In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

by Ana Menéndez

  “You look so much like your mother,” he says.

  “Yes,” Mirta says. “Everyone says that.”

  She kisses Ernesto on the cheek.

  “Is he here yet?”

  Ernesto shakes his head, aware that he is still holding her hands.

  Máximo had called Ernesto before anyone else.

  “Joaquin is coming,” he’d said simply. It was just like Máximo. He didn’t need to say all the rest. He didn’t need to tell Ernesto that much time had passed; that Joaquin, too, had paid for the vanished years. With Máximo, the truth came bare and neat.

  When Ernesto didn’t respond, Máximo cleared his throat.

  “I’m throwing a party for him at the restaurant,” Máximo said. “I hope you’ll come.”

  Ernesto was silent for a moment. He knew that his hands on the phone were cold and stiff.

  “A party for Joaquin Rivera,” Ernesto said.

  After Máximo hung up, Ernesto lay on his couch and stared at the ceiling. It had never occurred to him that it was a different shade of white from the walls and Ernesto bent his head back and forth trying to decide if it was a trick of the light.

  He didn’t sleep. But as he lay there, an image began to form in Ernesto that was very much like a dream. It happened more and more, these images that bubbled into his consciousness as if his collected memories had grown too vast to be contained.

  Ernesto and Máximo with Joaquin on the bus to Varadero. Late afternoon, the sun coming in sideways through dusty windows. The slow bus straining through its rocking, the broken light mottling blank faces. They have their swimsuits, are going to dive for lobster and later sail out toward the darker waters. The others singing. But Ernesto is sure that he will die before the night. That the light patches are the day’s final gift to him. A young man and already wondering which way his ghost will fall.

  He stands on the landing watching Joaquin bound ahead, life enough for the three of them.

  This is how it was before politics and leaving; this is the image that Ernesto rubs like an amulet against the others.

  They called him El Alemán, because only the Germans who vacationed in Varadero were pinker or stronger. You could see the veins bulging in his hands and under the pale white skin of his forearms. Joaquin filled the room he rented with copies of books no one had ever heard of. Poetry books in Persian and Urdu, homemade books bound in red ribbons. He was the only one who got involved with the student movement, organizing marches to the capital, talking about the man who was going to save the country. Even then Ernesto thought Joaquin was campaigning for a version of himself. The leader and the student even looked like the same man. People listened to them the way they had listened to their fathers.

  Ernesto stands by the door. He looks at his watch and when he looks up, Hortencia is standing in front of him, balancing a plate of food. She is round and her face is lined. But she stands with one foot slightly in front of the other, her free hand turned up gracefully, an echo of someone she might have been.

  “I hope Máximo doesn’t mind if I start eating,” she says without greetings. “If I wait for Joaquin, I’m liable to just faint.”

  Ernesto nods and tries a smile. Hortencia holds up her fork.

  “You know, Ernesto,” she says and pauses to chew. “Well. I was just going to say that I didn’t expect you here.”

  Ernesto looks at her steadily. Then he shrugs, decides not to answer, and rocks back on his heels. “And you,” he says. “I didn’t know you knew Joaquin so well.”

  Hortencia narrows her eyes at him.

  “You wouldn’t know this, of course,” she says, bending in closer, “but Joaquin was very much into the theater.” She raises an eyebrow and nods gravely. “Oh yes, he was,” she says. “I knew him before all the politics. He didn’t start up with that until after Felipe and I left for Miami.”

  She looks at Ernesto. She smiles and gives a little bow when Ernesto nods. “Well, he was the most marvelous of performers—what a future this guy had. You should have seen him.” Hortencia opens her eyes wide.

  When Ernesto first met her, he thought she had a certain grace—a good humor which, especially in the early days of exile, he found captivating and fresh. Nothing seemed to get her down. Oh darling, even bad news was just a passing thing. But as Ernesto came to know her over the years, at the annual parties, the weekend barbecues, Hortencia’s wide gestures and high voice began to seem as artificial as smiles in a painting.

