by Achy Obejas
Five years after she’d applied for el bombo, Marisol’s number had finally come up. Now it had been three years since she’d moved to Miami, and six weeks since Beatriz had last heard from her, the longest they had ever gone without communicating. Usually, Marisol called for a fifteen-minute check-in on the first Sunday of each month, and also, at some point each month, Beatriz received a letter with twenty-five or fifty dollars sent via a visitor Marisol had met in Miami. But this month there had been no phone call, and without Internet or even a way to dial the U.S. directly, Beatriz had been unable to contact Marisol on her own. She’d tried calling collect a few times, but Marisol was never there—she worked odd hours, a different schedule each week at an all-night restaurant whose name Beatriz couldn’t remember.
People tried to reassure her that everything was all right. It was just the distractions of Marisol’s new life, they would say. It was just la Coca-Cola del olvido.
Beatriz had suffered through so many secondhand stories of good-kid-turned-selfish-capitalist-pig that she’d wanted to scream. Each time, she’d shaken her head and recounted how, through all Marisol’s travails of the past three years, she had always managed to call, to send some small amount of money home to help out.
But this is how it is with la Coca-Cola del olvido, Beatriz’s friends had told her, as though this were not just an expression but the name of some unpredictable, incurable disease. It happens without warning, they said.
To occupy her mind and time, and to make up for her absent allowance this month, Beatriz had taken the remaining twenty-five dollars of Marisol’s last remittance and, through an extensive network of friends who could acquire the objects at their workplaces, had invested in some sharp scissors, a small plastic squirter, bottles of rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide, some shaving cream and aftershave, a pair of shiny metal tweezers, a nail clipper, three bottles of nail polish (red, purple, and pink) and some nail polish remover, a file, a fine-toothed comb, and a pack of six razors. She’d practiced on a friend next door, and then she’d begun her black market beautician tour where, by shaving one face each night and performing one eyebrow pluck for just eight pesos each, she could earn twice as much as she made each month at her engineering job, which she felt obliged to keep so as to not provoke suspicion. And, of course, to maintain her professional status for when the next revolution came, after which, she was certain, Marisol would return.
Beatriz’s second stop tonight was at a solar, a step down from a ciudadela. Here, most of the one-room houses did not have bathrooms, and several were without kitchens. Through a narrow doorway with no door, Beatriz stepped into the courtyard of the former mansion, now a cement floor covered with little puddles of water. The only light inside the solar came in the form of a thin orange glow from beneath the individual families’ doors. The courtyard walls were cracked, and Beatriz could hear cockroaches scurrying in the shadows near where a shirtless man stood stirring some pot over a communal stove. A corner shack served as a bathroom, minus the toilet paper and lightbulb, which each occupant supplied for herself.
This stop was not actually prearranged, but Beatriz felt the need to find an extra customer to make up for Marilys asking her to come back next week. Her postponement of the eyebrow pluck was unusual. Habaneros were a proud people; they might be suffering through their third night of pollo al bloqueo (chicken meat the first night, rice and fried chicken skin the second, chicken-bone soup the third), but look askew at an Habanera’s fingernails and she would find the money for a manicure.
If she must, Beatriz decided, she would use this tactic to convince Rita, whose gray hair she had bleached a platinum-blond ten days ago, that she needed a haircut.
Rita lived on the second floor of the solar, and as Beatriz used the banister to feel her way up the unlit staircase, she stumbled on a chipped step and felt her knee slam into the cold, hard marble. Her beautician bag slipped from her shoulder and tumbled back down the steps. By the time she regained her balance and retrieved her goods, her hands were trembling and her knee throbbing. She arrived at Rita’s door out of breath and with her heart beating so loudly she was sure it could suffice for a knock.
Rita opened the door a crack and then, once she recognized Beatriz, a crack more, flooding the corridor with light. In her long white nightgown, she looked like an aging angel.
“I almost killed myself on your steps just now,” Beatriz said, going for the sympathy sale. “I came up to ask if you’d like a haircut tonight.”
