by Wendy Guerra
No, he didn’t seem the same person at all. The one resting on my lap was a common man among mortals while, on the screen, the most beautiful man in the world screamed, got high, and suffered deeply while making me cry; he even managed to exasperate me, leaving me powerless.
When I finished the last reel of the third film, still overcome by the images, I became just an average woman and sneakily made love to him. I needed him to stay asleep because that night, while he dozed, and just this once, I could possess the actor instead of the man.
* * *
—
We learned about Chigüín’s death at six in the morning. A strange car accident had ended his life.
Alberto came early with the news. He’d heard about it from the veteran’s eldest son, with whom he’d attended military school in the Soviet Union.
The three of us had breakfast in silence, knowing his death was no accident.
I decided to accompany Gerónimo because the news had rattled him; Chigüín had been his best witness.
At noon, we arrived at a house in Siboney where peasants had been singing since the wee hours. Chigüín had made it clear: The day he died, he wanted music, and nothing to do with crying or solemn funerals.
The house was very odd; it must have won an architectural prize in its day. I’d never been inside such a gem of a place before. But, from the looks of it, its current inhabitants never quite perceived or understood the soul or personality of this 1970s original. Who was the architect?
Everything inside—the furniture, decor, and even its residents—contradicted the lyrical morphology of the place: rolling glass panels, wide hallways leading to the bedrooms, waterfalls that emptied into a pool surrounded by river stones or close-cropped Asian maidens.
Each room in the house, at each level, was illuminated by skylights that let in the natural sunshine.
Everywhere around us there were crafts, colored photos, political posters, Vietnamese mats and rugs with Moorish landscapes that served as hangings on the few walls with enough room and without glass tile murals.
This was, without a doubt, a true struggle for spatial dominance between two Cuban social classes trying to possess the same building. The bourgeoisie “fled in terror” (that’s what we were taught to repeat over and over at school), while the rebels took over spaces they continue to inhabit without understanding.
At least, what I could see hadn’t been modified; everything looked like it was in good shape. The house’s muzzled essence searched for light, vibrated, radiated, and tried to recover its spirit, tried to reach for the sky, like the vines sprouting from the side columns.
I wanted to continue to ponder it all but my predicament was calling me back. I’m going nuts. Everything seems to be about me and my problem. Every gesture, every look, in the faces and greetings of those old warriors seemed to say: The daughter of the Spy—Rodríguez’s daughter—The traitor’s daughter—The hero’s daughter. El Macho’s daughter is here. There, along with the guitars and the sad songs, the décimas and the peasant laments, I thought I’d found the answer to my drama.
Their wasted faces, their wrinkles, their war scars, their twisted features with unbalanced and mournful smiles drawn with dentures that were too big or too unreal, with sad eyes, complicit grimaces, guilty tics; quiet or restless faces. And there I saw myself, suffering with them. Civilian clothes worn like military uniforms, uniforms chock-full of medals, the escorts alert to whenever something or someone important crossed the threshold.
Alberto moved about that house like a fish in water. He’d brought two bottles of rum, found some glasses in the kitchen, and began to serve everyone. He looked after the combatants, chatted with them, hugged all those veterans who, it seemed, he knew very, very well.
I said something in a quiet whisper to Gerónimo but he thought none of this was unusual.
“This is an island, Cleo. Everybody more or less knows everybody else.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anyone here.”
“But maybe they know you.”
“Me? Why would they know me?”
I went out to the patio to get some fresh air. I still wanted to find a plaque with the architect’s name. I watched for a while as the chickens laid their eggs under the enormous wooden fence that encircled the mansion.
Since I was little, I’ve found getting lost in gardens to be a great pleasure. I picked up little blue ceramic squares that had been dispersed and buried in the dirt. I put together a jigsaw puzzle with them and remembered a spur-of-the-moment game about a path to heaven made from rocks we’d spread over puddles where the motley chickens and local ducks would bathe.
In the distance I heard Alberto’s voice nervously calling out to me. By this time I’d crawled under the house, with its capricious levels supported by pilings covered with shells, reeds, and green lizards.
“Cleo! Cleo! Where are you? Come here, I want to introduce you to someone.”
“I’m here,” I said from the humid depths.
“Here where?”
“Beneath the floor…”
Alberto came down uneasily on the slabs that made up the steps and found me, under the house, picking up snails of all colors.
“Hurry, come with me,” he said, like a boy who’s up to some mischief.
We entered through the service door. In the kitchen, the musicians were tuning their guitars, and in the living room, a décima singer who sometimes stars on TV was rhyming revolución with son and corazón, tristeza with firmeza, and muerte with suerte. The guitars were full of sorrow but flirted around the voices and the poet’s whimpers. I let myself go, flying like a ribbon in Alberto’s hand.
“And who’s this girl?” asked the widow, very upright, next to the coffin.
“This is Cleo, the girl who was helping with your husband’s interview, remember?” insisted Alberto. But the widow was confused.
The woman’s daughter joined us.
