Saturnina felt the press of the invisible hand propelling her forward again. She hobbled along as quickly as her aching knees would carry her. She passed the ruined buildings, the mosaics on each façade shattered by time. She could feel the tesserae striking the ground, her heart constricting as each one began to dissolve into the dust. She felt obliged to stop and rescue as many as she could, placing them carefully in a small pouch by her side.
She liked to hear the tesserae clicking, rubbing against one another; the soft swoosh of her many skirts and the counterpoint of colorful marble. She liked to collect these pieces every day and then at nightfall empty the pouch on the floor of the broken attic she called home. She would light a candle, arrange the tesserae by color and pattern, and whisper a prayer to the God who held her ankles so delicately, that He might watch over these hardened tears that dropped from her buildings just as He watched over her son in heaven.
"¡ Fidel calló!" Saturnina cried out to every passerby.
She walked as fast as she could, surveying the ground before her, picking up bits of fallen marble, trying to ignore the smell of fried dough in the air and the growl it had triggered in her belly. She had given away her last bit of bread to the children, and she wondered if there would be bread today at the food dispensary. The pouch of tesserae jostled on her hip, the sugary dough sizzled in the morning air, the invisible hand pressed against her back. She didn't have a single centavo in that pouch, so if the dispensary was closed, she would have to wander back with an even emptier belly into the heart of the city. She would have to stop by the farmers' market stalls and find a soul who would take pity and give her a handful of uncooked beans or a ripe mango.
The old woman covered her face and began to cry. The press of that invisible hand pushed her forward, the undertow of sorrow and regret pulled her under, until her mind began tumbling through the past, the image of her broken son on an aluminum slab at the city morgue rising before her. She felt the stiffened hands that had once held hers, tiny fingers wrapping round her immortal soul. All the fighting and the blood and the words— her son had been taken away unjustly, but he would return.
"¡Tomás! ¡Tomás! ¿No quieres café?"
"No, Mamá," she could still hear him saying. "I'll have some of your lovely coffee later."
The sound of Tomás's voice was so close by today that it was nearly unbearable. His voice had become amplified, as if all at once Tomás had become many people and was shouting at her from many different directions.
"¡Tomás! ¡Tomás! ¡ Fidel calló!"
Each time she called out the day's news to him, Tomás shouted back, the sound reverberating in her head, confusing her. Why was her boy shouting at her? This beloved son whose whispers 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