Izabel
Day Three – Mid-Morning
I can actually feel something in the air; I feel it in my bones, in my uneven heartbeat, in my sweating palms. This night will be much different than any night I’ve spent here since arriving with my wrists and ankles bound and my hair and face bloodied. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s here, waiting in the shadows, somewhere.
I lay amid the cool sheets with Cesara in her giant pillared bed, surrounded by painted stucco walls and a wide wall-less space in front of us that allows the Mexico breeze and sunshine into the room; Spanish tile floors stretch many feet out in every direction; the only thing the room lacks is an ocean view.
Cesara’s girl waits near the open wall; mine, Sabine, sits on the floor near the bed.
The heat of Cesara’s naked body curls around mine, her leg draped over my waist. I comb her soft hair through my fingers.
“Are you ever going to tell me, Lydia,” she says, “why you really hate men as fiercely as you do?” Her fingertips walk along my hipbone, inching toward my inner thighs, and then back up again.
“Men are the cancer of this earth,” I tell her. “I think I was born hating them.”
“Yes, but something had to happen for you to feel that way, something other than the man you killed. It takes more than one man, one incident, to turn out like you did.” She raises her head from my stomach, and looks at me. “You can tell me anything—I want you to.”
“Why?”
She presses her lips to my bellybutton. “Because we all need someone we can trust, confide in, tell our deepest, darkest secrets to.” She works her way up and kisses my breasts. “I want to be that person for you, Lydia.”
“Not long ago you wanted to kill me,” I remind her.
A little puff of air expels from her nose; she smiles at me. “Well, that was before I got to know you; there was a reason I didn’t kill you that day, and I know now what it was.”
She inches upward toward my face, kisses my lips softly. I think she’s about to tell me she has feelings for me, but she switches gears last-second.
Cesara sits upright next to my hip; my eyes slide all over her body, drinking in her perfect breasts, and her smooth, curved waist that ends in a plump, round butt.
She smiles and says, “I’ll tell you mine first, if it’ll make you feel better.”
“OK,” I say. “What is your dark secret, Cesara?”
The encouraging smile fades from her face, and she glances down into her hands in her lap.
“I used to be one of them,” she confesses, looking toward Sabine. “I was eleven when my mother and father sold me for fifty thousand pesos”—she looks dejected for only a moment—“It was a long time ago, but it’ll always feel like yesterday. And I will always hate them for it.”
“You were never sold?” I raise up fully now, and give her all of my attention.
She shakes her head. “No,” she answers, “but it wasn’t because I wasn’t good enough—someone else wanted me instead.” Her eyes stray, and I get the distinct feeling the person she speaks of she may have loved once upon a time.
“Who was he?” I reach out and lay my hand on her thigh for comfort. “Or she?”
She pauses, and then decides she wants to talk about it, after all.
“His name was Javier; he was Joaquin’s older brother.”
The muscles in my stomach tense; I keep a straight face, but underneath the mask lies a pain-filled expression. It isn’t unusual, or a coincidence, that Cesara and I share this part of our lives—Javier had relationships with many of the slave girls before me, and probably after me, too—but hearing his name on her lips, looking into the eyes of a woman who once shared Javier’s bed, just as I did, is a shock to my system, nonetheless.
“Javier used to own all of the Ruiz compounds,” she says. “He took an interest in me; took me away from the dirt-floor rooms, and the repulsive governesses, and from his sister’s cruel punishments, and he treated me like…a person. I thought he loved me, but one day he just tossed me aside.” She takes a deep breath. “Not that I can complain, really; he could’ve done much worse; he could’ve sold me, or threw me back in with the other girls, but he gave me to Joaquin, and Joaquin gave me a job. That’s how I became a trainer—been doing it ever since.”
“And this, ‘Javier’, never gave you a reason?” I ask, consoling her. “For giving you to Joaquin?”
She shakes her blonde head. “Javier never gave anybody reasons for anything he did, and no one ever questioned him—well, except maybe his sister, Izel. She was a heartless bitch, that woman. I celebrated when I found out she’d been killed.” A grin pushes through an otherwise heavyhearted face.
You and me both, Cesara…you and me both.
