The Ladies of Managua Read Online Free

was important to keep things quiet until the announcement was made, to avoid fueling the conflagration of rumors. And to keep people who could from fleeing the country. But I couldn’t not tell my sister that Rigobertito would be in danger. I knew how much she loved her son; I did, too. And I owed it to her. Celia was always the good daughter, who did what my parents asked, what they expected. But she was a good sister, too. She told me once that she admired me, even if she wasn’t like me. I wonder if she knew how important those words were, especially to a twenty-year-old who still looked up to her older sister with the straight hair and the slim waist. So I had to tell her. Rigobertito was turning fifteen and the conflict showed no sign of wrapping up. What destruction it took to improve our country!
    I knew that if I told Celia it meant she would leave, and she did, the very next week. I didn’t know that when Celia moved to Miami, our mother and father would go, too. It made sense for Celia to move—she’d been to college at the University of Florida, and her husband had investments he wanted to protect outside of volatile Nicaragua, and a friend with a car dealership who would guarantee him a job. But that my parents would go, too, and bring Mariana with them? That was so preposterous, it couldn’t be anything but a fantasy Mama, and later, Papa, tossed around, spoke out loud to hear how it sounded. I fought the proposal from the start. I told Mama that my child belonged with her mother. But then my father said, “I know you want to honor Manuel’s memory. And you should! But you’ll never forgive yourself if this Revoluci ó n harms someone else you love.”
    He was right. Even though I stormed out of his house, the door slamming behind me, threatening to knock Mama’s porcelain shepherdesses off the side table, he was right. Manuel was more alive than anyone I’d known, but he was prepared to die for the Revolución. It was a risk he took willingly. “At least my death would mean something,” he told me when I found out I was pregnant and asked him to turn down the more dangerous assignments. “If I die, it would be to make a better country for this baby. Besides, I’m fast, and moving targets are too tricky to kill. And I’m lucky! After all, I have you.”
    Remembering our conversation always makes me cringe so completely that I feel I might throw up; even my intestines are contorted in shame. If I didn’t feel so guilty, I might at least appreciate the irony of his words. But knowing that I cost him his life, and Mariana her father, I had to keep fighting in his place, to try to keep his death from being a waste. Besides, how would it look if the widow of Manuel Vazquez abandoned the Revolución and moved to the United States, a country that had refused to help us in our struggle? It would tarnish his sacrifice, shame him even in death. I had always been a valuable compañera, one of the generals told me, one of the most reliable members of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional. After Manuel’s death, I became even more: a symbol of sacrifice and struggle, triumph after tragedy. Whether I liked it or not, this was how people saw me now. I could use the role that had been assigned to me to help our country, or I could slip out of the ill-fitting halo I now wore and turn my back on the new nation Manuel died to create. It wasn’t a choice, really.
    And I couldn’t honestly tell my parents that Mariana’s life wouldn’t be at risk in Nicaragua. She was a seven-year-old girl; she wasn’t in danger of being drafted. But the war was being fought all over the country. It was possible that she’d get caught in the crossfire, or worse, be harmed in a mission that targeted me. Children had been dying since before the Revolución, when Somoza’s army killed kids as young as ten; it was after the death