  “I’ll bet he was something onstage,” Ernesto says.

  “Mi amor, he was more than something,” Hortencia says. “That big man had the lightest voice of all of God’s angels.”

  Hortencia reaches behind her to set the plate on a table and sighs. Then she spreads both her arms above her and begins to sing in a deep and clear voice.

  Ernesto cannot place the melody, but the way the final notes turn downward takes him to a younger part of himself and he knows the song is trying to make him recall some unpleasantness. He notes Hortencia’s closed eyes, her smudged lipstick. Ernesto reaches out to touch her, and she brushes him off. She stops singing, turning her back on a smattering of applause.

  “He sang it much better, of course,” she says quietly. “He would have been one of the great ones, you know. But his parents forbade it.”

  She holds her hands to her chest and pounds it as the women used to in church.

  Ernesto glances at the front door. Several more people have come through and he doesn’t recognize any of them. Across the room, the old woman who follows him everywhere holds her hand out as if to get his attention, show him that she’s still there. Ernesto makes a motion with his head, then turns back to Hortencia. He touches her arm.

  “But look at you,” Ernesto says. “You haven’t changed in twenty years. I don’t know how you do it—always the diva.”

  Hortencia frowns. “You think at my age I still fall for flattery,” she says. “You weren’t listening to anything I said.”

  “Of course I was and of course you look great.”

  Hortencia looks at him and, after a moment, tilts her head into a pose.

  “We would have all been in a much better place if Joaquin had stayed in the theater,” she says. She looks at Ernesto a long time. “All of us.”

  Ernesto nods, watches Hortencia go. The song she sang, he remembers it now and that year that everyone sang it. He remembers Joaquin humming it, and his own brother too. But his guilt is so old that he is comfortable in it; it is a warm hole.

  The old woman finds him in the half-light under a paper lantern. She wants to know who has brought her here. She whispers so as not to offend the family: “Tell me again who is it who has died?”

  Ernesto stops, turns to go. But instead of walking, he leans back toward the old woman and talks directly into her ear. “No one has died, Señora. No one. Only Joaquin has finally come out of Cuba.”

  Ernesto steps away and the old woman nods.

  “El Alemán,” she says. And then, quietly, “El asesino.”

  The flight is a late one and Ernesto worries that no one thought he might be too tired for a party. But the more he stands there thinking about it, the more he thinks he’d rather see Joaquin tired. Not so much as deflated. Just tired enough to smooth the old roughness. Ernesto sits by the door. He wants to be the first to see Joaquin. He has decided he will hug him. And then he thinks of a story he heard: of two men who were no longer friends or enemies, joined only by the same frail history. When they met again in exile, they hugged each other with such ferocity that they broke three ribs between the two of them.

  Ernesto looks up each time the bell on the door sounds, searches for a face he recalls, sometimes even stands and shakes hands. He thinks of what he will say to him. The call of the party is a low hum that spikes now and then, a bulge of laughter and then smooth and glassy. Ernesto stands and begins to pace.

  He feels a squeeze to his shoulder and turns. Máximo is smiling up at him.

&nbs
p; “What do you think?” he says. “He’ll be impressed, yes?”

  “It’s a surprise?”

  Máximo nods. “He thinks he’s just picking up something to eat.”

  “But it’s so dark in here.”

  “Part of the surprise,” Máximo says. “Don’t be so glum.”

  Ernesto waits for a moment before speaking. He is thinking of what Máximo is thinking.

  “You think he is the same?”

  “The same. What does that mean? Same, same, same. Of course people don’t remain the same,” Máximo says. He looks at Ernesto.

  “So you think that people change.”

  Máximo is staring off. He shrugs. “I don’t think so,” he says. “They just get older, realize some things.”

  Máximo stops himself and looks at Ernesto. They stand side by side. The restaurant has grown noisy toward the front where some of the younger people sit around a big table sipping drinks with umbrellas.

  “You know what I was remembering the other day?” Ernesto says. “That trip we took to Varadero.”

