Ruins

by Achy Obejas

  “Congratulate him, Usnavy, this is good news, remember?” Diosdado said, prodding his friend with a quick cuff to his empty belly.

  Usnavy nodded in Burt’s direction. “Ber-ry gut,” he said, ravages of his childhood efforts to learn that difficult and privileged tongue.

  Burt’s sunburnt face expanded into a wide grin and he went off on an unfathomable monologue about …what? The girl? Cuba? Marriage? Usnavy never heard the word love—he knew the word love—but English was something far away and long ago for him, and the Canadian talked so strangely anyway.

  “Maybe he’s a French-Canadian?” Usnavy asked.

  “Of course not,” said Diosdado. “Can’t you tell the difference between French and English? We’d understand French, you cretin.” Diosdado smiled deferentially at the Canadian as he insulted Usnavy yet again.

  Usnavy cringed. Where was yesterday’s defiance? Where was yesterday’s resistance to foreign whim?

  Then Usnavy recalled his own mother, back in Oriente, and how she’d gone from a headstrong, independent girl to a gracious and accommodating hostess in just a few years. He tightened his fists, just like Yoandry at Lámparas Cubanas, then remembered Lidia and Nena and forced himself to relax, to extend his fingers like spider legs, to stop thinking before he became completely immobilized.

  When told about Burt’s plan, it struck Usnavy as cowardly and unworthy of real love, but he knew there was no point in saying anything. For starters, he literally couldn’t communicate with this gangly stranger. Moreover, what good would it do if he could? Would the Canadian listen to him? And what exactly would he say—that if he really loved her this was all a charade? That this kind of thing revealed more about him than anything they could possibly find out about her?

  Usnavy had gone this far, all the way to Santa María del Mar, to earn a few dollars and see if, somehow—he realized this as he was driving, realized it only after he was already committed—he could buy a bike for his daughter (although he was also having second thoughts now, because he didn’t want to inadvertently reward the awful incident at the hotel). He was too consumed with his own situation to worry much about some foreigner’s intimate problems.

  “Let me see if I understand,” Usnavy said to Diosdado as they settled into the Daewoo again, the Canadian having folded his uncommonly large body onto the floor of the backseat. “We’re going to drive by the girl’s house to see if she’s really home, like she told him she would be. That’s all?”

  “No, Usnavy, no,” replied Diosdado, clearly irritated but trying to pretend he was calm for Burt’s sake. “We’re going to drive by so he can see her with his own eyes. She doesn’t know he’s here. We’re going to drive by to make sure she’s not going out with anybody else—that she’s not out at parties or anything like that—so we need to do this very discretely. Get it?”

  “If you don’t understand English, then how do you know that’s what he wants to do?” Usnavy asked Diosdado as he started the car. He felt the weight of the foreigner’s bulk against the back of his seat. “I mean, this is pretty ridiculous.”

  “He’s a friend of … he’s a friend of Reynaldo’s,” said Diosdado. “My son explained it to me on the phone, before the Canadian got here. He has a whole plan. Now, c’mon, let’s go.” He pointed forward officiously, with an upturned palm, as if he were making an offering. He gazed out the window to the immense and placid blue of the ocean, then quickly at his shoes, with the most fleeting sideways glance at Usnavy before taking refuge back on the shore.

  Okay, thought Usnavy, then Reynaldo’s still Reynaldo—that’s that. He’d have to tell Frank, even if there was no possibility of an apology, or of bringing Diosdado back to the domino game any time soon.

  He slid the car into first, trying to calmly go through the other gears and not have the car vault down the street. But his first effort failed and the car died a terrible gnashing death, which caused the Canadian to pop his head up and say something no one understood.

  Diosdado leaned back in his seat, gave a transparently fake smile to the foreigner, and, patting the air with his hand as if it were Burt’s head, said, “Soh-rrreee, soh-rrreee.” Then he turned back and scowled at Usnavy.

  Eventually, with Burt occasionally materializing to mime instructions for Usnavy (his wraparound glasses still on his head, neon-green shoelaces framing his face), the Daewoo began its afternoon of cruising. The girl, it seemed, was vacationing in Santa María del Mar and Burt was able to spy her instantly, sitting on the steps of a beach house not far off the road. The Canadian laughed nervously when he spotted her, rattling off what Usnavy and Diosdado presumed were pronouncements of love and admiration, then ducked down so she wouldn’t see him.

