House Arrest Read Online Free PDF

ruled
la isla
. They brought with them tobacco and sugarcane. They also brought with them slaves whose ships carried spiders the size of fists that nestled in the banana groves, and rats and snakes and cholera.
    At the end of the nineteenth century a Spanish landowner, Andrés Ortiz, freed his slaves and indentured servants and led them into the hills and the rain forest to begin
la isla
’s first war of liberation. The Americans would join Ortiz and his growing squadrons in what came to be known as the War of Liberation from Spain. When the victory was complete, the American Marines at the
fortaleza
were told to fly the flag of the liberation. They flew the Stars and Stripes instead.
    More than fifty years later a lone soldier would flail about in the hills with his band of followers, fighting a protracted guerrilla war. He would crawl, holding his breath, through burning fields of sugarcane, set afire to smoke him out. No one really knew who he was or where he came from, and rumor spread that he was the first Spaniard and his Taino wife. That he was born of a holy man and a martyr as well. But in truth this soldier who they came to call El Caballo wasthe bastard son of a Spanish peasant who ran a
finca
in the eastern provinces.
    He would spend years in prison, where this man famed for his incessant speaking—for keeping his brothers and fellow soldiers up all night—would never speak, and his guards came to refer to him as El Mudo, the Mute. And eventually he would become president of the republic, chairman of the Socialist Party, prime minister, director of the congress, and head of the armed forces. And on the day he became president, the flag of
la isla
flew in the wing-shaped harbor of Puerto Angélico for the first time.
    After our visit to the museum, where I made notes for the “Brief History” section of the guide, Manuel invited me out for pizza. We stood in a line that snaked around the block, in which old women in cotton dresses with aprons shifted from hip to hip, arms akimbo. “You see,” he said, “once we had hopes; now we have lines.” Children dashed up and down the line as their mothers called to them. Men who looked bored leaned against the wall as the line inched forward. When at last we purchased a greasy slab of bread with cheese running off it, Manuel said, “Everything here makes me sick. Why do tourists want to come? All we want to do is leave.”
    We wandered over to the seawall to eat our pizza. On the way he did a little mambo step, a spin on his heels. The wall was populated with young couples—girls in school uniforms sat as boys in work clothes arched their groins into their girlfriends’ backs. Others nestled, arm-in-arm, sleeping on each other’s shoulders. Manuel and I sat, swatting the flies and eating our lumpy pizza. Oil slid down my wrist.
    “You aren’t working today?” I asked him.
    He shook his head. Because of rationing, there was noelectricity in his office and he could not use the computer. This happened about three times a week. So really there was no sense for him to go to work more than a day or two a week. “So I come here,” he told me, “and watch the sea.”
    Manuel worked as a statistician in the Ministry of Agriculture. “I know it sounds impressive,” he said, “but what I actually do is fix numbers so they add up right. Per capita necessities, labor hours, production costs, profits. The goal of my job is to make it look as if we are ahead. Of course, we will never be ahead, but I just need to make the numbers look as if we are.”
    Manuel shrugged and smiled, which made his whole face turn upward like a child’s picture of a smiling sun. It’s not that hard, he said, to make the numbers look right. It also helped him to know what the shortages are, and if he knows what the shortages are, he can anticipate them. And this is good for black-market sales.
    “The black market is about the only thing I can count on.” Then Manuel began to complain