The grin fades, replaced by something indicative of resentment. She stares off toward the blue sky; infuriating possibilities running through her mind, it appears. “But there were rumors,” she says, still looking forward. “And around here, rumors are almost always true.”
“What kind of rumors?”
She looks over at me and smirks; shakes her head and turns back to the blue sky.
“And I knew they were true because even Izel talked about it with such hatred and vengeance; it was the only reason I wished Izel had never been killed—she wanted to kill that girl, and she would’ve eventually.”
She breaks away from the scenery, and looks at me. “Everybody said she was Javier’s downfall. And she was.”
Izel?
“There was a slave girl,” Cesara goes on, “in a different compound. Javier fell for her. Not like I thought he did with me, or the way he did with the other girls; no, this one was different, and they were right when they said she’d be the death of him. But he pushed everyone else aside for her; he lost his way…and his life.”
My heart is in my throat; I try to swallow it down, but it’s just stuck there, choking me, beating in my ears. Am I keeping a calm face? I wish I had a mirror.
“They called her his princess,” Cesara says, venom in her voice, “the little viper; the flower with poisoned petals. The great Javier Ruiz, known for his unshakable leadership, merciless heart, and barbaric tactics, wasn’t so unshakable, after all. The giant was taken down by a girl, reduced to nothing more than a fading memory.”
He’s more than that to you, Cesara, or you wouldn’t talk about him with such resentment.
I take another deep breath, and try to curb my need to ask her more about…me. “How did he die?” I ask instead, picturing the night at Samantha’s house in Texas.
“An assassin took him out,” she says. “Some say the girl killed him, but I don’t believe that—one of the rumors that aren’t true—no way a slave girl could pull that off. Javier may’ve been blinded by that little bitch, but I know she wasn’t good enough to kill him.”
Now I’m the one looking at the blue sky and sunshine, but seeing none of it.
I shake it off. And I grin at her. “You sound jealous, Cesara.” I move over closer, brush her hair away from her neck with the back of my hand. “Should I be worried?” I ask seductively, dragging the tip of my tongue along her throat.
She pulls me onto her naked lap, and I straddle her. “No, Lydia,” she whispers, flicking her tongue against my nipple, my breast cupped within her hand. “You’ve done things to me, to my…my heart…that Javier could never do.”
“Tell me more,” I say, breathily, grinding myself against her lap. “Tell me what I’ve done to your heart.”
Her mouth finds mine, and we kiss with feverish intensity; my eyes flutter when I feel the movement of her fingers between my legs.
And then she just stops.
I open my eyes and look down into hers.
She smiles.
“That wasn’t the deal,” she whispers, brushing her lips against mine. “I told you my dark secret, and now I want to know yours.”
“Tell me how you feel about me, Cesara,” I say, kiss her lightly. “You never had to tell me any dark secrets to get me to open up to you. All you had to do was tell me how you feel.”
With her arms wrapped around me, she plants kisses between my breasts. “I care for you, Lydia. I’ve never cared for someone like this. I feel like I can tell you anything, be anybody, and…”
“And what? Tell me?” I kiss the top of her head.
“I feel like we could go anywhere together, kill anyone who gets in our way—imagine the things we could do, Lydia.”
My hips stop moving; I hold her face in my hands and peer into her eyes, searching them. “You want to leave this place, don’t you?” I ask, knowing. “You’re tired of being Joaquin’s cum rag; you’re tired of the filth, and the hungry eyes of the men following you everywhere you go—tired of them gang-raping you, and you can’t do anything about it because Joaquin will kill you for killing his men.”
There’s nothing carnal in Cesara’s face anymore; her eyes are filled with darkness, the kind of darkness that breeds people like me.
I lean in closer, still holding her face in my hands, still searching her eyes. “You’re tired of being someone’s property,” I continue, knowing I have her in the palm of my hands, literally and figuratively, “tired of living in a man’s world”—I touch my lips to hers; my fingers put light pressure on her cheeks in emphasis—“I am too, Cesara; I’m so fucking tired of following in the shadows of men. And…I will follow you anywhere, kill anyone who stands in our way, or who tries to stop us”—I kiss her again, and my mouth lingers on hers—“all you have to do is say the word.”
