by Wendy Guerra
What could I do? I was living in a country where apparently everyone had agreed to slam the door in my face, but maybe that was just my paranoia. What would my father have said? Was I being neurotic? Was one successful book in Spain not enough to become part of the chosen circle of authors in this country? What is success? I kept trying, becoming a painful nightmare for the local publishers. I took my award-winning book to three publishers and, although I pressed and insisted, I never received a response. Why?
I ate alone in hotels, sometimes with friends of my parents, who usually didn’t want to be seen with me. I was an outcast and that feeling grew stronger when I started writing for El País whenever I spent time outside Cuba. After that, I was visited several times a month, always by civil servants in guayaberas. They came at lunchtime, just to “shoot the breeze,” and during these chats I began to realize I had been elevated to the category of dissident. Why was I now a dissident? It wasn’t my poetry, it was my status, the one they themselves had created without even realizing it. They had to put me in a category, regardless of whether it was the right one. They needed to classify me somehow and that’s what they did. No one asked if my heart was on the left or the right or what my position was on this long regime. They had already decided it for me. I was a dissident and now they had to “keep an eye on me.”
I started buying the coffee I knew they liked. I cooked traditional food on Tuesdays and Thursdays because I knew they’d be sending one of the compañeros to me while other officers took care of the rest of the dissidents who, like almost everyone else, I didn’t know. In talking with my minders, I found out how much a real dissident made, who brought them their money, and that some of them didn’t accept money sent from abroad. I discovered the officers feared or respected some more than others. I walked the streets looking over my shoulder to see if I was being followed, watching out for official-looking cars or shady people dressed in civilian clothes, but I never saw anyone. I detected a suspicious echo on my phone and every time I needed something, someone would turn up at my door selling what I was looking for. A printer, paper, ink, a fountain pen. My personal space became public.
* * *
—
Late one night I decided to go for a walk. I needed to make a choice: insomnia or incarceration, but I couldn’t stand both. I started to consider the possibility of finding someone with whom I could share my new poems, the house, and my success, and to relieve the loneliness I had been feeling since before the prize. Yes, that morning, as I stood in front of the Malecón, I swore I would find a lover. In Cuba? Only if I married one of the guys in guayaberas; there was no one else left for me. The salt cracked under my feet like glass dust stepped on by mistake. I stomped on it until I felt like I was walking on waves and, when I was nearly home, I realized just how much salt there was in this city, the salt path being the antechamber from the sea to my house. Havana is a bowl of salt surrounded by water.
When I reached my corner, I checked my father’s watch, an old Cuervo y Sobrinos that still worked as well as it did the day it was made. It was too dark to see the time, but from the peace that reigned in the neighborhood, I knew it was well into the wee hours. I looked up and saw shadows at my doorstep. People waiting for me. I couldn’t make them out in the darkness; despite my surprise, I found myself thinking I should get a light for the doorway. A green lamp would look good there, I mused as I crossed the street, taking note that there were three people at my door. What do they want? I wondered as I quickened my step toward them.
“Hello,” I said, unable to disguise my unease.
“Hey, hi,” they said in unison.
“We were looking for you,” said one of the women I didn’t know. I noticed it was a man and two women.
“What do you want?”
“Can we come in?” they pleaded as they pointed at the man. I thought it was a bit late.
“What do you want? Who are you looking for?”
“For you,” said one of the women, “we’re looking for you because—it’s about your poems.”
My poems? My ego took the bait. “Of course,” I said as my key entered the lock and I turned it swiftly, skillfully. Because I couldn’t see anything outside in the dark, I wanted to get inside, into the light, where I could understand things better.
I opened the door and they all exclaimed in awe when I turned on an ochre lamp in the living room. It’s true, we had a very special house. One of those old Vedado mansions, the kind passersby marvel at and wonder, Who owns that? How do they keep it up? There we were, walking by screens, stepping on kaleidoscopic floor tiles, turning on art nouveau lamps and, above all, breaking the rigorous silence that had filled those rooms for almost two years.
