by Karla Suárez
After lunch we walked in the gardens. According to Ángel, they gave you the sense of having fallen into a story or a place that only existed in someone else’s imagination, so that we were part of their dream, like the characters moving through the pages of a novel. I found that idea appealing. And strolling along the path bordering the lake, looking at the plants, hearing the sound of the water and breathing in the tranquillity really did give me the impression of being somewhere else, as if the city and its crisis didn’t exist or were far, far away; in a foreign country, for example. Not that I had any clue what a foreign country was like!
We finished our stroll, sitting together near a clump of pine trees, and he told me about his trip to Cienfuegos. It had gone well, had been the ideal occasion for talking with his sister. But despite what I might imagine, my angel had felt troubled rather than serene. Dayani was still in low spirits, and the torrent of her sadness washed over everything within its reach, including Ángel. His only consolation was that she was still thinking of looking for a place of her own. The trouble was that he still wasn’t sure what to do for the best. It occurred to me to say that his sister should visit a psychologist. There’s no getting away from it, I’m a practical person: if you have a problem, you try to find a solution; if you can’t, then you seek help. That’s what psychologists are for, right? It seemed to me that Dayani had lost her bearings, and maybe a specialist could set her back on the right track. Ángel burst out laughing: if he wanted his sister to see a psychologist, he’d have to drag her there in chains, and even then she’d be capable of biting her own tongue off to avoid speaking. The only person who’d ever been able to get a word out of her was Margarita, who, by coincidence, had studied psychology.
To tell the truth, I hadn’t counted on an appearance of Margarita’s ghost in the Japanese Gardens, so I rested my head in my hands and said: ‘A princess as fair, as exquisite as you, Margarita’ in a tone that must have been ironic because he looked ashamed and muttered that he didn’t want to discuss her with me. Then he moved his face close to mine and, with an expression I’d never before seen in his eyes, asked me to forgive him, saying he was all mixed up, that coming to the gardens with me was doing him good, I gave him a sense of calm, and he felt he could talk about anything with me, I was the only person who knew about his private life. I gazed at him for a few seconds and then put my arms around him. Don’t worry, I murmured softly, and we stayed like that for quite a long time without speaking, listening to the water and the birdsong.
At some point we began to talk again. As I said, the Japanese Gardens are mystical, a physical invitation to ecstasy and revelations. And that afternoon, I had a great revelation; not the divine sort: I learned something extremely important. After a few jokes and kisses, I swore that it didn’t bother me to hear him talking about Margarita, in fact, I was pleased that Ángel would share his inner life with me. He said he felt a little idiotic, but that it did him good to talk normally about his ex, it helped to close the cycle. He lay down next to me, resting one elbow on the grass with his chin in his hand. Do you know what fascinated me about Margarita? he asked. Naturally, I didn’t. Then, without raising his head, but opening his eyes wide in an expression somewhere between comical and perturbed, he told me that Margarita knew exactly where she came from, she carried her whole personal history around with her, but it wasn’t just a matter of memories; it was something tangible. Tangible, he repeated.
Due to a tradition handed down from generation to generation, Margarita was the custodian of her family history. It had all started with the birth of a child called Margarita, the daughter of two Spaniards who had arrived in Cuba in the nineteenth century. Ángel told me that it was the birth of the girl that underlay the couple’s decision to settle here, and so that initial Margarita had marked the beginning of something. She was the first Cuban in the family, and her parents wanted to make something extraordinary of the event, something that could be passed on to their descendants. So they created a tradition. Traditions are formed by repetition, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes from obligation, but at the end of the day, repetitions. Well, when that original Margarita married, her mother gave her what became a legacy: the first family photo, a piece of jewellery and some of her parents’ mementos. To ensure the tradition was perpetuated, the newlywed Margarita had to pass on her name to her eldest daughter. Incredible as it may sound, Ángel continued, the custom had become so deeply rooted in the family that every Margarita had been determined to keep it alive by having a daughter. So from generation to generation, on her wedding day, each Margarita received the legacy, which expanded over the years as the family tree grew, with the addition of more photos, the stamps of each period and significant souvenirs of the respective parents’ lives. And that was why, when she married Ángel, Margarita had been given the family history, the names and faces of her ancestors from her first namesake born in Cuba, the map of her whole family.
That seemed to me a very beautiful story: many of us know little more than the names of our grandparents and great-grandparents. After that, the trail generally fades out, our past might only survive a few generations before forgetting sets in, oblivion, ignorance of who came before, not knowing that some person you don’t like shares your blood, is part of your extended family. Ángel put such passion into his narrative that, although I hate to admit it, I somehow envied Margarita. There was no way a woman who carried her family history with her could be just anybody, he stated: she knew exactly where she was, possessed her entire past without any chance of alteration. He was obsessed by that notion. Do you get me? Ángel had a great weakness for what he called ‘women with history’. At least that was true back then. Sometimes I thought he was crazy. I once turned up at his place and found an enormous heap of videos on the floor. When I offered to help him to put them in order, he pounced on the cassettes and wouldn’t even let me touch them. Afterwards he told me the story of his ‘unknown favourite’, saying that he was the custodian of a stranger’s past.
