by Ana Menéndez
“What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with you, woman?”
My mother will clap her hands together for attention. “Look at all this smoke. You’re going to burn the house down.”
My grandmother has already ruined several good Calphalon pots this way.
In a black closet off the hall, we keep a photo of the old uncle in Havana. The photo is covered with scuff marks and tiny cuts like scratches over his face. Some days you’ll pass by the closet and hear screaming. It’s hard to invite friends over when you don’t know if your mother will suddenly walk out of the closet, her fingernails red with blood.
When my grandfather turned old, a radio grew out of his ear.
Now Radio Mambi follows him everywhere, the highpitched voices of the afternoon program seeping out of his pores like insects screaming. Even when we all go over to Aunt Julia’s to eat, he’s there, holding the radio up so it doesn’t fall out and take his ear with it. He’ll leave the table early and everyone will roll their eyes. When it’s time to go, we’ll all go looking for Abuelo, and he’ll be sitting on the couch, snoring, the radio antenna quivering over his head.
Every night, when he thinks we’re asleep, my grandfather calls up the stations that are attached to his ear. Sometimes I’ll crawl under my bed and tune in just to hear his voice, the sound of saltwater and sand.
Always, it’s the same story about the unbearable heat, about where the breezes hide this time of year. But one night there is something he wants to say about the old uncle in Cuba. He stutters and starts over.
“It’s so damn hot in this house,” he says instead.
I hear the men on the other end start to laugh and I lie there in the darkness under my bed.
“Damn hot,” my grandfather whispers.
On the twenty-sixth of July, the Aunt Julia bites my mother. Bites her on the arms and on the neck. She leaves beautiful red welts like roses. Just as she’s about to open her mouth and bite off my mother’s nose, Aunt Julia sees me standing there and says,
“Mind yourself, girl. The things that go on in this family are not to be discussed with strangers.”
An evil star hangs over our family. This is what my mother tells me one day when the clouds are high and the wind brings relief from the heat. We are cursed from the first pink Gallego who knelt on the white beach down to the old uncle in Havana, who as a boy used to run through the old streets with a loaded gun, screaming, “National pie and friendliness!”
The ghosts of all the dead pursue us still, my mother whispers. They appear at the brightest time of day, when the sun is full in the sky and you are thinking nothing in the world can trouble you. And then the ghost descends in the form of a memory, full of sugar and acid. It pokes the liver and makes the eyes water.
I tell my mother that I know. That I stood outside the Blue Moon one night with the old uncle and pointed a loaded finger at the shiny women.
“National pie!” we cried.
My father comes home from work and sits in his chair. His hair is carefully combed and his tie is loosened. He holds the newspaper in his right hand and after a while opens it and begins to turn the pages slowly. When he’s done, he folds it and sets it on the table.
“Ah, world,” he says and puts his hands behind his head.
He sits there for a while until he notices and calls me over.
“The real trick in life,” he says, “is finding a pink name for sadness.”
That night, I tune in to my grandfather on the call-in show.
“I think my son-in-law is dying,” my grandfather whispers. “Who will take care of us?”
My mother installs smoke alarms in the porch. Two next to my grandparents’ apartment and two more directly over the grill.
“Why’d you do that?” my father asks.
“Mother’s going to burn the house down,” my mother says.
“But they’re directly over the grill,” my father says.
“That’s the only way they’ll go off in time.”
“In time for what?”
My mother claps her hands together.
“Look at me,” she says. “Don’t you know that she’s been plotting to burn the house down ever since we moved here?”
One day, my grandmother puts poison in my mother’s coffee. Mother drinks it, turns pink, and grows an extra mouth. Through it she smiles at my grandmother. We have such deep love in this family, she says, and opens her arms wide as if for a hug.
I awake in the middle of the night to crashing noises from my grandparents’ room.
I walk through the house. I call out for my parents and get no answer.
Another crash. When I reach the porch, I see a light on in the little apartment. I knock on the door. Then I open it.
White plaster dust swirls into my face like snow. When it settles, I see my grandfather standing with a bat in his hands. Behind him, a wide black hole into the night.
“Damn hot in this house,” he screams.
My grandmother lies sleeping on the bed, her chest rising and falling on untroubled breaths.
“Damn hot,” my grandfather screams again. And we both stand there, the little voices from his radio coming faster and faster like frightened heartbeats.
The Aunt Julia has bitten the mailman because he stole the letter from the old uncle in Havana. She saw him take the letter out of the stack and put it in his pocket. So she waited for him in the azalea bush and when he reached into the mailbox, she jumped out and bit his hand.
“Family is sacred!” she screamed after him.
This is the way it goes around here.
We all pretend to hate the old uncle. But I’m thinking things are more complicated.
Sometimes I think my aunt Julia is really in love with the old uncle. And that is why she waits for him to write. Why she says family is sacred even though she talks all the time about how much she hates him. But when I tell my mother this, she jumps out of her chair and comes after me with the newspaper.
“Devil child,” she screams. “Talking what you don’t understand!”
