It was when the song began to swell and I let him pull me close that I first felt doubt. I knew then that I would never hurt him the way that he hurt me.
I did not let that stop me.
The imperialists descended upon us in the early summer, when the cassava was still green. Armando came running down the hill, across the fields, knifing his way through the leaves, to tell us that they were coming, that they would be here before the sun was high.
We had few weapons to fight with and fewer men to wield them. Armando and the other boys, a dozen pubic hairs between them, gathered in the road with spades and rakes until Cato, grey with age, bade them to put down the tools and stand in peace.
“If we survive this day,” he said, “it will not be through strength of arms.”
He was right. But that did not save him.
It was hot when the imperialists came over the ridge and into the village. The heat throbbed in my ears as we stood in the square, waiting for our fates to unravel.
The general led them in. He paced back and forth on his white horse as the marching soldiers filed into ranks behind him. There aren’t so many, I thought.
“Where are your men?”
The horses stamped. They too were hot.
“You, old man, where are your men?”
“They have gone,” Cato said.
“To the war?”
“They will not return.”
The general smiled, his teeth as white as his horse. “To the war, then,” he said. “Good. They were separatists, were they not?”
“They did not fight for the queen.”
The general seemed pleased. He marched his horse back and forth, weighing us with his stare.
“You, why did you not fight?”
My father squeezed my hand. “I’m not fit for battle, lord.”
“No?”
“My left leg is lame, lord.”
The general looked up and down the line of us and considered my father, the only man older than the boys like Armando and younger than Cato. “Step forward,” he said.
“Lord?”
At a gesture from the general, the officer that rode behind him dismounted. His face was young but he wore gold epaulets and three medals upon his breast. He approached and said, “I would prefer not to force you, father.”
Another squeeze on my hand and then, haltingly, my father stepped forward beyond the line of us, so that he stood alone before the general. His leg had been injured shortly after I had been born. Drunk on the wine and revelry of the wake, one of my mother’s former lovers, the one that she had spurned to be with my father, assaulted him. “You killed her,” the man said, the words both jagged and slurred. “You and your brat.” He lunged, and when my father turned his back to protect me, the hidden knife slashed out and tore across the back of my father’s leg. My father asked for leniency, but the law was clear and the man was hanged in the morning. My father never walked evenly again.
The general flashed his teeth at my father and then turned to all of us. “You sent all your men, all but the old and broken ones, to a war they could not win, that they should not have been fighting. Why? Why did they fight?”
Sweat trickled down my face, but my arms were frozen to my side, unable to wipe away the salt that stung my eyes as I stared, unblinking, at my father. No one could answer the general, I knew, because they could not hear their own thoughts over the pounding of my heart.
Cato broke the silence. “They fought for their homes.” He gestured at those beside him in the line. “They fought for their families. They fought for freedom,” he said.
The general’s strides were slow and deliberate, the toes of his boots snapping against the hard-packed ground. He looked around at the small buildings that lined the square, the cassava climbing up the hill, the jacarandas dotting the horizon, the frightened women and children lined up beneath the sun. He stood before Cato and leaned forward, speaking to him in a rasping voice that cut through the air. “Is all this worth fighting for?”
“It is worth dying for.”
The general spread his arms wide, grinning. “Boys,” he said, turning to Armando and the others. “There is a hero among you! A hero who believes in country and family and freedom, a dream that has never yet been made real on this earth. What a hero! Boys, I am no hero, but I have seen the world and I will share a truth of it: Cowards will tell you that something, anything, is worth dying for. But it is heroes who do the dying.”
He nodded at the young captain who left my father to pull Cato forward into the center of the square, into the abyss between the soldiers and the women and children. With a firm hand on Cato’s shoulder, he forced the old man to the ground. The general nodded and the captain unsheathed his sword and drew it across Cato’s throat. The old man fell to his side. His back was to me, but I could see the edges of a red pool spreading out beneath his head, dampening his thin hair where it touched the dusty ground.
“No, I am not a hero, but I am merciful,” said the general, once more addressing Armando and the other boys. “Remember this: Pain, like cowardice, is endless. But death is brief. Let us extend that mercy to heroes and cowards alike.”
Once more he nodded and this time the young captain pulled my father forward until he stood only a few paces from what had once been Cato. “Lord,” my father said. “Please. No.” The general nodded to the young captain. Vida, my mother’s sister, wrapped her arms around me and placed a hand over my mouth. I knew she did this, though I could not feel it, could not feel anything, having passed into another world that was much like ours but also so very, very different.
The young captain pushed my father down.
“Please.”
The sword passed across his throat and he fell and I saw his eyes but they did not see mine.
