House Arrest by Mary Morris Page B

golden sun that poured in. Fruit trees bloomed outside her window and some mornings Mercedes—the ancient nanny who had come to the family when she herself was not more than a child to care for Rosalba and had stayed with them all these years—plucked tamarind and papaya ripe from their branches. Each morning at seven Mercedes brought her a tray of warm milk and almond biscuits, a boiled egg, and fresh-squeezed juice while her parents ate alone downstairs.
    The man who called himself her father was a small man with blue eyes whom her mother had married when she was just a girl. Umberto Calderón always wore a black suit and smelled of antiseptic soaps and lingering disease. He was a dermatologist who specialized in skin ailments of the tropics. But his patients were mainly the wealthy of
la isla
who wanted him to cure their age spots, the dark blotches and moles that blossomed in the relentless sun and made Dr.Calderón’s medical practice flourish almost as much as did the business of the island’s only abortionist (whom the Calderón women would visit from time to time).
    Isabel’s older half sister, Serena, had her mother’s and father’s blue eyes and soft brown hair—the genetic vestiges of the Spanish aristocracy that once ruled. But Isabel had dark eyes and dark hair, and when she looked into the face of the man who called himself her father she knew that she was looking at a stranger. Umberto Calderón, also, had no doubt as to his daughter’s parentage. He informed his beautiful wife, whom he adored, that as long as she did not humiliate him, he would accept the child, giving her his name, but never his heart.
    One day a Portuguese freighter, filled with sailors, crashed into their seawall, and the sailors had to stay for a week until their ship was repaired and towed out to sea. During that time the sailors taught Isabel how to tie knots and do a dance in which she clapped her heels. They let her wear their hats and told her stories of monsters they’d seen rising out of the darkest seas.
    When the sailors left, Isabel begged them to take her with them but they laughed and gave her a hat to keep. She wore it around the house for years.
    She was miserable when Umberto came home from his trips to the outer ends of the island, where he tended the needs of wealthy
finca
owners and ladies who guarded over the sugarcane plantations that their fathers had purchased in Spain. He returned with gifts for Serena, but nothing for her. She missed the Portuguese sailors and held on to dreams of stowing away. She did not see why when there was an outing to the beach she would be left behind to wander the rooms ofthe big house with Mercedes in tow. And then one day she understood.
    Mercedes got her up early and told her she had to dress in her prettiest clothes. Mercedes put bows in her hair and fluffed up her skirt. And then Mercedes took her downstairs. Her mother sat in the living room with a man who looked familiar to her, though she did not know from where. He was tall and his eyes were black and shiny as polished stones and he wore a soldier’s uniform. “So,” he said as Isabel was brought in, “this is the child.” And for a moment Isabel thought that she was going to be taken away from everything she knew.
    Rosalba said, “Come closer, Isabel, come here.”
    Tentatively Isabel walked toward him. She smelled his cigars, the rum, and she smelled her mother’s perfume. He towered above her, more like a monument than a man, and she tilted her head back in order to get a better look, and this made him laugh. Perhaps there was a statue with his and other soldiers’ faces on it at the Plaza of the Heroes of the Revolution (there was not). Or perhaps she had glimpsed him on television, pounding his fists during late-night harangues as her mother listened, spellbound.
    But it wasn’t in any of these places that Isabel had seen him before. Rather, she looked up and stared into his dark eyes and found her own.