Renata waiting for Felipe: another of the Holtz family taking in another of the Otero women. He would soon drive her to his mansion where her mother, Celia, had been taken in and raised, and where Renata visited as a child, never quite understanding back then why this had happened. But she had exotic memories of vacations here with her cousins, of games played in their vast house and in the stables and outbuildings, with secret hiding places and cuddling until they found you, early intimations of romance, which seemed to be what they called it. Whatever it was those visits were always too brief, always interrupted, and always with that hovering mystery no one talked about but everyone (except Renata) knew — the secret life of her grandmother.
She sat at the first table in the café, near the door, and ordered a coffee. The waiter had a large scar on his neck, a rope burn from being hanged? Remnant of a murderous throat-slitting? But, Renata, might it not have been accidental? No. Something so egregious is rarely accidental in Cuba. She saw her Grandmother Margaret’s hooded eyes, and her scarred eyelids, and don’t try to tell Renata that was accidental. She conjured the face she knew from young photographs before the eyes were attacked. Such a wild creature, Margarita Lastra Pujol de Otero, who came to Cuba on a tidal wave of passion, unable to live without her husband of a few months, Jaime, who had left her in Spain in 1896 to join the war against Cuban rebels, also to elevate his military status, war can do that for a privileged young prince of a wealthy family.
Renata was now sitting a few blocks from where Margarita, with her year-old Celia, had first lived in this city while Jaime was making forays into rebel territory. Her townhouse belonged to Jaime’s uncle, Sebastian Holtz Otero, who derived his wealth from one of the few sugar mills to survive three wars in Oriente Province. Jaime came there twice to be with her, brief visits but wild with conjugal frenzy and bliss and such emotional consummation that he composed a will against the day he might die in war, giving her all he owned or might inherit. What he asked in return was her eternal love and fidelity, which she granted with the first blink of her eye, her worship of his penstroke and sexual fury, his teardrop on the letter, his mouth on her own and on her body and on the spiritual lips of her love. You will kiss me everywhere and forever, she wrote him. In these days he sent her three letters, all he could manage, but they were very like the twenty-seven he’d written when courting her: passionate, even shocking. They burned her imagination; she thrived on their heat.
Renata wanted to receive letters like those. As she grew older she heard her parents talk of them, then found the key to the strongbox where Celia had hidden them, because such things were not fit for young eyes. Renata sat and read them all, her first schooling in the language of sex and the thrilling persiflage of love. She wanted to own the letters but her mother discovered her reading them and put them in a bank vault, telling her: When you are ready.
Renata was ready now. She wanted to read them again, see farther into those words that had shaped an obsession in her grandmother. She wanted to walk to the town house, which was still there, for it would put flesh on her memory. Here is where it all happened, here the point of tragedy of the solitary young mother who one day hears Uncle Sebastian say Jaime has died in battle, nobly. In fact his head had been split in half by a machete stroke. Renata imagined the fall of her grandmother’s spirit, her instantly cracked heart, her life suddenly without meaning. Margarita did withdraw, her agony turning to delirious flights of conversation with the dead; and she seemed to have forgotten that the baby Celia existed. Jaime’s uncle, whom she rarely saw and who lived on the Holtz estate in Palma Soriano, monitored her condition through daily briefings from the nana he sent to care for mother and child.
A modest fortune accrued to Margarita, sent as income to her from Spain by the executor of Jaime’s estate, a friend of the Holtz-Otero family. The inheritance came with the proviso that Margarita not remarry, and if she did the inheritance would go to Jaime’s daughter with her, Celia. Margarita was oblivious of such detail, victim of the single-minded disease of love. She dwelt in grief and took pleasure only in the historic passion and memorious fantasy the love letters aroused in her.
Jaime’s uncle tried to reverse her withdrawal by sending his son Evelio, like Jaime a Spanish lieutenant, to comfort and restore her, a gesture so naive that his family thought him demented. Margarita was twenty-nine, Evelio thirty-four. Evelio visited her, offering comfort; returned the next day and the next with new comfort, which begat the word, the soft stroke, the fervor of immediacy. And there you have it.
