by Wendy Guerra
“I’ll call him Gabo,” I say, vibrating like an acoustic instrument dying to be played.
We pause for a soft kiss, as if caresses under flowering trees in April were part of the ritual process that awaits us at the end of the street. The neighborhood is very charming, sweet and fanciful with its vines and roof tiles.
“Will we meet Mercedes?” I ask, curious.
“Of course I’ll introduce you to Mercedes. You’ll love her. She’s enigmatic and sharp. There’s no meeting without Mercedes. Our meeting isn’t for another forty minutes. We’re much too early.”
“How many more blocks?”
“Walking down from here to there, about four or five more curves.”
“What was the first thing of his that you read?”
“One Hundred Years of Solitude, of course. And you?”
“A story called ‘Eyes of a Blue Dog,’ and then I couldn’t stop reading him. I was fourteen and I’d escape from school to go to the library at Casa de las Américas to consume it all. One Hundred Years of Solitude made me a poet, because that’s poetry…”
The voices just beyond the next curve slowly piqued our interest. Two motorcycles with cameras passed between us, separating us; then screams, an ambulance in the distance, reporters, more cameras; the situation was incomprehensible. We inched up to the unknown, which, in some way and from far away, seemed fatal. We walked maybe twenty yards only to realize that…
There was an ambulance at the door, where more than three hundred people had gathered to see the precise moment in which the stretcher, duly covered, was slid inside the vehicle.
The reporters were shouting and the cameras wouldn’t stop flashing. In the middle of the chaos, a gorgeous woman with downcast eyes reported on the death of Gabriel García Márquez, just as a frightened Gerónimo fled in the opposite direction of the rush of reporters. Once again, I’m abandoned, somebody leaves me in the craziness of a critical and anomalous situation, leaves me alone in a swamp of pain and confusion. It’s death again.
My heart stopped in front of the big colonial door at 144 Fuego Street and I said to myself, I’m always late to what fascinates me…I opened the cage of my body freeing my heartache like yellow butterflies.
This is the end of the fable that connects me to my parents.
I crossed the street dazed by an inconceivable emotion and lost myself in the interminable alleys on Fuego.
The story isn’t what you want to tell, but what the story itself dictates as it reveals itself.
On the screen I watch as the camera pans slowly over an immense and grayish rice field. The marshy landscape shimmers in the lens, revealing a balance of burning sun and sky.
Gerónimo and I get up every day before sunrise to meet with old retired military personnel, ex-combatants from Mauricio’s generation, who might have known him.
I stopped going to these meetings, which were practically interrogations, because their voices and tone reminded me of the worst of Cuban cinema. There was a false and hyperrealist feel to it all.
The truth has suffocated them and you never know if lying is their way of breathing, of lightening their loads, of getting distance from where they are now.
We divided the work between us. Gerónimo brings home the images, downloads them to his computer and then to my laptop in an attempt to keep them from getting lost in case of another raid. I check the dialogue, add time codes, and disappear. I feel like these testimonies contaminate the little poetry I’ve managed to recover and conserve.
I touch the glass to wipe away a stain, clean the image with a cloth. They digress. They blink nervously. Do they lie? Yes, many of them lie. Are their consciences at peace? Do they think they did the right thing? Would they do it differently? Would they do it again?
There’s a very common script to these meetings.
At the beginning of the conversation, they feel like undefeated heroes and, also, like saints almost, the kind we should talk about in dramatic passages.
But little by little, as the rum takes over, a very disagreeable layer of forbidden stories floats up to the top. A face, a painful grimace, will fill the screen. Then come the declarations, the tortures, the executions and betrayals with which, generally speaking, or so they say today, not one of them was in agreement. The fact is they were participants and the war wounds tattooed on their flesh are the greatest proof. The trembling of their hands. The pain deep in their eyes.
