Did she wish, some nights later, that events had reversed? Daniel killed by the military approaching from behind, undetected, deep in the Sierra? Did she wish never to know what happened to her husband, to say, He disappeared into the mountains one day and I never saw him again—he is a martyr? Not all nights.
Only the nights when Daniel came home rum-drenched, cursing the Yankee imperialists who paid him pennies while they cavorted with go-go girls in private clubs, when he dropped pesos, barely enough for milk, much less meat, into Dolores’s hand.
The blows came fast—to the face, the stomach, Dolores’s back. He’d lock the girls in their room. Carmen was old enough to hear her father’s yelling, her mother’s crying, but she stayed silent behind that door. Though Daniel had never touched the girls, they feared him, too, with a confused admiration that Dolores had possessed for her own violent father.
After the blows came kicks sometimes. With mud-caked boots. Drawing blood from a broken nose that never repaired right, from split lips and knocked-out teeth. She should have feared death but she didn’t. In the moments when Daniel appeared ready to kill her, all thought ceased, and she retracted into the shell of her arms, saw splinters of light, spinning walls, felt like a child on a merry-go-round thrust off and ready to hit the floor. Sometimes, at the crescent of raw fear, she felt free, like she soared. The pain came later.
Some men apologized afterward. She had enough friends with husbands who “got a little out of hand sometimes,” too, to know as much. Some men bought gifts and promised change. Daniel spared her that confusion, at least. Hours later, days later, in his sobriety, Daniel would say nothing of his violence. He’d ignore the bruises or the cuts, the bandages and homemade splints because they couldn’t afford a doctor. He’d pat his girls on the head and bring them wildflowers that he hid in his pockets. If there was any conversation, it was about the news on the radio. Freedom is coming, he would say. Inevitable. He didn’t mention a return to the mountains, though Dolores willed it those nights, willed it so hard.
But Daniel didn’t mention joining the fight again. He still crouched with his ear to the radio each night. He still looked out each morning toward the field before him as if the Movement would come marching through darkness right to his door. But he had settled back into work and Dolores had settled back into her previous routine. Perhaps it had all been a phase, Daniel the hero.
His absence, though, had given Dolores ideas. She knew that it was no longer preposterous that a woman might leave her husband. There was even a woman, just a few miles away—a woman with two kids and no husband. The woman lived with her mother, sister, and sister’s husband. And sure, people whispered about her, and some families didn’t even want their kids mingling with hers, but the woman managed. She showed her face at the market and at school to pick up her children. She held birthday parties and invited Carmen.
Dolores knew, too, that once Carmen got older and Elena started school, she could leave the older girl in charge of the younger one and find work more easily. Maybe it was a matter of biding her time. She began to prepare. She hid little bits of her grocery allowance in a slit she cut under the mattress. She loosened a slat of wood from a wall and hid her most valuable possession there—an original printing of Les Misérables given to her by her grandmother Cecilia when she was a child. She started teaching Carmen how to cook simple dishes and put her in charge of little chores like dusting the furniture. And she befriended a neighborhood woman who owned a typewriter. She joined her every few days for coffee and to practice memorizing the keystrokes. The woman thought her simply curious and didn’t mind showing off her prize possession. Dolores joined the woman’s circle of friends who met each day at noon.
Daniel seemed to notice the change. Perhaps she lowered her head a little less or spoke a little more. Whatever it was, the new Dolores sharpened Daniel’s wrath. A month after killing a man for the first time, Daniel broke three of Dolores’s ribs and they had to borrow money to get Dolores to a hospital. She spent weeks in a rigid cast, and Carmen picked up more household chores.
By then, it was no longer just Daniel with his ear to the radio, whispering that, yes, an ouster of Batista might be possible. Dolores heard it even from the neighborhood women. Voices lowered, everyone leaning in, talk over coffee.
“—students in the capital who stormed the presidential palace.”
“—five guerrilleros. Just boys, still baby-faced. Lined up against a wall and shot in the head one by one—”
Typewriter click.
“I heard the americanos pledged to help Batista.”
“Can you imagine? I hear it’s just handfuls of peasants in the mountains, and the troops are losing!”
A ding. Hit return.
“You know what that means. Batista will crack down. On everybody.”
Nervous energy in the air. An uncertainty.
It’s not that Dolores didn’t want to see the President gone. But she had thought Daniel brash to run off to the mountains and feared every day that squads would come in the night, would shoot the whole family, dump their bodies in a hidden grave, burn their house, rape her girls. She feared Daniel joining the rebellion not because she disagreed with it in principle but because she had stopped believing any kind of change was possible. She wanted to live. And, even more important, wanted Carmen and Elena to live.
But life right now. Daniel brought home less some weeks than others, and they always lived on the precipice of hunger, of falling ill with no money for a doctor or a hospital. Daniel had
