I Was Never the First Lady

by Wendy Guerra

  I stared at her, unable to avoid the embarrassment typical of us girls from the countryside.

  The slim guerrilla wore black sandals and a light yellow dress. She had gathered her long and straight black hair with a ribbon of the same color. She looked like a Greek sculpture and welcomed us calmly, smiling.

  Suddenly my sister and I were at the very center of a crowd with Celia, but we didn’t have a clue what was going on. Then all three of us were subjected to an unstoppable barrage of picture-taking.

  Why us? We weren’t better or worse than the other literacy teachers in the plaza with Fidel. The answer to the question of why we were there would come to me later: history doesn’t always privilege the heroic; what’s at hand can also be seen as epic.

  Those photos would later appear in newspapers and reach Miami. My father’s reaction was “Turn off the lights,” but portrayed in black and white in our literacy campaign uniforms, we were delighted with our lives. What a contradiction! The sisters, Americans born in Cuba (or better, in a part of Cuba that isn’t Cuba, at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base), were now fighting, along with everyone else, against imperialism.

  Subtly, Celia asked the photographers to leave. She didn’t seem to like the spectacle.

  My sister hugged me very sparingly and stiffly, like a stick, which is her way.

  “Did you already kiss Celia?” she asked.

  I shook my head, and she pushed me toward Celia. As I kissed her, I sniffed a perfume I’d never smell again. I was trembling. I couldn’t help it. Celia asked me if anything was wrong.

  “I need to pee,” I managed to say.

  Then she led me to a large, lighted bathroom, which was more like a bedroom, and waited for me to come out. My sister told her she was going to study medicine. She wanted to be a pathologist. Intrigued, Celia asked why pathology. My sister said she intended to save lives only by working under the microscope; she didn’t like patients.

  “I’d rather be among the dead and a bunch of tumors than among the living who complain all the time,” she added resolutely, and Celia was very amused with her comment.

  Then she asked if I was interested in studying anything in particular.

  “I want to go to art school,” I said. “I like to paint.”

  She asked if we’d seen exhibitions. I explained how little I knew about all that: the Bacardí Museum, Selecciones magazine, The Youth Treasure encyclopedia, and a small museum of pre-Columbian art in Banes. She gave me a thick, two-color pencil, one of those red and blue ones, and pulled the curtains so I could draw on the wall.

  “Draw something,” she said.

  Something of mine? I hadn’t a thought. My elbow trembled; my pulse felt tight; I was afraid everything would turn out disasterously.

  “Relax, girl,” said my sister.

  Celia was smiling, delighted.

  I made a sketch with no apparent shape, and then, as if by magic, it turned into a woman with a bird’s head. Celia said no one would erase that bird from the wall; I was so nervous I hadn’t noticed there were other people in the room with us.

  When she got a phone call, I entertained myself by looking out the giant window. Havana was a gem. I loved the buildings and the sea at sunset—everything was like new. Celia stared like a child at that bird with a woman’s body that I had released into the room.

  My sister and I said our goodbyes. But Celia didn’t let us go back to the plaza. She was worried about us, asked where we would sleep that night. She had other questions, none that offended us. (The woman from the plaza had told her our story.) Celia didn’t mention Miami or our parents. We would stay with the other literacy workers, she said, and a while later she asked us to get in a jeep that would take us to her house in El Vedado.

  First, we waited for the rally to end. It was impossible to get through the sea of people coming down Twelfth Street from the plaza. Celia drove frowning, her long arms and sleeves draped over the wheel. While we waited at the traffic lights, she glanced down at a folder full of papers on her lap. Her sandaled feet worked the pedals.

  At her house, she introduced us to two women, Pucha and Mary. They took care of us and gave my sister and me towels, soap, and identical pajamas.

  They dabbed us with violet water and led us to bunk beds ready with sheets that smelled clean.