The last interview was at a cattle farm. How many innocent men could this officer have killed? I wondered as I paused the image, looking him over, trying to find something lyrical about him, the part of them they all struggle to reveal at the end of the interview: showing photos with their grandkids, poems written while on assignment in the Congo, letters to a lover as they left Colombia with a load of merchandise on a sailboat with a faulty motor nicknamed El Quixote, drifting, and unable to communicate with Havana—“I never knew anything”—and no compass or clue other than being a bulletproof survivor. As I watch each one remembering their “adventures” with such nostalgia—adventures quoted by Régis Debray in certain articles—and which they each show off with certain pride, savoring their sadness and circling an uneasy road of epic weaknesses, exhibiting scars like medals, calling out their guerrilla days, their disembarkment and triumph, I think I do not want to have a father like that.
* * *
—
The speaker is Manuel, alias El Chigüín.
El Chigüín: I consider myself a warrior. The warrior’s soul is represented in various cultures as a butterfly. I drank water from ponds in Africa so the parasites would inure me and I could travel lighter through the trenches (…) The day I left on the sailboat from Buenaventura, I didn’t realize the storm would toss me back on shore. If I didn’t burn it down, they would burn me down.
He’s small and seemingly inoffensive. He speaks with a great deal of satisfaction about his “Cuban Rambo” days. One curious bit is that, in these interviews, no one ever says who gave the orders. The missions appeared out of nowhere? Disembarking, liquidating, attacking, extracting, transferring, or exploiting different zones, rescuing people and materials. Not even when drunk will these guys let on about any kind of hierarchy that could help decipher who gave the divine orders.
Gerónimo: And you, Chigüín, aren’t you afraid of talking? Aren’t you worried the information you’ve given me could leak and you could be taken before a military tribunal, or condemned by one?
El Chingüín: First of all, someone who asks me that question would be incapable of giving me away. I chose you because you’re ethical, you seem like a strong person who will not let anything intimidate you, and that…that is only discovered, learned, and practiced in another type of battle…when one has been an intelligence agent.
I spent the wee hours of my mornings inserting codes to identify the immense cast of characters and their clandestine lives. We urgently needed another face to emerge from them, that of Mauricio Rodríguez.
I refused to go with Gerónimo because I’ve never gotten along with the military world. Soldiers, police officers, agents, all that makes me profoundly depressed. To fix things in life with death strikes me as a crime. I don’t know what to do with their pathological lies.
Since they’ve been denied a role in the history archives, these folks yearn to be protagonists, and the story we start to construct begins to reflect more who they wish they’d been and not so much who they were.
El Chigüín: What should I expect? Death? Yeah, yeah, I played that part too. I also took part in firing squads, and if the opportunity arose again—if there was a grievance—I’d do it again. I’m looking for someone who’ll kill me (guffaws). I don’t want to die of cancer, that’s no way to go for me (nervous smile). (…) For example, my experience with Mauricio Rodríguez, everybody knows about it here, but few have the balls to talk about it…I was part of the firing squad…Mauricio took off his Rolex and gave it to the officer who had escorted him there.
Oh my God! Gerónimo hadn’t told me Mauricio had finally come up in conversation. I was so startled that I pressed a button and turned off the computer. It was so strange to have him pop up amid that sad forest that had been surrounding me, almost asphyxiating me.
I tried to get back to the interview to code it but I began to get dizzy. It all threw me back to such a hard reality that, like my parents, I needed to step away from it, edit it, censor it, pull it out of me.
I tried, I took deep breaths and went back to the moment when Mauricio is mentioned.
El Chigüín: Mauricio took off his Rolex and gave it to the officer who had escorted him there…El Macho, that’s what we called him in the Sierra because he was just a kid when he went up but he had the soul of a man, a real man’s man. El Macho took off his watch, which had been a present from the Comandante, and gave it to El Turco. And, just like he’d requested from his cell, he got to direct his own execution. I saw it with these very eyes that’ll soon be six feet under. That guy sure had a huge pair of balls, my man. Ready, set, fire! And there he went.
