains; a weeping willow caught in a shaft of sunlight; a deer sipping from a stream; a cave with the siren cry of winds, its entranceway wreathed with vines and orchids; dense forests dropping into ravines; and his favorite, a simple meadow of wildflowers over which fluttered a storm of butterflies. He would tell them, “For the naturalist there is much pleasure in this country,” a phrase he had lifted from a British lord, a gentle soul in a pith helmet with a butterfly net and thick ledger books by his side, whom he had met one night by the harbor and with whom he had discussed the splendors of the island.

  “Physically speaking, my dear friend,” the Englishman had told him, “the countryside is paradise.”

  — How Nelson Met Mariela —

  It was midsummer of 1900, the war over for nearly two years, and Mariela Montez, sixteen years old, sat in the back patio of the family’s house on Victoriana de Avila Street in Santiago, mending with needle and thread the loosened buttons of her father’s shirt. Amid palms and scented flowers, she rocked in a wicker chair. She was a pretty woman with long black hair that fell over her shoulders, an oval face serene and intelligent in its definition, high cheekbones, a sleek nose, but with such pain or stoicism in the darkness of her eyes that people sometimes had the impression that she could read minds. She was wearing a simple white dress with pleated skirt, tied with a yellow bow around the waist, and underneath that, a long camisole and a loose-fitting corset—she’d refused to lace all the eyeholes and hooks which, crisscrossing much of her wardrobe, seemed to inform her life.

  She had furrowed her lovely brow, enjoying, as she made repair, the birdsong in the trees: now and then, an iguana would peek out from under a jasmine plant, chameleons roamed over the stone walls and turned to a viny green where the ground had burst, sending up its blossoms, its thorns curling up into the arbor surrounding her.

  That day she felt herself idle, each stitch a marking of time. It annoyed her, for there were so many things she had never done in her young life, and there she was, slipping a length of thread through the third hole of a button. There was much that she wanted to know about the world, a curiosity buried under layers of dress and the formalities of the strictly run household to which she had returned; she had never been anywhere—save for Santiago, their two farms, and a retreat in the Sierra Mountains where the family had lived during the last year of the war. She had not even been allowed much schooling, except for what the good sisters had taught her in Catechism, but she did have a little shelf of books: one of them, much thumbed, was a book about a pilgrimage to Rome by a Jesuit priest, called En Roma, la ciudad de Dios, a lively mix of pagan and Church lore that was of much interest to her. Then, too, she kept other books on a subject that had fascinated her as a child, when in the evenings out on the farms she tended to daydream about the stars, a turgid, dense, three-volume encyclopedia on the stars and planetary motion that she had spotted in a bookstall in the market, with its listing of then known stars and its speculations about the planets. Another book, of a more frivolous and frankly enjoyable nature, was a capricious volume, a gift from her father, that had been published in Spain in 1895: La vida en el planeta marte, or Life on the Planet Mars, which had been written by a certain professor Severo Fuentes of the Astronomical Society of Barcelona. He had based this exemplary work on a sixteenth-century treatise in Latin by a monk named Theocratus, who had claimed through a vision to have visited that planet, where, according to professor Fuentes, the advanced inhabitants of this world concealed their presence with great machines that sent up plumes of red vapor into the atmosphere. Visiting that planet, he came upon “cities so majestic and serene, with hanging gardens like those of Babylon, and rivers on which its inhabitants journeyed in diamond gondolas.” There the good monk heard an eternal music, the music of the spheres, and encountered a people so wise that they had never known war or illness. “It was as if I had a vision of heaven,” the monk had
written. “The men and women of this world, who went naked as babies and had Oriental expressions, could, by an act of will and great mental exertion, sprout wings like butterflies. This they did on their day of worship, swarming in circles over the towers of a magnificent crystal cathedral through whose diaphanous walls flowed a brilliant light, brighter than the sun. And these people were ruled by a queen so beautiful that when I beheld her from afar I trembled.”

  It was Professor Fuentes’s opinion that all this was plausible and much of the text was a rebuke of what modern science—circa 1897—held to be true about Mars, then considered unsuitable for life. Mariela, entertained by the imagination of the professor—did a monk named Theocratus ever exist?—thought the book a pleasant invention, diverting and strangely meaningful to her. And its chapters about the possibilities that these beings had once journeyed to this world, settling on the island of Atlantis, which they later destroyed, intrigued her. Over the years the Martians had returned to this world to plant the seeds of advancement among us. It claimed, for example, that “the spirit of the Martians may have guided the ambition of one Cristobal de Colón.”

  Her father, Emilio Montez, had been a great supporter of the Cuban independence movement, but mainly, in his private moments, he had poetic aspirations; what notebooks he could find he filled with his lyric observations about the world and the cruelty and sanctity of men. He was not famous like the poet José Martí, but he had an elegant respect for the art of the language and often daydreamed, during those few moments of peaceful reflection after the war, about making himself a name, if not a livelihood, through the practice of that craft. Affection for the world and the small wonders of his life had poured from his pen, and his influence on his daughter Mariela, as thick as the sadness of that night, had inspired her own poetic aspirations.