Ruins

by Achy Obejas

  He knew that if he went home, he wouldn’t have the strength to make his case to Lidia. His single consolation was knowing the broken lamp he’d found in the ruins—the Tiffany!—was safely hidden somewhere in the back of the bodega, stuffed in a cardboard box and wrapped in a blanket. He was certain no one at the bodega would ever grasp its worth.

  Last night, standing over Nena and Lidia, he had finally and stubbornly checked the magnificent one for the signature—the T with the other letters hanging off it. He had climbed up on the bed and poked his head inside the lamp until it looked like he was wearing it for a hat. Then he lowered the lamp, slowly, careful not to strain the chain or the electrical wires—though from the ceiling a fine grit rained on him and his family. When he concluded his search, he looked up and realized the hole from which the lamp dropped was bigger now, wider.

  Yet he couldn’t think about it right then, couldn’t even consider the consequences because, once he’d had the magnificent one up close to him, he’d taken to it like an archaeologist might: with gentle care, with precision, but with a kind of focus that blackens away all else. He scoured every centimeter, with both his eyes and his hand—maybe, he considered, the initials were engraved but no longer visible. Perhaps they’d come up like Braille. But not even using a magnifying glass nor the bicarbonate of soda that Jacinto had once given him had helped Usnavy find what he was looking for. (All the while, he knew, Nena and Lidia were attempting sleep underneath him and the lamp, wordless and resentful.)

  This was considerably more magnificent than any lamp he had ever seen—but, he admitted to himself with sadness, it was not a real Tiffany. Its creator, he figured, must have been a Cuban who didn’t know what he was doing; another Juan Nobody who didn’t understand that his talent was celestial but ultimately useless because it lacked a giant T to quantify and qualify it.

  “Psssst … Usnavy …”

  A sleepy Usnavy snapped to attention at the bodega counter.

  “Usnavy, coño …”

  It was Diosdado, standing in the middle of the street, his bifocals on the tip of his nose, motioning his friend over with a jerk of his head. He quickly looked over his shoulder.

  “What …?”

  “C’mere,” said Diosdado, his stubby legs planted stiffly, his impatient professorial air in full bloom.

  Usnavy put down his Hemingway, ran his fingers through his white hair, and got up, sliding back into his shoes. His knees and elbows cracked, every juncture in his body yelled for grease.

  “I’m getting old,” he said to Diosdado as he walked around the counter to the middle of the street. The raw blister on his foot was rubbing against the leather, causing him to lean a little as he walked. If he had his bike, he thought to himself, he wouldn’t feel this way. His limbs would be loose from exercise, his circulation would be flowing like the Nile. There would be no blister.

  His friend ignored his complaint. “You drive, right?”

  “Well, it’s been a long time …” It had been years, decades even, since Usnavy had chauffeured Americans around Guantánamo, the only time he’d ever had behind the wheel of an automobile. It had been since before the Revolution, when he was just a boy.

  “But it’s just like riding a bike, right? You never forget?” insisted Diosdado.

  “I … I don’t know,” Usnavy said.

  “Look, Usnavy, I need your help.” Diosdado didn’t ask the way Obdulio had, impatient but as a friend. The manner in which Diosdado talked was almost a demand, defensive but proud. “It doesn’t matter to me whether you approve or not, you can think whatever you want. I’m going to offer you money for something, okay? And you can accept it or not, think badly of it, whatever you want. But I’m going to do this—and believe me, if you don’t help, I’ll find somebody else who will. I’m coming to you first because of all the years we’ve known each other, and because—in spite of your stupid revolutionary purity—I know you need the money. For your information—okay?—I can hear your stomach grumbling during the domino games, and I’m sure Nena and Lidia’s must be screaming too.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Usnavy demanded, hands on hips, indignant.

  “I need a driver—you want to make some money? Real money? Dollars? I’ll pay you to drive for me.”

  Usnavy shook his head in dismay and dropped his arms. “Diosdado, are you out of your mind or something?” he asked, now laughing sarcastically. “Did you lose your senses after that argument the other day, is that it? You think you’re a foreigner or something? You don’t have a car, my friend!”

