Revolution Sunday

by Wendy Guerra

  * * *

  —

  Armando took my bags to his place. He got me out of the hotel where I’d paid for one night and cooked up a delicious plate of Cuban-style shrimp stew and white rice.

  I took a hot shower, put on a pair of beautiful warm PJs some old lover of his had left behind in that little Cuban nest in Brooklyn, and allowed myself to have dinner.

  After three glasses of wine, when the January cold had finally left my body, I looked at the paintings by Cuban artists he’d brought to New York with him. I’d seen these same pieces in his old place in Nuevo Vedado but here they looked different. I strolled through their textures, I examined the Cuban light that still flickered in my eyes, I imagined the drafts before the paintings, those you can guess at even when the artist tries to bury them under a thick brushstroke; they still leave a trace. I cuddled up on the couch, under the blankets and next to the fire, so I could finally tell him what happened when I arrived in the city yesterday.

  I’d changed my surnames, I’d dug into my parents’ past, which was also my past. I’d gone down a deep dark hole investigating something which in Cuba is more than taboo. I burned all my bridges because I had made Gerónimo’s project my project; his narrative was about my life; I kept my silence, I resisted with great fidelity…

  “And now? What happened?” asked Armando.

  I tried to retell every word and reproduce every expression exactly as it happened, without taking creative license. I wanted this poet to be my witness. I felt very confused about everything and I needed to hear what he thought.

  I came on one of those direct flights, full of Cubans who make you feel like you haven’t left Cuba until you land and leave the airport, only to recover from that kind of tropical hyperrealism once you hit the streets.

  Lidia, Gerónimo’s assistant, was there to pick me up and handed me the phone I have now.

  “Why didn’t Gerónimo come to get me?” I asked her.

  “Because Gerónimo in an airport is like a time bomb. The reporters who live and die here wouldn’t let us take a step. You’d be in all the afternoon papers, and you don’t want that, right, Cleo?” Lidia asked with a look that puzzled me.

  I arrived at Gerónimo’s apartment and he gave me a distant and icy embrace. I gave him a box of Romeo y Julieta cigars and two bottles of Havana Club rum. He opened the cigars, chose one, tasted it, fired it up, and served himself a good glass of rum on ice. It was eleven in the morning. He moved with a certain gravity, transporting his body’s weight in a way that had nothing to do with the lightness I remembered.

  I didn’t recognize the person who was waiting for me, I didn’t know that man. I would have never taken a single step for someone like that; he didn’t look like someone with whom I’d have a relationship, with whom I’d share my house, my body, my poetry.

  “You seem strange. Is there something going on I don’t know about?” I said, unpacking.

  “Yes, sit down, Cleo. We need to talk.” He paused, served himself a bit more rum, savored the cigar, took a deep breath, and came out with a classic line, “I’m confused.”

  It’s well known that when a man says “I’m confused” it means “this is over.” But, in his case, I felt like nothing had ever really started, because he talked to me with cruelty, harshly, as if he couldn’t tell how he was hurting me inside and out.

  I felt as though the months we’d lived together in Cuba had become fiction, a role he felt obliged to play. He’d made me a character from an animated story who had shown up at his house to reclaim a fantasy. I was that singular creature who’d shown up to say, “Hello, Gerónimo, here I am, your cartoon girlfriend.” Then he had to bother to explain to me that I’m unreal, that what’s authentic is the nightmare that is his current life.

  “That’s just a perception,” said Armando. “Tell me what he said exactly.”

  “First, he said I couldn’t talk about it with anybody else. He said that several times.”

  “Yes, but go on,” a nervous Armando pleaded.

  He explained he was in a long divorce process, that his ex was asking for everything. She’d accused him of domestic violence and was trying to deny him custody of his daughter. He’d never said a word about any of this before.

  “Everyone knew but you,” Armando said.

  Later he told me he was seeing a woman he had talked to me about. In Cuba, he’d referred to her as the “Sociopath.” She’d follow him everywhere; she’d even managed to get him on the phone at my place and at the hotel in Mexico. He told me, as if it wouldn’t hurt me, as if I were his little sister, that his physical relationship with her was so complex that he could never abandon her. He knew it wouldn’t end well, even if he’d gotten another judge, but his weakness for her, what he felt sexually whenever they fought or fucked, wouldn’t let him leave her.

  “Then why did you ask me to come?” I asked, feeling overwhelmed by all this chaos.

  “Because these are things you talk about face-to-face. Because I need you to legitimize this film. Remember that we have a project together. Because it’s good for you to get out of Cuba. Because I want to reciprocate what you did for me in Cuba. Because it’s important to end things well,” he said, very calmly, without any resentment, all the while blowing smoke rings all around the room from his Havana cigar. “You can make yourself comfortable anywhere, in any room except that one, because that one is mine,” he said, pointing to his right as he stretched out on the couch.

  I grabbed my bags and dragged them through the apartment. The sound of the wheels on the floor, the smell of the cigar, and the lack of food gave me a feeling of nausea, dizziness. I struggled not to faint. I felt awful.

