she usually strained to hear, his voice like the rustle of new leaves in a summer breeze, today was shouting at her as loudly as a gale wind across bare-limbed trees.
"Madrecita, viejita de mi alma," the first soldier called out to Saturnina as she approached the dispensary. "Aquí tienes pan."
"Comrade, take your bread!" the second soldier barked.
Saturnina grasped the small loaf, tucking it inside her blouse.
"No lines today," the first soldier said, shrugging, a crooked smile on his face. "Why don't you take these, too? No one's here."
Saturnina said nothing but held out her skirts to receive the few hard biscuits that remained on the dispensary shelf, receiving them as if she were waiting for communion— a pragmatic, unexpected communion held before a ramshackle wooden shed and dispensed by a couple of priests in army fatigues.
" Fidel calló," Saturnina explained, offering them the words in gratitude.
"Madrecita—" the soldier with the crooked smile began. Saturnina saw him raise a forefinger to his lips. "Be careful."
Saturnina gave him a sidelong glance, her ancient underlip jutting into the infinity of space before her, the rope of her hair twisted into a crown at the top of her head. She looked down and remembered the bloody edges of her skirts. She wasn't certain which frightened her more, the knowledge she carried with her or the smiling soldier's response to her words.
"Calló. Fidel calló. ¿Qué van hacer?" Saturnina asked softly, calmly.
"Get out of here," the second soldier commanded. "You're lucky I'm not arresting you, you crazy old loon. Fidel is alive."
" Fidel calló. What will you do? Who will you stand with?" Saturnina insisted.
"Do what he says. Don't come back again, madrecita. For your own good," the soldier with the crooked smile insisted.
Saturnina squinted. Why did he insist on calling her madrecita?
"¿Tomás?"
The soldier with the crooked smile shook his head.
"José," he offered.
"I understand," Saturnina replied, winking.
Saturnina lifted the uppermost layers of her skirts until she reached the old apron with the deep pockets. She stuffed the hard biscuits into her pockets, then pulled the small loaf from her blouse and took a bite.
"You remind me of my mother," José said.
"I am your mother, boy. You all belong to me."
She smacked her lips and cocked her left eyebrow.
"Remember," Saturnina said, shaking an arthritic forefinger at him, "I was the one. I told you the truth. What are you going to do? Who will you stand with? You'll have to decide."
The second soldier scowled at her. Saturnina turned and walked a short distance from the dispensary.
"¡ Fidel callo! You'll have to decide. Soon."
Saturnina scurried away, shrugging off the volley of curses the second soldier hurled at her. She began the walk back to her hovel. As she walked, she broke off small pieces of bread, putting each piece in her mouth, chewing and walking until she reached the ruin she called home. From the outside it appeared intact, the blue-and-white Alhambra tiles that decorated the façade and entrance untouched. Inside, most of the walls and ceilings had collapsed onto the ground floor, slowly, piece by piece, covering in rubble the marble surface of the once grand foyer. Only the top floor, the carved wooden stairs, and a portion of the roof that extended precariously over the rubble remained. It was here, in this niche that extended from the landing and along one of the interior walls, that she made her home. She climbed up the long, rickety staircase and sat on the top landing in her battered rocker, glancing up at the morning sky through the broken walls of the building and then down at the passersby flitting across the broad entranceway below her.
Fidel's death had triggered in her a set of barely dormant preoccupations that began now to shift and commingle with the sound of the children's rhymes floating across from the building behind hers. She thought about how much she liked to play with the children; how they would call out their rhymes, running at her full tilt, fearless, like birds in flight. They trusted her dusty lap and her arthritic hands, which even now, in old age, could grip and raise them toward the sky. They would dance circles around her, hiding in the folds of her skirt, laughing from their hard, round bellies at the old woman, old as a rock, dark as a river idol raised from the mysterious depths on a fisherman's hook.
They were her children, she thought. Even the soldiers were hers. She extended her right hand before her proprietarily, beneficently, as if she were blessing her congregants. These were Saturnina's streets, her cobblestones under the tropical sun, her bony mongrels that sniffed and scraped for any morsel and died among thick cords of flies, their rib cages thrust into the midday air, defiant. The streets that tilted down in a long cascade, eventually finding their way to the sea; these were hers. The rusted wrought-iron balustrades; the perilously worn balconies; the toothless slatterns who hung their dingy laundry across rows of drooping rope suspended between doorways; these belonged to her, too. Sorrowful Saturnina, her neighbors called her, harmless bag of bone and flesh buffeted by forces so much greater than herself; crazy old woman, living trough of memory and despair. How she liked to rock back and forth on her perch every day and think about Tomás, her sweet and only boy, calling out his name.
"¡Tomás! ¡Tomás! "
She rocked steadily back and forth, calling out to him as if he were in the next room, as if he would be bringing her a bag of yarn, a misplaced pair of glasses. But today only the image of Tomás's bloodied body and that last, startled look on his face rose before her.
Though Saturnina lived through the turmoil at the end of Batista's regime and the beginning of Fidel's, she remembered very little, images of the violence and injustice of those years imprinting themselves on her memory as if they had been observed by someone else. She moved through the days and months after Tomás's death practically, methodically— the way someone moves through a series of facts memorized but not quite understood. She had always known about Tomás's interest in politics; she had never realized how actively he had been working against Batista, joining the Revolutionary Directorate and running an underground student network that provided food and shelter for dissenters of every political stripe. He had been arrested several times, but so had many of the university students who were members of the Directorate, and who had sworn themselves to the overthrow of Batista.
Saturnina remembered asking Tomás's classmate, Armando, to tell her what had happened.
"They singled him out. They singled a lot of us out," Armando explained. "They saw Tomás as part of the Directorate's conspiracy to assassinate Batista."
"Was he?"
"I don't know, Saturnina."
"You must know, Armando. You were with him."
"I just helped him shelter dissenters. We never told one another anything that could be used against us."
"He sheltered people, Armando. He would never kill."
"He
