The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes - 21

Havana

1966

Pilar stood outside Eva Fuentes’s building, praying that she’d found the right place.

She had two and a half hours left before she had to meet Mrs. Padilla’s brother. Two and a half hours before she had to depart Cuba.

Would she ever return?

A strange sort of calm had settled over her since she left her apartment with nothing more than her purse. Mrs. Padilla had cautioned her to take little with her, and now that she was in the same position she’d seen so many others face—fleeing the only home she’d ever known with only one bag to contain her most cherished possessions—she found herself reconciled to the fact that there was little she could do.

Maybe she’d been mentally preparing for this moment without realizing it, doing a sort of inventory of what mattered to her and what didn’t, what she could live without and what she could not.

She’d taken the book of poems Enrique was reading the night they captured him—the last thing he’d held in his hands before he was gone. The bookmark he’d made for her as an anniversary gift was no longer in A Time for Forgetting to mark her place, but instead rested inside the poetry book. Her wedding ring graced her finger.

Everything else she’d had to leave behind.

It was too dangerous to see to the rest of her things, too much trouble to worry about them, given the major’s condition.

The apartment and its contents would likely change hands, become someone else’s home, and she prayed that whoever moved in found happiness there, that the dreams she and Enrique had poured into the space, the details they had lovingly cared for, would survive them.

The list of books and their locations rested in her purse, too.

Pilar waited outside Eva’s building for a few minutes, until a woman walked up, her keys in hand.

“Excuse me,” Pilar said. “Do you live here?”

The woman glanced around and then nodded.

“Do you know if Eva Fuentes lives here? I have something of hers that I’m trying to return to her.”

“Eva?” The woman hesitated for a moment. “She lives on the fourth floor.”

Pilar’s heart pounded.

Eva’s neighbor let her into the building, and Pilar walked up the stairs, heading toward the fourth floor.

Pilar took a deep breath before she knocked on the door. There hadn’t been time to think of what she would say to Eva, how to explain the strange set of circumstances that had brought her to her doorstep, hadn’t had an opportunity to prepare for the fact that she was about to meet someone whose words had meant so much to her.

Pilar waited for a moment, the sound of footsteps on the other side of the door, and then it opened, and a woman stared back at her.

Disappointment filled her.

She’d expected a woman in her eighties to greet her, but instead the woman looked to be a little younger than Pilar herself.

Pilar hesitated. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for Eva?”

“I’m Eva. No one calls me Eva, though. I prefer Evita.”

“I’m Pilar Castillo. I’m a librarian. I’m sorry—I’m looking for Eva Fuentes. She wrote A Time for Forgetting . Zenaida Torres sent me.”

“I don’t know a Zenaida Torres. My grandmother might, though. This is her apartment. Her name is Eva Fuentes. I was named after her.”

“Is your grandmother a teacher?”

“She was. She doesn’t work anymore. Her health, you see.”

“Do you know if she went to the Cuban Summer School in 1900?”

“To Harvard? In America?” The woman’s eyes widened. “I don’t think so. She never spoke of it.”

“Evita, who is that at the door?” a voice called out from one of the rooms in the apartment.

Pilar reached into her purse and pulled out A Time for Forgetting . She held it out.

“This book was meant for your grandmother. My neighbor gave it to me. Her name is Zenaida Torres. She told me that her mother was keeping it for your grandmother. That they were great friends.”

“One moment,” Evita said.

She shut the door, and Pilar waited for a minute—and then two—before Evita returned.

“My grandmother would like to speak with you. Come inside. Please.” Evita stepped aside, allowing Pilar to cross over the threshold.

“I’m sorry to call at this late hour. There was some urgency, you see—”

Pilar followed Evita into the apartment, and then she saw her, sitting on a floral couch in the sitting room. She looked to be in her eighties.

Eva Fuentes.

Pilar introduced herself, offering the same explanation that she had given Evita, but it was clear from Eva’s reaction that she had already spoken with her granddaughter.

“May I see it?” Eva asked.

“Of course.” Pilar handed her the book.

Eva’s fingers trembled as it settled in her hands, as she traced over the letters there—the title, her name on the cover.