We ended up in the dining room. I sat down to listen to them. It was strange because they kept talking about and pointing to the man as if I should know him, but I didn’t. They said he’d read English translations of my poems in the Virgin in-flight magazine, and that he’d fallen in love with three of them, especially the ones from the series Bob Marley Is Alive and Well in Havana. It’s a text written like a song, which, like reggae, repeats the same phrases and words to dizzying effect, but it’s a clearly constructed effect. I don’t speak English and so the thin woman who’d originally asked to come in was translating nonstop, which was the only way we could understand each other. The American or English couple took in each of my words, the in-flight magazine still in their hands. I had no idea these poems had been published there, or even translated. I served each of them a glass of rum, and café con leche for myself and the translator. It was getting light out; it wouldn’t be long until dawn.
As I drank from my old aluminum cup, the first rays of sun—an amber light—reached through the trellises toward us. Rubén González played on the old record player by request of the strangers, who were all dozing off on cushions by then. That’s when, just as I looked at their tangled bodies, I discovered Sting’s face. Yes, there was no question, that was him and his wife, Trudie, spread on the floor of my house, drowsy but still aware of the music. Up until that moment, I hadn’t recognized them. I finally got it. A chill filled my belly and I sneezed three times, as I’m inclined to do when I’m nervous. I tried to hurry the sip of my café con leche as naturally as possible so I could go the bathroom without waking them. I had to wash my face to regain my composure. I didn’t want them to know I’d had no idea who they were or why they’d been so interested in my three sad poems for Bob.
Sting in Cuba. Yes sir, this kind of thing happens: Sting and his wife waking up sluggish on the floor of my home. Anything can happen in Cuba; no need to be surprised. I’d heard many stories about celebrities traveling incognito in Havana, but I’d never imagined Sting could visit my house, where no one wants to keep me company since the death of my parents. I’ve wound up a stinky orphan, a dissident old maid, a misunderstood and crazy woman who writes poems to be read in-flight. I offered my guests a hot chocolate before they went back to their hotel. Sting was affable, easygoing, thin as a reed, so youthful looking that he seemed more my age than his. His wife kept her distance; she was tough and intense, laughed at everything and laughed alone. Her outlandish Louboutin shoes had disappeared under the couch and it took us a while to find them.
Dressed as if for a yoga class, fresh as a daisy in spite of the rough night, Sting took my face in his hands, squeezed me, and kissed my forehead. He thanked me for my poems and said something else in English I didn’t understand. Before kissing me one last time, he mumbled, “Adiós, Cleopatra.” I said goodbye, enchanted, and tried to capture the moment with my eyes because I knew I’d never see him again. That wasn’t important, though: I may not have ever bought one of his records but he was part of the soundtrack of my generation, that soundtrack that had to contend with a music policy that only allowed one American for every six Latin Americans on the air. Luckily, since he was British, they’d fit him in between mariachis and Argentinian pop. Now all that was left was the scent of almon
d cream and Chanel, and Rubén accompanying Bob Marley on the piano that bright dawn.
I took a long shower, trying to remember the times I’d heard Sting during my adolescence, the men who’d kissed me as I listened. But none of that had ever happened; no man had kissed me while listening to him. No man ever wanted to kiss me like that before he disappeared forever.
What did he want? To use my texts? I’d said yes before I realized who he was. It’s really incredible how literature can soar, travel alone, freely; even when I try to strangle it with my tense and veiny hands, it refuses to condemn me; it flies on its own accord; becomes independent from me; refuses to be silenced; and, if it returns, it’s with a different accent.
Still wet from the shower, I threw myself in bed to see if I could finally sleep. When I was right on the edge of going under, the doorbell rang.