  Usnavy started to walk away but a determined Diosdado grabbed his arm and yanked him back.

  “That’s the car I need you to drive,” Diosdado said, nodding in the direction of a white Daewoo parked a block away, near the Badagry woman’s home. In that instant, Usnavy recalled her lamp—the one in the living room, the one her nephew had supposedly misplaced and Usnavy thought he’d seen over her shoulder—did it have a T anywhere on it?

  “That’s a rented car, Diosdado,” Usnavy said, reluctantly setting thoughts of Tiffany aside.

  “Yes, I need a driver for it. Will you do it?”

  Usnavy squinted in the car’s direction: It was certainly an expensive vehicle, he knew, with air-conditioning and tinted windows. He’d seen tourists pop open the back on cars like that and stuff in suitcase after suitcase. He always supposed they were en route to the airport, taking Cuba’s trinkets and treasures with them.

  “How’d you rent a car? What are you doing?” Usnavy asked. If it had been Frank, he’d have figured it was a scheme of some sort—he was always into money-making plots—but this was Diosdado, who acted responsibly nearly all of the time. Diosdado was insufferable, but of good morals.

  “I didn’t rent it. The person who rented it is a Canadian, a friend of my … of my …” Diosdado paused. His Adam’s apple slung high and his dry lips seemed to open for an eternity, without sound, without breath.

  Usnavy relaxed his own stance; it was a delicate moment and he didn’t want Diosdado to pull away with one of his sudden outbursts. He raised his hand to his friend’s shoulder and gave it a slight squeeze. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Of course I’m okay!” Diosdado bellowed, offended, shaking Usnavy’s hand off his shoulder. “Now are you in or what?”

  The Daewoo was cramped. “If you can’t drive, how’d you get it here?” he asked Diosdado as he struggled to fit into the driver’s seat. He couldn’t believe he’d agreed to drive a foreigner around—as if it were thirty-five years before, as if the Revolution had never taken place! What was happening to him? He’d closed the bodega down without even bothering to call someone to sub for him. I’m just helping out a friend, he told himself over and over, trying to be convincing.

  “There’s a little lever down there, under the seat, I think, which will move the seat,” Diosdado said, leaning down from the passenger’s side to the floor, tilting his head to better see through the lower half of his bifocals. He looked like a scientist, or an inspector.

  “How’d you get it here?” Usnavy asked again, fingering the lever. He pulled on it and the seat suddenly plunged back, leaving his feet dangling off the pedals. Usnavy’s stomach sloshed about. The sewed-up sole of his shoe snagged for an instant on the brake pedal edge but it didn’t quite come loose.

  “Ah, that’s it … but you’ve got to bring it up a little.” Diosdado ignored his friend’s question yet again.

  “Maybe if you get in the backseat and push me, I can get it to stay put a little closer to the pedals.”

  Diosdado popped his head up and glared at Usnavy. “Don’t be such an underdeveloped moron, for god’s sake,” he said. “This is a First World vehicle. Do you really think someone has to climb in the back to push you in order to adjust the seat?”

  “It’s Korean or something,” Usnavy snapped. “It’s Third World, just like us.”

  “You know what I mean,” Diosdado said. “Just pull the lev
er and bring yourself up. It can’t be that hard!”

  Usnavy tugged on the lever and scooted, letting the seat click into place. “Yes, I know exactly what you mean—which is that anything that’s Cuban is difficult—anything that isn’t Cuban is wonderful,” he said, annoyed that Diosdado’s instructions had worked.

  “What are you talking about? Are you going to try and turn this into another Cuba-against-the-world argument—because I’m not ready for that, okay? Not now,” Diosdado shot back, frustrated, as he quickly adjusted the passenger’s seat. “Cubans don’t make cars and have never made cars so there’s not even a point of comparison, all right?”

  “You know why we don’t make cars?” Usnavy asked, his two feet desperately trying to remember how to handle the clutch and the accelerator and the brake all at once. If Lidia were here, he thought, she’d be giggling at his clumsiness. “Because we have allowed the world to think we can’t make cars. I mean, why not? Why wouldn’t we be able to make cars? Other small nations make cars—Japan, see, Korea and Italy, even the Yugoslavians. We could make cars if given the chance.”

