“Yes.”
We decide to meet at two o’clock, and then with a brush of his lips against my cheek, he is gone, leaving me walking down the streets of Miramar, my skin warm from his kiss.
My home looms ahead, the pink edifice framed by looming palm trees. I walk toward the gate—
A little scream escapes my lips as a hand closes down on my forearm, tugging me to the side of the fence, away from the view of the house.
“Elisa.”
Alejandro is suddenly there in front of me, his hand gripping my arm, pulling me out of view of the street until we’re hidden by the massive walls flanking our estate.
My brother’s voice is low, urgent, so different from the teasing, mischievous boy I grew up beside. I’m not sure exactly when the change began, when he started looking at the society we inhabited with a different gaze than the rest of us. University, perhaps? He made it through a year at the University of Havana before its doors shuttered, and at some point during that time, he transformed from future sugar baron to revolutionary.
“What are you doing here?” I hiss.
My father made it clear the day he threw Alejandro out of the house—my brother could leave with the clothes on his back and nothing more, never to return again, his name expunged from the family bible, the sugar empire left to whichever one of our future husbands was most deserving in our father’s eyes, making us eminently marriageable. While our father’s edict hasn’t been strictly followed, Alejandro’s visits are typically relegated to evenings and days when our parents aren’t in residence. That our father is somewhere in the cavernous mansion, our parents returned from Varadero, makes this even more brazen.
“What are you doing with him?” Alejandro asks, his eyes dark, ignoring my question completely. His gaze runs over my appearance as though I am a stranger to him.
My heart pounds.
Brothers, too, are both a curse and a blessing.
“Nothing.”
“That didn’t look like nothing.”
What did he see? Me in the car? Walking away from Pablo? That moment when Pablo pressed his lips to my cheek?
“Well it was,” I lie. “And it’s not like you’re in any position to lecture me about being circumspect in my behavior.”
“This isn’t about being circumspect; it’s about your safety. He’s dangerous.”
“Not to me.”
“Especially to you. Do you know what they’re doing in the Sierra Maestra? They’re animals. Do you know how close he is to Fidel?”
That name drips with scorn falling from my brother’s lips. I’m not entirely shocked that my brother knows of Pablo; despite their ideological differences, my brother is every inch my father’s heir—he appreciates the value of information: hoarding it, trading it, using it to his advantage.
“He’s a good man.”
Alejandro snorts. “Aren’t we all?”
Something in his tone breaks my heart—what has Batista done to us? What have we done to ourselves?
“You’re still a good man.”
Alejandro runs a hand through his hair, grimacing. The hand falls to his side and he stares at it, pained, as though blood drips from his gaunt fingers.
Beatriz and I stood on the other side of the door, our ears pressed to the wood, listening as Alejandro and our father fought that fateful day in his study after the attack on the palace. I know my brother has killed in his private war for Cuba’s future—does he dream of the faces of the lives he took? Does he wonder if they had families—wives, children?
Beatriz and I have never spoken about what we overheard that day. Speaking words gives them an unimaginable power, and we’re full up on horrible things at the moment.
Alejandro curses beneath his breath.
“What are you doing here?” I ask again, my tone gentler.
“I need to speak to Beatriz.”
“Beatriz needs to be more careful. I caught her in Father’s study. If it had been someone else who saw her rifling through his desk . . .”
Alejandro lets out another oath. “I’ll talk to her. Tell her to be more careful.”
He’s the only one she listens to, and even that isn’t saying much.
“How much longer is this going to continue?” I ask, sagging against the wall.
“What do you mean?”
“Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to come home?” I reach out, grabbing his arm, searching his eyes for the brother I’ve known for nineteen years.
Pain stares back at me.
“How can I? What am I supposed to do?”
“We’re your family. We love you.”
“Do they love me? Perhaps you do. And Beatriz, and Isabel, and Maria. But our parents? He threw me out.”
“You tried to kill the president,” I whisper. “What was he supposed to do?”
“Understand.”
“He doesn’t. They don’t. What you’re trying to do—this system you want to destroy—is everything to them. It’s our heritage.”
“That’s not something to be proud of.”
“Not to you, but it is to them. The things you revile are the things they seek to maintain.”
He sighs, his expression haggard. “You think I don’t know that? That I don’t see that there is little chance for us to be anything other than natural enemies?”
“It’s just politics,” I argue.
“No, it’s not. Not anymore. It’s a part of me now. I can’t bury it and I can’t destroy it. I can’t go back to being the pampered prince who was set to inherit a sugar empire forged in other people’s blood and sweat. I can’t.” He pushes off the wall, frustration etched all over his face. “Tell Beatriz I’ll meet her here tomorrow at noon.”
“Alejandro—”
“I can’t wait any longer. I meant what I said earlier—that guy is no good for you. Stay away from him.” He leans forward, embracing me in a quick hug. His body is much slighter than I remember. What has he been eating? Where has he been living? How is he surviving on his own?
“Alejandro, wait.”
He releases me abruptly, turning away, his strides lengthening with each step away from me. It hurts more than I thought it would to watch my own brother nearly run away from me, and minutes pass before I’m able to move again, standing on the pavement between the mansion that feels a bit like a mausoleum and the brother who seeks to tear it down piece by piece.
chapter eight
Weeks pass, my brother absent once more, my life a cycle of ordinary events interspersed with life-changing moments with Pablo. Whatever Pablo does for the revolutionaries, he steals into the city like a thief in the night, providing us with hours together before he’s gone again. There’s no rhythm to his schedule, at least none I can see, and while I could likely search for a pattern in the news of the day, there are some things I am unwilling to examine too closely. Sometimes he is in Havana for a few days at a time and we are able to see each other once or twice; other times I can get away for a few moments and that is all.
The letters have become a method of keeping him with me when we are forced to part. They exist between dates on the Malecón, two times when he took me to the cinema, the occasional furtive meal.