Who could be calling so early? It wasn’t hard to guess. My compañeros would be wanting to know what the lead singer of The Police was doing at my house. I had the same question as I stared at the eyes of the three officers who showed up out of nowhere, thinking I was keeping the best part from them, while, for me, the best part was to remain free to continue writing the texts that brought me surprises like that. My compañeros were getting suspicious and I understood it was time for me to play along or I’d wind up in jail for having exemplary foreigners like Sting at my house.
The Cuban police don’t listen to music and educating them—taking them from his beginnings in The Police through all of his solo projects, and explaining that there’s nothing in it that would do harm to Cuba—would require more time than I had to give.
* * *
—
Since I couldn’t find anyone who would have anything to do with me, and since I felt watched and empty, I decided to try and salvage what had been snatched from us: the ordinariness of falling in love with people our own age, detoured like a stream, or castrated, as we marched in solidarity with that other silent war.
I made a list of the men who should have been mine, who should have been with me step by step, stage by stage, but were taken from us as if they had been sent to war all at once and then disappeared in that other war because of the strange circumstance of the diaspora. No one and nothing can keep us from our fate, I told myself, and I went running toward it, certain I could rescue something of what had been stolen. My next step was to coerce the oracle, or adjust its course.
I arrived in Mexico with the idea of drafting an ex-boyfriend who had provided some lovely memories. In order to do so, I called various friends I’d lost during the exodus in the nineties, and at the end of the week we all met up at La Condesa restaurant.
The boy I knew had matured into a man, but he hadn’t shed the spirit of adventure he’d had when I first met him. He’d grown up in Cárdenas. The sea came right into his mother’s yard, the same sea that washed the halcyon beaches in Varadero. From the time he was a little boy, he’d signed up for whatever water sport class was being offered. He was a natural winner, but what obsessed him was competing. I remember us in a kind of exotic duet: the couple no one could ever quite figure out. His blond hair would waft in the breeze in contrast to my shaved head, my own hair jet black. I didn’t play sports. I’d wait for him on the shore as he went out on his kayak and came back to find me facing the clumsy marine scenes I’d painted on cardboard with Russian watercolors. As he conquered the world stroke by stroke, I remained anchored on the shore of our adolescence. Nobody could explain how we understood each other so well. But it was precisely because we let each other be free, until our paths blurred, like my renderings, without our even noticing.
When I found Enzo again, I got an old feeling, my chest began to close in on itself, and when I looked at him I realized he was the same old fighting betta, now with lots of gray hairs and a kind of ashy veil in his eyes. He was, in essence, the same, diving now in a city with no sea.
The friends I’d brought together asked me about Cuba. I tried to explain briefly, in the midst of my agitation, the scenes I’d left behind and from which I needed to get some rest, at least for a few days. But I realized it was important for them to hear my whole testimony, and so I gave it, trying to use images, symbols, to explain what was happening there, narrating what you think is everybody’s life. The thing is, each citizen has a personal vision, fragments of a reality other citizens can’t see. As I talked about myself, trying to describe a collective situation, I felt a wave of goodwill, because, ultimately, all you can do is tell your sliver of truth. I was the last witness, the last of the beach-goers left in our abandoned city, so I told them about every last minute of my last days to describe what was happening in Cuba. At the end of my story, between tears and kisses, I felt like a hero in the Cuban resistance. None of them could have put up with what we endured every single day. How could they? I could see it in their eyes: They thought those left behind were the residue, the remains, shell fragments and bad ideas, the extras in this waste of a film. We were the pack mules heading toward the abyss, burdened with pain, brutality, senseless foolishness, and vulgarity, enduring what little is left of that sixties utopia. Without a doubt, the feeling was an anticipation of the misunderstanding we were yet to have. That’s just how I am, an insipid seer who can sense when misfortune is coming, then freezes, unable to do anything about it. My newly recovered friends wouldn’t forgive me for staying behind and yet they felt compassion because of all I’d gone through by myself. Why do you stay? Nobody articulated the question but it was there, in the air and the aura of the restaurant. That was obvious. When we were finally left alone, Enzo and I put aside our beginnings and went for a walk, risking Mexico City’s danger. After all, could there be a greater danger than all I had told and all I had lived through? What greater danger than having lost them all?
