House Arrest by Mary Morris Page A

looked around, waiting to be served, but no waiter came. Though the cafe was open, no one was working there. My mouth was parched, but there was nothing to drink. “I’m so thirsty,” I said. “Isn’t there anything?” Isabel went into the back of the café and returned with two glasses of warm tap water.
    I stared into my glass. “It’s okay,” Isabel said, “you can drink it. One of the few things my father has really done is make the water pure.” Sipping slowly, we sat facing each other with a view of the sea. “I like to come here,” Isabel said, “because my first husband is buried over there. My second husband as well.” She pointed to the old cemetery, which wasn’t far away. “I loved the first one and I liked the second one a lot. It’s a long story.”
    I looked at her, surprised. “Oh, I go through men like I’d go through money if I had any.” She laughed. “I’ve been married four times now. Milagro is the child of my third husband. My fourth was a businessman from Caracas. I married him to get me out of here, but of course my visa was denied. When I go to immigration, do you know what they say to me? They say I will never leave. They grin at me when they tell me this. They say that I will die here just like the rest of them.”
    Isabel took out a packet of cigarettes, Marlboros, in fact, tamped it, and offered me one.
    “No, thanks,” I shook my head. I hadn’t had a cigarette in nine years.
    Isabel shrugged, indifferent to my good or bad habits. She lit one, tilted her head back, and blew smoke into the sky as I sipped the water she’d brought me in slow, careful sips. As she held the cigarette between her fingers, I noticed for the first time her nails, which, like mine, were bitten down to the quick. “You’re married?” she asked, pointing to my ring.
    “Yes, and I have a daughter.” I fumbled in my wallet, though the pictures I carried were a few years old.
    “Oh, she is beautiful. She looks just like you,” Isabel said, her face lightening for the first time.
    I didn’t want to argue that she doesn’t look like me. “But she acts like her father,” I said.
    “And how is that?”
    “Oh, she’s chaotic; I’m more orderly.”
    “But she’s just a child,” Isabel said with a laugh. “Do you leave them often?”
    I shook my head. “Not often, but it is good to get away. I find it gives me a new perspective.”
    “Yes, I imagine it does.” She gave me a wry smile. “I wouldn’t know.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry …”
    “It’s all right. In fact, I’ve never been anywhere. You know, when we toast in this country, we don’t say
‘salud;’
we say ‘visa.’ We all want to leave, but there are no exit visas. My father is tyrant. What more can I say.”
    I wanted to ask about her father, but her bitterness surprised me and Isabel seemed agitated, almost angry. “It’s hard to imagine. I’ve always been free …”
    “Of course you have. How could you know, but it’s all I want, you see. To get away.” She sighed, gazing out to sea.
    “And you can’t …”
    “Oh, no”—she laughed a nervous laugh—“he’ll never letme go.” Isabel paused. “Believe me, I’m a prisoner, as surely as if I were behind bars.”
    As we sipped our water in a deserted café off the Miramar, Isabel told me that she had once lived in a house of many rooms that opened onto the sea. Its wide doors were never shut, except during the most violent storms; its windows let in the breeze. At night she was lulled to sleep by the surf pounding the shore, and every morning she awakened to the same sound, and it became the rhythm of her days and her nights. Even now, years after she moved into the ground-floor apartment, over a mile from the sea, she still thinks she wakes to the sound of the surf.
    In the house where she grew up, there were yellow curtains in her room and yellow flowers in the vase. She had a yellow cat named Topaz who slept at the foot of her bed in the pools of