I thought of winter in America, the trees losing their leaves, colors that should have borne names like ‘cremona’ and ‘anguish’ and ‘eldorado’, the scatterings of snow that you could smell in the air, the bitter wind haunting the eaves above the windows of the houses, ghosts of smoke from smouldering bonfires as people burned leaves in backlots and front yards . . .
And the hurt began again.
I retraced my steps to the house, where my son was studying. I stood at the back door, waiting for the sky to break open with the sound of rain. It came eventually, as I knew it would, and out beyond the limits of the house I could hear the lush vegetation stretching and yawning and swelling its leaves and stems and roots. Rain came like a waterfall, the rush of sound filling my ears, waves filling my eyes, every sense echoing the crescendo of nature as she burst and broke and bled. It was vast, immense, majestic. It represented everything, and yet nothing, and there were many things I did not understand.
Later, the air chilled and smelling of damp green destruction, I turned and walked back into the house. Upstairs I went into a small and immaculate room, the furniture not from this century, the counterpane covering the bed ancient and bleached with years of washing. I went through my dresser and found a white monogrammed shirt. I took a suit and other things from the wardrobe, silk and soft cotton and gaberdine pants with pleats and shoes with two sets of fastenings, buckles and laces, and over the laces a hand-tooled leather flap that prevented the cuffs of the pants from chafing. From beneath the pillow of my bed I retrieved my .38, heavy and solid, the handle pearled, threaded with lignum vitae beaded like marble. I hefted the weapon in my hand, tucked my finger behind the trigger guard, rolled it like a gunslinger, stepped back and aimed at the mirror, then turned and followed the lower edge of the window sill with my eye along the sight. I smiled. I sat on the edge of the bed. I reversed the gun, touched my thumb against the trigger, lifted it, opened my mouth and felt the bottom of the barrel against my teeth. I smelled oil, cordite, saltpeter – blood, I thought – and when I pressed the trigger harder I could sense the internal workings of the mechanism preparing themselves for movement.
The sound of the hammer striking the empty chamber was almost deafening, as if the sound had echoed against the roof of my mouth, filled my head and then exited through my ears. I smiled again, withdrew the gun and turned it over in my hand. I replaced it beneath the pillow and crossed the room to the narrow bathroom. Inside, the white porcelain tiling and bathtub were hued green in the sallow light from the window. I opened the lower pane, looked out towards the road, and stood there for some small eternity listening for any sound within the house.
It was close to evening. Somewhere Victor was reading aloud to Claudia Vivó. I could hear the rain out there somewhere, hammering relentlessly on some other part of the world. Unbeknown to me it was raining also in Louisiana. Three hours and the Bienvenue would overflow its banks, the Mississippi-Lake Borgne tributary would burst its concrete stanchions and flood a town called Violet on Highway 39; the River Gulf Outlet Canal would swell and threaten the safety of the Intracoastal waterway running north-east out towards Gulfport . . . and a man called Duchaunak, a stranger to me, would run through the everglades at the edge of the Feraud territory. He would never make it home. He would collapse into the mud and drown, and his body would rest in eternity beside that of Carryl Chevron.
I understood the depth of losing. I saw the well of despair in which I could have drowned, but the one thing that floats us is hope. Faith perhaps. But what was faith if not in yourself? We believe we understand ourselves, but we do not; and perhaps if we did we would spend less time concealing from others that we were not who we appeared to be. We perform, you see, perform some drama for the world; we carry a case filled with faces, with words, with different scenes and acts and curtain calls, and we pray that the world will never see beyond the performance we have practised for it.
I turned and looked in the mirror. My face looked old and lined, streaked with pain, it seemed.
‘Who were you?’ I asked myself. ‘What did you think or hope or pretend you were? Who did you think you had become?’
I reached out and touched my fingers to the cool smooth reflection.
My depression deepened, the urge for revenge gnawed at me, and somewhere in the small and narrow shadow of my soul I began to understand that my wife and daughter were dead, that Victor and I were alone in this world, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Later I went down for dinner. I sat beside my son as Claudia brought food for us. I listened to him talk excitedly about the things he had learned that day, and I sensed his perfect and complete desire to become a man.
One does not own one’s life, I wanted to tell him. One borrows it, and if in the borrowing there is insufficient retribution made, then the life must be returned. This is the way of all things.
I did not speak; I listened. I did not see; I perceived. I did not clamor and plead for my own voice to be heard over that of my son.
He was what he was, and that was perfect enough.
As far as my own life was concerned, I had perhaps wished for too much.
When my son was sleeping, I once again left the house.
I felt I was becoming something. I had walked out whatever thoughts had held me in the fine clothes, the buckled shoes, the gun in my hand, and I stood in the rain, water running down my face, a warmth glowing from within.
Je ne sais pas la vérité, seulement les mots du coeur, car ça, c’est tout que j’entends.
A voice inside my mind, a voice from New Orleans perhaps, rippling with echoes like a stone dropped into cool glassy water, spreading out through everything. The words of the heart: this was all I heard.
Blackness and rain and punctuations of silence, nothing but intermittent waves of water breaking up the dirt, flooding the riverbanks . . . nature crying her heart out . . .
