by Ana Simo
Pedro had a crude map of San Cristóbal de La Habana in his hands. He was going to the church of Espíritu Santo, whose parish priest was said to be kind to those who had sincerely converted and become good Christians. He helped them start new lives free of the stigma of their origins, after satisfying himself that they were not opportunistic marranos. The church was on one side of a muddy plaza. The entire city seemed to be built on mud. The lower parts of the façades, even the palaces, were thickly caked. Streets dissolved in mud only to reappear again, even now in December, when it had not rained for a month. All the wealth of the city was indoors. Outdoors, pigs and garbage ruled, worse than in Tenerife’s poor marrano neighborhood. When Pedro had a palace like the one across from the church of Espíritu Santo, he would pave the surrounding streets and order that they be kept free of pigs and garbage.
Father Leandro was in his vegetable garden when Pedro arrived. Pedro introduced himself and tried to show him his baptismal certificate, which stated that he was baptized in the Church of the Conception in Tenerife at thirteen months of age, when in truth he’d already been thirteen years old. His father had sold his only mule to bribe the sacristan, on whose penmanship and gambling habits the town’s dwindling marrano population depended. Pedro’s father and mother had pushed him to leave as soon as he was old enough to board a ship. There was little to eat in Tenerife and even real Christians were starving and setting sail for America or Constantinople. More importantly, in those windswept islands off the coast of Africa, a small and inbred world, it was impossible to hide or pass: a marrano would always be menaced. His three sisters had stayed behind. What else could they do?
Father Leandro did not take the paper from Pedro’s hands. He did not even notice Pedro was holding it in front of his eyes. The priest was examining a sickly-looking turnip. “I can’t make them grow in this heat,” he said, through clenched teeth, reminding Pedro of Jacinto that last night at the watchtower, even if Jacinto’s teeth were white and strong while Father Leandro’s were crooked and yellowish. Pedro felt like running away. He had never seen icy-white anger before. He thought all anger was red, hot, and meaty. He was twenty-five years old, but he did not know much about the world outside the Buena Esperanza and the port whorehouses. “Take this to the kitchen,” Father Leandro said, giving him the turnip. “I will hear your confession tomorrow.”
Pedro worked in Father Leandro’s vegetable garden every day from dawn until the morning mass was over. Then he cleaned the church and the sacristy, carried water and wood to the kitchen, and spent the rest of the day doing errands. For this he was given bread when he woke up, a good, hot meal at noon, and more bread before going to bed. He ate well here, compared to the Buena Esperanza, and put on some weight. He slept in the kitchen, on top of the massive stone cookstove when it was cold and rainy, and on the floor away from it on sweltering nights. He had been lucky. The seventeen-year-old Negro boy whom he replaced had disappeared a few weeks before his arrival. Father Leandro refused to hire another Negro boy, not because he loathed Negroes as he now loudly proclaimed, but because he was heartbroken and afraid that the new one would remind him of the one who had left without a word, after Father Leandro had raised him from the age of five. “Almost like a son,” he would tell himself in the privacy of his room, looking at his sagging face in the mirror. At the time, refusing to hire a Negro servant in San Cristóbal de La Habana was tantamount to renouncing servants. It was a miracle that Pedro had appeared at the church when he did, in the opinion of the cook, a vast mulatto woman who paid no attention to Father Leandro’s rants about the ingratitude of Negroes, which she found self-evident and not in need of reiteration. “He spoiled that boy,” she told Pedro. “I always said it’d end badly.” Pedro agreed with everything she said, and was rewarded with extra bread. He was guarded, though, with her and everyone else. His first confession with Father Leandro was very satisfactory. Pedro knew his catechism inside out and gave all the right answers. He did not lie to the priest, but kept certain things to himself. These were things that he could not peel off himself any more than he could peel off his own skin. He reasoned that they must not be acquired habits or sensibilities, let alone sins, but rather traits he was born with. God had made him that way. He would shed his marrano skin, gladly, and become a Christian, but he would not toss away the self that God had created, the self that Jesus had died on the cross to redeem. Pedro would have been appalled to realize that he was being duplicitous, throwing his marrano skin to the Christian wolves so that he could keep his inner Jew safe, in some secret box. But he never did because he never told anyone those “certain things.” Not Father Leandro. Not even his wife and children. Only sometimes did he tell Jacinto in his dreams. Little by little, those “certain things,” as he himself called them, lost their names and any connection to other people, places, or history and became just who he was. When he died, he did not know he was dying as a Jew, but he did know that he was dying as himself.
