by Wendy Guerra
What would we say the next day at school? I was terrified and anxious. Myth destroyed.
I love taming the old wolf. Leaping about together, as if we were fleeing. Traveling far, to an intermediate place—not Cuba, not France, not him, not Mami, not me. A place like us. My sex swallows him as if he were a Chinese plum, and I feel Paolo so wet that he traverses me and arrives at a place completely unknown. Although he may want to deny his instinct, his body is his country.
I cast aside all the women I’ve been with other men. His sex hurts me, and I tremble as he splits me in two. He’s already won.
May he remember nothing, may he dismiss his guilt and fears. May he destroy what he needs; I’m the force that awaits him, and I win by being destroyed. Balanced and centered. The hidden diameter between my legs. Paolo is below me. I slip and fall dead. I can’t contain my groan. I’m down on the mat.
My childish laughter ruins everything. Paolo is the most intense man I’ve ever met. His anger has turned to candor; maybe the waters from my body blessed the most amnesiac Cuban in the world with a little tenderness.
I was dying of desire and he was dying of happiness. It’s quite the trip to Cuba he’s taking with me on this sofa. We bruised each other and caressed each other. Wounds and caresses. Kisses and ardor. Hard, soft, slow, sweet. An adagio, a kind of pain that transformed into pleasure until we both shattered. I felt Paolo inside me like no one else. I decided to nap as he served the meal, the same menu as our country school. It was more like a meal from the Champs-Élysées.
I didn’t let him see me in the nude. I told him it was a tradition from school. We had to get our uniforms signed before we graduated. I showed him my back and asked him to jot down the names of my mother’s other lovers on my white shirt.
Paolo tore the shirt off me.
“In my generation, we got tattoos. We were a little braver than yours. Your mother had a compass rose on her back. Do you want the names or not?” he said, almost threateningly. He had a little gadget in his hand to emboss and color. I could tell from his fingers he wanted to start everything again.
I turned back to my own desire, moist on the sofa. I don’t know how we’d gotten the upholstery so wet. Paolo may be less to my mother, but to me he’s already too much. Sex must have been very hard in the ’60s. Is that why I was born? Anyway . . . I waited until he went to the kitchen and put on my coat. I wrote with my lipstick on the same graffitied glass: “The last Pioneer was here.”
I pulled the door open. I left without the list. I didn’t say goodbye.
Dear Diary: I’m going back to Cuba.
Part II
Pain and Forgiveness
The girl you still are would like to take shelter, but there is none . . .
You walk barefoot, Laila, on the ruins of your homeland.
—JORGE VOLPI
Cuba Stays in Cuba
Since Cuba stays in Cuba and can’t be transported anywhere else, I’m back here. I’ve come to bury my father. The graves and the flowers are here; the theaters with celebrity names and the jewels that got lost in the chaos. The beaches for swimming alone in the deep, blurry with whirling sand, blinding seaweed, and the dust from sifting shells.
I hear the laughter of those who swam with me in the first and second tiers of my childhood. They went on, but I’ve come back, I insist, to swim in the sea in my beach of memories. “We’re poor,” my mother would say when the afternoons ended on those beaches, and I’d be hungry as we waited for a truck to go home, or a lost bus that would stop for us at dusk. “We’re very poor, Nadia.”
I keep photos of the wreckage, the books upon books with and without homemade dust jackets read during the endless summer vacation of my life. I’m like an unhappy summer, like Saturday night parties covered in confetti, forgotten beers, and trova concerts on a stairway or black sand.
I am my last summer and the first of many without my father. One thing I know for sure: after experiencing snow, I’m not the same. I came fleeing the cold, and I’m welcomed by a frigid humidity.
The cold has stripped my skin of that perennial and liberating nakedness the heat had bequeathed to me. I’ve forgotten how to put up with the heat without complaint. Now the challenge is to bring the sun back to my skin, to forget the crushing presence of winter. Enough! The heat here doesn’t let you think. But don’t sweat it—the north sweeps away pieces of the Malecón, and that’s all the cold we get. This is Havana. That’s how it is. And how it challenges me!