  Diosdado rolled his eyes.

  Usnavy turned the ignition only to have the engine grind so loud—it was like a drill, nails on a blackboard, and a squealing pig all rolled into one—that people on the street and nearby stoops shouted at him to stop. The Badagry woman and her two elderly widowed sisters peered out their barred window, a corona of light behind them. This would never have happened to Lidia.

  “Oh my god! Oh my god!” screamed Diosdado, twisting in his seat as if he were having a seizure. “Do you have a clue what you’re doing? Do you have a clue? Because if something happens to this car, Usnavy, I’m … I’m …”

  “I told you it had been a long time, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you that?”

  Usnavy slammed his foot on the clutch and turned the key again. This time the engine purred and the neighbors smiled and clapped. But as soon as Usnavy tried to put the car in gear, it leapt ahead of him and died again. The neighbors chortled but for Jacinto, who walked by in such a hurry he didn’t even notice it was Usnavy in the car. Diosdado groaned and slid down in the seat.

  “Give me a minute, just give me a minute,” Usnavy pleaded, turning the car on again. With his foot firmly on the clutch, he maneuvered the gear shaft through the diagram on the knob: up and down, then up to the right and down, then … His blistered foot slipped and the motor whined back to silence. Maybe, he thought, it was a good thing Lidia wasn’t anywhere in sight, that way he wouldn’t ever have to tell her about this. And certainly Nena could never know: What would she think of him?

  “God help me,” Diosdado said, his eyes teary behind his bifocals.

  “Leave god out of this,” Usnavy snarled, remembering the betrayal of light from the first three biblical days, turning the key and working his feet so that the Daewoo lunged forward, rabbit-like, hurling all his neighbors in Old Havana off the streets and stoops, but with the highpitched sound of good-natured laughter trailing behind them.

  Usnavy followed Diosdado’s directions as best he could but Havana traffic was suddenly a horror to him. In Guantánamo a million years ago, there were only a few dozen vehicles and the population, he was certain, had respected stop signs and pedestrian crossings. Now, even in the very depths of the Special Period, Havana’s streets—so pleasant and spacious on a bike—seemed a confused labyrinth. Everyone ignored even the simplest rules of the road. When Usnavy whirled the steering wheel at a curb to avoid hitting a handful of kids playing stickball in the street, Diosdado screamed.

  “You’re hysterical!” Usnavy yelled at him. “Control yourself—you’ll only make things worse!”

  Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw the sparkly man from Lámparas Cubanas among the throngs leaping away from the Daewoo and was relieved to realize those had not been his chewed-up overalls floating off the Malecón. As the Daewoo careened down the block, the sparkly man, now holding his hip, turned and glowered in Usnavy’s direction.

  “Crazy old man!” someone yelled Usnavy’s way. It was a man’s voice he heard, but when he glanced in the rearview mirror there was only a statuesque mulatta, her figure shrinking in the distance, her wrists full of fantasy bracelets twinkling as she raised her fist to protest.

  Finally on a straight-ahead course out of the city, Usnavy threw the car into fifth gear—he’d never, ever, driven a car with a fifth gear before—and settled back. Lidia would love this, he thought.

  “You don’t know how to drive,” Diosdado said, curled into a fetal ball on the passenger’s side.

  “I’m driving, am I not?”

  “You’re like everybody else in this country, Usnavy, a braggart,” Diosdado said.

  “This is called driving, see?” Usnavy wiggled the wheel from side to side to show he’d gained command. The car zigzagged dangerously. “I may be a braggart but at least I’m not a coward like you. You’re afraid of everything—you’re afraid to imagine our greatness as Cubans because you can’t imagine your own.”

  “Usnavy, what have we ever done that’s great?”

  “What …?” Usnavy spun his head toward Diosdado—the car swerved—then back to the road. “Are you crazy? We have, first and foremost, set an example—”

  “Oh no.”

  “Look, Diosdado, we have been robbed as a nation—everybody knows that! We have been robbed of opportunities, and we have been robbed of our real achievements.”