And then I stand very still because I’m afraid of the neighbors hearing.
A boy I like has come to dinner. It was his idea. I would never invite anyone to meet my family. But he has come and my grandmother has greeted him at the door wearing leopard-print pants and a tight red shirt that shows her speckled chest. My grandmother kisses the boy and holds the hug until I pull her away. When the boy turns to me, I squeeze his hand hard and his eyes fill with tears.
In the porch, my father is grilling steaks. He wears a soft pink hat that covers his eyes. He drinks a pale milk shake as he turns the steaks. We sit around the table and wait. My grandfather sits there too with the radio in his ear, the antenna waving softly like a third hand.
We talk about everything but the old uncle, though I know it is the only thing my family ever thinks about. The boy who has come to dinner nods and smiles. Every now and then he looks above the grill and then at me.
Suddenly my throat goes cold. All this time the smoke alarm has been blaring and my family has been sitting there talking through it as if it were no more than a whisper in the leaves. Not even I noticed.
My dad finishes grilling the steaks and brings them to the table. My mother forms her lips into a prayer, but all that comes out is the sharp wail of warning.
I am tuned in from my room, listening to my grandfather talk to the radio again. His voice comes over as if from far away.
The radio men chuckle, but my grandfather doesn’t hear. He starts and stops and finally sighs and begins his story about the old uncle in Havana. The old uncle had problems in the head because of a family curse, he explains. One day, robbers got into the family home. They came in through a bedroom window and no one heard the glass break until the robbers had filled up two big bags of jewels and money. They would have gotten away, but the old uncle used to sleep under the dining room table. And when the robbers bumped against a chair on their way out
, he awoke.
The old uncle grabbed the robbers by the ankles and pulled them to the ground. Then he reached for the pistol he always carried in his back pocket and right there, as the robbers squirmed for mercy in front of him, he shot them dead. Even long after they had stopped moving, the old uncle kept shooting and shooting.
“On windless nights, you can still hear them scream,” my grandfather says.
And now he is sobbing and the radio guys are quiet and then the line goes dead and they’re playing a Beny Moré song like they do after the soap operas.
The Aunt Julia climbs to the top of the table and holds her arms out for silence.
“Today I ate the sun,” she says. “The darkness was delicious.”
We sit staring at her until she opens her mouth and blinds us.
After the old uncle shot the robbers in the family home, everyone came running to where he stood in the dining room. The women were afraid he was hurt and covered him with kisses.
My grandmother hung a rosary around his neck. The old uncle reloaded and shot off her thumb.
Then he pointed the gun at everyone.
“Nobody leaves this house,” he said.
The hunger became unbearable. They ate the pages of books. They burned suspicious documents for fuel. The old uncle took pity on them. He prepared a feast. Everyone knew he was a kind uncle then.
He built a pit in the living room like our country cousins used to build in the backyard on Nochebuena. He made a spit from young green branches and put the bodies of the robbers on it. My family watched from far away with their fingers in their mouths. The old uncle turned the spit and watched the flames jump.
My aunt Julia took the first bite. My aunt Julia said it was delicious. Then she ran into her room and cried for a month without stopping.
The old uncle went in to comfort her.
For three years, they lived like this. And then at the beginning of the fourth year, the old uncle said anyone who wanted to was free to go. One by one, my family left the house through the back door, leaving everything behind, ashamed of their nakedness.
In my dreams, I am still turning, the heat no worse than a summer blanket that smells of rain.
“Devil child! Talking what you don’t understand.” My mother is coming after me with the newspaper.
“And what do you think the old uncle did while he was comforting the aunt Julia?
* * *
My aunt Julia is crying in the azalea bush. I watch her from a distance. After a while she sits and begins to gnaw on her fingers.
“Don’t do it,” I shout out. My aunt Julia looks at me and I think she is going to start crying again. But instead she opens her mouth.
When I open my eyes again, she is gone and all the azaleas are bleeding as if it were springtime.
The boy I like says that maybe the old uncle wasn’t so bad. We are in my house, out in the porch, and he has to whisper because my grandmother has begun to suspect him.
“Maybe the way your family tells it is wrong,” he says.
He is a smooth boy, almost hairless, and he sits very lightly on the edge of the chair.
“Maybe,” I say.
I am not sure about the old uncle. I have never talked to him or seen him, except for the picture in the black closet.
“Maybe he kicked everyone out of the house because they’re all, I don’t know, contagious or something.” The boy smooths his hair back.
“Or because they were mean to him.”
I picture the old uncle sad and alone in his big house. At night he lights a cigar and sits on the roof looking out over the water. Does he think of us? Does he wonder what it’s like where we are?
I feel sorry for the old uncle. I do.
* * *
My mother comes out of the black closet, her face streaked with red.
“Devil child!” she whispers. “He made the aunt Julia scream with the pain.”
I am sitting in the porch eating lunch with my grandfather. He takes the sandwich in his long thin fingers. He cuts small bites around the bread, chewing each piece for several minutes. I say I spoke to the old uncle and he told me everything.