Before going to Brazil, Ángel had visited Margarita’s mother to pick up the letters the family wanted to send her. As you can tell, all his stories have to do with Margarita. What’s more, given that he intended to win back her love, he’d managed to record practically the whole repertoire of Benny Moré, a musician she adored. Letters, cassettes, and all the rest of her things went into a FAPLA military knapsack, the kind that was all the rage after the war in Angola. Ángel added a padlock and sent it as checked baggage. What happened was that when he got to his hotel in São Paulo and tried to open the knapsack, he discovered that he’d claimed the wrong one at the airport. When he succeeded in breaking the lock, he found women’s clothing, various items of craftwork and a package containing videocassettes. The worst of it was that there was nothing to help identify the owner of those precious belongings. And however often he apologised, Margarita had never believed the story of the mistaken knapsack, much less that he’d managed to tape Benny Moré’s repertoire. In fact, she accused him of not even being capable of bringing her family’s letters. She was furious. Ángel most definitely had no luck when it came to Margarita. He got rid of the clothes and the craftwork but decided to hold on to the videos. They showed a little girl taking her first steps, attending a Young Pioneers party, celebrating her birthday and going on family holidays. According to him, there had to be some hidden meaning to the mix-up, and he was certain that if he ever found the girl in the videos, who of course would be a woman by then, something was going to change in his life. He’d been obsessed by that idea for a long time. By then, he rarely watched the videos as he knew every moment of them, but he enjoyed playing them when he was feeling lonely or when something turned out well. It wasn’t the images themselves that fascinated him but the fact that they contained the history of a woman, and that she travelled, carrying her life story with her, not in her memory but in something tangible. Tangible.
Did you ever hear anything so crazy? That after
noon, I know I felt jealous of both Margarita and the woman in the videos, because something marked them out as different. I told him so, of course, and clearly recall the glint in his eyes as he sat up to move closer to me. Then he bit his lip – a habit of his – before saying that I had my history written on my skin. He glanced down at my belly and whispered: Go on, let me see it...
Years ago, I had my appendix removed. Nowadays those operations scarcely leave a mark, but that wasn’t the case way back then and so I have a scar, and Ángel loved it. Sometimes, when I was lying on my back, he’d slowly stroke its length. I’d feel the touch of his finger and then his tongue. He really used to adore passing his tongue over my scar. He said it was an important mark, not like having an ear pierced, or getting a tattoo, or wearing necklaces or rings. It was quite different from all that. A window to my interior. Something all too personal. A scar comes into being without our having the time or prerogative to make the decision. He’d slide his tongue along it, murmuring such phrases. He asked me if I realised I’d once been naked before a lot of people. I was unconscious. The doctors opened up my body, surely very slowly, and viewed my insides as I would never be able to, put their hands inside, cut, extracted and sewed up. When I came round, my body was apparently the same, except for the presence of a scar that would be with me for the rest of my life. Ángel said that it was like waking from the sort of dream that seems very real and then experiencing the disorientation of not being sure whether or not it was; but I only had to lower my hand to my abdomen, and there was the scar to remind me that it wasn’t a dream. My body had its history written on it. When he asked me to show him my scar in the Japanese Gardens, I knew that I was someone special for Ángel, a woman who carried her past with her. A tangible past. Get it? I was like Margarita and the girl in the videos: I was special.
In fact, I believe it was then that I developed the habit of touching my scar when I’m feeling low. If something goes wrong, if it’s one of those days when I look in the mirror and nothing’s the way I want it, I feel fat, greying, and the wrinkles are starting to show on my face; if I discover that I don’t have the answer, that there are things I don’t know, that my neurons are losing their edge and my feet aren’t set firmly on the ground; when all that happens, I only have to touch my scar to feel that everything’s going back to its proper place, that the equations are coming out positive and two and two make four. Or at least until there’s proof to the contrary.
All that was what you might call a personal discovery, but the really great revelation of that afternoon was still to come. After Ángel had kissed my scar and removed his head from under my blouse, he lay back and continued talking. He told me I should feel lucky because, come what may, my body would always have its scar, and so it was unlikely that I would ever lose my history.
The case of his unknown favourite was completely different, since a random Ángel had, by virtue of a muddle, become the custodian of her past, a past that didn’t belong to him, and so he was awaiting the day when, perhaps again by virtue of a muddle, he could return it to its true owner. Can you imagine just how miserable that loss must make her? he asked, before adding that her sadness must be as great as Margarita’s, because she’d lost her past too. That’s right; Ángel told me that Margarita no longer had the family legacy. He’d learned this the last time he’d seen her, during that same trip to São Paulo, when he’d hoped for a reconciliation but found her living happily with her Brazilian boyfriend. After an extended encounter, during which he’d attempted to convince her of his love and had ended up convinced of her lack of it, they eventually regained enough calm to talk of the future, the past, and then Margarita had suddenly burst into tears, saying she didn’t have the legacy and so was guilty of breaking the family tradition. Ángel used her tears as an excuse to embrace her, but although there was pleasure in that physical contact, he felt great sorrow. Remember my plan to exorcise her ghost from my life? he asked. The point was that Ángel had dreamed of being able to recover some part of the legacy, package it up with a one-word goodbye note and send it to Brazil so they could both find the peace they needed.
