Free House Arrest by Mary Morris Page B

Lorenzo says, calling me by my first name for the first time, “I’m sorry we disturbed you.” He motions for me to sit down.
    “It’s all right,” I tell him, “I have things to do.”
    Both men give me quizzical looks, wondering what that could possibly be. I shrug, pointing to my nails. “A manicure,” I say, and they laugh. Major Lorenzo has coffee and toast waiting for me and he sits beside me impassively as I gobble it down.
    Stepping out into the plaza, I am blinded by the light and the heat of the day. In the short time I have been here, I find I am growing accustomed to drawn shades, the subdued light filtered through them. Major Lorenzo holds my elbow as I step down from the curb, as if we are on a date. Perhaps now we will go out for coffee, have lunch at El Colibrí. I feel the sturdy cobblestones beneath my feet. Solid ground.
    People saunter past—full-bodied women move in languorous steps as if they have just risen from their beds. Men strut; others mill about, smoking cigars. Suddenly I am gripped with the urge to run, to dash away, to lose myself in the throngs. I’ve seen this in my dog. Sometimes he gets out and races down the street and I know that what he wants to do, what it is in his heart to do, is to run away.
    But I do not break free. I do as I am told. Major Lorenzo opens the door to the plain beige car I traveled in before. His aide waits until I am comfortably seated inside. Then the two of them sit in front, Major Lorenzo with his arm draped over the back of the seat, turning to me from time to time. “Is it too much air?” he asks as he did when he first brought me here. “Did you have enough to eat?” I am torn between feeling like a visiting dignitary and a truant child en route tosome official reprimand, my disgruntled parents in the front seat.
    We drive inland, away from the sea, and this disappoints me, since I was hoping we would follow the water. I want to take deep breaths. Instead the air grows heavy and thick. We move swiftly down the winding roads that lead away from Puerto Angélico, twisting so many times that I am not sure whether we are going to the east or the west.
    I have always had a good sense of direction, but now I cannot seem to get my bearings. I try to find markers so I’ll remember the way—a billboard, a sports arena, a road sign, but everything seems generic, nondescript, though I know I have never taken this road before. Isabel never brought me this way, so there cannot be much of interest here.
    Bloodred mariposa and wandering primrose cling to the median strip, but along the sides of the road the vegetation is thick, junglelike. Once again there is that sticky-sweet smell of overripe fruit. Palmettos, banana trees arch across the road. Perhaps there is a rain forest they want me to see. Something for the ecotourist market. A secret jungle joint-venture hotel, an inland lake resort about to be opened. Or perhaps there is an important person who wants to meet me. I think of all the houses of El Cabalio—the hunting lodge, the
finca
. He thinks I have information to share with him. I will tell him what little I know and they will let me go home. I picture a veranda by a pool, a cold luncheon plate of shrimp and little crabs from the sea.
    We become trapped behind the back of a bus. Diesel fumes spew into the car and Major Lorenzo grows impatient. He tells the driver to lean on his horn, to drive up on the sidewalk. He must not want to keep whomever it is waiting.For the first time the aide puts on our siren and the bus pulls over to the side of the road so we can speed by.
    Soon the vegetation drops back, the road widens, and we turn off onto a dirt road lined with cinder-block buildings, institutional structures that sit on dry, burned-out fields, and this does not appear to be where the head of a small island nation would live. It doesn’t even seem to be where he would work. And then I see the barbed wire around the buildings, the bars on the