The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes - 19

Havana

1966

Pilar was exhausted by the time she reached her apartment, wrung out by the emotions of the day. This no longer felt like home, no longer was the safe, happy space she and Enrique had created together, but now she had nowhere else to go. Tonight, she was eager for the comfort of her bed, ready to collapse under the sheets. Tomorrow, though, she would need to figure out her future. Returning to the library no longer seemed a possibility, considering Ignacio’s perfidy, but there was the very real and inescapable fact that she could not exist or survive without some means to support herself.

She unlocked the door to her apartment, shutting it behind her quickly.

She froze, her fingers resting on the lock.

Her apartment had been ransacked. Books were pulled off shelves, sofa cushions removed, cabinets opened.

A man stood in her apartment, his back to her.

Pilar opened her mouth to ask him what he was doing there, to tell him to get out, all the things that were running through her mind, but she couldn’t form the words, could do little more than just stand there in terror.

He whirled around, his gaze connecting with hers.

Her new neighbor.

“Where are the books?” the major asked her, advancing on her.

“What books?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Don Quixote and the others. I know you have them.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t lie. I know you have them,” he repeated. “I interrogated the servant who brought you the family’s edition of Don Quixote before they left Cuba. He said he wasn’t supposed to look at the item that he delivered to your apartment, but he did.

“At first, when I asked him to describe the apartment where he delivered the books, I thought it was your husband who was involved. I was aware of his political activities, even went to see him in prison. But the timeline didn’t match; after all, he was already in a cell when the servant dropped off Don Quixote . And then I learned that Enrique’s wife was a librarian. Luckily, we already had an informant working there.

“Your husband begged for your life, you know.” He said it almost conversationally, as though they were discussing the weather. “Asked me to leave you alone. Pleaded with me. He didn’t know what you were involved in, but he was terrified by the possibility of me coming here.”

Nausea slammed into her.

“Did you kill him?”

“No. Prison did that all on its own. Where is the book? How many books are you hiding here?”

Pilar gripped her purse. She inched back, trying to put some space between them, trying to move close enough to the door to attempt to escape.

It hit her then, the part that she hadn’t realized before. If the regime knew that she had been hiding books, they wouldn’t have bothered to search her apartment multiple times when she wasn’t there. No, they simply would have made her disappear as they had with Enrique. The major was here not because he was working for the regime, on their orders, but because he had heard that she possessed something valuable, and he wanted it for himself. That was why they were having this conversation here and not in an interrogation room or a cell. This was about greed, pure and simple, and him abusing his position to take something for himself like so many did.

The major moved quickly, yanking her purse from her shoulder before she could even register the movement.

Pilar lunged forward, trying to pull it away from him.

His hand slammed against her face, knocking her off her feet.

Pain shot through her, sharp and agonizing.

She watched, black spots drifting in and out of her gaze, as he pulled A Time for Forgetting from her purse.

Pilar struggled to stand, bracing herself against the kitchen cabinet, using the countertop to help get her bearings, trying to pull herself up.

She needed to escape, but the major stood between her and the door.

He flipped through the pages of the book, and then he stopped when he reached the end, and she knew the exact moment that he’d found the list, the one where she had written down the locations of where she’d hidden the books hours earlier.

She’d slipped the list—a treasure map of sorts—in A Time for Forgetting because it was the safest place she could think to store it, in a book she knew she would always protect.

He wasn’t going to let her live.

Why would he?

She was going to die here tonight.

In the time since they had taken Enrique, Pilar had thought about death more than she probably had in her entire life up until that point. When she learned that Enrique had died, she wondered what those final moments were like for him, was desperate to know how he had faced death, if he had come to terms with it through a quiet resignation of sorts or if he had fought, defiant until the end.

Pilar had thought about her own death, welcoming it more often than not. But now—now that she stared death in the face, the book that held her greatest secrets in jeopardy, she didn’t reach for the quiet peace, but rather for her mother’s iron pan that she had inherited after her death, the one that she had brought into her marriage with Enrique, the one that her mother and her grandmother had used to cook meals for themselves and their families.

The major was a military man. He had earned his place in the mountains, waging guerrilla warfare. It hadn’t prepared him for a Cuban woman armed with an iron pan. Pilar moved faster than she had ever thought possible, faster than seemed humanly possible considering the weight of the pan and her own physical weakness, the blow to the head aching. She moved with the force of her ancestors behind her; her grandmother’s hands, her mother’s hands that had wielded the pan with love so many times, now picked it up once more.