I don’t understand much through my Russian lens. This is Havana; you deal with it straight, no playing around.
From the airport to the hospital, all night waiting for my father’s death, and then, at dawn, to the museum. I go back to the contemporary art room every time to pray for those who are no longer here.
This is Havana. Mudéjar, neoclassical, art nouveau—it resists but still reveals the remains of an architecture that can’t be defined. This is Havana. For Uncle Matt, travelers mean ruin, the city conquered by Orientales—not the Chinese or Asian Indian kind but Orientales from the Eastern side of the island, cradle of the son. For others, the city is a sun-filled theater or a geriatric clinic. For me, it’s a museum where I come to rescue what’s left.
The hospital has smoked glass. Salt covers the views of the grayish sea. The salt advances! From here you can see the unforgiving sea taking back the pieces once stolen from it.
APRIL 18
AS IN any good drama my father has waited for me to return before he will die.
I cry to make him think I understand. But I don’t understand; actually, this feels like a conspiracy against me—it can’t be that I will have no one left who’s lucid. The nurse hears me talking with a psychiatrist friend of my father’s and interrupts us as she injects my father with morphine.
“Girl,” she says, “forget about it. They’re going to drive you crazy.”
As the poet Reina María says: “They’re going to drive me crazy, yes, just like everyone wanted.”
How can they want me to forget? Could it be the entire country has agreed to forget? Maybe I wasn’t tipped off and so I’m defenseless. They forget the sick a little before burying them. It’s all about avoidance. They prep themselves for that nonchalance.
I go down to the hospital lobby. Lujo Rojas waits for the shift change at seven. (Lujo is my father’s real widow.)
Now everything depends on the morphine, his kidneys, and the chess game my father wants to play. My father is bisexual and could seduce even death. He was always trying to cast a spell on anyone, at any time. Lujo was his lover before leaving in the ’70s; my father and I still live in his house.
He came back two months ago for his mother’s death, which turned into a melodrama; she was a famous television presenter. This country is a cemetery. Now my father’s ex-lover is trying to find a way to stay in Cuba. He’s come back and wants to resist; he has nowhere else to go in this world. “Lujo—‘luxury.’ ‘Luxury is red’ was his catchphrase.” I’ve never understood the nuance.
Lujo inherited from his mother a large house by the sea; it faces the Malecón. When you look at it you can’t help but wonder: who lives there, putting up with all that salt? When my father dies, I’ll remain with Lujo, resisting the salt. Lujo has been the most lucid of my parents. The third leg of the table. Outside Cuba, he couldn’t get it together to figure out his old age, but here he even planned my birth. Unbelievable!
Now we’ll come to an agreement. He’s going to take in my mother for at least three months, then we’ll see. The bureaucracy wears me down, and he’s already got his way back figured out. We know my father won’t die without saying what he wants to say to everyone. We have to wait until he’s a little better, listen, and let him go. Lujo knows him so well!
This is Havana. This is Lujo. We’re both back, finally. Things can start to change. Even if it’s bad, at least it will be a change.
My Country: My Personal Museum
My country has been pos
ing for the world since long before I was born.
I take Lujo to the contemporary art room at the Museum of Fine Arts. (The ’80s and ’90s.) Lujo is a painter. He inaugurated pop art in Cuba and has been banned here more than Celia Cruz, but they still exhibit his work in the museum. Kept under lock and key, various painters: Lujo, Julio—my first love—my mother lying on the grass . . . everything that was alive for us is now museumable.
“How old are you now, Nadia? You look like an old woman when you get nostalgic, when you complain, when you talk . . . Everything that happened to me is happening to you, even with your sweet little girl face.”