Gerónimo: I always thought Mauricio Rodríguez was just a popular legend.
El Chigüín: It was Che who was a popular legend. El Macho was one of the guys who was there so Che could be a popular legend, and I say Che because he was a foreigner, but I could give you quite a few more names. People, get it through your heads: For there to be a hero and a martyr and a symbol, there has to be an El Macho holding him up. There are no miracles! War isn’t some little history book. Every time I see kids at concerts with Che on their shirts, I just wanna…
I couldn’t take it anymore. I put on a dress, grabbed my purse, opened the door, and went out for a walk. I needed to rethink if I wanted to continue working on a story like this. I felt dirty, contaminated by things that had nothing to do with me. Why am I even involved in this?
I’ve struggled plenty these last few months with the idea that another person could be my father.
My mind runs away, bolts, refuses to touch all that blood. An alien blood is trying to take over my genes.
Was this the reason why my mother chose not to involve me?
I can’t, I just can’t with this, I said to myself while walking in Vedado, trying to get some air as I made my way through the familiar streets, labyrinths, passageways that guided me, the same Cleo, the same Cleo I’ve always been.
As day was dawning, with a son playing in my head and the sound of a pair of maracas splitting my skull, I made my way back through the empty and dreary gardens of the Hotel Nacional. With so much rum in my body, and after hours of watching the waters caress, lick, and swallow the city at the end of such an indiscernible spring, besieged by my apprehensions, finally, at four-thirty in the morning, when you can’t tell if you’re ready for bed or just getting up, I crossed my tiny yard and let myself drop on the colonial-style chair in the vestibule.
In a jasmine mist, neither awake nor asleep, and experiencing the same lethargy from which poetry is born, I could taste the salt of the bay on my lips, reconstruct the landscape in water and India ink, my sad and worn nib pen rendering a blurry view of that cattle ranch where Gerónimo had filmed the interview.
When I opened my eyes, the sun was already out. This was a proper daybreak, and my sense of belonging recognized it as such and took responsibility for the chain of unwitting and sentimental stimuli that streamed under the tiny bridge between dreams and reality. These are my birds, the ones that nest in the awning on my terrace. A little farther off, my neighbor’s roosters present themselves, like they do every day. These are my smells, my noise, and even before opening my eyes, my fingers recognized the bruises on the chair where my mother would rock me to sleep during summer night blackouts.
My fears depend on the scale of what I can stand. My apprehensions are the consequences of battles I’ve been able to fight on my terms. What I can’t take is a fear greater than my valor. That’s the difference between an artist and a heroine.
Do I really want to risk getting myself dirty? I asked myself from the depths of the nightmare. As a response, I received the sweet salty taste of Márgara’s café con leche. She’d come in stealthily, trying not to wake me. She’d come to save me from this exile, baiting me whether I’m asleep or awake.
On my body, there are pieces I’ve worn as armor. A slip, lace, veils, onionskins to hide my soul, see-through hose, layers of silk on skin shield me as I flee, get lost, and then emerge from the deep forests that intimidate me.
Apocryphal stories and secrets settle on my body, which is a map, a vital drawing, to guide me on a lucid tour that travels from feelings to actions and possesses me.
Below my legs—exactly between my belly and your eyes, between laughter and desire, between the smell and taste of us both—is a woman anointed with your balm, the one before you now, naked, taking you, stark, wordless but for her sex.
When we can’t talk, when saying everything is doubly difficult, when there are differences in our languages or in our way of feeling or thinking, we let loose with our bodies and lower our guards, burning down the protective circles that previously shielded us. In that blunt and delicious danger, in that contamination of rage and pain—that’s where desire truly resides.
Ssshhhhh!
We spent the morning in bed. He had waited for me all night. I couldn’t get over the previous night’s insomnia. We’d make love, nap, barely utter a word, then sleep again. The day seeped in through the blinds. I tried to will myself up but fatigue knocked me back down on the bed until I was fast asleep.