“Oh my!” Rita said. “You didn’t bring your flashlight?”
“Battery’s dead,” Beatriz replied.
“Mine too,” Rita said, nodding. Timidly, she patted at her short and, in this light, neon-blond hair. “Well, I guess I could use a trim tonight. I’d invite you in,” she added, hesitating, “but my husband’s in his underwear. We’ve just finished watching the telenovela.”
“He can sit in the bedroom. It shouldn’t take me that long,” Beatriz said, surprising herself with her assertiveness.
“Oh, all right,” Rita conceded. “You hear that, Ernesto?” She stepped back as a fleshy white figure with droopy boxers darted into the bedroom, separated from the main room by a thin sheet suspended from the ceiling.
In the living room, Rita settled into a rocking chair, and Beatriz used two clothespins to attach a worn white pillowcase to her upper back. She squirted water in Rita’s hair and handed her a tiny broken slab of mirror to inspect the process.
“Still no word from Marisol?” Rita asked as her friend began cutting.
Beatriz shook her head into the mirror, her reflection smudged and distorted. “And your son, how is he?” she asked. Rita’s son, a musician who had requested political asylum while touring in Mexico two years ago, now lived in New Jersey.
“He’s well, I think,” Rita said. “Although I haven’t heard from him for a while either. Bueno, ya tú sabes.”
Beatriz nodded, grateful to Rita for not starting in with la Coca-Cola del olvido. Rita told her about a woman she knew who had been changing jobs a lot lately, provoking suspicions in the neighborhood. Rita became animated as she told the story, waving her arms and the mirror.
“Rita, stay still,” said Beatriz, clipping close to her ear.
A small white dog walked in from the balcony and started sniffing under Rita’s nightgown.
“Ay, Yochi, vete!” Rita kicked her legs at the dog.
Beatriz sighed and put her hands firmly on Rita’s head. She had a sudden, stinging flash of déjà vu, recalling how she used to take the same stance with Marisol when she was little and refused to sit still for her haircuts.
“Don’t cut too much,” Rita said as Beatriz trimmed a piece she had missed in the back.
“Don’t worry. It looks good,” Beatriz said, placing her hand gently on Rita’s neck. “And actually, if you’re satisfied, I think I’m done.”
Rita studied herself once more in the jagged mirror, smiling at what she saw. She handed Beatriz her pay at the door and then stood with it open, shedding light on her friend’s descent.
* * *
In Marisol’s last letter, she’d written that she had enrolled in English classes.
I’m getting tired of the politics in Miami, all the anger and constant rehashing of the past, she’d written. And I’ve decided that I want to leave, and that the first step to doing so is to improve my English.
Marisol went on to write that she had come up with a plan for her future. She wanted to move to New York and enroll in art school. She had recently started painting again, and she was going to submit some of her slides for a few scholarships for Latino students.
When I receive one, she’d written, I’m hoping that with some money I’ve been saving I can come home for a visit.
As much as Beatriz had wanted to tell someone, to tell everyone that her daughter would be back to see her, she had refrained, not wanting to jinx this good news by discussing it prematurely. She had decided to hold off on sayin
g anything until a ticket had been purchased. She had decided to wait patiently until she received word from Marisol, not knowing at the time of the even greater patience that would soon be demanded of her.
As Beatriz made her way down Zulueta Street to what she hoped would be her final house of the night, the drizzle turned into a full-on downpour. The few unfortunate souls still in the street ran as if on fire, intent on getting home before the dilapidated balconies above them began falling, as they were known to do during hurricane season. A lone cyclist futilely spun the pedals of his clunky Chinese bike, his fenderless wheels spitting street slime all over his bare legs.
The sky echoed with the crash of thunder, and the eerie, almost human cry of cats mating emanated from behind an open dumpster.