  We ended up having chicken soup and drank milk from white enamel mugs. I think that’s why I love mugs. That night I didn’t get even two hours’ sleep. My heart was fluttering.

  “If Mom finds out about this, she’ll come back from Miami and sign up for a militia. But Dad will have a coronary,” said my sister.

  Everyone in our family knew who Celia’s father was; they knew Celia too. My mom adored Frank País, and Frank País adored Celia. Because of that, and because of Radio Rebelde, we knew about her and that she was the bravest of them all, and that they had been looking to kill her. My mom had seen her once in Manzanillo, but she didn’t talk about it because my dad hated everything that had to do with revolutionaries.

  I got up and went to the kitchen to see if I could get a glass of water, half for my sister and half for me. The others were sound asleep. I later learned they’d come with Celia from the Sierra. They were sick of seeing the same things. But not us.

  I ran the water through the filter, and when I least expected it, two cars parked just below the kitchen window and lit up the whole house. Everyone woke up. It was Fidel. I didn’t see him, but it was him. I knew from the sound of his boots, people coming through the door, and the noise and whispers of the women who attended us.

  Celia was sitting halfway up the stairs, pen in hand. She saw me in the hallway and greeted me with a wink while she waited, dressed in white, misty clothes; she was barefoot. She waved goodbye, and I ran back into the bedroom. So scary!

  My sister was also listening to the cars and wanted me to tell her I’d seen Fidel.

  “Tell me, even if it’s a little lie.”

  “No, I didn’t see him, but if she was waiting and there was all this running around, who else could it be?”

  My sister and I fell asleep in our bunks. We were more alone than anyone in this world. We didn’t know the people whose house we were at, but that day, we felt like part of their family.

  I wonder where the others who were there that day are now. What happens to things that excite us but get so seriously watered down it isn’t worthwhile to remember them? That’s when we’re silent, but do we actually forget?

  For example, my sister barely remembers any of this. I ask her if she forgets just to bug me or if she really has forgotten everything. I don’t think there’s an answer to that. I don’t even know how many days we stayed there. We met many comandantes, soldiers, and people related to La Sierra who came and went, including this family. It was like we were in a movie.

  I went on to study painting at the Escuela Nacional de Arte, officially entering on January 15, 1962, and my sister enrolled in pre-med at the medical school. The schools were close so we saw each other during breaks; she came to the ENA or I stayed over in her dorm. Months passed, and Celia seemed like a dream to us. My sister and I never talked about it. We were Daughters of the Homeland, minors, so we couldn’t go out alone, not even on weekends. Sometimes during the holidays they let our classmates’ families take us home with them.

  At the art school, I met almost everyone who is now among my closest friends. The craziest, most distracted, creative, delusional, and even normal people.

  It was a blast to hang out with Amarilis and Waldo Luis, lying on the grass on the old golf course, looking at the lost moon through firebricks and talking sublime nonsense. That’s when I understood I wasn’t alone in the world, that I belonged to a special place with enlightened and marginalized beings. People who’d been integrated or excluded and who, like me, brought their own madness and insisted on the same outbursts and sadness. They weren’t there to study but to try to heal and, once they finished painting, to try to heal those who would see
their works, because maybe art could repair their spirits as well.

  We were like broken mirrors rebuilding one another. By ourselves we’d never be able to reflect anything. That was how I realized I could collect the parts of myself I was missing. Going there was the only way to get inside myself.

  Celia herself left us at the bus stop by the beach and indicated where my sister and I should go. My sister left on the medical school bus. I walked until I saw the scaffolding going up to build the domes, a budding castle opening before the country club, which would be my home for several years.

  Little by little, the master plan became reality. The school has a wonderful design. Seen from above, from a high point like the red-brick bell tower, you can distinguish the figure of a naked woman, and in the long curve that makes up the domes and the visual arts classrooms, you can see a fountain that depicts the moist sex of a woman asleep on the old country club lawn.