  But this time Usnavy picked up another word in the Canadian’s verbiage, and it was as clear as the light from his magnificent lamp: Reina. He knew Diosdado heard it too, squirming there in the passenger’s seat, his eyes shut so tight his lids trembled like the ocean before a storm.

  The routine was simple enough: They drove by, confirmed it was still the same girl, and idled out of sight for a while. Then they cruised by again, pretending indifference. Sometimes, a middle-aged woman would stand at the door and talk with the girl; they figured she was her mother or an aunt. But mostly, the girl was alone or with a girlfriend, stretching, laughing, playing checkers, or gazing out at the world. This went on until dusk began to settle over the shore.

  Usnavy couldn’t tell much about the girl from behind the wheel. She was young, she had dark hair, like Nena. She had curvy hips and slightly bowed legs. Did she, like Nena, also need more than her parents could provide? Did she still know the words to “Tengo” or had she forgotten them by now?

  Maybe she could tell him more about Mr. Tiffany, later, after this episode faded … Maybe, he thought, she would prefer to stay at the museum, with its hero’s shirts and useless guns, rather than go north with the handsome foreigner. Perhaps the serenity of Canada could never mean as much to her as the din of Havana, with all its familiar anxieties.

  “There’s not that much traffic, you know,” he said at one point. “Surely she’s noticed us by now.”

  Diosdado shrugged. “Look, until he says to stop, we keep going.”

  Usnavy turned the car around again, barely paying attention anymore. They’d circled this finite piece of pavement so many times, there was no longer a thrill in shifting gears, the ride now as level and dull as the graying blue waters on the horizon.

  In his boredom, Usnavy looked out for invading soldiers, spillovers from what he was convinced would be a massive assault on Haiti. If they came here, how many would be Cuban-born, or the children of exiles? Would Badagry’s car-dealing grandson be among them, so long gone that he felt more at home on the other side than here, with them? Or would he, upon landing on Cuban shores, see that those in the crosshairs were mirror images, brothers and sisters he’d recognize on sight and embrace? Would any of them, like the Canadian stowed away in the back, fall in love? That, he thought decisively, could happen too. And then what would they do?

  Diosdado yawned. The sun was shivering in its descent, still robust enough to cause them to squint, but on its way down to a watery slumber.

  Then it happened.

  “Oh my fucking god!” Usnavy screamed as he slammed on the brakes, his eyes having drifted from the seascape to the abrupt sight of a young man standing smack in the middle of the road: The boy held his arms out as if he were Superman and could stop the Daewoo with his bare hands.

  “What the …?” Diosdado stuttered, his own arms up against the dashboard as Usnavy maneuvered and the Daewoo rocked in place, the Canadian rolling around in the back like a sack of grapefruits.

  “Compañero!” shouted the young man. He was in his early twenties, cocky, muscular, wearing a tight-fitting green Polo shirt. He smoked a cigarette that he tossed to the ground as he swaggered from the front of the Daewoo to the driver’s window.

  Usnavy recognized him immediately. �
�Yoandry, what are you doing?” he asked. It was the clerk from Lámparas Cubanas. His greasy locks uncurled with the humidity, the acne on his face a rash of tiny scabs.

  “You!” the clerk barked.

  “You know each other?” Diosdado asked incredulously.

  The Canadian poked his head from the back through the two front seats. “Hello,” he said, slow and nasally enough that everyone understood. The neon-green strings coiled around his ears.

  “What the fuck are you doing, old man?” Yoandry said, not paying attention to the Canadian and grabbing Usnavy by the shirt.

  “Nothing,” he responded, respectfully eyeing the hammy fist the boy had laid on him as well as the one that he was twirling in the air. Yoandry smelled so strongly of cigarettes that it overwhelmed the salt from the ocean.

  “Just driving, like good citizens,” a flustered Diosdado answered for them, smiling nervously, his voice cracking. “We’re showing our friend here the beautiful beaches of our country.” He pointed to Burt, who was now sitting up, but slanting forward in such a way as to hide behind the driver’s seat and keep his girlfriend from seeing him.