Outside the house of her friend Fefé, who had requested a haircut tonight, Beatriz heard what sounded like foreign voices. Before she could get close enough to listen more carefully, a gust of wind blew open the front door, revealing a party gathered around a small color TV. There were grandmothers and babies, middle-aged men and children of all ages watching a cartoon family sit down for dinner. The curvaceously drawn mother whose hair was styled in a beehive was pointing her finger angrily and yelling in English at a beer-bellied man at the head of the table, while a baby sat in a high chair, sucking a pacifier.
Beatriz’s first thought was that Fefé’s sister, who lived in La Yuma, must have sent back this video of American TV. Her second, more wishful thought was that maybe there had been money padding the video package and, maybe, if Fefé was feeling generous tonight, she would offer her guests a round of haircuts on the house. Beatriz spotted a woman who could use a new bleach job, and there was a teenage girl who could certainly benefit from her pore-purifying treatment.
But at the moment, everyone was too mesmerized by the muñequitos to even notice Beatriz standing tentatively in the doorway. She cleared her throat, and said, “Oye! Y aquí, qué bolá?”
“Oh, Beatriz!” Fefé said when she turned around along with the rest of the party. “With all the excitement, I completely forgot about my haircut.”
Fefé motioned for Beatriz to come in, and the crowd parted to make space for her. To the side of the TV was a white, plate-shaped structure that Fefé pointed to proudly.
“It’s an antenna,” she told Beatriz. “My son in Spain sent me some money last week, and I bought it from this man on Concordia who sells them as his negocio. Now we can get every station they get in La Yuma. It’s amazing the variety, and the crazy things they watch there.”
“Like what?” Beatriz asked, glancing at the screen again. She couldn’t understand a word of what was being said. “Does anyone here speak English?”
Fefé looked around, perplexed, as if the thought had never occurred to her. They all shook their heads.
“There are a lot of programs in Spanish,” Fefé said. “I’ll give you a taste of the stations while you give me my haircut.”
Beatriz positioned herself behind Fefé, took out her pillowcase, and, as discretely as possible, wiped off Rita’s stray hairs. “How much?” she asked as she pulled back a ponytail of Fefé’s thick brown, shoulder-length hair.
Fefé put a hand on her neck, just an inch below her ears. “I saw a woman on one of these channels with her hair this length, and layered—make mine layered—and it looked very nice.”
While Beatriz pinned her hair, Fefé flipped through the stations. It was true what she’d said about what those Americanos watched. There was every type of program imaginable—telenovelas and comedies and scientific shows. There were, Fefé said, stations that ran movies all night, and ones that showed twenty-four-hour sports, the likes of which Beatriz had never seen before—people scaling sheer rock walls, suspended by a series of thin ropes and supported, it seemed, by nothing; people trying to balance on oval-shaped boards in the ocean as the waves beat them down; and people standing on still smaller boards with wheels and riding up and down treacherously sloped platforms. Why would anyone willingly put himself through this? Beatriz wondered.
On a Spanish-language station, there was a show without any actors, just real people, a panel of three women accusing their partners of having slept with the other women’s daughters or mothers. Things like this went on in Cuba, Beatriz knew, but why were all these people on TV, airing their dirty laundry for the world to see? And then, also in Spanish, there was a courtroom show where, in the two-minute clip Beatriz saw, two former friends were yelling at each other about a slippery spot on one’s driveway that had caused the other to fall and break her leg when she had stopped by for a visit.
Beatriz made a mental note to ask Marisol if she knew about this case, to remind her to clear all slippery things from her driveway. She felt strange thinking about this side of American life she had never known about before, and she felt disturbed by her inability to picture Marisol in this world.
In their first few conversations after Marisol had left, she had tried to tell Beatriz about all the differences in La Yuma, but it had been too much for Beatriz to comprehend, and soon their conversations had reverted to simpler and more universal topics, like the weather and the salaries at different jobs. They had talked a lot about money and, Beatriz now realized, most often their conversations had focused on the problems in Cuba. At some point, Marisol had stopped trying to explain her life in La Yuma.