  “No, no, no!” Diosdado covered his ears; he’d heard it all before so many times.

  “The Americans took away our war of independence from Spain,” Usnavy said.

  “Oh, please!”

  “Alexander Graham Bell ripped off Meucci—”

  “Who wasn’t Cuban but Italian!” interrupted Diosdado.

  “He lived here all his life, didn’t he? Duchamp ripped off Picabia—” (This wasn’t an argument either of them knew much about but they’d picked it up when Reynaldo had been a student at the Havana Art Institute and they’d since integrated it into their litany.)

  “Who wasn’t Cuban either but the son of some French diplomat stationed here.”

  “That’s a lie!” screamed Usnavy.

  “Picabia never even set foot in Cuba!”

  “That’s a lie! That’s a lie! I suppose that next you’re going to tell me Picasso didn’t rip off Wifredo Lam?”

  Diosdado sat up and turned to Usnavy. “I’ll give you that one, okay? But what if Picasso hadn’t ripped off Lam? What if Lam had been Picasso? Usnavy, look around … we’re not big enough for a Picasso. What would we have done with that much greatness?”

  When Diosdado and Usnavy arrived at their destination in Santa María del Mar, the beach was quiet and deserted. The water shone bright as a plate, flat and hard. As soon as the car came to a jerky stop off a park (as Diosdado indicated), a fresh-faced young foreigner looked up, delighted at the sight of them. He had been strewn on the grass, reading Fodor’s Cuba, and rushed toward them like a gazelle.

  Usnavy scrutinized the young man’s well-toned body, fashionable haircut, and the multilevel sports shoes that gave his step such an unnatural spring. He was close to thirty, but his expression was as trusting and clean as a toddler’s.

  “This is Burt, a friend from Canada,” Diosdado told Usnavy in Spanish. Then he said to the young foreigner: “Uss-nah-veee.”

  Burt was wearing khaki shorts and a dark Polo shirt. Wrapped around his head were a pair of sunglasses that looked like diving goggles, they were so big and all-encompassing. Dangling from the tips around his ears was a neon-green string which dropped down around his neck. It was as thick as a shoelace.

  Canadians, Americans: How could two peoples be so politically different and look so much alike? Usnavy figured, if American soldiers invaded Haiti they’d look as innocent and simple as Burt, who said something bright and fast in an incomprehensible English and stuck his hand out. Usnavy took it and felt the man’s unexpectedly slippery grip. />
  “So what now?” Usnavy asked, uncertain, turning away from the American-looking Canadian to his friend.

  “Okay, here’s what now,” said Diosdado, adjusting the bifocals on his nose and fingering his goatee like a wise old lecturer. “Our Canadian compañero first came to Cuba on a Jewish church mission.”

  “It can’t be both Jewish and a church mission, Diosdado—you know better!” exclaimed Usnavy.

  “You know what I mean,” Diosdado said through clenched teeth.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do—he came with one of those groups that bring bread and medicine to the Jewish community.”

  “The Americans, yes.”

  “No, you idiot, the Canadians—the Canadians came first.”

  “Right, right,” nodded Usnavy, glancing up at the strapping northerner, who smiled uneasily as the two old men argued.

  “Now it seems he has fallen in love with a local girl,” Diosdado explained. “She is an architectural guide, I believe. Her specialty is the Museum of the Revolution, before it was the Museum of the Revolution, back when it was the Presidential Palace. She talks to foreigners about the bullet holes from when they almost shot Batista, and the statues of Abraham Lincoln and the other heroes, and also about the chandeliers and cabinet work, all exclusively created by Tiffany & Company from New York.”

  Tiffany! Damn! The universe was just throwing Tiffany in his face.

  Diosdado continued, oblivious: “He has visited her many times, on various trips, and now he would like to propose marriage—this, even though she is not Jewish.”

  Usnavy knew he was supposed to rejoice at the thought of love itself, and at the foreigner’s appreciation of Cuban women, but he also knew romance had become a wicked thing in recent years: These days, love was more often just a strong desire to leave Cuba, a one-way ticket to anywhere but here. And as much as he tried to lift his lips in a smile, his eyes betrayed his sadness.