  Yoandry leaned in to look more closely at the foreigner and gasped. “Oh god,” he said.

  Burt grinned, embarrassed. “Sí, sí,” he mumbled, managing to sound alien even in that simple syllable.

  “You know him too?” a flabbergasted Diosdado asked.

  “He’s my sister’s boyfriend,” said Yoandry, disgusted. He let go of Usnavy but left his other meaty fist up on the windowsill for all to see. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Ah, so you’re her brother? How wonderful!” Diosdado chirped with another one of his patently false smiles, his voice unnaturally bright and cheery. “Burt here wanted to surprise your sister with his visit! Burt,” he said, gesturing for the Canadian to straighten up, to get out of the car even. He signaled toward the girl. “It’s her, yes, your love!”

  Burt grinned like a fool, addressing Yoandry, who surprised Usnavy by responding in English—it was fractured, he could tell, it was all twisted metals, but it was English nonetheless and obviously functional.

  “Okay,” said Burt to whatever it was Yoandry had told him. “Okay,” he said again, then yanked the door handle and, waving at his excited lover back at the beach house, struggled out of the car and dashed toward her. He had managed to produce a box of Belgian chocolates out of thin air that he now had tucked under his arm.

  Diosdado leaned back in his seat, relieved. “Usnavy, let’s park the car, let’s stretch our legs, please.”

  Usnavy ignored him, turning to Yoandry instead, who was still standing in the middle of the otherwise deserted road: “Is your sister being true to him?”

  “What?” The boy grabbed him again, this time practically pulling him out the car window.

  “Usnavy! That’s none of your goddamn business!” said a horrified Diosdado. Then, after a quick glance at Yoandry’s fists: “Besides, of course—look at that girl! The picture of fidelity!”

  But Usnavy was undaunted. He imagined them—him and the boy—as African warthogs, capable of killing even lions with their tusks, but convinced that in a fight among themselves there would only be shoving and snorting.

  “Let go of me,” he said, forcefully shaking the boy off and grabbing his wrist. “I asked for a reason, and it’s not because I think your sister’s a whore.”

  “You’d better let go—and you’d better talk fast, old man,” Yoandry cautioned, pulling his arm back and aiming his fist even as Usnavy held on to the other.

  “That foreigner, you know what he was paying us for? To watch your sister, that’s what. So here’s my advice: Whether he has a reason to worry is not my concern. But make sure that whatever is going on, he doesn’t have a reason to think he should be concerned. Follow me?”

  He wanted to add something about Yoandry’s dishonesty at the lamp shop the other day, about the way he’d tried to trick him because of his ignorance, but instead, he let go of the boy’s wrist. In this particular situation, he knew whose side he was on: Yoandry’s sister, after all, was Cuban.

  Diosdado held his breath.

  Yoandry stared off at the foreigner, now on the steps of the beach house, making his case to his sister and offering her chocolate, piece by piece. He pondered for what seemed an eternity. “Okay,” he finally said, lowering his fist. “I hear what you’re saying, old man.”

  Then the boy pirouetted as if he were one of those herculean Russian ballet stars who no longer came to the island, and headed back to where the Canadian and the girl were hugging and kissing, celebrating their reunion.

  Because Burt kept the Daewoo with him at the beach to drive his girl around, Usnavy and Diosdado were forced to walk back to Havana—a long, mostly silent march. The sky was a glorious red and purple behind them, the sea a bottomless blue that looked almost black, like the rich feline grays and purples on Usnavy’s magnificent lamp at home. There was barely any traffic, and what few vehicles chugged by were jammed with other, earlier riders. Usnavy, his foot on fire, kicked at a small rock, which skipped ahead of him.

  “Why’d you do that, huh?” Diosdado whispered, meaning not his friend’s clumsy play but the way he had confronted Yoandry. Diosdado was tired, the skin on his face sagged, his goatee like a prickly cactus.

  Usnavy shrugged. There was no way he could explain, not to Diosdado, not now.

  “I don’t know, I really don’t know.”