We journey through the past: people, places. Lujo wants to know if my parents have prepared me. He asks me about Martínez Pedro and territorial waters, about Tania Bruguera’s Statistic, woven out of human hair, a promiscuous intervention we’ve all gone through while waving flags; the bathroom tiles Alejandro Aguilera remade while covering the word “Revolution” with shards from his own house and body; the bow of the working-class instrument René Francisco pulls from oil paints; Glexis Novoa’s Russian and ensemble-iconic master plans; Elso’s sacred hand; Bedia’s isolated men; and the void in the white walls waiting for those yet to come, like a boomerang in the shape of an island.
In the midst of this “red fantasy,” Lujo is delirious about being shown among the younger classics.
“Are you not museumable yet?” my old and new friend sneers.
“No, I’m ephemeral.” Not even the MoMA can conserve me.
“Soon, soon. You’ll see. Life is just a breath, my dear . . . and everything is catchable from the front, against a wall. That’s when they’ll begin to murder your style.”
My bridge is between the ’80s and ’90s. It’s those ramps that take me from one decade to the next. I try to catch and keep the things I love—that’s why I like museums and not cemeteries. The art of stopping, conserving, grasping. That’s also why I like Havana: this city is a museum not yet collapsed in the midst of a strange battle to protect its shine. My time is sepia; my pain, salty; my scent is the essential oil from that old, old perfume, those traces (or remains?) of Chanel in remote bottles, like my own memories of this indefinite age.
The curtains and the balconies, the sculptures and the buildings. Ideas and words, posters and vinyl records, bricks and lace. Palimpsest. Life under layers of paint, between hidden letters no one can silence.
Country, personal museum, rituals, echoes.
Funeral Speech. Havana in the Rain
THURSDAY, APRIL 20
We weren’t in Paris during a downpour, but “downpour” was the best word to describe what was falling on my head. The sound hit my forehead, my body, my height, and it hurt. The man in charge of the green light to success at the national film institute, that melancholic and elusive man with a Belgian accent and dictatorial smile, said a few words about my father.
I don’t understand why it wasn’t one of his photographers, or Lujo, who spoke. I don’t know. Anyway. Apparently I’m not made to understand but to feel anger, all the anger in the world during this funeral, which is in such bad taste.
Grandstand. Speakers. The circus of death. Again, the circus of death. I hate the collective meaning of death. But everything is collective here. I don’t even know if sex here can still be a thing for two; in fact, I’ve made love many times between bunk beds full of people talking, singing, and hurrying us along as accompaniment. I open Lujo Rojas’s gray umbrella. He won’t stop crying, expressing a pain I didn’t know existed. He’s someone else who likes to give to and receive pain from his neighbor. I can’t tolerate that. I spot people who love or loved my father very much, and people who just love to be near the tragedy of others. I won’t be able to review how I really feel until I get home. How stupid it was to hear the apology addressed to my dead father when we all know that, in life, he was sentenced to silence! But I didn’t have the courage to tell them to shut up.
I cry because I never cry. My only reaction is to escape. I leave them, I’m leaving. I don’t care if their eyes pierce my back. No one here can comfort me. I walk away to get closer to my father. I walk on the wet grass poking out from Colón Cemetery’s white concrete and think about the times he filmed here. I sink into this tragedy of Lalique crystal and Carrara marble loved by the Cuban aristocracy.
This death means the end of what began with my paternal grandparents’ patrimony, this endless socialism that separated them from my father. Now we can rest, leaning on the sad and expensive glass that decorates their graves. After rejecting what we would have inherited from them, we now accept this last feast and go headlong into the grave, where they’ll bury us in their elegant pantheons.
Although life was humble and miserable, what little we have left is here, in opulent death. In the end we will find ourselves in the same magnificent place. Now I enter a ransacked crypt. Bones, glasses, snails, rosemary, weeds. I see what I see—what do you see?
An angel missing an arm.
A tiger missing a copper ball.
A girl with a broken tiara holding a glass of dead flowers.
A strange flower with its marble stem rebuilt with plaster. There’s a confusing text: “Arturo: We remind you of what you took without telling us.” God!