“Very early in the morning there is even pornografía,” Fefé announced as she flipped the station once more, pulling Beatriz out of her thoughts. “Men with pingas the size of elephants’!”
There was a hearty round of laughter, and then someone called out, “Las noticias!”
“Oh, right,” Fefé said. “There’s Spanish-language news right now on Univisión.”
Unlike Cuban news, which was essentially a recapping of all that was going well on the island, Univisión seemed to recount only the disastrous. It was a litany of loss—a baby stolen from a shopping cart as the mother turned her back for a split second to pick out a green pepper, a man who returned to his hometown twenty years after he graduated from high school and murdered the teacher who had failed him in geometry.
“Escucha eso!” Fefé announced. “Their news is more sensational than our telenovelas.” Everyone nodded their heads in shocked silence.
When a photo of George Bush came on the screen, a loud hiss reverberated through Fefé’s living room, making it impossible for Beatriz to hear what the newscaster was saying.
By the time the local Miami news came on, Beatriz had cut a good four inches off of Fefé’s hair, and she was beginning to feel a little worried about how Fefé would react to the end result. Personally, Beatriz didn’t think that she had the type of face for short hair. It wasn’t angular enough, and would now look even rounder.
Beatriz was about to hand Fefé the bit of broken mirror when she heard the newscaster mention something about Havana.
“…After nearly two weeks of investigations into the bombing of the gallery, located on a side street in Little Havana…” the newscaster was saying, and Beatriz realized she’d misheard him.
Fefé was so caught up in the news that Beatriz decided to wait for a commercial break. Even after just two weeks of cutting hair, Beatriz had learned her lesson about asking people to approve further cutting when they were distracted, only to have them angrily retract their consent after the fact.
Beatriz set down her scissors and held the mirror in her hand, turning her attention back to the TV.
“Police have reported that the explosion was set off by a group of Cuban exiles who refer to themselves as ‘Los Rectificantes,’” the newscaster continued. And once more, a loud hiss filled the living room. “They claim to have been protesting the five painters whose works were exhibited, all of whom still reside in Cuba and have been labeled as Castro-supporters by the bombers.”
“Son terroristas todos!” a man next to Fefé declared angrily.
“Although the bombing took place when the gallery was cl
osed, police have confirmed that there was one casualty, a young woman who had been peering through the window at the moment the bomb went off.”
As the photo of a smiling mulatta flashed onto the screen, her face framed by long black ringlets sun-streaked with redgold, the newscaster’s voice was once again drowned out, not by hisses this time, but by a lone, shrill wail, and the sound of shattering glass.
PART IV
DROWNING IN SILENCE
ZENZIZENZIC
BY ACHY OBEJAS
Chinatown
There it was, framed by the oval of my airplane window: a shout of palms and prickly grass, low concrete buildings with exposed stones in hopeless need of As we descended, plumes of smoke, both paint and repair. black and white, spiraled up to meet us. I’m told exiles returning to Cuba sob as soon as the plane door pops open and the blinding Caribbean sky spills before them. But not me.
When I stepped onto the tarmac, the wet tropical air pawed at me reeking of mildew. The skies were a sweet pastel but I could barely see. I held my breath for the first few steps thinking the smell was just a bad patch—one of those sulphurous smoke trails having descended back to earth perhaps—but all was lost the minute I had to respond to the military guy with the official passenger list flapping wildly on his clipboard. His finger pointed at something and sweat ran from behind my ears.
“Yep, that’s me, Malía Mercado,” I muttered. It’d be rude to hold my nose or cover my mouth, so I was praying for my senses to acclimate quickly, very quickly. How could anybody stand this for long?
“María Mercado, sí,” he said, and went to correct the spelling on his neatly typed list.
“No, no—Malía, not María—Malía’s right,” I said in my best Spanish.
“Malía?” he asked, a hint of a smile disturbing his officially somber face.
“Yes, it’s Hawaiian,” I said, the Spanish accent my parents had added notwithstanding.