House Arrest by Mary Morris Read Free Book Online

Spain,” she said, stroking the wood. “My grandmother died on the passage and my grandfather arrived with just my mother and these chairs. They lived in this house as I did when I was a girl. You used to be able to sit on them on this porch and smell the sugarcane burning across the Miramar. There was nothing but banana groves and tobacco and sugarcane fields here when I was small.” She extended her hand toward a neighbor’s house of battered walls and peeling paint.
    “The first time El Caballo came to this house,” Rosalba said, as she led me to the kitchen, “he sat in these chairs.” She made us a tray of lemonade and two glasses that did not match and carried the clattering tray down the stairs and onto the patio. Motioning for me to sit, she poured the lemonade into the glasses. When he came to see me, Rosalba went on, the chairs had their cane. And my mother was a young widow and I was just a girl. He could as easily have become her lover as mine. You cannot imagine what he was like when I first met him. He was the biggest man I had everseen. Here on
la isla
the men, except for the Africans, are not known for their size. But he was huge and he had those piercing dark eyes.
    But what drew me to him wasn’t any of this. It wasn’t any of the things you’d think. I won’t talk about him in bed, but it wasn’t that either. It was the way he talked, it was what he said. He just looked you square in the face and he talked. Or he listened. His gaze made you feel as if you were the only person in the world and there was nowhere else that he ever had to be, though, of course, especially for El Caballo, this was hardly true.
    My father died in a boating accident when I was six. A storm at sea. His body was never recovered and some people suspect that in fact there was no drowning, but that he escaped to another island and another life. Years ago I heard a rumor that he was living on Saint Lucia with a black woman from Mozambique. But whatever the real story was I never saw him again after I was six and I never had a man sitting across from me, listening to what I had to say.
    So when El Caballo sat across from me, leaning forward and looking at me with that fixed gaze, I would just open up to him, more than I ever did with anyone, more than I ever did with him in bed. Stories poured out of me about my grandmother who was buried at sea and my father who was lost at sea, about my bereft grandfather who rode across the cane fields from dawn until dusk, and about my mother whose solitude only matched my own.
    He was just a bookkeeper then who had come to help my mother with her accounts, but there was something about him, I must say, that made me believe he would do more than just balance our books. And in his own way he has. He has done what he set out to do. You must admire him forthat, for whatever else he may have done. He was a dozen years older than I, but that did not matter. I knew him as well as I knew myself. We would still be together today, but, you see, in the end there were things we could not forgive.
    He was gone for many years. When he returned, I was a grown woman, married to a prominent physician, and we had a young daughter. But I could not keep El Caballo away. Not that I wanted to. In fact, all my life I have never wanted him to stay away.
    I never knew when he was coming, but I would listen for the car in low gear without its lights on that would pull up in front of the big house by the sea where I lived with my husband. When it became too difficult for us to meet in my home, we rented a small apartment in the center of town. Our love nest. Whenever I could I went there and waited for him to come. Some days he did and some days he did not. While I waited for him, sometimes I decorated or cleaned, but mainly I read—mostly history and the biographies of great men. I read until the cabinets and shelves of the little apartment were filled, dreaming that someday I would be in a book someone wrote