  Gerónimo assumed I would settle into one of his rooms. Instead, I turned toward the front door and tried to open it but couldn’t. I insisted, turning the key until Lidia came and asked me not to go, that he’d take care of all my expenses until we went to Cannes in May. I listened, then I begged her to open the door. She asked me to please not talk about any of this with the media or any of my friends. I asked her once more to open the door. She did. I took the elevator down and went to look for a hotel.

  “Why am I not surprised?” said Armando as he poured himself a glass of cognac.

  * * *

  —

  I walked around New York and saw Gerónimo on billboards advertising an Armani suit.

  He was everywhere, including the movies I’d find when searching the long list of TV channels available to me.

  It was strange, in every film Gerónimo was a different person than the one I’d known. The person I’d lived with had disappeared, or perhaps I’d invented him. I’m a specialist when it comes to inventing people, things, worlds.

  I tried to contact Rubén so I could go to Princeton but he wrote to say he was already in Havana, having a wonderful time and teaching his class.

  I began to write a new poetry book that talked about contexts, wardrobes, suits for a man that changed with each story, while Armando coached a French actor who was playing a Cuban dancer. It was very amusing to see the actor in makeup, disguising his voice, his gestures, with something that for us is so natural, genuine, common, and everyday: cubanía.

  Truth be told, Armando cooked like the gods but sometimes, for the sake of variety, we’d eat out at a Korean restaurant on Grand Street, very close to the apartment, called Dokebi. Since I’m not as interested in actually eating as I am in the spectacle of dining, I’d always choose a dish that required we cook our own meat and vegetables at the table, which had little gas burners in the center.

  Other times we’d go to Tabaré, a very good Uruguayan restaurant. The owners are friends of Armando’s, it’s in the neighborhood, right there on South 1st Street, and they have great meats and marvelous empanadas.

  I’d spend hours alone walking around Williamsburg, window-shopping at stationery stores and playing a game of trying to find bookstores with Spanish-language books. What am I looking for here? The days passe
d without mystery. Nothing was happening, nothing but life. Is there something else waiting for me or is this the end to all possible ends?

  My father’s face appeared in the Moviola; at age twenty his features so resembled mine. The smell of burnt film and Gerónimo’s intense scent by my side provoked a brief disorientation, followed by a spasm, almost a lurch in my stomach; but I contained myself, I kept it together until the archival footage was over and the lights came on.

  I avoided running into Gerónimo, and when I met him out of necessity, I didn’t look him in the eye. I responded mono-syllabically and refused his invitations or meetings if they didn’t have to do with the film. I wanted to know how I’d come across in the documentary script, because the story belongs to who tells it, and I didn’t want to take my eye off its collimator.

  They needed to interview me, but what could I say? I was still not used to being the daughter of someone unknown to me, a stranger, a hero, a bandit familiar only to Cuban Intelligence, the CIA, the State Department, an urban legend in whom everything was magnified and distorted.

  There I was, blathering before the camera, struggling with the past that was waiting for me. Gerónimo sat in front of me and shot three questions my way.

  “When did you know Mauricio was your father? What did it mean to you once you knew? What does it mean to you to know you’re American and that your father was executed the same year you were born?”

  I responded with the theatricality he expected. I gave him back his role of hero, which he needed in order to be the great discoverer of the truth.

  I cried at the end, and that guaranteed a little drama for the credits. He’d already filmed me walking around Havana and what I was doing now fit perfectly with what he’d already captured. The music he had me listen to would help sharpen the sentiment, emphasizing the melodrama, making even the most stoic cry.

  “It was very difficult for me to look at myself in the mirror and see another face, but at least now I know where I come from,” I said, figuring we were at the end of the interview. I said it with all sincerity, because since I’ve discovered Mauricio Rodríguez is my father, it’s very hard for me to walk by a mirror. Now I see something in me that I don’t recognize.

  There was applause in the studio. I’d done the right thing. I expected to see a little of the fiction he’d filmed when he first arrived in Havana with a head full of fresh ideas. This was an experimental film in which Gerónimo played my father, reimagining everything he hadn’t been able to figure out. I trusted it could be interesting to work with the apocryphal, but I hadn’t been able to preview it. Every day, they’d tell me to wait until the next day, when it would be ready with subtitles.

  * * *

  —

  I met Miguel the last time I was in the editing room.

  Who is Miguel? Why was he being interviewed?

  I listened to his testimony, and it was so intense I couldn’t leave the studio until he finished. Every one of us has a book to write, that’s the only way to beat the silence to which Cuba confines recent history.

  Miguel is the son of a very famous spy, someone we all knew in the seventies and eighties, thanks to a TV series that ran during the summers on Cuba’s two channels. He had infiltrated the ranks of the enemy, reporting each step, every plan, and had been transformed into a hero. But it seemed his real identity was a secret, and Miguel’s entire childhood was based on that idea, which was rescued by his mother, who was sharp and naturally warm. Even though the character’s name had been changed, and the story was treated as fiction, Miguel explained that the last few times he’d been to Havana, he felt people calling him, in low and feigned whispers, the “spy’s son.”