I shed my skin like a snake, and if I believed, if I breathed and believed in all that I was I would eventually swallow my own tail and disappear. It was divine and preordained and complete in its simplicity.
There was a fluidity, a gracefulness in my motion. Like the birthing pain of some creature – unearthly, arcane, sliding through the walls of the chrysalis, splitting the cocoon and feeling it slip to the ground. I was everything, and yet nothing, and in my eyes was merely the reflection of everything I was, everything I would become. If only for my son, I would breathe forever.
I stepped aside, I sank to the ground, I rolled in the soft and yielding dirt, water cooling me, washing the sweat from my skin, and when I stood I was black. I knelt, I cupped my hands, and from the rivulets that danced between the clumps of undergrowth I scooped a handful of liquid darkness. Against my face it felt smooth and forgiving, blending away the edges, the seams, the junctures between sound and silence, shadow and light, and when I ran my fingers back through my hair, feeling the mud on my scalp, I saw that I had indeed become something all-seeing, sensual and sublime.
Moving then, on the balls of my feet, stepping lightly, gathering speed, and soon I was running breathless and windswept through the trees, dancing between the trunks of moss-clothed trees, leaves against my face, against my skin. A ghost, a spectre, a haunting.
From the heart of this land, from the boundaries and limits I went like a wraith, my skin blended with nature so perfectly I was unseen. I was silent, and it seemed that I existed only in my own mind.
For miles it seemed, slipping through the night, the rain, the silence, until I came to a fence that ran as far as my eyes could see both left and right. I stepped back, and then with one stride I vaulted it, landing on bended knees on the other side, rain glancing off my sweated shoulders, leaning once again to refresh my face in the pools that had gathered.
I recognized myself as the creature who had surfaced from the swamps a thousand years before, who had padded silently into a motel room, who exorcised the sin from pale, weak bodies.
Poetry
in motion, blessed and beautiful.
I assumed right of possession over my own imagination, my own faith and belief, and I saw that I could become anything I desired, and anything I desired I could have.
I believed that they were still alive – my wife and my daughter. I believed that they were somewhere waiting for me, and it was only a matter of time before we would be reunited.
I believed these things with all my soul, for to believe otherwise would have caused me to lose my mind. It ran like a wheel from beginning to end, back to inception again, and like a thread from a spindle it would draw us all together once more.
On the way back to the house I found a dog sleeping beneath a tree at the side of the road. With my bare hands I strangled it, and then carried its limp body to the edge of the woods and hurled it into the darkness.
I kneeled in the dirt and cried until there was nothing left inside.
Back inside the walls of the house, I stood motionless outside the door of Victor’s room. I could hear him breathing, hear him murmuring as he slept, and I closed my eyes and prayed to a God I knew could not exist that he would survive these things.
I returned to my room; I lay on my bed; I closed my eyes.
I slept like the dead, for that – at least within – was what I had become.
Of these things – these thoughts and feelings – I said nothing to Victor. He was a bright child; eight years old, eyes wide for the world and all it had to offer. Mrs Vivó taught him well, even committing to his memory the basics of Spanish and the history of his grandfather’s homeland. I watched as a man apart. I loved the child, loved him more than life itself, but there was something always in his eyes, something that told me he believed me responsible for the death of his mother and his sister. Perhaps it was my imagination, perhaps a projection of my own guilt, but each time I looked at him I could recognize his loneliness and confusion. He had lost his family in the same way I had, through the brutal actions of brutal men, and had I not taken such a path, had I been a man of learning and culture, had people like Fabio Calligaris and Don Alessandro not been part of my life, then none of these things would have happened.
One day he spoke to me of God. He asked me if I believed.
I smiled, I pulled him close, I pressed my face against his hair and I told him the truth.
‘Some people believe in God, Victor, and some do not.’
‘And you? Do you believe in God, Daddy?’
I was quiet for a time. ‘I believe that there is something out there, but I cannot be sure what it is.’
‘Claudia believes in God . . . she prays every day before lessons, and then again before she leaves.’
‘It is good for people to have faith. Faith helps people make their way through life without fear.’
‘Fear of what?’
I sighed. ‘Fear of men, of the things that men can do.’
‘Like the men that killed Mommy and Lucia?’
I felt a tightness in my throat. It was difficult to breathe. Incipient tears stung my eyes. ‘Yes, Victor, like the men who killed Mommy and Lucia.’
‘Do you have faith, Daddy?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘In what? What do you have faith in?’
‘In you, Victor. I have faith in you. Faith as well that one day we will see Mommy and Lucia again.’
‘Will that be soon?’
I shook my head. ‘No Victor, it will not be soon, but they will wait for us.’
‘I want to pray, Daddy. I want to pray with Claudia . . . for you and for Mommy and Lucia, and that we will see them again soon. Is that okay?’
I pulled him closer. ‘Yes Victor, that is okay. You pray with Claudia and have faith in these things.’
‘And what will happen to the men who killed them?’
‘Perhaps God will make them hurt too,’ I said.