13
Dry Blossoms
From across the river I could see the tiny stick figure high up against the darkening sky. McCabe was still standing on the edge of the ravine, where I had left her. Was she waiting for me to return and push her to her death? My elaborate plan for justice had not accounted for meekness. Oh, what meekness on the face of a criminal can do to the judge and executioner. Meekness, which carries no understanding of the crime, whether factual or moral, because it is an essential trait, like the wings of angels, that precedes any action or thought, even birth.
I sat on a fallen tree trunk to catch my breath. I had fled down Round Hill and across the bridge, then followed the trail by the water, toward the sunset and the remaining light. The shadows from the east were nipping at my heels as I rushed down the trail, trying to keep my feet dry. That is how Turgenev would have written it, and that is exactly how I remember it. The trail was getting soft, announcing the beginning of the marshes. By the time I collapsed on the tree trunk, the shadows had overtaken me. I did not have a flashlight, but I did not need one. I had taken the trail for years as a kid to sneak into town.
I stood up and began to walk toward Shangri-La. I do not know why. My feet just took me. I looked back up at the Judge’s land before the river turned. It was now too dark to tell if the tiny stick figure was still there.
Shangri-La did not appear before me all at once. It crept in, lazily, as always. First came big chunks of brush in between the little cinder-block houses. Then, the brush became smaller, and larger the number of mangy dogs and barefooted children staring at me in malignant silence from their tiny backyards.
In the white neighborhoods to the east, decks, gardens, terraces, and picture windows overlooked the river. Shangri-La, on the other hand, turned its back to the water, which it saw as the enemy. Windowless rear walls fortified her against it. Her first lines of defense were the slivers of mud enclosed by rusty chicken wire that were grandiosely called backyards. You could not sit inside a Shangri-La house or stand in any backyard and look at the river. Nor would you want to if you were in your right mind. The river did not flow by Shangri-La: it stagnated there, foul and ugly, breeding mosquitoes long before sewers were installed and began disgorging fecal matter into the waters. Once or twice a year, without warning, the river swelled and flooded the backyards. Chicken, pigs, and children were then corralled on front porches, while flood ditches were dug in back.
Shangri-La preferred to face its inner roads, once a symbol of progress and civilization when they were new and sidewalks had been promised. Now crumbling, they were an indifferent sight to the current inhabitants. The few old-timers who did remember sat on porches with their backs to the road, enclosed in thickets of morning glories and potato vines that kept their disappointment out of sight.
I climbed the low riverbank behind my parents’ house, holding on to roots with my hands while my feet slipped in the mud. After my mother’s death, seven years ago, I had sold the house for $15,000 to a Mexican who worked at t
he remaining poultry-processing factory. That money was long gone. I reached the chicken-wire fence and crawled under it into our pathetic backyard. The house had disappeared. Only charred ruins were left, covered by a forest of thick, oversized brambles with killer thorns.
I was nailed to the ground. Not by shock, but by egocentric predicament. The house was not there, yet it was still there. As long as I stood there, it would remain there. I had been happy in this house. I had a happy childhood. Even my sometimes unhappy adolescence was happy. I was loved here. An only child, I was my parents’ pride and hope, my grandmother’s joy, Ezequiel and Genoveva’s indulged goddaughter, standing in for the little girl they kept trying for in vain, and Rafael’s brother, pal, fraternal twin. The burden of past happiness became unbearable. Charred ruins were the ointment that healed.