My grandfather stops eating and turns his neck toward me. And what did he tell you?
The words are like a spell and now I cannot remember. It was only last night that we spoke. But now I can’t be sure that the words I remember are his.
The ancient family house is falling down, I tell my grandfather. The old uncle has sold all the windows for food and when it rains, the house fills with purple shark fish. He has white hair and wears the same uniform he wore when he worked for the railroads. In the daytime he walks around the house giving orders to the four walls. At night he goes out in the street to rescue lame animals. He brings them home and cares for them, and sometimes, to help them, he shoots them dead. He is the most tender of men.
My grandfather listens quietly and then darts out at me, sinks his sharp fingers into my wrists until they bleed.
“Bastard!” he whispers.
* * *
That night I age a hundred years through the holes in my wrists. The darkness leaves me panting. I am tired from so much walking. I wander through the house for hours until I remember what I am looking for.
I stand outside the closet and listen. After a while I turn the handle. Inside it is dark and damp and cold like the inside of the earth. I light a candle. The old uncle looks down at me with his scratched face, surrounded by black walls. The flickering light makes him jump and twitch and soon I grow nervous too.
We stare at one another.
Finally, when I see day seeping in through the cracks in the door, I bow my head to speak.
“Everyone is wrong,” I say. “I can understand the confusion. The boy who loves me is also confused.”
I look up at the old uncle.
“You have always known it,” I say.
We both begin to laugh. The old uncle has a laugh like an old cat and it scratches my throat.
“There is no curse,” I say, and he shakes his head.
And then I don’t have to say any more. We both understand everything. There is no curse. There is no bleeding moment when it all began. It is all very simple and funny: He is crazy because of us and we are crazy because of him.
In the morning, the aunt Julia bites off all her fingers.
“Mind yourself, girl,” she says. “The things that go on in this family are not to be discussed with strangers.”
* * *
I am squatting with my grandmother in the mango tree, our toes curled around a green branch. My grandmother eats sunflower seeds and throws the pods to the wind. From where we squat, we can see over the tops of the houses with their broken tile roofs and the whirling metal fans that stand like frozen smoke billows. A street runs straight out of the neighborhood south through the orange groves and above it, like a blue strip of light, is the ocean that separates us. I see my grandmother looking out over the water, thinking. She spits out a pod and shifts her weight on the branch.
“We will never be rid of the old uncle,” she says, facing the direction of the ocean. “Even after he is dead.”
I nod.
“But they say he is very sick,” I say.
My grandmother spits.
“The old uncle won’t die of any human disease,” she says. “The devil himself will come for him on a golden chariot.”
We sit on the branch for a long time. Birds come and peck at our hair. They bring twigs for a nest. My grandmother spits out the last of her pods and holds her hands out so the birds can eat her fingers.
My toes hurt where they grip the branch. I wonder how my grandmother can sit here for hours, old as she is. I turn and see her eyes are closed.
“Look,” I say and point at a well in the earth. “Open your eyes.”
First there will be a noise like a deep sigh and then the house will tilt toward the center and all the screaming in the world won’t save us. Aunt Julia’s house will d
isappear too and the fields beyond it, all the orange groves and the green grass and the houses with broken tile roofs and the street that goes straight out of the neighborhood.
“Everything will sink and we’ll be forced to live under the earth,” I tell my grandmother. “Each generation more blind than the last until a thick layer of skin covers our eyes.”
Now the family has gathered under the tree and they are screaming up at us.
“Devil child!” my mother says and claps her hands.
“Mind yourself, girl,” says the aunt Julia.
The antenna growing out of my grandfather’s ear quivers.
They shake their fists up at us, but my grandmother does not move. She sits in the mango tree with her toes curled around the branch. She will not open her eyes and I try to wake her, but my voice is thin and small as a grasshopper’s.
“He is crazy because of us,” I whisper. “And we are crazy because of him.”
The Party
The old woman is at his ear again, a jumble of half-forgotten words until she whispers, “But have we been here long?”
Ernesto squeezes her hand and smiles before nudging past her.
“Not too long, not too long,” he says, but his thoughts are already elsewhere. A woman Ernesto recognizes is walking through the front door and he makes his way to her.
The restaurant’s bare bulbs are covered tonight with paper lanterns that cast crosses of light across the tables. Streamers hang from the ceiling. Members of the band Máximo hired stand around in a corner, lights reflecting in their shiny suits. Ernesto stops by the door and smiles at the young woman who stands looking out into the restaurant.
“Oh,” he says and pauses. “Mirta.”
The young woman looks at him and laughs.
“Oh,” she says. “Ernesto. Did I disappoint you?” Her eyes turn down at the corners and when she smiles a dimple forms in her left cheek.
Some recollections fade; others continue to sharpen in shadows until one day, suddenly, they prick through the veil of years. Standing there in front of that young woman, Ernesto could not be certain of where in time he stood. And for the first time in his life he wondered how often he had been misled by a familiar gesture, fallen in love again with a memory.