‘He will . . . yes, he will,’ Victor said, and then he was quiet, and I laid him down on the bed, and I curled up beside him until his breathing slowed and he was asleep.
I did not need to work. The money that I brought with me would have kept us in comfort for a considerable time, but I was restless before long, agitated easily, and I understood this to be an indication that I could not exist without some purpose.
During the day, while Claudia was seeing to Victor, I would walk out among the people of La Habana Vieja. I would listen to them, watch them as they went about their business, trying to find something that would interest me. On the corner of Bernaza and Muralla I found an old-fashioned store that specialized in cigars and antique books. Here I would spend time talking with the owner, a man in his seventies by the name of Raúl Brito, and he spoke of the revolucion, of the days when Batista was in power, and the fact that on two occasions he had spoken with Castro himself.
Raúl was a man of education and literature, and though he had at first begun his business dealing only in fine tobaccos and cigars, it was not long before he started to bring his own books to work in order to have something to occupy his mind. Customers would come, they would show interest in his reading, and soon he started to trade also in these. The store, known only as Brito’s, became a gathering place for the elders of La Habana Vieja, and here they would smoke their cigars, buy and sell and read their books, and occupy their hours away from home.
I frequented Brito’s more and more often, until there came a day in June of that year, a day no more than a week after Victor’s ninth birthday, that Raúl asked me if I would be interested in managing the store once he had retired.
‘I am seventy-four next month,’ he said, and he leaned on a stack of battered leatherbound volumes that looked barely able to stand his weight. ‘I will be seventy-four, and as each week passes I wonder if I can manage to make it down here again.’ He smiled, the creases around his eyes causing them to almost disappear into the origami warmth of his face. ‘You are a good man, Ernesto Perez, a man of character, and I believe it would suit you to settle here and make your business.’
I did not give Raúl Brito an answer that day, nor the next. I did not give him an answer until August, and then I told him I would be willing to manage the store, but I believed we should enact a partnership, that the name of the store should stay the same, and I should pay him a partnership fee to buy into the business.
‘Money?’ he said. ‘I did not suggest this because I wanted your money.’ He seemed slightly offended, as if I had made some improper suggestion.
I raised my hand in a conciliatory fashion. ‘I know, Raúl, I know you didn’t, but I am a man of principle and honor, and I feel it would be unjust to enter into this without making some contribution to the venture. I insist that it be this way, regardless of your viewpoint.’
Raúl smiled. He winked. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘If that is the case then we shall employ a lawyer and we shall draw up an agreement, a letter of co-operation if you like, and we shall have it sworn in and made legal.’
I held out my hand and we shook. I would give Raúl Brito ten thousand American dollars, and I would become his partner.
It was then that the difficulties began. My money was well-hidden in my house. I had no bank account, I had no records or registered assets. In organizing the legalities of our partnership I was required to provide a passport or some legal means of identification. These things I did not have, at least nothing current and admissible in a Cuban lawyer’s office, and when the lawyer suggested I solve the problem by registering my name and place of birth at the local police headquarters I was caught like a rabbit in the headlights. I had made an agreement with Raúl to do this, but what was asked of me I could not provide, and no matter the attempts I made to construct this agreement based on a handshake and a word of trust, Raúl insisted that if we were going to do it then we would do it properly. It was, after all, my idea, was it not?
When I failed to appear at the police headquarters, not only on one occasion, but a second time also, the lawyer – a suspicious and invasive man by the name of Jorge Delga
do – commented to the local constabulary that there was something unusual about the elderly man who lived in the house on Avenida Belgica. The constabulare, a card-carrying member of the Crusade for the Defence of the Revolution, an organization that was nothing more than the eyes and ears of Castro’s secret police, was interested enough in me to ask details of Claudia Vivó, and she – loyal and reticent in her own way – merely served to awaken his further curiosity.
It was in the second week of September that he came to Brito’s, and there he found me seated near the window, smoking a cigar and reading a magazine.
‘Mr Perez,’ he said quietly, and sat beside me at the narrow table.
I looked at him, and everything within me told me I was in for some difficulty.
‘My name is Luis Hernández. I am the constabulare for this sector.’
I held out my hand. ‘I am pleased to meet you, sir,’ I said.
Hernández did not shake my hand and I withdrew it slowly.
‘I understand that you have been here in Cuba for some months?’
‘Yes, I have . . . myself and my son Victor.’
‘And how old is your son, Mr Perez?’
I smiled. ‘He is nine years old.’
‘And I understand he is tutored by Claudia Vivó?’
‘He is, yes.’
‘I have spoken with her and she tells me he is a very bright boy indeed.’
I nodded. ‘He is a bright boy, yes.’
‘And his mother?’
‘His mother is no longer alive.’
Hernández shook his head. ‘I am sorry. She has been dead a long time?’
‘In March of this year.’
‘And she died here in Cuba?’
‘No, she did not die in Cuba.’
Hernández was silent. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
‘In America. She died in America.’
‘Aah,’ he said, as if suddenly understanding something significant. ‘And may I ask how she died, Mr Perez?’
‘An automobile accident, she and my daughter, Victor’s sister.’
R. J. Ellory Page 46