“Mama, she’s the American actor’s girlfriend,” she said, raising her voice so she could be heard. “Alberto just explained to us she’s the little girl that…she’s Aurorita Mirabal’s daughter. The doctor.”
“Who?”
“The doctor. The one who taught Chacho and me how to swim in Varadero. The one with the big wooden house in front of the water.”
“Ah, yes, yes,” said the elderly woman. “And did anyone ever tell her she’s El Macho’s daughter? Your father was very handsome and when your mother…”
“Mamáaaaa!” the daughter screamed.
A huge Cuban flag covered the closed coffin. After these outbursts, there was a terse silence, followed by murmurs and coughs; weeping and music from the living room flooded the somber, flower-covered corner where they’d laid out the body.
My own body felt alien. It wasn’t obeying me. I wanted to take control and breathe calmly but my legs were trembling and my hands could barely hold on to the glass of rum Alberto had handed me in the confusion of voices and tears. I thought about running, going home alone, but Alberto kept signaling for me to wait a little longer.
Gerónimo was recording everything that was going on. He followed everyone who came in and out of the wake. He followed any little thing that happened, and he wouldn’t take his eye off the viewfinder.
I tried to squirrel back behind the house, to retreat underneath it again, but then a platoon of soldiers came in with a floral overlay that read, “For Chigüín, from Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz.”
The thick smell of the madonna lilies, the constant whispering and the aggrieved looks of the veterans, some of whom we’d already interviewed, paralyzed me. I was just about ready to take off when we heard two shots followed by screams coming from the garden.
“Get out, everybody out! My father didn’t have an accident, he was murdered—enough already! Get out of here!” Chigüín’s eldest son yelled in both Spanish and Russian. “Out, out all of you! Have the decency to go and leave us in peace.”
The young uniformed military officer entered the living room, aiming his firearm toward a median point in the glass. Alberto and I ran. Gerónimo stayed inside, filming. Though we called to him over and over, he didn’t respond. I decided to go back in, despite the danger, and grabbed his camera before it dawned on one of the guards to do the same. It was only then he realized it was time to get out of there. As we fled, we witnessed a group of soldiers disarming and handcuffing the young man, who continued to shout insults in Russian.
We gained some distance by picking up our pace and were about three blocks away when we heard one more shot and then some thuds. With our hearts in our throats, we desperately searched for some form of transportation to get out of there, but by this time the police had blocked off the area, making it impossible for any vehicles, much less a taxi, to come in or get out.
The only thing left to do was to walk quietly toward Fifth Avenue, praying for a miracle so they wouldn’t take everything Gerónimo had managed to film.
By nightfall, we were at Alberto’s house enjoying the fruits of his discreet marijuana harvest, which he cultivated himself, dispersed in small hidden pots all over the backyard. Surrendering to the mystic smoke, we flowed, because if we didn’t flow from the insanity of it all, the insanity would get to us, would destroy us and tear us to pieces.
Gerónimo, Alberto, and I were stretched on the grass, smoking, laughing without a care, ready for whatever was coming, which, we knew, should be finding my past and accepting it as my present.
Gerónimo recited lines from a famous animated cartoon he’d made very popular by doing voice-overs. We laughed until we couldn’t anymore. We were an octopus adrift in the Caribbean, a solitary creature with many hands trying to make ice sculptures at the bottom of the sea, brief sculptures that disappeared each morning with the sun.
In a fit of hope, it occurred to me we could play at telling the truth.
“The truth? Which truth?” asked Alberto, barely conscious; he was the one who had the hardest time disconnecting from the world.
“For example, I could say this is my first time smoking grass,” I happily confessed.
“Noooooooo!” they shrieked in unison.
“Also, you are both suspicious of me. I want to help you but you won’t let me.”
“Suspicion is an illness!” Alberto shouted in his cracked voice.
“Another example: Though it hurts, I’m starting to believe I’m Mauricio’s daughter.”
“I could say, for example, that we’re trapped on this boat and the only one who knows where we’re going is you. You know more than you let on, but you throw us off, you throw us off course,” said Gerónimo.
“I could say: You don’t love Cleo, and that you’re only with her to get your hands on the story. I could say she’s nothing to you. I’ve seen the women you’re with on American TV,” said Alberto between yawns.
“I could say that in this country it’s a crime to watch American TV but they let you…Why? Because you’re an informaaaaaaaant!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
“I could say I know you have a brother, and I know where he lives,” confessed Alberto.
“I could say that if you’re giving away all this information, it’s because somebody upstairs wants us to have it,” Gerónimo said calmly, in a whisper.
“I could say you both talk about me as if I were dead. You exchange information as if I didn’t exist. And I’m right here. That’s the truth.”
“I could say that for the first time you’re assuming this is your other life,” responded Alberto, surprised.
“I could say that Saturday morning I fucked a black woman who runs a ramshackle grocery, and we did it standing up,” said Gerónimo, to ease the tension.