The pan caught him where his face met his skull.

A Time for Forgetting fell, hitting the apartment floor.

The major followed.

The pan slid from her hands.

Pilar stared down at his body, her brain struggling to catch up to the actions she’d just taken.

She’d killed him.

How was she going to get his body out of the apartment without anyone seeing him? He had to have at least one hundred pounds on her and several inches. There was no way she could lift him, no way she could hide him.

She had killed one of Fidel’s men, an officer in the Cuban army.

There would be no coming back from this. Perhaps she had postponed death to a later date, but she certainly hadn’t evaded it.

The fight drained from her body.

Before, adrenaline had guided her actions, the desire to finally fight back, to do something after having lost nearly everything. She had been so angry, at him, at the government, at the world that decided to take so much and give so little. She had let her anger dictate her decisions, but that anger was as much a luxury as meat these days and she should have known better, should have realized that no matter what, she was always going to pay the price.

Footsteps sounded behind her.

A rapping at the door.

She watched, helpless to stop it, as the door to her apartment swung open.

Mrs. Padilla and Mrs. Arango stood over the threshold.

They both had pots and pans turned makeshift weapons in their hands.

Mrs. Arango’s eyes widened as her gaze settled on the dead man in Pilar’s apartment.

“Is he dead?” Mrs. Padilla asked.

“I think so.”

Both women glanced down at the pan resting on the floor.

“You hit him hard?” Mrs. Arango asked.

Mrs. Padilla didn’t wait for Pilar to answer. She turned and shut the door to Pilar’s apartment, engaging the locks she’d been interrupted trying to close earlier and blocking out the rest of the apartment building.

“Yes,” Pilar replied.

Mrs. Padilla moved first, walking briskly over to the body sprawled out on the floor. She was wearing her pink floral dress, the one that had faded from so many washings, yet was no less lovely for it. There was something incongruous about such beautiful, delicate flowers in proximity to death.

Mrs. Padilla leaned down, checking the body with the precision of someone who knew her way around such things.

She had been a nurse—Pilar remembered that now. It was one of those little pieces of information she had inadvertently collected about her neighbors that she had forgotten over the years.

“He isn’t dead,” Mrs. Padilla announced, rising from the body. “At least, he isn’t dead yet . He is unconscious, though.” She stared at Pilar. “What do you intend to do about it?”

“I—”

“If you don’t kill him, then you’ll have to leave. It will be impossible to get his body out of here without anyone noticing, and this won’t easily be explained as an accident. When he regains consciousness, there will be hell to pay. Did he see you or did you hit him from behind?”

It took Pilar a moment to understand the question Mrs. Padilla was asking her, to make sense of the conversation that was playing out with bizarre normalcy. They might as well have been discussing repairs that were needed in the building, the fact that the roof leaked now, or lamenting the cost of bread.

“He saw me,” Pilar confirmed.

“Well, that’s it, then,” Mrs. Arango interjected. “You will have to leave.”

The apartment building?

In her stupor, she must have voiced the question aloud because Mrs. Padilla shook her head. “Cuba. My brother is a fisherman. He occasionally makes runs up to the Keys. He can get you to Key West. You would have to go soon, under the cover of darkness.”

“Now? Leave Cuba now?”

She couldn’t make sense of it. Suddenly, she felt as though she had traveled back in time to the night that Zenaida had knocked on her door, when she had first given her A Time for Forgetting . She remembered the way Zenaida had announced that she was leaving Cuba, voicing the words as though she couldn’t quite believe what she was saying, hadn’t accepted the reality of her situation, as though she was waiting for some force to intervene and stop everything in its tracks.

Was this how it felt to be exiled?

“It’s the only way,” Mrs. Arango replied. “They will come for you. And after everything—”

“You must go now,” Mrs. Padilla said. “Before he wakes. Take what you need and leave the building.” She gave Pilar an address near the water. “My brother will meet you there in three hours. It should be late enough then. I will arrange it.”

How could she leave? How could she stay?

“You must go,” Mrs. Arango urged.

Pilar bent down and picked up A Time for Forgetting from the ground where the major had dropped it, clutching the book to her chest.

“I’ll be there in three hours.”

She had somewhere else to go first.