Night had fallen. My limbs regained movement. In the dim reflection of the corner streetlight, I stepped into the land that had held my old bedroom, trying not to get flayed by the thorny brambles. They were impossible to avoid. Soon, my left hand was scratched and bleeding. I kept my right hand in my pocket for protection.
The ground was higher where the house had stood. Its charred remains had created a thick layer of blackened chunks of concrete and wood. It was in that rich fire loam that the unusually robust brambles had grown. If they spread throughout Shangri-La, life would become hell for men. Every summer and fall my father and Ezequiel spent entire weekends with machetes in their hands, hacking away at the old brambles, pygmies by comparison to these, and burning them to the ground. Just so that Rafael and I could play in our contiguous backyards.
Had the house burned down accidentally, or was it arson? Nothing remotely useful had been left in the charred debris—no copper pipes, bolts, electrical wire, or roof tiles, but plenty of mosaic shards. We had green and gold Byzantine mosaic floors in every room just like they had in La Esperanza, even if they were expensive here, and impractical in the cold, humid winter months. My parents had installed them by themselves, working nights and weekends. I carried them from their boxes on the porch to the room where, crawling on their hands and knees, they placed them down. It took them two years to finish the whole house.
The Cohen house, next door, kept its original cement floors. Years later, when cement floors became fashionable among the very rich, Ezequiel bragged that he had seen it coming. My parents never contradicted him, although I once caught my mother rolling her eyes. They loved Ezequiel and indulged him despite his lack of ambition, which, my mother explained to me one night, was his only fault, but not his fault. I understood then that people are born with a certain moral temperament that they cannot change and should not be blamed for. At school I was taught the opposite. Every first Friday of the month, the principal made us yell in unison, pumping the air with our little right fists: “Yes, I can!” “Yes, I can!” “Yes, I can, and I will!” The future National Security Advisor loathed those Inspirational Fridays as much as I loved them. He just mouthed the words until the day he was caught and severely caned on his bare buttocks in the principal’s office. After that, he screamed like everybody else, which was for him an unbearable humiliation.
I picked up a gold mosaic shard from our living room and put it in my pocket. The Cohen home was still there, on my right, packed now with destitute Mexicans, judging from the rotting lean-to shacks filling its backyard and the blaring norteño cacophony. I wondered if the house was rented, sold, or squatted in. Standing in the midst of the bramble forest that used to be our kitchen, I could not see Glorita’s house on the left, but I heard its soft hum. “Every house has a distinctive breath, and every room within every house,” Bebe had once said, showing me her room-tone calibrator.
It was snowing when Glorita moved in next door with her godmother, Altagracia, a cook in the white people’s retirement home on the other side of town. Glorita was five years old, like me. Our carnal liaison began that same day, rolling on the snow in her new backyard, warm tongues licking each other’s frozen lips, and lasted until the day I boarded that refugee bus. We were nineteen then. I never heard from her after that.
A father was never mentioned. Glorita’s mother, who had died in childbirth, was complicatedly related to the godmother. So Altagracia was doubly bound to raise Glorita. A godmother raising an orphan was better than an ordinary parent. Altagracia was somebody in Shangri-La. She’d had a choice and done the right thing. I envied Glorita her godmother. Altagracia was wide, and regal, with copper skin the color of Glorita’s hair, and a native south-Texas drawl that got stronger every year. No one ever ratted on Glorita, kid or adult, because they were afraid to break Altagracia’s heart.
I could have gone down to the riverbank and climbed back up to Glorita’s house. Instead, I chose to walk through the brambles to reach the road, a half-hour Via Dolorosa through our phantom kitchen, living room, porch, and front yard that bloodied my arms, hands, and face.