I wanted to tell Gerónimo I couldn’t go on with his project. Where was the poet, the essayist, the writer in me?
I wanted to explain that following those warriors’ paths would end up hurling me into their own manure, and I couldn’t afford that luxury. I’m alone and have sole responsibility for myself. I gain strength from being alone, from watching out for myself; being my own guard keeps me strong.
Unquestionably, this project isn’t for me. I can’t deal with it; it’s bigger than me.
I closed my eyes as I rehearsed the thousand ways I could convince Gerónimo, but not a single word came out of my mouth. My sex rushed to his sex, trapping it savagely and without explanation.
Márgara brought us lunch in bed: okra and chicken, plantain and corn balls, white rice and fried yams. We made a nest underneath my bed’s mosquito net.
“C’mon, get up so I can fix the sheets. You two are like a couple of babies in a crib,” said Márgara as she shook the sheets and attempted to make the bed.
By dusk, I knew Gerónimo had spent the better part of his childhood without parents. His mother died first, then his father. He and his little sister ended up in an adoption program for Latino kids. After a very long wait, when they finally found a home, Gerónimo was already too old and he wanted to go someplace else, by himself, to study acting, along with people he’d already chosen along the way.
That dawn I realized what it was like to be aimless. Childhood is the loneliest and most unjust time in our lives. Everyone has a say, authority, and the ability to intervene in our lives.
I was always in a hurry to grow out of childhood but, as some kind of punishment, I seem to be here still, anchored, asking myself questions about it.
I’m trapped, full of doubts. I don’t want to consider that my mother betrayed my trust, my integrity.
If I end up proving I’m not the child of the man I thought was my father all these years, if I confirm that my mother preferred to keep a heavy political silence over telling me the truth, if I end up discovering this nightmare is real, then I’ll have to start over again, just like Gerónimo.
“Did you also write while your parents were alive?”
“Not that seriously. I wasn’t yet aware that this is all I wanted to do.”
“Then you’ve already become something else. You’ve become an author since they’ve been gone. Think about everything you’ve experienced since then.”
“Parents are human, and they make mistakes. They tell us they’ll be there all our lives, but they can’t keep their word forever. They leave us. I feel strange since they’ve been gone. There are things I still don’t understand about their deaths.”
“Why don’t you go to therapy? They probably have good therapists here.”
“Yes, the kind who, when squeezed, will tell all. That’s how it is with the babalawos. Everything you confess to them ends up with those who you least suspect. I can’t risk it.”
“Did you ever suspect your family was hiding something?”
“Never. But now I understand why the past was a point of no return in this house. It was something we never talked about, something we hid from all the time. I always thought to allude to the past was a sin. I never ask anyone about their families, because I was raised to believe that to inquire was bad manners. Now I think I understand some things. All that’s left is to confirm them.”
* * *
—
I had promised myself I wouldn’t so much as glance in the project’s direction anymore. I asked Gerónimo to free me from all of it, to forget about finding this person and writing about him.
I knew this would separate us. I knew Gerónimo’s time in my life was based, exclusively, on finding my alleged father. He’s a practical man who changes depending on the role he plays and, back then, his role as director was the only thing that really mattered. I was part of that.
It took hours for me to explain things to him and it would take even longer to convince him, because no one can understand, like I do, how damaging it is for me to stick my hand in my parents’ business; that world is so sordid and black that it swallows me whole, and I don’t have the antibodies to protect myself.
Continuing with the past, Gerónimo showed me outtakes from his movies, ones I’d never seen. He screened fragments from the three films he considered the most exceptional of his career. He’d received an Oscar for one of the roles. Gerónimo fell asleep after the third one, which I’d decided to watch in its entirety because I’m enthusiastic about Sandinismo. As I watched him sleep, I thought the actor on the screen was a different person. I fixed his hair, kissed his neck, and slowly uncovered him to see his stupendous naked body.