  “Which trip?”

  “One of the last ones. To dive for lobster.” “When the police stopped us.”

  “Not the police,” Ernesto says, “some tipo from the hotel.”

  Máximo nods his head slowly and then smiles. “And there I stood with a suitcase full of squirming lobster.”

  Ernesto laughs. “Thank God for Joaquin.”

  Máximo shakes his head. “What do you mean, Joaquin? Thank God for you.”

  “But Joaquin faked the epileptic attack.”

  “It was you who had an attack,” Máximo says and laughs. “A real one. Asthma or something. You stopped breathing and we had to get the hotel medic to give you a shot of something.”

  Ernesto stops and looks at Máximo. “You have it all wrong.”

  “You have it wrong, my friend,” Máximo says. He claps him on the shoulder. They stand together a moment and then Máximo waves to someone across the room and begins to walk away.

  “Why don’t you help yourself to some food, eh?” he says as he goes. “Might be a while.”

  Ernesto shakes his head. Máximo cheery and businesslike. And for him to have forgotten the details of the last good memories between the three of them. It wasn’t like him at all.

  “Thank you,” Ernesto says. “You’re right.”

  The tables have been pushed to the sides to make room for dancing, though except for a few practice notes, the band has done little more than watch the crowd as if they were the entertainment. The restaurant is loud from shouting and laughter. People have gathered into protective clusters. In the corner, Raúl and Matilde are motioning to Ernesto.

  “What were you and Máximo talking about,” Raúl says when Ernesto reaches his side.

  “Old stories,” Ernesto says.

  “Did he tell you he’s thinking of selling the restaurant?”

  “Máximo would never sell the restaurant,” Ernesto says.

  “Rosa’s been pretty sick,” Matilde says.

  Ernesto thinks. “He didn’t say anything about that. The restaurant or anything about anyone being sick.”

  Raúl offers Ernesto a cigar. “Awful sad.”

  “What is it?”

  Raúl shakes his head. Matilde mouths the word and Ernesto catches it silently: cancer.

  They stand and after a while, Raúl says, “I think it was good of you to be here.”

  “How could I not come,” Ernesto says.

  “I didn’t say anything about you not coming, just that I’m glad you’re here.”

  Matilde points her chin across the restaurant.

  “Remarkable how that girl looks like her mother.”

  Raúl bends down to spit into a flowerpot.

  “Nah,” he says. “Her mother was much more beautiful.”

  Raúl smiles at Ernesto before shouting over the crowd: “Hey, beautiful. Why don’t you come over here and brighten the evening for two tired old men.”

  From across the room, Mirta turns. She bends forward to see and then waves at their little group.

  Ernesto looks at Matilde. She is looking ahead, her face smooth and impassive.

  The old woman walks through the restaurant alone. She stops and points to an areca in a red ceramic pot.

  “In Cuba,” she says, “we used to put iron spikes through the guanabana trees. They gave the biggest fruit that way.”

  They don’t talk, just watch Mirta walk toward them. Matilde is the first to draw her near for a hug.

  “Hello, cariño,” she says and caresses her hair. “What are you doing wasting your evening with a bunch of old people?”

  Mirta smiles. “Now, if I answered, I’d be calling you old, wouldn’t I?”

  “Just like her mother,” Raúl says.

  “Why didn’t she come?” Ernesto says.

  “She’s in North Carolina,” Mirta says. “Sometimes Miami’s too much for her. But she wanted me to give her love to Joaquin.”

  “Yes,” Matilde says, “of course.”

  Raúl looks at Matilde and points a finger at her. Ernesto worries that he will say something, but then there is loud shouting from the front of the restaurant and they all turn. Matilde touches her husband’s arm.

  “Joaquin!” she says.

  Raúl shakes his head and holds up his hand. “No, it’s not.”

  A woman’s voice silences the rest of the crowd.

  “Don’t call hijo de puta someone who is helping change things.”

  Matilde opens her eyes wide at Ernesto. “Is that Máximo’s daughter?” she whispers.