  There wasn’t enough material to paint and study, and the buildings weren’t finished yet. The architects Porro, Garatti, and Gottardi, one Cuban and the others Italian, roamed the school until late at night.

  Sometimes Celia called, asking about me; I know this because some professors told me, but never the principal, a tyrant who imposed military discipline: painters marching to the dining room, dancers marching to the bathroom. Madness.

  In the first months a collective call was made to join the mobilization to harvest coffee in the eastern zone. On December 22nd, in the Plaza de la Revolución, we asked Fidel: “Tell us what else we can do. We will always do our duty.” And Fidel answered: “Harvest coffee”—and we took off for the mountains.

  I actually wanted to be in Havana. But I couldn’t—and I didn’t want to—miss this new adventure. In any case, no one was staying behind at the school. I would have preferred to read and paint, but we’d asked Fidel and he’d given his answer.

  Apparently this was part of the economic struggle being waged as a result of the Second Declaration of Havana. I don’t know, at the time nobody was asking too many questions; we put everything away where we could and went off to the hills.

  My luggage was a cardboard box. We went on a train, different schools mixed together, boys and girls together, but I don’t remember where my sister was at the time. The journey seemed to never end, but we finally arrived in Guantánamo, near the base where I was born. I remembered my mother, cried a few tears, and made a sketch of her face in my notebook. I didn’t want to forget it. I knew our family was now the whole world, but my mother’s face was my mother’s face, and that was no game. For me, this was indeed a journey in reverse.

  My God, we were so hungry! I missed the scholarship-funded meals the high-life chef used to cook, substituting spices with whatever he had on hand. We used to call those meals “Whatever’s not gone with the wind.” I missed my mattress, the school cafeteria, the fine cutlery with which we had learned how to eat in a refined way, the people who returned to visit after they’d left in the ’60s. We were living in their mansions, located around the club, full of encyclopedias, stylish furniture, fine ornaments—we had destroyed it all. We hadn’t known what to do with what we found in the drawers or on the shelves of those houses; we couldn’t even imagine what or how half those implements were used.

  We waited all morning at the park in Guantánamo, and in the end, all fourteen visual arts students were sent to Santo Domingo de Sagua. We were exhausted by the time we arrived. It was so muddy they had to tie the truck to tree trunks with a steel cable. I was terrified of the precipice, the emptiness. “The abyss calls the abyss.”

  Finally, we came to a large tent with a zinc roof near the Toa River; it had a coffee-drying room. It was El Achiotal, where Raúl Castro had founded the Second Front in the Sierra Cristal. We ate boiled mushrooms and Russian meat. We passed a farmhouse where there was a small store, which would later supply us with groceries, and a very nice wooden house where a French family lived.

  We made the journey singing revolutionary songs, boleros, and laments. Although we weren’t lost, it wasn’t a very accessible place either, and that worried me a lot. I’m one of those people who always have a map in their heads with the fire exits marked, just in case.

  I fell fast asleep in a stick hut where several girls were assigned to live together, with hammocks and all sorts of junk. When I woke up, I realized the back part of the hut had a kitchen covered with royal palm leaves and a latrine I never used because, in those cases, I’ve always preferred the outdoors.

  We met the chief, the owner of the stick hut. An unbearable man. He lived there with his wife, María, and two boys. His biblical name, Adonai, comes and goes from my memory of him giving orders.

  “You have to work from daybreak until night falls! If you don’t work, there’s no food! You pay for your food with your work!”

  None of us knew how to pick coffee. At this point nobody wanted to be there.

  We got up at half past five in the morning. Amarilis, the skinny one, cried and cried. We drank María’s watery coffee. The days and nights there erased any desire to paint, read, or even sing. We were only aware that the ditches we dug were called furrows. Backpacks on our shoulders, we learned to shred the bushes without damaging the green grains. It wouldn’t stop raining; it was as if the sky was crying all day. Every Sunday, a little sunshine peeked out. We were hungry and cold. I got bored of mushrooms and weeds boiled in a bucket.