The corner streetlight blinked, then went off. Blind, on the pitch-black road, I walked the short distance to Glorita’s house guided only by its hum, which became polyphonic as I approached, a weaving of room tones, as Bebe had explained to me, presciently, that day years ago. The house was shuttered and intact. There was no name on the gate. My eyes had gotten accustomed to the dark. I looked around to see if anyone was watching. Earlier, there would have been a dozen eyes behind the window shades, but this was dinner and telenovela time. The norteño racket had given way to women’s bravura crying and fighting, punctuated by flashes of alarming symphonic music. The front yard and the porch were clean and empty: no furniture, no sign that anyone lived there. I circled the house trying to listen, but my footsteps were the only sound. A car came down the road. I hid behind the house, not wanting to be seen. The car did not stop. Abruptly tired and hungry, I longed to be back in the Judge’s house, which now felt unreachable in space and time. I sat in the dirt, leaning against the back wall, facing the chicken-wire fence and, beyond, the invisible river. I must have fallen asleep.
When I woke up, the quarter moon was out, and Shangri-La was perfectly silent. By the position of the moon, I calculated that it was just after midnight. I circled Glorita’s house again, leaning my shoulder against doors and windows and pushing hard. The kitchen door gave in with a groan. Like all kitchen doors in Shangri-La, it was on the right side of the house, toward the back. I stepped in and closed it carefully behind me. The hinges made the same scratchy sound as when Glorita sneaked out at night. The house was scrubbed clean and smelled disconcertingly fresh. There was a new fridge in the kitchen and a big, new TV set in the living room. The rest was old and faded, as if it had always been there. At first, it felt unfamiliar, except for a few items that I immediately recognized: the two rocking chairs that Glorita and I used to bring out onto the porch, unless it was raining (they were her godmother’s two good pieces of furniture, left to her by her mother); Glorita’s little-girl bed with the hand-painted flower buds on the headboard, which I always looked at while we kissed; her matching dressing-table; her bedroom wallpaper of tiny roses braided with gold.
After a while, however, the entire house seemed to be as I remembered it. Every single item was true. Even the new fridge and TV set now appeared in my mental snapshot if I closed my eyes. The present was becoming memory, implanting itself more vividly in my mind every minute I spent in that house, while my true memories dried out and turned to dust. Sitting on the rocking chair where Glorita always sat, her naked leg slung over the arm, I fought back against the power of the house. I tried to hold on to what remained of my memories, those brittle, wispy, shreds, to prevent what I was seeing now from supplanting them, but it was a lost battle. I could not tell whether I was holding on to the old, or the invading new. Like the woman giving in to the sweetness of the conquering pod, I meekly let the house enter my mind.
14
Reckoning
Glorita and Bebe are like Saint Theresa’s two candles, so close that they produce a single flame. Yet, they ca
n be separated, and each will subsist. Distinct, but one. First there was Glorita, then Bebe. Each announced the other. Forward and backward. Yes, my timid epiphany: Glorita announced Bebe, but Bebe also announced Glorita. I see it clearly now.
When I had a well-fed brain, it was too enslaved by Bebe’s flesh to understand. Even after she became Mrs. McCabe and I declared myself cured of her, the longing to touch her, lick her, smell her armpits, swim up and down inside her persisted—locked in a cage, in some shameful corner, but alive. Unrequited lust is eternal, as long as there is flesh to support it. I never even stole a kiss from Bebe, unlike with Glorita, whose every delicious corner I poked and squeezed for years. Glorita, who denied me nothing, except perhaps her love, I forgot until I came back here. I did not even keep her in a cage. She was erased. Or so I thought. And McCabe? Was she one, or two? What was she? These are mysteries I would like to live long enough to understand.
Now that all the flesh I have left is in one tenuous brainstem, philosophy comes naturally to me. I have no trouble understanding abstractions that used to elude me when I was a short, stocky, female biped. Infinity and immortality are as simple to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch as boiling coffee. Losing my sensory organs has sharpened my memory of the past. Of the present, all I can perceive is how dry, brittle, and powdery I am becoming. I cannot imagine my last shred of flesh surviving for long in this sub-zero temperature. I won’t suffer. I do not, I cannot, feel cold. I can keep time, though, so I know that today is January 31, and that Rafael Cohen has been dead for thirty-seven days.