House Arrest Read Free

nothing at all. I think that at any moment he will mention Isabel. He’ll say, “Why don’t you tell about what happened the last time you were here.” Instead he starts shuffling papers on his desk. “Anything else?” he asks abruptly.
    “Yes, I have to go to the bathroom.”
    He signals to one of his guards. The stone-faced guard with a gun in his hand accompanies me down a narrow corridor. To my right is the bathroom and straight ahead is the door outside. It has been left ajar and a warm, tropical breeze blows in. I hesitate, smelling the salt, the sea, a hint of jasmine in the air, and for an instant I think I could dash through the opening into the night, but the guard motions with the butt of his rifle. The bathroom is gray and there is no mirror. There is also no toilet paper.
    I am taken back to the immigration waiting room, where it appears I will be for a while. I try to stretch out across threeplastic chairs, but the armrests press into my sides. Tossing a light jacket over my shoulders, I arrange myself better, resting on my duffel, the way I have seen pictures of travelers stranded by snowstorms in Denver, strikes in Milan, though I have never been a stranded traveler before this night.
    Just when I feel as if I could doze off, as if I could actually sleep with my head resting on my palm, one of the guards, a pleasant enough man with a nice face, informs me that I am to be moved upstairs, where I’ll be more comfortable. He hoists my duffel as I follow him up some winding steps into a departure lounge. The lounge, lined with vinyl-covered benches, smells of grease and beer and does not look like much of an improvement, except that the guard tells me I can stretch out on the benches. He also tells me that there are no more flights until Tuesday so I could actually live in this lounge until they find a flight for me.
    I sit down, trembling. Though I have my duffel with me, the only warm things it contains are a few cotton sweaters, an extra pair of jeans. I pull on a sweater, but still my teeth chatter. Travel light, Todd told me, but take a sweatshirt. You never know, he said. He’s practical about this sort of thing, but somehow I don’t listen. My bag is heavy with a blow-dryer and a clothes steamer, but no sweatshirt. The windchill was fifteen below when I left home; I handed Todd my winter coat at the airport when I kissed him good-bye, knowing he’d be waiting at the same place upon my return.
    I’ve never been very good at being awake when everyone else is asleep. At home I want to wake someone up to keep me company. I’m not one for cleaning drawers or counting sheep. When I was younger, I used to drink a little brandy, though I never felt right the next day. I try to lie down onthe narrow benches, but as soon as I start to doze, I feel myself slipping toward the floor.
    The fluorescent lights are on in the duty-free shops that line the departure lounge, and I get up and walk around. One shop displays a giant lizard, stuffed in attack position, and a weird chess set that appears medieval in origins. The pawns are belly dancers as if out of a harem; the rook is a real castle; the knight, a knight on his rearing horse. I wonder where this chess set came from and what it is doing at the duty-free shop in the Aeropuerto Internacional.
    There is a display of wood carvings and giant spiders with wire legs that I try to envision on coffee tables in Munich and Amsterdam. Do these spiders really exist on
la isla?
There are ceramics—bowls that look as if they’d disintegrate with water in them, brittle-looking plates, perfect for hurling in domestic battles on Spanish-language soap operas, but I can’t imagine serving food on them. The ceramics have squiggles and shapes on the sides in an attempt to appear indigenous, but the natives were wiped out centuries ago.
    Books line the counter. Propaganda mostly.
The Revolution from Columbus to the Present. The Diary of a Guerrilla Fighter
. Leafing through