At Evita’s invitation, Pilar took a seat in one of the chairs in the living area. When Evita offered her coffee, Pilar politely declined, her gaze on Eva, who seemed enthralled by the book.

“How is Zenaida?” Eva asked finally, looking up to meet Pilar’s gaze.

Pilar hesitated, unsure of how much to share. “She’s left Cuba. For Spain. She couldn’t take the book with her, didn’t want to risk something happening to it, so she asked me to bring it to you. I don’t think she knew much about it, about why her mother had it other than that she was keeping it safe for you and meant to return it to you.”

“No, she wouldn’t have. Her mother Dolores was always a good secret keeper.” Eva sighed. “I’m sorry Zenaida has had to leave, although I can’t blame her for it. These are difficult times. Terrifying times.”

She spoke with a freedom that Pilar had often noticed some of the older women in her building like Mrs. Padilla and Mrs. Arango expressed. The sense that she had lived far too much life to be defeated by Fidel and his ilk. Pilar admired her courage. Perhaps one day she would be like that—unafraid of what was to come because she’d already navigated the worst of what life could throw at her.

“Were you and Zenaida close?” Eva asked Pilar.

“Not really. She was kind to me, but we didn’t know each other very well. Still, she was respected by everyone in the building. She had a way of looking out for people—when my husband—when I went through some troubles, she left a flan on my doorstep.”

In that moment, Pilar noticed that Eva had kind eyes and a demeanor that had the capacity to convey a depth of emotion without saying a word, as though she intimately understood life’s more difficult moments.

“Her mother was like that, too,” Eva replied. “Dolores cared for people a great deal.”

“How did the two of you know each other?” Pilar flushed. “I’m sorry. It’s a bit forward, but I’ll confess, after Zenaida asked me to find you, to bring the book to you—I’ve wondered.”

“Dolores was my roommate when we traveled to Harvard together.”

“Harvard!” Evita interjected. “So it is true. Why did you never say anything? Why did you never tell anyone?”

“Because there are some things that are too difficult to speak of. Some memories you carry with you and others that are best left in the past. My summer at Harvard was complicated. And when I returned to Havana—well—I couldn’t bear to speak of it.”

“What happened?” Evita asked.

Pilar listened as Eva explained to her granddaughter about the summer school.

“Dolores was a teacher as well, and we became friends. When A Time for Forgetting was published, the publisher mailed me a copy. They hadn’t printed many, a dozen copies or so—it wasn’t the great success I had envisioned, but I suppose that’s life. What does turn out the way we planned?

“After I came back to Cuba…I wasn’t myself for a long time. I had no interest in looking at the book; I wanted to throw it away. But Dolores told me I would regret it, that one day I would want it, so she held on to it for me. Zenaida must have inherited it after Dolores died. I learned of Dolores’s passing weeks after it had happened. We had lost touch throughout the years.”

Eva glanced down at the book again. She opened the cover, a sigh escaping her lips.

“I never thought I would see it again. I imagined it simply ceased to exist. I cannot believe—thank you,” she told Pilar. “Thank you for bringing it to me.”

“Of course.” Pilar took a deep breath. Time was almost up, and if she never found the courage to tell Eva Fuentes what her book had meant to her, she would regret it.

“My husband.” Pilar swallowed, the words ash on her tongue. “My husband is gone. Your book came to me after he was taken by the police. And later—when I found out he was killed—I wanted to die. I wanted to be elsewhere, wanted to escape the feeling inside me. I finished your book while I was grieving. And then I read it again and again. I don’t know how to describe it, how to explain what it has meant to me. Thank you. Thank you for writing it. For sharing your characters with me. They helped me feel less alone.”

Eva took her hand. “I am so very sorry for your loss. I know that isn’t nearly enough to say.”

“Thank you. When I read the words you wrote in A Time for Forgetting , when I read about the pain Ana experienced when she lost Michael, I felt like someone had taken all the grief inside of me, all the pain that I had, and put it on the page.” Pilar flushed. “I’m sorry—I know I must seem bold. But when I heard that you went to the summer school, I wondered how much of your own experiences inspired A Time for Forgetting . I just can’t stop thinking about the characters, about how much they loved each other—”

Eva shook her head. “The book, everything I wrote about Ana and Michael—the love between them—it was a lie.”