  Miguel’s case is exactly the opposite of mine. He’d had an excellent relationship with his father but lived trying to escape the stigma. I grew up not knowing mine, but it seems fate ran and ran after me until it caught up with me. Today, Miguel is an excellent journalist and edits a magazine dedicated to the visual arts. He was completely up to speed on everything going on in the city in terms of exhibitions and public performances.

  It was with him and his friend Olatz that I first went to MoMA on that early morning.

  MoMA looked like a deserted skating rink. The paintings were reflected on the polished floors. A deep silence surrounded you when standing before them.

  It was deep into the night yet there we were.

  Olatz had been a very famous model in Paris in the 1980s, and had, for decades, been painted by Julian Schnabel, the father of her children.

  An exhibition would be opening the next day about contemporary muses and it was impossible not to gaze upon the three enormous canvases the artist had dedicated to her.

  Schnabel’s work seemed to pop, to pour out of the frames. I trembled, shook like a leaf when I watched Olatz inspect the lights under which her body would be draped and exhibited for the next few months. Olatz had loaned the pieces so they could be shared with the curious who, during normal business hours, would come see her pose with her back to New York, in front of the studio she had built next to the artist, and with eyes wide open before the landscape of her native San Sebastián.

  A silver rain of questions was digging into my skin as I looked at the artwork and the model operating on such different planes. The light vibrated, shook, adjusted, focused on the sublime creature for whom a monument had been erected. Then the connection dissolved and there it was: art, posterity, literary material. How can these pieces connect without the pain of the past? Is there some kind of agreement about how to redeem that past and then leap, unscarred, to the other side of art? Olatz was alive, as was the artwork. They both survived that love. That must mean I have a chance to survive as well. Maybe I’m just here to understand that, I thought, breathing in the still moist texture of the curving paint turned into waves between narratives on the solemn canvas.

  This was the only hour when Miguel and Olatz could come in peace to the museum so there was no other option but to open it for them…and for me. What luck!

  Using his charms, Miguel managed to get the museum guards to let me quickly look around the adjoining rooms. That’s how I saw—in the blink of an eye—works by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marcel Duchamp, Mark Rothko, and Wifredo Lam.

  You don’t have to smoke or drink to enjoy kaleidoscopic visions; you don’t have to leave your body to feel overwhelmed by the material.

  Olatz’s green eyes roamed the museum ceiling and I felt my father’s face drape over me. My body was a sled Gerónimo had thrown on the bed in my house in Vedado. Cameras followed us again, and I, I was just a stranger, an intruder in the closed museum cage, a spy once more, but a spy at MoMA.

  It snowed that day in New York. We went in and out of stores and restaurants that opened early, ate very little, and walked a lot.

  “Why do you live here?” I asked Miguel.

  “Because it’s the only city in the world that lets me have Thai soup at four in the morning and buy a computer at two. Because I can get the newspaper before dawn and see the reviews before I go to sleep. Nothing ever closes here for renovations,” Miguel said with that splendid smile as he paraphrased Reinaldo Arenas.

  By daybreak, we were still together, now at Olatz’s house, where we’d gone from red wine to café con leche with ease, and there, alongside Julian’s drama, I swore to not believe in anything but friends ever again. Love passes, the euphoria that provokes desire passes, you can be erased from a photograph by drowning, choking on a sea of India ink distilled by the most absurd passions, you can be exposed and you can be tried, they can dynamite your life, take you and invade you and later claim not to know you; but friendship, that really can last forever.

  WHAT IS WINTER

  for Miguel

  I can’t quote

  I never quote

  The readings travel hidden and in the light inside my

  garments

  silk cut on the body Olatz’s hand haute

  couture in flam
es

  Nobody knows about them they’re the silence of my

  childhood breath

  or they’re shown in the revealing intimacy

  under the neon of the year’s first fire

  we were the classics

  stretched under the sacred fabrics of

  the contemporaries

  we read life from memory believed in

  the eternity of affections

  In parental immortality the wish and miracle

  of the cold

  That instant when the beauty of the work is brighter

  than your word

  Your word radiates like those of cummings Your hands

  smaller than rain the spasms

  of a fearsome winter

  January’s everyday fireplace and New York

  out there like a taxi

  The meter still running running running

  Life like a song transports itself

  in the marvel that is wine

  Essential cloaks eternal loves

  What is winter?

  Pink boots as a gift your laughter like an

  individual exorcism and six photos of the yard

  stripped of desire

  Everything about our winters then was

  predictable

  I’d already learned that next year we’d be the

  same

  Washing our hands at a store that sold

  Egyptian soaps

  The cold would reappear like those poems we

  recite from memory

  But I can’t quote

  I don’t quote

  I punish the body: remember remember remember but

  forget

  Please forget a little go on

  try to forget this.

  I spent more time on Lafayette with Armando trying on his fantastic gray suit than I did deciding, with Miguel and Olatz, what I’d wear to walk down the red carpet for the film’s premiere. I don’t really pay that much attention to my clothes, but the Dior dress Olatz chose for me made me feel beautiful: violet, velvet, it uplifted and exalted me. Perhaps it’s something my body needed at the time.