Ángel really was an angel. He said that I was definitely lucky because I carried my history on my body, and not just my own, since any personal history is also the history of a time now past. For example, the videos belonging to that unknown woman, who was a little younger than us, contained all those years, that black-and-white childhood, the objects, the way people moved, their habits. And in Margarita’s case, it mushroomed: there were so many generations involved. I could have no idea, he insisted, how proud she was to be the custodian of that legacy. To give me an idea, it contained the first family photo taken in one of the city’s first photographic studios, the same studio where the child José Martí had later had the portrait we all know so well taken. It also contained a document that, according to family tradition, had been written by the Italian who supposedly invented the telephone.
When I heard the words ‘the Italian who supposedly invented the telephone’, I felt like I’d been kicked in the guts. Are you talking about Meucci? I asked. And he said, yes, that was the name. The family legend was that the first Margarita had worked with him in the theatre and they’d somehow acquired this document belonging to him. Ángel wasn’t certain whether or not the guy had invented anything, but the important thing was that it had been written in that era; so the paper, ink and handwriting belonged to another time.
I swear I was dumbfounded. Ángel was referring to Meucci’s document. He’d seen it but had no idea of just what it was. That was why I stopped listening. I know he continued speaking because I could see his lips moving, but all I could hear was the phrase ‘the Italian who supposedly invented the telephone’. Then my mind, my neurons – like I said, I’m a mathematician and mathematical brains are in constant ferment – sprang into action, making connections. I recalled Euclid’s words, the story of the marvellous woman who had owned the document, and then came the image of the day Euclid and I ran into Ángel in the street, and Euclid’s surprise (it was only then that I realised it was surprise) at seeing Ángel, his haste in explaining that Ángel was a friend of his son’s, the change in his behaviour, the fact that he knew Ángel lived alone. Somewhere between Euclid, Ángel and the Meucci document was a woman called Margarita. I could see it all so clearly. Euclid, my great friend, Euclid, a man who loved women so much, had an affair with Ángel’s wife. And that made her the ‘common denominator’. When he’d smiled as he said that there was a common denominator between him and Ángel, I’d thought he was referring to me, but no: it was Margarita. So that bitch Margarita was the owner of Meucci’s document. You think that’s incredible? Well, imagine how I felt. Of the two million inhabitants of this city, I knew two who had seen the document. Unbelievable. It was clear that Euclid was aware of who Ángel was, but not so certain if Ángel knew exactly who Euclid was, and I thought it might be better not to ask him, at least not at that moment.
There’s no doubt about it: the Japanese know how to design gardens. They are places of meditation, but I was incapable of sitting still. I wanted to write everything down so that I could go back and analyse it with a cool head. When Ángel nudged me and asked if I was listening, I kissed him and suggested we continue walking. I needed to move.
8
I believe that euphoria is exactly the right word to describe how I felt after the revelation in the Japanese Gardens. I was like Archimedes, longing to shout ‘eureka’, even though I hadn’t actually discovered anything yet, because knowing that my friend had had an affair with Ángel’s wife didn’t actually add much to our knowledge; it was just another datum.
Among the things that the mathematician Poincaré said, I love: ‘It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.’ I’d simply intuited something, and then I had to apply logic. I didn’t spend that Sunday with Ángel. After our marvellous afternoon in the Botanical Gardens, I slept over in his apartme
nt and returned to Alamar in the morning. Sundays tend to stretch out slowly, as if the day was bored with itself. Added to that, everyone who lived in the apartment was present. That Sunday was definitely a classic: my brother was making a fishing net in his room; my stepfather was hammering away on the small front balcony, repairing something; Mum was cooking lunch, coming out into the living room every so often to watch television; my sister-in-law was picking over the rice in front of the TV, accompanied by a friend who lived next door and who, in turn, was painting her toenails; the pressure cooker was whistling and in the rear, glass-enclosed balcony our ten chicks were pecking grain: Mum was determined to keep them, despite my stepfather’s protests about turning our home into a henhouse. What the heck, our home was always like a henhouse. So whenever I wanted to work, I had to shut myself up in Mum’s bedroom. That day, I put on Roberto Carlos, one of my favourite singers, got a pencil and paper and began to analyse the elements at my disposal.
That Euclid had never mentioned his relationship with Ángel’s wife was, on the one hand, strange, but on the other logical. Let’s suppose the following: Ángel takes his wife to the house of a friend; a house where Euclid also lives, a likeable father and great conversationalist who, between jokes, steals glances at the young woman. I know his behaviour well. Margarita is caught in his web and, little by little, begins to steal her own glances, which neither her husband nor Euclid’s wife notice. One day, when the guys are doing something else, Euclid and Margarita arrange to meet, and that’s the beginning of an affair Ángel will never know about.