As a child, I had loved to dance. My father would clap a rhythm and Vida would sing one of the silly songs that she and my mother had made up when they were children and I would spin and twirl and kick, caught in the embrace of something far older and more lovely than any of us knew.
When I came of age and the young captain claimed me for his own, I did not speak, not to him, not to Vida in the few moments we had together, not to anyone, for a year. But when the captain was with the general, strategizing for skirmishes that never occurred, defending against a revolution that had already been defeated, I would dance. There was no beat, save the sound of my heels against the stone floor, and no tune, save the melody in my head and the harmony in my hands. I would dance until sweat ran down my neck and my vision began to swim, until I could not remember who I was or who I had been or what I had seen or what I must do.
I was a woman when the captain told me that they would be leaving, that the queen had called them back, that there would be a gala to celebrate the end of their time in Novos Começos. For almost ten years I had lived with him, filling the place of the young wife that he had left behind in Portugal, each of us wondering who the other was. None of us were young anymore.
“I would bring you with me if I could, you know.”
“I know.”
“I’ve bought you a gown. The seamstress will come tomorrow to fit you. It is beautiful.”
I placed my hand to his cheek and held his eyes in mine. He had a beauty of his own. He was a kind man, from the day I was first brought to him. When the general’s men chose their women, he had claimed Vida, who was lithe and slender and charming. He was kind to her, she later told me, but he never touched her, not even when she wanted to be touched. When I came of age, he told the general that he wanted me, and he let Vida return to our family home with many gifts and a letter thanking her for the joy she had brought him. She told me that he did not know that I had been the little girl who had lost her father on that long ago day. Good, I thought. I too tried to forget that girl.
When I came to him, the captain wanted to touch me, but he didn’t, not until I allowed it. I made him wait for a long time, made the longing within him grow and stretch and multiply. And then, when I gave him the grace that he craved, he savored it. We both did. It was worth savoring.
Years passed and if at times it felt that we were setting aside a reality too cruel to be spoken so that we could play at a dream of domesticity—there they go, the handsome captain and his beautiful mistress!—then there were more times still when it did not feel like play at all. All that I wanted, the captain provided. All that he desired, I held in my hands. There was tension but there was also trust. We lived within each day, heedless of those that had come before and ignoring those that would come after. We did what any two people must do when they are brought to one another by choices and fates that are not always within their control. We built a life that we could live, a lie that we could believe, and sometimes we wondered where the lie ended.
The gala was wondrous. All that we ate was ripe and bright and full of life. All that we drank was clear and clean and crisp. The other women envied my place beside the captain, so handsome, so honest, so strong. The other men saw me, beautiful in the gown he had bought me, and desired gifts they knew I would never bestow. Armando, a lieutenant now with a mistress of his own, grinned at me as I passed.
When the music began, the captain led my steps, holding me close, breathing me in.
“You’re afraid,” I said.
“I’m being foolish,” he replied, though he did not believe it.
“Do you remember our first dance?”
“I will never forget it.”
“I was afraid then.”
He laughed. “You were. But you were strong. You are strong.” Yes, I thought. I am. “I will never be whole without you,” he continued. “I will come back and find you, or maybe I can convince the general—”
“No. You know what that would cost.”
“Our love is worth dying for.”
“Then let us be glad that we have it and yet have not died.”
He laughed again. “You’re right. You’re always right. How are you always right?”
I swallowed my pain and smiled my brightest smile. “Come,” I said. “Let us dance while the music plays.”
We danced until there were no others left, until the band had gone and the only song was the hymn of our breathing that would outlive the coming dawn.
I sat in our bed until all the warmth of him was gone and all the salt from our tears had dried from my cheeks. Later, there would be perspective and shame and pride and reckoning and an endless string of unread letters, each and every one fed to a purifying fire. But in that morning, I hoped only that sometime, somewhere, we would meet again.
In the days before the imperialists came, my father sat beside me beneath my favorite jacaranda, our home off to one side, the sprawl of the valley to the other.
“Your mother was so kind,” he said. “I loved that about her. It’s important, Izzy, or I think it’s important, that we be kind to one another. As kind as we can be. There is so much hurt in the world, so much pain. There should be more love, and only we can create that. Do you understand?”
I nodded to him then, and I believed what he said, because he was my father. I believe him still, because I have felt hurt and I have felt love and I have known the profound imbalance between them. But his words are not all that I believe.
The day before he died, I helped Cato pull water from the well. I am older now than he was then, and I have seen and heard many things, but it’s his words that come to me at night, when the fire has died and the truth is creeping close in the dark.
“When they come, don’t be afraid,” he said. “They feed on the fear. Let them starve. And they will think that you cannot hurt them, because you are a woman. Don’t believe them. We can all fight, every one of us in our own way. There are weapons worse than swords in this world.”
Yes, I think. There are.