“That’s not fair—we agreed to ‘tell the truth,’ ” I protested.
“It’s the truth,” answered Gerónimo.
“Then tell the whole truth: It was a black man, not a woman,” Alberto said, somewhat sarcastically, to correct him.
We cracked up laughing until we went numb. Alberto tried to kiss me but I pushed him away to get to Gerónimo. It was so strange: For an instant, alienated as we were, the three of us shared a kiss.
Hunger, magnified by the effects of the marijuana, invaded my body.
It was time now to get up and walk back to my house, where Márgara always left something prepared in case of emergency. But a greater force seemed to overcome all three of our bodies, consumed by a pathetic autophagy. It just got more and more difficult to stand up, to escape from stupor’s embrace and break away from whatever was holding the three of us together.
Where it says house, it should say prison.
When we got home, we saw that everything was open—all the doors and windows. Márgara was still waiting for us, nervous, her body bent, reclining on the rocker on the terrace. They wouldn’t let her in; they wanted to go over everything without witnesses. This time the raid was accomplished without my presence, but they were still waiting for us.
Márgara’s eyes looked like they were out of orbit. She made a bitter gesture I didn’t understand, then emphasized it by asking us, Gerónimo and me, to keep quiet, so we did, we kept quiet.
This time they’d left only a few damp papers scattered on the floor. They’d taken every book and notebook from the library, the closets, the wardrobes, the drawers, the shelves, the racks, the trash, and the corner tables.
There weren’t very many documents left at the house. We lost a bunch with each raid but this time they’d really outdone themselves. They also took all the cameras, the old cassettes, the DVC, rolls of film, the computers and the video production equipment. But they left Nitza Villapol’s recipe book, for which I am very grateful.
Amid all the disruptions, this made some sense because I now understood what they were looking for. Like us, they were all trying to find Mauricio Rodríguez. But there is something about that man that makes him hard to snare; he doesn’t bow down, but appears and disappears, escapes and there’s no human way of capturing him. We can’t do it: not them, not us.
In less than fifteen minutes, a new officer was at the house ever so gently suggesting to Gerónimo that he should leave the country.
“When?” the actor asked.
“Immediately. You’re leaving today on the last flight.”
“Why?”
“You should know. I haven’t been ‘instructed’ to explain it to you.”
When we tried to gather his clothes and pack them in a suitcase, the official, in the kindest tone again, suggested he should leave the country with just his documents and the clothes on his back. They took the camera with the images from the wake as well as all his personal effects. His electric shaver, his pills, his cell phone. None of it would accompany him on his journey out of the country.
When Gerónimo tried to protest, the official explained that they were doing this because of who he was, but if he refused to cooperate, they’d detain him until they could figure out some things they still had doubts about.
“But, detain me for what? I haven’t done anything illegal. If somebody’s hiding something here, it’s you guys.”
“Well, sir, it’s obvious that what you’d like is to be taken to a detention center, to have some time to reflect and think things through until you can see our point of view. Come with me.”
Gerónimo slammed the wall with his fist and it was in that gesture that I saw, for the first time, and only for a few seconds, the man and the actor come together in the same body.
At midnight, I watched them take him out to the street. They didn’t handcuff him and they didn’t mistreat him, but they expelled him just the same without a right to protest.
Outside, people were watching. It never occurred to me that the people on my block were so aware of our lives.
I could hear his name being whispered. Every minute there were more and more people looking for the actor. It was so strange. Whenever I had walked around with him, I’d
had the sense that here nobody knew who he was, or, if they did, that they didn’t really care. I remember crossing San Rafael Boulevard, or Neptune Street, taking pictures all over Old Havana, without anyone, except tourists or some of the better informed Cubans, greeting him in any way.
When the car took off, I wanted to chase after it. I walked out to the sidewalk and, when I tried to run up and give him a kiss, two women in civilian clothes whom I didn’t know grabbed me and pushed me around until they finally held me by the arms.
“Careful! You little shit!” the taller one screamed at me.
Márgara persuaded them to let me go and they did.
Nobody else did anything. The neighbors retreated little by little and the street was empty in seconds. It was as if nothing had happened.
Márgara closed the whole house; that is, what I still insisted in referring to as a house. It didn’t matter anymore if it was open or closed; in any case, I didn’t know if I was inside or outside. I fell into her firm, muscular body and broke into sobs, crying until the phone rang and I rushed to it thinking it could be Gerónimo. Instead, it was a correspondent from the international press who needed to interview me and, most importantly, to ask if I knew the whereabouts of the actor. “Who knows?” I said, and disconnected the phone.
Márgara and I crashed on the couch but we couldn’t sleep. She got up and prepared me some tea. She came back looking very worried and, as serious as usual, asked me to clear my mind and get some sleep.
“How do you clear your mind, Márgara?”
“By setting aside all those demons you live with, child.”
* * *
—
At six in the morning, I was awakened by the sun with the anguish of an incomprehensible feeling that, between dreams, you can’t figure out, but stays with you and grows more intense.