They began in secret and were interrupted when Evelio was sent into unequal combat against the invading American forces. She welcomed the defeat of the Spanish military by the Americans for it meant the restoration of a lover to her life, a lover who banished all her guilt over the swift relegation of Jaime to memory, just as he banished her melancholy with his passion. Three months after Evelio’s release from the army Evelio secretly married Margarita.
Renata, remembering this, wondered, am I my grandmother? She saw the parallel to Diego and Quinn just as she looked to the doorway and saw Quinn coming toward her.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I just met your cousin Felipe.”
“My coffee,” she said.
“I’ll get you another one.”
“I didn’t pay for it.”
Quinn put money on the table and led her out to the street.
“Those guns of yours,” Felipe told Renata as they moved out of Santiago in his car, “we loaded them into a truck with fake floorboards that made room for them all. There were six Thompsons. Alfie found the truck. He knows how to get things.”
Holtz had been quietly supporting the Directorio with cash infusions until the previous week when two fourteen-year-olds he knew, neither with any connection to the rebels, were tortured and killed by police; and his outrage escalated. He flew to Havana and told his friend Aurelio he wanted to do more. Aurelio took him to a boat basin to meet a gun dealer, since Holtz had offered to buy guns. But neither money nor guns changed hands that day, the transaction aborted by a cruising police car. The transfer was to be the next day, but that afternoon the Palace attack was launched and Holtz went underground, surfacing only when he knew Aurelio had survived the attack; and by then Alfie, through Renata’s and Quinn’s intercession, had delivered the guns to Aurelio and Javier at the gas station.
When Renata mentioned yet more guns in the Sixteenth Street apartment that she and Diego had rented, Aurelio put Holtz together with Alfie to find a way to rescue them. Two nights later Fidel’s people were poised to bomb a major electrical grid; and if it succeeded, much of Havana would go dark, a propitious time for burglary. The weapons’ preliminary destination was an empty warehouse where they would be put on a commercial truck bound for Oriente. But then Holtz said to Aurelio and Alfie, if there are no guards at the Santa Fe landing field, and usually there are not, I could fly them to my father’s airstrip in Palma Soriano and Fidel’s people will unload them.
“So we put them on my plane and took off at dawn,” Holtz said to Quinn and Renata. “Four of Fidel’s peasants met us and took them. Fifteen minutes after our landing the army showed up to search the plane, but there was no contraband to be found.”
“Where is Alfie now?” Quinn asked.
“At the house,” Holtz said. “He’s waiting for us.”
On the road to the Holtz estate, going north out of Santiago, they faced a major army checkpoint with a tanqueta at the ready, a dozen armed soldiers at the barricade, and four cars ready to pursue any vehicle that would try to crash the barrier. Holtz told the soldiers that Renata was his cousin and Quinn her fiancé, and they were visiting at his home. The lieutenant recognized Holtz’s famous name and let them pass.
“These checkpoints are all over the Sierra Maestra,” Holtz said. “If we do go to see Fidel we must have a reason or they’ll turn us back.” Holtz said he’d brought one americano up to meet the rebels, presenting him as a businessman buying land from a defunct sugar mill.
“Can we go as a family, having a reunion?” Renata asked.
“I’d like something more specific. We have an americano here.”
“What if the reunion is a wedding?” Quinn asked.
“Whose?”
“Renata’s and mine. You and Alfie can be cousins in the wedding party. Do you want to get married, Renata?”
“Is this a proposal or just a way to fool the army?”
“One reason is as good as another for marrying you.”
“Do you mean a wedding in a church?” Holtz asked.
“That’s too complicated. Just have a babalawo do it.”
“You are crazy,” Renata said.
“Do babalawos do weddings?” Holtz asked.
“I never heard of it,” Renata said.
“Babalawos do everything,” Quinn said. “If I marry you I want a babalawo. They read minds, they predict futures, they heal your soul.”
“But they don’t do weddings,” she said.
“All right, we’ll get a priest too,” Quinn said.
“I like this,” Holtz said. “It’s oddball, which makes it real.”
“It will be real. All we need is a babalawo and a priest.”
“A crazy man wants to marry me,” Renata said.