  To drive away the bibijagua ants, which sneaked in between our waist and navel, we smeared ourselves with kerosene. I’ll hate that smell the rest of my life. We were short, so we got lost among the old, tall coffee plants in the folds of the hills. The ground was muddy, and I often slipped, anchoring my boots against the tree trunks so as not to fall.

  Coffee Plantation Shelter

  Ancient legends

  from the coffee plantations

  conspire against us.

  In the middle of the night

  the sounds of

  a lost mule’s bell.

  Who knows

  where it stopped,

  resigned and terrified,

  before the short-necked

  duck’s macabre teasing?

  Laughter’s mightier

  than any legend.

  It’s us, compañeras,

  waking the day among the leaves

  and the coffee beans,

  yawning the last yawn of the night.

  The cold, fatigue,

  the coffee mug passed from mouth to mouth

  makes us of a piece.

  Coffee plantation shelter,

  the warm arm of a woman

  against which silence collapses.

  One day, while looking over a cliff, what I had imagined happened: I lost my balance and was left hanging by my backpack. At first I almost hanged myself and then I rolled down a steep slope, hitting myself against all sorts of things, and saw the vegetation and the mud in a circular way, like from a porthole, until a rock brought my head to a stop and I lost my senses, my balance, and my memory. At this point in history, I think it was the best thing that could’ve happened to me.

  From that moment on, from that time on, what I remember most is the bitter sweetness deep inside the red coffee beans; the night swims in a stream of icy black water; Marisol—the group’s philosopher, who stayed on shore to keep her promise not to wash up until she got back to the ENA—and the look on her face.

  The moment I felt the blow, I let go. I abandoned this world, which didn’t seem like a bad plan. It was Marisol who went with me to the hospital. According to what I was later told, I was taken to Havana. I survived being carried from one car to another until I finally arrived, alive, at the hospital.

  I saw images between fainting spells, as if everything happened far away, outside of me. I vaguely remember being moved from a truck. According to Marisol, there was a column of barefoot militiamen, like a dream of what had been described on Radio Rebelde a few years earlier about the struggle in the Sierr
a. Something important was happening now with the militia. Marisol thought it might have been raids against bandits. Maybe other rebels, other insurgents, were in the hills, but no. Later, in the hospital, she told me we were on the verge of war. All those mobilized men remained in the mountains.

  Back in camp, the girls got tired of picking what was no longer there, but they were trapped in the same surreal story out on the hills.

  Havana was tense. Marisol said US ships could be seen near the coasts. War tanks were parked on the Malecón; there were trenches, sandbags, and armed people everywhere.

  I felt bad for Marisol, who sometimes slept in the bed with me, or on the iron rocking chair in the hospital room. But she didn’t complain: “So long as I’m in Havana,” she said, “I don’t care if we’re at war or if I’m in an operating room.”

  I don’t remember the operation, and I don’t want to talk about it. I’d rather forget those things. The cures, the pain, and the consequences are buried deep in my memory. Ready to be forgotten. My head was shaved; I looked like a girl from the Middle Ages, one of those bald girls I’d seen in book illustrations.

  One day, asleep and still troubled, I opened my eyes. Who was at the head of my bed? Celia, my sister, and Pucha. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t remembered my sister until then. I hadn’t asked about her. What was happening with my memory? I felt guilty.

  Celia, without a word, placed birds of paradise in an earthenware vase next to my bed. I kissed all three of them very dramatically and started crying like a fool.

  “I don’t have time for crybabies,” Celia said. “Much less to sit here and pat your hand and tell you it’ll be okay. I’ll leave you with your sister, who’s been looking everywhere for you.”

  Pucha put a notebook and a yellow pencil on the table, along with a new pencil sharpener and a very fragrant eraser.

  “If you get out of this alive, we’re going to organize a show of your work,” my sister said, trying to be a smarty-pants, “but first we have to get through what’s happening out there.”