  After the confrontation, a guileless Burt had paid them, Diosdado thirty dollars for coordinating the day, Usnavy twenty for driving. The single bill was folded in half in Usnavy’s pants pocket. He had expected to feel excitement, a rush of hope—anything—if he ever made that much money, but instead he felt a strange, almost aching void in his chest.

  “It just wasn’t necessary,” Diosdado said. He was practically gasping as they went up a hill.

  Usnavy nodded and looked off toward the horizon, searching for paratroopers. There is not one other country in the world, he thought, that lives like we do: always looking over our shoulders, wondering if the black dot in the sky is an enemy plane or a bird. And the worst part was that if the invasion were here, on the northern shores of Cuba instead of in Haiti, he knew too well that there would be more than a few locals who would look over their shoulders as well, but mostly to see when they could feel free to cheer, when they could let loose with cries of hallelujah and hurrays.

  “Do you ever think about Africa?” Usnavy asked suddenly.

  “Africa?”

  “Yeah, Africa.”

  Diosdado shook his head. “Can’t say that I do.”

  “I do,” confessed Usnavy, “all the time.”

  “You mean Angola?”

  “No, no,” said Usnavy, who had wanted to volunteer for that struggle but was kept from doing so because of his flat feet and back pain. “I mean, Africa—its vastness. Maybe it’s because I’m part Jamaican, I don’t know. I think about its destiny.”

  Diosdado said nothing.

  “It’s a curse, really,” Usnavy continued. “Maybe the plagues, the famines—sometimes I wonder whether all that isn’t the price of having once participated in selling its own sons and daughters.”

  Diosdado shook his head and kept walking.

  After a while, they could see the outline of the city, a smoky crown on the water. Usnavy kicked at a small rock again, but this time his shoe caught on something and the sole flipped open, his toes caked, wiggling like greasy maggots. The dried blood from the blister was black.

  Diosdado chuckled. His own shoes were a gift from his child, a pair of Reeboks that hugged his ankles and kept him steady. “My …” He glanced up at the city, with its huge swatches of absolute night from the government-imposed blackouts. “My son … you know, well, now … Reina … she—I’m still getting used to it—I’m not sure at all how I feel about any of this, you can’t imagine, really … He’s coming for a visit.”

  Usnavy swallowed
hard. He knew better than to touch or even look at Diosdado now. He kept walking, putting one aching foot in front of the other, regardless of how unwieldy it was with the sole that now flip-flopped as he advanced.

  “Well, that’s good,” he finally said.

  “We’ll see.” Diosdado arched his eyebrows.

  They were almost home.

  “I really wish I had my bike,” Usnavy lamented, sighing.

  “Yes, yes,” said Diosdado, putting his arm around his friend’s shoulders.

  IV.

  The next morning, a depressed Usnavy tossed about on his crackling, leaf-thin mattress. Rather than lay in the dark, he’d turned on his lamp, its vivid colors spilling into the room, washing over him. Yet today there wasn’t much comfort in the light: Instead of heat from the reds and imperial gold, he felt only the icy stare of the purples and whites. The feline eyes seemed to indict him in some way. Usnavy was strewn on his stomach, away from the lamp, resting his head in the folds of his arms. He hadn’t shaved in two days and his face was stubbly, his armpits rancid.

  Earlier, he’d heard the bustle of Nena readying for school, and Lidia carefully tiptoeing around him as she helped their daughter. But when he finally lifted his lids, thinking Nena would be gone and he and Lidia might finally talk, he discovered he was by himself in the darkness. Quickly, he turned on the magnificent lamp, as if hoping its beam would reveal Lidia’s warm, doughy body hiding under a pillow or safely curled on the bed. But the light came cold this time, remote as a Saharan night.

  When he looked up, he realized some of the lamp panels were dirty again and, grabbing his special silk cloth, rushed to polish them. On a few, a layer of moisture had turned the fresh dust from the hole in the ceiling into a sticky grime and Usnavy had to do some serious scrubbing.

  When he and Lidia had first gotten together she told him he reminded her of Aladdin, rubbing on his lamp. But he couldn’t see it at all—Aladdin’s lamp had been an oil can, nothing more, and this was a piece of art, no matter its provenance.