* * *
—
Since what I needed was a warm body, we made love, that’s what we did, everywhere: In his building’s elevator, he tore my mother’s old coat as he went to caress me; in his living room, he undressed me so he could come to me like the great freighter he’s always been. That’s how I felt him penetrating me, rigid and virile through the moist, warm cove where he’d planted his flag a summer long ago. Here he was, doing battle with the remains of my virginity, from which he’d freed me in beautiful Cárdenas Bay when I was seventeen, right after our school vacation. Enzo destroyed the celibacy I’d taken up in captivity, and with the waters rushing from us both, we sparked a flame between tremors and moans, then surrendered to a final and incredulous sob. How many years has it been since then? Maybe we said goodbye yesterday and all this angst about exile is a fiction that falls apart on contact with flesh? All that time, I lived enthralled by other politics, the politics of the body, caught up in the art of offering it as a singularly free space. I was very much enjoying Enzo. As far as I was concerned, he was perfect, but the shores were calling me away from his body. That’s when I understood everything: In our condition, we can’t have everything. The shores could wait and our bodies would always feel the swaying, a reminder of our origins, the inner rhythm that follows us and rocks us from infancy. Our habit of lying flat to float on the waves would haunt us forever. When we woke up, we felt sand in the bed, but it was just a feeling, because the shores were distant, as distant as Cuba.
* * *
—
Life with Enzo wasn’t exactly life with Enzo. It was collective and communitarian. The shores may have been far but the cubaneo was always with us, and constant. We dished about everyone and everything, and lovers were handed off to the next friend who’d then leave with the prior lover’s ex. Academic subjects were discussed in the same tone as a recipe for picadillo a la habanera. We didn’t buy furniture, or paintings, nothing that would last forever because everyone was supposedly going back to Cuba in ten years (max). For them, the end of the everlasting government was close and they were living its last days.
There was never a lack of moral support. They were kind and gene
rous. They cooked together, accompanied one another on medical appointments, and lived near each other. They called at all hours and planned their vacations at the same time so no one would be left alone in that sober and gray city. Cubavisión Internacional was on all the time in every home to make sure they’d know immediately if anything happened. It was hard to explain that they’d know sooner via CNN Mexico than Cuban TV. How is it possible to forget such essential things about the closed Cuban system in which we grew up and which no one has ever been able to change? To change it would mean to bring the whole system down, and that’s one headline Cuban TV will never air, no sir.
They taught college classes, returning under a torrent of rain to their refuge: apartments that smelled of Cuban cigarettes. They wrote articles for the local press about their only subject: Cuba. They would come home exhausted late at night, singing a song by the Trova Santiaguera or an immortal composition by Frank Domínguez. They’d take part in public conversations on panels about Caribbean art, history, and sociology, and never leave Cuba behind. I’d see them come and go from my window. Enzo had a beautiful penthouse with a view in the middle of this ghetto. They’d come and go far away from Cuba, now out of reach in exile, even as it shadowed them everywhere.
One Sunday, Enzo took me to a little market, a discreet little alley in the Zona Rosa. I bought a few books, a silver coffee-maker, and a 1920s purse that looked like the perfect piece Anaïs Nin would have carried around during her New York adolescence. Suddenly, we saw an enormous photograph of Fidel, from when he used to talk to the people in five- and seven-hour stretches. We bought the portrait and brought it to Sunday dinner. My intention was to hang it on the wall, given that our friends couldn’t live without him anyway. But that’s when the fighting started. They didn’t know how to take the joke; the only thing exile had really deprived them of was their ability to laugh at misfortune. To laugh at misfortune meant coming face-to-face with the pain.