  He holds a finger to his lips. Another woman is shouting now and knows she has an audience: “You were a little child when that man came to power. I carried you in my arms. And now look at you. A grown woman and that man is still running our country. I carried you in my arms!”

  Other people are shouting and Máximo comes out of the kitchen wiping his hands.

  “Oye! Oye!” he’s saying. And then the individual voices are swallowed again in the low hum of resumed conversations.

  “Who was she talking about?” Matilde says.

  “Who?”

  “Máximo’s daughter. I hope she wasn’t saying what I think she was saying.”

  “No, no, of course not,” Mirta says. “She was talking about dissidents, in Cuba. We’ve been talking about it, the risks that they take.”

  Raúl lets out a groan. “There is no such thing as dissidents in Cuba. You think Castro has lasted forty years by letting people speak their minds?”

  “So what are you saying, then?” Mirta says. “That these people are frauds?”

  “I’m saying, don’t be naive, little girl.”

  “Now, Raúl,” Matilde says, “that’s not nice.”

  But Mirta is smiling. “Well, I remember very little of Cuba, it’s true. But what about Joaquin?”

  Matilde looks at Ernesto before speaking. “Joaquin’s case is special,” she says.

  Raúl interrupts her. “Look, more than anything, Joaquin was a kind of—how would you say it here?—a ladies’ man.”

  Matilde shakes her head at Mirta.

  “What are you talking about?” Raúl says. “At the University, he always had someone’s boyfriend coming after him. I used to hide him in my room. Everyone knew where he was. But it gave folks a way out of the unpleasantness, you understand.”

  Raúl takes a drag on his cigar and lets out a puff of laughter.

  “Though I remember one time, one time he almost didn’t make it. Ay, ay, ay. That Joaquin,” Raúl says and wipes his eyes.

  “He comes running into my room. It must have been way past midnight and I was reading in bed—the University was still operating then. And suddenly there’s Joaquin, whispering, ‘Oye, chico, tremendo lio,’ and he disappears into the bathroom down the hall. Before I could say anything, there’s a guy standing in my doorway. He’s about as big as Joaquin and it’s so late and I’d already had so many p
roblems with the landlady.”

  Raúl takes a long last drag and throws his cigar down, putting it out with his shoe so he can tell the story with both hands.

  “So I get really serious. Ask him who the hell he thinks he is.” Raúl stops and opens his eyes wide. “Imagine that,” he says. “Imagine me lying there about to be shot.”

  He turns to Mirta. “This was no small thing,” he says. “All the students carried guns back then.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  Raúl wipes his forehead. “Anyway, I’m getting a little worried when I hear, from the bathroom down the hall, a door cracking open and then a woman’s voice—a somewhat deep woman’s voice—saying, ‘Ernesto, mi amor, who’s bothering us at this time of night?’”

  Raúl slaps his thigh and shakes his head. “Oh God. It took everything I had to answer in a very serious voice, ‘Don’t worry, Violeta, it’s someone with the wrong room.’”

  Ernesto laughs, but Matilde says, “Violeta, eh?”

  “Oh, come on,” Raúl says. “It was the first name that came to mind. It’s a good thing I didn’t call him Joaquina.”

  Mirta rolls her eyes.

  “I don’t know about that story,” she says with a smile. “It sounds like something you saw in a movie.”

  Raúl shrugs. “You don’t understand. This guy was an original.” He turns to Ernesto. “You know, he told me once that he spent his entire wedding reception kissing the bridesmaids behind the bandstand.”

  Matilde, who has been looking at the floor, suddenly blurts out, “He asked me for a recipe once.”

  There is a long silence when it seems everyone at the restaurant has stopped talking. And then Raúl lets out a long laugh.

  “Maybe you didn’t know him as well as you think you did,” Matilde says. “He liked to bake when he was upset.”

  Raúl turns to his wife. “I’m sorry, honey,” he says and coughs for breath. “You don’t need to sound so defensive. I thought you were making a joke.”