After a passionate kiss, Cesara looks into my eyes as a different woman with a newfound trust—she’s finally who I wanted her to be since I met her, and I know now I can get her to tell me almost anything, without the fear of her becoming suspicious. Because she’s falling in love with me, and love is the only force in the world that can blind a person to even the most obvious truths.
“How did you know?” she says. “About the guards?”
“I see it when they look at you,” I tell her, stroking her hair away from her face. “They’re not afraid of you; they look like men who know they’re the ones in control, and are just biding their time, waiting for the right moment. How long have they been doing this to you?”
“For as long as I’ve been here,” she says, solemnly. “Since Javier gave me to Joaquin—they never dared touch me when Javier was alive.”
“They will pay,” I promise, peering deeply into her tortured face. “We will be the ones biding our time, waiting in the shadows for the right moment; and before we leave this place, together”—I tighten my hands against her cheeks—“we will kill every last one of them.”
“Yes,” she whispers. “Yes…” I see that darkness in her eyes dancing to the rhythm of a whole new future, one of vengeance and love and desire and danger. “Yesss—together we can turn a man’s world into rubble; we can walk across the bones of men; we can bathe in the blood of our oppressors—together, Lydia, we can do anything.”
“Yes. We can.” I smile down at her. “It is our destiny.”
“Didn’t you ever wonder,” she says a moment later, “why the guards never bothered you?”
“A little,” I answer. “But I figured you had something to do with it.”
She nods. “When you first came here,” she begins, “they knew better than to touch you because they never touch the merchandise. But later, when you started working under me, I told them that Joaquin had his eye on you—technically that wasn’t a lie—and that if any of them ever touched you, they would pay with their heads.”
“You’ve been protecting me.”
“Yes. And I’ll keep protecting you. For as long as you’ll let me. But I need to ask you something.”
“You can ask me anything,” I tell her right away, though it makes me nervous.
“That girl, Uma, who you came here with”—(Finally! I can find out something about Naeva, and without having to bring her up myself!)—"I just need to know: was she special to you? Be honest. I know an attachment when I see one.”
Ah, Cesara’s jealous; she’s worried my heart is with someone else.
“Uma and I formed a small bond on the way here—technically, she was the one doing all the bonding; I just went along for the ride.” I brush the pad of my thumb along her jawline. “But no, she wasn’t special to me. And I don’t care what happens to her. Why do you ask?” Translation: Please tell me everything you know about what’s happened to her.
“I just wanted to make sure your loyalties didn’t lie with another woman,” Cesara says. “The way she took up for you that day—I just had to be sure. But I believe you; I can see it in your eyes, that you’re telling me the truth.”
I smile on the inside, deep down where she can’t see it, because if she did, she’d know I was laughing at her. Blinded to the most obvious truths…
I kiss her lips and her chin and her forehead—ah, the forehead; one kiss there and you know the love is real.
After a moment, I say, “My dark secret, the reason I am who I am, is not so different from yours, Cesara.” If she only knew…
She tilts her head, curiously, interested.
“I was practically given away to a man by my mother, when I was fourteen-years-old. I hated her for taking me to that place. And I killed her for it.” I bring my hands up between us, and look into them. “With these hands, I killed her.” I drop them between us again. “Like you—like so many women—I was violated; I was humiliated; I was lied to and loved and betrayed; and I was tired of it. After I killed my mother, I escaped the man who brainwashed me; I left that whole world behind me—and my child with it. And since then, I’ve encountered so many men like those who made me what I became. And I killed them all. And I’ll keep killing them until the day I join them in whatever hell awaits me.”
Cesara cups my face in her hands, peers deeply into my eyes with compassion and pain. “We will kill them together, Lydia; you and me, an unstoppable force.”
“We will live—truly live for once—and die together,” I say with conviction. Where’s my Oscar?!
Cesara pushes me down on the bed, and I picture only Victor’s face for the next hour.
How did I come this far? And what is happening to me? Something is happening. When I woke up this morning, I could feel the lurking hands of inevitability all around me, inside of me, and I knew that something would happen before this day was over. But…I assumed it was something else altogether; I thought it had everything to do with tonight at the final auction; I was halfway convinced it would be that I discovered the real Vonnegut.
But I was wrong about the source of that feeling.
Despite the Oscar-worthy act, I think I’ve discovered the real Izabel.