I see what I see—what do you see?
I see Saúl running in the rain. Saúl running in the rain? He hugs me as if all this hurts. But what is Saúl doing here? He lives in Barcelona. This is a nightmare.
“Nadia, I’m getting wet. Can you share your umbrella?”
“What are you doing here?” I ask as I cover him.
“It was true, your father was alive. I never believed you. Your father was a great filmmaker. I’ve seen his work.”
“But since when are you in Cuba? What is this?”
“I came to photograph the Plaza de la Revolución after the celebrations. A foundation has given me money to salvage the remains of flags and posters. Ah! Your father’s documentary on Cuban political symbols is very good. What an amazing vision he had of the circus during the seventies!”
“Fuck you, Saúl. Do me a favor and get out from under my umbrella, because your opportunism is contagious. Get out from under my umbrella, or I’m going to bury you alive in the tomb of the counts of Pozos Dulces. Go, go, and have some respect: it may be a circus, yes, but it’s my circus . . . Now you’re here to drink from the water that seemed so cloudy to you. Get wet, asshole. Get wet because this is Cuba and it really rains here; it’s not the light pitter-patter that will make you sick. A lightning bolt will kill you here. Get wet with what I grew up on; bathe in this downpour to see if you’ll finally become a man. I hope you drown while shooting photos of flags. You’re so cowardly! Get out of my sight, Saúl. You don’t know me.”
I turn my back on him and lose myself among the graves. This is pathetic. My father doesn’t deserve this, but I’ve already allowed it. I can’t go up against the institutions, the cynics, and the madness. You don’t own your own pain here. What did I expect? I’m going home.
As the rain rages, the many actors in this play my father put together scatter. The wind stirs voices I hear in the distance: Sorry. Prohibited. Courage. Daring. Suffering. Revolution. Rehabilitation. Return. Return. Parameterization. Understanding. Reconsider. Every five minutes: “Sorry.” That word is a slap in the face.
I move away from their false spirit of mourning. Running to the cemetery gate, the man from the institute who spoke passes by me and almost trips. He runs as if he’s afraid of being trapped with the others. Everyone is dead except him.
This ending doesn’t resolve what they’ve done to my parents. Nadia, Nadia, think a little. Couldn’t it be your parents allowed themselves to have this done to them? This can’t be an accident.
Saúl grabs a cab as he takes two or three photos—videos?—of this gated graveyard. First he rejects us because of the way we misuse our political circumstances; now he takes advantage of those circumstances. Not one more dead. I
can’t stand this wake, which now extends to my body.
APRIL 23
LUJO AND I are moving. Like two old women, we run around the old house, picking up photos, forgotten tapes, books with and without dust jackets. At last we can cry without witnesses.
“Nadia, your father didn’t get a chance to say what he wanted. He didn’t have time.”
“If my father went like that, it was because that’s all he had to say.” I knew him very well.
“Don’t be cruel.”
“But I knew him.”
“Me too.”
“Where did you get to know him so well, huh?”
We laugh. We cry together and open a bottle of wine. He told me how he courted both my father and my mother because otherwise my mother wouldn’t have allowed the relationship. God, what a weird couple! What a weird trio! Actually, my parents’ marriage was an agreement so one of them would finish art school, a pact that ended in love. She’d been expelled, but someone had to graduate. I’m exhausted. We’ve worked too hard.
I like staying with Lujo. The new house is wonderful. We light candles for glamour because blackouts are out of style.
“Thank God I’m not alone; I have tea and sympathy.”
“Thank you, Papá. Lujo is a real luxury. Rest in peace. I release you—you deserve that,” I say at sunset, already settled in front of the Malecón.
Words Against Oblivion
Lujo and I re-create Mami’s show with her two “celebrity” announcers. Each tries to take the other’s role. The theme: my mother’s memory.
LUJO: What do you remember about your mother?
NADIA: What do you remember?