Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗

the Sierra Maestra. In her town in Camagüey, things were quieter. Rural Camagüey’s news: that Carmen had slashed her finger with a scissor while cutting paper dolls out of newspaper, that Elena spilled black beans and rice all over the floor. Exhausted. Dolores feared what everyone feared—President Batista’s men coming in the night, knocking down their door. President Batista’s men with hands over her girls’ mouths, President Batista’s men demanding she dig her own grave. She knew the stories. She knew how fast an entire family disappeared in the night, dissipated like vapor. She knew how easily someone could erase her, knew she barely existed at all.

But to reason with Daniel. She’d whispered her concerns one night as they lay in bed and thick rain lulled them to false calm. How quick he had knocked her to the floor, said she probably wanted to open her legs for Batista, slashed the belt across her face so that a welt formed diagonally from the bottom of her left lip to her right eyebrow. She feared her husband more than any president or his men.

The day before Daniel Hernández killed a man for the first time, the guerrillero Fidel Castro made a plea from the mountains: Come with your rifles, your machetes, it’s time. That’s all it took. Daniel grabbed his straw hat and the blade he used to cut cane on his patrón’s farm. Dolores didn’t know how long he’d be gone or if he’d live. Just a few days of missed work meant she would have to feed the girls whatever was ripe on their little plot—some boiled plantains or malanga or, worse, a handful of nísperos, glasses of sugar water.

The day before Daniel Hernández killed a man for the first time, Dolores watched him leave down the dirt road behind their house. He hitched a ride, waved back once. Elena slept in Dolores’s arms. Carmen grabbed her hand and yelled. She asked where her father was off to, work? Dolores lied and said he was visiting family. Carmen demanded to know when he’d be back. Daniel wore the same clothes he wore each day he worked the fields, left the same way he left each morning. But somehow Carmen sensed a different current to today’s departure. Perhaps Dolores too eager to wave goodbye.

She told Carmen she could miss school that day. The girl quieted.

And, aside from no money for food, how nice to have the house to themselves. Dolores swept and dusted, mended Carmen’s school clothes, knocked down ripe bananas with a wooden plank.

Later, they took a bus to the capital of the province. Carmen stood on the vinyl seat, nose glued to the window, and Elena wailed in Dolores’s arms before collapsing into sleep. At the plaza, Dolores let the girls run free, Carmen dangling over the edge of the fountain, wiggling ripples into the water, Elena toddling at Dolores’s feet. Dolores had no plan, no reason to be in the city. The best kind of feeling, to do something for no reason. She wanted to scream, wanted to dangle over the fountain like her daughter, force miniature waves with her fists.

That day was a Tuesday, a workday, and she watched bankers and shop owners wander through the plaza, watched the society women with their fancy prams and stockinged children, their nannies trailing behind. She knew her children looked feral in comparison—dirty and darker and poor. But she didn’t care. Bolero, mambo, son: she could dance if she wanted. Through the alleys, between market vendors, in the parks, at every stoplight. As she used to do with Daniel before the children. At the huge church that anchored the plaza, two bells rang to announce the hour while on the steps a woman begged for change.

“Why is that woman sitting like that?” Carmen asked. She had run to the bench where Dolores sat. She caught her breath with a dramatic gulp.

“Children don’t ask questions,” Dolores said. “Don’t leave your sister behind.”

Elena sat on the concrete at the foot of the fountain, watching the women who click-clacked past in bell-shaped skirts and cat-eye glasses, a chicness that immediately separated the plaza women from campo women like Dolores who, no matter how much they washed, always wore a sheen and scent of dust and earth.

Dolores stayed until sunset, stayed until her stomach grumbled and the girls began to whine and cry. She paid the last few cents she had left besides bus fare for cucuruchos de maní from the plaza vendor, which quieted the girls long enough for the ride home.

Was she disappointed when Daniel found his way back three days later? Truthfully, yes. They were hungry. She’d desperately looked for work but every person she approached turned her away. Nobody wanted a two-year-old on their farm or in their factory, and with all four grandparents dead, she had no one to watch Elena.

But she had also never watched the hours unfold as when Daniel was gone, time offering up its bounty like the yuca she dug from the ground. Dolores did as she wanted. Dolores visited neighborhood women and crocheted on their porches, took long walks with her girls and ate plump guavas straight from the bush. Dolores forgot to check the time, had no need to ready anything for anyone at any specific moment, just the food they’d eat. She even listened to the radio—her radio now—and danced to Beny Moré and Bola de Nieve as she swept.

Daniel arrived grizzled, dirty, in borrowed fatigues too big for his frame. “I’m so hungry,” he said as he walked through the door.

Carmen cried out, ran to his side.

“There’s nothing,” Dolores said. “I had no money for the market.” Dolores readied herself for a reaction, but Daniel only stared and slumped into a chair.

“Two days ago,” he said, “I killed a man.”

“Not in front of the children,” was all Dolores said. She knew Daniel didn’t offer conversation as an invitation. He said what he wanted to say, and she listened. In that